The Consequence of Desire-1st

<center>The Consequence of Desire</center>

He awakes from his nap warm and damp. He is laying naked on the bed, flat on his back, staring emptily at the weak afternoon shadows carved into the ceiling by the dilute sun. His hair is loose and wet, the curls unwound from the moisture. His head itself is crowned in a wild halo of sweat that arcs dark and blue across his pillowcase. He lays on his back in the heat thinking nothing. Sweating and breathing into the evening.

He breathes deeply and exhales quickly, sits up rigid and straight. He swings his legs over the edge of the bed and bends them at the knees, placing them carefully, firmly on the floor. He stands, his slight body cutting bluntly through the air. The edges of his shoulders feel thick in the heat. The air pushes heavily around him, then ripples and settles as he walks to the bathroom. Stepping carefully over the pieces of his discarded clothing he goes into the bathroom and turns on the shower.

The hot water hits the bottom of the tub with a flat smack and proceeds to hiss and jabber as water will. He turns his back on the water and faces the mirror looking at himself from the waist up, from the place where the dirty counter cuts him in half. He looks himself over with eyes like patient fingers. He is examining himself, searching for something invisible or intangible. Naked and needing, he thinks about honesty in the bathroom. It is a place where we see ourselves most starkly. Where we cannot escape honest observation. Where we see our flaws and seek heal or hide them. It is the place where we are naked, inside and out. Exteriors exposed by unkind light to uneager eyes. Interiors revealed by creams and pills. Where we exhale and breathe again. The place of truth in the house. Ugly and honest. He sighs, heavy in his lungs. Perhaps not. Perhaps the toilet is just a place to shit, and the sink is just a place to spit.

Eyes dropping unsatisfied, he turns the handle of the faucet, and lets the water’s temperature rise. He applies the hot water from the sink to his face, softening the stubble. He shakes the bottle of shaving cream and curls the foam into his hand, smearing it on his face. Behind him, the hissing liquid quickens and becomes steam, filling the room with a vibrant heat that makes him sweat acutely. It shoulders the torpid heat of the afternoon out, pushing it quietly past the door and it’s ill fitting frame. The lazy afternoon warmth and its accompanying lethargy presses out of him in the tight heat of the steam, rolling down his forehead across the planes of his face, cutting messy incomplete lines into the smooth field the shaving cream makes.

He starts to shave. Carefully cutting the cream and the hair. With his left hand on the right side of his face he begins. Under his sideburn, down his face onto his neck continuing in a long straight line. Completing this he rinses the razor under the running hot water, and travels the same line back up again, pulling the razor in the opposite direction. He continues in this pattern across his face and neck, shaving slowly around his lips and the small cleft in his chin. He comes to the left side of his face, moving in the same manner as before: down then up. Coming back up his face, just past his mouth, the blade catches and cuts. He ignores the wound and finishes shaving. When he is done he splashes his face with both hands. His cut runs with blood and water.

He turns, clean shaven and damp with sweat, to the shower, pushing through the steam that hangs in the air. In the shower he lets the water pour over his body, pounding into his chest and rolling down his stomach, tracing lines across his buttocks and thighs, running off and twisting into the drain. He enjoys the sensation. In some ways the sensation of sensation, merely the act of feeling is a release from the monotony of the of the heat, whose constant stifling presence had become like a numbness. He holds his hands against the water, trying to capture it there like moonlight or a dream, a fruitless habit he had practiced since he was a child who had first begun taking showers. Catching at the water that had sprayed into his eyes, dreaming he could catch it between his fists, tiny hands unable to hold it there.

He unbuckles his hands, and he moves smoothly through the ablutions, washing the loose curls of his hair and rinsing, eyes closed, head turned toward the light. He gropes for the soap, eyes still closed, and lathers himself carefully, the tips of his fingers around the soap feeling each edge of his body. The smooth topography that they create moving together under the surface of his skin. Each edge adjoining, causing valleys and hills as his arms flex and turn. The ridges of his bones beneath the blunt points of his fingers. Sliding along his ribcage, imagining the sound of each impact, ribs ringing like chimes. Feeling the roll of his shoulders, the break of his elbow, the lump of his belly, the curve of his buttock, the hard line of this thighs, the hollow of his knee, the dip of his ankle, and the crook of his toes. Each of these pieces feeling his fingers in return.

He finishes with the soap and finds the washcloth with blind fingers, eyes closed now to the soap. He wipes his body clean and shutting off the water he steps out of the shower dripping onto the white bathmat. He reaches for the thin white towel dangling limply from the silver bar hung horizontally, a silver incision in the white skin of the wall. He dries himself as much as possible in the heat leaking slowly from the room through the unmet edges of the misshapen door. He pushes it open and steps back into the bedroom.

