Nothing To Remember Pt. II

He used to say it sometimes at parties. He’d stare at his scuffy boots and scratch at the greasy hair behind his ear and say it. Or, he’d tug at that stupid thrift store t-shirt and look over your shoulder as he said it. Alyson had watched him do this once a week, every week, for 8 months and now she watched him do it again in that fucking basement. He snapped the folded-down beer can tab with the nail of his forefinger and looked up at the ceiling and said it.


“I don’t know… you know? It’s like, when you make art – when I write – and you do it in public like that, you’re just free. And anonymous. In front of everyone. “

The skinny red-headed girl, that girl that everyone thought was overdressed in her asymmetrical dress and asymmetrical haircut and teetering, perilous heels, nodded solemnly with her eyes closed and her head down, like an acolyte at prayer. He went on. Alyson, on the mildewed basement sofa, stopped smiling.

“It’s like, because everyone is there and sees you, it's like you matter. But you don’t have to explain to anyone why and no one could say for sure why, but everyone knows that this guy, with his typewriter…”

He touched the little, freckled thing on the hip with the tips of his fingers of his non-beer hand.

“or this girl with her sketch pad, or whatever. They know that you matter.”

He shrugged and pressed the sweaty beer can against his forehead and the little red-headed girl bit her lip, blushing behind all her adorable goddamn freckles.

Allyson stood and smoothed her sweater, swaying a little. Leaving that half-full beer can on the coffee table she’d carved their names into in the Spring, she climbed the stairs out of the heat and the sweat and the noise of the basement. The rest of the house was cool and all you could hear was traffic outside and the muted thump of the music downstairs. She tried a few cupboards and finally found the glasses and selected the biggest, cleanest one. At the sink she let the water run and and stared at her reflection in the window out on the alley between disheveled bungalows.

She knew she was pretty. Delicate featured, with fair skin and a great mass of healthy dark hair. It wasn't just her looks he didn't talk to anymore. It was her, in all the invisible ways.

Alyson dipped a finger into the water coming from the faucet and it was that shocking mid-winter cold. She filled her glass and lit a cigarette at the stove. Ducking outside, she sat in the late-march cold with her water and chain-smoked, shivering. And not crying.


She'd left her coat down there on the couch and couldn't decide if it was worth retrieving.

Mildew & Rust. Moths & Blowing Dust

She preferred her dresses barely there and this one was no exception. It wasn’t so much that a dress should show vast expanses of pearly skin, though this one certainly did. After dashing across her front, just beneath her collarbones, the neck line traversed a scapular curve at a dire, hurtling angle, and swept back up over the other shoulder blade just as abruptly. This dress was barely there in that perfect way; it hung across her frame delicately and yet moved with her like an aura. Like a razor thin cloud of silvery ephemera. In candle-light, she glowed. In passing headlights, she shimmered.


And the best thing about this cad on her arm was that he never noticed. She could set her emerald irises in a field of smoky grays such that they suggested men would fight wars in her honor, and he would spend the whole evening behind a scotch and a cigar, content to kiss her cheek on every entrance and exit. She was, for him, much like his cuff links; dashing accoutrement that, if left at home, would be unfortunate but, after all, the night would go on. Tonight, she’d feign a yawn and tuck her fingers beneath the lapel of his coat.

“I’m tired,” she exhaled, brushing his ear with just the hint of her bottom lip. He produced some bills and she received them along with a last kiss for her cheek in all those masculine aromas.


And wherever the taxi took her, she had hours before the illusion required she was home. There were, of course, men who loved her. Probably one each in every surrounding postal code. Men who would have stolen her away to any number of warm, Catholic places for the rest of history. And she told them how she loved the sound of escape. And, in the mean time, she let them buy her things she had no place to wear. Every single one wondered why she never spent the night.

And every morning she woke up before him in that sprawling bed and thought with fear that she would always love the man who never called her by her name.

