What now my love?

Now that you’re gone

I’d be a fool

To go on and on. –Frank Sinatra

            I suppose it should be said, that we are a joke that begins: two bi-polars walk into a bar.  I will get to the punch line later.  We take turns, that boy and I, deciding who gets to be insane this week and who gets to be sane; but neither one of us seem to succeed at either role, forever doomed to live in some horrible in-between spot that prevents us from thoroughly understanding each other, or ourselves.  As I write this, wearing a hat with bear ears on it, I suppose it’s his turn to take the insane reigns, though I am not sure where I am as he takes them.  But I am no where near sane because Frank Sinatra is tearing the paint off my walls and the flesh from my bones; “the voice” breaks the silence I left to hang like a heavy fog in my living room the night before, with the words “Oh no you can’t take that away from me.”  Frankie, (he knows so much that I do not), with an ensemble of flawless accompanying musicians encouraging him through every stiff drink and warbled, “Scooby-dooby doo.”

Oh, but there’s something that needs to be said before I get lost in endings and beginnings and in-betweens and outlines and the pain creeping it’s way up my back.  Creeping, because of a lumpy mattress he can’t stop complaining about, because of the drugs I did the night before, because I am hunched over a computer trying to get my back to hurt even more so that mental pain turns physical, because see, it’s his turn to be insane. 

            I know I stand in line

            Until you think you have the time

            To spend an evening with me

            This must be said: His eyes have softened me in some way, or perhaps I am looking at things softer.  His voice has softened me in some way, made me laugh a little louder and more frequently, made me enjoy listening for different reasons.  His arms have softened me in too many ways for me to reveal without feeling my cheeks redden like a coy young girl, without returning to a childlike state that the Buddha might liken to enlightenment.  Reader, this is not me, this is not where I am comfortable, feeling like this.  This is uneasy, this is unpredictable, no card or stone or palm I can read can tell me where he will go next and what part of me he will take with him when he goes-- and I know he’ll go, they always do, men, the ones that love to leave.  The part of me that could begin to trust with an introduction died a very long time ago.  In spite of this knowledge, I find him and knowing him an utterly irresistible idea.

            I only know this: several months ago I received a Tarot reading from a Voodoo Mambo, and she said that within six months I would meet a fair-haired man who will just be there for the party.  Just for the party.  I told him about this, only I phrased it as, “Who might be trouble.”  I guess it depends on how you read the Devil card.   

            Maybe it was her prediction that allowed him to catch my eye and be held and rocked in it.  Either way, he caught it, first with his quite literally rose-colored glasses, and later with the words, “I think I was destined to have been born a Kennedy.”  Somewhere between those words and now I started loving him.

            You woke up this morning, and while you took a shower, he went to the grocery store up the street and brought back a box of Trix, some English muffins, cranberry juice for his urinary tract infection, and a battery for the clock in your living room, which has never worked. You probably left it that way for so long because before your friend Dan left for Egypt he set it for two minutes to midnight, so every time you looked at the wall you thought of him and Iron Maiden. It takes the mere placement of a battery to send it into motion, and what was once two minutes to midnight is now ten after nine.  Your heart rises in your throat and you do your best to hold it in, as you realize that in your world of broken things, no one has ever fixed anything before. 

            I go to leave, weighted down by the work of the day, and he looks at me warmly and says, “When are you coming back?”  I examine him closely, because he revealed his cards to me the night before in a moment of drug-induced weakness, and told me that pupils dilate when a person is feeling love and affection for someone he is looking at.  He said that women in France used to put some sort of drops in their eyes for the sole purpose of dilating them when they were going to balls or dances.  That boy, his pupils are dilated as he looks at me, as he asks when I’m coming back. 

            You have a warning bell in your head designed specifically for men, and it goes off when any man moves too quickly and tries to surpass one of the nine gates of hell put in place before a man can truly know you. You don’t trust men when they start to move in closer, they always move in closer before they start bucking like wild animals.  You can’t decide whether or not to ignore it.  And you can’t help but like it, that he wants to know when you’ll be back, even though you know that words such as these are often spoken before someone decides to run. 

            Later he brought me dinner from an Italian deli.  He got me a sort of pasta called Ziti, and he looked at the noodles critically and he said, “I should have gotten you some vegetables.”  This makes me laugh.  This is the man I got drunk with the night before, the man I go on emergency gummi-worm runs with, and now he’s concerned about my health.

