Don’t you think, dear Louise, that because I sing I have a light heart. It’s been such a long time since I was in love.
On the anniversary of the night you were hastily dispatched, I walked past a church. The lights were on in spite of the evening’s blanket. The yellow windows cut through the darkness. I looked over through their triangular shape and saw your Bronze ornaments. Reaching up to the wooden ceiling went your pipes, forming a staircase for escaping air. I could see souls swirling around your bench and your pipes. They hid inside them, bouncing back and forth on their rims. That’s when I saw a young woman sit herself down in front of you. She played one holy emperors chord; that was all I cared to hear. I continued my walk through the cold with a firm Bronze cage keeping my brain in its place.
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And the riverbank talks talks of the Waters of March.
He thinks of all the things we would talk about lying together in the dark on the hardwood floor in his Santa Monica apartment.He is a man of abstruse mind and his beauty is an abundant bounty.I cannot help myself but leave depressing emails and messages on his answering machine. It’s so embarrassing, it has been a tortuous couple of weeks. I sit and think of him. I desire so deeply to take the rusty nail holding up the cat painting out of the wall and drive it into my temple over and over again. I walk around carrying the knowledge that I could’ve loved him better than any of the millions of beautiful women he’s ever been with in his life. I could bear the load of his hatred and his mind, but we never got the chance to meet. So I continue to float my messages to him with only the promises of life I can make, never to be substantiated by any real relationship.
I think about all of these things while letting the cigar ashes fall onto the toes of my brown boots. The water sloshes underneath the wooden dock that I keep threatening to burn. I can’t focus my eyes on just one thing, and it makes me sad to imagine you like this. Like how I am right now.
She’s got a good head on her shoulders. And another one on her desk.
I remember when I used to wait for the school bus at the end of the driveway, and how dark gray the cement was. It would be so early in the morning, we lived far away from the school. I would wake up earlier than everyone else I knew by hours and arrive at school with enough time to watch TV on my phone before classes started. I would chew on my headphones and listen to The Soft Bulletin, thinking that I should watch the movie it scored.
Blow it out your crusty rectum, you loser. We don’t know you, we barely just met you, we certainly don’t like you, you’re fucking crazy. And you’re ugly, besides.
You level my love, you make it common. Like the marriages of people on Facebook or the pre-planned engagements at supermarkets. Those people shouldn’t feel love the same way that I do, but my love for you puts both of us in a dive bar, and I am watching you order beers. My love should feel like firework sparks that jump on to skin or tiny bombs dropping out of MiG planes. My love for you is like the fat fifty year old couple in flip flops picking out the best cans of Spam from the shelves.
In this world as we know it sorrows come and go. But now, we see the human race has put its footprints on the moon’s face.
Perhaps the following scene is uncommon or seems alien to you, but it is certainly not to me. That puts me in a unique enough position to detail it to you in this moment, exactly as I remember it. I’m sure your mother has a story much like this one, similar enough where she’d knowingly laugh at a movie portraying this kind of thing. I digress.
I was having a late night in New York City. My most languid love is the brushing of hours past seven thirty in Manhattan; it never gets dark true enough for me to want to sleep but the navy night sky is much more amenable to me than the bright blues or grays of all the hours that come ante meridian. My office on the freshly swept eighteenth floor has two floor-to-ceiling windows: one facing my desk and one to the left of my desk. To the right is my door which leads to the rest of the floor. Maggie’s desk is right outside the door on the right, to the right, wherefrom she takes my calls and fiddles around with her glass bunny paperweight that her high school sweetheart bought for her when he was still dating and driving. She keeps a framed photograph of the two of them at the Senior Prom. She says she would’ve put their wedding photographs on display, if he hadn’t died in a car accident two months after graduation. I don’t have any pressing work left on my desk to do. It is only Wednesday and I’ve already sufficiently prepared for the myriad of meetings I am to sit for and mediate on Friday, so I’m left picking about at letters or budget proposals that will need rooting around in at the end of the month, which it is not. I have my calendar marked for the seventeenth of October, only thirteen days before my birthday. I haven’t made any dinner plans but I suspect all will work itself out. The painting of the smiling black cat above the latticed weeks of October looks distinctly like my childhood cat, Clyde. Perhaps that’s why I bought it in the first place. He was a Christmas gift, but always seemed to look the most beautiful in October evenings. I opine that it is the reason for our deep kinship. The coffee I had brought to my office earlier today has already gone stale, sitting a still brown ebony and collecting moonlight like pitch on its surface. I hold a pencil balanced sharply on my desk with one finger as I glance to the clock, hung directly to the right of my door on the right wall: seven thirty-six. Jesus. I don’t necessarily feel I’m avoiding my apartment in lieu of lingering in the office, I’ve just been neglecting to re-hang this It’s A Wonderful Life poster I had framed and it’s just propped up gently in my bathroom against the hoary tile. So, I suppose I am avoiding my own apartment. Jesus. That’s just as depressing as my stale coffee or the six minutes I’ve spent wrapped up in my own head. In a documentary moment that I can’t stop replaying, the pencil falls just as there is a singular hearty rap on the wooden door of my office. I take half a moment to myself. Was the sound I just heard the small clattering of the pencil, or was it the door of my office being knocked on, approximately two hours and thirty-seven minutes after all the day workers head home? As if hearing my self-consult, the drummer drummed the door again; a singular tap.