The room is cool in comparison to the steamy bathroom, though the temperature has not changed, only the shadows have shifted. Dry and hot, heat pressing in on him like the fleshy palm of a soft but insistent hand, he stares at himself again in the full length mirror centered on the wall opposite the window. He examines again what he sees. He sees his body: pale, yellow in the dead light of afternoon. Darker where his skin pulls and puckers into two round brown nipples. He sees the tight black hair that covers them, the same hair that rises from the center of his chest and trails to his crotch, where the hair widens and flows across his legs. His penis dangles loosely in the heat, a pale reminder of flesh in the midst of the black hair. A sad soft comma of sex. He looks at his arms and legs. Appendages with no distinctive marks. His hands with their small fingers and their carefully trimmed nails. His feet slightly splayed, the geometry of dark skin cut into squares by the white stripes his sandals create. He looks at his face. A small, almost delicate mouth. Gentle ears nearly lost beneath the mat of unruly black hair, a smooth brow similarly hidden. Large brown eyes with neat eyebrows. Clear eyes. Not deep, but insistent. Bright but slow. Patient. Caught constantly on things that on one else ever sees, making it difficult to tell the dreamer from the prophet.

In the mirror his body begins to change. The pale yellow skin cuts and curls into oblong sections. His hair darkens, and lengthens, it’s curls becoming hard sharp points. The skin continues to curl, so that the blood beneath runs out and pools into the cups that the pieces of skin have become. The blood soaks quickly into the skin, staining it a deep red. The petals of his skin collect slowly, surrounding his navel, tightening into a fist of petals. A single coherent blossom. His hair from his head to his navel stiffens and straightens into the long sharp stem of a hanging rose. He watches it hang there for a moment, then watches it shudder and die. Each of the petals curls and browns, then drifts slowly to the ground. The desiccated fragments fall slowly, their brittle edges rocking sharply in the heat like row boats in the wind. He, invisible, watches the petals pile on the pale beige of the carpet. The image fades and only he remains in the mirror’s single silver eye. He exhales slowly, having just discovered breathing.

Moving the mirror to his bureau he dresses slowly in the heat. He selects and wears each piece with care. He pulls his socks to the calf tightly, the black line contrasting sharply with his yellow skin. He buttons each button of his shirt carefully and tucks it in. It is purple. He pulls on a dark blue sweater vest, despite the heat, and adjusts the collar of his shirt until it is symmetrical and straight. He slides black trousers on and threads his belt carefully through each loop, then cinches it securely. He picks out quiet shoes and ties them well. Taking one last look in the mirror, he picks up the pale green envelope from the dresser and leaves the room, shutting the door quietly behind him.

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Outside it is unsurprisingly hot. He walks from the three story apartment building, glazed white by the reflected light. The light that had been so stunted in his apartment catches the dirty stucco skin of the building and reflects in a hot white sheet onto the street. He walks around behind the building to the parking lot. His car sits shaded from the sun by the tree that hangs over it. He is dismayed by the spots the tree leaves across the thin green skin of the car. He slides himself inside and sets the card down on the seat next to him. It is hot despite the round black shadow of the tree slanted sideways across windows. The heat inside is nothing like the steam from the shower. It has an edge to it that the steam lacked. The steam, water come heat, closed over him comfortably. A thin second skin. The heat in the car is hard flat and sharp. It pushed him back as he opened the door and attacked him with angles as soon as he sat. He begins to sweat. It is like pins pushing through his skin.

He sits in the heat, sweating, and holds his vision in mind. He watches the petals form and fall away. Watches the stem grow and fade. He does not understand it. He does not ever understand much of what he sees. The trouble with vision is inaccuracy. It reflects itself in cards and crystal balls. Makes them look cheap. Hoaxy. The difficult thing about the future is that nothing is solid. It is liquid, sliding and rolling through fingers that try and clench tightly around it. We think of the future as we think of the past; set solid and defined. We plan it out in tiny boxes that track evenly across the blank face of the calendar, as if time were divided as we like. As though it were not a single piece of fabric divided arbitrarily by phases of light and dark. We plan out our future as though it were the past, laying out a fragile grid, some conceptual cage to keep time trapped. But the two are not reflections of each other. Instead the future is a distorted reflection of the past, warping as we press against the mirror, changing the hard reflection that catches in the camera.

He thinks of the rose undoing itself in his apartment. He thinks of the heat and the inevitable separation. It all rolls in his head, and he begins to understand the difference between puppets and people. The pieces of him that caught in her eyes. The ones that shone when she smiled. He understands the incomplete pictures that we keep of each other, the flat surface of perception, and the incomplete measure of a touch. He understands suddenly the consequence of desire.

His body moves the car blindly through the narrow knot of asphalt that serves the apartment parking lot. He is not paying attention. Instead he is focused on the narrow almost pleasant vibration in the front of his skull. It isn’t physical, but a psychic sort of humming. A sweet cream fog, that melts, and rolls into his eyes. He sits staring idly into the distance, seeing through the sky, neither thoughtful nor attentive. He is lost, halfway behind the moment that rolls smoothly around the car.

He maneuvers into the street where he folds himself into traffic. At four o’clock on a Saturday there are enough cars on the street to make things slow. He pays no attention to the world around him, now changing into darker clothes as the sun slips itself into the horizon. The apartment buildings and the convenience stores and self storage units and parking lots and the strip malls and the restaurants and the auto repair shops and the lingerie windows all pass unseen, rising and falling like stop motion lungs. He is blind to the passage of the city. Though it cannot be rightly called a city. It exists uneasily between the city and the suburbs. An unchecked borderland of stucco, neon, and asphalt. Checks cashed, food served, tires rotated and replaced. All the silent voices of commerce whisper at him from behind the sidewalks. All slide past unnoticed, more static behind the muted harmony humming in his head.

He doesn’t have far to go. She is waiting, but he is not in a hurry. It is only dinner. Something done a hundred times over. She will cook and he will clean. It is not because they believe these are the roles they should play, rather they play these roles because they are the easiest. The most pleasant. He has cooked for her before, but they have both agreed that it is better the way that she does it. He forgets things. The sauce in the lasagna. The dressing for the salad. The cake in the oven. He has tried to learn, but there is something in the twist of her wrist the he cannot master. Something in the way that she moves seamlessly through the kitchen. As though the meal were a single entity to be tended to, and not a five disparate operations all with tedious details to be attended to. There is something in her timing and understanding of flavor. In the way she can make a meal from little or nothing. She loves to cook, and he does the dishes better than he could ever make a meal. She is happy in the kitchen. He is happy watching her.

He takes a left, and finds a spot on the street. On a weekday he would be lucky. Street parking is always scarce, but Saturday nights don’t count. He picks up the card from the passenger seat and exits the car, locking it as he does, walks up the sidewalk to the door, and hits pound, then the numbers three one two. It rings twice and she picks up.

‘Hello?’

‘Hey.’

‘Hey. Come up.’ The door beside him buzzes and he turns the silver knob, slick in his hand, and pulls the gate door toward him. He walks in the long thin shadows of the apartment buildings that are beginning to blend with the asphalt, looking at the bumpers of parked cars blurry because his eyes are empty and unfocused. The heat is hangs in the air.

He climbs the two flights of stairs slowly, the card in his left hand, held loosely behind him, his right hand just above his stomach, holding the sweater vest so that it does not flop against him as he walks. He feels secure with his hands this way. One pressing against his stomach, a reminder of being, a reminder of feeling. The other pressed against his leg, feeling the muscles bunch and release as he climbs, a reminder of motion. From the landing between the second and third flights of stairs he can see into her kitchen window. He watches her black hair move about the kitchen. She never stops for long, and when she does he can see her hair sway with the motion of her unseen hands. Cutting stirring mixing. Thinking of her hands, he realises the he does not know what she is making for dinner. He finishes the stairs and arrives at her door out of breath. From inside he can hear the shallow sound of music, nearly all rhythm, with a hint of melody, lyrics lost in the thickness of the door. He inhales and exhales once, deeply, and knocks.

Behind the door and the music he hears her footsteps. She is not wearing shoes. She opens the door and smiles. He smiles back at her. They hug and she kisses his cheek.

‘Happy anniversary.’ He hands her the lime green card. She takes it in both hands and holds it there delicately, thumbs over the long V that cuts down and up across the back of the envelope. Her black hair hangs down over her face so that he cannot see what she is thinking. She looks up and smiles at him.

‘Thank you.’ She leans up to kiss him, calves flexing as she rises on the balls of her bare feet. There are two small sounds, almost like kisses, as the heels of her feet unstick from the linoleum in the hall. He holds her, his arms around the small of her back. She breaks the kiss and falls backward in a mock swoon. He laughs and holds her as she hangs there, outstretched arms brushing the wall. The card slips from her right hand and falls to the carpet, catching once and sliding in the air the way a flower petal might. He watches the card fall, and he does not hear her laughing. He lifts her up, sets her straight and moves past her into the kitchen. She stoops for the card and follows him.

‘You look nice. I didn’t know you had a purple shirt.’

‘It’s not something I wear very often. It’s too…dramatic.’

‘Is it going to be a dramatic evening?’ Her eyebrow lifts and she grins.

‘Maybe it already has been.” He smiles and looks away from her, eyes inside. She is wearing a black skirt that ends a long way above her knee, and a sleeveless blue top. It is shimmery material with birds and leaves embroidered across it in gold thread. It is simple, and beautiful. ‘What are we eating this evening?’

‘Garlic chicken with vegetables, marinated all day, steamed white rice, and cheesecake for dessert.’

‘Mmmm. Can I help?’

‘Yes. You can set the table.’

‘Where Kris and Jen tonight?’

‘They’ve found things to do. I asked them if I could have the apartment tonight. They won’t be coming home, if that’s what you mean.’