Admirable Advent Attempts

This is what became of my attempts to write an advent story. It's a little long. And I don't have many pictures to accompany it. But here ya go. Merry Christmas to all and, to all, a good night.

At those bright, shining, over-lit way stations along the American highway, the bathrooms were somehow factory-like. Station after station to set about your work. Careening, efficient rows of urinals and stalls like at an airport or stadium. In these he’d gladly piss his caustic caffeine-driven piss. It was those damp, grey cement bathrooms he was in hope of perpetually. Something single-use and reeking of every other fellow’s bad aim. Some place with a drain in the floor and no tile or mirrors. It was in a place like this, a place with an air-dryer for your hands instead of paper towels, that Eric could turn the rickety padlock and fill his lungs, for a few moments, with heavy, ammonia-laden breaths. With his greasy jeans splayed at the fly and wracked halfway down his thighs, he’d spit in his palm and sprawl across the cool, grimy seat, rubbing one out to the thought of the last time Rebecca shared his bed. Sometimes, if someone shouted through the door, he’d clutch the hair on the back of his head the way her slender fingers had. He’d gasp a little and stare agape without seeing.

This road, like many of the others, was long and straight with a lane in either direction. The fields on either side bore the blonde, wiry stubble of cut down corn stocks. Rabbits and skunks slept mutely in boroughs along the banks of the dry irrigation ditches. The snow that lay an inch on every surface was fresh and dry and blew in wisps across the plain. Eric, driving and ensconced in all that hurtling steel, would come to drift askew a troubling angle for a hundred feet or so. The lengths of ice were invisible on the pavement, but if the wheels stayed as straight as the road, they would quickly catch rough pavement again. Eric would ease back into his lane, his eyes a little brighter and his heartbeat a little louder over the wind. Every few hours he would stop and fill the same Styrofoam cup with bitter gas-station coffee. He’d tip a few of those coins he’d fished from a fountain in Boone, Iowa out of another Styrofoam cup onto the counter next to the cash register and ask where the bathroom was.

It was a hell of a car to be driving in the winter. The heater worked, but it blew a heavy, oily air into Eric’s eyes. And though it kept his hands warm, he drove with his coat on. The coat stayed buttoned to the throat on account of the electric window motors had long ago failed at almost-closed. Each nostril was ringed in chaffed, red skin from where he’d wipe with woolen sleeves at his unending sniffle. The dry, split leather of the seats would abrade lines of pilling up the peacoat’s back. The foam-rubber headrest was crumbling and Eric would find bits of it in his hair at night, like pieces of oversized novelty dandruff. The ceiling upholstery had dangled nearly into his line of sight for days, until he cut it out with a pair of stolen scissors somewhere east of Omaha. He’d sometimes, while pumping gas, pick with the toes of his shoe at the climbing, two-dimensional stalagmites of rust on the exterior metal panels. The elderly fellow who pumped gas for him in Oregon had crouched by his rear tires for a moment and whistled one slow mournful whistle, but not said another word as he tucked a penny back into that tiny, fifth pocket of his jeans. For all of it, the car ran along well enough and unhurried, like the most of us ineligible for redemption.

____________________________________________________

The man feeding pigeons wore one on his shoulder like a pirate. Another, speckled black across its dull white feathers, perched at the bird-man’s wrist, pecking bread crusts from his hand. The man wore layers of tired and ill-fitting clothes. His shoes were once white, though the only evidence for this was the sliver exposed by a twisted and leering tongue, bound in fraying laces. Eric watched the pigeons bob and sidle around the man in a great swarm. Some hopped about on mere stubs of limbs. Some were great big birds, with iridescent washes of purple upon their necks like they’d wandered beneath some drooling, magical beast. Eric smoked and leaned against the front bumper of the car he’d slept a frigid, fitful night’s sleep inside.

“You do this every day?” Eric spoke across the small town square to the man. No one else but a newspaper man milled about the scene.

