Smoke Break

Rain through my hair and over my face and in my clothes and the streets. The weather is the weather and I can only move through it. The grass is greener. The world hums in dull blues and grays and browns and I sit on my porch and try to keep my cigarette dry. The lawn chair I am sitting on is soaked and my jeans are now. I watch the rain spatter off of the road. A lovely static and hushed chaos in my ears. A gloss over everything. A drowning earth, an indifferent earth. An indifferent man. As much as I can.

I pull off of the cigarette. Inside the house I'm expected to be someone else. It's expected and I comply. I fulfill the role and I fulfill it well. I need this soaked moment. This poisoned breath. Out here, on the porch, in the rain, my mind wanders. I dream of what if's and what might have been's and what will never be's.

I pull off of the cigarette. I thought this would be different. I thought I was supposed to be something else. The white noise settles in my chest and I close my eyes. I'm a poet. I don't write poetry. I don't rhyme, or balance, or starve, but I am a poet. I long. My heart sings softly. Unheard, but singing none the less. I pull off of the cigarette and watch as a drop of water hits the paper and the white turns gray and I can see the tobacco through it and I hide the cigarette again cupped in my hand. It's almost gone now anyway and I imagine what life would be like if I could speak. If I could say these things. If I knew what these things were or what they meant or what they really meant and maybe I'm a fool.

A heart won't sink if it won't rise, I think and regret thinking it. I stand and flick the cigarette out into the road. I feel my wet shirt press against my back and I take in the streams down the road and the sound, the beautiful endless patter, and the color of the world and the fact that, truly, none of it matters at all and I go inside.

Climbing Up the Walls (22-23)

22.

Friday came. Payday, I suppose. Indian Tommy and his girl were over. She didn't say much. That was fine with me. We sat around the fire and the fall, despite being in full orange and red force, was warm and it was a nice night for beer and pot and people you call friends when you don't have any.

“I was thinking of starting a band,” Indian Tommy said.

“Yeah? You play anything?” I asked.

“He doesn't play shit,” his girlfriend said. “Idiot.”

“Whatever, babe,” he said. “I can sing though I think. Maybe play drums.”

“You have a kit?” I asked.

“No, but, you know, I'll buy one if I have a band. If the commitment is there.”

“Right on,” I said.

“How are you going to write songs with a band if you wait around to feel out their commitment before you get drums?” she asked.

“I don't know babe. Shit. I guess I'll sing then. I have a guitar amp and microphones can't be that expensive.”

“You know any musicians?” I asked. I stared at the fire and watched it dance and sway and burn away each moment and word in the air.

“Not really. My cousin Ted plays bass, but that's about it. Maybe I'd put an ad online or something. I don't man, I haven't thought about it.”

“I've been thinking of writing a book,” I said.

“Yeah? Confessions of a Hermetic Drug Dealer?”

I faked a quiet laugh. His girlfriend laughed.

“Can you write?” she asked.

“Yeah, can you even write?”

“I don't know. I can read, so I guess I can write. I've been thinking about it a lot. I know how I like things to sound. I think I understand rhythm and I don't know. I don't have a great vocabulary, but maybe I don't need one.”

“I think you do, dude,” Indian Tommy said. “All writers, aren't they all fancy words and bullshit?”

“A lot of them probably, but maybe it's because they think they have to be. Maybe it's because that's what they think make them writers. Taking group writing classes and trying to out-vocab each other. I don't know, maybe none of that shit's necessary. Maybe I just need to write whatever comes out.”

“Maybe,” he said. “What are you going to write about?”

“Who knows. My life, maybe? Shit that happens? I have no idea. I've just been thinking about it.”

“I'd read your book, David,” his girlfriend said.

“Thanks.”

“So, where'd this come from? The writing thing?”

“I don't know. I get a lot of time out here, you know, to myself and I was thinking about prisoners and how they have all of this time to themselves and some of them write these books and some of those are really surprisingly great, so, maybe I could, right?”