‘It wasn’t, but that’s reassuring.’ He smiles. They move around the kitchen. He rummages through the silverware, producing two knives, and two forks. He pulls off two paper towels from the rack. He moves to the small square table in the dining nook, the space that serves in lieu of an actual room. A pause between the kitchen and the back of the couch. He sets two places across from one another. One against the wall and one opposite, facing the wall. He notices the candles only after he has set both places, one knife and one fork on either side of where the plates will go. There are two glass candle sticks with long unlit tapers in each.

‘Matches?’

‘What?’

‘Matches. For the candles.’

‘Not yet.’

‘Ok.’ He moves back to the kitchen, where he reaches over her for the plates from the last set of cabinets. He presses his body against hers and feels the fabric of his sweater vest slide slickly across the back of her blouse. He pulls the plates down and holds them in front of her and leans down to bite her neck. She leans her head to the side, and closes her eyes. Her hands stop stirring the chicken. Her whole body tenses and focuses on his mouth. On his folded circle of his teeth lips and his tongue. He finishes the bite with a kiss and moves away from her, setting each round white plate on the table in the space between the knife on the napkin, and unadorned fork.

In the kitchen the food is ready. She moves it from the pan on the stove, still sizzling, into a clear glass bowl, the one he admires so much when it is empty, because of the blue when he holds it in the light, where it curves and finds a bottom, becomes a bowl. There is not much food. Enough for the two of them. The chicken slides to the bottom of the bowl, and the vegetables are pushed to the top. She slides a large black plastic serving spoon between the chicken and the sauces, and sets it on the table. Leaning against the couch, arms crossed, he watches her. She scoops the rice from the silver and white cooker and puts it in another bowl, this one more decorative. A white bowl with silver lines cutting squares across the sides. She sets this next to the chicken.

‘Drinks?’ He is still leaning against the couch.

‘Water.’

He moves into the kitchen. ‘Do you have any wine?’

‘No. Kristy drank the last of it watching “Sex” last night.’

‘”Sex”?’

‘”…in the City.”’

‘Oh. Right.’

‘Are we ready?’

‘Matches?’

‘Oh. No.’ She leans over and pulls out a drawer, removing an orange handled lighter, with a long silver nose, and a short black trigger. She comes to the table and sets the silver flush with the wick of the first taper, then pulls her index finger. The room, quiet in anticipation of fire, cuts with the sharp click of the trigger. The flame leaps out and licks upward, lighting the wick. She does the same for the other. Returning the lighter to the drawer, they sit at either end of the table facing each other. She smiles across the table at him. He watches her between the long pale lines of the candles.

‘Happy anniversary.’

‘You too.’

‘Now eat! And tell me what you think.’

He laughs. A single quiet note that is more air than noise. ‘What is there to tell you? It’s always good. You don’t need me to tell you that.’

‘I don’t want to know if it’s good. I want to know that you enjoy it.’ She looks at him carefully, the smile having slipped away. He wants to answer back. But he eats instead, ducking his head towards the fork. He chews it, swallows it.

‘It’s good.’ He looks a line at her, then smiles.

‘Good.’

They both fall to the tedious business of eating. He hunches toward the plate to eat. Puts his mouth closer to the food. Takes big bites and pushes them at his mouth. He eats more as a mode of survival than out of enjoyment. He tastes the food, but it is a one dimensional sort of sensation, like sandpaper or silk. He does not understand the subtlety of flavor. He does not sense the layers beyond the bluntness of the major ingredients. His tongue is not accustomed to details. He takes no joy in eating. He does not dislike it either. Rather he likes it because of the way it makes him feel. The way it fills him up. The way it makes his stomach shape. The way he can feel the way he is built. The food presses the edges of his insides. He knows his limits and how he can expand them. She is not the same. She does not eat until she is full, rather until she is done. She eats in small bites, taking two forks of rice before her one bite of chicken. It is a loose ratio. She is not a careful eater, merely a concise one. She savors the flavors, rolling them over her tongue before swallowing them. Pushing it over all her different taste buds. Sensing the sweet and sour. The essential ingredients rising and mixing, supported and contrasted with those spare spices that run like warm red lines between the chicken and the vegetables.

They eat slowly, enjoying the silence. The warm silence running between the two melting pillars. Watching each themselves eat. Listening to the small sounds of eating. The flat sound of forks tapping against the glass. The soft impact of lips and teeth through the tender bits of chicken. Breathing. The sounds of movement from the next apartment. They look at each other. Thinking things to themselves. Eventually the plates begin to show themselves. Revealing their hard white skin through the brown sauce and the tiny green vegetables. Their forks find their places near the edges of the plates. The candles melt slowly, falling in on themselves. When she finishes, setting down her fork, he stands quietly and takes his plate.

‘Are you finished?’

‘Yes.’ He takes her plate. Leaning down to lift it he kisses her cheek.

‘Thank you for dinner.’

