Tag: short story

Dried syrup and lingering grease coated the plastic counter of the booth and tore against the jean of my jacket when I went to shift my arms. For how many cups of coffee could we carry this conversation into hell? Talk about the unimportant particulars of our daily routines, while pretending that it could mean anything else. I know that you woke up and went to work, but forgot to brush your teeth; therefore, I must know you. Its a false simulation of intimacy that we create in this run down diner every passing Sunday. You are a boy that pretended to want me, and now we are stuck in the same passing charade of un-truths and clipped clarity. Barely even thinking. Barely even being. A perfect Descartian paradox. 

He orders a black coffee, the kind that tastes like buttered popcorn from the too damp, un-roasted, and watered down beans. He pours in two packets of white sugar and three small cups of half and half. I add a splash of syrup, not minding that its the fake kind, and only one packet of half and half. I could tell him that he’s barely drinking coffee, that its more milk and sugar at this point, but that would signal that I truly had nothing else to talk about, that I the girl whose mouth flows like a river had finally run dry. 

Instead we talk about the Robert Longo’s exhibition at the Pace Gallery. His eerily photographic charcoal prints, each pencil stroke a camera light and pixel of its own. He remember the soldiers standing all in line, a uniform battalion with mixed faces emerging from their endangered mix. I remember liking it, that drawing I saw way back in September or October, but the faces have blurred in my mind. The soldiers are faceless again, an unknown mix, marching slowly to an unknown war front and soon-to-be-forgotten horror. Instead, I remember the bees – a collage of intermixing bodies, overlapped, thin legs stacking on top of black and white striped fuzz. The loneliness of all-consumption. That is what the bees are, lonely, intermixed, and never truly free. 

My coffee tastes too sweet, the artificial syrup coming back to haunt me. The constant rhythm of pots and pans crashing into stoves and enamel countertops interrupts my mind’s already unsteady flow. The other perpetrator is his face, the nonchalant complacence that he wears. I truly do not care. That is the expression he wears, a constant aversion to feeling or emotion. A declaration that this is just a task assigned to him the morning after. I’m just looking for a good time. He’s looking for a corpse to warm his rotten bed. 

There was a certain charm to his coldness when we met, disguised by artistic flair and an undiscovered history. I was alone in the back row of the jazz concert since my friend had left for her boyfriend’s place or a small studio apartment at least forty minutes away on an un-delayed train. Two large heads blocked the stage from my view, but the music flowed throughout the room, only interrupted by the constant clicks of pool balls scattering on twenty tables of green and grey velvet. The hum of chatter, cheering glass, and chess pieces falling, checkmate, clack, clink blanketed the sassy whirl of the saxophone and the constant flicker of the drums. This speakeasy was a thriving ecosystem of the cities most artistic, fashionable, musical wannabes and together, we drowned out the fear of failure with more and more glasses of bubbly cheer and fresh rolled tobacco, sex and performance, or whisky neat and too-smart humor.

I was bored and alone, and so when a certain stranger with wispy hair and a leather jacket drenched in smoke asked me to play, I quickly went along. His hand guided mine along the pole as he spoke. “Now do you see this angle between my fingers. Wherever my forefinger points, that’s where your ball will go.” I didn’t tell him that I already knew how to play pool, that I had learned from my dad when I was ten in a cabin in Tennessee. It was unimportant, another useless piece of information that would only serve to separate me from the image of the girl he barely knew. Was I a replacement for another brunette with too wide eyes from his past or perhaps another girl who also liked to sit in the concert’s back row alone? The possibilities are infinite. His former love could have loved to wear the color pink, just like me or have had a rounded jaw, just like me. He certainly smelled nostalgically of cigarettes, had the same roughness to his hands, the same medium built arms-that looked nice and felt soft to touch-as a boy that was in my life before. Only now, the tragedy had already struck, and so when he slid his hand across my thigh, I didn’t feel anything but lust and a fondness for an already-slaughtered dream. 

When he told me that he knew a place, I expected nothing more than a quick few minutes of too-intimate touches, heavy breathing in my ear, and then a long bus or train ride home. Back to the burrows. Back to the barracks. Back to the mechanical breaking of life. It could have been a damp, back alley way. I wouldn’t have minded. Or a car with too thin windows, a park without a fence, a stall in the men’s public bathroom. It would have felt cosmic, those few minutes of liminal resistance while panting heavily in a voyeuristic stall. I could have imagined the roughness of his unkempt scruff rubbing up along my chin all the while staring at a mildew stain leaking from the rusty pipes for years to come. He would have been the dark knight of an unfulfilled fantasy, someone to pine after for years until the next drunken bachelor dragged me off. Only he didn’t take me somewhere dark or wet or rough or cold. Instead, I spent the night sleeping on his recliner sofa, entirely clothed. 

Why didn’t he want to sleep with me? That was the question that filled my mind for the rest of the night as I tried to sleep beneath a too-soft blanket and the heat of anxiety and unquenched desire. My breath, my hair-unkempt, my stupid laugh that I never learned to force softer or control? Respect? Disgust? A million possibilities filled my worthless, spinning mind. 