            That’s new for me.  I like it. 

            And if we go some place to dance

            I know that there’s a chance

            You won’t be leaving with me. 

            We take Ecstasy together, “roll” if you will.  It is my first time.  All of my drug experiences have been bad, and the presence of Zoloft in my bloodstream for so long prevented me from pursuing more potent anti-depressants.   But for once I am prescription-free, the time is right, I am out of my small college town for a change,  (visiting instead a small college city) and that boy will be with me.  That boy only gives me half a hit, he doesn’t want me to feel overwhelmed in the club scene, he isn’t sure what I can handle yet and I don’t know either.  I am there with Jules; I go with her because I won’t go on such an adventure alone. I think that you never know about men, when they will choose to remain at your side and when they will choose to imagine you’re not there.  I have no expectations of him; no more than I have had of other friends, lovers, and fathers.  We are later than we planned on being and that boy doesn’t let us forget it, tapping his foot while we choke down food.  We took a long time to get ready, and I wonder if he thinks I look pretty.  Later I ask him, (why do you have to ask him?) and he says, “Of course, you look beautiful.”  You don’t know why, but in spite of all you’ve accomplished, some days nothing makes you happier than the word “beautiful.”

            I am slow to absorb E, and I end up sitting at a table and not feeling very good while the others are rolling hard.  I am depressed, out of place at a club where everyone’s a sheep in sheep’s clothing and I am a wolf that doesn’t give a damn about the hunt.  He is trying hard to be a sheep, and Jules decides that while they’re all sheep and she’s not, she can dance better than any of them and therefore doesn’t give a fuck what they think.  I sit at a table; I find a candle and start dipping my fingers into it.  I don’t feel anything, no pain from burn, because, good God, there is no burn, and this flame has a shape, and for the first time I can feel it, I can wrap my fingers around it and own it.  Wow.  And, fuck me, I am wearing a backless shirt that is not covered with sweat from dancing because I don’t like the people here watching me, I don’t even want that boy to watch me, I’m intimidated, but you better believe I feel every bit of air on the back of my shirt and it feels fine, just fine.  People notice your back, its muscle.  It serves to remind you how strong you are.

            That boy keeps disappearing; he’s interested in some girl.  She’s rolling herself, and that boy has an inhaler that he can blow a vaporizing mist over someone with, and she loves it.  I think, fuck her; I am prettier than she is.  I only do open relationships, but there are always rules, and one of the few I employ is a request to never have a lover flirt with another right in front of my face.  This is the first time I see him like this, desperate to know more people without regard to those that he’s with.  It seems he likes quantity more than quality, and I store this information in the back of my head with the mental note, don’t you dare get too attached. 

He seems to forget about you then, he seems frantic and weird, and you start to feel uncomfortable. Jules is yelling at him, but your high is still kicking and it all seems very funny to you. Jules wants to leave, she can’t stand to look at him for even another second, while you just want to lie on his bed with him and look at him and smile.  That boy, she spits his name in every sentence on the way home, cursing him deeply and more firmly with every passing freeway exit, using the word “disrespect” with such venom that it makes a tear in your heart, because she uses that word coupled with your name.  She thinks he’s not good enough for you, but all you are thinking about is his finger tracing a trail down your bare back as you journey down a separate trail that doesn’t exist anywhere near here.

            Back at home, there is a message on your answering machine from him.  He’s talking to a homeless man who is trying to drink a forty-ounce on a street corner but doesn’t have a bag to hide his liquor.  That boy, ever the humanitarian, goes to the coffee shop nearby and gets a coffee cup for the man to pour his beer into.  You decide to wait to call him back, Julie’s words echoing in the back of your head.  Out of respect for her you should take her words seriously, but you still can’t stop your face from smiling.  You climb into the shower, and you feel every...single...droplet of water careening down your back in perfect little arches, where his fingers traced only a few hours ago.  You open your mouth and let it be filled, for once without worrying about the iron content of the spring.  You press your hands against the wall and lean into it and whisper to no one in particular and everyone in particular, “I am taking a shower.”  Then you remember: you have a tube of something that would go excellent with this mood.  It is called Invigorating Apricot Scrub.  You fill your hands with the brown sandy substance, and you slowly...exfoliate...your...Oh God...skin...this, you think, is something you could do forever, where are your witnesses to shout an Amen to this? God, has it ever felt this good before? Has anything ever felt this good before?  And did God give you this Invigorating Apricot Scrub so that you could feel, even if only for a few moments, something so perfectly clean, so that you would know that it exists?  You move your hands in circles and sideways and up and down, because goddamnit while you thought you were cute it isn’t until that moment that you realize that you are so damn beautiful; you, with this body you have been given, this mind, all of these things, gifts from God.  How could anyone not be grateful?  So you think you should stay in the shower a little longer, use a little more hot water, turn the white skin pink and the pink skin red.

