musings.on.writing

I was just jotting down some ideas today...thinking about what writing does to people...what it does for me... and here's just a few lines...

words stroking ears
distilling,
or enriching
everlasting reverberations
of lives,
of loves
burned,
or melted
onto the mind's canvas
for a later show

magnum opus. the epilogue.

The marriage to Peter Pan was no fairy tale.

And as I danced with him at our wedding to the same haunting song that had not long ago opened up a new world of possiblility that night on the hardwood floors of my paramour's asylum, I felt like a prisoner.

Everything that had once been, inevitably, resumed before the ink on the marriage license had even had time to dry. The once wistful and starry-eyed girl became an iconoclastic barbarian, deconstructing and devouring each relationship that crossed her threshold. However, as the years passed, I grudgingly lowered my mallet, and succumbed to marriage once more.

The neighborhood in which we bought our house was every bit of the cookie-cutter image I had laid out in my youth. Tightly nestled houses flanked the street, fences and garages in tow, and a slate-gray sidewalk meandering through this small splinter of heaven.

On a blustery afternoon mid-year, I attended a conference for work being held at a local convention center. As we all lined up to receive our badges and seating arrangements, I glanced out the window at the other drones filing in. I was alone, and I was hoping to find someone I knew to pass the time with.

Beyond the tinted glass and the ornamental shrubbery, above the masses of people, I recognized a figure. Almost as if with a spotlight turned to illuminate the masterpiece of the gallery, there was my David; my sculpture of what I thought should be good and true in a man loomed only a short distance away through a thin sliver of glass.

I fought hard with my heart. Keep pumping, please, for the love of God, I pleaded. It had been six years since Matt and I has spoken the goodbyes that we both presumed to be our last. I hadn’t once imagined our eyes would rest on the other's face again, and my vicious heart was clearly protesting.

When I entered the conference room, I sat down for a moment to try to get my wits about me. What if he doesn’t recognize me? Should I speak to him? What if he screams at me and tells me to ‘get away you wretched fool of a woman’?

He was in the refreshments line. He looked just as I remembered. Tall, slender. His head still shaven, glasses still framing the eyes that had once thrown countless longing and seemingly unfeigned glances over the arches and plains of my body. I knew well the chest that rested underneath the blue button-down shirt. My hands had walked and memorized its lines once, as if they had some intuition that their journey might be short and unsustainable.

If I was going to talk to him, this is when it would have to be. There was assigned seating, and some might consider it in bad taste to catch up with your former visionary-dream of a lover during a seminar speech. I gathered up every bit of courage I could muster from down deep in the bowels of the microscopic cells that composed my body, walked up to him, and as if out of habit or longing, softy brushed his elbow.

“Hey there. I just thought I’d be the one to come over and say hello,” I stammered with a slight chuckle.

He looked trapped. “Oh. Wow. Hey. H-how are you doing?”
“I’ve been okay. What about you? Still at the old office?”
“I’m good. Yeah, I’m still there. And you?” he asked, still sounding stunned.
“I’m over at the branch on Marianne Avenue now. I’ve been there for about five years.”
“No way,” he said, looking away. I had always loved the way he glanced off in the distance when he was nervous. “I just applied for a transfer there.”

Somewhere, I imagined a cloven-footed imp checking off a list of infernal plots hand-crafted just for me.

“Uh-uh,” was all I could manage.
“Yeah. How do you like it over there?” he questioned.

I think I said something about the office manager being a bit of a knuckle head (and I’m sure I used that ridiculous word) but how generally speaking the place was really exceptional—I can’t really be sure, because at that point I was running on pure cracked-out adrenaline force like a jet coasting in with no engines. I didn’t know what else to say.

Inside, I was sceaming. I was wrong! God, was I wrong! You were perfect to me...you still are. Take me away like you did before. Please, I swear I won't be an idiot again...

But instead, conquered by rational thought, I chose to say another goodbye.

“Well, it was good to see you,” I said.
“You, too,” he finished. “Maybe I’ll see you around.”

The only way this was possible was for him to indeed get transferred to my office, but after six years, I think we both knew this wasn’t the place to consider the repercussions that event might have.

Flushed, feeling a bit faint and completely exhausted, I sullied my way back to my table and took my seat. As if Moses himself had been present in this very room, the sea of faces between where I sat and where he was soon parted, creating a clear line of vision between our respective positions.

In the course of the blessedly lengthy speech, I did not refrain from more than a few stolen glances. And, each time I looked in that direction, Matt's face was directed at mine. I thought surely this was coincidental, but I wasn’t taking this situation lightly. I had to, I needed to talk to him again. Before the speech ended, I devised another excuse for conversation.

