fevered inspiration: coffee liqueur

She was drinking coffee liqueur and that seemed unusual, and she must have noticed me staring because she said it made her think of all those nights in high school when she'd go out to the diner and have coffee and talk until the sun came up and she had to go to school. We talked until the bar closed and they kicked us outside and the wind was high and the rain was terrible, the streets filled with water, and neither of us had the cash for a cab--so we took shelter in the mouth of the subway station, leaning against the wall and watching the rain outside.

It wasn't too cold but it was cold enough, so we huddled close, and talked--about the religion we'd both left behind, the small towns we still called home for some reason. I talked about my comfortable upbringing and how I was never sure if I should claim it or reject it. She told me about her family and how she left it behind when she was 18 but she kept going back. Then we both thought of the line from Magnolia, "We may be through with the past, but the past ain't through with us," and a part of me wished it would rain like it did in that movie.

But it's true. We drink coffee liqueur to remind us of those carefree days in high school we hated so much because we can't afford to forget about them. But, she says with a tired smile, it also reminds her she's not there anymore. The taste of alcohol wasn't there when she was young. Maybe it's cheap and artificial, but sometimes that's all we have.

"We're really fortunate, you know," she says. "Life should have been perfect for us."

I tell her I know.

She says, "Then why are we so unhappy?"

In the morning we go home and I'm left worried about the world but so happy for that one night, and I still don't know why.

fevered inspiration

Sometimes I feel lie I am only really alive when I'm sick. It happens maybe once a year and my mind just stops working--or at least, not like it used to. My memory isn't sharp and I don't notice details like I usually do but maybe that's just because my mind is racing. I drink a lot of coffee, smoke cigarettes sometimes, to try to replicate that but once the fever takes hold I just keep thinking and I usually can't write fast enough to keep up with--

--this sad girl at the bar tonight, and I didn't even mean to start up a conversation but we talked for hours and the trains stopped running and the bars closed and we wandered out into the night but it was raining and windy and we had to run for shelter and--

--the last time I really talked to my sister, at the airport just before she left for Paris. Well, before the airport, really. We spent all night at a Denny's in SeaTac, drinking coffee, occasionally retiring for a smoke--I always loved having a smoke with my sister--and then she was gone and so was I, on the last plane to Boston, leaving behind all the disappointment and regret from--

--that wide-eyed acceptance and optimism I've always had somewhere. I'm not a cynic. I've never been a cynic. But I'm also afraid. I'm afraid and desperate and frantic and that never comes out until--

--my fever.

wardrobe

Every morning I wake up at the same time to get ready for work. It is the same routine every day--I put the coffee on, take a shower, come out, have some breakfast and coffee. My girlfriend emerges to join me for my breakfast at this point. We are still warm and communicative this early in the morning.

I return to the bedroom to get dressed. My suit and shirt are neatly pressed. I pass my girlfriend on the way into the bathroom to adjust my tie in the mirror. This takes a few moments, as I must be perfect. I return to the kitchen to read the newspaper my girlfriend has left there. She is reading the financial section. I turn to politics.

When she returns she is wearing a sharp skirt suit in black with a white blouse. She is wearing glasses now. Her hair is perfect. I lower the paper to give her a cold look. I glance at the clock. "Shouldn't you be going?" she asks. I nod curtly and leave. I enjoy work. I run into her at lunch at the cafe, and we talk business over coffee. We are cold but polite--cold in the sense that there is no warmth left between us. She drinks an iced latte. I drink black coffee. We argue about the economy and stocks, but politely.

I work late tonight. When I come home she is sleeping on the bed. I hang up my suit and tie and change into boxers and a t-shirt. She wakes up as I slide into bed and smiles at me--no longer perfectly arrayed for work. I tell her she's beautiful and she kisses me softly, and we lie in bed, enjoying each others' warmth. In the morning it will be the same. We'll get dressed and pretend we are polite business partners. We will quarrel politely over coffee at lunch. We will present our perfect selves to the world.

unfamiliar territory

Despite going home to the same place every night, I have not stayed in the same house on any two consecutive evenings for weeks. I come home to an unfamiliar building--the furniture is different, the layout of the house, even the architecture. But it's home. The key fits, the same people are there--or at least they look the same.