            When you get out of the shower it’s 6:30 AM, and the phone rings and it’s that boy again, calling from that small college city he calls home.  He says, “I’m coming to Athens, I want to see you, I don’t want to wait anymore, I’m on the freeway.”  You’re startled at first, you didn’t expect him until morning, afternoon, or early evening, and now he’ll be here in an hour.  He can’t wait to see you, and you like that, so you curl up in your bed to wait for him, tucking the covers under your chin.  You stare out the window and allow yourself a rare giggly-girl type moment as you whisper to your stuffed bed companions, “We are watching the sunrise together.”

            Then afterwards we drop into

            A quiet little place

            And have a drink or two...

            We read a Cosmo together one day, we take a quiz to see if he’s ready for a relationship.  There’s no quiz in this magazine for me.  There is never supposed to be a question about what a woman wants. You’re supposed to set the trap and wait.  Isn’t that how it’s supposed to go?   The verdict is the “potential mate” middle ground, by the skin of his teeth, and that boy seems genuinely disappointed by his mediocre performance.  He thinks it’s time we stop fucking around with that stupid quiz and read the nitty-gritty part about advanced nookie technology, which is the other thing Cosmo is good for.  The first is lining your hamster cage. 

            You read this one part together, that says that if you rub the inside of your partner’s wrist, they will feel compelled to tell you that they love you.  You say that there is probably a part that you can rub to make this happen, but you don’t think it’s the wrist.  He grabs your arm and starts rubbing your wrist.  This scares you.  You know such words often leave a trail of bullshit in their wake.  You don’t care what anyone says (when have you ever?), you like him around, you like how he makes you feel, you like how he can turn an otherwise dismissible day like Tuesday into something unforgettable.  You think about him saying, “When are you coming back?”  You decide to rub the inside of his wrist.  You figure it must work for one of you.  Neither one says anything.

            And then I go and spoil it all

            By saying somethin’ stupid

            Like I love you. 

            That boy tells me about the time he told a girl he loved her, and she freaked out and called him a psycho.  He hadn’t meant anything by it, he says, not like he was saying he was in love with her, love means a lot of different things, right?  I tell him about the time I told someone I loved him, and his response was, “Well, I sorta love you, but not really, there’s a little bit of that ‘being in-love’ sort of love, but not a lot, well, you know...” and babbled on for ten minutes, until I knew that not only had I said something stupid, I had said something unthinkable.  I was stunned by such a reaction, because no matter what movie I saw, love declarations never met with a response such as that. 

            You tell that story over and over again, but you never process the lesson behind it.  You never take note of what those words are prone to do.  You know a spell when you hear one, and that’s what those words serve to do: place a spell on someone by announcing your gift, place a spell on you by revealing your vulnerability.  You know that never has a spell backfired so often as that one.

            You are going to do it anyway, aren’t you?

            I am very impatient, and though I have been carefully instructed by Cosmo that a woman should never profess her love prior to the official man or man-figure, I figure that since I am not planning on doing his dishes or washing his socks any time in the immediate future, I might as well say fuck you to this gender role as well.  My voice catches in my throat anyway as I say this to him (it is here that you became the brave one, remember this), as I am leaning on him, as we are talking about nothing, I love you.

            “Really?”  He says.  I try to judge the really.  Is this an effort on his part to buy some time?  Is it genuine disbelief?  Two bi-polars walk into a bar...       

            “Yes.”  There is a pause, but for some reason, I no longer doubt what his response will be.      

            “Well,” he begins.  “I guess I love you too.”

            “You guess?”

