costume parties

This is different.

Sometimes, her sarcasm worries her, but not often. It surrounds her like armor, and with it she has grown bold enough to challenge the world--though she wonders, if everything is a quip and nothing is serious, if any of the friendships she makes are genuine. So sometimes she drinks too much at parties, and her barbs get sharper, and she kisses a boy who is not interested in her just to see what he'll do, and by the time she gets home she hates herself for it, then laughs when she realizes there is no one she can tell.

He is not interested because his boyfriend is also at the party, and his boyfriend is already making fun of his "new drunk girlfriend." He laughs alongside, of course, but somehow he feels the jokes are mean-spirited, because even if she was drunk and abrasive she wasn't a bad person. No one deserves to be laughed at. Eventually, later in the evening, when his boyfriend asks "Are you going to call her tomorrow?" he says, in a voice much more curt than he intended, "Maybe I will," and then spends the rest of the night wondering why he did that.

The party's hostess is very good at throwing parties, but, she has realized tonight, she is starting to hate it. No, she isn't starting--she has always hated it. She does it out of a sense of obligation, which she hates, and to please her friends, whom she doesn't particularly like. But even as she is thinking this she finds herself putting on a smile, engaging in these pointless conversations, and wishing she had an excuse to kick these people out.

She doesn't consider her roommate a host for these parties, but everyone loves him anyway. He tells interesting stories, laughs at everyone's jokes, and doesn't have an unkind word for anyone. But he is afraid of real, intimate connections, so he keeps everyone at a distance, because from a distance everyone thinks he's great. And so long as everyone is happy, what does it matter? But then sometimes someone else's facade cracks, just a little, and he worries that maybe he's lying to himself, too.

devil's advocate

Always aiming to please.

Yeah, we used to fight every single fucking day. This was back when I was still running the magazine, and it was never to his satisfaction--and mind you, it wasn't his magazine. He read it because it was something that I did, and I think he delighted in telling me that what I did was insufficient. Sometimes there weren't enough stories, or maybe there were too many. They were all too similar. There was no coherent theme in this issue. I wrote too much in the way of editorial comment. I needed a stronger editorial voice. One time he said to me something like "I feel like this isn't a magazine anymore so much as it's just a few of your friends writing for you. Don't you ever publish new talent?" For the very next issue I published some new authors (I told myself not because he told me to, but I'm not fooling anyone with that bullshit) and he complained that those stories were terrible.

And for some reason I still talked to him about the magazine. I'd tell him what I was planning to do. I remember telling him about an idea for a theme issue--I wanted spring stories for spring--and he asked me why I thought this was interesting enough to bother with. That was always his complaint: what I was doing wasn't new, or interesting. In his eyes I was completely failing to distinguish myself. He was constantly degrading the thing that I poured all of my energy and being into. And every night I had to defend it.

Nothing worked, though: I pointed out that we were doing well and he said some bullshit about how many popular things fail to distinguish themselves. I described what I felt was unique about our stories and our publication and he merely denied that these qualities were in any way interesting. I realized I'd hit a new low when I actually staged a little experiment where I picked stories from some other lit mags, and the stories I was planning to print in the next issue, and had some friends blindly guess which ones were mine. I came to him proudly bearing the results, that my friends could reliably guess which stories were mine, and he just told me that it was probably a sampling bias.

None of this could deter me, but I felt drained. Or, more precisely, I felt attacked. I was losing my will to fight. So I stopped. Winter had finally come and the seasonal melancholy set in and he was telling me some bullshit or other--something about how directionless the magazine seemed--and I finally said: "You know what? You're right. It's a useless fucking lit mag that nobody reads. It's got no direction because nobody cares about it. You win. I'm done."

He seemed taken aback by this. "Jesus, what's gotten into you?"

"Every fucking day you have another complaint. I'm done fighting. If it will shut you up I'll stop publishing the damn thing."

"I never asked you to shut up. I think it's great what you're doing."

"That is bullshit and you know it. You are constantly belittling me and the magazine."

"Look, I just want you to strive to improve. I think that's important for everyone. I thought you understood that. And I love seeing how passionate you get about it. It's beautiful. Don't ever lose that passion."