“I’m not hurting ‘em.” Replied the man, his smile suddenly gone. Eric looked around.

“I didn’t say you were.”

“Pigeons can eat bread. It don’t hurt ‘em none.”

“Yeah, but are you here everyday?”

“Everyday. Me and them, we,” the man gestured expansively, sending the pigeon on his wrist into flight, “greet the day.”

“You greet the day?”

“Together. Yes.”

“Are they your friends?”

The man’s smile returned and, moreover, he laughed. “No. I don’t think pigeons are much for friends. No birds at all, I’d guess.”

“You know much about birds?”

“I know pigeons can eat bread and that they aren’t much for friends. Ask me something else. Maybe I’ll know it.”

“Nah, sir. I think you’ve got it about figured out.” Eric tossed his cigarette butt into the gutter and circled around to the driver door. “Give the day my greetings,” he offered over the top of the car door and the man turned back to whatever it is one says to pigeons. The coffee Eric reached to sip had ice floating in it.

__________________________________________________________

At the diner counter, he counted out four bills and a pocket’s worth of change on his paper mat before ordering. He ordered the pancakes with eggs and a cup of coffee. He sipped the coffee black and stared at his face in the greasy glass between the counter and the kitchen. His dirty black hair stood at some odd wiry angle across his forehead and grey had crept in crackling bolts. The lines coursing his forehead beneath the bangs and in the flesh around his mouth were getting worse. He’d left the city with boyish features and now there was this man who looked back at him. For some, years pass before we are strangers to our own faces. For Eric, eight months.

“I drove my baby round in that same car. Make and model.”

Eric looked down the counter at a woman his mother’s age in black slacks, a mauve blouse and graying apron. Her hair was long, but up, loosely, in a bun at the back of her head. She’d been pretty, but not for decades. She squinted nostalgically over her glasses at his Volvo. He drank from his mug while looking at her, burning his tongue.

“Fell apart around me, but didn’t I ever put that key in and it didn’t start up.”

“My experience has been selfsame.” Eric offered, looking down into his mug, accusatorially.

“Took that little girl to Sunday school, to regular school day after day with that car. Parked it out back. Near anyone round here could tell you so. Plain spooky seeing it pull up like you’ve done.”

“It was a popular car at one point, I’m told. Safe.”

The woman nodded solemnly. She looked across her shoulders at Eric.

“On your way, home, Sweety? From school?” Eric read her name tag. Hillary.

“No… No, I’m just driving.”

“Well, you in some hurry to get where you’re driving to?”

Eric laughed. “No, ma’am. I’ve had no hurry for quite a while now.”

“Alright then,” Hilary said and turned to the kitchen window and slid a piece of paper across its threshold. “Well, sweetheart, everyone calls me Hill and you’re meal will just be another few minutes.“

Soon enough, out came a stack of pancakes leaning jauntily, capped with butter. A second plate arrived with eggs and meats. A glass of orange juice found their shared counter space. Eric looked around. Hillary emerged from the kitchen.

“I can’t pay for all this, ma’am.”

“You’re certainly right. Wouldn’t have your money.”

“I’m afraid I wouldn’t be equal to this much food either.”

“Don’t you dare. You’ll insult me if you won’t eat every crumb.”

“Ma’am.”

Eric ate every crumb. He left all four dollars as a tip for the check that never came. He didn’t bother with the change and gathered it back up.

_________________________________________________

He sat for a long time on that front step, hoping someone might be on their way home. He sat until the cold cut all the way through his clothes and he couldn’t feel his toes. He wished he had a cigarette to pull at furtively. The wind blew furiously for a while, and then was still and that was all the worse. That silent plane lay out around him like some bed long ago made and never slept in. He tried all the doors and all were likewise locked. Every window was latched to its sill. Every light was out. Every car was gone. Rebecca and her people, it seemed, travelled for the Holidays and the New Year. The Christmas tree was inverted in a cardboard box by the trashcans, tinsel clinging and a few fractured ornaments strewn at the box’s bottom.

