The Day After I Moved Out Of My Parents Place

Ana and I went to a bar where Jimi Hendrix used to drink and drink a lot. We went in after the large man checking IDs asked me exactly how many hearts I planned on breaking tonight and I responded none. We walked in and were a foot and a mile shorter than every sophisticated, 30 something beautiful person in that bar, covered in old framed photos of Grace Kelly, Bob Marley, and some other influentials. Beautiful people sipped gin and tonics and laughed close to one another's faces as we tried to find a place to cram into in the corner so we could talk above the music. She told me how she didn't see this coming: her pseudo-boyfriend wasn't really working out and I could see her faith in that distant thing called love or a connection fading out as quick and as fleeting as the belief was. She sipped her drink through a tiny red straw as I took mouthfulls of beer and told her I wasn't sure about anything anymore because moving around made you lose your balance, and I was so sick but sure about suitcases that boxes made me scared and boy there sure were a lot of them in my apartment currently. She finished her drink quickly and told me she had to get home. I didn't finish my beer, but still put on my coat and told her, maybe I'd catch her next weekend. I walked past the fabulous people smoking cigarettes and walked the longer way back to my apartment because the weather was warm for April.
I called her once I got back to my place and asked if she was alright. She cried on the phone and said she wasn’t sure she could do it. Do what, I asked. Do anything anymore, when will I ever find someone else I can be with, you know, just be with? The universe is a bitch and she think she owes not a person anything and that’s how lots of intelligent people end up dying alone. I let her pause. Well we all die alone, Ana, I said. Not loveable people she sobbed. You’re a loveable person, I said. I’m a loveable person too, I added. I’m fat, she whimpered.
“You’re not fat,” I said.
“Yeah huh I’m fat.”
“You are absolutely not fat. Now, listen, I know right now things--”
“Aleks can I can ask you for your advice, and please be honest because I count on you for these things.”
“Yes, Ana, go ahead, what.”
“Do you think,” she sucked snot into her throat as she finished, “I should slash his tires?”
I paused. I laughed for five minutes in-between Ana telling me to fucking shut up and say how I really felt.
“Fuck yeah I think you should slash his tires,” I said.
“Really?” she said, excited.
“No you idiot.”
“Oh.”
“You really think I feel like bailing you out of jail this weekend?”
“I already walked around his parking lot for three hours yesterday trying to find his van while he was at work but I couldn’t find it--”
“My God, you are actually legally insane. Really, you’ve lost it.”
“Fuck off.”
“Oh you fuck off.”
She sat and sniffled, trying to hold back giggling so she could sound more angry.
“Ana.”
“What.”
“You’ll be okay.”
“You weren’t okay.”
“When in twenty two years of existence have I been okay?” I laughed.
“You know what I mean.”
“I do, and you’re right, but guess who’s still breathing.”
“Not Sylvia Plath.”
“Okay I’m not even going to ask how that relates to this conversation but if you’re going to make me come over and make sure you don’t close your head in the oven and miss bailing you out for causing pancake parties on ex-boyfriend’s tires I--”
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For, I don’t know, being there or some shit,” she said.
Silence fell over the phone.
“Yeah, you know it.”
“You deal with a lot of people’s crap, especially mine.”
“Well, you know--”
“I don’t. But thanks. For loads of things.”
“It’s really no problem. You alright? I really should be going. Work tomorrow, yanno.”
“I’ll get there. And you don’t have to say it, I know you’re there if I need anything.”
“Spot on.”
“Night Aleks.”
“Night.”

This Day Got Me Thinking...

The light slid in through the train window, the trees were whipping past and my legs had fallen asleep, half stuck under Owen’s own legs. The plastic grey train seats were covering what drained liquid turned the floor sticky, and my shoes gripped the back of the seat ahead of me so that I might steady myself against Owen’s sleepy weight. 8:30 AM and we both found ourselves traveling from his house in Camden to New York City so I could work and he could wander into bike shops. I remember my right hand wound up in his hair, his left hand tucked into mine, softly rubbing my thumb. I had asked if he wanted to listen to INDK or Oi Scouts and he batted at my hand instead telling me he’d rather just talk. I told him I’d rather not work. I looked out the window and saw two boys running the same direction of the train, waving sticks and plastic swords in the air, stains running down their shirts, their lips open wildly in impressive smiles.

