I will make the mermaids sing to me.
So. I’m a failure. Last time I checked, I was floating between the 20- and 30-year-old buoys. And I know floating is a bad word for it, though flailing doesn’t really work either. Maybe I’m sinking. Yeah, that’s it. I’m sinking. Fucking sinking.
Anyway. I skip my AA meetings to shoot pool (whiskey) over at my friend’s house. He’s not really my friend though. He’s my best friend’s husband. Let’s just say I take too many shots when we play and I’m a bad loser. I never get kicked out. I usually get the cold shoulder and wake up with a thud, when I fall off the couch in the morning. There’s never a note or breakfast or a wash towel out for me when I finally peel the carpet off my face. There used to be. But there isn’t anymore.
(I told you I was a failure.)
I can’t really get laid off from my job, so that’s just about the only perk I have in life. I’m not really hanging onto my job though. I mean, I don’t actually have a job. If typewriters had feelings, mine would feel as worthless as I do. We are failures together and we are well aware of it. The key moments in our relationship involve a blank face staring at fixed pages staring at a blank face. Sometimes when I get inspired, I wonder who changed the stickers on keyboard to Latin. Maybe that’s why everything I write is dead. Dead beat. Beatnik.
Yeah, I used to wish I was a beatnik—a failure with talent. Sometimes I wish I could’ve had Thoreau’s humility—I’ve only got a few friends now and I feel blue-balled. I guess, if I absolutely had to describe myself, I would stuff a blender with Natural Light, orange juice, marijuana, an Irishman’s pride, and the last few sections of “The Cantos”: a Pound of Bukowski seasoned with those terrible clichés that I know I shouldn’t use.
I used to hope my friends and I would turn out to be one of those enviable groups of friends like Kerouac and Ginsberg, or Stein and Picasso, or Des Imagistes. And I’m pretty sure I would’ve slit my wrists if I’d learned to write my name by tracing my mother’s grave stone. Poor Mary Shelley. That whole thing just blows smoke on the ashes that are my heart. (I said that to my friend this one time. She laughed. And then she said, “Yeah, don’t ever say that again.” I said, “Well, why the fuck not?” and I knew why the fuck not. So, she didn’t need to say, “Do you even have a heart?” but she did.)
She can be a bitch sometimes. It’s true. But she’s never actually mean about it. The truth is a bitch, anyway. And since my heart—the one I’d like to believe I have—is withered and decayed, I don’t really find it painful that there’s no wash towel out when I leave in the morning. Not that it’s ever actually morning when I leave. Haha?
(thudthudSwish) FuckingSHITwhatthebloodyfuckinghellhowdidthatFuckingHappen?
HOHOHOHAHAHA british now, Eh?
British? What The--?
does that Look like Cricket up thair on the tube?
hohohohuhha. No?
wait.
where Am i?
bloody Cricket. iss like a Uh a Cheapass Ripoff of baseball yeah.
Amen. God Bless America.
Our Lady of the Diamond would like you to Not take Her name in vain.
hehhuhhaha.
Lady-Damn me!
i Apologize. i’ll say my prayers before bed trust me i will.
O Our Lady of the Diamond, who art in Boston now; bless my Mommy and my Daddy and little Ricky—make him feel better soon so we can play in the snow—and PuhLease let Baltimore not be such a tease. And oh yah maybe decrease the price of beer? Kaythanks. Amen.
AhhhhhMen!
suspeaking of men. where’s Yours at?
LOOSEBALLLOOSEBALLLOOSEBALL!
GetitgetItGetit!
“Get your shitty ass out of bed.” My eyes let in something rank and I shuttered. “I said get up.”
“I’m up, I’m up, what the hell?” I said.
“What the hell is your problem?” She threw something at me. Luckily it was soft. I pushed it away, nevertheless.
I said, “I was asleep and you woke me up, fucker. That’s my fucking problem.” I rolled over and closed my eyes again. She grabbed my forehead with her lanky-ass fingers and shook my head like a martini.