Eric wedged his fingers under the garage door and it lifted with some effort. Across the polished cement, the door to the kitchen was unlocked and Eric let himself in. He slid each shoe off his heel and left them neatly by the door like he had the year before. For a moment he heard a whole family’s chatter of joy and anxiety and conflict. He heard the skitter of canine claws across kitchen tile. The whistle of tea kettles before bed. The creak of an insomniac grandmother shuffling to the porch for early-morning cigarettes. But the inside view was still dark and everything tidy and in its place. It was all but a corpse of a home, laying in wait for a Christ-like return to resurrect it. Eric was colder now than before.

Up the stairs and into her room, he sat the edge of the bed. He turned to address the window, ensconced in frost.

“I guess…” Eric wiped at his nose with that woolen sleeve.

“I guess I though this was the piece that would make sense if I just did some stupid heroic thing. Surprise you and come inside and you’d be mad at first, but in that way you forget quickly. I’d stand here looking so tired and you’d touch my sleeve and your dad would shake my hand and your mom would pour me a secret brandy and park me next to grandma, asleep and…”

Out in a field, two deer dipped their heads to stalks that broached the snow. Eric stared at them and they seemed to notice. For a moment, Eric laid his sight at where it seemed their dark eyes were aimed. Then, they returned to their chewing and Eric found he’d slipped his hand between the pillow and its case.

Standing, Eric crossed the room to her dresser. He slid open the bottom drawer, full of sweatpants and socks. His fingers rifled a stack of cotton and came up with a grey t-shirt with a city’s outline in crackling screen printing across the breast. Unfolded before him, he breathed in its thrift store sweetness. It didn’t betray the scent of its newest owner even a little.

“It’s not like I could ever wear this again. But it just isn’t right,” Eric said, turning for the door.

He stopped short and turned back.

“Fuck it. I’ll trade you.”

Eric reached into his coat and brought to bear a folded wad of paper, splitting and softened at its edges. Inside the folds was a note she’d written that previous year on a paper table covering, just beneath the edge of her plate. It was something her mother would have hated and her father would never see. It was written in blue pen. It was a secret shared before everyone and that he’d only spoken of once, towards the end. She’d heard it mentioned and turned immediately for the door. They spoke after that, but not easily. She didn’t even know he’d saved the scrap.

But how could he not? And leaving those blue-inked words on the duvet, he descended into the broader quiet of the kitchen and out the door.

Eric pulled the garage door back down into place with a crash and climbed back into his frigid vehicle. Back in town, he bought some cigarettes and matches with his coffee at the gas station, but did not ask about the bathroom. When he refilled the gas tank, he spilled a little on the wadded up cloth at his feet. Eric sealed up the gas tank and leaned against the door to light a cigarette with his back to the breeze. He made sure the lit match fell to the wreaking rag on the cement. It smoldered and crackled, fighting against the incipient cold as he drove away.

In the end, the city of Chicago lay in ashes and Eric would see its outline resurrected on the horizon in less than a day.

The Way Winter Wears

Papers are finished and graded. I’m home in California, where it’s warmer by twenty degrees and considerably less snowy. The air here is damp all the time, though. Even when it’s sunny, the coastal damp hangs invisible in your sweaters. I’m colder here, by far. I wish I were more relaxed, but well, I’m not. I corralled the long-ignored tasks from the weeks of paper writing and finals stress, dumped them in a folder and now they lurk here as well. PHD applications. Student loan business. Letters I’ve been meaning to write for ages and ages. I forgot to pick up some dry cleaning last night and I woke up in a panic this morning. Old habits die hard, they say.

So, in faith, I write:

“Winter’s here,” She sighed and pulled the expanse and weight of down-filled white around her middle, “and I’ll never be warm again.”