I wish I could say I'd said something witty, or slapped him, or even stormed off theatrically. But I just felt defeated--it should have been something momentous. Instead all I learned is that nothing is as easy as you hope it will be.

a conversation provided with no context at all

"So, you're opposed to torture under any circumstances?"

"Uh, yes."

"So, let's say you've captured a terrorist--"

"The fuck am I doing capturing a terrorist?"

"--and he's the only one who knows how to stop a bomb plot that will kill five thousand people. Do you torture him?"

"I'd rather ask politely."

"But the only way to get information out of him is to torture him."

"What if he lies?"

"He won't lie. You can torture him and he'll tell the truth one hundred percent of the time."

"Do I know this?"

"Yes."

"And I know that he's the only way to stop the bomb plot?"

"Yes."

"And, presumably, that he will only talk if tortured?"

"Yes."

"How did I find all this out?"

"What?"

"Well, I mean. You clearly want me to say yes, right? You've got all these hypotheticals set up so that that's the only clear moral choice, but, I mean, there's so many assumptions there. I can maybe believe all the 'he's the only one' crap but then I have to assume that somehow I've found this out. How did I do that without just figuring out how to stop the bomb?"

"Just answer the question."

"Fine. I let all five thousand of the fuckers die."

"That's kind of a dick move."

"It's my hypothetical revenge for living in a hypothetical world of implausible nested hypothetical situations."

"Fine. Let's try this one. Would you ever kill a man?"

"Sure."

"What the fuck, man? You wouldn't torture someone, but you'd kill them?"

"I said I believed that torture was always wrong. I didn't say I'd never do it."

"I hate you."

static and noise

This never happened.

I don't think I've ever told this to anyone. I guess that will be pretty obvious soon enough. Even now, trying to write about it, I want to get it over with as quickly as possible, rushing over the backstory, providing a bare bones outline of events.

It's about the time I very deliberately betrayed a friend's trust. She'd told me a story--I won't repeat it here, but it's probably still out there somewhere if you know where to look--in confidence, but I want you to understand, this wasn't a "let me tell you a secret" type of thing. We were the sort of friends where she would never have even considered that I might betray her on this one. It was a very intimate and personal story about death, and it's not like it made her look bad, but--and here I am making excuses again. The point is she told me this story in private, and she expected it to remain between us. A story she'd never told anyone else.

I don't know why that story is the one I chose, and I'm not sure I matters which one. We'd had something of a falling out--she called me out on some of my bullshit and I was in the wrong mood for it. There were some other things, I guess--little things, cracks in our friendship that had been growing for a while, but it took me years to admit that it was anything but this stupid argument. I don't even remember the actual thing she said that set me off. What I do remember, with perfect clarity, is shouting at her empty house long after she had left in her car. I remember shaking with rage, crying hot tears. I remember wanting revenge.

So, I wrote her story. No exaggerations or attempts to make her look bad--this wasn't about people thinking she was a bad person. I wanted to destroy her privacy. I wanted people to see this story and write her and call her and ask her about it--I wanted them to know those private moments, where she watched someone die. I wanted her to know that took something sacred and I left it naked and exposed. I wrote it and I saw to it that it was published in her name.

I published it in the lit mag of which my sister was the editor--another betrayal that I had to deal with. It was never widely read, but it attracted notice within our social circles. So she received a trickle of interest. At first she assumed it was a mistake, that someone with a similar name had written something. Then she began to doubt. By the time she had a copy of her own, it was too late, damage done.

I never asked her how she felt about the sudden exposure, of course, but she made it clear that she got the message. I'd never seen her so furious. It was far less satisfying than I had imagined it. Even then I was already having trouble remembering what I had hoped to accomplish--mostly, I think I just wanted her to hurt. But it seemed empty now.

In an ideal world this would end with an apology and forgiveness, but this is not an ideal world. I felt like apologizing was disingenuous--not because I wasn't sorry, but because apologies were not sufficient. I had very deliberately crossed a line. The idea of being forgiven, of being trusted again, was unbearable. So, in what could have been the ultimate act of revenge were she not being so damn sincere about it, she went and forgave me.

