Protected: Part the Third: The After Party, or, Confessions
February 14, 2009
Protected: Part The Second: Birthday Fetes, or, a Prelude
February 6, 2009
Protected: Part The First: We Meet Again, Batman, or, Setting The Stage: The past revived
February 1, 2009
Relics, II
December 13, 2008
It is 12 a.m. when you come home drunk. You stumble in the door, heeltoe off yellow flats and drop bags, heading without real hope to the kitchen table. If there were mail, it would be here.
There are two things you are expecting: the first comes in a plain, white envelope, bearing ill tidings from the land of standardized tests. The second you do not truly believe will materialize from the West Coast, but if it did, it would hold a number of things left behind when you flew away five months before. Tonight there are no standard white envelopes on the table, but there is a package. High and brown, it stands shady in the dark. You flick on the Christmas tree–overhead lights are not right for this, nor for tired, dilated eyes–already half knowing its origins, half repining its sender.
The letters on the “sent from” side of the packing label, lashed on with messy, crisscrossing skeins of tape, are light and scarcely legible. There is an unfamiliar area code, handwriting you do not recognize. You are perplexed; perhaps it is not for you at all, but a mistaken delivery to an affable neighbor. But then you make out a “G” printed beneath “sender.” With some amusement, you realize it is in fact only his letters, not his numbers–surprisingly neat–that you recognize. There was never any reason for you to get his numbers; he called you first.
You gaze down at the package, sober. There is finality here, some sort of end you’ve been telling yourself you need for weeks now, but which in the end you are not certain you want. Part of you has been hoping for a Christmas miracle. Part of you has always been an expectant child. But here they are–your gifts, from and for you–arrived 13 days early. Everyone knows that Christmas miracles do not happen early, and they do not happen to you.
There will be no one at your door step, no personal delivery, and no happy serendipity, this package seems to say. You do not live in a novel or a movie or a tidy, happy dream. This you should know by now. This you should accept. Wake up, tiny Who-girl, and grow a nose–or at the very least a viable dream.
By the light of the twinkling tree lights you gut the parcel, slicing through the last thing he touched, brushing against invisible fingerprints. It is the closest thing you will get to holding hands. Inside the package there are three shining Christmas tree bulbs from Goodland, Kansas, a bathing suit, a strange, new copy of a movie you like–a copy that never belonged to you. Perhaps all the gifts are not your own, and you do not know why. And then there is a small note with only 7 words, a single frownie face
Sorry.
PS: Still looking for your earrings.
There is a deep yawn in you, a creaky, aching opening that threatens, for a second, to overtake. You begin to cry, but stop. You will not let his letters do a number on you.
By the dim warm light of the Christmas tree you hang the bulbs upon overburdened boughs. Green, blue, gold, they are all in various stages of cracked hilarity. Peeling and unseemly, luxurious and fine, they are a symbol of something that you do not know–perhaps of all the foolish notions you had about what a future might have been like in which you spent all your Christmases holding his hand.
“Sorry,” it says. But sorry for what?
You stand back to regard your work. The three new ornaments are out of place, strangely wrong on the tree that has been decorated now for a week. In an act of humbleness, perhaps of apology, you remove the bulbs and nest them like three delicate baby birds back in the box, flicking off the lights as you go. You bear the box upstairs, sit down with it in your lap, do not cry. Stare. Finally, you shove the box between the desk and the bureau, draping a tee shirt, a bag, a large file folder over it.
Some cracked and golden things must remain in the dark.
Relics
November 19, 2008
It is a month now. Since I took the GRE. Since I came home to crow my delight to a receiver 2,839 miles away. Since I was coolly received. Since I was asked whether I remembered a conversation in which I’d stated “If ever you cheat on me, it will be over.” It has been a month since I replied a sinking, tentative “I remember,” and a month since he hung up, signing off with only a choked, “say hi to your mom.”
At first hurt the large, systemic questions hulk in the foreground, bustling and crowding one another like a pair of chubby thighs. They scramblestep fast, struggling against, jarring past one another, working up an untidy, embarrassing friction that creates a “shush, shush, shush” as background music for each step. Did he ever love me? was he lying all along? for how many days, weeks, months was nothing as true as I thought?
Did I coo “I love you” to an unfeeling, remorseless person who had lost his mind, or to a boy who had simply lost interest?
But, then, thirty days of chipping away at the big questions yields no satisfaction. Now in their place are unanswerable, fragmentary queries that used to comprise the big, unanswerable wholes. Now I wonder the silliest, smallest things. I cry over the tiny injustices, over the things I have yet to send back in an unceremonious cardboard box.
How does he think of me? Have I gone from Peachtown, from tiny dove, to simply “my ex girlfriend,” or does he dare name me when he speaks to her, to others, to himself?
Does he speak of me to her, to others, to himself? Am I still there, dirtying up his head? Or has he zenned me away with willful, mindful mindlessness? Am I as invisible, impossible, as the future he could not see for us? Am I as unwelcome and feared and unloved as that thing I represented?
Does he sing to her, ridiculous, made up, ebullient songs?
I am, even with a month intervening, unable to call him “my ex,” partly because I feel no right to the possessive, partly because he is, and always was, simply Greg. I have not been able to stop wondering why, or wishing I could wake up tomorrow and it wouldn’t be true. And I think about how it started, and the sweetness in between, and I think about seeing the green and gray stripes of his shirt from a high-up airplane window and wish–God, how I wish–I’d known that was the last time we’d suffer a goodbye. I would have looked him–really looked him–in the eye. I would have kissed him goodbye once more, hoping it would somehow matter. And I wouldn’t have taken his sweatshirt. It would have been one less thing to pack in the cardboard box.
Walking home in the cold, shoulders hunched against the wind, I wondered: does he look at the wool hat I brought him from Morocco and does he feel sad? Did he cut off the long, funny tassle, or did he throw it–the entire hat–in the trash? I hope he at least found a nice bum somewhere, a nice bum that needs a nice wool hat.
Does he ever think of me at all, and did he cry? Does he still miss me?
Why do I still miss him?
Nacho the otter has been exiled from my bed. He lies on his back on a notebook on the floor, stuffing leaking out of a seam I never got around to sewing shut. The last time Greg called me before The News was in the middle of the week. It was to tell me that he’d just seen a dog get hit by a car, by the car that drove behind him, then drove away. He’d pulled over and gotten out to hold the animal as it bled, squealed, cried. The owners rushed from their house and took the dog away to the vet. I don’t know if it died.
“Why did you call me to tell me?” I’d asked.
“I just though I should tell somebody,” he said. He had to go. He just wanted to say it. He hung up. Compassion or curiosity?
And now I have dreams of him mowing down animals with his car–flocks of chickens and one snow white rabbit–and I am holding open a gate that he’s meant to drive through. We have been escaping, through tall grass, to somewhere, from something. We are both tense. I yell to him to stop–he’s going to kill these animals. He doesn’t see them. He doesn’t stop in time. He is focused on driving.
I wonder why he called. I wonder if it was in that moment I asked that I became just somebody to tell something to. Or maybe it had happened long before. Maybe I’d just been a voice, a vessel, for longer than I care to consider.
I wonder who he calls now when he sees animals dying in the street.
The end.
November 13, 2008
A missed morning phone call. An afternoon of wondering. Late night, poorly planned, alphanumeric tapping.
She writes: “Why did you call me?”
He writes: “To see how you are doing.”
She writes: “And why in the world do you care? You wanted your freedom from me and you got it. Run. I’m not holding on.”
He writes: “How are you doing?”
She fumes.
She writes: “You have absolutely no right to know: you forfeited that two weeks ago. Stop acting, unless it’s to do me the same courtesy I did you and exit yourself from my life. I don’t know you anymore, and you don’t know me.”
He writes: “Then how are the cats?”
She waits. She writes “You must be retarded.” She erases it lest he think she’s being cute. She stews. She decides that maybe he should know. Maybe he should care.
An hour later she writes: “What precisely do you want to know? That the cats loathe you? That I range from being excellent to forlorn and fucking weeping from hour to hour? Is it that you want to survey the damage you’ve wrought? Does it delight you? Does it remind you how to feel? What? You’ve got it now–all the news there is. Now, let me get on with a life that does not include you.”
He waits. He writes the only two words that would have alleviated anything had they arrived two weeks earlier.
“I’m sorry.”
She doesn’t reply. She knows there’s nothing left to say.
This visitation brought to you by prehistoric cellular devices.
November 1, 2008
Sometimes I am just. so. stupid.
I fired up the ancient Samsung phone with the intent of harvesting the contact info for Trinity people I’m hoping to see over the course of the next few days. My intentions were to dive straight for the phonebook, to entirely eschew the backlog of received messages…and yet… I couldn’t help myself. Okay. If I’m to be honest, I suppose I should admit that I didn’t even try that hard to block out the siren song of a dead romance.