He was alone at his table when the keynote speaker finished his closing remarks, and people again began to descend on the refreshments table. Trying awkwardly to seem casual, I walked up to where he was sitting.

“So, I was just thinking that if you want me to, I could put in a good word for you with the office manager,” I said, revealing my clever conversation starter.
“Sure. That’d be great. I just don’t know how things are going to play out at the office and I’ve heard the Marianne branch is great…”
“Yeah, it really is,” I interrupted, accidentally sounding a little too eager.

Maybe he noticed, so he changed the topic of conversation.

“So where are you living now?”
“Brookline,”
“Really, I live in Brookline, too,” he said, seeming amused at the coincidence. “Which neighborhood?”
“Autumn Park,” I replied.
“No way.”
“Yeah, why?”
“I live in Autumn Park.”

What had turned out to be an already eventful evening, suddenly morphed into something of a cross between winning the lottery and the apocalypse.

All I could say was, “That’s funny."
“Which part do you live in? I mean, which street?”
“I live off of Ackers Avenue.”
“Mmm…” he truly seemed perplexed. “I’m off of Ackers and Loveland.”
“That’s like six houses down from me,” I stammered.
“I know. That's wild.”

Just then, a vanilla-looking woman, slightly shorter than me who I noticed had been sitting next to Matt during the speech, came back and took her seat at the table.

“Oh, Valencia, this is my wife, Megan. Megan, this is Valencia. She was an intern at the office a while back.”

I was waiting for the film crew to come out and let me know which painfully intrusive reality TV show I was being punked by, and where the hell was the money I deserved for being placed in this festering boil of a situation.

Stunned, but fast on my feet, I quickly recovered and reached my hand out to hers, while I offered a pleasant, “Nice to meet you.”
“You, too,” she offered back politely.

I can tell you this much—if I had seen my husband conversing with someone like me when I wasn’t around, the gloves would be off and the claws would’ve come out. However, she continued by courteously asking where I was working now.

“She’s actually over at Marianne Avenue,” Matt answered for me. “She’s gonna put in a good word for me over there.”
“Well, that’s great,” she said.

Instantly, I could tell Megan was an extremely congenial and pleasant woman. While not exactly the replica of the inconceivable beauty I would’ve selected for Matt, she seemed to fit the personality profile in a sickly-sweet, agreeable sort of way.

My domain was conquered.

“Well. It was good seeing you, Matt. Megan, it was nice to meet you. I’ll be sure to let the manager know you’re up for that transfer,” I said, suddenly humbled.

“Thanks. I’d really appreciate it,” he said, waving goodbye as I turned to make my way to the door.

On my way home, I stopped and buried myself in the dark corner of a coffee shop to recompose and gather my meandering thoughts. As I allowed the steaming cup to scald my weakened hands, questions burned and tugged on my muddled mind: Why does this matter to me now? Am I still just eternally grateful for the handful of weeks we spent together? Am I once again feeling the life well up inside of me—was it all just a fantasy that I felt and saw the picture of everything I’d imagined as a girl in all of its Norman Rockwell perfection? I just didn’t know. I still don’t know.

I sulked for the better part of an hour, languishing there, feeling my heart roaring and tearing at my rib cage like a crazed, caged animal starving and struggling for a piece of flesh just outside of its reach. Then, the grim reality of life set in. There could be no fulfillment of that hunger. Mistakes and newly imposed boundaries would leave the beast inside thrashing and hungry. Once made, decisions change the course of the reality in which we live, and the distance of road we had once traveled together had been irrevocably forked.

After about an hour, I made my way home. I turned down the streets that had now become familiar in my scripted life, but on which I was still a wandering gypsy. Except this time, I noticed a house on the corner that had once blended in, just a few rows down, where a pickup truck—the same pickup truck I had ridden in dozens of times—sat parked in the driveway. A fence encased the backyard; the house was blue with black shutters, and a beautifully manicured lawn boasted itself out in front. It wasn't all that different from my own home.

Then I realized why it had been so easy to overlook this object of my longest imaginings—it was the same portrait harbored in the deepest corners of my mind, the one I had envisioned countless times, with one exception. I was not able to recognize it because, as the fates would have it, the divine artist—the one who meticulously and purposefully crafts such masterpieces of the mind and of existence—seemed to have decided on a more suitable female subject for his magnum opus.

magnum opus

“This is just what I feel like I have to do.”

The rain was now beginning to fall in torrents outside of his house as I reached up and stretched my arms around his shoulders for what would be our last goodbye. As I let go, I glanced up at his face one last time; I wasn’t quite sure what I saw there. Hatred, sadness, empathy—they all seemed to be mangled up there in the raindrops that criss-crossed his face. With a final half-smile, I climbed into my getaway car, the one which would take me back to the home where I belonged. It would be as if we had never known each other.