Even as I tried to stay, to make it work, because this was someone I couldn't afford to lose--especially not now--I could see the end approaching. One night I deleted her from all my contact lists. I stopped responding to her phone calls and instant messages. I excised her entirely from my life.

The worst part of it was how right it felt, how easily I could just switch off a human relationship. The very next day I found some pictures of us together and I felt nothing at all. Instead of any sense of loss, I felt like I'd discovered something important. I guess it's always been in my nature to run.

grids and patterns

This happened.

This was when I lived in Maine, I think. Alex was visiting for the summer (this is before things fell apart), and it was one of those perfect nights in July or August when the sky was clear and the stars were burning so terrifyingly bright and--anyway, we spent the night outside just watching the stars come in, and eventually I found my eyes drifting closed.

I couldn't sleep, though. At this point I noticed a little red and black grid pattern when I closed my eyes. Which was weird, but I could have ignored it. Then there were these vivid images floating through my imagination.

It's hard to explain how weird that is to most people, but my visual imagination has never worked--certainly not with the intensity at which it now burned. Suddenly my mind was working in a way it never had before, and I hadn't had so much as a drink to explain it.

I panicked. What else could I do? I was no longer who I always thought I'd been. And every time I tell this story I say that Alex helped me calm down, reminded me who I was, but that's a lie. I was too paralyzed to move. By the time I could even will my eyes open and look over at her, she had fallen asleep. I was alone under the canopy of stars, which had changed since I'd closed my eyes. How long had I been frozen there under the grip of panic?

I took her hand in mine and finally found sleep, with that reminder that someone was there. We slept until the storm rolled in the next day. It came with flooding and thunder, and we ran inside, thoroughly drenched, and as we sat there laughing I told her about my attack. It's easier when you're already laughing. That way you can pretend you can laugh about that.

I've never seen the black-and-red grid pattern again, nor the strange vivid images that accompanied it. But that night I was certain I would wake and find that I was a completely different person, and sometimes, when it's late and I'm tired and the evening feels just so, I worry that I did, and I wonder who I used to be, if there's anything left of that former self, maybe in a clearing in Maine, forever trapped in the perfect stars.

gimme shelter

A lot of things happened in not very much time. I was crashing at my bandmate's new place when my roommate called and told me that our house had been destroyed by a meteor. I thought I was being strong and calm and collected when I took her out to eat. We talked about trivialities and skirted around the subject. Then she asked me if I had a place to stay and I just--"I think I need to get some air." I remember walking outside. I remember my hands shaking, fumbling with my phone, walking. Then I remember sitting, trembling, on the front steps of the house of a friend I hadn't seen in years.

Her name was Alex. She was my only real friend for the longest time, by the strange standards I kept at the time. When I moved out east she stayed here, and when the roof started leaking in my place out there and I didn't think to move my roommates' books to safety, Alex was the only person to say "yeah, that's fucked up, I'd be pretty pissed at myself, too." Everyone else tried to tell me it was okay.

Later on I betrayed her trust and I couldn't take it when she forgave me, so I just stopped seeing her, except now I was on her front porch, waiting. I didn't really remember coming here. I could have fled. I probably should have. Instead I waited for her to come up the walk. She said my name, hesitantly, guardedly, and I said something like "It's been a while."

"Yeah." We embraced tentatively. Then she said, holding me at arm's length, "What are you doing here?"

The suspicion in her voice stung, mostly because I knew I'd earned it. "I think I need a place to crash for a few days," I said, trying to sound as unobtrusive as possible. "You won't even know I'm here."

The silence that followed seemed like it lasted for hours. Then, "I'll think about it. You can come in and have a beer, at least."

She led me inside, and we drank, and I was never sure, right up until she went to bed, whether she was going to let me stay. It wasn't very late when she finally got up and made her way into her bedroom. "Just leave the light on out there," she told me, and I thought, so this is how it's going to be? You'll let me stay on your couch but you won't even let me turn the light off?

As I lay down on the couch and put a pillow over my head I noticed her still standing in the doorway. "Well? Are you coming to bed?"