“You aren't a prisoner.”

“Look around, Tommy.”

He looked at the black outside of the glow of the fire and a few moments passed.

“We should get going soon,” he said.

23.

My crop was nearly exhausted. And I was sitting at the table in the camper smoking my second joint of the morning and drinking from a jug of port wine that I paid Indian Tommy to bring to me a few days earlier. I was going to write.

I sat at the table and stared at the notebook and I wrote a few lines.

Maybe I'm not here at all.

I crossed it out.

For the best, I guess.

I crossed it out.

I could feel the words in my chest. The need to say them. The need for them to be understood, but my brain, my hand, wouldn't let them out. They got muddled and I realized the difference between people who create stories and people who read stories and I worried I was a reader.

I tried again.

I've spent six months living alone in a derelict camper in the middle of fucking nowhere.

It was better. I took a swig from the wine and went on.

I sell weed and am alone in every sense. I have considered killing myself. I miss my mother. I met a beautiful girl. I still consider killing myself. I can't stop thinking about it. Any of it. It has become maddening and my crop is nearly gone. I am writing this smoking the last of it and drinking fucking port wine and wishing the beautiful girl was here.

I looked it over. There was something there, but it was awful. I drew a large “X” through it all and closed my notebook.

I pulled from the bottle and thought about jerking off but I just wasn't in the mood then.

Fifty Million Viewers.

My hair was long still then. In my bathroom I ran my fingers through it and parted it to the side and tried to remind myself to buy a comb. I never recognized myself in the mirror. I understood that people didn't think I was an ugly man. I understood that some of them even thought I was handsome. But when I looked in the mirror I didn't recognize me. I didn't see the me that through each day and hour and thought lingered and whispered and breathed. I didn't know what monster or shipwreck I expected to see, but it was never what appeared. 

I often spoke in the mirror after a shower or a bottle of wine. As if I were applying for a job or trying to fuck someone. I'd cock a half smile and lift one eyebrow and speak my side of the conversation and think theirs. I'd charm them. I'd make them flutter. I'd say all the right things and I'd be quick and witty and lovely and the perfect employee and the perfect man. In the mirror alone, clean or drunk, I could be.

I brushed the hair from my face and behind my ear.

"I just thought I could," I said. 

Well, you certainly did, and perfectly, they said.

"Thank you."

So, if you don't mind my asking, what brought you to this? What made you think, 'I should'?

I fake a smile in the mirror. To the interviewer. In this world I have been asked this a thousand times and I pretend here, for this interviewer, this woman, brunette with a low cut baby blue blouse and a black pencil skirt and patterned stockings and black heels, that she is the first.

"I don't know," I say. "I just thought, fuck it, you know?"

She laughs and smiles at me. I like her smile. She knows I like her smile and she keeps it up.

"I've always thought, what if suicide were a sport? You know? Who could just do it the best? And then I thought, fuck, I could."

Well, I think that everyone at home will agree with me, you are, without a doubt, the best suicide this year. The only suicide that matters, certainly.

"Thanks, Lee... Can I call you Lee?"

Of course.

"Well, thanks Lee."

So, tell me, where did your inspiration come from for this suicide? What brought you to the decision that you just had to?

I smile and laugh a fake laugh. The mirror knows it's fake. I know it's fake. Lee doesn't. Maybe she does but she shows more leg. 

"Lee, sometimes people are born and they're just natural athletes, you know? They just pop out and bat a thousand or figure skate the shit out of things. Me? I guess I was just born to die. All my life, just waiting, just feeling this innate need to disappear and, well fuck me! What better way to go than in front of fifty million of your viewers? Am I right, Lee?"

The fog has cleared now from the mirror and I can see the extra weight around my waist and the hair on my stomach and grimace. I feel my mood shift but Lee breaks the descent. She opens her legs further and smiles and bites her lip. She never breaks eye contact. Her stockings only come halfway up her thighs. Her panties are white cotton and clean as new. 