***

It had been an ill-fated liaison right from the start.

Intern. Associate. The entire affair screamed Clinton administration within the confines of the small office where I was finishing out my internship for school.

Regardless, for the expanse of three sensational months during my last semester of college, I experienced one of those transcendental winks of time which hurls you forward into life at blazing speeds and then recklessly careens off of the straight highway you had chosen for yourself—these encounters, while intoxicating and life-affirming, leave an indelible skid mark on life’s journey that can never be paved over.

At twenty-three, I was finishing up my college career and preparing for graduation. At the time, my stoner on-again, off-again fiancé was wrapped up in the clutches of his own mind and his feeble struggles to kick a porn addiction. It wasn’t the weed I minded so much; but when your fiancé would rather spend a quiet evening alone in his office with Tiny Tina from Tokyo than with you, well, let’s just say you begin to question your own self worth—which is pathetic.

In the recesses of my mind, my first encounter with Matt plays out like a movie scene—you know the one—The new temptress of the office moves in slow motion through the rows of cubicles, hair blowing, form-fitting silk shirt, sculpted calves stretching out from underneath her pencil skirt and melting down into her kick-ass stilettos. The office hunk, upon seeing this vision, drops his pencil and clutches at his tie, tugging desperately as to get the blood flowing again to his….brain. Here’s where the record scratches.

In reality, I was just a slightly fetching, idealistic college intern looking to wrap up this façade of a semester and start what I considered to be “real life.” I had gotten myself into this self-imposed engagement as another way of completing my idyllic scenario of what I was supposed to do after college. But my pseudo fiancé and I weren’t exactly the poster couple for post-collegial, marital bliss.

When I met the wanker in college, he was a twenty-six year old sophomore waiting tables and stoned out of his gourd at any given moment. As a naïve nineteen year old, to me, he was a vision: older, hip, and a source of free bud. However, as time went on, I grew up, and Peter Pan did what Peter Pan does—lusted after mind-altering fairy dust and skinny chicks in short skirts that were flyin’ as high as he was.

So, when I saw Matt on the first day of my internship, standing outside of his cubicle with his steady job and khaki pants, I suddenly had a new vision of hip. Closer to my own age, twenty-eight, Matt was a guy many women would put in their “moderately attractive” column. But to me, he was the very statue of David; hair-shorn, tall and slender with the energetic gait of the soccer players I had tousled with in my heyday, he was all I could see for the first few weeks of my stint in the office. Each day, I walked past his office while he stood outside and chatted with co-workers before the day began. We politely made awkward eye contact and gave the congenial half-smile to acknowledge each others’ existence, and then I slipped away into my cubicle to deconstruct each look he had given me.

About two weeks into the job, I was on my way home for the day, and he was leaving his office for a meeting. While admittedly, I had tried before to time my departure to coincide with his, today’s encounter was by complete chance.

“So you’re from the college, right?”
“Yeah, I’m just finishing up…getting ready to graduate,” I managed to choke out.
“I’m Matt. I work in the Research and Technology Department.”

I noticed quickly that he was walking exceptionally close to me. I could feel the edge of his sweater brushing up against my purse. The current of electricity that pulsed through me was unnerving, yet vaguely familiar.

“I’m Valencia. But most people just call me Val.” I hated to be called Val.

As we made it to the doors of the conference room where his meeting was being held, he casually sort of brush-tapped my elbow with his notepad and said, “Well, Valencia, I guess I’ll see you around.”
“You bet.”

I felt like a verbally challenged idiot.

I went home that evening, and after some green tea and a warm, sudsy bath, settled myself into bed early to rehash my brief rendezvous. Peter Pan wasn’t an issue; he was tripping the light fantastic in his room of debauchery, so I had the bed all to myself. As sleep began to touch the outer fringes of my mind, I subconsciously felt a tremor run across my body. What was I thinking? Where did that come from? Briefly emerging from the onset of sleep, I noticed my right arm was asleep and shifted it from the position where it had been tenderly cradling my elbow.

By the following morning, our normal dose of a smile and a nod turned into a “good morning” and, by day’s end, we found ourselves again in a chance meeting, sitting beside each other at the monthly, management mandated, staff social.

