I put fingers in my mouth because you don’t. In the jury box, my tongue twined around my knuckle, stuck in traffic in my brokedown Honda with licking the pink V between my fingers. Too late at night, I sit at home with the six televisions blaring (these days, I can’t get enough noise. these days, I can’t get enough anything) and give myself hickeys on the pads of my fingers.
The people who used to come by used to tell me, with an air of alarmed disapproval, that it was all too goddamn much. No one, they told me, needs twenty couches. No one but me needs eight indoor lime tree, a stuffed gazelle, a wall of canned tomatoes, a chiffarobe overflowing with condoms, a dining room waist deep in decaying larkspur and sunflowers.
The locks on all my bathroom doors don’t work anymore. Back in the oldest days, when you used to take showers at my place -
(here is a short list of things you used to do. wear green scarves. pet other people’s dogs. eat avocados with no silverware. Breathe on my neck after you kissed it.
here is a short list of things you used to care about. your personal safety. hygiene. my feelings. me)
-I would bang on the locked door. You always half listened to my monologues about the distance between us and how I was already forgetting what you looked like. We both knew that wasn’t true and I’ve got the mountains of print photo albums to prove it. And I remember how I would finally give up and jimmy the lock with a butter knife and how I would sit in the sink and talk a million miles an hour about things that only made sense to us. We constructed our own world, with fjords and suburbs, blueberry bushes and microclimates. Mostly importantly, our own dialect, unrelated to any other (not even Basque, my darling).
Now its July and I’ve got the air conditioning on high enough to kill all the orchids and I sit here drinking gallons of hot cocoa and thinking: this isn’t fucking right.
I used to be the responsible one. My Phd is from Reed. I graduated summa cum laude. But I think the diploma got lost in all this breakdown and now they won’t hire me to drive school buses. You played the fuck up for our theater production we called a relationship (do you remember the time we argued about whether I should call you my lover, my partner, my significant other, my fuckbuddy? I do. {i hold our memories inside of my ribcage like a malignant tumors. my heart is beating itself to death}). You were the mess of things that you wanted, and you dodged consequences like the slipstream.
You used to wait for me in all the airports. You’d watch me walk away in my pantsuit that you got to get off me, wave goodbye. Hop a connection to St. Louis. Take the Concorde to London, just to keep waving goodbye over and over and over and over.
You used to have days were you’d collect everything you saw that was my favorite color; dropping stop signs, knitted baby’s jackets, bricks pried up from the street, coke cans, stolen snippets of hair into my lap like a pleased cat.
I’d find you charting the atmospheric conditions at the moment of my birth, and making sketches of the possible bluebird skies I might have seen. You’d laugh at the sunrise like you’d been up all night, and you never did find that shade of cerulean, did you?
Now? I give myself everything but what I want. I must’ve swallowed your sickness whole, like the chimerical twin I devoured before birth. It lives under my skin and wears me like a glove (and to think I used to be four fingers deep in you). This thing is my puppet master and it more than moves me my days and nights. I am the seat of all unrest. I swear to God, I used to sleep.
I am not at all picky. Drive thrus are always surprised as they haul bags of fries, mounds of hamburgers, puddles of chocolate-strawberry-vanilla-swirl milkshakes to my car. I am huge, but my want is vast.
Before all this breakdown, I used to say no. I budgeted. There was a blue day planner. Sometimes, I went to bed early. Now, in these days of catastrophe, I lie in my bed until the dead hours of the night eating endless sour candies until my mouth is blistered and weeping.
(I remember your brown eyes dilated until just a ring of color showed. Though the library in my heart is a catalogue of regret and methadone and hotlines that didn’t work, there is one thin book of thanks for the blackness of your eyes that night)
I am learning to love absence like a wife. If I am going to have anything, I am going to have all of it, so I’ve poured concrete over all the windows and stuck spearmint gum in the doorknobs. I am learning what it is to be alone. God, I’m so good at it, and I never realized how much stillness could hurt before now. This stillness means that my story doesn’t move. I live in loops that beat at forty strokes per minute, same as petting a cat or a womb after orgasm. My narrative is twisted around your finger like how you used to twirl your hair as you smoked American Lights. Canon can go to hell. These days, I get what I don’t want and I don’t want you to know what really happened. Truth is a weapon and my stitches aren’t healed yet.
So believe this:
I think Salinger was writing about you -She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there, leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together- the night I met you, except we were in line at Registration.
You took my History of Logic class and I failed you for handing in a response to “What is sense?” that read “What you and I make together. Duh.”
You were all twitches and haggard insouciance and so assured of your superlatively bad taste that I had to talk you out of donning a fetishwear latex gown to meet the Queen of Denmark.
You had plans for the end of the world, and it depended on whether it ended in light or blood.
You were surprisingly good at arcade games, whack a mole particularly.
You thought you looked like an Orthodox Jew. You didn’t. Your elbows sucked. You listened to Barry Manilow. Your veins were collapsed. You got the gist of the trick called living, but oh, oh, the niceties were hell.
To want is to build hollow worlds, to write novels composed of ink blotches and scratches. I am fruitless. I’m sorry I wasted your time.