The next morning we had our first breakfast together. At the very same diner that we’ve frequented for the past year. His face has shifted through the year. A progression that is infamous, impossible to ignore, and stains every memory no matter how hard one tries to forget.

I love you. 

No one has ever believed that I would actually become a writer. It the equivalent of aspiring to be a Hollywood actress, a wishful hope that one individual can arrange the words of the English language so perfectly that they might one day be read by millions. Its a career in pursuit of an unattainable ideal, that of being understood. I could tell you every thought in my conscious mind, every memory that has helped to shape me, every piece of specific information that might just be essential to understanding myself, and I’m unsure we’d have fully touched each other. Touched the life blood that makes us human or whatever soul that I’m unsure I even believe in. How can one write to the souls of millions if no one has a soul? But how can we not have souls if at least some of us are dancing for we hear the music? 

That’s how I felt when he told me that he loved my writing, my mind, when he told me that he loved me. I was exhilarated and insane because I wanted to dance to the music that no one else could hear. I wanted to move my limbs in free flow with the breath of the Universe, guided by his gentle hand, the angles of his love. I didn’t know that it could feel that strong, that quick. 

Do I believe that we are real? That was the question he always asked me, perhaps not directly, but it was at the center of his every statement. “Is everything not just an interpretation of another interpretation of another interpretation?” he asked. “Do you believe that you have a subconscious?” They’re difficult questions to answer, harder when love makes you hopeful for stability. I have a subconscious, but I don’t want to think we’re all fake. I don’t want to believe that the world is a series of signs and reactions from which I can never escape. I told him that I wanted to believe that we were real, that I had to believe anything was real.

He told me, “I love you,” two and a half weeks after meeting me. It should have seemed crazy, a psychedelic ride through the an imploding mountain pass. Monarchs, buttered pancakes, and cups of foamy, German beer. Philosophy and art, history and science. An exploration of the history of the world and human soul while high on LSD and spinning into the ground. Only, it wasn’t doomed to total destruction, or at least it never felt like that.

He held my ran to greet me in airport waiting rooms and squeezed me until my luggage fell from my hands on to the ground. He held a bouquet of dollar tree flowers, wrapped in purple tissue and crinkled cellophane and a pair of Nike running gloves. He said something about seeing me running through frosted trees and streets with my hands gone red and blue. Something about wanting to keep me warm, something sweet, thought at this point, I can’t be sure. They were the kind that wicked the sweat away from your fingers to keep them dry. A size small in black and white and gray. They looked like nothing I would normally wear, being to sleek and modern, too athletic-looking. But they were warm, and he was too. He said “I love you,” and drunk, stumbling through undiscovered land, I fell through air and earth and watched him colonize my unburnt hearth. 

He was from New York. “There’s great schools in New York, great English programs in New York,” he said late one night or early one morning. “We can live together in my apartment, maybe get a cat or dog.” This was his idea of domestic bliss. “I love your mind. I love you. I can never get enough.” He said all of this and more on just week two. 

Heathcliff supposedly loved Catherine because they shared a certain darkness between their souls, because they saw the world differently than others. He saw the pain of fists in darkened dirt and sunken puddles, her the blood of sundered innocence before even having felt another’s touch. Still, Catherine, despite being a woman, had access to a far superior education to Heathcliff’s. Catherine had access to the gift of literacy, could read and write. She had access to the language of power, so I guess in a way, Heathcliff had to love her for her mind. He had to love her because she knew things he did not if he truly loved everything about her. Only what they had wasn’t love. It was an obsession. Obsession with subjugation. Obsession with domination. Heathcliff was the conqueror of the young girls heart, a land which he waged war on until its melted into rotten flesh and broken lust. He tried to love the woman smarter than him, and was only brought to peace after breaking both their minds. 

Of course Eli wasn’t exactly comparable to Heathcliff. In fact, he only really was in the perverse, innermost corners of my mind- the same parts of my mind that narcissistically hoped that I might one day write something as wonderfully as Thomas Mann or Marcel Proust. No. Instead, he was just another overly confident boy, bolstered by his choice of shoes and hair, and with little to no experience of anything constituting real life. He was a shell of a human having been entirely sheltered to this point, only then it didn’t much seem to matter as that shell of human was entirely mine.

They say girls mature faster than boys. Perhaps its social convention. Perhaps psychology. Only, I know that they must be right. I could be 22, and I would still be suffering the same blunders of the male species, the same failure to commit, communicate, or even just exist. Together, we spent four months falling in love, watching our common sense drift off in the whirring smoke of cigarettes. Together, we calmed our fear, constantly touching whether a hand, a leg, a half of a foot, a constant, co-dependent amalgamation of limbs. Together, we fantasized about a life in which I’d move closer to the city for school, he’d work a six-figure job, and we’d live in a too-large apartment for our budget in that overly expensive city. 

Conversations about life can’t exist in the world that we moved to, however. They can’t exist in the repetition of the morning after the night we met where the same coffee fills our cups and the same images of bees race through my mind. Him being unwilling to sleep with me that first night and me placing a bowl of bees, “swept from the corner of [my] studio” on his front porch, just like in the work of Robert Hass. Before, I never understood what Hass meant with the bowl of bees, just because a man didn’t want to sleep with a woman with a double mastectomy. Only now, I know the bees are castration, loneliness, helplessness, and the bowl forced the man to see. 

I wanted him to want me in the same way he’d want a model or a pornstar, a famous artist or a doctoral graduate who managed to finish her dissertation without excessive wrinkles. I wanted him to find me attractive, someone to fuck and fuck hard. Someone irresistible and impossible to evade. I want to be complete seduction. I wanted him to want me in the way that no one ever has, but we kept talking-philosophy, politics, and the potential for sex-without any actual lust. We kept talking, and somewhere between Foucault and the trajectory of AI politics, he decided to be in love, and from that moment forward, I became untouchable. And then one day I wasn’t and everything shattered at our all-consuming climax. 

“I want to go, anywhere,” I said. “It doesn’t really matter where, but just to know I’m going somewhere.”

“What’s the point of going somewhere you don’t even want to go, though?” He was as always, practical. 

“It’s not that I don’t want to got. Just that I don’t even know yet. Does that make sense?”

“Not really. Just sounds expensive.” 

“But think, you wake up one day after a red-eye, and suddenly you’re somewhere foreign, somewhere new! Can you imagine anything more alive than that?”

“Taking a flight to a country that you learned the name of before yesterday.” I tried to laugh. He tried to pretend that he didn’t find me overprivileged and impossible, that he didn’t think constantly about the differences between the houses where we grew up. I hoped one day he’d seem to understand just what it was that I needed to escape. The monotony and complacency. The discipline that actually crushes souls and dreams, that surely can’t traverse continental divides. I needed a thousand miles between myself and every little thing in my life that had been destroyed, and the worst part was that he was one of them. 

It had started small. I always knew he wanted kids. In a far off futuristic kind of way. In a dreams of fatherhood kind of way. I was never sure on the issue, but it seemed irrelevant at 22 and 23, something that I didn’t need to know before age 27. 27 was a more suitable age to think about having children, to decided whether you can give a child all the love it needs, sacrifice your body, sacrifice your life, all to have one small, precious thing. Suffice to say, I never much knew whether my life would morph into come five years, let alone whether I wanted kids. 

“I just think two people wanting high-demanding careers are incompatible-if they want kids that is.” 

He said it so nonchalantly, like it was perfectly normal to imply that your 22 year old girlfriend needs to consider her future career in the context of your potential, non-existent prosperity. The implication was clear. He wanted a career at a big tech firm, was willing to shed his artsy performance in favor of a high-yield checking account and 401k. He also wanted children. According to logic, x principle plus y principle always equals z. He proposed that x, or one high demanding career individual plus y, a variable that must be inherently different to have a new representation would equate to compatibility. Y was domesticity. Y was sacrifice. Y was who he wanted me to be. 

Once he asked me why I wanted to become a professor. Why English? Why anything at all?

“To read a book is the opposite of being alone. There’s a million people out there, that I might not ever understand, who surely won’t comprehend most, if anything, about me; but in the world of fiction, I have never had to fight. Words link out souls with chains of letters, unbreakable, inescapable. Only the imagination can go beyond the set potential offered by a universal language. Only fiction can give a place between worlds, languages, cultures, people, tongues. Only literature will ever make me truly free.”

X plus Y equals Z. Fiction plus imagination equals freedom. Freedom is indeterminate. The syrup sinks into my sleeve, and on the window seal rests a pile of dead and drying bees. 

My mother has warm eyes that squint whether she’s happy or sad. Any emotion and her face squeezes with compassion. She dances when something tastes good. Whether its savory or sweet, her eyes spark alive and she wiggles back and forth in her seat. My mother is an optimistic woman. She has the sort of kindness that extends to everyone, but I’m not sure Eli would receive her kindness. Perhaps instead my mother would sweep my studio’s corners, looking for extra bees. 

“Of course I don’t mean that we’re not compatible! You don’t want a high-demanding career. We could make this work.”

“You do realize I want to be a professor?” 

“Yeah, but that not high-demanding. Besides, you’d get to arrange your own schedule, so you’d have plenty of time to take the kids to school before and after work.”

Its fair to want, but his desire extended over my body in the strongest way it ever had. The man, who failed take me on that first night, now wanted not only my body, but my entire life. He wanted me to become the opposite of the woman he claimed to love. Theres nothing wrong with being a stay-at-home mom. Only, you have to want it, and he loved the parts of me that never would. He loves an idea that philosophy incepted in his mind, and not the actual girl, and as he said those oh so disastrous words, I started to fall just a little bit out of love. Reality had revealed the equation from which our fantasy emerged. 

Perhaps from the moment we had sex, he claimed ownership over my body. Each time we intersect in that manner, I turn into more of a corpse. I lose my allure, my mind, my soul, and the act of lovemaking sucks me dry – an inverse succubus. Perhaps the act of lovemaking is actually its destruction. He sucks me dry and steals my womb, and before we feel the tobacco coat our lungs, the conversation dries like forgone maple syrup, too sticky to become unglued.