‘Uh huh.’ He takes the plates into the small kitchen. From above it is white tile square with one corner missing to pass in and out. On one side is the refrigerator, on another is the sink, and on the third is the stove and oven. The fourth faces out across the dining nook toward the television. A substitute for the bar. Above each of these sides are cabinets full of food and dishes, pots and pans. He sets the plates and silverware in the sink, rinsing what is left down the garbage disposal. He flips the switch and it growls, guttural. He shuts it off, the growl that shredded the soft silence that covered the room winds itself slowly into silence. The plates he stacks in a dish tray on the counter above the dishwasher. She comes into the kitchen bringing the two serving dishes with her. He leans back and watches her. She sets them in the sink, but does not rinse them. She moves to stand in front of him, and leans into him, head tilting backward. He leans down and kisses her, sliding his hands around her back, and pressing her against him. They kiss. The flavor of the food still fresh on their lips. He cannot tell if it adds anything to the kiss, finally deciding that to consider it while kissing it must be a distraction. Mouths open, they find their way inside each other. Their hands and arms wrapped around one another, eyes closed, hands still. There is no other world but the warm softness of her mouth. There are no words but the ones his tongue ties to hers.

The kiss breaks. He pulls at her lip as she pulls away. She tucks her head neatly under his chin and her arms cross in front of her, held against his chest a silent request to be held as the two of them lean back against the sink, her bare feet flat on the warm linoleum. He slides his arms around her, over her shoulders, holding her tightly to him, squeezing her intermittently, pressing her body flatter, feeling it expand just a little from the point of pressure. He holds her as strongly as he can. But he cannot hold all of her. He is aware of the inadequacy of his arms as he holds her listening to her breathe. They stay that way for what seems to him a long time. There are no words. Only the silence and the sensation of bodies. She looks up at him, her head leaning against his shoulder. He feels her move, but cannot see her face. She is looking at him from underneath. She sees the smooth plane of his jaw becoming his neck. She notices the cut on his face. She presses the end of her nose into the soft triangle of his neck, and kisses him.

‘Happy anniversary.’ He smiles, but does not answer. Only hugs her and kisses the top of her head. ‘Come on. I have presents to give you.’ She says it quietly, but the moment turns over. Delicacy undone by something stronger. She slips out of his arms, grabbing his wrist, and pulls him to the seat he’d only just vacated. She moves softly into her room, and he watches her go.

She comes back with two boxes. One is long and wide, the other is a cube with apparently rounded edges. She sets them on the table, now clear except for candles. She moves to the couch and retrieves the card in the light green envelope from where she’d set it earlier.

‘You first.’

‘Why me?’

‘Because you have two. We can begin and end with you, and I’ll be in the middle.’

‘Does that make sense?’

‘Yes. It does. Now pick one please, and tear it open.’ He picks the cube. It is neatly wrapped in festive but generic paper. A dark pine green laced in vertical and horizontal directions by red lines edged with gold, crossing each other at intervals. He suspects it was originally Christmas wrapping. His fingers feel for the edges of the paper, where it last came together. He tries to pull at the paper and remove the tape without ripping much of it. He has always envied that ability in the people around him. To be patient in the face of anticipation. To be so careful that nothing was ripped in opening it. But he does not posses the delicacy necessary to open the gift without ripping it. He pulls at the tape and it pulls away, brining pieces of the other side with hit. He unfolds the paper clumsily and pulls at the other side. It rips too, more obviously. The two triangular ends fold out like stunted wings and he pulls at their common edge. It opens upward like a mouth hungry for rain. Inside is a dark box. He reaches in around the edges, but the paper tears again it is so tightly packed. He tugs it out of what is left of the wrapping. It is a small tin box that reads ‘Fossil’ across the sides in various guises. The theme of the tin is Fifties gas station. The signs are simple in a couple of colors with small slogans that say ‘Fill Up Here’ and ‘A Healthy Car is a Happy Car’. He pries at the edge of the lid, rounded outward like a silver tin lip. It pops off and drops out of his hands onto the table. Inside is a watch set in a foam nest. It is long, square, and silvery. It’s face is cream and it’s band is brown. He wonders if it’s leather. There are no numbers, only long marks set evenly around the edge. In the center, near the bottom, halfway between the fulcrum of the hands and the top edge of the bottom line where six might be on a simpler watch was a little box with the number 12 inside.

‘Do you like it?’

‘Yes.’ His eyes are intent on the watch. ‘It’s…elegant.’

‘Do you ever use words like “pretty”?’

‘No. They’re too inaccurate.’ He looks up at her. ‘Your turn.’ She grins and reaches for the envelope. Her nail finds a space near the green corner and she slides her finger along the sharp lip running along the backside of it. It is neatly done with no tearing or ripping. Merely the undoing of the envelope. She unfolds the lip and reaches inside, sliding the card out of it’s thin package. She lays it aside, the lip folding slowly down over the now empty envelope. The card is rectangular and beige. The image on the front is a simple burgundy heart. It is raised from the edge of the card so that its edges are not sharp but apparent. Along the outside edges of the card is a simple line enclosing it, in the same deep burgundy color. She runs her fingers along the outside face of it, feeling the ridges of the heart and the rough skin of the card. Tiny dips and divots. She opens the card and something falls out, floating slowly to the carpet before she can grab it. He lets her reach over her knees to pick it up, her hair falling over her face. She picks it up and holds it up. It is rectangular, the size a check might be. But it is not money. He is not so thoughtless. It is a full day pass to a health spa near her house. She smiles and leans over to kiss him. She lingers there before his face, watching him, then leans back.

