Tuesday, July 22, 2003

It's been way too long since I posted something here. I've sort of assembled a book of things that I'm not too embarrassed by to let other people read them all. I'm going to try to to exhume a few poetic corpses and do a little slashing, but I think an anthology of my poetry and prose not related to my novel will soon be forthcoming. In the meantime, take a gander at this slab o' words, which I wish was a piece of fiction. But you know what they say about truth. I don't think the person in question has ever read this one. Don't get too depressed, though.
********

It’s Not Important

I said “I love you” as the sun came up, a reply I neither expected nor craved. She simply exclaimed “Oh, Jesus!” and her sigh punctuated the air. It was followed up with a disgusted look, then she rolled away and wouldn’t let me touch her. I asked her what it was that was wrong and she said flatly “it was nothing.” But nothing always means something, it’s just something you don’t want to know.

She stopped staring at the wall, but not to look at me. Instead she gazed up at the stars; the phosphorescent ones stuck to my ceiling... placed there by my brother, when he was much younger, before I left the house and lost the lease on my room.

We’d shared many moments in the course of winter months, which I’d taken to mean that there would be more. I had already lost my heart to her, confessed how I felt, told her I’d been trying to play the hand I’d been dealt, but by her response I could tell she wasn’t impressed. She told me she didn’t love me and doubted that she ever could. I know I heard what she said as her eyes and mine were locked in painful embrace, but my heart and ego were plugging their ears.

She was crying up a tempest when she made me leave that night. The rain fell hard on the hood of my car as I drove speeding home in pain, screaming along to the Get Up Kids, punching the ceiling with my fist, wondering if I would see her with the same eyes again.

My feelings grew stronger and the days just got longer, no matter how hard I tried to fight it. Despite the things she said and her poker face, I kept thinking I could beat the house. When she told me of another, whom she wanted for a lover, I figured she was just confused. After all the (mis)adventures and the times we had kissed, when she said she missed me I assumed her mind was made up.

She never said she loved me, she made that painfully clear. She always insisted that we were just friends, something I never truly believed to hear. It seems like every time she told me something else that should have stopped me dead, we just slept together again. Third time was the charm, the one that did her harm; she quickly drew the bath so she could smoke and cry. She intimated that she missed him, though it was me with whom she’d been, and my heart rammed into my intestinal wall.

Despite all the damage she caused, I can’t really blame her for mistakes that I made. Follies committed in the nature of love - that human weakness for connections, for ties that bind. I knew it was wrong, but I could not extricate my heart from the wreckage-to-be, even though my head kept telling it that she won’t be the best one I find.

She rocked me like a hurricane then docked me like a dinghy, left me floating, tethered to the dock, by a string wrapped around her pinky. I’m cutting it, I’m cutting it, now I’m hopelessly adrift in the middle of an emotional ocean... godfuckingdammit.


No comments: