I hung up the phone and got mad, and for what

She took almost pornographic glee in this, the way I just fell on my face in front of anyone who held sway over me. There I was pinned down and squirming into a telephone with her jamming fingers into my ribs and making faces while I tried to talk to my boss’s boss’s boss.

He was saying spreadsheets and buzzwords and she had her hand clapped over her mouth with her face all gone red while I fought to be smart, which maybe I was but it never came across over the phone. It was like the warm hum of electromagnetism broke the language centers of my brain, leaving me backing into sentences and tripping over unneeded and unfunny asides.

I was thinking to myself good Lord just fire me already so I can get drunk and stop ironing shirts in the morning, but he wanted to know about sales indexes or something on a Saturday afternoon. I saw myself becoming this slowly, over a span of decades, with her laughing all around me and dancing from one foot to another. Her gray at the temples but tickling me on the phone, acknowledging how ridiculous I still felt after so many years to be taken as a serious adult. This was the kind of connection, her seeing what I couldn’t say out loud about myself, well I guess she understood me better and better.

Every day is the same exact day

Being a miserable person is easier when you have someone to share it with, but watch three or four Bill Murray movies in a row by yourself trying not to think about all your personal faults and you'll see too that it has an underneath effect, like hey it's slowly making notches in your bones that start to splinter and stick into the muscle. At least Peter Venkman was charming and funny on top of his thinly-veiled contempt. What redeems you with an audience is what I had to ask myself.

Every time I come home to bag out for awhile after the latest tragedy of being alive one of the dogs, name's Huxley, never knew me as a kid, well she follows me around all over. Right then she was pressed against the door to the spare bedroom whining accusations into the crack, and I thought how do you get an empty bottle of whiskey past her and everybody else and into the garbage without being put on suicide watch for secret drinking. I was full of questions, like what are you doing here anyways goddamn. People called, left messages about can I buy you some furniture at this yard sale. I'm sorry with a hint of I told you not to open a joint bank account. Stuff like that. I kept my phone off mostly.

You do a thing and then you keep doing a thing and then one day you find you can't do a thing anymore. You find you've compromised yourself one electron at a time, from the inside out, and now you're just an onion skin. That's the whole story, but you don't say a story like that aloud. Look I'm trying to write a warning here is what I put down on paper. I watched movies and I drank and I wrote things down, and I thought Steve Zissou, Frank Milo, Bob Harris, and Phil, they would understand. You don't say that aloud either.

Debtors' prison caught on fire

She had her back to me at the kitchen counter on purpose, which I could tell by the way her neck and back were arranged that this could go on and on. Her teeth were clenched or something and she grabbed the spatula and pulled it around the inside of the bowl with a violence that continued to make her point, that the cookies were enough of a Christmas gift and that was it.

I went outside and thought about smoking the joint in my front pocket that she didn’t know about, maybe let her have something worth really yelling for. There are things that are intractable anyway, and I didn’t much give a damn what she wanted our new holiday tradition to be when it drew so much attention to the fact that hey we’re Dickensian poor isn’t that adorable. If that’s pride then what.

My mind went around a million words while I stood there on the porch not smoking that joint and the clouds hanging over the city couldn’t figure between rain or sleet. I thought if I could get her to see, but the problem was I’d go back inside and say ten of those words, sputter and look away. So I stayed, and I thought about the plastic tree inside, cheaply made and shorter than I was but laden heavy with lights and plain ball ornaments and a few other ones, Santa playing tennis and Chewbacca and a dozen others, made special because they were given between us, how even the corniest of things could be the embodiment of love, so too with the cookies, and I went inside and I picked up that tree and threw it to the floor on my way into the bedroom.

January One

The way she kissed me was she leaned in real fast on that hotel bedroom, caught me by surprise. I had seen her at a booth in the bar downstairs in the smoking section. I watched her while I pretended to talk to my friends, and then we were here.

She didn’t take her dress off or anything, which this is the kind of thing I like. The mystery is more than good enough. She slapped at my chest, like counting time. Afterward she lay on me with her cheek on my lips, and I kissed it over and over. I didn’t know her last name, but I thought I could pick out every element of every atom of her.

We were like that, me kissing her cheek and her doing who knows what but breathing real soft, her hair spread over me like curtains, when the first fireworks went off. From the fourteenth floor we could see the whole city and those fireworks.

She shushed me, which I wasn’t talking by the way, and lifted herself. I followed her to the window. She put her right hand on the small of my back, the thing I was going to do. We could see the whole city and those fireworks, which was all we ever needed.

