Pulling away the curtain, revealing another curtain

You left a message on my phone that said I wasn’t allowed to write about you anymore. Or maybe your mother did. I didn’t actually check my messages or look at the caller ID or actually have a phone connected anymore. But I like to think that’s what happened while I scribbled on blank pages, the backs of envelopes, an old eviction notice.

Because look at what I was doing. I was incarnating and incarcerating you again and again. Shackled in words of my choosing. A homunculus of every bad feeling. You bled out onto the page, merged with people I’ve known and still know, written down how I wanted, crucifixion as creative nonfiction.

Look, I have exhausted you, and I wish I could say I was sorry. I put you on like an old sweater and I wore you out, which I mean that two ways. I feel like I should be ashamed. I feel like people should be calling me up to chide me. But it’s just praise and praise and praise. Oh he’s so honest, oh his pain it must be real, oh he really resonates. No one said how dare you. No one said I’m draining the blood from a good woman. No one said you are a liar for saying any of this is the truth and you are a liar for saying any of it isn’t. No one said anything at all while I stood up there and read these things I have written, these words I have shored up against my own sense of failure. It’s not like an apology would be anything but hollow anyway.

Occam was a friend of mine, but one day Occam died

I thought she looked best over breakfast, our tired old cartoon strip mugs filled with coffee and too much sugar, overcooked eggs on a plate with too much salt. She was a girl who took well to being disheveled is what, the way her hair goes back to the curls that she always fights against and the little bit of makeup she forgot to wash off is still smudgy around her eyes, but she caught me looking and stared down into her plate, pushed her eggs around with her fork and gave a plaintive quit it.

But I didn’t quit it. I thought I could look enough to catch something more if I only tried. Her covering her mouth while she chewed. Her staring into the middle distance in thought. Her wrapping her feet around the chair legs. I thought these things kept a secret.

Which isn’t that always the tragedy anyway? She could bear the weight of it, maybe, or she couldn’t. Each second I tried to give her a meaning grander than just being her was an assault. It was tyranny. It was my own failure to comprehend and accept reality as something worth believing in. No, I had to have magic at breakfast, magic at every meal, I wanted to be sick to my stomach stuffed with it. And I saw myself looking back at this moment from years later and wondering what had happened, never suspecting the easy, the obvious, the inevitable answer. What had happened was me.

The jihad of hands on sleeping hips

The heat of her back pressed against me was enough to keep me up at night, which what kind of person is it that would call this a denial of the way a life should go. It’s one of those things you have to hate about yourself after awhile, the way being happy felt something like an old and rusty anchor. I put an arm around her and scooted closer, got the smell of her skin by pressing my face into her shoulder and kissing it a little here and there. She didn’t stir.

What was I even at war with all the time? The self-assurance of chemical reactions and neurons firing all over the place, maybe. The things whispered back and forth, axon to axon. This is what you deserve. This is your identity. The mitochondrial masses cast their vote, the democracy of feeling lousy for no good reason.

I got out of bed and paced around, got a glass of water, stood in the unlit kitchen drinking it and staring at the one glow-in-the-dark magnet from our trip out to that cave system, how it was so wet and muggy underground. This is the reality of being alive. All that storytelling, all those moments that can be shaped into some kind of meaning, and then there’s this one. Narrative from a junk drawer life.

She called my name from the bedroom, and I set my glass down and went back in there. She half-asked what I was doing, and I said nothing, just awake for no good reason. She smiled and reached up to touch my arm. I put my hand on her hair. It made me feel like maybe I would make it through.

At the end of our mercenary summer

There’s rain, and then there’s drinking gin in the rain, the way the pine taste of it on your tongue takes you back to the Northwest and kills your brain cells for you so you don’t have to bother holding your breath for an extremely long time or sniffing glue. Which we were not depressed. That much must be said. No, we were drunks in the rain, and that’s quite different.

We passed the bottle between us, and yeah, we danced maybe I guess, and to be honest I hated the taste of gin but she didn’t and there it was. The back yard was starting in on being puddly, revealing how uneven all of it really was. Her hair was plastered over her eyes and dripping while she smiled with the bottle thrust up in the air like she was presenting it to god. It made her bellybutton show.

We grabbed at each other and spun around and fell over. Did you ever do that? It feels pretty good. In heaps is what. We lay there letting the drops hit our faces and force our eyes closed tight, and then we got cold, and then we went inside, and then we didn’t speak for an afternoon for fear of breaking the spell.