“I think it would be really nice to try to help people,” I said.
I felt his body shift as he swallowed his spit and answer with a soft, “hm?”
“Help people. You know,” I said.
He cleared his throat and scratched his nose. The little boys waved to the train as they failed to catch up to the bulleting wheels.

“Yeah, no I got you. It would be nice. Lot of people want to do that though. Think you could really get anywhere with it?” he said.
“What do you mean get anywhere with it?”
“Nothing. I‘m sure you‘d figure it out.”

I pushed the hair out my face and my foot started to tap the floor at increasing speed, and to Owen’s discomfort.

“Did I say something wrong?” he said.
I looked out the window and said nothing.
“Ah, what, Aleks come on. You know what I mean. I guess I just never thought that was really your thing.”
“My thing? Yep. You’re right.” My eyes wandered and tried their best to concentrate on the clouds outside. I took a quick breath.
“I don’t think that’s exactly fair to say. Just because you want to do firefighting doesn’t mean I don’t have my own ways to like, contribute or--”
“I didn’t mean--”
“You did. But you did mean that. You mean to take me as a selfish person. It’s fine,” I moved my arm out from behind his head and adjusted myself closer to the window, away from his legs, “I just don’t understand why someone as open and honest and helpful and kind like you would ever want to be with a self-concerned, self-involving and ill-intented person like myself; is all I’m saying.”
“Jesus Christ Aleks I’m--”
“No, no. Really it’s just fine.”
Next stop is Maplewood, next stop, Maplewood. Please remember to use the cars with the stairs that lead to the platform; we will I repeat, we will not wait for you if you are in the incorrect car. Maplewood next.

The silence lasted the rest of the train ride. The silence on the subject lasted the last year of our relationship.

Gone.

With your headlamp on your forehead, you smiled, that day, that summer.

"Maybe I'll get to go to Iceland this year. Or Prague, or Africa."

You smiled at the sky, and even then, months ago, you were already gone.

The Story

It was a one summer back that I dug my fingers into the thick blades of grass in your backyard, when that rabbit hopped by. The rabbit that I always told you wasn’t wild. His ears were too long, and his comfort around people was too strong for any sort of natural tendencies. You rolled on your back, adorned with your headlamp and raincoat for no reason and claimed that you were ready for jungle exploration. I looked at the grass and asked you why domestic rabbits weren’t enough, do you really have to go to a jungle, but you laughed instead of answering. A summer. It was a summer ago when I had no job, and you had too many, so that when I came to visit, I would spend hours out on your back lawn, reading books until I fell asleep on the warm concrete, or waiting around on your living room with the thick carpet in-between my toes.
Your house. We were in love, back then, in your house. I never told you, but in the beginning, your house scared the shit out of me. I watched it from the corner of my eye. Filled with family photographs and other normal things like sewing rooms and toys from when you were six. Boxes of car magazines and assurance that one day you would amount to something.

Sometime after we began snapping photographs on the boardwalk of southern New Jersey, I started to love your house. The way your mother’s rocking chair still swung minutes after she got up to cook dinner. The way the house’s floors muffled the sound of a hard walker’s feet. Your room was where I felt I fit into one of the only niches I could find in your life. In the room where the grey walls showed off photographs of bikers, trucks, trains speeding to this country or that. Boxes upon boxes piled up to the sides of your bed, filled with vintage tinker toys; that particular box of old keys you kept on your bedside dresser. Right over the drawer you used to keep our scrapbook, my letters, and my picture inside of. To the right of the corkboard you kept magazine cutouts and photographs of family and friends.I never made it to your cork board. Your clothes spewed forth from your closet that was never cleaned, and your bureau vomited t-shirts and dirty shorts from hiking trips. Bike chains and gear parts covered the floor, tripping me every time I walked in the room.

In that room, one night, you pulled out your box of keys and I asked you to tell me which one would be the key to your heart, if it existed. You pulled out the smallest, most ornate one. This one, you said. I put it on the chain around my neck. You liked the idea of keys and locks representing cold, hard feelings, and you had always wanted to close two locks around one another, to show the rest of the town we were in love, closed and set. We used padlocks, but combinations for its release were always there. “You attach it to the side of a bridge”, you would tell me, and then we’d be “just as romantic and hopeful as young couples are in Florence”, where that mass of locks, all huddled around and among one another, keep people holding hands forever.