I get used to the new arrangement and find my room--always in a different place--and go to sleep in a bed that feels like a stranger's. I dream of the house I used to know, but it seems distant, dark, and haunted now. Then I wake up and find myself somewhere entirely new. When I eat my breakfast, it doesn't taste like it should. I can never quite place what is wrong with it. I can never remember how I like my coffee, but it always tastes wrong. Now too sweet. Now too strong. Too much cream. Too grainy.

And my love is different every day. Today her hair is up and dark, she is dressed like a professional, a working woman, very serious. Last night when I went to bed she had her hair long, it was red, and she wore jeans and a striped shirt. She smiled a lot more. "Did you dye your hair?" I ask her today. She looks confused. I apologize and say I haven't been sleeping well, which is true.

Nobody knows about this disorientation, because they don't seem to understand when I start talking about it. Am I the only one that notices? Am I going mad? Can I trust my own memories? I don't know what is a dream anymore. I'm never sure what is happening. And I'm not even sure I'm the same person through all of it.

familiar accents

I spent much of the evening in a diner, drinking coffee with cream but no sugar, reading a newspaper. I usually put sugar in my coffee. I usually don't go out alone on a Saturday night. I usually don't read the newspaper. Tonight was not every night.

The waitress talked to me occasionally, but mostly just to make sure I was okay. She didn't say much to me. She talked to some of the other patrons, too, and some of them I got the feeling she knew. About half an hour into the evening, while I was eating my club sandwich and generally feeling tired, I noticed that she was greeting the couple behind me without an accent.

She spoke with an accent to me--not strong, but noticeable. Did I look like an out of towner, or did I look like a local? Was I just not hearing her right? I didn't ask about it but I left a good tip and smiled as I left. No sense acting like anything is unusual.

what i had in mind

I'm often guilty of overplanning. I want to make sure everything goes a certain way, and while I don't always write it down I always know the steps and exactly where everything is expected to be, when it's supposed to happen.

I saw a friend a few days ago that I hadn't seen for a year. I'd sort of given up on ever seeing her again. I had plans for the evening--I always had plans for the evening--but I didn't see any problem with her tagging along for a while. Then we stepped into an elevator and something changed.

I'm still trying to figure out what happened. I didn't mean to change it, but suddenly I felt like we'd gone off course. This was not what I had in mind. I've been uncharted for a few days now. It's completely new to me. I should be uncomfortable with it--I always am when something doesn't go according to plan.

But all I'm worried about is that I'm not worried about it.

legacies and paper trails

A dear friend of mine committed suicide recently, unexpectedly. I was looking through what she left behind with her brother, and we found a little box full of receipts. Her brother figured she was just keeping a record for herself, but the box intrigued me. I asked if I could keep it and he said sure. I put it in my bag.

While he continued looking through her things, I was looking through some of her jackets. She liked wearing jackets and had a lot of them. And the pockets were mostly full of receipts. Some were faded so only the server's name was readable, or only the restaurant, or only the price. Some were to places I had no idea what they were or that she had ever been to.

I spent the evening poring over these old receipts. They told me nothing, were kept haphazardly in a dusty box, obviously never looked at again, but there was something that kept her from throwing them away. There was nothing unusual about her spending habits, no way to create some narrative from it. Perhaps that was the story. I wanted something unusual. I wanted a marked deviation towards the end, or some dark secret that was revealed in a receipt for $17.76 at the grocery store. It's information for accountants, not for bereaved friends.

I saved a few of them. Times I remembered, things she'd bought that I recognized. I keep them in my own box, and never look at them. But lately I've taken to keeping my own receipts and putting them in the pockets of my jacket, just in case.

departures

I'm at the airport, staring at the screen with the lists of departures, flights, arrival times, delays--people walking around me, brushing past me, leaving, arriving, waiting for friends, family, relatives.