Christmas cards, ransom notes

The picture shows the two of us in matching shirts, terrible Norman Rockwell cheese. Ironically unironic. It’s from last year maybe but that’s basically okay for the purpose. I dump a bunch of them in the mail, some with addresses, some not. Some with directions as best I could remember. He lives on that one street with all the cars. She used to live with her sister but now I’m not so sure. Her sister is the one that had one of those looks she’d give from across the bar where she would just smolder and smolder but you never knew what it meant.

The girl in the picture who was you is smiling. The girl in the picture who was you has a big cheesy eggnog smile. The girl in the picture who was you knows exactly what that means. I throw some out the car window and wish the wind well. Wish the wind a merry Christmas.

I am drunk and I am driving and I am in the present tense. What has happened to consistency of voice is a reasonable question to ask. Cards go out the window and into the dampness of the ditch. The song on the radio is of a band I used to like before it was on the radio. I am that kind of person. I thought the girl in the picture who was you was aware, but she was not.

Many more moments like this one

I sat down drunk on the pavement near the bus stop, pulled a knit cap down over my ears, and waited in that dead part of the downtown night. After a few minutes I crossed the street to buy a sandwich and a six-pack of cheap beer before it was too late. A bus went by in the meantime.

I sat back down and ate my sandwich, washed it down with one of the beers. That’s when I saw her watching me from the benches. The bus stops in this part of town were lit up and plexiglass like they were from the future, and the light cast harsh long shadows down her face. I said what, and it came out maybe a little too hard, so I offered her a beer. She asked me if I was homeless. I said no, I’m just a degenerate of some kind or other. She looked around, slid off the bench to the pavement, and took me up on my offer.

We did the whole small talk thing there in the stone heart of the city while civilization’s stragglers walked by or took up the seats we’d abandoned, me a long time ago, her just that moment. I told her that sitting on the ground felt better because it got at the truth of what we’d done in all this building of things. There was beauty in it somewhere is what I said.

Suddenly I got this idea to head over to this unlocked fire escape I knew about so we could see the sun come up from the rooftop of some lousy hotel. I told her so. She agreed to follow.

When we got there they’d padlocked the thing shut again. We stood at it and had another beer each, worked through the different ways we might get it open or get enough height to reach the second floor landing. I asked her name. I could see the way the light would come in, first as a whisper, then staccato bursts between the different buildings, finally the sun coming over and around the edges and warning off another night containing another million possibilities. By this age, though, you’re pretty well locked in. Finally I said well goodnight, Claire, which I realized later wasn’t the name she’d told me.

Between the absence and the presence is the thing

There were the deadnerve days, an apartment littered with yesterday’s yesterday’s cups of coffee. I pressed my hand against the window just to feel, how cold the glass, walked around with most of my bed around my shoulders. I didn’t turn on the heat on account of how it dried out my nose and I didn’t like the smell. And also there was the money.

Then there were her days, the ones where the bathroom echoed forth a voice singing snotty old Alanis Morrisette songs, you know the ones about Joey Gladstone. She got embarrassed when I said I’d heard while light cut through the slats in the blinds. We would make love, and it would be about how long we could hold onto a conversation before losing the gasping thread.

There were probably other kinds of days, but really I’m talking about those two, which was which, which was true. My brain told me all the time how I wanted to die. It made compelling arguments. I did what I could to not listen. Every now and then she would touch my face or say something, I don’t know, it felt like a refutation or a spell. Two types of day. That’s what I’m saying. I knew then that one was doomed.

Life is sad. Here is someone.

The water was running along the eaves and dripping, raindrops as racecars. I stood there under the shelter looking up at them, how there are tiny dramas going on all around us that we fail to notice. I’m sure I looked pretty dumb to the other people coming out of baggage claim and looking around for old friends.

She pulled up in her fading Volvo and I fast walked over, taking a long step off the curb but still hitting the outside edge of a deep puddle. I got in and gave her one of those awkward getting-into-the-car-after-not-seeing-each-other-for-a-week-and-missing-each-other-even-though-all-we-did-these-days-was-fight-all-the-time hugs. The windshield wipers clacked out the passage of time, and I bit the inside of my cheek.

The way she drove was squirrelly with hard manual shifts that were fun for her, how she pretended at the precision of a machine, but caused me to tense my legs against the glove compartment. She said she was feeling drab and kind of sleepy, so I should talk, just say whatever came up.

