we were so close, weren't we?
once.
close enough to taste and breathe happy.
our little dreams tied together, christmas bows and knotted rings of twine.
our little faults made peace and became something nice, i think. something neat.
and you held me as i held you as we held onto fleeting faith.
we coalesced there in dawn, convalesced and came together once more each eve, turning the world to a suspended broken mirror.
our little whispers made a grand symphony, didn't they, in between unsure sighs and cigarette puffs?
little broken bells struggling to the surface.
and on nights like this, when all i can see is our little home inside each-other, our little freckles suspended midair, little constellations among tiny little clouds of stars, your voice keeps me awake, a little shout on distant horizon and
it's the little things that hurt the most.
Sunday, November 17, 2013
Monday, November 4, 2013
Smoke slowly spiraled up to oblivion as I sat on the curb that night. My third cigarette, and it was time to go back to work, back to wishing and wondering and waiting for day's end. I clung to my phone as the bitter wind nudged my mind down the street and around the corner and to your door. Wanted to call you. Didn't. Wanted to tell you everything. Couldn't.
It had been a while since I'd been able to see the beauty in my life. I was used to chronic happiness, used to nothing being able to bring me down. But for some reason, lately, tiny little unrealistic daydreams had been creeping like relentless picnic ants into my ears and through to my brain and stopping my smiles dead in their toothy tracks, and mentholated inhalations seemed the only way to temporarily ward them off. I was stuck. I wanted so many things, and for the first time, I felt I couldn't have any of them, no matter how many shooting stars passed overhead, no matter how many ladybugs decided to grace my lapels. I wanted somebody to hold my hand and guide me through the labyrinth of secrets and crushed dreams I'd found myself in, past the drunken tattoos in unfinished basements and bathroom sink hair color experiments and sad songs on repeat, to a field of sunflowers, towering over my head. I wanted to wander aimlessly, to play in the shadows cast through the swaying petals, to be carefree, to be weightless. I wanted to lay in the grass and watch the flowers vibrate against the sky, the greens and yellows and blues all unnaturally oversaturated. But at 18, I was taller than any sunflower I'd ever seen.
I lit another cigarette in a fiery fuck you to corporate time constraints and tried to figure out what exactly I felt I was missing in my life. And truth be told, the only thing I could come up with was home. I hadn't really felt at home nearly anywhere for years-- not at my parents' house, or friends' houses, or in college. So I yearned for some imaginary place, some city where it was always the magic hour and the sun reflected off of sky-high windowpanes of vaguely different buildings and cast a cantaloupe glow on the dirty streets below. Somewhere I could dance through the streets and sing Imagine and hand people peace signs made of daisies and nobody would think twice, and dandelions grew in the cracks of the sidewalk, and everything smelled vaguely of honeydew. And nobody would ever end their lives. Nobody would ever have to gather the frayed ends of their existence into a final knotted sigh. And I could think on paper. And I would never, ever have days like I was having then, days in which I was the last piece to be placed in the center of a jigsaw puzzle, but somebody's toddler had chewed on the edges, and a little piece of me was missing, so the puzzle could never be finished.
I rose from the curb, brushing away tiny pebbles and bits of dried leaves that clung to the fabric of my skirt.. As I turned towards the door, I saw a middle-aged man in a smart suit and subtly patterned tie hurtling out of the store, the produce and loaves of bread in his cart jumping and jostling with every elongated step. A few peaches made their way from a bag struggling to contain bananas and artichokes and kiwis and rolled freely around the cart, but the man kept running. I thought, is his wife going into labor? Did his stocks just crash? Is there a baseball game on tonight? He neared the steep part of the parking lot, the section that was absolute hell in the winter, when scrawny teenaged boys struggled against the icy incline to push snow-covered metal contraptions to create dangerous puddles on the floor inside. But he didn't slow; in fact, he picked up speed, until at the cusp of the hill, he jumped onto the bar supporting the bottom rack of the cart and rode it like a chariot down the incline, tie thrown over his shoulder, carefree, weightless. Alive.