"Ah. I thought--nevermind. Be right there."

I turned the light off on my way in, because old habits die hard.

any questions?

More stuff from that thing.

There's this thing that's been bothering me recently. Whenever someone asks me if I have any questions, the answer is invariably "no." Opening a new bank account, orientation at a new job, moving in to a new apartment. It's always the same thing: "so, these are the basic facts," with the strong implication that the specific facts are available if only I ask the right questions. So then they smile at me and say "any questions?" and suddenly I'm on the spot.

I don't know what I'm supposed to ask. Everything they said makes sense, and if anything does come up that I don't know the answer to, I can just ask then. I don't really trust explanations, anyway. I don't trust words that aren't in stories. Stories are how you learn; explanations are there to obfuscate. It's just, somehow I don't think "do you have any stories about this place?" is the question they want to hear.

There was a time this girl emailed me after I tried to fill the room that had just opened up at her house, when I was back east. I got a tour of the place and spent hours with these people, who felt like old friends. We told stories. Then I got an email saying that I didn't seem interested in the community, whatever the fuck that means, so they'd gone with someone else. And I remember, after I'd been given the tour, the tour guide--my emailer, I think--said "so, do you have any questions?" and of course I pretended to think about it for a minute before saying "no, I'll just figure it out as I go."

And then, what reminded me of all this, I was opening a new bank account today, and after the lady went through all the details with me, she asked me if I had any questions. And I thought about it, and said, "no, it seems pretty straightforward!" and I swear her smile was almost pitying. Like she wanted to say, "you shouldn't be doing this, you don't have any idea what you're doing, you need to research your decisions before making them," but of course she wasn't allowed to. I tried to smile in a way that said: "I know that I'm making poorly considered decisions but I've chosen to trust my future to you, even though we've never met and will probably never meet again."

 Probably I'm imagining it. Probably she wasn't thinking anything at all, and that point in the conversation is just when her smile starts getting strained. Maybe it was even relief that I hadn't gone off the script. But I remember weirdly hostile emails from future roommates that never happened, and I wonder.

discord

This is from something I'm working on, sort of.

 I helped my bandmate move his old couch into his new apartment this afternoon--the couch that used to occupy the attic we used to hang out in all the time back in high school. That couch was old. That couch had stories to tell.

Once we'd finished he offered some beer and we sat on the new couch--the spoils of victory--and my friend put on some Radiohead.

"Man, this takes me back," he said. "I remember the first time you came here and introduced me to Radiohead. I was hooked from that weird wind at the start of Planet Telex."

"Except, I didn't bring that album. I brought OK Computer."

"Are you sure?"

"Does it matter?"

He shrugged and said, "I guess not."

Of course, it did matter. That had been the day my friend got it in his head that we should be in a band, and talked me into talking my parents into getting me guitar lessons. The actual band didn't materialize until I'd come back from college, of course, but it was a big day, and one of us didn't actually remember it, which meant that in all probability neither of us did. How many times had we told that story? How much had it warped in the telling, until our memories were just of the stories we'd been telling?

The vision came to me then: the two of us in high school, working on some homework or other. I dig around in my bag for my math book and find the CD I picked up earlier and say something like "You want to put on some music?" and we do, and we probably even enjoy it. But there is no big moment. The album is incidental to the question he asks me later: "Wouldn't it be cool if we were, like, a rock band?"

We shared stories for the rest of the evening, but I found myself doubting all of them, his and mine both, and no amount of alcohol would shake this nagging doubt.

street lamps

There's a street light outside your house I keep mistaking for the moon. It's the right color and shape, and it's in the right place in the sky. Every time I leave at night I see it hanging there and for a brief moment I'm ready to smile, to feel as if the moon is guiding me home. I always identify it soon enough, of course, and it could never guide me any further than the street.

Tonight I found myself wondering if you were to blame, as if you had set this up to punish me for my wanderings. Perhaps if I didn't slip away once you were asleep, this false moon wouldn't be here to mock me. Or maybe you set it up to keep me here. Did you hope I would circle it like a moth, captivated by its soft cold light? Does it worry you that I have never woken up next to you, that I leave you alone in the dark to find my way home?