As the less timid members of the staff engaged in a tawdry rendition of Springsteen’s “Born to Run,” our conversation stoically maintained the general ebb and flow of any first date. He was from New Jersey, and had come here to attend college, where he subsequently became entrenched in the town through work and his semi-dependent roommate. I regaled him with my love of music, despite the fact that I hadn’t been able to carry a tune or play a note my entire life. The discussion was, at best, a dabble in mediocrity; there were no in-depth deliberations on life or love, there was just something… comfortable…about the evening. And, when making my way back from the restroom, he stood up to greet me upon my return, a long-hidden pang of hunger swept through the pit of my stomach and up into my throat.

Towards the end of the night, when our colleagues were fully blitzed, and the karaoke event which, much to our gratification had quickly reached and surged past its zenith, ended, Matt nudged me and nodded at an older woman from the office in navy pumps and red lipstick who was still lingering at the bar.

“That’s Deidre Riley. She set me up on a date with her daughter tomorrow afternoon. We’re supposed to go watch the Nets play the Celtics at Ramshackle’s Bar.”
He quickly added, looking up coyly at me through his stylish spectacles, “I’m not exactly looking forward to it.”
“Why’s that?” I asked, trying to seem aloof to the news.
“I was kind of hoping to go with you…but, you see, I agreed to it late last week…before….”
“Damn. So you’re sayin’ I missed my shot, huh?”

The vixen in me, which had sat dormant for years, stirred inside. I began to taste the bitterness of jealousy, again. In my mind, there was no way some tramp daughter of a red lipstick-wearing karaoke junkie was going to commandeer this man that easily.

“Well, it’s not actually a date so much as a ‘meeting in the same place’ sort of thing. There will be other people there that I know, so, if you came along, I don’t see what the harm would be,” he pondered.

The only harm, I thought, is gonna be to her ego. I couldn’t be for sure, but judging by the looks of her mother, who was smiling and winking back to Matt with her pillow-shaped ass stuffed into her khaki skirt, I thought that I pretty much had this one in the bag. He wasn’t yet aware of the ferocity he had unleashed within my long-neglected body.

“Ah, well then I think I’ll join you,” I said with a slight smile.
At the sound of this, he gently bit his lower lip and grinned back.
“And maybe we can do something, afterward? Just us?” he offered.
I had him.
“Of course,” I said putting my hand up to my chin. “It’s my Saturday off.”

***

Knowing plenty well that it was indeed not my Saturday off at my part-time job, as I left the restaurant, I frantically dialed the number of the store where I worked selling women’s shoes.

When Aisha, another associate, answered the phone at the store, I quickly interrupted.

“Ellen…let me talk to her.”

Ellen was my Kashi-eating, tree-hugging, Buddhist manager who also happened to be an unparalleled friend. She was sympathetic to my plight with the pseudo fiancé and was always on the lookout for a man who was more suitable, as she put it, to my “spiritual needs.”

“This is Ellen,” her voice chirped through the phone.
“Ellen, it’s Val. I hate to do this to you, but I need someone to cover my shift tomorrow.”
“Dude, you know I’ve got that film festival tomorrow…”
“I know, I know. I would never do this to you, but it’s important. You know that guy, the one I told you about from the intern thing I’m doing? Well, he asked me to go watch a basketball game with him.”
“You hate basketball,” she protested, “and, excuse me for mentioning, but you’re somewhat engaged by the way.”
“Come on, you know we’re on a break. And I swear Matt is the guy you’re always trying to find for me. Please? Remember that time you lost your underwear at the bar and I let you…”
“Okay…” she conceded.

I knew she would give in. She was too good to me.

Her response was followed by a deep sigh. “I can split the morning up with Aisha. But I would like to state for the record that if you think for one second that you’re gonna start watching basketball miss priss then…”
“You’re the best, love ya,” I said interrupting and snapping my cell phone shut. Thank god for returned favors.

I woke up early the next day and lingered around my apartment. I was draped in anticipation, but felt completely helpless, at the same time. For the better part of four years, the seductive sex-kitten of my youth had been tamed by my unresponsive, stuporous significant other. I had the feeling of a courtesan struck with amnesia.

To calm my nerves, I went for a run down the trails that snaked around the lake behind our apartment. The pseudo fiancé had smoked up this morning and set out to work at his $2.13 per hour career, so there was no need for gauche explanations of how I would be spending my day.

When I returned from my run, I peeled off my athletic gear and took a long look in the full-length mirror at myself for the first time in what seemed like a lifetime. Cheeks flushed and body glistening with sweat, a vision of the woman I was capable of being suddenly came to light. Someone...Matt...had obviously noticed me. The visage of the woman in the mirror must not be the walking calamity I had come to know. The pseudo fiancé must be smoking crack out of that pipe he keeps in there, because I was certainly nothing to be ignored. While not a vision of Venus, I was astutely aware that the hills and valleys of my body had unmistakably been place exactly where they should have been. Did he actually think that his pot-bellied, thirty-something, weed-smoking self was missing out on something by having me?