We talked once about how we were as children. I didn't have much to say-- I lied a lot, screamed a lot, manipulated people beyond the capabilities of the average youngster. You told me about how you wanted to be a vampire, so you could live forever. You'd hang upside-down in trees, swinging by your knees, until a hapless victim ambled past, at which time you'd swoop down and bite them. "Not too hard," you told me. "Just hard enough to feel powerful. Freak people out a bit. I didn't need their friendship to be okay," you laughed. "I just needed their blood." And you told me your skinned knees and shrunken sweaters and mudpie experiments and dusks and summers. And I told you we should get married. I wasn't surprised when you laughed, but a tiny part of me hoped you wouldn't. A tiny part of me wanted you to find me a field of six and a half foot tall sunflowers. I wanted you to find me that imaginary city with the perpetually setting sun. I wanted you to show me how to finally just breathe, because everything was just as great as it ever had been or would be, because I was alive and my heart was beating in time to the rhythm of the pulsing planet. And I didn't need anything else, there in that moment, than the thought that you'd never stop looking at me like you were just then.
It had been a while since I'd been able to see the beauty in my life. I was used to chronic happiness, used to nothing being able to bring me down. But for some reason, lately, tiny little unrealistic daydreams had been creeping like relentless picnic ants into my ears and through to my brain and stopping my smiles dead in their toothy tracks, and mentholated inhalations seemed the only way to temporarily ward them off. I was stuck. I wanted so many things, and for the first time, I felt I couldn't have any of them, no matter how many shooting stars passed overhead, no matter how many ladybugs decided to grace my lapels. I wanted somebody to hold my hand and guide me through the labyrinth of secrets and crushed dreams I'd found myself in, past the drunken tattoos in unfinished basements and bathroom sink hair color experiments and sad songs on repeat, to a field of sunflowers, towering over my head. I wanted to wander aimlessly, to play in the shadows cast through the swaying petals, to be carefree, to be weightless. I wanted to lay in the grass and watch the flowers vibrate against the sky, the greens and yellows and blues all unnaturally oversaturated. But at 18, I was taller than any sunflower I'd ever seen.
I lit another cigarette in a fiery fuck you to corporate time constraints and tried to figure out what exactly I felt I was missing in my life. And truth be told, the only thing I could come up with was home. I hadn't really felt at home nearly anywhere for years-- not at my parents' house, or friends' houses, or in college. So I yearned for some imaginary place, some city where it was always the magic hour and the sun reflected off of sky-high windowpanes of vaguely different buildings and cast a cantaloupe glow on the dirty streets below. Somewhere I could dance through the streets and sing Imagine and hand people peace signs made of daisies and nobody would think twice, and dandelions grew in the cracks of the sidewalk, and everything smelled vaguely of honeydew. And nobody would ever end their lives. Nobody would ever have to gather the frayed ends of their existence into a final knotted sigh. And I could think on paper. And I would never, ever have days like I was having then, days in which I was the last piece to be placed in the center of a jigsaw puzzle, but somebody's toddler had chewed on the edges, and a little piece of me was missing, so the puzzle could never be finished.
I rose from the curb, brushing away tiny pebbles and bits of dried leaves that clung to the fabric of my skirt.. As I turned towards the door, I saw a middle-aged man in a smart suit and subtly patterned tie hurtling out of the store, the produce and loaves of bread in his cart jumping and jostling with every elongated step. A few peaches made their way from a bag struggling to contain bananas and artichokes and kiwis and rolled freely around the cart, but the man kept running. I thought, is his wife going into labor? Did his stocks just crash? Is there a baseball game on tonight? He neared the steep part of the parking lot, the section that was absolute hell in the winter, when scrawny teenaged boys struggled against the icy incline to push snow-covered metal contraptions to create dangerous puddles on the floor inside. But he didn't slow; in fact, he picked up speed, until at the cusp of the hill, he jumped onto the bar supporting the bottom rack of the cart and rode it like a chariot down the incline, tie thrown over his shoulder, carefree, weightless. Alive.