            “Well, I sort of love you, but not really...” 

            He has invoked your old demons, you are laughing, he has stripped the final layer of hurt from those old words in one fell swoop.  He has reset the stopped clock, he has resuscitated the word “love” for you.  You have never been so certain of words when they were spoken.  You have never been so confident in both yourself and in the love of another, in your ability to love another.  You have waited a long time to be this strong, to know yourself this well.  You have never been so sure, and you think, that boy...that boy.

            I can see it in your eyes

            That you despise the same old lies

            You heard the night before...

            In a burst of inspiration, he decides to make me dinner.  He tells me that the wine is the most important part of the meal, because the more you drink, the better the food tastes.  His mother has an ancient cat that follows him around everywhere.  It seems she is chasing his life force to compensate for the fact that hers is rapidly fading.  That boy puts her in the basement while I’m there, so that I don’t sneeze too much.  It would be awhile before the full-body sneezes and stay-puff marshmallow cheeks that are my allergic reactions would become comical to him; at this point, he is still trying to woo me.  That cat will be dead in a week.  He left her outside, he wonders if he’s responsible for her death.  I wonder if it is my fault, since he was with me the night he left the cat out.  I wonder if it ever occurs to either of us that the cat was just old.  Two bi-polars walk into a bar…

He puts on Frank Sinatra, and I’ve never really heard him before or had much desire to listen to him.  I end up liking it anyway, the use of words like “t’would” and the breaking of the word “ter-rif-ically” in “I Get a Kick Out of You.”  That boy makes dinner, he lights candles, and I want to laugh because no one has ever done this for me before, and I didn’t realize how silly the whole thing would be, how contrived it would feel.  Bottled romance always has the strangest taste; it’s been aged so well it feels disrespectful not to like it.  I don’t want to like it, I want to make him try harder, be more creative, put his back into it.  I end up liking it anyway.

            You really like Frank Sinatra, more than you thought you would, and who are you kidding, you like it mostly because it comes to remind you of him.  You buy a CD with money you don’t have.  That boy sings the songs around your house, sings them along with the stereo, pointing at you when he sings the chorus of “I Get A Kick Out of You.” Duets like “Somethin’ Stupid.”  Depressing songs with strangely upbeat tempos, like “What Now, My Love?”  You can’t sing yourself, you’re embarrassed to sing, though sometimes when you’re not thinking you belt out a line or two much to the mortification of present company.  Only one person ever loved your voice, and that was A, she was the one who said, “I’ve never heard anything unpleasant ever come out of your mouth.”  She was among those that told you that you must be an angel, because she never knew an earth-bound creature such as you.  She is among those who now ask what you are doing with that boy, and she doesn’t understand, because to her an angel is dating a human.  She will never understand at all.

            His singing, you’ve always been a sucker for men who sing to you. Men have sung to you before, and it’s always had the same effect.  Even your father, who you spent much of your childhood hating, (when you weren’t desperately seeking his love and approval) made you happy when he greeted the evenings by playing a guitar and staring out the window singing, “I’m being followed by a moon-shadow, moon-shadow, moon-shadow.”  Later, this song would come to haunt you, come to be something that both made you scratch your head and sent shivers down your spine.  You’ve written stories about stalkers based upon this song, and you’ve wondered how someone could write a song detailing the dismemberment of their limbs with such a joyous melody.  You listen to Frankie, you listen to that boy, singing, and you think about how songs, and having songs, are such dangerous things, because what was once beautiful can quickly morph into a tool through which pain can be resuscitated over and over again. 

            The CD cost me twenty dollars, and I can’t return it.

            And though it’s just a line to you

            To me it’s true

            And never seemed so right before.

            It’s Sunday, he’s picked through the many stacks of newspapers cluttering up my house, he’s read all my junk mail and urged me to respond to the “personal letter” that I received from Bill Clinton.  He announces credit card annual percentage rates across the living room while I beg him to hurry and bury them in the backyard before the number zero seems infinitely impossible.