“I’m not kidding, Mary-Katherine. Get up.”
Whoaaaa. The whole name. “What in the world could ever warrant such an intervention at such a gawd-awful hour?” I asked, slowly sitting up in my bed.
“Do you even know what time it is?” I didn’t have a clock in my room. (I don’t work with such silly inventions.) I looked around nonetheless. The shades were all drawn shut.
“It’s dark-time.”
She got up and opened the blinds. Light poured into the room; so much light, blinding light. “Are you hungover?”
“Not really.”
“Do you want some coffee?”
“Of course.”
I pushed my temples in with the palms of my hands as she walked away. I shivered again, noting the difference of warmth between having the covers enveloped around my body and having the stale air thrashing at my skin.
She came back in with the coffee and handed it over to me carefully. I took it in close to my chin and then took a big gulp. “RAWH. That’s hot.”
“It’s coffee.”
“Can I have my key back now?”
“Do you know what day it is?”
“February.”
“It’s March, actually. March 2nd.”
“It’s not my birthday. And it’s not yours. So what’s the all this hubbub about?” With my freehand I wiped the sleep from my eyes. I felt like I’d been asleep for days. Unfortunately, I felt like I hadn’t been asleep long enough.
She traced her fingers on my cheek. “When was the last time you ate?”
“I had some cardboard rings in milk before I went to bed.”
“And when was that?”
“When was what?”
“Nevermind. C’mon. Put something clean on. I’ll make you something to eat.”
She left the room again, left me all by my lonesome. And after a minute of assessing the lonesome room—the bare floor accompanied only by a few semi-blank pages strewn about here-and-there and a pathetic pile of dirty laundry in the corner by the closet, and the closet draped with jeans and button-downs though it’s back wall was very-much visible—, I stretched my tiptoes all the way over to the closet and grabbed a pair of torn jeans and an old, loose button-down. No reason to look cute, of course. It was way too early to think about “cute.” It’s always way too early to think about “cute.”
I rolled my neck around and squeezed my temples together again as I made my way into the kitchen. There was a strong aroma in the air but I couldn’t pinpoint it. It wasn’t like the stale taste of cigarette butts; and cardboard rings in milk don’t have a smell. I plopped down at one of the table’s two chairs, and let my upper-body crash on the table top. “So, what time is it?” I asked, only moving my head to look up at her.
“Well I got here at 1:30. So…somewhere around then.” She shuffled a skillet around precisely and I saw a little white and yellow thing flip about two inches in the air above the black pan. And two brown squares shot up from shiny machine to her right, making me jump. I leaned back in the chair, then. She moved to her left and mixed up a bowl of some thick white stuff. And then she held her hand over an empty black pan before she ladled some of the white stuff on it. I didn’t know what it all was. But I knew what it all meant: a feast was to ensue. “So,” she said in one long breath. “So, what have been doin’ lately?”
I thought for a moment, letting out an unintended errrrmmmmm. “Writing.”
“You know I haven’t seen you in over a week. And you haven’t been down at the bar since last Wednesday.”
“So what day is it?”
“Tuesday.”
“Did you get a snow day?” I figured I should wait for her response before I laughed.
“No.” She was walking towards me now with a large, round object that looked incredibly hard. I decided that I shouldn’t press any more buttons. “I took off from work. Again.” She placed the plate down in front of me.
“When was the last time this happened though? Like. A year.”
“It happened over Christmas!”
“Oh.”
“You can’t keep doing this! You can’t just go missing for weeks at a time. I know you’re writing. But I know you’re drinking. And not eating. And not sleeping. I know it.” She let herself fall into the second chair and sighed deeply. “You just can’t keep doing this, Kate. One day something bad is going to happen and no one will ever find out unless they come banging on your door.”
“That’s why I gave you a key?”
