each time i try to finish this out, to leave a footnote that'll be an introduction, because of the way these things are structured, i get stalled. i'm not proud of any of this, but i erased so many things that i cared about, i feel like i need it here. or it will be something that never happened at all.

it's this dumb romantic notion i've got. i wanted the end of the movie, where you see the setting in panorama and you start to think about what it will be in a decade or five or a century. where the events you just saw become a story. stories by their nature get forgotten. most don't even get a proper telling, and i wouldn't even attempt that - even with the benefit of hindsight now. they get lived, and generally you have to be happy with just that.

i wanted it to be a long story, i wanted it to mean something. i'm never going to know, now, if it meant anything to him. at this point, i think about the nothing that happened, the fraction of a possibility, and i think that's gonna be the best story in my biography. 

i doubt i got the best of him, but he got the best of me. when i go running now, i think about him. when i write something. there's this half-conscious hope that if i managed to be impressive enough in some regard, if i managed to be special, something would click into place with karma or the universe and he'd reappear in my life. maybe material, maybe somewhere i could actually see him. it's a foolish hope but it's what i get by on now.

fool though i made myself, that's the one thing i regret. i lost all fucking hope and just shattered. and in terror that he'd see how awful and ugly i'd become, i stopped talking to him, i intentionally vanished. now i can't undo that. no matter where i look, he's gone. maybe because he was hurt or pissed. probably because he was just tired of me.

you can build something up in your head and know completely that your fantasy is your own responsibility. doesn't mean you stop wishing for it to come true. 

in that widescreen movie ending i see when i think of him, it came true, of course. and instead of pathetically sputtering out, we burn together and our ashes hit the wind and eventually disappear. just another secret history where they'll someday build a mini mall. when you think about it that way, what really happened doesn't make much difference. there's something a little beautiful about a lost chance floating away.

eulogizing ruth popper

She watches her own grey toes. In the dimness of the room they resemble gravestones, which is fitting. She sees double, uses that as a sad amusement, blocking out objects with her big toe and still seeing them. As if she weren't even here.

The fight in her is diminished. Maybe gone for good. She can't remember being wild, she only remembers trying to escape dull days by lying as still as possible, faking sick and making forgettable excuses in order to do nothing but stare at the ceiling. There was nothing she ever wanted. Now she only wants to be left alone. If alone is all she'll be, then rip off the pretense and call it that. Call it an old woman in a dirty bedroom, no longer cared for, no longer wanted.

Her skin is cool. It isn't sweaty or dry, no, it's even, it might be pleasant, but she wants out of it. If there's no one to feel it, what's the point. Maybe if she were still pretty, she'd be wanted, but she isn't pretty enough and so she's just invisible.

Like an idiot, like a fool, she keeps hoping for the door to open.

Part of her wants sex so badly it hurts. Some days it possesses her and she can't think of anything else, it's all she can do to keep from rubbing herself on furniture like some animal in heat, offering it up to any warm body that happens to pass. She doesn't go after it, though, because she doesn't want a shameful angry fucking in some dark closet. She wants to be free, she wants back what she was before she fell in love and found herself imprisoned by the spectre she dreamt up.

It wasn't real and she knows that. She wanted it to be something it was clearly never going to, and she's culpable, not him. Could she ever be angry at him? No. Yes. Only in those insomniac 3am moments when she realizes she will never touch him. And she thinks he made her fall in love, like a curse, and how cruel to do that to her.

Then she spends the next day faking sick, playing hooky, staring at her toes and knowing she built her own damned prison. She saves up courage and starves herself so she'll be able to slip through the bars. She hopes she didn't invent her one good chance, but she knows nothing else will ever live up to it. Even if she makes it out alive, she'll be a fugitive, forever running from the sadness she brought upon herself.

what if i could just go back

If I could start over and do better I could do it now, now I know what to do. My floor would still be real wood and the would-haves would be dids. My limbs and heart would be hard and my mind would not be melted mush. My fingers would still be lightning quick and I would still weave that magic with them.

It feels like going home. But my walls aren't mine now and I'll be going near, but it won't be any less too late.

What if I could go back and find you? Drag you out of the memories or sink myself back into them, I don't care. You were never there to find, I know it, it was just in my head, you were all that was in my head. That hasn't changed, at least, but it used to be a flush at the fire and now it's just anguish.

All the old days are better than the days we have now, and when the good days are gone, we were too busy to take any pictures. They just blow away like the dust of the cherry trees.

Feels like I could turn a corner or get off a plane and be right back where I made that wrong turn. Maybe it's better I can't, so I don't have to live with making the same mistake twice.