            This Sunday is different, he says it’s a good Sunday for a last ride before the seasons change and winter makes it impossible to take a motorcycle out on the road.  He asks if I want to go for a ride, and like so many things with him, it seems, I have never done this before.  I insist on calling his bike a chopper, though he says that’s not the kind of bike it is, and when I finally get that out of my system I want to call it a hog, which it isn’t either.  It has a passenger seat (that boy was thinking), or a bitch seat, which is a term I learned after reading an interview with a member of Dykes on Bikes who informed the reader that this was the sort of seat a woman needed to get out of.  It seemed appropriate for me, though, as I sized up the metal frame and envisioned myself clinging to it around every turn; not because of biology, but because of mediocre at best driving skills. I pass on the helmet, because he isn’t wearing one, and if he trusts his driving that well, I suppose I should too; and if I’m going to do something any police officer or high school safety captain might call stupid, I’m going to do it all the way.

            You tease him, you joke around to hide your nervousness, and when you get over the awkwardness of being so short that it’s difficult to mount the chopper gracefully, it’s better than you ever imagined it would be.  Your eyes, which are concealed behind huge sunglasses that you repeatedly have to adjust because the speed twists them on your face, water heavily, and you feel it is God demanding your gratitude because you love every single turn. For a long time you have needed a return to something simple, something that you can just love without lengthy explanation or complex definition, just because.  You saw the Appalachian Hills covered in shades of yellow and red and orange for what felt like the first time, in spite of the fact that you have walked through and driven past those hills countless times.  You know that this is how you were meant to see them.   You have “Raspberry Beret” going through your head, and your mind becomes that of the fortune-teller again as you turn to the reading you gave yourself and you think that this is your Ace of Cups from the Tarot, and oh how it runs over.  The warrior in you wonders if this is a weakness, all this water, but you ignore her for now.  You drive through wooded areas saturated with the latest crop of ladybugs, such simple signs of good fortune, and they quickly cover his jacket.  You consider brushing one from his shoulder, but then think to yourself that he is being pelted with good fortune, and you want to look at that a little longer.  At the same time, he is shielding you.  Such a strange whisper from God.  You know that boy would never see it that way, but he understands later when you say that you feel like a child, (talking to God on the back of a motorcycle), that you love that he’s introducing you to so many amazing things. 

            Afterwards, I sit on his lap on my porch, I crawl on him like a tiny child scrambling to the top of a jungle gym.  I laugh and think to myself that he is a chair with dialogue.  But this has nothing to do with childhood, I would never want to be a child again, it will never be my will, there’s in nothing from that age that I long for in my present day world.  I know that one day this will be what I miss, what and who I am now if I should drift into something dark and become less than this.  I sit on his lap as a woman so full of love that only this level of comfort will suffice, only knowing that the arms around me and the seat below me are secure keep me warm as the seasons change to colder ones where I have less control of my mind and the many moods that are it’s make-up.    

             This is your childhood, or so says the Buddha, who said that you would feel so much younger when you finally really started to unlearn things.   There’s something different in you, and you know it, you are younger today and more aware of how long life is and how minutes can chug by slowly or quickly depending on how much you cherish them.  Each day with him blends into the next, and your priorities are shifting.  You are beginning to realize that you’ve stacked written-on-paper accomplishments up to the ceiling of your house because you knew that you could do all this in a single evening alone and never have to feel anything.  Success seems to stick to you, but people seem to go, and you have learned that often times the love of a deity is the only love constant and unconditional. Love is something that you have no control over, that another person can choose or choose not to give.  This is what you are most afraid to ask for, and you feel it radiating from him, he need not say a word. But you never thought you could have it, not again, you never thought you could deserve it more than once, more than twice.  Just how many chances do people think they have?  Just how many do you think you are worthy of?  But it’s too late for these questions, isn’t it?  Some part of you, long dormant, has been awakened, and you feel you’ve already loved him forever, and if you haven’t in some other lifetime, you will in this one.     

            I practice every day

            To find some clever lines to say

            To make the meaning come true.

            He has been in Athens for three solid weeks, but he’s leaving soon to return to the small college city he calls his home.  October 28th will be his last night.  Then he will be an hour away again, and seeing each other every day will turn to weekends, sometimes, maybe, depending on him, the owner of the car, and not on me.  I have no control here.  He doesn’t call me.  He didn’t call me the day before.