“That’s not—even—funny. I’m worried about you, Kate. Again.”
“Chill, I’m not dead. And I don’t plan on dying…yet.”
She hmphed and rolled her eyes before standing up and walking back to the stove. “Just fucking eat your food,” she said, still facing the machine.
I wonder sometimes if
there really must
Be a Reaction.
I wonder sometimes what
the Reaction must
really Be.
Is it Enough to say that Death is only Death
and that Effect is only Effect?
Or, must there be a Life;
must there be a Cause?
T.O.D.: 14:59—
After wasting 13 minutes of water and two dollars of soap, shampoo and conditioner, I threw on a better pair of jeans and a nicer button-down. I aimed a machine at my head and held the heat on my skull so long I thought my eyes would just shrivel up and fall out of my head.
I walked around aimlessly, in and out of the two rooms, until I stumbled on my coat, and then my mittens, and then my hat. And I locked the door on the way out.
Teddy was already at the bar. But, then again, it was almost time for happy hour. For Teddy, though, it seemed that this hour was happy enough. He greeted me as if I were some war hero. Yes, that was it. I was battling life. And winning?
“How are you, you sonuvagun?” He wasn’t really allowed to curse at work. Especially since it was so early in the day.
“Awake. And sober.” He was already filling a glass for me. And he slid it right into my hands as soon as the “er” dropped out. “I won’t tell Jackie. And thanks.”
“Won’t tell her what?” He rested his elbows on the top of the bar and held my wrists in hands lovingly.
“You know she came to get me this morning.”
“I do know that. I sent her. But anyway. This one’s not from me. Mark said he owed you one from that Duke game.”
I laughed. “I forgot about that.”
“You forgot about a lot of things, it seems. Like the sun. And, of course, your friends. And—oh, yeah—you’re life.”
“So, anyway,” I drew out the “anyway” and watched Ted laugh for a moment before I continued on. “So, yeah, how’s life?”
“Good. Now that you’re awake, I might actually get laid tonight.”
“Good. Good. Sorry about that, by-the-by.”
“Whatever. Just dedicate your book to your favorite celibate bartender.”
“It’s not celibacy if it’s not a choice.”
“It’s Jackie’s choice. Dedicate the book, then, to her.”
I stepped off the barstool and held my glass up high, announcing, “To my Favorite Celibate Best-Friend and her Sexually-Repressed Husband. Thank you for all of your support and kindness and breakfasts and free beer.”
“What? No mention of inspiration?” he poked as I sat back down.
“Free beer = inspiration. DUHHHHHH.”
He reached over, then, and patted me on the shoulder. “I’m glad you’re back, Kate.” It was a mushy moment. But it was over soon enough and he left me alone to stare at whatever was on the tube, while he tended to the other costumers.
Around 5:30 he kicked me out, forcing me to go eat. “And I don’t wanna see you again until eight. Come over and we’ll play pool.”
Lady Day
and I have a shot of something distant but alarming
over egg-drop soup and moo shoo pork
and I think the waiter wants to fuck me but I can’t be sure,
so I take my chances.
Ginsberg and O’Hara
and I ventured back to my dorm;
I found something I never knew I’d lost:
Shel Silverstein, he held my hand
as I crossed the road.
Why?
To get to the other side, of course.
J. Alfred. Ohhh, J.—
Can I call you J? Is that okay?
What did you do with the time
you
lost between the seedy streets and the mermaids on the beach?
“So, you decided to show.” She let out something of a sigh that oddly resembled The War Hero has returned! I blushed.
He took her hand and interrupted the celebration. “Hey, honey—why don’t you, uh—I think I left my cigs upstairs, will you get them for me?”
She pulled her hand back and snapped, “You’re not smoking those things in here.”