We talked once about how we were as children. I didn't have much to say-- I lied a lot, screamed a lot, manipulated people beyond the capabilities of the average youngster. You told me about how you wanted to be a vampire, so you could live forever. You'd hang upside-down in trees, swinging by your knees, until a hapless victim ambled past, at which time you'd swoop down and bite them. "Not too hard," you told me. "Just hard enough to feel powerful. Freak people out a bit. I didn't need their friendship to be okay," you laughed. "I just needed their blood." And you told me your skinned knees and shrunken sweaters and mudpie experiments and dusks and summers. And I told you we should get married. I wasn't surprised when you laughed, but a tiny part of me hoped you wouldn't. A tiny part of me wanted you to find me a field of six and a half foot tall sunflowers. I wanted you to find me that imaginary city with the perpetually setting sun. I wanted you to show me how to finally just breathe, because everything was just as great as it ever had been or would be, because I was alive and my heart was beating in time to the rhythm of the pulsing planet. And I didn't need anything else, there in that moment, than the thought that you'd never stop looking at me like you were just then.
Myspace Blogs shut down, and I thought I had lost my old shorts forever, but they e-mailed them to me. And for that, I am grateful.
They told me that you may have been able to hear me, even if you couldn't respond. I didn't believe them. If you could hear me, you would be incapable of keeping that straight face, incapable of keeping those blue-sky eyes comfortably shut. If you could hear me crying like that, you would sit up. You would take me in your arms and you'd tell me in that low, steady voice that everything was going to be alright, even though we both knew nothing was alright, nothing ever would be alright again. Because without you beside me, nothing could be real.
I sat beside that electronic contraption of a bed and traced your veins with my fingertips, pretending they were a blueprint for our life and that if I could just memorize every twist and curve, then I could rebuild what we'd had. What we should have now. What was taken away by the Chiclet-square teeth and quick tongue of some million-dollar doctor who couldn't wrench his eyes from his shiny black shoes to tell me that the only man I'd ever love was going to die, and that there was nothing anybody could do, and that I should probably just go home and get some sleep because you weren't going to wake up anyhow, and that he was sorry, sir, but he had other patients to see.
I was kept from your body by a web of wires and tubes and beeps and tears and memories. And all I could think was what Sarah said. That love is watching someone die. And I thought, then this should be easier, shouldn't it? This should be the most natural thing in the world. But instead, I held my breath, because I felt that I'd already taken too many today and you hadn't taken enough, and I watched as each descending peak on the LCD took you a little farther away from me. And I thought of everything that we were supposed to do. We were supposed to buy that little car, you know, the one with some ridiculous 30 miles to the gallon? And we were supposed to get married in a backyard somewhere, and we were supposed to honeymoon on that little stretch of rocks and sand on the edge of Lake Huron, in that cottage we'd fallen in love with one summer. And we were supposed to have a puppy and a house and maybe a kid or two, eventually. Eventually. But every plan we'd ever made was just a tiny prayer to father time, wasn't it? And now eventually would never come.
I traced your shape with my eyes, storing you in my memory, trying to form a lasting image. And it stung like a violent wind to realize that our memories depend on a faulty camera in our minds, and that no matter how hard I tried to hold on, you would fade. And as the TV entertained itself in the corner, the beeps and whirs and the rushing of air through that tube in your nose came to a halt, and I prepared to speak a final word in that place where we only say goodbye. But it didn't happen like in the movies. You didn't slowly exhale, admit defeat, fade quickly and give way to the orderlies waiting anxiously with a stretcher, wondering how I was going to take it, if I was going to be one of those crazy guys that screamed and threw things and tore the curtains down as his lover died. You kept on breathing, even without the assistance. But you looked increasingly haggard and your breaths came in uneven jolts, like someone was shoving the air down your throat against your will. Maybe God. Maybe me. After an hour, it slowed. Your muscles relaxed, and you were gone. And Sarah's words still rang through my head, almost annoyingly, like a fight song at a college football game; yeah, yeah, it's that song again, lah-dee-dah, go fight roar, it was fun the first time, but enough already. Love is watching someone die. Right. But who was going to watch me die?