‘Thank you. Now you again.’

‘That’s not all.’

‘What?’

‘Inside the card. There’s more.’

‘Oh.’ She picks up the card and opens it. There is no printed inscription. The card itself originally blank. There is only his neat hand across the inside. On the right it says this: Katherine, Happy anniversary. Love Matthew. On the other side are seven lines. She reads them slowly. They are words. More a thought than a poem, but something more for their relationship to each other and to her. It is not complex. It is not grandiose or flashy. It does not bare it’s teeth at her in passion. It merely reads like this:

To you
Who has made it all
Interesting
I give thanks
It has been more
Than I imagined
It might have been
M.

She holds it in her hands, forgotten. Her eyes somewhere between tears and memory. She sniffs and swallows. She is crying, and he is watching her cry, half way between tenderness and satisfaction. There is something he appreciates about the moment. He takes the card and sets it on the table next to the candles that have run over their crystal bases with their copious and waxy tears. He holds her hands in both of his and watches her as she cries. He does not say anything. He just lets her cry. Watching her weep as though she has lost something. He understands that he cannot understand. That the cloudy mystery behind her tears had everything and nothing to do with him, and that the edgy clutter of words full of indistinct spaces unable to convey the ripe round shape of emotion would only confuse and frustrate them both. So he lets the silence fill our the moment, holding her as best he can.

As he watches, her tears begin to change. They seem to slow in the air. The liquid thins flattens and flushes. Each drop takes the shape of a red rose petal and floats mercilessly to the floor. They shift slowly, the red running out of them until they are pale and white. They collect on the floor between her bare feet, a scattered pile of broken blossoms. She feels his hands tense and looks up, still crying. His face is tight and his eyes are somewhere else.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘For what?’

‘For everything. For hurting you.’

‘You haven’t hurt me.’

‘And I don’t want to. I don’t want it this way. But it’s just not the same.’ She sniffs and wipes her nose on the back of her hand.

‘What’s not the same?’

‘We’re not the same. I’m not the same. You’re not the same.’

‘What does that mean? Of course we’re not the same, but that doesn’t mean that we’re all that different. That we can’t still do this.’

‘But it does mean that. We have changed and we are different. There’s just no room for this anymore. You’re not interested in who I am or where I’m going. You’re content to remain here in this moment forever, and I don’t want that. I never wanted this to be forever. I just wanted to be happy.’

‘Aren’t you?’

‘Yes, but not forever. Not like this, working a shitty job in a shitty apartment with a boyfriend who wants to stay this way.’

‘I do not. I don’t want this forever anymore than you do. But that doesn’t mean I’m ready to rip it up right now in exchange for something else. Something fleeting and idealistic. What do you want that you don’t have?’

‘Ambition. Advancement. Freedom. This just isn’t working for me. We are fundamentally different people, and that’s become apparent in the last few months. I can’t talk to you. About London or law school. Not seriously because you don’t want to hear those things. They’re not what you want, and I understand that. And I don’t want to hear about your brother and his wife anymore or which church you think we’re going to have our wedding at or about how you heard the greatest name for a baby boy. Those sorts of predictions, fantasies, just aren’t what I’m looking for.’ She is crying again. ‘And it’s so much harder because I still love you for the person you are. I still feel for you. But I can’t keep you in my life. We can’t stay together. Not if I want to be happy.’

‘What about me? What about what I want? I want to be happy too. There is room for all that in your life. In our life. There is room for those things. All of those things. London is fine. Law school is fine. Those are all fine things. And we can do them and the things that I want too. These aren’t mutually exclusive dreams. These are things we can accomplish together. I didn’t know you were serious about those things. I never knew you wanted them. I always thought you talked about them like I talked about owning a house. Something to be done, but not immediately.’

‘That’s the problem. That’s one of the problems. You have a patience that I don’t. You have a longer slower plan than I do. You don’t want anything right now, and I can’t spend my life sitting around waiting for it. I do not want to end up like the rest of them. I won’t end up like the rest of them, and the only way I can avoid that is to keep moving. And I can’t carry you with me when I go.’

His mouth opens and he runs his tongue across the top row of his teeth. He is trying to say something. He is trying to say ‘But’ and follow it with a reason. Something to dismantle her unbelief in their future. Something substantial in the face of her unsteadiness. In the shadow of her doubt. But he can’t. He understands that he is alone. That he has been alone for some time. That when she had stopped imagining him by her, he hadn’t felt it. Caught up in his dream, he had somehow lost hold of her hand.