A month before she’d filled the trunk of my car with fallen leaves so that they spilled around my ankles when it opened. She was thoughtful like that. There I stood, at a gas pump in Lancaster, Pennsylvania with the New England fall condensed about my feet, laughing to myself. The pay phone line had crackled when she told me, “You can take it with you…see!”

I still haven’t vacuumed the bits and grit from the carpeting.

Now the clouds seemed, having once been fleecy, to take a cold distance of slate-like canopy. The crisp breezy had become a harrowing howl. The leaves of autumn had long been bagged and shipped away. And all her rambunction with it. I’d returned, but she’d retreated into a cocoon of bedridden boredom. Of tea and television. Soup and solitude. She lay like seeds underground, waiting to blossom through the snow.

This morning she’d awoke in last night’s clothes. The party I’d dragged her to had murmered collectively with the fervent solemnity of deep January. Everyone smoked a little more and the drunkards’ conversation was of challenges more than triumphs. So rarely was agreement found and two young bucks had locked horns in the yard, spilling across the frost and ice. I’d got her home, but she burrowed into the bed made for guests on our sofa and would not be moved. I slept alone in her bed, most of the heavy sheets and covers pushed down to the floor. I’ve never needed to be so warm.

She’d long stopped turning her back to change and the t-shirt fell across her breasts a veil that bespeaks the covered. I sat the edge of the bed and she stood before me, a bare-skinned pilgrim, and I pressed my lips to the skin at the hollow of her hipbone, just below the hem of that shirt. She laced her fingers through my hair and clutched weakly.

“Will it be like this every winter?” she asked in that far-off way.

“Here? Maybe so.” I pressed my temple to her waist and looked across the field of empty clothes that led to the door.

“It’s harder when you leave.”

“It makes a difference if I stay?”

“I think it does.”

“I couldn’t anyways. You know that.”

“I know. ‘the cost of a future somewhere warm’” She parroted what I’d written across the collage of used-up plane tickets.

She plodded in her bare-feet to the window and pulled the shades. When she returned I spun her round and down across the bed, and for a while her hands about her hair and her thighs about my ears. Later I’d lift the shades and sit with a book over a steaming cup of coffee by the window. In a few moments, she’d emerge at the steps of the building and light a cigarette.

At the bottom of the next page, I’d look up to see her seated on the snow and crying.

When I finished that chapter, I’d looked up and she was by my side.

Futurisms' Myriad Marvels

It’s all light and lightness, cozy in the heavy white of morning dreams. A creaky hand of mine excavates the sheets beside me, traversing the hollow of where bedside companions would be. Colors tumble into shapes behind my stubbornly shut eyelids. Angles and flashes and light and nothing and more, depending on which way I loll and roll about the broken down mattress we’ve shoved in the corner beneath thrift-store curtains and odds-and-ends decorations; amongst a litter of clothes and stacks of un-shelved books. The swirled mass of blankets beside me evidence that she’s been here and their remnant warmth evidence it was recent enough. It’s a good thing she quits the bed well before me in the mornings. If she lingered, I’d never write a thing.

When I convince eye-lashes to part with cheeks, she’s perched at the window sill, like a kid to candy store windows. Our mountain looms somewhere in her gaze and the morning sun can’t bleach her silhouette. She heaves a contented sigh and the blinds shimmer around her. I sleepily push up seated and the corners of her mouth lift and the corners of her eyes pinch pleasantly.

“I think the peak thinks we should dance today. At least once.” She says, gravely. “To something old and something new. But not necessarily in that order.”

“Easy for him to say. Mountains don’t have to finish dissertations.” I reply, gruffly, while tucking a tired pillow behind my head.