But tonight the false moon was not false. The street light hung in the air above me even after I had walked past it, as if you had planted a real moon there--and it must have been you, right? Who else could have, and who else would have? I was so startled I considered running back and waking you up, asking whether you were trying to send me away or guide me home. But as I stood and stared at this strange new moon, I realized the distinction was largely semantic. Either way my path was laid out before me, and my steps would take me back home.

bleach

I spilled bleach cleaning the house the other day, and it seemed to drain the color from the little patch of floor where I spilled it. I tried mopping it up with a sponge but it seemed to just spread, until a whole corner of the kitchen was paler than it used to be. I put the garbage can over it and hoped nobody would notice. I had a reputation to maintain. Not that I entertained anymore.

I slept easily, woke up, and got ready for work the next morning, only to find that the metal stopper in the sink was curiously pale. And I thought that was odd, but what could I do? Maybe metal just turned pale sometimes. It wasn't as if it looked bad. Then I noticed that the shower curtain had faded as well, and then I started to worry.

As I made my way to the bus stop I noticed that everything was losing its color. The grass, the trees, the houses and buildings, all had this horrible fade about them. Like I'd spilled bleach on them, too, trying to clean up after you. By the time the bus faded I couldn't tell what color it used to be. What color is a city bus meant to be? Are the seats really that sickly pale green color?

At work I spent about thirty minutes working before it was too much. I told my boss I was feeling ill and spent the day hiding in the clean white sterility of the bathroom. Eventually the automatic lights turned off, and I curled up in the dark and slept uneasily, dreaming alien dreams of color.

casting shadows

There was a trash can on fire outside of your apartment this afternoon. I'd been walking through the streets in a haze, staring at the sky, wondering if it was always so empty, if the clouds of winter were doing us a favor by hiding that vast expanse of shapeless blue. There was no one to be seen anywhere in this city. If the sun wasn't at my back casting my shadow, I wouldn't even have believed that I was out there.

I stood there and watched it burn, red flames licking out of the black metal, warping the air above it, spitting a little cloud of black smoke. The flames focused my mind--it felt like weeks since I've had any sort of mental clarity--on the message I knew you must be sending. What else could it mean? No one else walked under this empty sky. But the signal was anything but clear. I hoped you wanted to leave this world in flames with me, but when I finally walked in you gave no sign.

The thought of this message gave me purpose under this empty sky. I searched for patterns in your speech when you greeted me, in how you would look at me or not look at me, how you touched me and kissed me and undressed me, but there was nothing. That night, as I watched you sleep, listening for patterns in your breathing that might betray your message, your intentions, I was struck with the certainty that there was no message. You had intended nothing for me. And so my purpose faded, my mind adrift once more.

I went outside to smoke a cigarette, and the sudden impulse struck me to throw the burning cigarette into the same trash can. It didn't catch, and I was alone in the dark. The streets, the sky were still empty as they'd ever been, and there was nothing to focus my mind anymore--just the dull buzz of the streetlights, casting my shadow across the sidewalk. I stepped behind a tree, shielded from its light, and closed my eyes and let the dark empty streets swallow me.

an eternity till april

Is it spring where you are? I waited all winter.

The first day of spring always makes me think of you--the day you stop wearing jackets and scarves and start wearing summer clothes, and remind me how beautiful you are in a whole different way. Even now, even since you're long gone. The chaos of the changing seasons is on us now, and yesterday the sky was clear and the temperature was perfect for jackets and scarves, and I found myself in the park with the sun on my face and I said, "I'd be happy if spring never comes, if it just stays like this forever." It was a prayer to the sky, and the sky said nothing in return.

But that night I slept and I dreamt that my words had stilled the change of the seasons, that I had forever solidified the weather of that day. Every day will be perfect for jackets and scarves, the streets bright with cherry blossoms and the promise of leaves that will never come. There will be no spring, no burning summer sun, no dying autumn leaves, no bitter winter winds. Just today, that perfect day before spring. And you will be banished from my thoughts like a ghost.

