October 21, 2012

• A different you (story)

  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.

  • 4:20 am
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