            You suspect he is going to leave without saying good-bye to you.  Some part of you knew this would be it, that his love for you wouldn’t stretch an hour’s distance, beyond immediate satisfaction.  You never like to believe such things.  Like most people, you like to believe there is something in you that is unforgettable, that must be held and rocked and nurtured and tended to, because you are different.  This is it, this is the time for panic.  He is leaving you, honey.  He is leaving you.  

            Halloween in Athens, there are big parties, the streets fill with forty-thousand people from all over who come to see who can drink the most and do the must drugs and still stumble their way through the crowd without getting arrested.  I decide to make myself a contender, and I remember as I swallow a bit of E that he was once dreaming of this night, dreaming of hosting a warehouse party of his own that would serve as an after-hours for interested folks.  He has a lot of ideas that are born and are then killed very quickly, and I wonder if he’s thinking of that, right at that very moment, kicking himself for it.  I wonder if I am one of those ideas.  I don’t know, because he isn’t talking to me. 

            So I am sitting on another’s lap, another lover of mine who knows very well that I am feeling something for the man placing a CD in a player across the room that I felt for him a year ago.  He doesn’t hold this against me, that I’m not really there with him, but rather thinking about how rapidly I’m losing that boy.  Perhaps it is in part because he knows that if that boy really ever wants to know me, know me the way that he does, he still has eight more gates of hell to go through.  I decide to give that boy the power to ruin my evening, because I want to feel all the pain at once instead of in small doses over a long period of time.  That boy puts on “Raspberry Beret.” I don’t know if he knows that this song, like many songs now, reminds me of him.  There’s a sense of doom to it this time, I’m not sure why, maybe it’s because the song is cut off half-way through the second verse, right after, “She had the nerve to ask me, if I planned to do her any harm.”  I remember then that I woke up the morning before with the same feeling of doom I feel when someone dies.  In spite of this warning, I am only partially ready.    

            He leaves with a bunch of people, and you can’t keep up with them, they have long legs and tall bodies, and you get caught in the crowd fairly quickly.  You feel like a child again, but it doesn’t feel good this time, scrambling to latch onto the hand of a parent so that the crowd can be better negotiated, so that the whole thing seems less frightening and overwhelming.  Instead, it is like the first childhood, the one without the Buddha, the one you’ve been trying so hard to forget.  You are left behind, their heads grow smaller and smaller, he doesn’t turn around to see if you are there.  Unlike your first childhood, however, you don’t have to stand in the middle of the crowd screaming for help, you can turn around and go back, and you do. You know how to get back from where you came. 

There’s a party at the office that he is part owner of, and there are a lot of people there.  There is a girl there that he ditched in favor of me a few months ago.  I am looking at her differently somehow.  He told me that he stayed at her house because she had a comfy bed and air-conditioning.  I wonder why he stayed at mine.  He ditched another in four seconds flat.  What made you think that you were any different?  I wonder if he has found someone else; he doesn’t strike me as someone that does well at being alone.  You look for the love you knew only days ago.  His pupils are dilated.  It has nothing to do with you. 

I sit and stare out the window at the crowds gathering on the streets, waiting for something, and more than one person approaches me and says that they’re so glad they stumbled upon the word “misanthrope” because it describes me so well, they understand me so well through that word.  I don’t question whether or not they know what it means, but I do question whether or not they know what I mean.  None of them know me well enough to know whether or not I hate them, whether or not hate is even a word I understand, and I can’t help but think, why are you fucking up my high?

            You know that you don’t really hate people, though it would be easier if you did.  If you hated people, you wouldn’t be sitting here, being hurt by one who is choosing to ignore you, hating yourself because he has the power to make you feel so badly. If you hated people, you wouldn’t be trying to work out a way in your head that you can still know him without being with him, you wouldn’t be trying to negotiate the hurt and place it in boxes in different parts of your body to be opened at later dates.  If you hated people, you wouldn’t be trying to decide whether to call him a coward or not call him at all.  You wouldn’t be here. 

            But then I think I’ll wait

            Until the evening gets late

            And I’m alone with you. 

            E isn’t what it once was.  The first time I felt a surge of love, now I feel a surge of hate, because my mind is a mess of wanting him.  I shake off the aching because I don’t know where he is and there’s no point in obsessing, and after awhile I stop caring.  I just hope like hell that he stays away so I can make the most out of whatever’s left of this high.  I decide that I am not paying anyone for it.  