As I drifted through the waiting room, everyone lifted their heads from the linoleum, briefly, almost unnoticeably. Nobody really looked at me. I wondered if it was because I was gay and they didn't know how to relate to me, or if they just didn't want to see the truth in my eyes, the blatant evidence of extreme loss that they were soon to experience for themselves. In either case, I pitied them. I moved stoically forward.
I made my way downstairs and into the gargantuan parking structure, realizing that I had no idea where I had parked. I wandered the rows and rows of vehicles, remembering... remembering. You would have laughed at how silly this was, me, lost in this sea of impersonal SUVs and Hummers and pickups, emotionless. Like Pacman. Just doing my job, navigating these corridors.
I retained the stone façade I had held since you'd gone until finally I found the car. I slid into the front seat and just sat, staring ahead at the glare of my headlights on the dimmed bulbs of the car parked in the spot in front of me, facing mine. My lights were giving life to those dead lamps, it seemed. I almost laughed at the futility of the thought that immediately ran through my head: that I wished I could somehow restore your life, just like that. One headlight to another. A simple turn of the key.
I needed a smoke. I never smoked. You always did. Somehow it felt appropriate. I rifled through the CD pamphlets and discarded takeout menus in the center console with no luck. I moved on to the glove compartment, hoping to find your stash. Id always thought that the glove compartment was inaccurately named, because behind its door was nothing to keep my fingers warm. Except this time, I was wrong. There lay the intricately knit gloves I'd thought I'd lost two winters ago, the ones you'd bought me for Christmas the year I'd bought you that Espresso machine. You said you felt like a shitty boyfriend, but I said it was okay, because I would drink your espresso and I wouldn't let you wear my gloves. I pulled the gloves from their no-bigger-than-a-breadbox prison and ran my fingers across them. I brought them to my face and inhaled. The grey knit smelled like cigarettes, because you had insisted on warming my trembling fingers with your tainted breath. And I hated you for insisting and I hated you for making me feel like I needed you and I hated you for leaving always the faint scent of tobacco embedded in the wool and I loved you for being the only person I had to find such trivial reasons to hate.
It wasn't cold out. It was hardly autumn. But I slipped the gloves over my shaking fingers anyway, adding a smell to my sensory portrait of you. And I could swear, as I pulled them on, I heard your voice in my ear. "Are you crying?" you asked. "No," I replied, voice stale and thin in the empty car. A single tear carved its way through my stony exterior. And it came to me then that you were a truth I would rather have lost than to have never lain beside at all. You asked: "Why not?"
I sat beside that electronic contraption of a bed and traced your veins with my fingertips, pretending they were a blueprint for our life and that if I could just memorize every twist and curve, then I could rebuild what we'd had. What we should have now. What was taken away by the Chiclet-square teeth and quick tongue of some million-dollar doctor who couldn't wrench his eyes from his shiny black shoes to tell me that the only man I'd ever love was going to die, and that there was nothing anybody could do, and that I should probably just go home and get some sleep because you weren't going to wake up anyhow, and that he was sorry, sir, but he had other patients to see.
I was kept from your body by a web of wires and tubes and beeps and tears and memories. And all I could think was what Sarah said. That love is watching someone die. And I thought, then this should be easier, shouldn't it? This should be the most natural thing in the world. But instead, I held my breath, because I felt that I'd already taken too many today and you hadn't taken enough, and I watched as each descending peak on the LCD took you a little farther away from me. And I thought of everything that we were supposed to do. We were supposed to buy that little car, you know, the one with some ridiculous 30 miles to the gallon? And we were supposed to get married in a backyard somewhere, and we were supposed to honeymoon on that little stretch of rocks and sand on the edge of Lake Huron, in that cottage we'd fallen in love with one summer. And we were supposed to have a puppy and a house and maybe a kid or two, eventually. Eventually. But every plan we'd ever made was just a tiny prayer to father time, wasn't it? And now eventually would never come.
