Badinage for One
Well, I really don’t feel like doing this tonight. Like at all.
I should do drugs. I did carry around a box tonight with the single word COKE printed on it. And another one that read: BEER. Coulda been a fun night if it was more than just words. Story of my life.
I don’t have any clue how I’m going to get to 500 words without ending up complete gibberish. We just finished eating at Village Inn which was pretty quiet except for a group of seven or so self-righteous teens and some kind of parental supervisory unit and they were all talking about the immorality of abortion. My sister and I actually got up and got our food to go. It was ridiculous because not only were they full of asinine confidence about the moral state of the soul and when conception happens (all this decided at the Village Inn, alert the media) – they were abrasively loud.
So tonight – it’s late at my crepes benedict feel like a wheelbarrow full of bricks got dumped in my stomach. I don’t know what to talk about. We can talk about tomorrow and freedom and fireworks and hanging out and being rad at the farmers’ market. Or some variation thereof. I’m not great at plying my words tonight. Too tired and guilty. It doesn’t grease the wheels.
Stupid man continued to be stupid. I don’t know what he’s thinking. This kind of overweening praise only serves to make him look…well, overweening and desperate and obnoxious. At least to me. I don’t need every time I see him to be complimented on how I have it together, or how I handle everything so well, or my overall aplomb or how I’m looking good or how if everything gets better with age in a few years I’ll be fucking Gandhi (that was my paraphrasing as I’m sure the actual wording was too lame to exist on this blog.) It’s creepy. It’s just creepy.
And it makes it difficult for me as I’m wildly in love with the voice of another man with the same name. Yes, wildly. His voice. Yes. It’s this David Duchovny-esque monotone and it sets my soul aflame. This is a dangerous conflation of sign and signified. They really couldn’t be more different except that both are convinced that I’m professionally more professional than I’d ever profess or than could ever be reality. Yeah, say it three times fast. And one has this tragic conception (it doesn’t begin with the sperm and the egg, kids, it begins with the dolt and the flapping jaw. SHUT. IT.) that I might turn to him and bat my fucking eyelashes and give him some sort of satisfaction. The other is oblivious to the fact that I may have saved his freaking life, that I bring him cake because I’m in love with his voice and I want to hear him talk about, well, everything in that sardonic manner that reduces everything to a pithy, dismissive soundbite. He wasn’t in tonight so I had to give cake to the semi-rastafarian chick who ran the desk and look over my shoulder in despair to see if he was hiding in the racks. Not so. Another thing let go for another day.
Tomorrow I’m bringing my Decameron, my poetry, my Ipod, a pen and paper, maybe my laptop and a winning smile to our farmers’ market and see what I can pick up. If the nice guy is there, as expected, the great plan involves staring at him until both of us are really uncomfortable. I didn’t say it was a good plan…just a great one.
The man in hospice yet lives.
Enchantee
There’s a boy. It always starts with a boy, doesn’t it?
Makes me feel like I’ve spent my life holding my breath.
Everyone’s having babies and married. Everyone’s happy. Makes me feel like I’ve come to school naked. Forgot to take a class for a whole semester. Like I’m still using school analogies when I graduated over three years ago. Like I’m a fool.
I’m running around trying to pretend that there’s no reason to make eyes at a boy. That I don’t even want to. And I don’t even want to. He’s not even anything more than a checklist of cleared hurdles. Manageable liabilities. A fine young man. Too fine, really. He’s not a layabout. Not a spelling champion. Not secretive. But he touches everyone but me. Strokes them. Rubs their shoulders. We just nod hello with a gravity as if we are one another’s graveyard, we know there’s no reason we can’t laugh, soften, smile, but habit, you know? It’s a misbehavior somehow and inappropriate and starting something there’s no reason to start. Maybe no desire.
I think I only fixate because I know how to do it. Oh, so well. I know how to glow with a want that means as much to me as world peace. I know how to watch him in a room and fume when he drinks a couple beers and leaves. I know how to tabulate every other girl in the room’s score on a scale of yes and no. I know how to find myself lacking. I know how to screw up my face and stare in the mirror. I know how to make grand assertions about how I can fix this. I know how to stand completely still and feel as though my cells are reaching out against my will, my body begging for touch, attention, the grace of a lingering eyeball, anything, and finding no respite, leave completely numb and chilled and unmoved and everything that rose is choked back and cordoned off and the spills on Aisles 4 and 9 are mopped up and whatever memory there was turns tea-colored and pinned into a scrapbook.
I sometimes feel like I do this because as pathetic as it is, whatever wretch it is slowly and surely turning me into, it’s a path well-tread. It is safe and regret is some other girl’s problem on some other day. It’s better than the alternatives of both failure and victory, of being chained by the results. It’s better than finding out you’re just a nice guy who can’t spell who likes to go hiking and help people and maybe you like me or maybe you don’t and then, there we are. We’ve chosen our own adventure and page 53 or page 89, either way, we wind up dead.
Still.
We’re the only two young ones. Unattached ones. Good-natured ones.
I know I’m supposed to ignore that.
I know I’m supposed to ignore that, toss back my head, flirt disaffectedly, and not feel like you’re waiting for something better. Even if that’s exactly what I’m doing, too.
