It's been a while since she's felt sad so she decides to...
The scratched rubber soles of the flip-flops scatter the oxidized red dust of main street into the air as she chases after the boy in his school uniform, bright, crisp, white at noon.
She's almost there, it's resting on her wrist, but then it rains and she decides not to slice if only because it can't end in a cliche.
The wrench slips out of her hand before she can tighten the bolt, right when the gravity generator switches on again. The station begins flashing big red letters on each of its impassable windows. The sirens are unbearable; her ears are bleeding. She kicks off her sheets. She left the heater on through the night.
She does not know why this man thinks that talking about the "pussy he pounded last night" will make her go back with him. She thinks that he is either an idiot or she is a lesbian.
Nobody will tell her, but eventually someone let's slip. Your son made it into medical school. Your daughter got accepted to MIT. Your sister cured five types of cancer. You've become a household name. That trip you took to some tropical country last week? You were fighting off the paparazzi and interviewers the entire time. Don't you remember? No? It just happened. Real as reality. When she opens her eyes to daylight it seems so perverse she cries without knowing why. She used to love mornings.
This is the second time she's woken up to the lights in this same fucking ICU. The next time, if she makes it, the next time she'll fucking end it.
She's listened to this sixties pop song twenty-one times. It's in a minor chord. She thinks that she should stop. But she can't. She wants to know how she can hate herself for doing nothing. She wants to cry. But she can't. She's an adult now. She wants to sleep all the time. She doesn't want to shower. That's how she knows. It's back.
He doesn't know her middle name. She will spend the next sixty minutes thinking about him, once or twice her mind will switch to something more pertinent; whether to eat lunch or just wait for dinner. She does not realize this will kill her. It's a Sunday. There's nothing else anyway.
She can recognize her life is a loop. It is replaying patterns. She's tried almost everything except; ...like you wouldn't believe. But she hasn't ended it. That's the only thing she hasn't tried. Three more months, if she makes it, and she will do it.
He had been watching the fly all morning. It was too hot in his office. And he hadn't taken a shower in two days. His scalp smelled like a grandfather's baseball cap. And he was unbearably itchy. The fly did not make this better.
It had been two hours and thirty-two minutes since he had walked in. Put his things on his desk, a wooden dark affair with a computer and a frame with a picture of his sister in it. She was wearing a sweater and she was standing in front of a mountain. A mountain range, really. She seemed so cool and cold. The picture seemed so refreshing. It worked well to convince him that the broken air conditioning unit was no big deal. But then the fly would buzz somewhere and he'd lose concentration and his neck would tick and he'd try very hard to kill it without getting up from his chair but it would never make itself that easy. If he stood up, he would know immediately that he had lost. And he wasn't about to lose to an invertebrate.
It was probably a house fly. If it was a doctor fly, it would have probably bitten him by now and he would have killed the damn thing. He'd only been bitten by a doctor fly twice since arriving in this equatorial hell hole, and he hadn't enjoyed either experience. They were large and purple and yellow. But usually, after being bitten by one, they were soon dead. Guts and innards, escaping the thorax onto whatever killing device he had swatted at them, like the colored and artificially flavored corn syrup they put inside Gushers.
This was just a house fly. He'd been re-working the draft of his speech for days now. There really wasn't much else to do. If he didn't stay on the premise, they wouldn't pay him. But he didn't have any work to do. He wondered if he should be manipulating a third world government in such a way. But then he'd walk past the fat post master whose private office was only a few hallways away, and briefly peering in at the ornate cultural decorations lining his wall, the Jay-Z albums, and the signed New York Yankees jersey he'd framed, and knowing that his postmaster salary couldn't possibly cover any of that, he'd feel much better about himself. He'd wave at the gentlemen, piled into his probably designer suit, bulging a bit at certain seams, and say hi with a smile, but really, when he walked away he'd think to himself that a fat fuck like David would never make it in America. Then he'd smile for real and get back to his office and pretend to be working some more until 5 when he could actually go home.