“I promise I won’t.” He spoke calmly as I looked over the newest additions to their shot-glass collection. New York, I read. I made sure to say the words loud enough in my head so that I couldn’t hear anything that was going on in the room. San Francisco!, San Diego, Ontario, New Orleans—
He touched my elbow lightly. That was my queue to start paying attention. “Kate, I want to talk to you. Real quick.” He glanced up to the basement stairs, hearing the door throw itself back into its place. He pulled me back a few steps out of ear-shot. Just in case the door was listening, you know.
“I didn’t come over here for an intervention, Ted.”
“Well you’re having one anyway, Kate. I’m just warning you. Okay?” He let the words sit for a moment. They were the truth and I knew it. “Jackie seems to think that you should go back to subbing some classes, at least. She’s worried about you. I say you just need to get laid—err—find a guy. You know what I mean. But, well, her idea isn’t half bad. Not half bad at all.”
I just stood there trying to piece together the reflections in his eyes. It might have been a joke—he’d never warned me before any of her hissy fits (it’s not like I couldn’t tell when they were coming). And, okay, it’s not like she was always throwing hissy fits. But when she did, she always threw a damn good one.
“I told her not to do this,” he continued. “I told her to wait a few days. She said that we didn’t have a few days. Something’s gotten into her lately. Are you sure nothing happened while you were gone? You were just writing right?”
“Well, yeah.”
“You should’ve seen her when she woke up this morning. Something broke her last nerve and I dunno if it was you or if it was me or if it was work but something’s been stretching that last nerve out for the past couple days and then snapped it today. They finally fucking snapped it.”
“So, I should be happy for her?”
“Don’t do it tonight, Kate. Don’t do that. Just nod and smile and cry when you think you should cry. For my sake.”
I thought back to my interaction with Teddy earlier that day. He’d seemed alright. He’d joked with me. He wasn’t any more or less adamant than he usually is about me getting off the barstool.
She’d changed him. She really had. Was this man, I thought, really the Teddy I knew? But that was all I was allowed: Jackie came back down. She seemed calmer. She threw the box at Ted; it bounced off his chest and into his cupped hands. He extended the box out my way and I nodded in agreement.
Jackie joined us outside. She waited until I was down to the last few drags of my cigarette before she began. Teddy was right. Something had broke that last nerve. But it wasn’t like they just ripped it. They’d tormented her first. As she blabbed on, blubbering here and there, I wondered if maybe she was just having a mid-twenties crisis. A breakdown.
“I’m just so worried about you,” she told me again.
“I have a feeling this shouldn’t be about me.”
“No, no way. No, you’re not just gonna slide out of this one so easy, Kate. You’ve got to find order. You can’t just float anymore.”
“I’m not the one who’s floating. You live your days and weeks by such a schedule, there’s no room for you to deviate off course. I may be roaming a little, but at least I’m not living each day within the lines.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. How does that make me the floater?”
“Because you float from each day to the next, each task to the next; every day you wake up and go to the school, and then you teach for a while, and then you grade papers for a while, and then you come home, eat dinner, watch the tube, and go to bed. That’s floating. Floating is the act of living without recognizing one’s own free-will.”
She laughed and laughed. I think the first time she laughed it was just nervous laughter. But the second set was fuller and uncontrollable. It just shot out from her lungs like the pizza you had for lunch that couldn’t keep up with the whiskey you had for dinner. Teddy giggled a little. He was just high.
I went back home that night. We never even played pool. Ted told me the next day that Jackie had cried again before getting into bed. She never cried in bed. I remembered that one time, back in college, she sat at her desk all night long and just cried, with her head down on edge of the table. I laid at her feet, staring up at the ceiling. And every now and then she would lift her head up to ask me a question and see if I was still awake. She always had a flat forehead when she did that. Red. You could see where the skin bunched atop the table. She never cried in bed because she said if she was going to be sad in this world, then she would want to keep her dream world happy. She told me that her father used to do this dream-catcher routine with her when she was a kid. She said he turned back the clock on her forehead and opened up her imagination to take out all the bad thoughts from the day. He told her that he loved her just before he closed her imagination and turned forward the clocks. I told her my father sang loudly in the kitchen all of the songs he learned at the bar.