It was ironic, I told you that summer, that we had both visited Florence, with different people, different years, before we knew each other. But I wanted a way to show off our feelings in a less iron way, in a more organic way. We both decided we should be vintage and carve our initials into tree trunks, but you wanted to on our college campus and I thought that juvenile. I wanted to carve hearts all over Keene Valley, but you feared for the opinion of others. Hikers crave unmarked trails, you would tell me, so in a huff I let it be. Now, our initials exist only on a bridge in Connecticut somewhere. It seemed as if we could only do things on the run. Even serious conversations were held on the sides of roads, our stomping grounds for things amiss. Blinking caution lights reflecting tearful conversations, and serious misunderstandings.

One especially hot day, that summer, we peeled our bodies from the dirty seats of your unwashed Jeep and sprawled across old towels on Wildwood’s beach. The boardwalk attracted few people that day and the water even fewer. The sun gently warmed my shoulders, made you wipe the sweat from your eyebrows and made the seaweed sweetly stink. The water was still that day: even the surfers noticed. I pushed my hands into the sand and inspected every grain that stuck under my fingernails. You played with a shell between your palms and without looking at me told me I was everything you wanted in a lady. I smiled, and pushed my hair aside. How so, I wondered. You just are, no reason really. I laughed and said I was glad he thought so. I will always remember how that made me feel: wanted. I was wanted by you, I was enough for you, and in turn, that was enough for me.

Phonecall?

I finally take the time out of my day to write to read, and what do I get? My phone vibrating with the words "DON'T ANSWER. NO REALLY." flashing up on the screen. I felt a rush of hot horror flash through my body starting somewhere in my skull and landing in my toes, taking all my strength with it into the bottoms of my shoes. I was convinced for a second I peed myself. Luckily, the phone just kept flashing until the call went to voicemail and no emergency bathroom breaks were needed. But hold on, let's be serious: the hell does he want? Really? Calling at two in the afternoon? What could possibly have happened at two in the afternoon that he would feel the need to call me? If it was at night that would be one thing. Then at least he could have been drunk and needed to tell me sorry he called, he can't remember why he called in the first place, and was I doing okay? At least then he would have had to call the following day and apologize for the annoyance. But unless he took up a hardcore drinking problem, it's still 2PM and it is still too early to get saucy off a single beer like he normally sips. Maybe someone kicked the bucket; did someone important die? I checked BBC, CNN and Google, but no one of any importance. Tom Waits and Mick Jagger are still alive and kicking. Did he forget a sweatshirt at my house? Did the new girl make him cry? Did I leave more CDs than I had thought in his truck's glovebox? I'm pretty sure I cleared them all out but there are still quite a few empty pockets in my CD case. Maybe he missed being able to tell me how work was or how his Dad never stopped bothering him about getting a real job and medical insurance. He left a voicemail; I had to go through 5 unchecked messages from my mother until I got to the one he left and: it was the sound of him hanging up.

Caffeine

The door to McNulty's Teas and Coffees opened. The distinct smell of mold, musty tea, and coffee beans hit the mix of fresh air flowing in from behind me. I looked around at the boxes and boxes of teas and large glass containers with labels reading LAPSONG OOLONG and GREEN GUNPOWDER in old typeset. Diced, dried fruit in a large glass canister, and saw the strange reflection in red of a tea box behind it. Minutes passed. Lots of minutes as I stared at that glass with its colour. The strange manipulation of the light and the colour made me realize how much love made me miss out.

Because

I'm still in love with you.


Harvest Moon by Cassandra Wilson

Come a little bit closer
Hear what I have to say
Just like children sleepin
We could dream this night away.

But theres a full moon risin
Lets go dancin in the light
We know where the musics playin
Lets go out and feel the night.

Because Im still in love with you
I want to see you dance again
Because Im still in love with you
On this harvest moon.

When we were strangers
I watched you from afar
When we were lovers
I loved you with all my heart.

But now its gettin late
And the moon is climbin high
I want to celebrate
See it shinin in your eye.

Because Im still in love with you
I want to see you dance again
Because Im still in love with you
On this harvest moon.