* * *
My first thought, on meeting you, was “He doesn’t look as stupid as Star says he is.” You were leaning against the front of the lab, smoking. Your face had a slightly ferrety look, your hair was slicked back, and you wore a long chain on his wallet. I didn’t know it yet, but over the coming year, I would get great amusement from watching you lurch and reel as the chain caught on your chair.
For the first few months we worked together, you were silent. Then one day you cracked, into the existing conversation, a joke so clever and so foul that I found myself looking at you for the first time all over again.
Soon we went to lunch together, awkwardly at first, and then more naturally. “This is no good, she is married,” tutted our Armenian boss. We protested our innocence-- “We’re just friends, Raffi.”
Cleaning day was the point of no return for me. After dousing the wax-covered floor in lighter fluid and setting it on fire, we snuck away, without clocking out, to the bar down the lock where we sat and talked and drank. I saw you backlit by the winter sun, your hair falling over your forehead, and I realized that I liked you way too much.
I took a picture on my phone to save the moment when my life changed forever. I lay in bed with the flu, weeks later, and looked at the picture, furtively, as a lifeline. Like a dream
* * *
Sunday, June 05, 2005
I dreamed of you last night....
Instead of running away to Mexico, like we joke about sometimes, we went to the Enchanted Forest. I'm sure you've never been there, being from California and all, but I went there a lot as a kid. It was different, of course, in the way of dreams, darker and more disturbing. We were the only ones there, besides the shadowy staff, and we wandered in a maze of half-finished exhibits with puddles on the floor until at last I could stand it no more and kissed you.
And then I woke up sweating, sick with longing and horror.
I very nearly kissed you Friday, at the end of the day. Everyone else had gone home, and it was just the two of us. You have no idea how I long for those occasions. I was watching your hands as you worked, fixing my mistakes. I studied your fingertips, blunted and square with the cuticles sneaking up the nails. I watched your hair fall over your forehead. I almost reached out to you.
I'm crying a little now, as I think of it. I never wanted to be this woman- fat, old, pathetic. I never meant to lose interest in my husband. I never intended to fall for a man who is so clearly unsuitable, who reminds me so much of my father, who doesn't even read, for christssake. I never meant to be here. So of course, here I am.
I wonder sometimes how much of this you're aware of. On the one hand, you are terrible at figuring out women. On the other hand, you've shown a knack for figuring out me. It's a dangerous game. I often wonder if you find me attractive. I have no idea what I look like anymore.
All I know is that I want you. I don't want to walk away from my life and ride off into the sunset- I could never abandon my child, and I don't even think we'd last very long as an actual honest-to-god couple. I just want to be able to put my hands on you, to kiss you, to sneak off on our lunch break to fuck in your car. I want you to call me on the weekends and tell me you miss me. I want the rush, the adrenaline, to feel alive again. I want to feel like I'm not so alone.
* * *
Things changed at the lab. Raffi, the sweet, naïve, fatherly Armenian, left for California. Rick, the provocateur, collected his porn, sabotaged the machines and left to marry his Muslim lawyer girlfriend. Soon it was the two of us against the world. I was not alone.
I snatched every moment I could to go to work. To escape from my collapsing marriage and troubled child, to watch the man I loved and hope that no one noticed. “This is just between you and me,” Michael in shipping said as he related a piece of gossip. “And I know that between you and me also includes Zach.”
I got up early, waiting for the bus as the first light seeped in. Sometimes I got to work to find you still there, working, from the night before. Every day we went to lunch, I drinking a vodka tonic, you taking quick hits of weed in front of an empty storefront. We talked of our childhoods, painful past and present relationships, and sometimes sat silently, filled with thoughts that could not safely be said. Once I asked you "Which one of your ex-girlfriends' hearts did you break? Which one still thinks "Damn you, Zach!"
"All of them," you said.
* * *
Tuesday, August 02, 2005
I'm so confused.
I decided that I want to stay married. I really, truly do. I know that I will never find a better man than my husband, and I know that if you and I ever were to try, god help us, to have a relationship, that we would end up horribly reenacting the hideous dramas of our childhoods, but none of this is any help in making me stop wanting to kiss you.
All the time.
When you get to work in the morning fresh out of the shower with your hair combed back, I want to kiss you. At lunch, when you have salad dressing on your chin, I want to kiss you. I want to kiss you when you're sighing over the new cases, taking a drag off my cigarette, talking to doctors on the phone, running your hand through your hair, when you're looking at me because you just heard something you know I'll think is funny, and most of all when you've got a thin dusting of acrylic on your cheekbone.
I wish I could tell you how cute you are. How sexy your hands are, with all the calluses and your knuckles just the right amount of knobbly. How adorable it is when you get agitated and your hair starts sticking up. How much I like your laugh.
You're not even that good looking.
I just don't know what's wrong with me.
* * *
Nearly a year after Cleaning Day, we were fired- a combination of a stupid prank and management’s maneuvering. A week later we sat in a different bar and I said, my heart beating wildly, “I love you. I can’t see you anymore.” “I understand,” you said. We did not speak for six months.
* * *
Friday, September 23, 2005
I don't know how to get through this night.
I wish so much I could call you. But if there's one thing I've learned, it's that you can't count on an Aries when the chips are down. You don't want to see me cry. It would just make you squirmy and then you'd run.
But I don't know how much more I can take. My life is getting so awful so fast. I don't know how to live through this, and I don't have anyone to turn to.
* * *
Years went by. I convinced myself that it was an aberration, merely a symptom of other conflicts. We met and parted, with various degrees of conflict, never speaking of that which drew us together and kept us apart. We went out to nightclubs and drank too much. We lied to ourselves, to each other, to everyone.
