“In my dream I was pinned to a glass wall by a sheet of rain.  If I moved, I would be drenched.  I couldn’t even move my head to look down at the tiny part of the concrete I was standing on that was dry.  I could see thirty feet away a safe place, but if I went for it I would be soaked before I got there.”

Her arms were crossed and she leaned forward on the counter and looked out the rain-speckled window.  We sat in blue chairs with high metal legs that made our feet dangle.  I could tell I didn’t know her by the coarseness of her taut cheeks, a message that she had welled something up long ago and never told me.

“I don’t think people desire anything,” she said.

“That’s a ridiculous thing to say.”

“I wonder if these streets go anywhere.  If I could drive somewhere on them and feel like I were somewhere else entirely.”

“I miss your voice in my head,” I reflected.

“I’m not God.”

“No one is,” I shrugged.

The door jingled as people walked in and out and my belief in a connection with her would snap as I craned my head to see who it was.  I felt hated by people who saw me. 

“The correct answer to ‘do you love me?’ is always No.” 

“I know.”

Cars drove through puddles and people in hoodies looked down as they were doused by the grey sky above them.  All cursed in their minds and did not know that the rain had nothing to do with it.  We sat there for awhile until we grew uncomfortable with the amount of truth we realized in each other’s presence.  I may have pretended to text, or she went to the bathroom, but pretty soon things were back to normal.

A friend walked down a path
From a gravestone yonder the hill
I thought nothing of the fact
And continued eating my fill

But your eyes were ready to break
And I knew you were hurting inside
I was ready to comfort your ache
But then I knew it was we who had died

I always wished we could pretend
That we ourselves didn’t exist
For then we’d only see them
And the good of their happiness 

You continued to walk right past me
And though my heart filled with lead
I decided to kneel to kiss your feet
And be loyal to your turning head

I woke from my bed to find you. Through the window panes a lazy streetlight filtered in from the neighborhood where cars sat on driveways like sunken ships. I flew down the stairs past windows out which there was nothing I wanted to see. Trees I have decided create meaningless mysteries; a treasure buried deep in the woods, covered by leaves and bushes, is a mere trifle compared with the ghosts that woke me. As I grabbed the knob at the bottom of the stairs I recalled those deep summer nights we would play flashlight tag behind Bobby’s and Samantha’s and Tristan’s houses; the swing set was home base and we each wanted to win so badly we all ended up home late.  We would be grounded, but we would make the same decision the next time to stay out late as our hearts pounded from our hiding spots. One time Anna got mad that people wouldn’t stop when she froze them and she threw the heavy duty flashlight against the house and it cracked the paneling. We’ve grown older and we don’t know the kids in the neighborhood anymore, but the crack is still there, but no one who sees it knows why.

I’ve never been so nervous about time, about what it means for our ticking hearts; I shy away from mirrors at all costs. I stiffen like a cadaver at the thought of reflecting reality, of seeing what all this looks like from our future hearts, when we’ll get that feeling you have as you smoke a cigarette on a porch the morning after a heavy downpour.

Sophomore year of college I went to a party at a ramshackle house with ‘caution hot!’ stickers plastered all over the chipping wood on the porch.  Dark splotches covered the sooty carpet inside where the smell of sour alcohol and cigarette smoke mixed and mingled. I found myself by a fellow named Scott with a blue sweater and spiked hair. I told him Green Day was a terrible band and he said ‘Fuck that’. A girl in a leather jacket with straight blond hair smoked a cigarette with her legs crossed as she leaned against the doorframe. I told him that I only spoke for myself, and he said I shouldn’t speak at all, ever. I decided to move on from the situation and found the deck where people laughed at stories of misfortune and stealing from gas stations and cars swerving late at night in West Virginia and I found myself laughing too. As I left through the house I saw Scott making out with the blond on a ratty couch and I stopped and looked from the front door for a moment before leaving.

I learned that night to laugh and agree at parties, that the crowd is truth and that I am nothing. When I met you again I had forgotten any versions of myself that were not a product I could sell for mass consumption. You had a horrible knack of making me remember things I liked about myself, and the deep myth of vagueness and flexibility I had used to associate myself with any and everything became meaningless and unusable. It is a horrible thing to learn how badly you are bleeding.

The future was gilded to our parents but walking through these night-clothed streets I can see the rust on all this 20th century alchemy. All these houses are like Anna’s broken panel; born of a past emotion in someone else’s lives, an emotion I know nothing about. Our parents just make sure there’s a mailbox to mail their kids away at the end of it all. We wrote ‘return to sender’ on our own hearts because we forgot it was they who mailed us, and now I am walking along these streets in clothes they bought for me, clothes that hopefully would make me happy enough to not come back.