I woke feeling refreshed and alive and hopeful, but the wind today felt dead, and the rustling of the wind seemed to have the taint of the grave about it. The sun shone wanly in a sky of a dull and listless blue. I sat in the park and watched the clouds, and I swear I saw your silhouette, just for a moment, before the wind picked up and blew all the clouds into fingers pointing south.

Did you end up going south when you left? Will you bring the springtime if I come and find you? Because I recant. I will not invoke the sky again. I want to see you smiling in the perfect endless light of the summer sun, to see you play in a pile of freshly raked autumn leaves or make sculptures from snowdrifts blown by the winter winds. And I will wait for April, if I must, if you return the spring to me.

a conversation, provided with minimal context

With apologies to A____, who deserved and hopefully received better.

I got the feeling she was presenting me to him, which is odd because he wasn't her boyfriend--that was someone else. He'd introduced us. "He's walking me home," she announced. She told him we were both drunk off our asses. I grabbed my coat and left my bag behind.

We both knew that this was not about walking home. This was about the cool March air, and all the various places we could think of to put our lips. But we danced around the subject as we walked aimlessly. She accused me of being a cynic. "It wouldn't kill you to actually like something for once," she said, taunting me. She sat down on a tree stump.

"Are you saying I don't like anything? I like some things." I pretended to be affronted. It took some doing, because all I could think of was kissing her--but we'd been dancing around the subject for so long, taking the direct approach seemed unthinkable. Not that we were being subtle at this point. I could read everything in her eyes, her expression, her tone. I have no doubt I was just as much of an open book.

"Prove it." This was not a challenge, but a request, a plea: stop this dance.

"How am I supposed to prove that?" A flimsy pretense.

"You know how."

I did. Most of what followed didn't count as much of a conversation, but pretenses were dropped now. She told me she had a boyfriend, and I said I knew. "But you don't give a fuck," she told me, and I suppose I must have shaken my head. I had other things on my mind.

She invited me back to her place. We were against the hood of someone's car--God knows whose--and I hesitated. I made up some excuse about needing to get my bag, or maybe I just said we probably shouldn't. I finished walking her home, then hoped I could apologize without words. Then she was gone and I walked back to the party alone and waited in the wings like a ghost.

small town charm

I think the first thing you ever told me is that my hometown was ugly. We hadn't met yet, and it was the way you said it--that tone of genuine surprise, that bright smile--that made me think you were just fascinating. I drank too much and you stayed up with me, telling me stories about a life that seemed so much richer than life in this ugly little town. We walked through the empty streets that night and I said something like "it's beautiful here at night," offhand. I don't remember much else that happened that night, but I remember that clearly.

When I finally moved to the city we kept running into each other. We talked about small towns, and about how glad we were to be rid of them forever. You had changed and so had I, but your smile was still the same, and I still found myself fascinated by your words. It was probably a year before we actually started dating. We just sort of happened. You liked saying that. Like the universe, we were a series of impossible events that became something amazing.

Then it was several years on and we were older and no longer as enamored with the city as we were before. It was full of fleeting contacts and superficial connections, and nothing makes you feel isolated like being in a crowd of people and realizing none of them care in the slightest that you exist. So you used words like 'jaded' and 'ennui' and complained about that isolation. Some days I felt like our joie de vivre would never return. Some days I tried to recover it. And you smiled at my efforts, and that almost made it all worthwhile.

One of us--or maybe both of us--came up with the idea to take a trip across the country, stopping in all the small towns along the way, eating in their diners, drinking their coffee. And I thought of the day we met and you told me the small town I lived in was ugly, and here we were romanticizing these little towns, these places that people like you and me try so hard to get away from.

The towns we visited were quiet, peaceful, free of our city affectations, with so many more stars in the sky. And so long as we kept moving we left our troubles behind us, gathering stories as we went. Everyone we met was polite, curious, friendly, and we never stayed long enough to learn any other side to them. And you told me you thought it was refreshing, meeting so many friendly people from so many places, how connected this trip made you feel with the world. And I told you that I'd never felt more alone, but that sometimes a little loneliness is all you need to put things in perspective.