It had been a pretty hectic day. Yes, that's what she'd call it. If anyone asked. Not that anyone would inquire about how her Saturday was--but she was ready to engage anyone in a story, really. It was a wake up call. Not the extraordinary events of the day. Not the strain in her hamstrings the following morning while holding a cup of hot chocolate in her dark living room watching the morning news, a result of running around the city the day prior. Not the reading over her monthly statement online and realizing that she'd spent far too much on her Visa the night before. Not the shock at looking at her impromptu hair cut in her toothpaste splattered mirror. Not even the letter in the mail she would receive a week and a half later. No. The wake up call was that she had just had a spectacular day--the sort of day that helps to fend off the pesky thoughts of suicide--and she had no one to tell. She didn't realize how lonely she was until she woke up the next morning with a tale on her tongue with no one to lash it at.
If I was just a little more feminine I would have cared. I would have felt remorse that I was walking all over him. But, like people making excuses for themselves always say, it's a man's world, and following tenets, I refused to care, because men never care (that's why they can't cry, the damn bastards). Still it was unbearable. The feeling of guilt, equivalent in severity to, I suppose, running over your neighbor's dumb and deaf dog with your SUV at 4 AM on the road outside your house, stayed near my train of thought even when more important things, like my daily half hour of television, should have been taking center stage. I didn't hate myself, though I refused to look at myself in the bathroom mirror while brushing my teeth. He wanted me to feel bad. But I wouldn't give him the satisfaction of knowing he was at all important to me. Because I didn't fucking care.
The number of missed calls my phone reported became more like a casualty report. Two opportunities died the other day at 3:17 in the afternoon. How he endured, I'll never know. I'd only reply in impersonal texts that were short and nondescript, like, "Sure. Sounds fine." Even though his plans for lunch always sounded horrible. Who the fuck like Thai soup? It's all watered down. Canned soup tastes better, but it's probably all thanks to the sodium; 20% of your daily allowance? What the fuck.
But if I could show him in person that I no longer cared, then it was worth the train ride to the edges of Chinatown, even though there weren't any Chinese in the city. It should have been called Asian town, but that would probably sound even more offensive. At least it wasn't Oriental town. Then nobody would visit for fear of being labeled a racist through association.
My yellow trench coat kept catching my attention in the windows of the stores I walked past. I hadn't brushed my hair. I had taken a shower, but only out of common courtesy. If I wasn't trying to send a message, I would have had an eyeliner stripe a centimeter thicker underneath my green eyes. It was January, and my cheeks were flushed red. I should have been in love. Catching the neon Budweiser sign hanging in the Thai restaurant's window, I fully realized that if what he thought this was was love, then there was no God and everything anyone had ever told me about life had been a wishful euphemism.
If I had seen him, I would have probably told him flat out to give up already. I had rehearsed it hundreds of times. Sometimes he cried. Sometimes I cried but tried to cover it up by looking away or wearing sunglasses. Sometimes he shot me in the back of my head when I turned one-hundred-and-eighty degrees to leave, my blood splattering on his white wooden door, mixed in with a little brain. But he wasn't there. He stood me up. I stood outside the restaurant, feeling cold enough to order a soup anyway, as long as it was still steaming when it was placed before me. After considering whether his actions might have been a more blunt message indicating he was tired of my games, I reminded myself patiently that it didn't matter what he had meant or what he was thinking. I was going to fuck him up.
NEW BLOG PROTOTYPE! So I have decided to start a new blog with a more directed purpose: exploring the world of mixed drinks. After my first Midori Sour, I knew there was a world out there that didn't suffer from beer-induced hangovers (seriously, most beers are disgusting). Or is that just an opinion? It doesn't matter. I'm exploring HTML so if that is also a fail, my apologies. THE COSMOPOLITAN: what a curious name behind a widely popular drink. Three things come to mind: 1) the galaxy forced into a small cocktail glass 2) the incredibly unhelpful and usually contradictory magazine Cosmo 3) what cities were called, and still are referred to I suppose, back when skyscrapers were still breath-taking. I'm pretty sure the 3rd choice is most appropriate, especially since after drinking a cosmo I did not feel a strong urge to question whether my boyfriend was right for me (I just felt like jumping him; and I didn't feel like wasting my time with "sex tips" either). [Ingredients: 1 pt triple sec; 1 pt cranberry juice; 2 pts vodka; splash of lime.] Results: very delicious, very pink drink. I believe triple sec is a type of orange liqueur, but I'm still unsure. First mixed, the drink burned a little, so to be more precise, bump 1 pt cranberry juice to 1.5. Let's be serious: the best drinks are the ones that are just diluted enough to let you forget you're swallowing fire.
A sorry if this is rude and/or offensive, B but please entertain my neuroses: A what is the chance you are HIV+?