Invigorated and suddenly eager for this charade of a basketball game to be over, I showered, and excavated my drawer for the underwear all women save for occasions such as these. I dawned my tightest black pants, my lowest-cut sweater, and my highest-heels. Sauntering out of my apartment, I caught a glimpse of a long-haired, brunette someone that I used to know in the French doors that led to the porch—a recovering amnesiac—a courtesan inamorata.

***

Ample clouds of ashen smoke overcast the dingy bar that sat on the outskirts of campus. Taller than most men there, my silver lining was easy to spot. He was leaning casually against the bar in jeans and a black polo when he caught sight of me just as I was heading over to meet him.

“Everyone’s over here,” he said, meeting me halfway.

As he ushered me over to the tables beside the excessively large television, I could feel his hand positioned just slightly over the small of my back. Fuel to the fire.

Beside two empty chairs sat my condemned competition. Her hair was tucked neatly back in a matronly bun, and I could’ve sworn I’d seen that blue button-up sweater-tank duo in my mother’s Spiegel magazine.

“Allison, this is Valencia. She’s an intern at the office,” he voiced over the boisterous crowd.

Rather than actually looking at me, she was eyeing my chair, which was being pulled out for me. She managed to utter a ‘hello’ as I sat down. Obviously, the same had not been done for her.

The game was on, in every sense of the word. After ordering the Heineken, my college beer of choice, I situated my body towards my new center of gravity, and took in the revelers surrounding us, who were gawking up at the game on television.

Soon, Allison, Matt, and I found ourselves in a conversational ménage a trois. Although, no matter what topic of discussion she brought to the table, his attention was perpetually affixed to me. The dialogue was pleasant enough, but the further the conversation progressed, the less I could recall of it, because without warning, I felt his leg settle next to mine under the table. Shortly after that, his hand was on my knee, and after that, spoils to the victor, Allison excused herself by saying she had some work to do at home. Slightly plagued by guilt, I had to give the poor girl credit for her efforts; she just wasn’t aware of the unrelenting, long-subdued madness this unsuspecting man had brought upon himself, and her by association, simply by acknowledging my existence.

***

He shared a three-bedroom brick house not far from the office and close to campus with the same roommate he had had in college. It was a somewhat symbiotic relationship; Matt cooked dinner for Trevor and his rodeo-loving girlfriend periodically, and in exchange, they kept their sexual escapades confined to Trevor’s room. I parked my car in the driveway behind his pickup truck while presumptive visions of a possible conventional life danced in my head. It couldn’t actually be possible that a man who caused a feverish pulse of electricity through my dead-battery of a libido was also a non-drug addict, home-owning deity of domestic-ism. But it wasn’t only possible. It turned out to be all that and more.

A barrage of whimsical and endearing images clouds my memory from that first night together. When the steam from the boiling spaghetti noodles he was cooking that night fogged up his glasses, I took them off and wiped them dry. As we lounged after dinner on the white couch that sat atop the worn hardwood floors, we sipped red wine and listened to a CD of David Gray that Ellen had made for me as a “weapon for seduction.”

Unlike our prior idle banter, these conversations took on a more profound tone; he let me in on his tendency to love pernicious women who were inclined to love the nightlife more than the quiet nights he chose to spend at his humble abode. He cautiously imparted questions that cut down deeply to my roots, and surprisingly, it felt so good to open-up and reveal the dark underbelly of my fears and to remember the dreams that stirred in my core. I couldn’t remember the last time anyone had bothered to ask—and as the upbeat tempo gave way to the deep bass of the piano in my favorite song—he took the half-empty glass from my hand and placed it on the sofa table.

That was the first time I felt his hand; he took mine and pulled me up gently to stand beside him in the center of the room, before placing my arm around his neck. I pulled the other up to join its counterpart and we stood there wrapped up in the novelty of each other. If I could capture the bated breath, the music that floated above us in the atmosphere, the burn of that first kiss—in a painting—it would be a scene to rival the fields of Elysium. The years of neglect and mind-numbing hallucinogenics had cost me a fragment of who I was; I’d been dead. This simple human contact set my callous mind and body stirring, and when the last note of the song was played, I surrendered to the woman I had rediscovered that day, and the door of his room clicked shut behind us.

