I am not sure what it means that I want to run here whenever I am despairing, I am unsure if it is really so great a thing to have this at the end of the rainbow, to have it as my great consolation, to be able to tell myself, At least you have that. No matter what happens at least you have that.
Jeffery Gold, 2001. Oil on linen.
Smog, Dress Sexy At My Funeral
This song felt lump-throaty, felt lean your head back against the headrest and look out the windowy. Felt like nervously asking you who it was that was singing and then looking off into the mountains, looking out at all the lights and wondering if you liked me.
I liked you.
It wasn’t exactly that it was right, I just didn’t want you to leave. I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to stay around you and feel a little bit self-conscious and a little bit off, and stick around for moments when I felt something in you that I wanted to crawl into. A funny voice. An “I should take you there.” A “why am I telling you all this?” Don’t all friendships begin with, “Why am I telling you all this?” You sounded right; good; nice; warm. We were awkward and bumbly and we didn’t know each other and we didn’t know if we liked each other but you felt right and good and nice and warm and funny and adorable and I wanted to stumble through conversations and wait for the good parts and I did not want to go.
—
We sat on his porch, on the ledge, cross-legged, facing each other, two beer cans between us. “This is like Sixteen Candles,” he said, “But with beer.”
I had a dress on that was really a shirt and I remember constantly worrying my ass was hanging out, or that my hair was a mess, or my makeup smudged. I don’t think I said much. I was too far in. I was confused. My legs were spiky because I didn’t know if you could bring razors on the plane and my bangs were curling up and looking terrible and did we want to go to this party? We didn’t, really, I don’t think. “Oh, um, we don’t have to? Or do we? Should we?”
i stared off back into the sky which wasn’t as dark as it should have been and we talked about how weird it was there and did I want another beer?
“We don’t really have to go…,”
“I thought we did.”
“Oh. Do we?”
We sat on the couch. I leaned back in a way that was unintentionally intimate. I say unintentionally because I was trying very hard to not reveal how I felt. So I did what i always do in other peoples’ spaces and I picked up all of the books and flipped them over and read the reviews and sat on the couch and he sat next to me quietly and grabbed books from my hand after I spoke about them. I very tangibly switched tones then, perking up, reading last lines of chapters with grandeur.
“Oh, are you going to read to me?” he said.
I believe that was when it was inevitable. “Yes,” I nodded. Maybe this was a scene in a movie we were acting out. I read and laughed and blushed and shook my head and never looked him in the eye. When I gave in he was leaning back in a very intimate way and maybe by now it was intentional. We laughed about things and I wondered how the fuck two people like us would move from Point A to Point B. I said something and he dropped his hand, the back of it, quickly onto mine— bounced it off of it. It felt like high school. This was high school. I cleared my throat, shifted a little, sat up straighter.
“Hold on,” I said and furrowed my brow and made a big to do of flipping through the book and considered the idea that I would have to kiss him first.
“Um,” he said.
“What?” I looked at him pleadingly, my cheeks on fire by now. I played stupid.
“I,” he was so cute. His voice was so wonderful, so good, so nice.
“Whaat?” I said and hid part of my face in the couch, staring up at him with one eye and my mouth dragging across the fabric.
“I feel like we’re about to make out or something.”
We were.
I asked you about every girlfriend you’d ever had, my hand in yours as we walked over the Brooklyn Bridge. You never let me tell you about the people I slept with before you, which I was suppose is some classic romantic trope or something but it never suited me and I was dying to. I still hate you for that, and would quite like to send you a list, with footnotes concerning the number of orgasms gleaned from each, maybe how many times I went down on them, or where. You wouldn’t be able to unread it. So there’s always that to look forward to.
But it was dark and the weather was perfect and you didn’t tell me that’s where we were headed and right when I thought, hey! We should walk over the bridge! you turned to me and said, Hey! Do you want to walk over the bridge?
I did!
And you told me about your women and I loved every story you told, stopping to kiss you, reimagining your romantic narrative with me at the end, asking you if you touched her boob, if you saw her naked, if she was a good kisser, if she was as good of a kisser as me.
The wind was blowing and we would stop on the sidewalk and kiss; you’d lift me up in the air and kiss me, and I say this because it astounds me now, that moment before you disappoint each other, when you can stop mid sentence, overwhelmed with this, astonishment, Who are you?
It’s not that we really even want to know yet.
And when we walked home I start to tell you about the first boy I ever saw naked and you got mad and annoyed and I hated it. I want to be confessional, I want to be transcendent, I want to torture each other emotionally and cry and stay.
That night I think you let me tell you about the first boy. About Pete. I told you how I only knew his name when he asked me because I saw a drawing on his fridge, done in crayon and stick figures, addressed to Uncle Pete.
“Did you like it?” you asked. Did I? I don’t think I did, but I don’t think that’s what I was in it for. I liked that I knew, now.
Pete did something boring with money, I told you. He was a federal actuary, I remember that now, but I liked to remind you how boring I think money is, how different and creative I am.
I picked him up in a bar, I tell you, I was very drunk, I tell you, in a way I never am now, I tell you, because I’m afraid you won’t like that about me and I tell you that after I took a poll of the crowd— “Raise your hand if you’re a virgin!” no one raised their hand but me. Which was, of course, the deciding factor.