C because i'm an obsessive hypochondriac D so, me dying of AIDS? C throws my holiday cheer out of whack.
Ei'm really just looking for a "you are crazy" E or: "very unlikely though the stats are a tad hazy." E i'd text you but i am too lazy. E other STDs would not phase me.
F but dying? ay, there's the rub. F i'm never getting plastered; never again for a pub.
"I can't believe he would do something like that." She was, of course, furious. As a captain she was rarely allowed this level of disorganized emotion. She rarely allowed it of herself. Vox, her second in command, was doing her very best not to be harmed in the ongoing internal conflict. "You know what makes me really furious?" The captain reached out with one of her long limbs to connect with one of the stone walls so that she could momentarily balance all of her weight on something other than her overpaced feet. Vox felt that disregarding the terror of being struck across the face, she would have rolled her golden eyes, an expression that she had picked up from the broadcasted dramas. But instead she shrugged. Vox hadn't said a word for the last twenty or so minutes; she had told the Captain of the scandal and was then forced to watch the proceeding intrapersonal argument. Vox could not understand why the Captain had been so upset. Only later would she begin to realize that something was up.
But right now, Vox was terrified. The Captain's onland quarters didn't help her feelings either. The dark stone walls that had been quarried at one of the poles of the planet, had a perpetual look of damp sogginess to them. It reminded her, through some unforeseen cognitive connection, of the "sickness" that her elders were always talking about but which she knew very little about. The captain slammed the hand that had been residing on her body into the wall, pushing herself off it. "He was one of Nexis's. Goddamn," Vox hated the use of Earth expressions, "He should have known better." Vox agreed with that statement, and analyzing the captain's face closely, she realized that she was no longer angry, and having a perfect understanding of situational exigency, she slowly backed out of the room into the corridor, too aware that she was still very tense, but very glad she had not seen the captain express sadness.
force yourself to laugh when his jokes aren't funny make sure to show all your teeth (worth thousands in braces, retainers, and hydrogen peroxide pastes) don't get upset when he never calls cry yourself to sleep but don't sob (remember to wake up with a manufactured smile) act too weak to pick up objects that need to be moved never, ever, never mention your six minute mile (it's not right to cultivate strength) feign ignorance when he talks about things you already know show interest even when you think he's pathetic (if you're wearing shades feel free to look away) when you have a good idea, don't share it when you don't want another drink, just take it (get to the point where you'll stop thinking)
forget about the importance of yourself when you get denied but it's all your fault that the tests came back positive
remember that you're worthless to everyone but yourself but only when you cry at night, okay? so you can wake up the next morning with a smile when you don't want to, do it anyway
Jackie and I were best friends until I tried to kiss her and she told me she didn't like boys. We were thirteen, I think; the summer before eighth grade, so yea. I had been hanging out with Jackie's family all summer. They had a nice house, and even though it was old, the wooden floors reminded me of what homes should be like. Kind of romantic, right? Everyone's smiling around the dinner table in a well furnished house with paisley window shades and blue wooden sidings.
Also my own parents decided that it was time to fight again--I can't remember what this one was about, but it started when I found my mom crying on the red sofa in the dining room with a piece of paper in her hand. It didn't end until after they both had challenged the other to a divorce. But they couldn't do it. Hell of a summer though.
Jackie and I had gotten bored of pretty much everything else to do around town and in her house. No new movies. No new stores. We had biked to the lake nearly every day. TV was almost painful, we'd watched it so much. I had started looking through the cabinets and drawers in her kitchen, staring at the multicolor cooking set and the fine silver with fluted handles tucked away underneath the regular silverware in a kind of hidden compartment. I was that bored.
One of us suggested tag. I laughed because there were only two of us. What about hide and seek? That was Jackie's idea, definitely. I wouldn't tell her I was scared of the dark, but I was especially afraid of the dark when I also happened to be in her basement.
The stairs creeped and as my feet alighted on the concrete floor I instantly realized that this was a horrible idea, to be playing hide and seek in a basement that randomly erupted with noises of plumbing and strained air conditioners. She wanted to hide first, and I agreed. She turned off the light and as I sat down on the stairs, eyes in my palms, counting aloud to twenty or thirty, I tried very hard to hear her. Her summertime bare feet sweeping across the smooth floor. The air circulating around her as she moved carefully through the rooms below her house.