***

Weeks passed like days rushing towards eternity, and many of them were spent the same. When we left work, Matt and I played house. After love-making, we took long, restorative naps. We made runs to the supermarket. He would make dinner, and I kept his kitchen clean. I regularly stocked the vase on the kitchen table with rainbow-colored Gerbera daisies, and he held me close, as if I might float way, when we watched television until it was time to sleep. The ins and outs of this counterfeit life were luminous and arresting to us both. It was not even two weeks into our tryst that he nobly offered the third room of his house to me as a way to escape my nefarious situation with my pseudo fiancé, Peter Pan. I ruefully declined, citing that our co-workers at the office had already started to throw accusatory stares at as when we left the building beside each other on most afternoons. Getting involved with an intern could possibly cost Matt his job, but he didn’t seem to mind. He was genuinely just as swaddled in my existence as I was with his. So it continued that way, until two days before my internship would be completed.

That inauspicious evening, Matt and I lay in bed discussing his hometown back in New Jersey; he somewhat missed it and its old-fashioned charms, and he had always seen himself there, raising a family. I lay there shrouded in happiness, contemplating this as our potential dual-destiny, when I heard the buzzing of my phone on the nightstand. It was just past midnight.

“Hello?” I answered sleepily when I recognized the number.
“Val, it’s Ellen. You’d better get home. He called me. He knows you aren’t with me.”
“W-what? How?” I pondered. I knew she would never have given that information up freely.
“When you wouldn’t pick up your phone, he called mine. He insisted I put you on the phone. I told him you didn’t want to talk…but he just…”

I had gotten in the habit of turning my phone on vibrate, because of late, Peter Pan was growing increasingly aware of my absence, and wondered where I was spending my nights.

“Okay. Thanks, Ellen,” I muttered, snapping my phone shut.

Matt sensed the worry in my voice immediately. He was so good at that.
“What’s wrong?” he cajoled.

As I quickly pulled on my clothes and gathered the random belongings I had strewn across his room, I couldn’t bring myself to look at him.

“Nothing…it’s just that…I’ve got some stuff to deal with at home is all.”
“I kinda thought this would be your home soon…in a couple days, when you’re not an intern anymore, there won’t be anything we need to hide.”

I had never been punched in the stomach, but I was fairly certain that the pain that lurched forward deep in the pit of my gut, which welled up in my throat at his words, was a comparable experience. He hadn’t said it to be disagreeable, he’d said it in earnest, and that was what tortured me.

“C’mon,” he pleaded from the bed, reaching for my hand. “There’s no reason for you to go back there. Just wait ‘til tomorrow, and I’ll go over there with you. We’ll get your things and we’ll bring you back here.”

His sincerity was more than I could bear, and without the proper emotion to convey what I was feeling. I snapped back at him.

“You don’t understand…me and him…I’ve been with him since I was just nineteen…I kind of owe him an explanation. Don’t you understand?” There was venom in my voice.

He rescinded. “Yeah, of course. Right. Do what you gotta do,” he paused briefly, “If I were in his position, I’d want the same from you, too.”

Without another word, I withdrew from the safe trappings of my sanctuary, and sped away—my black heart fading in with the blackness of the night.

***

My pseudo fiancé was sitting at the table in the dining room of our shared apartment when my key hit the doorknob and begrudgingly began to turn. He stood up and came at me as I entered the door. He was only an inch or two taller than me, but carried a considerable strength which I knew well under his beguiling sheath of pudginess.

I had taken to leaving notes saying that I was staying with Ellen on the nights I had been with Matt; it was just easier than explaining the truth. I spied my latest note crumpled pathetically on the floor.

“Where have you been? And don’t even tell me with Ellen because I’ve already talked to her,” he fumed.

“I was with a friend from the office. I stopped by to see him before I was headed over to…”

“Him? Is that where you’ve been going at night? I’ve known you haven’t fucking been at Ellen’s for a long time. I had one of the guys from the restaurant swing by her place the other night—your car wasn’t there. I’ve been worrying my ass off wondering what the hell you’ve been doing!”

What had been remorse quickly turned to enmity at his pretentious words, and I fired back.

“Worried? You? About me? I can’t even believe you noticed I was gone! Half the time you’re walled up in your room, high as a kite, and jerking off to God knows what on that fucking computer. And, by the way, you forget that you were the one who agreed that maybe we needed to spend some time apart before we got married.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t mean that you should go off and screw any bastard who showed up. Who the hell is this guy? I’m gonna kill him,” he fumed.

Carefully, as to protect Matt from any incendiary drama at work, I slowed and lowered my voice.

“Who he is irrelevant here. What did you expect from me? You never touch me. You’ve barely looked at me for the past couple of years. This guy comes along and shows me some attention, and I just want to hang out with him—to have someone who will listen.”

“To listen? You never asked for me to talk to you. For God’s sake all you had to do was ask,” he retorted. “What do you wanna talk about? C’mon let’s talk right now.” He was standing right in my face, and I could smell his beer soaked breath. It turned my stomach.