I thought for a second and then said I like that poem by Tao Lin, the one about stealing from Lorrie Moore. I said I could relate as a writer. She said I was so full of shit sometimes with the self-involved writer stuff, which was said lightheartedly. I didn’t take it that way. A minute went by and I said sometimes I felt like I was dying faster than everybody else, and she laughed. She slammed on the brakes because the people in front of us had all slammed on their brakes. The wipers clacked at each end of their circuit.

Right then I almost told her about staring out the window of the plane watching the diorama landscape unfold, clouds over land, and realizing that there was nothing much for me these days, how maybe love was a finite supply of civility and trust and tensed knees in car rides. That all we had left was empty companionship and someone to pick us up from the airport. Instead, I asked her how work was going, and I listened.

Delivering all the dead letters

She was suddenly full of words all the time, like there was a pressure on her sternum pushing them bubbling out of her mouth. A happy plague of sentences is what. It lasted for three weeks or so before slowly dying off as she came to realize that the things she talked about didn’t have any weight, which they didn’t, but they did.

But those three weeks. At first it was a kind of miracle, the way we suddenly found ourselves awash in things to talk about after months of dry land. She told childhood stories, ones I’d never heard, like the one about the inflatable pool or the one about her dog eating a whole turkey and throwing up in her bed or the one about her uncle hanging her over the banister by her ankles and talking like he was Hans Gruber, which these were warm and film-grained memories that filled in the darkened places. She told about her dreams and her fears and how some of them were the same thing. She told little things, white truths, honey-thick and without fear of judgment or the pain of human loneliness.

You would think that after all those silent clinking dinners that I would have fallen in love all over again, that what would have happened would have been a soft slipping away of all the barbs and resentment. But come on. By week two I was on the couch watching TV asking her to wait for the commercial, but wait, have you seen this commercial? I was staying late at work, which I didn’t even have the excuse that it was my career. Week three saw the birth of mocking uh-huhs and rolled eyes. It’s funny the way we commit these tiny assassinations again and again. Actually I guess it’s not funny. But it happened.

I will be taking Thanksgiving week off so I can head to Las Cruces and celebrate genocide and imperialism and how great it is to be a white male with two of my best friends.  Updates resume on the 1st of December.  In the meantime, maybe you could tell some people you know about me and my writing?  It would help satisfy my constant need for attention and praise.

Come on and wave the damn torches already

She was always saying that we didn’t do enough things together, like maybe if we played more putt-putt or bowled under every blacklight and disco ball in town our problems would finally go away. It was autumn, and yeah, leaves were falling, and yeah, daylight savings time wasn’t doing us any favors, which maybe we could blame the sun going down so early every night for us looking at each other across the kitchen table and knowing we had the same idea.

The first time it was almost as a joke, but we got good at killing ourselves after awhile. Made an art of it. We would devote a whole evening, taking great fistfuls of pills and doing slow dances on the roof. Every morning, though, we’d wake up sweat-drenched in the noonday sun.

After we ran through our medicine cabinet we sat fidgeting on the couch watching the clock tick down the hours left in the three-day waiting period. His and hers handguns, hold in each breath, exhale and squeeze. The noise was something that we kept marveling at to each other. Did you feel it like it was inside your head like I did? Are your ears still hurting? God damn it was so amazingly loud. But we were among the living just the same. We tried a bunch of other ways, and then we started wondering if something was wrong.

We stumbled to the doctor’s office, sat in the waiting room holding hands and maybe a little happy again while impatient patients sat aghast. We didn’t blame them. We were covered in scars, rope burned necks, pockmarked livers, great sucking wounds in our chests. That last one’s a metaphor, but yeah, it felt good to be a team again.

And across town the abandoned grocery store is being broken into

She liked to give out awards in the way she pronounced and inflected her words, sentences as Nobel prizes. There was a warmth that spilled out around the edge of conversation that she didn’t bother to hide. I wanted to know her better, to be blanketed by her voice telling of the tattoos she was going to get, what she liked to eat for breakfast, how she had trouble opening up to people except to tell them she had trouble opening up. She bloomed in my brain like I imagine an artichoke would, though I’d never seen it happen and maybe it doesn’t really.