After the trip, we fell apart much like we fell together. I left the city, found a quiet place in a quiet town and lived there, and maybe I was even happy. I made no meaningful connections here, but I made a lot less meaningless ones. I'm hiding, I know, but I don't see what choice I have. Please don't come and find me.

laugh at me

He is young and the sort of stupid that thinks he ought to be taken seriously, and he is quite taken with a girl who is smart enough to know that there is nothing so serious you can't laugh at it. She has a smile and a joke for everything, and sometimes, when she is feeling existential, wonders if she is missing the point, if the world isn't a joke. And he holds her tight and takes it all very seriously, even the jokes. Especially the jokes. There is nothing more serious than human laughter.

She often wonders if he doesn't get the jokes. He often wonders if she is laughing at him, because although he is very serious, he is not so stupid as to think that laughter only means someone is happy. And she laughs at his solemn promises of devotion, his earnest declarations of love, his sincere praises. He pours out his heart and she laughs and tells him he's all right, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. And he feels patronized.

When he talks to her, she can't keep from feeling that he doesn't think of her as an actual person. He is very serious and has a very serious story that he wants to tell. He doesn't understand her laughter or her jokes. He doesn't understand that humans are not meant to be serious. Sometimes she thinks she would not mind being a prop in someone's fantasies, so long as those fantasies had room for laughter. His do not. So she laughs at him, and finds it funny, because the alternative is too depressing to contemplate.

Eventually he decides that she is not behaving like someone to whom he has sung such solemn, earnest, sincere songs of praise. And what right does she have? Is this what she does with his love? He begins to tell her, subtly but certainly, that she is unworthy of the devotion he has given her. The implication is that she should be grateful.

Of course she only laughs at this. What did he expect? She laughs, and tells him he should't take himself so seriously. And then she is gone, and he is left with those words. One day he will understand, and if he is very lucky, he will laugh.

rage and despair

I heard a drunk girl screaming bloody murder the other night, and went outside to make sure she was okay. I couldn't quite piece together the scene--she was in an incoherent rage, not sure whether she wanted to attack the boys trying to calm her down or flee the scene. I watched long enough to decide that she wasn't in any danger--or at least, not the sort of danger I could help with. Eventually one of her companions saw me watching and told me to fuck off. I smiled at him and walked back inside.

Watching this scene put me in a bad way. I felt claustrophobic, felt like I should have done something instead of making an assumption based on incomplete evidence that everything was all right. What right do I have to define if something is all right? This woman, surrounded by friends whose interest in calming her down ranged from the genuine-seeming "shh, it's okay" to the annoyed and patronizing "shut the fuck up, Amy," was about as alone as I'd ever seen anyone.

And she represented everything I'm afraid of about the city. It is so much easier to be alone when you are surrounded by millions of people--and that isolation is so much more crushing than the isolation of the wilderness. I have sworn that if I am able I will help people in need--not because I am a good man but because I refuse to be less than human. But how can I help someone expressing rage and despair I could never hope to understand?

Her friends, if that's even the right word, frog-marched her off down a different street. I sat on the porch for a long time with a cigarette and listened, really listened, to the city. I imagined that everyone I saw walking down our street was involved with this scene somehow, talking or laughing about it. And I cursed the selfish desire to help, to prove to myself that we aren't alone in the city, or that if I ever break down there would be someone there to catch me.

whispering apocalypses

I'm remembering a frozen New Year's day in the northeast, drinking far too much absinthe with a girl I knew--an old friend I'd just met. She was so much more alive than most people, and certainly more than me. We kissed at midnight and made our way back to the subway in single-digit temperatures, the warm clarity of wormwood and fennel staving off the chill as we laughed our way through the wind and snow.

She told me that night, waiting for the train, that she wished she wasn't real. I didn't tell her I wished that I was. It baffled me then--did she really wish that she was a ghost like me? Then the train rolled in and there was no more time to ask for clarification. We stumbled aboard and sat in the back, leaning against each other, as the train rumbled on to our destination.