But I could not. And as I walked around after reaching thirty, navigating like a blind man, I tried to humor myself. Maybe get her to laugh so that I could find her and we could both go upstairs and do something less creepy. Like a cross word.
I was big on self deprecating humor back then. Nobody told me they hated it until one day it seemed like everyone was telling me to stop complaining "every goddamn second". Somebody had told me that once, in that exact way. I remember her face was flushed and red and shaking, but I cannot for the life of me remember who it was. But this was seventh grade and I was the only child of a couple that didn't love each other so I had enough reasons to think that I was relatively worthless. Mom crying when I asked her to make me pancakes; letting the griddle slam into the sink and telling me that she couldn't do everything for everyone all the time. But I'm your son? Or Dad walking past me one time as I walked into our front door, waving at him, and he just kept on walking past me, like I didn't exist even at all.
The worst were the grades. This'll sound corny, but whenever I used to get a good grade in elementary school, she'd have to frame it. She used the same frame over and over again, but still, when I got an A I got to see it hanging on the wall next to our kitchen table and I felt like people cared. But sometime in the summer the frame, and my last report of the year, a creative narrative about a dream house, disappeared. Just gone. There was no sign of struggle, but as I sat at the table and munched on my morning cereal, alone, before heading out over to Jackie's house, I felt deeply betrayed.
It occurred to me that this might not have been a localized incident. I didn't bother to clean up after my breakfast as the milk sat in the porcelain bowl. I slowly moved into the empty family room. All the pictures were gone. The dark wooden frame that sat on the coffee table of me in my baseball uniform was no longer there. The huge family portrait, a sixteen by twenty four, was gone too.
No I couldn't even pretend that my home was a happy one. There weren't smiles from long ago to hint at a time when the house had been quiet during dinner time, when my dad hadn't had to sleep in the basement.
So I left the house that day, pretty confident that nobody no longer loved me. I later found out that my mom had hidden all the pictures in the attic. She hadn't burned them like I imagined she had, standing over them in the backyard late at night with a can of gasoline in one hand and the grill lighter in the other, her face glowing orange, twisted up trying to decide whether to laugh or cry; in either case, like a maniac. But the fact that they still existed didn't make me feel better when I found out a few months later.
I think Jackie's parents found out that day that my parents were fighting. I had been going over to her house a lot, but they probably never suspected anything was amiss. We were just kids with nothing to do. We had been in the same pottery class in a neighboring town two years earlier, and since we were the only kids in the class who went to Astor Elementary, we had to become friends. So no, they didn't suspect anything. But that day after biking over and dejectedly knocking on the blue wood of her door, I had no other thought in mind then to cry. I was obsessing over it. That's all I wanted to do. I wanted to curl up into a ball and cry. I would have done it at my house. I could have done it in my room. But no. There's no way that could have worked because I would have been far removed from the only person who seemed to like me, and her house still seemed so happy. Not like mine. Not like the house where I felt like I was constantly walking on eggshells.
Looking back, I feel really bad about what I did. I wasn't embarrassed while I was laying on her corduroy blue coach, sobbing in hysterics while she sat in the oversized leather recliner next to it, just staring at me. She had tried to say things but I couldn't listen. I was so sick and tired of my parents and their faces and why wasn't anyone ever happy anymore. But afterwards, I felt so very odd. I shouldn't have told her all those things; I shouldn't have poured out the intimate details of my family's life. I shouldn't have told her that I didn't think my dad had been cheating but that how the hell should I know because he never talks to me.
As a preadolescence I was trying to communicate the things that even adults can't say. I felt relieved when I finally stopped crying and she ran across the wooden floor into the kitchen to get me a glass of lemonade. They always had lemonade. Fresh. Incredible. I was jealous of the strangest things. But when she sat next to me I started to feel uncontrollably embarrassed. Mostly because she wasn't saying much and I had just told her everything that had been in and out of my consciousness during the past month. I didn't say anything else and we just sat on the couch. This is how her mom found us when she came home from work shortly thereafter. Her mom worked a rather posh job in advertising, and she always came back at around eleven thirty. Her mom loved me. She thought it was great that we were both friends because, as she told me sometimes to Jackie's protesting, "It's just so hard for Jackie to find good friends her age." I didn't really know if that was true. But we were both the only children in our respective families, and I guess growing up it's kind of lonely. I never felt lonely, though, always felt like I had my mother with me, until that summer and then well, that's how I learned self deprecation. My eyes were swollen and red. My ankles were crossed as they dangled from the couch and my fingers were wrapped around a lemonade filled glass that I couldn't drag my eyes away from. I couldn't have looked more depressed. Jackie greeted her mom as cheerily as ever, and her mom looked at me, but not too long, before walking up the stairs to her room. I expected that to be that but it wasn't. A few minutes later she came back downstairs. "Gavin honey, are you alright?" I can still remember exactly what she looked like because she looked like an angel. Gray pencil skirt, black dress shirt, white cardigan, green rimmed glasses. That's all I wanted to hear. I wanted an adult to ask me how I was and to actually mean it. "Yea Mrs. Jo. I'm alright."