Eventually I check my bags and shuffle through the security, thinking of all the other people who were departing. It wasn't their stories that interested me this time. I wonder how many of them are returning, how many of them are being replaced by others. Everyone in the airport eventually wears the same hassled look of too many security checks and too many excess fees, waiting in line, hoping everything works, being made aware that everything really important to you fits in a couple of bags, that it will be searched by people who have never met you, and that they will not find anything interesting about it. Whether that is a comfort or a fear--in the end everyone looks at the planes with the same mixture of boredom and trepidation.

Even the ones who aren't returning. I wonder if anyone notices the wistful quality to my gaze. There are no families embracing past the security checkpoints. None of the travelers look happy to be home, however many of them are coming home. I'm sure some of them are secretly happy, though. And I know I'm happy to be home, even if it's for the last time.

I'm one of the last to board my flight. I have a window seat. I close my window and close my eyes so I don't have to see when we depart.

where i've been lately

The past few days I've been wandering. Visiting old friends, exploring places I'd never been--carrying most of my stuff in a bag or the back of my car. It's always a weird sort of feeling. We never act like I'm about to leave forever. It's always casual conversation, asking about the last few days. It's like watching a clip from a movie or reading a chapter from a novel. I don't know their stories anymore, and I'm reading a little chunk of it. But they look happy now, mostly.

I wonder if they notice that I'm coming undone. I've got a few nervous tics. I fade in and out of attention as some little thing, a movement of her hand or something she says, draws me back to the time she--well, that's another story altogether. I return to reality and shake my head to get back. I blink a lot more, scratch my arms, look around--do they see me? Do they know? And I do it all more when I'm nervous.

And the night comes to a close and they ask if I need a ride back to my car and I say "No, it's okay." So then it's hugs and handshakes and fleeting glances and I'm alone in a darkened parking garage. It's a long walk to my car, a hundred miles to the place where I'm staying--and I realize I'm finally a man without a home.

nonexistence

Solipsism is the belief that you are the only person or thing which is real--everything else is the product of your imagination. Lately I've been wondering if I'm not an illusory being--maybe the world is real and I'm not really here, like a ghost or something. Oh, sure, people talk to me, even interact with me, but it seems like it's on a limited level. If I'm hallucinating my own existence, or at least my own interactions with the world, it's not a stretch to assume I can hallucinate some limited interactions with people. My ghostly brain just adjusts all the facts to make it seem like I'm really here.

It doesn't make sense, of course. But I feel dreamlike and detached, I feel like people forget that I exist--and that makes me wonder if I ever really existed in the first place, or if I just wish that I did. I cling to photographs, things I've written, a handshake--some desperate evidence that I'm really here.

express mail

I wrote a letter, a real letter, the other day. It was a personal letter, to someone I'd written letters to before--and sometimes they were never sent or never delivered and sometimes I'm sure she got them but never read them, but I know she read at least some of them. We still talk sometimes. The letters are a part of our relationship that I'm still not even sure I understand. It makes the moments real, somehow.

I don't have an outgoing mail slot so I walked out to the post office. It costs twenty dollars to ship something by express mail, and I wondered how many letters get shipped express. There by tomorrow a noon. Guaranteed. It's not important, or expected, and I don't even think she'll be home and if I really need to hear from her there's always email, which we use, but--

I decided to ship it express anyway. I dodged the questions when the woman at the counter tried to make conversation, because I didn't want anyone to think I was weird. Or at least, not yet. I'm sure it will all melt down soon, but I've long stopped trying to resist my whims. Anyway, I couldn't bear the thought of another undelivered letter.

with good behavior

I have never managed to keep a grudge. People have done things to me I've sworn I would avenge--and usually a month or two later we're pretending it never happened, or I'm apologizing or they're apologizing and then everything is normal again. I never forget. I just don't hold a grudge. They aren't bad people. Sure, they've betrayed me once or twice. That's fine--who hasn't, really?

So I can't keep a grudge. I can live in terror of someone else keeping a grudge. Against all assurances that they haven't, against all reason, against all evidence--when I've wronged someone I can't confront them. It will go horribly wrong. It will be awkward--all nervous laughs and walking on eggshells, testing the waters, hoping nobody says anything to bring it all back.