Then the train stopped, and went dark, and she whispered apocalypses in my ear. "This will be the year everything freezes and dies," she said. "Starting with this train." The conductor led us off the train, and we escaped into the transit tunnels. I imagined that I was a real, living person, going on the sort of adventures real, living people went on, while she dreamt she was a ghost, flitting through the shadows, lost and alone in the tunnels beneath our city. We sat in secret places and watched the trains rumble by and whispered apocalypses to each other, as the clarity of absinthe faded and the clarity of the new year settled in.

this year

I. February sometime, the best show I've ever seen, flirting with the girl next to me: passing notes, brushing against one another on accident. I never hear her voice, and lose her at the counter where I checked my bag. I bike home in perfect weather, my ears ringing.

II. October. New teeth. I walk home smiling, unaware that my mouth is full of blood.

III. Finally, a windfall. A new bike, wizard blue.

IV. No spring. Every year I identify the first day of spring as that day when suddenly everyone is done wearing winter clothes. Everyone is so beautiful on the first day of spring, and the gloom of winter seems gone forever. But this year we get no spring.

V. New Year's Day. I start the year bleeding and broken, drinking whiskey through shattered teeth, or trying, watching movies about the adrift and purposeless. "Where are you going?" I wish I knew.

VI. A spontaneous wrestling match. I lose.

VII. What the fuck happened to my arm?

VIII. My sister is coming home.

IX. "You're always smiling. Are you happy?" That question, that statement. It's hounded me for years. It reminds me of the most important thing anyone has ever told me. I do not know the answer.

X. I walked away. I kept going. That is enough.

XI. I laugh at the wrong things. I am afraid of the wrong things.

XII.The worst has happened and I'm still here. You have no idea the calm that brings.

XIII. Summer came late.

XIV. I never knew how much you bothered me until I saw you walking out the door and I could not keep from smiling.

XV. Caught on the Hill in a snowstorm.

XVI. I would forgive you, but I can never forgive myself.

XVII. Trying to rebuild my self. Patient, calm, content, at ease. In order to do this I am impatient, restless, unsatisfied, uneasy.

XVIII. I miss you.

XIX. I am leaving 2011 behind me. There are no expectations, no plans, no resolutions. I am taking 2012 on its own terms. Happy New Year.

a horoscope

A life unfolded in the stars:

She will not have a happy childhood, but who does? Children are meant to be unhappy. She will make decisions that her peers will laugh at, because at a young age we are taught to fear the Other. She will not fear the Other. She will play with toy cars and wear her hair short and scrape her knees and laugh and cry. When she experiences the soul-shattering hardship of losing her father she will become withdrawn, but she will determine to be strong from that day on.

Though for many children, the mockery of their peers might convince them to conform, maybe even to mock the Other that once they were, she will not. She will take the pain and make it hers. As she grows older she will have close friends, but not many of them--she will alienate many, because her standards will be impossible. And while she will be quick to forgive others, she will never forgive herself.

This regret will haunt her through her teens. Everyone she gets close to will remind her of someone else that she pushed away. The idea of closeness, the idea of friendship, will become too much for her to bear. Perhaps a close friend will survive her forced distance, but just as likely, she will be alone, surrounded by people for whom she feels no genuine warmth or affection. The artifice of it all will make her furious, but she will learn true self-reliance before she is finished with high school.

College is always said to be a time for experimentation, for reinventing oneself, but if there is one thing she will already have by then, it is a self. A real, solid self. This is a treasure she will cling to as she submits to the pressures that surround her, and the reason she never loses control. She will date someone without that solid sense of self, or maybe even several someones. That someone will cling to her sense of self. She will leave them adrift without an anchor, like a religious person suddenly stripped of their god.

She will have no time for religion. She has no time for people who are certain of anything. She will question everything. She will continue to alienate people with the conviction she has in her self, with her inability to forgive herself, with her refusal to be patient with those who don't meet her standards.

Sometimes she will wish that she had learned to rely on someone else, or wonder if she would have been better served learning to be happy rather than learning to survive. But, as they say, call no man happy till he dies--and she can go to her rest knowing exactly who she was.

administrative note

[This blog has been silent lately because I'm working on a new project, Vaudeville Ghosts (And Other Haunted Tales). Updates here will probably resume soon, but in the meanwhile, why not check out Vaudeville Ghosts and let me know what you think? -the author.]