            You announced your will to the world.  Something different, the opposite of every man that ever loved you. You have heard a lot of clichés in your time, like “be careful what you wish for.”  You never pay attention to clichés. 

I ask him to walk me home later.  He makes a big deal out of it, because he wants to go to this party later, so instead I ask him to walk me home in five minutes and I walk away.  He follows me and asks if I’m okay, and I say no.  E makes me more honest, somehow.  That boy says that it seems like I want a boyfriend or something.  I sigh.  I remind him that all the boyfriend-like behaviors come from him, not me, and he agrees.    He resuscitates a conversation from a week ago where I told him that I felt I was being treated without respect at times, and he says that he’s thought about it, and he thinks it’s true.  I ask why nothing has changed then.  He says he doesn’t know, he thinks it’s because he doesn’t want a girlfriend.  I tell him I’m not his girlfriend.  He’s not even your friend, is he?  What does he know about you?  What does he want to know about you?  He says that nothing is ever simple, I tell him he doesn’t allow anything to be simple, it all has to be hard and hurtful and impossible for him, or melted down into something digestible courtesy of a whole collection of amphetamines.  My mind and body turn serpentine and I begin to generate my own venom, I am coiled and ready to strike.  The target: he doesn’t have a job.  This has never bothered me before but it does now, because I need something to bother me.  I need to hate him, I need to pick him apart in my mind and highlight all the things that could be construed as fatal flaws if I didn’t try so hard to make love unconditional.  I decide that boys are stupid, especially that boy.  I decide that I am stupid for having faulty radar, for getting swept up, for being a…girl, when I choose to use the word girl as an insult.  I decide that both love, and unconditional love, are things that only exist in my mind, they require another player to truly have life, and while I thought I’d met someone willing, I had not.  I think of the immortal wisdom of the Cat and Hat, who offered the ominous words, “Maybe you had too much too fast.”  He says he’s an asshole, and I don’t argue. 

            You thought you were safe this time, you did.  It was not even a week ago that you wrote in your journal that you have come to realize that you’ve been afraid of too many things, and you are not afraid of him.  You wrote that you are going to love with no apologies, no questioning of feelings, but with total confidence in your ability to love.  You realized that you could do what you want and follow your heart, not just the money or the written-on-paper accomplishments.  There is another layer of life that you would like to know.  You should laugh. You are really quite stupid.

You’re hiding now, you’re tucking your body up and folding it into your stomach, the home for all your hurt and anger.  The woman you were with him, the one that loves him, has to hide so that you can sit in this office surrounded by people without crying... and the woman who loves him could never do that, could she?  She is screaming right now, because she doesn’t want you to lose again, she doesn’t want you to lose this one to cowardice or whatever else it might be.  The warrior in you will take over, as she always does in times like this, and will paint your face with a solid, dead, plastic stare. She will hold your arms down so that you don’t fling him from his chair and demand an eye for an eye. I don’t know why you felt so safe. 

            The time is right, your perfume


            Fills my head, the stars get red


            And oh the night’s so blue.

            He says something about loving me, and how he still loves me, that hasn’t changed.  He says it like a pacifier, a salve to soothe the wound.  People always say things like that when they want to pacify you.  It never works.  They are only words, words that will instantly be, at the very least, mentally questioned, when the words do not match the actions, the presentation, or the dismissal. 

            He has already cast the spell and you welcomed it, and he says it again and you recoil, because you know that he’s saying it differently this time.  You find it patronizing and pitying, and it makes another tear in your heart.  You are mute, you can’t say anything, you feel like you can never say anything again. Why should you speak when you don't know what the truth is anymore and you’ve never had a heart for liars?  Why say anything that could make him speak more, say more that will add another bit of water to the cup that you once drank from and that you are now drowning in?  This is the lesson of the ace.

            I say that I want to go home; he says that he will walk me.  When we walk out the door, he holds his arm out for me to take.  I don’t understand right away, but I take it anyway, and walk down the street, saying nothing.  This is where he makes himself feel better, this is where he presents himself as the nice guy to cushion the blow.  I hope it makes him feel better, because it does nothing for me.   

            Of all the times you’ve wanted him to hold your body to his and he didn’t, it is now that he moves to be closer to you, to put his arms around you.  Of all the times you have wanted him to stay and he didn’t, it is now that he lingers in your doorway, looking back at you.  Of all the times you wanted him to say that he loved you, it is now that he finds the words. Why do people say and do such things when they are leaving you?