I refused to go back to teaching—even if it was just a subbing position. I just wasn’t that kind of person. I decided to write to my friend in Italy. She was off singing in the opera. I knew that she would take me in. She wrote back two weeks later and said I should just send her the dates when I’d be visiting so that she could plan her schedule around my visit. I wondered what it was like to be a professional opera singer. I guessed you had to practice every day like a professional athlete. Writing was something different. There was no practice. There was failure, instead. Whatever was written but didn’t work was thrown out and considered a waste of time. With singing, though, you had to like prepare for the piano being too quick or for someone being off key or missing a queue and you had to prepare for sandbags that might fall on your head. With writing you just wrote and hoped that the flutes were in tune with the clarinets and that the strings wouldn’t rush the triplets and that no one threw tomatoes from the audience.
Jackie was forcing me to go back to AA. I didn’t want to go. And I didn’t think it was necessary since I’d be going to Italy in a few weeks. She freaked. She was all like, “Well, what the hell are you going to Italy for?” and I was all like, “Because I want to fucking go to Italy.” So then she goes, “What’s in Italy that’s not here?” So I said, “It’s what’s not in Italy that is here,” but I shouldn’t have said it.
So I went to Italy for two weeks and did the whole Italy thing. They have some old-ass buildings there. But really good wine. And a damn good opera company. When I got back I went over to Jackie and Ted’s and Ted was all full of questions like Oh, what was it like? Did you bring back pictures? Did you go anywhere famous? I told him that I saw George Clooney because they were shooting the Ocean’s Thirteen and he asked if I got a picture with him. I said, “No. I didn’t actually see him.” At that point, Teddy caught on.
“Ted,” Jackie said. “Tell Kate what happened while she was gone.”
“Why don’t you just tell me?” I asked.
Ted said, then, “Ohhhh. Some dumbass wants to buy the bar.”
“So fight?”
“We can’t. The offer’s just too good.”
“Oh c’mon. You saw Empire Records,” I told him.
Jackie snorted. “This is real life, Kate. We have to be serious about this.” I didn’t even honor her with a response. So Teddy said, instead:
“She’s right.” He was fingering through all of the CD cases he had, looking for one to play. He stopped a few times at better options, but only picked out two. He held them up. I shrugged. I didn’t care. Kate picked Coldplay and then her phone rang and she answered it with an Ugh, “Hey, Mom.”
We knew we had some time to kill, so Teddy grabbed a few beers and we smoked out on the back porch. I said, “Remember in college when we had to stuff blankets under the doors?”
“I was always afraid my mother would smell it when she sat down on the couch.”
“Your mother was more worried about you and Jackie living together.”
“I didn’t live there.”
“Yes, you did.”
“Well, I didn’t pay rent. So I didn’t technically live there.”
“Metaphysically, though. You did, metaphysically.”
“You don’t even know what that word means.”
“I used to.”
“You used to have a life too.”
I paused for a moment. I couldn’t figure out if he was being mean or ironic. Maybe he was being both. It was beginning to eat away at me when he said,
“Oh c’mon, Kate. Do you really do anything besides drink, write, and sleep?”
“I’m doing none of the three at the moment.” I looked down at my beer. “Okay, maybe not.”
“Jackie’s got this friend at work. She seems to think he’s perfect for you. Tall. Smart. Handsome—or so she says. I met him once. He was kinda shy, and I thought he was a little cocky. All he talked about was all the big books that he’s reading with his classes.”
I laughed.
“But whatever. When Jackie asks, say yes. Just say yes. And go on the date and behave and maybe you’ll like this guy. I dunno. If it doesn’t work out then you can, at least, say that you got out of your apartment and got to talk with someone other than us and your typewriter.”