I press my eyes closed again, gently, and the swirl of shapes and kaleidoscope patterns washes around me. For the theater of my mind, the random dance of rods and cones before the blood-vessel patterned curtains. She’ll pad across the floor in bare-feet and re-inhabit the mass off blankets and sheets where she nests with me every night when our eyes can’t keep to their reading lines. She’ll run a cold hand across my chest and hook an ankle with mine and nuzzle into the crook of my arm and chest. Her cheekbone will set into the notch of a long-ago-broken collarbone as though God set the cost of this moment before our births; one bitter tumble and 6 high-school weeks in a sling.

“Did you notice?” she whispered into the egg-shell sheets.

“Notice?” with eyes still closed, feeling her breath rise and fall.

“God gave us a new place in the night. We’ve been the victim of angelic relocation. I can’t believe you slept through a miracle, young man.” She yawned,” While you were staring at me, I bet you didn’t notice the drywall is now exposed beams and white-washed cedar walls.”

She poked me in the ribs.

“You’ll find that Gabriel rolled up his sleeves and built our deck in the night, with his own golden sweat and honey blood. Patio furniture, delivered by cherubic messengers, carved from heavenly Galilean corral, light and sturdy, bears our morning meal. Jesus himself strolled through the home, performing inverse-fig-tree miracles on every pot and planter. We live in a sea of white and green. Michael’s sword cauterized a white-sand beach just steps from our front door. The basket is already packed with brie and strawberries and crusty, rustic bread.”

“I’d settle for coffee,” I teased.

“Let’s not pretend I’m the weird one, yeah?”

“Coffee, three pages and lunch and a swim. Then we’ll dance. Does the peak have a playlist in mind?”

“Let’s start with Marvin.”

“…and end with Justin?”

“and we’ll improvise in between.”

In our still-damp t-shirts and swim-clothes, we swayed and smiled and laughed as the afternoon sky darkened with the mountain’s bass-beat of thunder. It would be a week before we saw another soul. A month before either of us laughed at anyone else’s jokes.

Hemi-veritable History (Futurisms' Look Back)

It was a look you’d expect on the face of a mischievous child, really. Her chin held squarely and evenly straight ahead, with a waxing smile to its north and arching eyebrows more northerly still. It was the eyes most of all, somehow looking at me, though they were directed up and away. It was a face that said “Water balloons? What water balloons?”

But it resided on a face I’d never seen before and it traveled with a person passing me in a public place. I fear I may have gawked openly at first, only to drop my head shyly at the last moment, and catching that troublesome look only sidelong. Her hair was a weightless but satisfying whirl about her head in the springtime wind and her white, unbuttoned and knee-length coat whipped with a contrasting sharpness. The rest, including sharp dark jeans, rolled to the peak of the ankle and some stiff, elegant but simple collar of her shirt showed without imposition. The only item without tact and impressive consideration was the plastic handled, retractable dog leash, which conjured images of velour be-track-suited housewives on mid mornings walks much more than this urbane cloud of lavender scent.

At the end of this retractable, awful leash was a gleefully spirited terrier, like a pit-bull, but smaller and with none of the menace. Only Romanesque musculature in miniature. Its broad head swung, smiling mouth grinning to the world, from side to side, weaving erratically across the paved path between swaths of inviting lawn. Uninterested in me, the terrier dashed across my path from behind, and then returned behind me again, following the trajectory of a Frisbee or the like. Responding to its mildly annoyed owners calls, it dashed before me again, and I realized I was going to be wrapped in its tether. I attempted to step to my right, onto the lawn and out of its spiraling path. The leash joined me in the traverse.

Some other distraction found the canine attention and my ankles’ noose was suddenly synched. Laughing embarrassedly, the girl who’d moments earlier looked away, stepped towards me, stooped and trying to free me.

“Oh my god, I’m SO sorry!” She chirped, between titters of laughter and stammering steps towards my predicament.

And we pitched together on the lawn in a silent moment, my eyes filled with springtime sun and my ears with springtime wind. We just lay, for a moment, laughing with mutual shame and good-nature. A rough, warm tongue came to my cheek and streaked across my forehead in the greeting of four-legged friends. I gripped the pooch about the ribs and lifted it into the air.