Who calls them stampies anyhow

She had this way of getting excited about the things I thought were mundane. We'd be in the art supply store and I would round a corner to see her on tiptoe and beaming, humming to herself looking at the different paper stock, just glad as hell to be alive when put me in the same position and I'd make a mockery of joy in the aisle. At home she'd put the paint in front of her nose before putting it on the palette, go on about how she loved the smell, which it was the way she had love for the smallest moments that made me love her in the smallest moments.

And don't think it was just the art stuff. Every errand we ran was done with deliberate, cheerful energy. She sang a song about writing the rent check while she wrote it, did a little dance with her shoulders. Here's the money for you, landlord, I hope you don't buy drugs with it. She wanted to hold hands and swing our arms like kids on the way to get toilet paper and cherry tomatoes, said tomatoes with an accent. These were folk music days, and our lives were simpler than the chords laid down on beaten old four-track machines and handed out for free at some coffeehouse down in the city.

A thing like that has got to end is a thing I like to think, and when I've had too much wine I might say it out loud to myself. No surprise, then, that we were walking out of the store with pens and a book of stamps and she's got tears in her eyes and I'm thinking to myself why the fuck do you have to criticize a thing you love? Is it just so everyone's as miserable as you? That's goddamn supervillainous thinking.

A second date that never ended until it did

She was wearing one of those floppy knit hats and a scarf, both baby blue but the scarf was yellowed a little like she used to smoke in it all the time. She leaned in real close, fogged up the driver-side window, and wrote “Hi.” I smiled, that real kind of smile that movie stars work on.

It started snowing while we drove. A little bit of dark hair poked out from behind her ear, and I looked over at it and tried to memorize how her neck looked at that angle. It’s the kind of thing I’m not in on that often, but she saw me and smiled and pushed my face back to facing the road with her finger. It smelled like coconut. Her finger I mean.

The snow caught on the windshield and melted. We talked about a lot of things, I can’t remember. She pronounced awry wrong, like aw-ree, and then we talked about words you only really see in crossword puzzles. Oner. Aver. Stuff like that.

Her laugh was a little hoarse, and I wanted to hear it until it hurt her throat and she had to gasp at me to stop, it’s not funny being funny. Just a car ride turned gold by the light of sodium vapor lamps on a wet road, somewhere downtown where the old houses met the newer buildings, and the bars on the windows faded away forever.

A letter to a former me

The right words can travel through time, and it’s never the ones you want. I love you and you bring a joy to my life where there was none, those words stay put, inert in time and space. You look beautiful today is a dead sentence without legs beyond the moment. But oh, you don’t even know what’s going to come sprawling backwards from a future you couldn’t even fathom while you sat here with her drinking coffee on the couch thinking I’m going to kiss her now or in a minute.

You don’t know it, but there’s poison in the air, an infection. I never needed you is sitting between the two of you on that cerulean couch cushion. If I have to choose I choose swirls in the ochre of your chipped tiki mug. Time travelers! Invisible sentences! But there nonetheless, stretched out over the entire span of the two of you, filmy and rough to the touch, standing ready to make sure you don’t even have good memories left when you walk away, which that’s all you’re going to want. Just wait until the pictures develop.

Go on, lean in for that kiss. I could say be careful, but I know you won’t be careful. You’ll still be drunk today like I am with the sun coming up thinking of this moment and seeing plainly the words my problems fell away when I was with him stitched into her eyebrows furrowed while she stared at something, you didn’t know what. She was staring at the things that you are going to say. Try not to know that when you put your hand at the nape of her neck and draw her in.

My mother was a fish

The way the light played around with everything you would think I never quit being amazed, but that’s all you get down here is sunlight skewing off every which way. I’ve got bigger things to worry about, like sudden shadows.

It was just kind of rocking on the surface, a big rectangle shape that was almost always a boat, but this one had a piece cut out of the bottom that the sun shone through. I swam up to it to see, because I never get to see things that way.

She was there on the boat, twig-bodied with her arms crossed stretched out on the glass in a brown bikini. I swam under, one eye on her, and she just watched me. She brushed some hair out of her face. It’s dangerous to stay in one place long, but I made to go around the boat again.

I took a long arc away and then cut quick back, came all the way up to where the two skies met, skimmed the bottom of the boat. When I saw her again she jumped back a little, which maybe I was too close but it hurt just the same.

Reasons to not look away

She had this one smile that you couldn’t catch on camera, just as futile as ghost photography. It was a real one, which you could tell by the way her cheeks would squeeze up into her eyes while she was in the middle of saying something she really thought was good, like she’d take a little pause or maybe just between syllables drop it in there real quick. You really had to watch her face for it, and just now I got it and it was like enough for the whole day.