Interspersed with messages from Katie, from Marisa, from Thea, there were a string of them–the things I “did not” want to see; but, just like me, I opened them and I read them–each and every one. They ranged from the more overt “I love you, Smalls” and “Happy Birthday, Small one!” and “Can’t wait to see you tonight, either. Muah,” to those which were then and shall always remain mysterious. “Mission accomplished. Expect results in o-100 hours.” “You wouldn’t believe it even if I took a picture” and “Thanks for putting up with me, Bean. You’re the best. xoxo” I don’t remember what that mission was now, and I have no idea what the results might have been or if I ever received them. What it was that I wouldn’t believe even if presented with photographic evidence I couldn’t tell you. I cannot remember what he did wrong that warranted that last message, but I’m sure I forgave him, and I’m sure that it didn’t matter in the long run, and I’m sure I still wanted him to kiss me good night. All I know now is that I miss the boy who renamed me Smalls (regardless of how much I hated it at first) and Baby Bee and called me every night and knew how to hold me like nobody else ever has.
He had all of my heart and he’s seen everything I am. He’s the only one, in fact, who ever has. He’s the only one who ever wanted to shoulder some of my sadness. He’s the only one who I ever trusted with so much of me. Not because of ego, but because of how stridently he proclaimed his affections, I still can’t believe he threw it–threw me–away. I still can’t believe that he probably doesn’t think it was a mistake.
I don’t know how I feel about going to campus now. I’m not sure I can without seeing specters of a wraith-thin boy in a horrible winter coat grinning as he lopes toward me. Of course, All-Hallows Eve is the ideal date for a haunting. I suppose there’s nothing for it but to go, to be brave, and to confront my ghosts.
It isn’t easy, but I’ve made it look pretty good.
October 29, 2008
For days now–three, to be precise–I haven’t cried. I’ve felt as though I’m steadily growing taller, standing straighter, stooping over in a motion of sick and woebegone fetal aching less and less.
When the phone rang on Monday night I did not answer. I watched it there on the bed as it sounded and stared at the familiar numbers flashing across the screen. My palms were pricked with sweat, heart raced as I gazed. But I did not answer. Only after it had lain dead for a while, chimed to signify a missed call and new mail, did I listen to his message. My real name–not Peach, not Little Dove, not Bean–in his voice, then his own name, as if I couldn’t tell who it was, as if I hadn’t been holding on to that voice telling me he loved me across months and miles. He said he wanted to see how I was doing. He said he was glad I was reconnecting with my friends. He said he’d been conferring with the older brother I like so well, that I should use my November tickets out West to see graduate schools in California in place of seeing him. He said he’d call back.
And that’s when the shaking commenced.
Somehow I texted back a curt reply about having already canceled the plane tickets. I said his obligation to me was at a close. I said to tell his wonderful mother that he’d done his job by getting in touch. I said he was a “very good boy” to have done so. He called seconds later but I just stared there at the phone, knowing that if we spoke now, it would be only to hear him protest that he’d called because he wanted to, not because his mother or his brother told him he should. And I’d know it was a lie.
If for a second I believed he’d called because he cared, I would have flipped it open. I would have said hello.
How do you love someone who does good only out of fear of the punishment he’ll receive should he not? How do you believe in someone to whom giving something to you will always translate into giving something up? How do you trust someone to whom loving you, by definition, can be nothing but a job, even if it is a job with occasional acknowledged benefits? These are questions to which I do not have the answer, so regardless of what my heart wants, of the intimacy I crave, of the continued confusion and the indignation of being given up on, I cannot–I will not–answer the phone. I can’t put myself at risk to continue loving or wanting something that I shouldn’t want back, that doesn’t want me back, either. His bed is warmed now. His ego is stroked. I was the suspect, prehensile tail that kept him from pulling on his new life, one leg at a time. He’s evolved into something that does not require or include me.
I am obsolete.
The last time I saw him was from a plane rising into the air, away from the Oregon coastline I was certain I’d see in only a few months. To my surprise he’d stayed there at the airport for nearly an hour after we’d parted, waiting for the last glimpse of my plane as I left him to his new life. At the time I’d thought it was a way to hold on just for a few moments more, but now I wonder if he stayed and watched just to confirm that I’d finally actually gone, giving him entirely back to himself. I wonder if he rejoiced after.
I sobbed so hard on the plane that the stewardess brought me more napkins, offered an extra glass of wine. I don’t know why he stayed now, and I don’t know why he cried, too, when we said goodbye. I’m trying to untangle why, the night before, he’d pulled the blankets over both of our heads and pulled me against him, eyes welling with tears. He told me he wished he could keep me there forever, and I believed. I remember the dark sparkling of his eyes in the dim light, of holding onto him and weeping, of telling him that I didn’t want to go. I know that at least I meant everything I said.
If he called again I’d answer, but I don’t know why. He could have kept me by his side forever, but he’ll never get me back.