"Well if you ever need anything, if you ever need to stay here, you know you're always more than welcome." She studied me for a couple of seconds. "What do you guys want for dinner?"
And that was that. But between me and Jackie I was less sure. Maybe nothing changed. Nothing probably changed at all. But I started watching her more. I tried to gauge her reactions to things I said. To things I did. I didn't want her to be over worried or not worried enough. I didn't want her to distance herself from me but I didn't want her to think I was being too much to deal with. Soon thereafter watching television turned into watching Jackie. It was probably around this time that I started to like Jackie in any type of serious way but I didn’t actually know that I knew that then.
Oh, so anyway, we were playing hide and seek, and I must have said something funny or something stupid, either or, regardless, I hear Jackie giggle or something and I carefully move toward the sound I had just heard and start walking carefully. "Jackie, can we please do something else? I don't want to admit this but I am not brave enough to not be afraid of the dark." I didn't hear anything, so I kept trudging my feet flat over the concrete floor. "You know I can always just walk upstairs." I thought the threat would get her out of her hiding spot but it didn't. I tried to hear her again for a moment or two, but that was unsuccessful so I turned around and started walking to the stairs. Or at least to where I thought the stairs should be. But I ran into Jackie. Somehow she had gotten up out of her hiding spot, never did learn where it was, and I stubbed my toe on her heel. I was so scared that I grabbed her and refused to let go. First because I was really scared and then because it was funny.
I'm wondering now if I should feel self pity or if I should just laugh. My life is so melancholic it almost seems like a melodrama. Honestly, my life is being written by a horrible author. I want a remake. Why would you make me this? Half-black, diabetic, mild depression that wouldn't make someone suicidal just really pessimistic about everything. Social skills so questionable I probably would have been labeled autistic if I was five years old today, in 2009.
But then again, maybe this is just hilarious. Maybe it's amusing to pose a relatively self centered person, who asks, why am I what I am, it seems like such a strange combination, in a variety of situations that makes reality seem very much not like reality at all. Why do I keep failing? Why do I keep failing in increasingly abstract ways? Honestly. Should I be expecting something? Should I? What is it? What's going to happen next? Maybe just once you could tell me.
Or maybe I could just assume it will be something even more ridiculous. Because clearly fate's a bitch and I swear to God that even though I'm very lucky to be financially secure, relatively intelligent, and healthy enough to pass for normal, I wouldn't wish this life on anyone. It's just so terribly unfortunate in no particularly serious way.
The aquamarine and fuchsia lights in the dance hall were making me feel erratic. Why anyone would come here far escaped my reasoning skills as a fourteen year old. Worst yet, it smelled like cigarettes. My mom hated cigarettes. I'd seen her do all sorts of evil things to cigarettes that had she done them to humans she might only escape the death penalty by pleading insanity. Whenever she found a pack of dad's, she'd go on a rampage. First the yelling. I thought fucker was a brand of smokes until the sixth grade. Then the torture. Boiled in a metal pot in the kitchen until the skin peeled away and the nicotine and crap dissolved, toxic gaseous steam rising into the vents over the stove while mom just watched, arms crossed, not a smile or a frown. Sometimes she took delight in flushing them down the pastel pink toilet in the first floor bathroom. She'd walk out, slapping her hands together as if she'd just saved the world. Dad never stopped smoking, though. She'd stomp them underneath her white sneakers. She'd toss them into the fireplace. Once, just for the hell of it, she took one of the balloons I'd gotten from grandma after my piano recital, and tied a half empty pack to the plastic string. I saw her do all these things. Dad assumed she threw them out. Hah. He did get better at hiding them though.