‘Why did you wait until tonight?’

‘Because I wanted you to be happy. I want you to be happy. Tonight was supposed to be perfect. The perfect end to a beautiful thing. A beautiful relationship. We were supposed to have dinner and exchange gifts and be together one last time. I was going to tell you tomorrow. Be rationale after the passion. Spend it all and leave the rest. Lay it all out for you carefully, piece by piece, so that you would understood where I was coming from. Show you simply how this wasn’t going to work. But…’

‘But?’

‘I couldn’t. It- there was no way to go on. Not after reading your card. Something just broke. My resolve? I just couldn’t, not after knowing how invested you are in this. How much you didn’t understand or feel the separation like I have. I just couldn’t do it. And I couldn’t stop crying, because this hurts. I won’t say as much as you, but it doesn’t hurt less because I know you hurt more. I don’t enjoy doing this. But I know that I have to.’

He sits with his mouth closed clenching his jaw, thinking nothing. Eyes staring stiffly between his legs at the curled knots of the beige carpet where the flower petals might have been. Unprepared, he cannot comprehend. He cannot piece it together. His mind is numb. Not cold or broken, just gone, as if nothing remained in its place but dry sponge. All liquid and thought somehow disappeared.

‘I’m sorry.’ She tries to hold his hand, but he pulls it away. The skin is cold. Her fingers are not strong, but sympathetic, and she lets his hand slide out of hers. He stands, mind still missing, hands picking blindly at the things on the table. He pushes the chair out of his way and walks to the door. Opens it. Shuts it. Stumbles down the stairs. She sits and watches where he’d passed beyond the wall. The candles cry quietly to themselves.

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The sun catches cadences along the wall. It is afternoon again, it seems it is always afternoon, the sun slanting through the window and along the wall, drawing pictures of leaves in dark relief along the empty spaces of the spackled beige walls. The wind shakes the branches of the tree and a dead leaf falls loose and floats in silhouette across the edge of the extent of the sunlight.

He remembers the rose. The vision from the day before. He understands it now, but in understanding a new and sharper mystery arises. He understands the specifics of the vision, but not the vision generally. What is the purpose of a clue that unravels itself only after it is useful? He watches the branches bob and wave in the shadow of the window.

He lets the thought drift, it’s shape bending and flexing as it falls through his mind. Down past the memories of her that crowd quickly at the tiny point of recognition in his brain. Clamoring for attention. He lets the thought fall deeper into the shadows, watching it go. Letting the hook become a whole. Letting it become a piece of something instead of a hungry question at odds with answers. He let it become an answer itself, and sought to discover its question. He looked at the spaces around the thought that were not there and studied their significance. He watched what his hook left out and included it as part of understanding. He loosened his mind and let the question fall, gathering speed and weight as it did, pulling at the pieces of thought that seemed relevant to itself.

He lets it go, sinking into his subconscious because he was not hungry to understand the specifics of what he had seen or why. He did not care about the vision. It seemed too complicated to consider, and he seemed too tired to deal with it carefully and logically. He is only tired and lonely.

He sits up from his bed, setting both feet on the carpeted floor, seeing his shoes where he’d tossed them last night. He is still wearing his clothing. He had fallen asleep crying, his thoughts having twisted into indistinct dreams of dark beaches and the gaping maw of the sea. His mouth is dry and sticks to itself as he opens it to yawn. He rubs his eyes. They are tender and soft. He assumes they are red as well. He stands and removes his clothing carelessly, pulling it off of him as though trying to rid himself of a tenacious smell. He tugs off his underwear last and pulls on a pair of loose cotton pajama bottoms, blue struck through with a pattern of white lines making small boxes across the legs. The fabric is cool and smooth against his legs, still hot from the trousers he’d worn all night.

He moves to his desk and sits on the small gray chair. It has no armrests, so he props his elbows on edges of the desk. He looks at the gifts sitting lamely against the wall, still laying where he’d thrown them when he’d come in last night, having moved from numb acceptance to angry understanding. He’d thrown them, careless of the consequences, then fallen onto the bed and cried into clenched hands oblivious to everything except for his sudden release and the continuing sensation of falling.

He picks up her second gift, the one he’d taken, but not opened. He shakes it. It tinkles and something pecks at the paper, and collects in the corner of the wrapping. He sets it back down, frowns. Sighing, he opens it, pulling the paper slowly away from the mystery beneath. Inside is a silver picture frame with a five by eight photo of the two of them on their second date. He’d taken her to a place called ‘Stooges’, and they’d played skeeball and miniature golf. She’d had a stranger take their picture beneath the mock Eiffel tower after he’d beaten her badly. She is smiling and about to laugh. His eyes and mouth are open wide. He remembers rambling on foolishly about how she shouldn’t trust strangers like that. Watch, now she’ll run away with your camera and you’ll expect me to chase her. Fuck that, chivalry’s dead baby, you can chase her yourself. The woman taking the photo smiled behind the camera. He’d kept up the monologue long after the picture was over, and she’d been forced to kiss him in order to quiet him. She’d owed him the kiss anyway, he’d beaten her at golf, but the suddenness of it had been satisfying.