“I think this is yours,” I said, staring into friendly eyes.

“Haven’t you ever read this before?” she replied, holding up my copy of Gatsby that tumbled from my bag in our mutual felling. Propped up on her elbow, she flipped through the pages casually. I put the terrier down between us, immediately regretting the barrier.

Starting to stand, she clutched the dog under her arm, pressed a free hand against my chest and said, “Besides, you should make notes in pencil. Second readings rarely yield identical notes.”

I nodded, without looking her in the eyes I would have bet were green, and untangled myself to leave.

She was already laying out her blanket beside me.

Sweltering Summer (Futurism)

At least on the balcony, there’s a breeze. The soap and brush and bucket from when I scrubbed these ancient patio furniture this afternoon still sweats in the corner, beneath the vine creeping across the wrought iron, losing its grip on the decrepit French windows. Those awful windows, single paned and warped, that let out all the heat in the winter and leave no place for an air-conditioner in the summer. Her sandaled feet, clad in the gladiator style of several summers ago (that I teased her so mercilessly for following), rest on the railing, nestled into a niche of bare wrought-iron amidst the august greenery. She’s been drinking the white wine I’ll only buy a bottle at a time.

“I won’t display alcohol like it’s a prize,” I’ve been known to say, over wine-racks at flea markets and bazaars.

“Its not a liquor cabinet,” she’d tease,” its vino!”

The glass still hangs tenuously from her slender fingers, just a breathe from the brick. Her nails are painted an ice-like blue and I can’t tell if her eyes are open behind her sunglasses. Her head is tilted gently back, at rest and her face is creaseless in a near smile. The breeze remains faithful. A favorite t-shirt, washed and re-washed to near-gossamer, wraps across her stomach, crinkling here and there with deep breaths.

A train rolls by as I mutely take my seat beside her placid sea of composure and the bell cuts over the din of work-a-day traffic. Beneath us, 10 or 15 feet, an army of joggers and students and young mothers march their discordant parade route of the late day. It is the heavy golden hour of cinematographer dreams, and warm in that way only the late summer can be. Warm and heavy and somniferous, like the atmosphere is decompressing us (and school children, most of all) for the ascent into autumn, we retreat from the brick oven of the apartment. Salad for dinner and day-old bread with oil and vinegar linger unattended between us on a low, wobbly table decorated with a spotty mosaic of a rose or some such thing. We’ll nibble at our meal eventually, when she feels like talking and I’ll mostly listen and eat more bread than salad.

Her breathing pauses ever-so-briefly and I look, expecting her words.

“How come I’m never ready for August?” she exhales, in mock frustration.

She laughs that easy laugh of youth and smiles at me, shielded in the blank owl-eyes of her sunglasses. I reach across, leaning my chair perilously on two legs, and swipe her wine glass carefully. She reaches out for the lost item, faux-pout on her lips. I switch the glass to my right hand to keep it from her reach.

“ I’ll open a bottle of red when it gets dark,” I say, taking her hand in mine. We fold our fingers together and she resumes her perfect relaxation, as though I’d dropped a stone in a pond and the ripples had diffused themselves, to be forgotten for always.

I squint against the golden glow to catch in my view the slightest part of her lips at her breath and the throb of pulse in her regal neck, trying to make a memory in the materiality of the life she shares with me.

Blessedly, the breeze remains faithful, propelled to us by a storm the french windows will not survive.

Where Is Our Fanciful Futurism?

The linoleum is cold and plastic and awful. It hasn't been mopped in...well, a while, so its gritty with crumbs and a little sticky in spots. Four minutes have gone by and I'm pressing the handle down on the french press, with bleary-eyed diligence. Preternatural quiet. 50 grams of just-ground Trader Joes something or other. 30 ounces of just-not-quite boiling water. The black pours itself through its own cloud of steam in the early spring morning cold. Those fucking boilers...


