I press my forehead to hers and don’t say I love you. The scent of grape bubblegum lingers in the threads of her cotton summer dress. For a minute I’m five again and I don’t know anything, joy and pain are base and unaccounted for. I sense her skin is warm and smooth, but my nerves are inverted, all my efforts scrape against bone. The more I press the less I feel, every sensation dissolves in the search. Soon my flesh will melt entirely, I’ll be stood naked in garrulous detail, and she won’t say I love you too.
Standing there, back to the wall, drawing slowly on a cigarette, watching her laugh. Watching her, sat there with that stranger. Nicotine and cut grass molecules intertwine like entropic time. The stranger leaning easily against her, arm around frame, around dame. Dropping cigarette on concrete, pressing boot into cherry, approaching the bench. Recognition paints a colour, she smiles to introduce a stranger. ‘I’m Jack,’ he’s saying. Shaking hands with continuities trembling. Forgetting what was and knowing what’s next. ‘Old friends,’ she’s saying, writing new histories, drawing shares in the same empty frame. Walking away, everything confusing comes into relief.
I’ve been repeating myself a lot lately, which I guess is better than repeating others, but still, it feels like I’m stuck in a spiral, a vortex not a closed loop, spinning round and round and revisiting myself at moments of minor variation. It’s mildly maddening, like missing your subway stop for malfunctioning doors. I wanna get off, but then it feels like I’ve tried that already. Maybe I should stick it out, things could get better. I think they get better. Have I tried that? I don’t know, it feels like I’ve been repeating myself a lot lately.
I haven’t felt too great lately, so it’s been a while since I thought about suicide. It always comes alive like a safety mechanism locking into place, you know, like how surge protectors work. I put it in play to kill vanity, but it bores me now. I’d like to blame Franny and Zooey, but if I started targeting my influences I’d simply be left in different shreds with nothing to enjoy. Usually I try to focus on not focusing on it, but even wallpaper can drive you mad over time. I only want to enjoy my misery more.
Hunched over the kitchen bench between a ream of baker’s paper and a pile of bush-grown reefer, the hair-wand in hand, Caleb looks lifestyle channel manic. His apartment is furnished in the same vein, modern minimalist meets mad scientist, patches of projects in nebulous progress and experimental discard everywhere, each an indication of interests sought at the time, abandoned as soon as their knowledge was won. Since Caleb keeps his head shaved as part of his ascetic aesthetic, things should have made sense as soon as I saw the straightener. ‘We’re trying dabs now,’ he tells me.
Four showers today and still so unclean, it’s not a smell but a state of being, a spectral odour on the spectrum between rotting meat and regret, secreted by my oblongata and sent to my senses, the stench of it lodged in the cavity of my humanity. I think about taking out the brain with pharmaceutical strikes, but that strategy already made me my own casualty. Better to scrub, rescrub and scour, become some skinless heroic villainess. Yet here’s a spot, again and again; and here’s the smell of blood still. Maybe I’ll bathe, soak and submerge my sins.
I dated Carla for a year after the abortion as a way to punish myself. She had no idea how much I was grieving or why, but she could see my pain and poured it over herself hoping to help. My agency dried up as she assumed responsibility, my expression along with it. I became a puppet husk and floated without purpose on the ebbs of her compassion. I couldn’t bring myself to explanation, to a declaration of desensitisation. I could never say I’ll never love you. I broke three hearts for stopping one but couldn’t hurt myself enough.
I tried kissing her, gently at first then slightly harder. Her mouth was there in all the right ways but distinctly empty. I pulled away, the taste of ash and resentment on my tongue. She looked at me with lethargic stability but I couldn’t keep it up, I moved my eyes away hoping to keep my soul to myself. Don’t you want this, I asked. Her voice was a pressed reed, pleas written on papyrus in a since lost language. We’ve become meaningless to each other, dead script. I close my eyes and wonder if she’s thinking about him.
Being absolutely floored. Summer storms, warm southerlies and soda. The strip of stomach showing between denim and cotton. Little topographic ranges that presage a hip-line, the slight dip at the equatorial belt and the geometry of promise. Lickable surfaces. Swift kindnesses, irrepressible joys, little innocences in everything. Silent understanding, comedic relief, taut volumes and enlightening speech. Socks in a tumble dry, hair fall and lost ties, interpersonal litter. Evaporated salt, waning scars, tussled sheets. Coy smiles, casual affection. Cliff faces and blind leaps. Naivety without ignorance. More time than can be held and memories that fail to fade.
Mikey’s mentality resides somewhere slightly adjacent to the rest of us, entering into his awareness can be difficult. I told him, I don’t believe in monogamy anymore. ‘Oak is nice,’ he said, ‘or pine.’ I’ve learnt not to pick my battles, to just engage and let him extract what he needs. So, I gently outlined my love for him and lust for others, my need to stay but stray. ‘And me,’ he said eventually, ‘what should I do?’ Whatever you like, I said, as long as you love me. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I think I’ll just keep being myself.’
I tell her, when you look at me I feel more attractive than I really am. ‘That’s stupid,’ she says. ‘You’re exactly as attractive as you are.’ Arris feels subjectivity objectively, I sometimes watch her pulling the world in around us and straightening it out as though it were an untucked sheet or petty knot. I ask her how attractive I should feel. ‘More than most and less than some,’ she says. ‘But it’s fucking arbitrary, you’re just you and that’s as wonderful as it needs to be.’ Well, you’re amazing, I tell her, and she nods. ‘I know.’
Every time we fuck I feel like I should mark it on a calendar. Will this be the last time? Does she mark the passing like I do, with cravings and despair? So rare now that I get to look let alone touch. I once thrived on those moments, the little glimpses, fleet contact, flashes of flesh. Such small tendernesses sustained me for so long. I don’t know how to dine with any other, how to accomodate new etiquettes and tastes, how to satisfy strange urges, but I’m so famished now and life goes by too quick to fast.
Dana lifted up her skirt so that Laura could take a look at her new tattoo, then she made eye contact with me and hiked it up again so I could see her panties. ‘The fine details are gorgeous,’ Laura said. Dana, still forcing my eye, smirked and shifted in her seat. ‘It’s tight huh, and there was very little blood.’ The world felt weak, rubbery and stifling, a capriciously skinned balloon caught in an easterly wind. Dana broke her lock, remarried skirt to knee, and returned herself to Laura. ‘You know, I’m actually starting to enjoy the pain.’
I’d given her so many pet names over the years and she’d always abided. Honey lamb, sweetie, pudding-pop, baby, sugarplum, kitten. My lover, my partner, my friend, in the end they were only labels, poorly indicative descriptors for their innards, simply something to write out and slap over minor misconceptions we both agreed on. Needing to know now what we couldn’t, we spent years assigning designations and designing abstractions, showing our friends and easing our fears. Together we made a maze of nomenclature and died inside its nadir. The last name I ever gave her was her own.
Every evening I slit my wrist and pull out the little failures. I am a party magician and their spool is never ending, it is the realest illusion in my life. They stream from me in ribbons of degraded earthen shades, bled terracotta soldier, and I use them to bind my unhappiness. Abraded clots in braided knots, woven tightly to the psyche. I keep my eyes open and try to see it all unfurl. When I fall asleep, I hold the knife to my throat and tell myself this will be the last time, I won’t be tricked again.
A Few Short Words 