He turns the frame over in his hands. Three small pieces of glass fall onto the desk and bounce away behind it, dropping into the gap between the desk and the wall. The glass had cracked down the center, the scar of an seen lightning bolt that flashed through it when it impacted the wall last night. He focuses on the cloudy split, and smiles. He would not have broken it purposefully, it is difficult for him to consciously destroy things. But he had been careless this time. It does matter. He sets the frame down and stares at the photo, focusing on the details, playing idly with the watch. He hadn’t remembered that her hair had been that long when they’d started dating. He did remember the trauma when she’d cut it. Her absolute panic, and self loathing. She cried a lot that night, afraid her mother would kill her for cutting her hair; an act of control and a loss of innocence, she’d called it later.

The photo blurs and he is staring through it, his ambivalent eyes seeing the colors but not the shapes, his fingers bending the watch between his hands, flexing it at the joints so that they fold like the limp leathery wings of an unconscious bird.

The humming returns, the sensation of movement just above his eyes. He submits to it, setting his hands idly in his lap, and enjoys the subtle motions of the room; the pulsation of his monitor on the desk, the repeated tick of the second hand on his bedside alarm, the sound of the wind in the branches outside his window, and the soothing way the shadows wash the walls, the doubling of objects as his eyes swim in and out of focus. He breathes heavily and his shoulders slump, and he rolls his head between his shoulders, stretching the muscles in the back of his neck. His eyes fall and focus on his hands, highlighted by the dark material behind them, and the shiny watch in his hands, and he remembers that he is alone.

Watching the watch, the irony of her gifts strikes him with a certain sharpness. She’d given him a reminder of something he no longer belonged to, what she had planned to take away, to dissolve, even before they had come together, and a watch to keep track of the hours falling away from that moment of separation. He sighs and leans forward, holding the watch up next to the picture, and counts seconds. After thirty three he stops counting and looks at the watch. The time, he realizes, and the date had already been set. She was certainly fastidious. An excellent gift giver. He needed a watch, wanted a watch, and it was a nice watch. It will go well with his brown Doc Martens and the library of khaki hanging in the closet. He lays the watch down next to the picture frame, spreading each half of the wrist band flat against the slick wooden surface. He remembers the time they’d both been invited to Jen’s birthday and she’d destroyed herself trying to find something appropriate, until she had- He stops himself and frowning, shakes his head, and searches blindly for thoughts of something else. Gifts. He couldn’t give gifts to save his life. His consisted mostly of gift certificates and calendars. Let the givers express themselves. He remembers getting her a gift certificate from the mall and thinking how she would appreciate the variety of stores she could choose her gift from, and how irritated she’d been because there was no specificity. She pointed out to him that the idea behind a gift shows how well you know the person, turning cliché ‘it’s the thought that counts’ around on him. He’d put no thought into the gift at all, she said, and furthermore- He grimaces again. He does not like this difficulty in forgetting, and the new selectivity in remembering. This need for caution walking backward. To look back carefully, eyes half closed hoping that she won’t be there waiting for him somewhere behind the next recollection.

He does not like being afraid, so he thinks of her, consciously conjuring her image, carefully examining his memory of her. There is a surge in his throat as he does so, but he swallows and focuses on his memories of her.

She is still beautiful there, standing without background or context in the flat white plain of his memory. She does not stay in place, but flickers in and out as he focuses on specific pieces of her. Her hands, and the sharp ovals of her nails, the white crescent of feminine nail above the finger. She’d never painted them, only kept them a little bit long. Her smile. Her easy smile, the one she wore regularly and felt genuinely, the one that made you think that there wasn’t much more to her than her grinning enjoyment. But behind the smile she thought a lot. That had surprised him about her. Her neck. Her breasts. Her thighs.

He smiles as he cries. Like walking through a thorn bush to a sweet soft bed beyond, he focuses solely on the good in order to ignore the rising pain each of the images inflicts. He holds his head in his hands and cries silently.

He stops and wipes his eyes on his knuckles and his nose on the back of his hand. There is no point in this crying, but there is nothing else for him to do. He wanders through his memories of last night, trying to find some way to undo them. To figure out how she had tricked him into believing that this was real. Or that it no longer was. He realizes that’s all it is anymore: a fantasy. Something he might well have imagined, had he the time and desperation to create the dinner and the details. The distance between memory and imagination is measured in degrees of belief. Then he would not believe. He would not believe that it had ever happened, and therefore he could go on believing that it never ended. He closes his eyes and cuts away the end last night from his fantasy and cobbles together a more fitting finale from other nights that had ended more passionately or not ended at all but had turned themselves into morning as the slow roll of the horizon brought them across the eye of the sun.