I know people are usually pretty good people and don't keep a grudge, water under the bridge and all that, I shouldn't worry about it--but I have to do my time.

my human interactions

I've known people who routinely spend a week or so going without something they feel like they are addicted to--television, the internet, sweets, unhealthy foods. Or they spend a week where they exercise every day or they don't sleep in or they always eat three meals a day at regular hours or they read every day.

I've never quite gotten the point, so I thought I'd try it this last week. I went seven days without any human interactions. I spent the days in my bedroom with a stack of books and wandered out at night to fix some of the foods I'd stocked up. It was challenging to avoid my roommates but I managed, mostly by listening to see if anyone was around, moving quickly and quietly, and not taking food that required a lot of preparation. I managed, though. I saw no one and spoke to no one.

This of course included interactions online. Those were easier than you would think. Ultimately I wrote several poems and filled up the rest of a journal I'd been working on and burned through several books that I'd been meaning to get to. It was nice to be able to focus and get rid of the distractions human interactions cause--and really I think we could all go without them for a while.

You shouldn't have to feel alone just because there's nobody to share your fears with.

camera shy

There was a photographer over the other night. She wasn't here just as a photographer, but he did keep taking pictures--not just of us, but the house, random objects, things she thought were beautiful, things I thought were silly. I asked her not to take any of me, and for the most part she respected that, but as the evening wore on she started trying to when I wasn't looking, trying to persuade me to let her, to stop looking away.

To be honest I don't know what I was afraid of. It wasn't just being genuinely captured on film--no one is genuine when they smile for the camera--but that had to be a part of it, right? She eventually asked me, when everyone else had gone to bed and I was still eluding her camera, why I was so camera shy. Answering the question would ruin it, I said. She insisted. I said it was so I could maintain an air of mystery. She said I was plenty mysterious enough--but that wasn't it, either. If I could have explained it I'd have let her take my picture.

cyanide capsules

I've been seeing someone who is glued to the political blogs, the news websites. There is a certain fervor that perhaps I never noticed in previous years, but it seems more pungent this time around. People are confident in a Democratic victory--the climate is sure of it. But the polls don't mirror that! What's wrong? Which statistics should we listen to?

Of course I've gotten into it, too. It's starting to dominate the topics of my conversations, and it's giving me this shapeless sort of fear, not just for politics, but for understanding. Causes and effects--does worrying change things? Will it make it better or worse? Does knowing about the climate affect how things will happen? Does it simply tide us over?

She's managed to get enthusiastic for November. I just want it to be over with. I wonder if this will make the little rift, some of the tense political conversations, get bigger. I wonder if my worry will affect my daily life--if the worried buzz going around the media is going to win the election but ruin my personal life. She treats my worry like it's a poison, and I agree with her that it probably is. She just thinks I'm doing it on purpose, and I'm not even sure I believe it when I insist I'm not.

uniquely you

After she died I found myself searching for someone else who could be her--her smile and the way her hair was always a mess and her laugh. It's been years now and I'm still searching. The hardest thing has been finding somebody with her smile. She didn't smile often, except when I was around. So it was almost my smile, in a way.

For a long time I didn't understand my failure--put it up to bad luck, perhaps, or being in the wrong city. Maybe I was too late, I thought. She would be older now, more mature. A lot can change in a few years. There were a lot of reasons I could have been failing. I never stopped to consider that I was hoping to meet her again.

There's a song with the lyric "I met a hundred people yesterday, and none of them were you." At some point when I was listening to it I realized that she was unique--not because of any special qualities she had, but because everybody else wasn't her. That there was a convergence of forces so intricate and complex that it would never be duplicated again when she was born, acting on every moment of her life--and that it would only be futility to try to reproduce them.