The lamppost by the park table and trash can is where you said to meet.  We sat there as kids and you would run into the forest. We’d hide in the crater and no one ever found us because no one was looking. In that life your soft hair meant more, just to look at; it’s only when you’re older and you have had thoughts you can’t take away that physical things lose their beauty.  Add words and all the colors fade.  I never understood why you didn’t say anything as we sat there. Someday, I told myself, we would talk and talk and talk and we would find out everything that people have ever learned, those quick emotions that make up all of life. I always imagined it would be sitting on a roof, on top of the world of products, the same place you would teach me to live sophomore year of college.

Scott disliked me but it was I who deep in my heart thought that he was right. I have never moongazed with anyone else and I like it that way. I know it’s something someone could take from me with the quickest dismissive line.  There is a storehouse of private pleasures I have locked up to not be touched or shared by others. In the chasm between that storehouse and the me that’s a product is where I live, a man hanging desperately on to boats sailing furiously in opposite directions.

I stopped in the middle of Harlon Avenue and looked down at how empty it was in both directions. Where do these streets go to? I have driven them a thousand times and never gotten anywhere. Now I can’t see anything; I lost my grip and both ships have sailed beyond their respective horizons. It’s just me left over, but everything I had – jokes, memories, loves – were on those ships. So who was standing there on Harlon Avenue? 

I nearly tripped over my jeans as I stumbled away from the thought in search of you, the one whom my dreams were too restless to not wake up to find.  I was horribly, rippingly hungry, but the trees hid nothing I wanted. I ruined my shoes on the grass and squinted my eyes to try to see through the dark to the park bench. I was coming home, landing in the one spot that’s always been there for me to go to. It was moist in the air and my head was drizzled like gravy over the dirt scuffing on my shoes. ‘Where are you?’ I was almost there.

There they were: the park bench, the trash can, the lamppost. But you were not there. An hour of dark and directionless thoughts later I felt again how bitter I was that you said you didn’t care for modern music. You said the songs are all fake because the singer says ‘you’, a symbol that presupposes a direct intimacy with another person, an intimacy of meaning and feeling that does not truly exist. In this intoxication of resentment I realized that you are someone I have never known. Like my parents I imagined a meaning for you that kept me going, that led me all the way to this park bench eleven years later to try to find some rest. And then I remembered that you were always here at the lamppost first, that I always found you here and that it wasn’t for me that you had come. Now, just like then, it is just me and my imagination. There is no one I am even writing about; there is only me here. You, or the thought of you, led me to this horrible center of myself, this place where I realized all the people in my head were thin as ghosts. I supposed that meant it was up to me to find out if there was something likeable about myself. But I got lost in my head again and I thought of you when you were little running into the forest, and how I ran after you, and I began to cry.

I am going to write because I don’t know what else to do.

We live in a culture of entertainment – movies, video games, Netflix.  It is very easy to overdo.  So what are the good reasons to let ourselves be entertained?

1. Empathy.

When you watch a movie you are not only entertained, you are forced to think about someone else’s experience.  Through movies we better understand war, drug trafficking, the other gender’s perspective on romance, etc.

2. To spend time with others.

Playing video games for guys can be an unhealthy fantasy-based addiction, or a way of doing relationship. 

3. To use for analogies.

Having a common culture with strangers is a good thing.  It helps you get to know them if there is something you have both already been a part of.  And the idea of using analogies also means that your mental terrain was expanded, that you became capable of more expression by the entertainment you imbibed.

4. Recovery.

Sometimes we can simply be up to no greater task.

 

Each of these reasons has its limits, but they each have something to say as well.  And now we can think in the case that none of these reasons really seem to apply, maybe there is something else I should be doing with my time.

Have you ever been urgently calling someone only to have the electronic woman that is their stock voicemail start talking to you in her slow, easygoing drawl?

You have reached the voice mailbox of …

(I know this is a voice mailbox. I know who I called. Please let it be a name, the numbers take forever.)

6……

(NOOOO!!!!!)                

1…….4…..

(Oh my gosh. The pauses. The pauses between the numbers. I could take naps between them.)

9……..6………1……..

(The number will end. There’s an end to the number. I know it.)

6………4………7……..

(Almost there! Last number! C’mon robot lady!)

………………………………………………………………..

(AHHHHHHHHHHHH! Let’s goooooooooo!)

…………8.

The wireless customer you are trying to reach is unavailable.

(I know!! Or did they turn into a deaf humorless e-woman with no sense of urgency??)

To leave a numeric page, press 2.

(What’s a numeric page??? I just want to leave a message!! LET’S GOOOO!!)

To leave a callback number, press 5.

(Let’s be real. This is the 21st century, I’m sure they have caller-ID.)

To leave a message press 1, or just wait for the tone.

(OK, the tone is about to happen. I’ll just wait for the tone.)

……………….

(AHHHHHH WHERE’S THE TONE????)

………………

(AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!)

Please leave your message after the tone.

(ARE YOU KIDDING ME??????)

When you are done recording, you can hang up, or press pound for more options.

(Is one of the options ASKING FOR THIS NOVEL TO BE SHORTER NEXT TIME???)

…….

Beep.

“Hey, bro. It’s Phil. Just wanted to see if you wanted to hang. Call me back, son. Lata.”