In my head blood pours from my arms and throat and stomach and Lee stands. Her hips fill in all of the right places. Her chest pushes riotously against her blouse. Her hair falls over her shoulders in waves and locks and she never breaks her gaze. She walks to me, nude and bleeding and victorious. She wraps her arms gently around my neck and even though I am THE suicide, I can't think. I feel her body against mine. I feel her breath, light and warm, against my neck as she pulls in tight.

Kill yourself again for me. Kill yourself again for me. Please.

Her leg bends and her thigh slowly slides up mine and her grip tightens and she begs me to die. Her lips press against my neck and her hands roam and suddenly I feel nothing and I see myself in the mirror, nude and not bleeding and overweight and heartbroken and she is gone and death is gone and my hair was long still then. My hair was long still then and I fucking needed you.

I Was Young Once.

Air is sharp on my lungs and cool on my skin and just cold enough to warrant a coat and not cold enough to need it. I leave it on and let leaves crunch under my feet as I say goodbye to the fall and begrudgingly hello to winter. There is no snow yet here, only trees and forest space and sunlight and air. And me, walking. I think to myself that I haven't walked in the open forest like this since high school. I wonder if it's because over a decade has passed and at some point I became an adult and adults have no time for this sort of thing. I wonder if I did become an adult at one point, or over many points. Over a series of trials and I decide that that is more likely. It seems obvious. It feels like it happened yesterday. Or, at the least, recently.

I was twenty once. I was twenty one and I drank and suffered poor and I was twenty three once and was married and loved. I was twenty five once and I was twenty six once and understood my love and the world finally and cruelty and I was twenty nine once and looking back and writing and walking through the woods at the end of a season.

The snap of branches under my feet. The vague heat of the sun. The scent of freedom unbound and a beckoning world behind me. I had forgotten what relief a long walk in the woods on a nice day could bring. Time to clear your head or sink into it. Time to see yourself. Time to be yourself. Hands in my pockets, I looked at the ground often but reminded myself to look up. To look forward. Forward to the future, up to dreams? I asked. Don't let go, I answered.

Few people would consider me young anymore but I felt young. I felt inexperienced and I felt dumb. I felt immature and silly and I wanted to be mature and experienced and respected and I wanted to be all of the things that a man was but I wasn't them. Maybe I could fool a few people in conversation, but I wasn't those things. I preferred my music loud and weird. I drank in the daytime. I avoided hassle and conflict and duty. I thought constantly about fucking and bands and art and it all may as well have been lying down in daisies and staring at clouds.

Something skittered off deeper into the woods as I came close to the treeline, close to the car.

I wanted desperately to be a respected man. I wanted desperately to hold onto youthful hope. Both of which seemed to be failing completely. I stepped through the treeline and toward the car. I glanced at my phone for the time and I had twenty minutes still until I had to get the exhaust fixed again. The car was embarrassingly loud and it was costing a fortune and it needed to be done and only a few years ago I would have just been happy to have a car.

Messiah

We are in our new red car  in the parking lot of a drug store but we both know the car is broken.

The storm is ominous. Darker than I have ever known. Low and chaotic. Rain falls like hammers and Bridget and I watch the water crashing and exploding on the windshield.

I see a man walking toward us on the road.

"He could help," I say to Bridget. I get out of the car and the rain hurts and I know I have broken shoulders and I yell to the man, "Please help!"

He walks through the rain and the sound of the storm, thought it terrifies me, does not register with him.

He touches my shoulders and they won't hurt. I don't feel the rain anymore.

"Thank you," I say as I get back into the car. He lays his hand on it and the car hums and then roars and is alive again, full and well.

"Can I have a ride to the Barrens?" he asks before I shut the door and roll the window down a bit.

"Where is that?"

He points down the road.

"Fuck that," Bridget says.

I look at the man. "Sorry guy, fuck that." I roll up the window and worry it was Christ.