“I didn’t think I should have to. Besides, it’s not just about talking. You care more about those women on the computer screen than you do about me. They’re not real. And do you think they’d give a shit about you in real life?” I reasoned. “I’m here. I’ve tried to help you and make a life with you. What did I get in return? Money pissed away on dope, booze and internet porn. That’s not what I consider a life.”

His demeanor suddenly and cruelly went soft, and he held his hand up to my face to cradle my chin.

“You said if you ever started acting like your mother, I should tell you. Well, you are now,” he finished.

Pain. Nauseating, dizzying, pain.

He had hit me in the one place he knew it would hurt the most; it was the place I could not dispute or ignore.

He knew the stories of my mother. How she had neglected me and my father. How she left my father for some scum playboy, only to come groveling back on her hands and knees when her pipe dreams of youthful grandeur froze over. How she left me to the whim of every boyfriend she brought over to the squalid trailer she lugged me off to. He knew what my mother had used as her excuse for her escapades: They paid attention to me.

And I knew he was right.

***

The clouds moved in small slivers across the moon which gave way to the crimson coating of the sun when the morning crept in around us as we sat across from each other on the balcony of our apartment. I had spent the majority of the time in confession, and we spent the remainder of the early morning hours renewing promises we’d made in the past and making new ones to fill in the holes of our tattered connection.

There is no rhyme or reason in the choices we make about who or when to love. With a few carefully chosen words, Peter Pan convinced me that his youthful enterprises were over, and assured me that our happily ever after was possible if we stuck it out together. I was inclined to believe him. After the years I had already committed to this, I owed it to him to try.

Without rest or time to reconsider the ramifications of the choices I was making, that very morning, I had one more stop to make before I resumed the trek on my convenient, predestined course.

I walked up the front steps I had such a short time ago clamored upon to reach the love which waited beyond them, and without hesitation, gently tapped on the door.

He opened the door, and smiled.

tapestry

And here is where the precariously woven tapestry of my life inevitably starts to unravel....

I'm reluctantly, but fanatically updating my social networking site (which I adamantly insist is the devil), when I get a message saying that Chris, who let’s just say, might have been the love of my life, but who I totally gave the screw-over, has added me as a friend. Okay. I accept. In my mind, it’s a chance to reconnect—to apologize for past mistakes and rekindle a sense of connectedness between two people who once shared the most intimate of connections.

As I open his profile, what's the first picture that pops up on his page? A sickeningly sweet ultrasound of the lovechild of Chris and my former best girl friend, Rebecca.

When considering this joyous occasion last night, to put things in perspective, let me make clear two things: 1) I'm already nursing a sick, pathetic heart. My best guy friend is gone halfway around the globe, but--not only that--I don't know where our relationship is going. Purgatory is the world that comes to mind. 2) I want a child--there's no doubt about that. But, I don't just want one for the sake of having one, (perhaps I’ll divulge later my melodramatic views on the beauty of child-making and how it is the molecular binding of souls--)however, that doesn't mean it doesn't hurt like hell when someone I used to love is having one with another person I used to love.

Sleep is futile. Even the shadows playing peek-a-boo through the curtains recreate the black and white image of what should have been the consummation of my childhood love.

In the morning, I had banana bread and blueberries in memoriam. This was the breakfast I had last shared with my friend, Emile, before he trekked of to his new adventure for work overseas. I was feeling a bit better, despite the fact that I had another dreaded doctor's appointment. Somehow I drug my globetrotting best friend loving, baby less, tired ass out the door and went to see the doc.

In the exam room:

"So, how old are you?"
"Twenty-eight."
"Oooh..."
"What?"
"You plan on having kids?"
"My husband and I have been trying for years."
"Oh, that's right. Sorry. Well, here's the deal. I'm worried that these cells might be hiding deeper inside your cervix, and, if we find that's the case after today, then we'll need to do another surgery. It can have an effect on your fertility by making your cervix incompetent."
"Hmph."
"Well, maybe only slightly. But nonetheless, I have to let you know of the risk."

My inner dialogue sounded something more like this:

"So, how old are you?"
"Twenty-eight."
"Oooh..."
"What the hell does 'oooh' mean?"
"You plan on having kids?"
"I've told you every visit for the last three years what's been going on. But, thanks for bringing it up again, fucker. And, by the way, I’ve moved past having kids with my husband anyway. I've really just been holding out for my best friend’s sperm."
"Oh, that's right. Sorry. Well, here's the deal. I'm worried that these cells might be hiding deeper inside your cervix, and, if we find that's the case after today, then we'll need to do another surgery. It can have an effect on your fertility by making your cervix incompetent."
"Really? Personally, I think an incompetent cervix would fit just right into my picture. Incompetent brain, incompetent heart, incompetent relationships...bring in on, doc."
"Well, maybe only slightly. But nonetheless, I have to let you know of the risk."
"Thanks for that. So, what you're telling me is that I have to do the surgery or there is a risk of death or I can have the surgery and there is a risk of no kids. Wow. You really know how to turn a girl on."

