She got what was coming for not going

I had a mouth full of mistakes that I was going to drop over our conversation like a sad and reckless payload, landing wherever they may. Maybe it was a mark of who I am or maybe it was just gender patterns that I thought in war metaphors a lot of the time, but at any rate it didn’t much help me being drunk and more than a little bitter.

I thought the central problem of the human condition is everybody gets raised all fucking wrong, one way or another. I thought it while I sat on the bathroom tile leaning against the tub with her standing over me, I thought we’re all miserable, we all hurt and hurt and hurt, which I meant that as transitive and intransitive both. It was a goddamn reflex for me to say what I was about to say, and then all the things that eventually came after, like what was I but one of those sea anemones, if those are the ones that just react to the current all the time and jerk their tendrils in at the sign of danger. I’m no zoologist.

But let’s watch this how it played out through the way my brain saw everything as growing constantly like an optical illusion and my words slurred a little and I stopped mid-sentence to consider if I was or was not saying something I wanted to say. I didn’t look at her face was all, I was brave enough to say the stupid thing but not enough to see what it did. I didn’t see the way her concern for me that had held fast all the way home from the party, through the half-conscious singing of songs that weren’t on the radio and pulling her hair by mistake, I didn’t see that become a deep and shriveling pain when I said the only reason anybody would talk about your paintings is because you look like a go-to-the-back-bedroom-and-give-a-blowjob kind of girl, so don’t expect that guy to actually call his gallery friend. And then I was in the bathroom alone, head lolled back on a loose neck thinking about what it would feel like to throw up my whole vocabulary and never speak again.

The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon

I wrote I saw your face in the wood grain of my kitchen table, and then I crossed it out. The sentence I mean. I wanted to hit on something common but compelling, and I thought pareidolia was a good start, but there on the page it came off as a contrived and quotidian lie, which I wanted to seem artful and smart and maybe a little mysterious I guess. All week I'd been making a list of words that sounded impressive.

I was seeing her everywhere anyway. She was my barista, then she was at the grocery store buying ice cream while I did my weekly trip, then she was riding her bike past the the laundromat, plus it's true about the kitchen table. It was like suddenly she'd metastasized into the gaping commonplace wounds of my little life, or else she was always heading there in a peristaltic motion that brought us together slowly like heart beats. Serendipity.

Or else, and this is just too much for my self-concept and how much I'll trust my brain ever again, she was always there at the grocery store and the laundromat and the coffeehouse that always smelled acrid and burnt, which that drove away the youth groups at any rate. She was always there and I was blind to the knowledge until I'd lost my headphones and felt forced to make eye contact. That's the kind of thing that can make a man wonder what all he's never paid attention to. How to make it up to a girl like her. I thought she'd understand if I just knew what to call it.

Survival never goes out of style

I felt made from old plaster most days, some depressing building rubble poured into a wrinkled suit. I scrawled the words to songs in the margins of inter-office memos, sometimes on ones that weren’t mine. I came across her indignant in front of the coffeemaker, which it must have been her passive-aggressive note that I put the Jawbreaker lyric on.

She said things like what kind of an asshole would and who the hell do I work with that doesn’t and other things about coffee pot politics. She was talking like to her self, mostly, too fast for me to answer anyways, looking at her note taped to the cabinet. I poured myself a cup, the last of it, and walked off.

She followed me, which I was thinking what a fluorescent gray day I was having anyways, so when she started in on me not brewing more I almost had to smile. Her face was so intense, and it was just Maxwell House, you know? She was seething, blood turned her cheeks and throat red, and I thought that here’s one of those moments.

We walked together back into my office, me turned to look at her with her straight ahead and her voice all hard words. I sat down at my desk and took a sip of coffee, which tasted really good right then. She petered out and stood there, dazed, for like four seconds. When I didn’t say anything back she turned and stormed out, slamming the door, and I watched her angry hair flip-flop down the hall through my window, wondering what could have made her so bitter and lovely.

Mother's maiden name, high school mascot, first pet

I was sitting at my usual table chewing dumbly on the space between my left thumb and forefinger when she came in and started poking around in the different whole coffee beans they had for sale in these troughs that worked like automatic dog food bowls, which maybe me seeing them that way was a thesis statement but I doubt it. I spent every day getting my light and heat from ugly buzzing fluorescence instead of the sun, from the time that the morning was thick and black like an old television screen until the sun was being swallowed up by the shadows of the buildings downtown, so if I liked to come out here on my day off and sit by the window drinking black coffee and writing down things I wished I could afford to do with myself while a man played checkers in the corner with his grandson then the least she could do was never exist again ever.

Maybe God had done me that favor or maybe he just liked to watch my hands shake, which I can’t blame him. I wrote down see Tibet and find something like zen while she browsed. Our eyes didn’t exactly meet but I knew she saw me when she turned around because there was this flutter step of I don’t know.

What do you do? I wrote down take a lot more photographs with a nice camera while she placed her drink order. The backs of her arms and legs were a darker brown than I had ever known them to be, a rich and natural tan, and I wrote down fire a nuclear warhead at the sun. It was petty to feel betrayed by the employee who made her drink, but traitors come as they come.

I knew she wasn’t looking on purpose, and she either faked or made a phone call on her way out the door. That’s what the years and all that love and pain were worth to her. All that sharing of what we were, how we were experts on each other, the top minds in our field. She didn’t turn and look back but I waved out the window anyway, half-hearted and partway dead but a greeting for whatever that means.