Traversing the interior threshold from linoleum to hardwood, the steady pad of my feet weaves around the boards I know tend to creak. There's another I ought not to wake. The floorboards are just as cold, but worn softer with the years. More pleasant beneath my toes. The books are already stacked on the sill of the tall windows facing the street. Beside the works, on one side, are the sunflowers I keep in a copper vase and, on the other, the magnolias she keeps in an empty wine bottle. The curtains hang around them all like wedding veils. I lift them and kiss the texts with my fingertips, pulling today's old, dead friend. The mug, sitting beside the stack of tomes, steams the pane of glass in a conical opaqueness.


Wrapped in an afghan blanket from the first time I lived in this city, against the opening volley of cold from a tired leather sofa, I sip and read and stare at the street. A few folks trundle through the cold towards a days labor. A neighbor walks a dog. Too early still for school children. I pencil in a note or two. Underline here and there. I'll open my computer in another place. I can read in this spot, but never write. Couldn't tell you why.


I don't hear her steps, but I do hear the bedroom door creak and scrape across the surface of the floor just a little. I smile and, for a moment, don't read the words my eyes pass over. As I feel her breath on the skin behind my ear only a second before she presses her lips in the same spot, I stare at that photo of her from the lake so many months ago. A strand of her hair falls across my neck. I grin and tilt my head, revealing and yielding more of the tender skin of my neck to her kiss. She obliged, pressing her cheek into the hallow between ear and shoulder. I crane and twist back to look up at her, still sleepy-eyed, but smiling, arms folded.

"You always think I won't hear you. You think you can grind coffee on the back porch and it won't wake me up."


I laugh and she winds around to sit across my lap. She's only wearing a t-shirt and socks, with just the glimpse of boyish underwear peaking out. Its a t-shirt that, the first time I saw her wear it, we lived a thousand miles away. A t-shirt I could never wear again once she'd claimed it without knowing she'd claimed it. She curled in my lap like a cat intent on keeping me from my work, her arms around my neck and nose pressed to my nose.

"Let's bundle up and see the tigers today."


She knows I've got to work. She knows I need so much to read and to write and grade papers and... but she'll talk to the tigers and hold my hand and smile at me when I laugh at her one-sided conversations.

The evening's warmth will be my opportunity to read in peace, after dinner, while she gardened. The rest was too sacred to sully with responsibilities.

Sorry Mom, But I'm A Man Now

So, after that other thing self-destructed with greater finality, I find myself...well, a little lonely. Moreover, I feel a little guilty about feeling a little lonely. I've got a bunch of friends that, at any given moment, at least one of them wants to hang out or get coffee or what-have-you. And its not like we're just acquaintances with little in common or a lack of emotional availability. We talk about just about everything. Especially our feelings, struggles, questions, etc. They're great. Really.



But there's this other thing. This...I dunno, romantic thing, right? Erotic thing, I guess? Though I mean that in a rather proper sense...not at the exclusion of that "other" sense, either. Its that "I'm approaching my mid-twenties and I'd like some companionship but its hard finding someone you're compatible with who's in a similar life station and also feels the same way about you" difficulty that a million tv series and movies are all about. So, I guess I should take comfort in the normality of all this.



So, anyways, I'm just trying to keep my eyes open and make myself available, though I am feeling a little gun-shy after that other thing. And I've been cramming my life with cuteness and beauty and loveliness where-ever I can (as you all might have noticed from the photo-tastic posts of late). I'd just like to meet a girl who nests into this lovely life I've got for myself these days. Someone to bake for and go on picnics with and snuggle next to on sofas. Someone to dance with and sing to. That kinda stuff, ya know?



Its like that other girl got all these boy-friend-y motors running and now I'm just idling in the parking lot. *sigh*

Who wants a blueberry muffin?