And this was us sprawled across the unvacuumed floor of my apartment, our clothes picking up crumbs and hair and bits of the previous tenant’s life. I wondered at what she would be leaving behind as we talked, would it just be microscopic cells or would it be hair in the drain and her mother’s recipes on my tongue and an extra toothbrush next to mine. I’ve always been one to overthink a thing that hadn’t even started, tracing the future of every moment to its possible endpoints. I thought about saying this while I looked at the constellation of brushed-off bits forming slowly on her shirt.

I was calling myself a writer by then, which mostly meant that I was the kind of person who couldn’t tolerate a job and who was most happy when he wasn’t. I spent most of my time staring over a great yawning gulf and trying not to slip into it, but I felt like ground was giving all the time and I was headed back to double-whiskey places. Traps traps traps. There I was, though, child-like and simple on the floor, hearing her talk, glad to hear her talk, aching for it maybe. I put aside who I was for awhile and listened.

Pull the cord to stop

She had a detachable nose. Or at least I suspected. The way it stood out from her face and kind of dominated you would think it was a design choice, like maybe she had a whole collection of them and today felt like a day for being striking.

I thought about saying this to her while she sat on a plastic bus seat reading one of those plain little books that had been re-bound by the library with each passing decade, but I’d learned a long time ago that I wasn’t that great at things I thought were maybe compliments. She would probably just had said Oh and gone blade-eyed back to her book.

I wanted her to be interested, though, to see that having something weird was better than being regular. I wanted her to have something to say about me that would be unintentionally cutting. How my hair looks like it’s trying to start a band. How I probably think my lips are closed but really there is a slight gap in the center. How I look like the kind of person who would be dressed better. I was itchy is what, not for a fight exactly, not for conversation exactly, not for love exactly, but for something.

Whitman sees ships at dock

I was sitting on a brick planter outside of her downtown office complex, that time of day when afternoon and evening depend on your relation to the hard-edge shadows of the buildings. The day had gone cold here in the shade, and I clutched at my elbows and kept my jaw tight against chattering. I hadn’t really planned on being here except that I was forced to drive into town for an unpaid parking ticket.

But that’s a lie, isn’t it? I knew my day would end up here from the moment I got the summons or the warrant or whatever it’s called when you owe the county a hundred and forty three dollars. Maybe it was low impulse control, maybe it was fate. I guess it depended on who you asked. Mostly I was looking for a justice in the world, for her to say or for me to say what we’d spent so many months in mutual nonexistence not saying. I sat there, tapping both my feet with hands thrust deep into jacket pockets, trying to keep my extremities feeling alive.

People started coming out of the building in spurts, like each elevator load was a pump of blood. These people probably hadn’t been smiling on the way in, but now some were, and I wondered how they lived their lives when so much time was spent in the thing they dreaded.

Then it was her, talking to a girl I met at a party once where I had kept my mouth shut and took awkward sips of beer. She was beautiful still—I don’t mean the girl from the party—she still walked with that bounce that worked against the sunken slump of her shoulders, how she never really wore makeup anyway and how her hair was blowing all over and how her nose was starting to go a little pink already from the cold. I didn’t want to be here then, I didn’t have the right. The silence between us had been the justice I deserved. She saw me and froze, not smiling, not frowning, just blank-faced recognition, maybe with her head going through how sadly I was presenting myself these days, how goddamn pathetic to be sitting on a brick planter unshaven wearing an old jacket and trying to work up the nerve to look away. This was just what I wanted, and it felt awful.

What epiphany looks like

She had painted a teenage boy at a piano all in Technicolor, he looked like a Von Trapp or something, and she wanted to know what I thought. I stared at the thing, which what do you say anyway? Every answer was wrong. The colors were good, but I was more interested in what was happening beyond the window on the back wall, it looked like something good was just out of reach. The boy’s dour face agreed. Maybe there’s the point.

I said I’m trying to understand your statement, but I’d like to know what you are trying for. She gave me this look and stalked into the bedroom all huffed. What else should she expect when she asked a question so loaded up with buckshot? That time I made the cake for her birthday, the one with the scrambled eggs in the middle from my inability to use a mixer, well when I asked her what she thought I hadn’t cried about the look on her face. And here she was painting more confusing scrambled eggs.

I went to the door and pressed hard into the jamb, which of course she was face down and rigid on the bed like an exclamation point. She said to go away, and I didn’t. I stood there, lonely, both of us trapped in our own understanding of the other, me slowly coming to realize that who I was and who she wanted me to be were different, her realizing it too, both of us waiting for me to apologize basically for not being an artist like her, to just say sorry for it. I found that even though I was, I couldn’t.