Poor Richard pretended to be important

My job when we met and for a little bit after was I wrote maxims that were printed on the side of paper cups, which what more honest thing was there than decorating future garbage with empty wit. I took ironic pleasure in it, had pictures of Franklin and Rochefoucauld on my desk, thumbed through almanacks looking for a saying worth modernizing.

Like what, she said, an email in the inbox is worth two on the server? This while she cut up onions in my dank and cluttered downtown apartment with me making rice. Normally I would make fun of my work too, but on a fourth date cooking dinner together I didn’t much want to feel ridiculous about my worthless job and how I took such pride in it in secret. She said I’m sorry that was pretty bitchy wasn’t it, and I said no, I know I’m superfluous, a cheap appropriator.

She said she liked little touches in the day, the way it made a brain seem worth having. She sniffled from the onions and I pushed the button on the rice cooker, and then we were turned around and kissing, which the kitchen was small enough that we didn’t have to step towards each other to do it.

We kissed like that for a minute, her breath a little sour and mine probably too. I wondered what she was thinking there with her eyes closed and her tongue playful, whether she was thinking how she meant what she said or of how else she would have to patronize me or if she was even not thinking at all, like what if she was able to enjoy a thing for what it was, what if when she kissed she just thought about the kiss. I didn’t know what to do with someone like that.

The best kind of fairy tale

We did it all in one day. We got up early, both of us unable to sleep, and we added up all our credit and our savings. We arrived at a number, and we went about doing that which the number required.

At first it was easy. We went to a bookstore and spent hundreds, got a nice set of earrings for her. We promised no electronics but bought a new TV anyway. After that we had to get creative. We bought a palm tree that was sure to die since we didn’t have a place to plant it. We bought a half-dozen piñatas at the grocery store along with a case of chocolate bars and some frozen egg rolls I always wanted to try. We went over to the flea market and bought the suit of armor that had sat unsold for months outside and probably wasn’t for sale until the old woman in the straw hat saw our enthusiasm and joy. We gave her some chocolate just because.

We added up the receipts with a calculator, spent down to about the last penny except for seventeen cents that we found in our car’s console, which we threw that out the window.

We got home and put it all in the living room and kitchen, sat on the floor eating chocolate and Chinese takeout and our own egg rolls. She pointed at the pile with her chopsticks and said look at our net worth, and we laughed. Maybe in the morning we would get scared and return what we could, maybe we had just committed the gravest of errors in the history of man, maybe this all wasn’t funny, but we both bent over and laughed in the face of reality until we were flushed red and holding each other as bravely as we knew how.

This is every night

I woke up thinking someone was standing in the corner. She was asleep still, slowly edging me off the bed like usual. I thought it meant something that she was always filling any space I gave up, like I was dating Argon gas. The corner was empty, because what is this a horror story, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that the room should anyway be vacated.

I left her there with the doom of my imagination and walked into the bathroom, maybe quicker than was reasonable in the dark but what can you do. With the bathroom light on I felt weird about looking in the mirrors, and I checked behind the shower curtain, which it’s always these just awake moments where I get most irrational. I tried to tell myself that this indulgence would only be dumb until that one time I’m right.

I used the toilet and thought about waking her up, but then I’d be chastised for being silly or for not getting her out of there immediately, depending on how serious she took this particular dream. She was always back and forth on if they were real at all.

After that I watched television on the couch, some fake health show set up like a news interview so I would buy a supplement, just kind of lost in the rhythm of their back and forth sales pitch. I woke up to her nudging me and looking sad, like what is this about. It’s a new betrayal, sleeping alone, which that’s not what I’d meant at all.

Save me from the rest of my life

I said this hotel has a Reagonomic shower while I jammed a towel in my ear and watched her read Anna Karenina on that pastel paintbrush bedspread. She hummed a basal acknowledgement, which I don’t know what I expected when I thought that up in the shower but a realist would say that what I got was about right.

Earlier we had kissed in the ocean and later we would eat in view of the beach, but those things were relative to this moment. I scrubbed the towel over my head, thinking how hotel towels were always so worthless and it’s always which one of these is the bath mat or is there not one. She had her chin tucked into her chest, brows furrowed and eyes flicking across pages, one leg resting on the other, and I realized I should find something to do but didn’t want to.

I said we should have gone to Russia and she barely said the word why. I said you’d like me better in a bread line. She said I love you dummy, and I went into the bathroom without saying anything back. I wondered how many chapters I would be waiting out, which wasn’t fair at all because I liked to read too just not on vacation.

I was brushing my teeth when she started screaming oh shit oh shit like she was on fire. I hit my shoulder into the doorframe on the way out of the bathroom and lost my towel, got toothpaste down my chin. When I saw her she was in the same position, book open on her chest, but she was smiling into the pages. I had that shaky nervous feeling, like my body was ready to put a rapist’s eye out with a toothbrush, and I stood there dumb and naked watching her smiling face and waiting for her to look up at me. She did, but she didn’t look for long before she went back to her pages and said really quiet, she said do you love me, and the way she asked it was with a frailty I hadn’t known from her, and I knew I did and she did and that those photographed vacation moments weren’t at all worth remembering compared to this.

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.