The first course came, tuna sashimi for her, California roll for me. She liked to hassle me about this, called it baby’s first sushi. She would try to sneak wasabi into my next bite when I wasn’t looking. She was always so playful here, like the chopsticks brought some hidden joy out. I fumbled with them, but come on you can’t retreat to the fork before the entrée.

Nobody ever came here except to sit at the part where they cooked the food in front of you, so we were in a booth in the abandoned corner and we could hear the music that was drowned out everywhere else by the sound of knives and spatulas hitting rhythms on stainless steel, which it was some pointless mix of bad jazz and that Japanese harp stuff. We laughed at this and everything else.

The days were hard. We didn’t sleep touching at night. The bill we couldn’t really afford was inherent in this moment. But that all didn’t matter.

The daydream girl

These kinds of things always seem to happen to me. A girl falls fourteen stories, yeah, she’s gonna land on my car. And there she is, all nestled in the hood that’s wrapped her up like warm blankets, kind of half-smiling but you know something’s off because her neck’s turned a little funny, but get this, eyes closed, no blood, just a beautiful, sad girl in a red sun dress asleep on my car. It’s enough to make a guy drop his latte. Really just a special moment.

I imagine it sounded like when you push on a cookie sheet and then it pops back into place, but deeper. I was on the wrong side of a plate-glass window at the time and didn’t hear anything. She just came into the frame and disappeared into my car the way a stone wrapped in a red flag would, say China’s. What I instead heard was the air being sucked out of the room by a dozen coffee-breathed mouths and one “Oh God.”

Everybody kind of stayed put, but I got up and walked over to the door and opened it. My car was honking that slow, plaintive alarm that comes factory-installed, not one of those aftermarket sirens that are only good for scaring cats away. I remembered I’d left my keys inside on the table. I thought the horn fit, anyway—I was just going to turn it off because that’s how we maintain social order.

I looked at her for a long time. She had nice skin, almost translucent. Her shoes looked expensive. I’d say she looked like a model, but her nose was too big for it. There’s always something. People were gathering around, watching out of windows, you know, the way a city does when it isn’t something they can do anything about and therefore don’t have to ignore.

I thought this would be a great love story, if only, and maybe I did fall in love with her a little bit. Anyhow I couldn’t stop studying her face. The girl with dark hair and a secret. I wished she could fly.

On a date with the ghost of Christmas past

I said idealism is just stupidity putting on a brave face. I said words are just the way a brain aborts a thought. I said there's no such thing as truth and we're so busy looking because we're cowards shirking blame. You put a beer in my hand and look how invincible. Of course I wouldn't say these things if I believed them. Somebody asked how I met her and I wondered which story I should tell.

This was me surrounded by friends in a backyard on the hottest day of the year, which yeah that record would get broken every day for a few weeks. She was against the fence with a few other women, like lined up against the wall in junior high outside the bathroom before the first bell of the day. Social strata and all that. We were all sweating out in the scorched-earth suburbs where the only shade was manufactured because nature wasn’t part of the development plan. It takes dedication and a certain stubborn denial to say that this is the way to live.

I said what. I said we were planets set loose from a dead star and drawn into each other’s gravity. I said we met at a bar. I said we were going to meet in five minutes when I got the nerve to go over to the fence. I said our lives moved in every direction, forwards and backwards and crosswise and that asking me to explain was a pretty dumb idea because I was trying to get drunk here. People cheered and held up their drinks and we toasted. I choked it down.

If you're explaining then you're failing

Hello, Imaginary Audience. Before anything happens, let me tell you what's happening.

For the last six months, I've been writing these vignettes. They're all interconnected, although at present there is no concrete narrative sense to be made of it. They tell the story of a boy and a girl who meet, fall in love, and then slowly destroy each other and themselves. You can't tell a story like that in a linear fashion and be fair or really get at the truth of anything--there's just too much. So all of this happened in the context of their life, and none of it did, and that's that.

What you're reading is one person's struggle to make sense of his life through constructing fiction. These started in earnest when two things happened: first, I bought a typewriter, and I realized that there was so much power in filling up the real space of a sheet of paper. Word processors change things because they're infinite. This blog post has the potential to go on forever. But if I can capture a moment on a single page, and really invest myself in it, and at the end say that it was worth writing, well...

The other thing that happened is my life started falling apart. I felt numb at home, I felt cheated by the world around me, I felt like a misfit. I thought a lot about suicide. My marriage suffered for it, and now it is over. The details are my own, but in the last few months I have basically lost everything I ever thought gave me worth. I needed some way to explain all of these things, and these vignettes were all I had.

In the end I was still alive, and that felt good, which I can't honestly say I've felt that way in at least a decade. Today I am twenty-eight years old. Today is a day to begin sharing.