One night, again in the winter, after too many Cosmos, you sat down beside me in the booth. I leaned against your shoulder. You put your arm around me and trailed your fingers along my back. We sat like that for a long time, everything of seemingly endless significance, the remains of a sesame cracker clutched, forgotten, in my hand.
Later we would argue, and never resolve, who had moved first. However it happened, we were kissing, while around us our lives shifted into new configurations of uncertainty, fear. and hope. Later I would remember the toast I ordered and then was unable to eat, the newly naked and vulnerable look on your face.
At home, I lay on the couch for two weeks, as if fevered. I slept and ate very little, losing nearly ten pounds. When I arose again, my marriage was over.
* * *
Saturday, December 1, 2007
Is it possible for a memory to become grubby and indistinct from over handling? I know we talked for hours that night, but I only remember a half-hour's worth, tops. I want to remember every word.
I went out last night with my brother and his girlfriend. We ended up at a bar, and it was horribly noisy and crowded and they seemed to know half the people there. Small fucking town, I guess.
That's only the second time I've been out of the house since the last time I talked to you. Both times I ended up in bars smoking and staring at my drink while someone says "Shit, man, that sucks. I don't know what to tell you."
I don't know what to tell me either.
I can't believe how much it hurts. I want so badly to call you, to tell you I can't do this. I want to see you again, to kiss you one more time. I want it to not be over.
Underneath all the pain, in spite of it all, a tiny part of me is happy. I never, ever thought I'd hear you say you loved me. It's thrilling and dizzying. It means everything to me.
But then I remember that I may never hear it again, and I curl up into a ball and cry. And I'm irritated at you, which is totally unfair. I want you to love me, I always have, but finding out that you actually do has made my life REALLY FUCKING HARD.
* * *
Finally, it was a real relationship, open, acknowledged, honest. But it didn’t take long for things to go sour. I had never lived alone. You knew nothing else. I was raised with constant, heavy drama. You fled from any sign of emotion. I cried. You withdrew. We broke up. We got back together. Horrible things were said.
The next winter, always in winter, we broke up for good.
* * *
Monday, December 1, 2008
I’m feeling very anxious just now.
I’m alone in my apartment. I haven’t been really alone in days, and I don’t like it. I don’t quite trust myself.
I miss you too much. I want desperately to know that you haven’t given up on me, that when I come out the other side you’ll still be there. And I can’t know. It’s dreadful.
I haven’t any food in the house, except some oat biscuits that I’m too troubled to eat. Terrible stenches are coming from the garbage, and there’s cat shit on the floor, and I can’t bring myself to do anything about it. I want to cry. The hope I felt earlier is gone, replaced by a grim emptiness in where I imagine my stomach to be.
I know that I ought to be concerned with getting better for my own sake, for my son’s sake, for the sake, God help me, of the work I have yet to do. But all I care about is getting you back. I know it’s wrong, but I’m powerless to change it. I don’t feel the anguish I often do, when it feels as though my chest is going to rupture from the ache and the longing, but I feel a deep, grinding, hopeless resignation.
I’m not proud of any of this, you know.
* * *
I was going to buy berry pop-tarts, but then I saw the orange cream. I knew that they could be really good or really bad, and I would never know which until I bought them. From behind the counter, Mel called “You know you want to try them!” I did.
The night before, the man I slept with most often had told me that he couldn’t go on having sex with a woman that he didn’t love. I agreed that it was time for him to move on, and wished him well, even though I would miss him. The next morning I saw him posting in Casual Encounters. I was angry and hurt.
Seeking comfort, I called you and badgered you into letting me spend the night with you, watching TV and getting high. I took the pop-tarts with me.
The smoke filled my lungs, tasting faintly of mint and dirt. I coughed and gasped for breath. When the drug hit my bloodstream, I relaxed for the first time all week and reached for the first Pop-tart.
The filling was runnier than I expected, and it was a pale, almost sickly orange. To my surprise, the grainy sweetness tasted exactly like St. Joseph’s baby aspirin. I said so to you, but you had never known there was such a thing as baby aspirin.
We smoked and watched cartoons for hours, lulled into finally feeling at home in the world. Your hair had grown too long. Combined with the glasses that you seldom wore, it made you look every day of the forty you were about to turn. I ate my way steadily through the Pop-tarts, washing them down with lukewarm diet Coke. We talked about whether it would be okay to have sex with a cartoon dog if he talked, drove a car, and smoked cigarettes.
Eventually, we drifted to bed. I could still taste the gritty orange in the teeth I was too lazy to brush. I ran my hand under your shirt, marveling anew at how hairy your chest was. You slept, murmuring fretfully.
I leaned my head against yours and breathed in each of your exhalations. When awake, you held yourself back from me, determined to never fully commit. Asleep, unguarded, for a moment you were mine. The smell of your breath was sweet, despite the years of meth damage to your teeth. It was the same smell I discovered the night you first kissed me, the night that killed my ailing marriage. The acridity of your beloved weed was mellowed by the journey to your pores. It was sweet and woodsy, like sun-warmed trees.
You stirred briefly and kissed my shoulder as I sunk gratefully into sleep.
* * *
I dreamed last night that I finally found a real boyfriend. He looked like Paul Rudd, and was a painter who dabbled in musical theater. It was one of those mega-Hollywood stories—we had met somewhere and talked for hours, made a connection, and somehow lost track of each other. After some time, he tracked me down at a raucous but unfulfilling party. We hurtled into each other’s arms and I knew we would be together for a long time. He went off to get a drink, and as I woke up, I was looking for him to ask “Hey, it’s ok if I still sleep with Zach sometimes, right?”
I will move on, but you will always be with me.
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