“Hello?”
“Hello. May I come in?”
I could not place the door’s voice. He sounded like he could be familiar, like if I turned on the radio and he greeted me, I could maybe tell you his first name.
“Right.”
The door swung open slowly, revealing the all-hours antifreeze lighting from the hallway. The figure stood stolid in the doorway: definitely a man, tall, in a black suit. His face remained obfuscated in the middling place between the blue light from the hall and the tawny central lighting I preferred in my office at nighttime, but his hair suggested handsomeness.
“It’s admirable to see a woman working tirelessly in her office so late. I should like to get you out of your birdcage and take you to the streets. Would you like to see a movie with me?” Clint Eastwood asked.
I dreamt about you last night and I fell out of bed twice. You can pin and mount me like a butterfly.
Jack, I thought of your house on Martha’s Vineyard yesterday while I walked through your museum. Even though it was a bright, sunny midweather day here in Boston, I couldn’t help but placidly muse about the sigh on your breast on the afternoon of that fourth day we spent by the sea. We laid together on the wide couch, me bustling and readjusting under your unflexed arm, watching the rain beat down on the water and the covered boats. You still wore your sunglasses indoors because you were nursing a particularly capricious hangover that came on all at once after a few days of good luck, and I wondered if you could see the individual fat drops of condensation like I could through the screened in porch. It had been our first official moment in repose that we’d spent alone together, aside from sharing the space in your childhood full size at night. I remember being able to finally tune out the indecent clatter of dishes and chattering from far down the hall in the kitchen because of the rain, and how relaxing it was to no longer hear the Bobbys lilting stammer as a constant metronome throughout every waking moment in that house. I could feel my body and mind slipping away into a state of hazy calm, my hair pooling in your shoulder and bunching down the front of your white tennis shirt. The smell of your shampoo from your morning shower coupled with the petrichor that we let in through cracked windows was a spell that rocked me gently like lapping water. We were watering the plants, you had said.
When she stands in anger, locusts darken the sky, forests burn to the ground and nothing ever grows again, the seas grow rancid and calm as all life underwater ends. We keep coming back. We keep getting scarred and our flesh gets burned. She lives in all of them. Different faces, same snake. I had to cut up a few to find out.
Save me from myself. I can feel the evil compulsion of womankind inside of me, sticking its red demon hands out of my throat whenever I get too close to a man I like. I want to tie him down to the bed with his limbs splayed in every direction so he never leaves me sight. I want all of his hair to fall out because he is so devoted to me. I want him to follow me to one spot and for him to dutifully sit and stay there. I want him to never think of himself and waste his entire existence making up for the xeroxed blank pages I loathe in the binder of my chest. I get so afraid of that instinct now. I let it get its shoulders out of my mouth last time I loved a man, it nearly killed him. It made him into a lecher, hopeless and lost. I don’t want to do that to other people, and I don’t want to be like the dirty house wife with knobby shoulders from Pink Floyd songs.
Kaleidoscope eyes sparkle on pillows in the dark, replacing empty sockets with jewels.
I wish you were a priest. Léon Morin, Priest. I wish you were a Jewish priest. Not a rabbi, a Jewish priest. I wish you were a religious mosaic whose faith led him to feel strongly about the sanctity and institution of marriage. All your reading and all your work, the files you had me download to view your college assignment, tell me that you love Roman Catholicism as much as your olive oil blood might allow.
Protect me from what I want.
You come to me, simple and upright like a baseball diamond. The needle that hovers dangerously close to the pearly oyster bubble in my stomach is not under your direct control hand-wise, but the existence of these two objects indicates something. That something could very well be the end of desire.
Today I went walking up a rocky mountain. Every clutch in the trees looked like a mirage. That’s what longing will do.
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