I live in a fire. I live on a stopped train full of chickens and cigarettes. The rain I catch in my hand is sap the trees sweat out and I am bleeding too. My skin's hot and dry, freckling at each burning pinprick.

Standing in the bathroom, my hand, for the first time, did not shake. And no one noticed. I am past catching and past caring. I just want it over as fast as it can be.

I'll be wearing a blue satin dress, I'll be trashy with my burned skin and battered heels. I'll be smoking in the shadows and I'll be waiting.

When the night comes I'll stop smiling. I'll turn my face to the wall and watch those old flames flare up, swallowing secret gasps in the dark as the rest of the world burns down and leaves just the ticket in my hand to the place that's always there. The place I never reach.

i dreamt about you last night. i've been crying all day.

When I do cry I always go in the shower because I don't want to have to atone for my sadness. I don't want to be asked what's wrong and I don't really like other people to know I'm crying in the first place. Because it's weak. Because I want to be harder than that, colder than that. But sometimes shit just gets you.

Third night in a row, and god knows what brought you back from a sore spot to a full-on specter haunting my nights again. the first night I was standing on a freeway overpass and I knew you were below me, about to pass under me. I knew because I was reading it as it happened in a notebook I had. Then I realized I was writing the words and just then you passed under me and were gone and you'd seen me but you were lost in the sea of cars.

The next night was the same thing, I was reading your words, not speaking to you. You slipped up, you said you lived in South Dallas, which is probably not even a real place.

And then last night you were standing there, a full person with a face and features and everything. You were wearing boots and jeans and your hair was cut short. It was grey, which may or may not be the case but I'd spent the night drinking with a guy whose haircut has that same silhouette and it's grey, so. Your face was red, you were flustered, you were moving in to my building. But you sat down, you started playing a game with my husband and I, and you relaxed. You had a normal face, friendly, handsome. But you were whispering to me behind a scorecard and your voice was like Tom Waits or Nick Cave, full of a rumble of frightening secrets, and the whispers became kisses.

I woke up to the same old day with the same old neighbors and that regret was a sharp as it was months ago.

I know you weren't in the old place, but you could plausibly be here as well as anywhere. Sometimes I'm walking up 1st, and I wonder if you could be one of the commuters stuck at the light, if this could be your town, if I could pass you every day and not know it. I wonder if I'd want you to see me and I still don't know. Though the shame that made me want to hide from you is still with me, I fucking miss you, and I miss being able to pretend there was going to be something more.

get me out of this

I can hear him in the hallway, making excuses to no one. When's he's angry, or frustrated, his voice gets nasal, whiny. He's doing the last part of the chores. I'm out of the way. But he wants me to know how much he's suffering. He was a suburban kid. His mom cleaned the house, made his food, wiped his nose so that now he thinks he's allergic to everything.

There's a crash, followed by an expletive he habitually misuses. Who misuses expletives, as though there weren't enough to go around? He sounds like a midwestern churchgoer, dancing around the idea of actually swearing.

I swear to god I do not want to hate him. He's a good person. And I know, believe me, that the things that drive me crazy about him are really just me, feeling trapped.

At the moment there is literally nothing to do. We have no money, we have no furniture. We have a corrupt notion of a home that is really just four walls, and the being trapped is less figurative than it's been since I married him. I stare at the walls and imagine I'm alone, imagine I can go out and walk the streets and see things without having to drag him behind me, whining because he has to go to the bathroom or blow his nose or wants another latte or can't find a job. But I don't leave because walking with him exhausts me and I know he'd never let me go on my own.

I don't want to hate him. I want both of us to get out of this before that happens. Instead I turn it inside out, swallow it. I see what this lie of a life is doing to me and try to just hate that instead.

out with the rain

Time to clean up, time to close up. It's raining drops and the petals drops carry. Any second the ocean is going to sweep down my street like a sweet breeze. On the floating pieces of my dismantled household I'll be washed downhill and out to sea, drift south and hope the couch I'm riding grows wheels to carry me inland.

Inside it's dark like the power was already off. The low clouds block out the sun, a blanket over my head where I am hiding while I still can. And the streets whisper, shush, shush.

They say everything is bigger there, no thin and wan ghosts of the sort who wander the streets here survive. But I'm going to be smaller, once I dry out. What used to be a home I've shaved down to a storage unit. Halved my regal wardrobe, sold what was too big to get my arms around. By the time the waves carrying me out erode me down to what I'm left with I'll be person-sized again. I'm scared that I've surrendered too much. That the current may just pull me down.