I told him I would. There wasn’t any way I could say no. There was just too much that he and Jackie had done for me already. Which didn’t make sense. Why did I accept their help if they’d offered so much already? Shouldn’t I have stuck behind my pride and said no? I wondered if I even had a pride.
I woke up dead on the morning of the date. I filled up the coffee machine and could feel that my soul had escaped me. The coffee only made me more aware of my empty chest. Something was missing.
I killed time down at the bar with Teddy, but he only let me have two drinks. Before I left for the restaurant, he told me again to Behave.
My date was already at the table when I entered; the hostess showed me the way to him. His name was Andrew. And he was tall. And he was handsome. I wondered if Teddy was right—maybe I just needed to get laid. Err, find a man. I laughed in my head.
He told me about all the books he was reading with his class: small talk. He asked where I went to college and what I studied—“Jackie told me you were a writer, but not much more,” he explained. I told him. We talked about the classes we took in college, since he had been an English major too. He told me about a few odd professors he’d had and I not only sympathized with him, but understood quite well.
I told him that I didn’t live far from the restaurant. He offered to walk with me. I let him. I offered him something to drink as he sat down on the couch. He asked for just a coffee, please. And he said, “Thanks,” with a smile when I served it to him. I sat next to him on the couch and he told me about his favorite movies and his favorite writers. We had nothing in common in that department. But he seemed open. He said there was some indie film down at the theater that week and that it didn’t look terrible. It was a title I didn’t know. It was also something in Italian. I think he was just offering a second date. I told him that I had been wanting to see that for a while. He said, really?, as if he could sense the lie. I told him that my friend was in Italy and that she’d recommended it. He asked all about her, so I told him about my trip.
When he stood in my doorframe I realized that he wasn’t so much taller than I was. I figured I’d only have to get on my tiptoes a little bit to kiss him—unless he leans down to kiss me, then I won’t have to move at all. He didn’t lean down. And I didn’t get on my tiptoes. Instead, he just took my hand and gave it a little squeeze. He said, “I’ll see you Wednesday night then?”
“Wednesday, yes.” I smiled, I think. I must have because he smiled back.
“Great. Good. Wednesday,” he said, unable to fully turn away from my door.
I didn’t have a telephone number to give him. The upside of it was that I didn’t have a telephone number for Jackie to call and leave a hundred messages on. I knew she would have if she could have. So, I stopped by for pool the next evening.
“So…Andrew called me this morning and thanked me for setting him up last night,” she said with a wink.
I looked at Teddy and we both laughed. “Did he say anything else?” I pretended to be super excited.
“Just that he had a good time. And that he’s taking you to a film on Wednesday?” It was clear that he’d told her that, but she said as if it were a truth that she couldn’t believe. I nodded and took a drink that Teddy offered me. He then began setting up the balls on the table.
“So you had a good time?” she pried.
I walked to the opposite corner of the table and pulled out the eight-ball from the corner pocket. I rolled it back softly to Teddy’s collection. “Yeah, sure.”
“Are you excited to see him again?”
“I haven’t seen Kate excited about anything since she finished her probation in college,” Teddy joked. I laughed as soon as I hit the cue-ball so I only broke a few of the balls on the outside of the diamond. I wasn’t even excited when I graduated from college…or grad school.
“What about when she quit her teaching job?” Jackie joked. I laughed. She was right; I was excited about that too. She turned to me. “You know, Kate, I just had a thought.” I almost had time to make a joke, but she continued on, “If you’re not a floater, but you don’t go out and get anything, what are you?”
I thought for a moment as I watched Teddy sink the four-ball, right after sinking the three-ball. “I go out and get liquor. And coffee, sometimes. And food. I go out and get food.”
“You know what I mean. If you don’t get excited about anything in life, then how can you say you’re not just enjoying the fact that you’re floating through life?” She stumped me, I thought. “I may be living between the lines,” she went on, “like you say, but just because you don’t have any lines to cross doesn’t mean you’re not a floater. You’re the ultimate floater, in fact.”
I tried to get excited for my movie-date with Andrew. It’d been so long since I’d been on any sort of date, I knew that the first wouldn’t go well. But when was the last time I’d actually been on a movie-date? Twelfth grade? Eleventh. It was Mike Mc-something. He was a year older than I was. And he was an asshole. I dated him for three months. He left me when he left for college.
When I was in the shower I wondered how one made oneself “excited.” It was just one of those reflexive behaviors, wasn’t it? Something made you excited. It wasn’t as if you were given something and then had to pump yourself up for it. No one made you poet laureate and then waited for you to get stoked about it before they actually gave you the award. It happened or it didn’t. And you got excited or you didn’t. Maybe life was like that. You either had to be stoked about it before you were born, or you just had to cope when it was finally given to you.
After the movie, Andrew and I had coffee again. I told him about my dilemma. He was quiet for a few minutes, just staring down at his spoon, before he finally said, “That’s pretty deep.” I just shrugged. I didn’t know what to say. I figured it wasn’t that I didn’t want to see him again; I just wasn’t all pressed to schedule our next encounter. So I told him that. He smiled. “Well, that’s okay. For a minute there I thought you were breaking this off,” he said with a chuckle. I thought I was too. “Listen,” he began. (No conversation that begins with “Listen” ever really deserves your attention, by the way. If someone needs to preface what they’re going to say with an attention-getter, then their actual statement will be lame. And it will be a letdown if you actually choose to “Listen.”)
“I kinda dig you,” he said then. “I like the fact that you’re not all pressed to have the whole relationship thing. You’re smart and you’re deep. Kinda morbid and pessimistically cynical sometimes. But I like you. And I don’t want to pressure you into seeing me again. But since you’re spilling your guts I figured I’d spill mine: I’d like to see you again.” He paused for a moment to survey my face. I saw in his eyes that something was playing at the corner of my mouth. I wiped it away. He laughed and then covered his mouth in embarrassment. I wasn’t embarrassed that was laughing at me. I was embarrassed that he had been looking at me in that way.
I realized then that I really didn’t have a soul. I could feel the emptiness in my chest again. I just sat there with nothing to say. I thought that maybe my soul had been revoked. Maybe I wasn’t fit to live anymore, so they took my soul. I thought I should tell him my whole life story then. I thought I should just lay out all of my vices on the table. So that he wouldn’t have to deal with them later. According to my theory, he would get excited or he would just cope. And if my calculations were correct, he wouldn’t get excited. Of course, it was most likely that he would just retract his “I want to see you again” statement and go on with his life.
So, I invited him to stop by Ted and Jackie’s on Friday night. “I want you to see the real me,” I told him.
“Is this a joke? The real you?”
“It’s not like I’ve been lying to you. But you’ll see. You’ll see.”
“Should I be scared?”
I didn’t respond. I didn’t know how to; I should’ve said, “I dunno,” but I didn’t. It wasn’t like people ran away screaming after they got to know me. It was more like they chose to disassociate themselves with me afterwards.
“I thought you were too good to be true,” he said softly. For a moment I wished I hadn’t set it up this way. I wished I weren’t going to run him off, but it had to be done. “But you can count me in,” he added.
A sense of relief passed across my shoulders and I shivered. At least, I thought it was relief. I wondered, then, if you could earn back your soul. Maybe mine was only at the soul-impound.
“Good,” I said. The words just kind of peeked out of my mouth. I didn’t even know they were there. I think they surprised Andrew too. He smiled and offered me another round of coffee. I took him up on his offer; I figured I would fight for my soul. And even if I could never get it back, then at least I could say I tried.
Maybe I did have a soul after-all. Or, at least, a heart.
Fuck you, J. Fuck you.
all the things in your head—
all the balding hallucinations.
I hope they died with you.
The mermaids never sang to you
Because you never sang to them.