What else could I do? I gave up.

all my darkest secrets

I met a girl on the bus yesterday to Tacoma--I wasn't going there for any real reason, just to take a trip. It was a fairly bright, sunny day, as it so often is, so I had my sunglasses on, so I never had to meet her eyes. Traffic was terrible but we spent most of the trip talking--sharing secrets. I told her I was afraid I was unable to commit to anything and she said she was afraid she was desperate to commit to anything. I worried I was lying to myself about my quest for meaning, that I was trapped in the past, and so on, and so on. I told her everything I'd ever thought or worried about myself and she told me all of her fears and I realized, to my surprise, that this was a real conversation. Not just a chance to vent--I can vent anywhere, I do vent anywhere. This was reaching out to someone and actually getting something in response.

There was a desperation about us both--we both knew that even if we ever saw each other again it would never really be the same. So we held on to the moment as much as we could, bared our souls, said it was such a relief to tell someone all this even though we'd both said it a hundred times before to a hundred different people. We were both too poetic to have any dark secrets we actually kept.

But it was honesty not because I valued a relationship or because I thought honesty was the best policy or that lying or keeping secrets was morally wrong--it was honesty because it was safe. It could never come back to hurt me. I even told her that. I told her that she was the one girl in my life who could never come back to hurt me--she felt the same way.

I wanted nothing more than to live forever with her, despite knowing only that she had the same fears and problems as any number of similar people, caught in the moment. But I knew one day I'd have to take my sunglasses off, look her in the eye--and that would ruin the moment forever. She knew things about me some people had never heard but she didn't know what color my eyes were.

thoughts of the macabre

Driving across the mountain passes these days makes me uneasy, not because I'm afraid of an accident, but because I always find myself thinking of how easily I could end my life--just moving my hands a few inches, barely a twitch, and my car could go careening out of control, off the cliff--and I'm not afraid of this, no, but I have the power. I think about it. I even have to fight back the impulse.

I don't really know what it means. I could probably reference a handful of philosophers but that doesn't mean anything, it's just wrapping it up in words and making it sound palatable when the fact is it's just wrong--and it doesn't make it better if other people are the same way. And then I'm driving and the moon comes up over the mountains and somehow everything is better, but I still know it's only temporary.

blackouts

Last night we had a blackout and a thunderstorm. Even the phones were dead. I was hanging out with my girlfriend at the time. I thought it was exciting. She thought it was a profound reminder of how much we rely on technology.

It struck me then that every five minutes we're reminded how much we rely on technology. It's nothing new. It's not even interesting anymore. Yes, technology is convenient. Yes, sometimes it breaks and we have to rely on more archaic methods. This is nothing new. It isn't paradigm-altering. I'm going to go right back to using my laptop and cell phone and electric lights when this is all over, I said.

But you can't now, she said. Doesn't that make you feel enslaved to technology? You're stuck with candles and you can't call anyone and you have to write on paper.

I tried to explain that I was really just enjoying myself with the candles, but she was bent on believing that there was something important to be learned from this. I think it's this: we have too much time to wax existential when our technology fails us, and not enough drive to just run with it, or find a solution.

how to disappear completely and never be found

It was sometime in the evening last night that I started feeling like I wasn't real anymore. I was at a show, watching the crowd between sets, and felt this weird sort of disconnect, like maybe I was imagining the whole thing--just a passing ghost that nobody could see or, worse, nobody cared about. I knew I wasn't, of course, but then there's that whole question: what if I'm wrong?

As I made my way to the bus stop I suddenly felt very ill and very weak, without any real prompting. I staggered into a seat and watched the empty 1 am streets, coughing occasionally, trying to fight off the sickness in my gut, the dreamlike certainty that the bus driver wouldn't even stop for me.

I heard a siren down the road, and I remember this very clearly, like it was a scene from a movie. A car sped past, going perhaps sixty miles an hour in the narrow downtown streets. The wind from its passing blew a bus transfer from the sidewalk, swirling it up and onto the ground at my feet. I stood up and looked down the road, where a police car was fast approaching, weaving past a few cars. I put a finger in my ear so the siren wouldn't deafen me and wondered if he saw me, if he was coming for me. I watched him drive past before I realized of course not, I wasn't really even here.

There was a crash down the road. Someone yelled something about it, but I wasn't listening anymore.