You told me always that I should set some goals. Make a list. You’d say this to me on the way to things, Tell me about your writing, you’d say, it’s the elephant in the room, you’d say, it’s who you are, and I’d let go of your hand on street corners and shake my head and look away and get very angry. How could I tell you, “It is very private.” “You wouldn’t understand.” “You don’t understand anything about me, and you never will. But we have excellent sex and you hold my hand and I would like to see how complicated we can make this.”
It is not something I can tell you about because I will need it for when you leave me.
So I told you that losing my virginity was simply a goal I had set and the time had come to check it off my to-do list. The sadness of that didn’t hit me until a few months later, in bed with another stranger I had picked up at another bar, an Italian, this one, who asked for my sexual origin story and held me and said that that was not how it should be, that I should have a boyfriend who loved me who I could make love to multiple times a day and who could teach me and help me learn what I liked, and, and, and. I cried in his arms and he ssshed me, kissing my back, telling me it was okay in his Roman accent. It wasn’t right, I thought, but it was true. What could I say? That no one showed up for me, that no one liked me enough, that maybe no one felt that I was worth the risk, so I took my own.
I shrugged to him and he told me I was beautiful and creeped down to the end of the bed and asked, “Can I eat you?” I still laugh when I think of it.
That night with Pete I was wearing these underwear with sparkly fireworks all over them that I got at Wal-Mart in the 7th grade. Really. I considered them my lucky underwear and I guess it held true, in a pile in his living room where Van Morrison was playing on a 6-cd changer and candles were half-lit. What are you doing, I demanded, as he lit them and I stood there alone, behind a loveseat.
It always felt very lonely, is what I wanted to tell you. And it didn’t with you.
I went into the kitchen to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and I almost forgot to put the bread down. You wrote about watching people in the subway and I remember being in there with you. Looking up at you when you watched someone’s newspaper, when you looked down at me when the train took a turn, hugging me to you so I wouldn’t fall on someone, telling me that, my god, could I at least go to cnn.com once a day so I knew who Bernie Madoff was, and, No, I said, the news changes every day; if I need to know, I’ll hear about it. I had never had any coffee yet so it was always an unfair battle, watching you check your email while we went over the bridge, alternating between ignoring me and trying to kiss me before I made it clear that I didn’t like you to do that, before it got both so bad and so good that I would let you kiss me wherever you wanted to. The shift between always feeling you about to kiss me, coming down over my shoulder and looking at me that sweet way every time you looked at me, when I knew I could look at you a certain way and you’d stop what you were doing and pull me to you, between that and when I would dance around you on the subway platform, this time learning to buy coffee on the way to the train, putting on a show now; putting on my makeup before we left now, none of it mattering too much because I stood below you, close to you, my breasts pressed up against you, not caring who saw, and you looked down on me— to me, but that, too— faked a smile, craned your head to see if the train was coming. I gripped the waistband of your jeans, desperate now, and now, speechless. You looked at me again, raised an eyebrow. “What?” you asked me. It was the worst thing you could have said.
nightmarebrunette: CinemaCowgirl
You asked me if I really missed you, or just the warmth of someone.
Now, this was unfair because:
1. You just read my blog, where I said that very thing.
2. I cannot separate the two.
3. This was no time for truth.
I don’t want to forget how it felt to take the last kleenex out of the box you made me buy.
I didn’t know it was the last one when I took it.
(via melanie rodriguez)
I was buying groceries today and thought how much I missed cooking for you, although I think I only did it once. But it was the possiblity of it that I missed. The meaning to. When will I wander dreamy-eyed through Key Foods again, turning things over in my hand, wondering if you’d like them?
There is still chunky peanut butter in my cabinet that makes me want to cry when I see it.
I gave you an apple and a jar of peanut butter and we stood in the kitchen and told each other funny stories about baseball from our childhoods. We were loud and silly and gesturing madly, I sliding around the kitchen floor in my socks and my yoga pants and my freshly reapplied makeup and you smelling faintly of sweat and chlorine. I told you that the apple probably wasn’t very good and you said the peanut butter wasn’t very good, either. These were small failings that we could say out loud and condemn each other with and my face will fit perfectly in the gap where you sternum is and I will pull you to me in the light of the kitchen and not want to say much else because it didn’t matter.
I fixed it next time I went shopping, I bought the kind of peanut butter you liked, but I never got to tell you and I never got to show you and you may never really know all the ways I tried to express all the affection I had for you, despite how much it scared me. For all of my complicated feelings and poetry, I could never figure out how to just show you.
That night, just like always, you said things to me that felt very generous and unnecessary. I like being here. This feels nice. I like spending time with you. Things that held no cleverness to hide behind. I began to love those simple sentences, to curl up in them as you whispered into the curve of my shoulder, the nape of my neck, along my spine. Words that became remarkable when you uttered them, that made my face and mind go blank, made me close my eyes in shame, in humility, words whose meager syllables performed a unilateral disarmament on my winding desperation. Words that put me at rest.
And I know that now I must rediscover my consolation alone.
But I go to sleep, my darling man, and I don’t even fluff my pillow. I collapse in my bed with my my shoes still on. My bed is filled with the dirt from my shoes and there isn’t even any reason to change the sheets.
I leave my room to go to work without worrying about who will be here next, because I know there will be no one.
The last time I straightened up I found a condom wrapper in the space between the bed and the wall and I swear I wanted to keep it.