After that, I somehow managed to stumble back downstairs, out the doors, and into the street to my car (unfortunately, without being struck by an oncoming vehicle), where I proceeded to sob incessantly the entire way home.

Here I am—pitifully in love with my childhood best friend who is halfway across the world in God knows where who may or may not be "in" love with me, but definitely "respects" me and even that may all change after he hits it big with his band (money is Lucifer paper-fied), living six-doors down from my last semester of college fling who wants to get a job where I work (more on that later), looking at pictures of my former love and his spawn, tirelessly campaigning against small-minded, small-town thinking and not able to get drunk enough to blot our the aforementioned love of the best friend. Did I mention my email isn't working today and I might have cancer that could lead to "cervical incompetence"?

I think I'm going to need some safety pins.

epiphanical email

“I’ve never wanted to kill someone that badly before…” his return email continued. “But I remember exactly how it felt to have you laying on me and for me to be touching you. It felt very much like being home... cliché as it may sound. It felt like honesty.”

I’d only brought the moment he was referring to up in my rambling letter to elucidate the fact that my feelings were not out of desperation. I had been desperate before, but I hadn’t run to him like an animal in heat looking for any old tramp in town. Instead, I had only lain softly in his lap one portentous January night, cloaked in the disgrace of a miscarried marriage and shacked up in a raunchy apartment with a kid who just happened to be an ace in the sack. Slightly muddled with rum, and trying fiercely to ignore the ramblings of my drunken adolescent chattel, I dwelt in a moment’s respite from the carnage that had been my romantic life up to this point. Just as it did for him, that evening’s modest moment held steadfast in my memory as the last time I had felt like I was home.

The moment ended abruptly. The kid (who, I should mention, was well over legal age, but unfortunately, there’s no way to gauge where someone ranks in mental maturity) had decided to do no less than piss all over me to mark his territory after that. He had no intention of allowing Emile to think anything other than that he and I would soon be wrapped up in post-coital bliss in the room next door, while Emile languished on the couch, no doubt humbled and in awe of this kid’s inconceivable studliness.

He left the following day, and we’d never spoken of it since. Until now. Almost four years after what could have been the night that altered the flow of the wind in my tattered sails, I had what some would call an epiphany.

A mutual friend of ours was having an art show in a town near where I now lived with my new husband (not the kid). Emile had plans to be in town on business, and it was a straight shot from my house to the cafe where his work was showing, so we decided that we’d both meet up there to catch up. Our visits since that night in my hell-hole of an apartment had been sparse, but just like for the last decade of our platonic friendship, we’d managed to keep in touch, and any encounter we had was just as if we had seen each other the previous day. Distance was never an obstacle.

Our friend, Nate, was wrapped up in the trappings of a struggling artist’s life; he flittered and fluttered around the tiny cafe like a hummingbird on crack, speaking indiscriminately to anyone who would listen, while Emile, my hub, and I sat at a worn table sipping Yuengling and trying to make meaning of his slightly kindergarten-esque masterpieces. I’m the first to appreciate modern art, but even I had to admit that Nate was grasping at coffee stirrers here.

A tall, lanky giraffe-looking fella who I gathered knew Emile from back in Boston came over and they chatted idly about Nate’s attempt at art, some music they’d both been listening to and the state of each others well-meaning and lovely, but completely ramshackle relationships. As I listened, I heard that Emile and his love of the moment, an aspiring actress named Manny, weren’t living together anymore. I was perturbed. Why hadn’t he told me this?

The rusty wheels and levers of my mind, which I assumed were frozen perpetually in time since my most recent marriage, were suddenly lubricated and hurled back into motion. He’d had broken relationships before; so had I. We’d been through this dizzying circle a million times together: I fail, he fails, I fail, he fails. That’s just us. However, not once in the array of our mutual botched intimacy had I considered him as a viable option to failure.

Suddenly, a sickening, abject, but altogether sublime feeling erupted in the pit of my stomach. A room showered in the song of bohemian existence, buzzing with conversations of beauty, music, sex, and booze, fell silent. The zoom lens of my life suddenly fell into sharp focus with one distinct object on the horizon.

It was at this point that I decided to compose the epiphanical email.