I traced your shape with my eyes, storing you in my memory, trying to form a lasting image. And it stung like a violent wind to realize that our memories depend on a faulty camera in our minds, and that no matter how hard I tried to hold on, you would fade. And as the TV entertained itself in the corner, the beeps and whirs and the rushing of air through that tube in your nose came to a halt, and I prepared to speak a final word in that place where we only say goodbye. But it didn't happen like in the movies. You didn't slowly exhale, admit defeat, fade quickly and give way to the orderlies waiting anxiously with a stretcher, wondering how I was going to take it, if I was going to be one of those crazy guys that screamed and threw things and tore the curtains down as his lover died. You kept on breathing, even without the assistance. But you looked increasingly haggard and your breaths came in uneven jolts, like someone was shoving the air down your throat against your will. Maybe God. Maybe me. After an hour, it slowed. Your muscles relaxed, and you were gone. And Sarah's words still rang through my head, almost annoyingly, like a fight song at a college football game; yeah, yeah, it's that song again, lah-dee-dah, go fight roar, it was fun the first time, but enough already. Love is watching someone die. Right. But who was going to watch me die?
As I drifted through the waiting room, everyone lifted their heads from the linoleum, briefly, almost unnoticeably. Nobody really looked at me. I wondered if it was because I was gay and they didn't know how to relate to me, or if they just didn't want to see the truth in my eyes, the blatant evidence of extreme loss that they were soon to experience for themselves. In either case, I pitied them. I moved stoically forward.
I made my way downstairs and into the gargantuan parking structure, realizing that I had no idea where I had parked. I wandered the rows and rows of vehicles, remembering... remembering. You would have laughed at how silly this was, me, lost in this sea of impersonal SUVs and Hummers and pickups, emotionless. Like Pacman. Just doing my job, navigating these corridors.
I retained the stone façade I had held since you'd gone until finally I found the car. I slid into the front seat and just sat, staring ahead at the glare of my headlights on the dimmed bulbs of the car parked in the spot in front of me, facing mine. My lights were giving life to those dead lamps, it seemed. I almost laughed at the futility of the thought that immediately ran through my head: that I wished I could somehow restore your life, just like that. One headlight to another. A simple turn of the key.
I needed a smoke. I never smoked. You always did. Somehow it felt appropriate. I rifled through the CD pamphlets and discarded takeout menus in the center console with no luck. I moved on to the glove compartment, hoping to find your stash. Id always thought that the glove compartment was inaccurately named, because behind its door was nothing to keep my fingers warm. Except this time, I was wrong. There lay the intricately knit gloves I'd thought I'd lost two winters ago, the ones you'd bought me for Christmas the year I'd bought you that Espresso machine. You said you felt like a shitty boyfriend, but I said it was okay, because I would drink your espresso and I wouldn't let you wear my gloves. I pulled the gloves from their no-bigger-than-a-breadbox prison and ran my fingers across them. I brought them to my face and inhaled. The grey knit smelled like cigarettes, because you had insisted on warming my trembling fingers with your tainted breath. And I hated you for insisting and I hated you for making me feel like I needed you and I hated you for leaving always the faint scent of tobacco embedded in the wool and I loved you for being the only person I had to find such trivial reasons to hate.
It wasn't cold out. It was hardly autumn. But I slipped the gloves over my shaking fingers anyway, adding a smell to my sensory portrait of you. And I could swear, as I pulled them on, I heard your voice in my ear. "Are you crying?" you asked. "No," I replied, voice stale and thin in the empty car. A single tear carved its way through my stony exterior. And it came to me then that you were a truth I would rather have lost than to have never lain beside at all. You asked: "Why not?"
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