            Something changes in his face, his certainty drains and he is somewhere else.  He suddenly scrambles for words, plucking them out of the air to fill in gaps left by my silence.  He says he doesn’t know what he’s saying, he doesn’t know what he’s doing, he’s on a lot of drugs, he has to leave before he says something else stupid.  He says he knows we can work this out, he knows we can make it better, he knows it will be okay.  He says he wishes he wasn’t leaving tomorrow, because he’s sure that we can work this out, tomorrow, when we’re both sober.

            You can’t even find a way to speak.  You’ve lost the ability to articulate sound.  All you can do is stand and stare in the doorway.  You don’t watch him leave.  You remember watching your mother drive away to work, and the defeated feeling you sometimes felt as you wondered if leaving was really that easy.  But you watched her go, because you knew she would be back, and it felt all right.  You know this will be much more than that, so you don’t watch.  You are more familiar with this feeling, this leaving, than any other.  So familiar are you, so sensitive to the sensation, that every time someone left the party that evening to go uptown, to go to a bar, to wade through the thick crowd, you wanted to know if they were coming back, and if so, when.  They would always give a time that was off by several minutes, but they always came back.  He gave you no time at all.  A battery for your clock, but no time at all.

            You talked to one of his friends earlier, and she said that boy speaks so highly of you, he has nothing but good things to say about you, you make him happy.  At the time this made you feel a little bit better, because at least he spoke of you, at least you make him happy, as he makes you.  But now, that boy just walked out your door.  You can’t speak.  Why are you crying?  What are you crying about? 

I don’t speak, but words run through my head.  There are many words that could be spoken for the purpose of inflicting pain; accusations, dismissal of emotions, I am well-equipped with an icy tongue.  I use that tongue the next day, when he sends me a patronizing email asking me not to be sad, and saying that he needs this to be happy.  I feel cheated out of the final burn, so much venom backed up it’s poisoning my body, and I feel the need to make up for lost time.  I am sober.

And the other things I think to say are even worse than that, they are the words of the child left in the crowd who wants to know why they were left like that, what they did, how they can fix it, doesn’t anyone want them, doesn’t anyone love them?  And another voice that I am not very in touch with right now but might be in the future just wants to lean into him and whisper, “It was so good to love you. It was so good.”   

            He is wrong right now, he is wrong about you wanting to possess him. But if enough time had passed, he would have been right.  Eventually you would want more from him, more than you’ve wanted from anyone in a long time.  You enjoy being in open relationships and loving people, but you want someone to love you better than anyone else, you want to have expectations of someone. You want something more than a series of journal entries that repeatedly ask the question “why?” something that doesn’t lead to questions about the difference between love and being in-love, because it just doesn’t matter.    That’s what you’ve always wanted.  Always.  And sometimes you wanted him more than anything, sometimes you were in the present, in the moment, and that’s where loving him is perfect.  But when you thought of the future logically you only saw disaster, and other times you thought that if anyone could ever love you forever, it would be him.  Forever?  Forever?  And you thought he was supposed to be just for you, that you had finally found someone who was just for you, who would notice you when you walked into the room, not just because of your aura, but because he was looking for you; who would get the joke and offer one of his own.  He was supposed to be for you, he was supposed to be the one who fought for you and didn’t leave, who always saw a reason to stay and stay and stay...he was supposed to be for you.  But he left before he knew you, before you truly knew him.  He left while something was still cooking and neither one of you had more than a taste. 

            He accused you of being detached, but he wouldn’t let you attach to him. 

            I am sober.  He is not.

            You are thinking of his motorcycle, and the back of it, and how nicely you fit there.  You are thinking of when he was crawling around on your floor pretending to be a panther, rubbing his head against your leg.  You are thinking of how he always makes animal noises at you when he tries to feed you food, and how it makes you laugh.  You are thinking of how you wrestle around with him without fearing that he will hurt you.  It wasn’t your body you had to worry about though.  You never needed to worry about the safety of your body.

The two of you are a joke that begins: two bi-polars walk into a bar.  It ends with this.

            And then I go and start it all

            By saying something stupid

            Like I love you.