We enter the car with the
Best Mix tape she has ever Heard sitting in the plastic receptacle-wielding bin
next to the passenger chair like some sort of trust fund inheriting heir. I
make such a conscious effort not to slam the door in disgust that the second
she rolls out of her driveway I need to open the door and slam it again so that
the car quits emitting a goddamn high pitch bling sounding like some old
Midwestern dotard buying vowels off of Wheel-of-Fortune. Megan backs out again
of the driveway in a quick screech. She tells me to wait until she is at least
two blocks from her home until I fire up another smoke. I flip my sunglasses on
my head and puff away and notice my reflection in the side mirror, briefly thinking
about the old man I sat next to on the 300 hundred dollar forty-five minute flight
I took from O'Hare to Appleton the day before. Behind my eyelids part of my
skull seems like crumpling, like the friable architecture culled from the lip
of antiquity. It feels like my skull is going to implode and drip, slicing down
the front of my countenance in something that resembles tears.
I don't
want to look at myself in the side mirror. I ask Megan where she wants to go.
She asks for a cigarette. The number of cigarettes we have prodigiously
consumed between over the last twelve hours have dwindled so that the carton
offers a healthy samba-like rattle when shook. As I bring the smoke to my lips
the look on her face seem to say that you don't need to light it for me every
time I ask for a cigarette, David. When I hand her the let smoke she says thank
you. I can't get over just how perfect the weather is outside. I tell Megan
that the overhead blue kinda resemble the enhanced window of a computer screen
when first you turn it on before the decals plop up.
I tell her
I need more coffee. She says I guess we can go back to the mall and walk around
for a while and then maybe go to a movie.
I look over at Megan, shove
the top of my sunglasses back into the center of my brow. I light a cigarette
off the stem of an old one and flush the previous one out the side of the
window. I look back at Megan, the unvarnished bride I had traipsed all the way
up the North country somehow to see. She has a look on her face as if she trying
to study for some college entrance exam. There is a sick feeling lodged in my
stomach. An alchemical beaker filled with inhibition and failure all at once
that is slowly beginning to bubble and somehow char under the Bunsen burner of
my chest. It's like my face needs to ejaculate needs to erupt from my chest
like a botched junior high science fair baking-soda pebto bismal and vinegar
science fair experiment. From the best I can tell we are near the area of town
where Megan plowed over the curve last night.
Megan looks at me and asks
me if I am alright.
For some reason the only
song that has been the radio the whole weekend is Meredith bainbridge’s “mouth.”
A part of me wants to plead my case. Part of me just needs to crumple apart in
shatter leaf of tears.
”You know
Meg,” I say, still calling her Meg, omitting the second syllable of her first
name for reasons not known to either myself or the discourse of mankind. “Even
though we got into the tiff back there in the coffee shop, it was still really
good coming up here and saying you again.”
Megan says
nothing. Her lips then seem to hush out a you too as if she is saying the name
of Bono's band before she reels the vehicle into the concrete topography of the
mall parkinglot and I ask her what she wants to do and she responds that she
doesn't know, stating that maybe we can just walk around and hang out or
something.
***
Exactly 17
months later Megan will call me and tell me that she had a dream where she was
giving me a good old fashioned down south mouth hug. A blow job.
I was
giving you a blow job in the dream and you just...couldn't” There is a pause. I
ask Megan what she is talking about. She seems to be quiet before her voice
audibly nibbles into the side of the phone once again.
“You know
its like,..you whipped it out and I started going down on you only you just
couldn't...” Another pause. I ask Megan what she is talking about.
“You just
couldn't come.” She says again. “And then I started to get frustrated thinking
it was all somehow my fault and then you told me that it was all your fault
somehow and that you have never been able to do it that way. And that it was
all somehow you.”
****
I tell her that I need more
coffee. Megan shoots at at me before tells me that I've had something like four
accumulated pots today already. I tell her that this is a typical day for me
and that I’m trying to make quota.
***
For some reason the mall
seems vapid, like we already been there done that. The autumnal sun is blaring down on the sallow
geometrical u-configured slants that signal vacant parking spaces. For some
reason as I slam the car door shut Megan tells me to try to remember where we
parked this time.
It takes forever for the
emerald-apron clad barista at Gloria jeans to concoct me a decent Mocha. The
line is too long and it is awkward waiting in tandem with Megan who insists that,
no, she’s currently caffeinated enough for the time being, thank you. A
listless silence ensues. Keeled over the chrome hisses of the airplane engine
espresso machine the red-haired barista looks at me and says, “That was a
decaf, right?” I snap. I tell him
no. I can see his shoulders titter in a
post-electric shock fashion. He says sorry. He jettisons the cup with the swill
of the first drink stored inside and offers to fix me another mocha. Normally I never bitch about retail services
but I’m in a bad mood. The way Megan says, “Really different people” sounds
pre-ordained like she has rehearsed it before hand like a religious mantra.
The mocha the gangly barista
is pouring looks like some sort of microwaveable friendly excrement. I want to
tell him that I know espresso. That I worked at the Starbucks in my local Barnes
and Nobles last summer. That what he is currently draining in a Christmas tree
cup and dolloping with a boutonniere of
whip cream and sprinkles looks like some sort of embellished fecal
sample.
“Since you
fucked up on the first one and made me wait and extra five minutes shouldn’t
this one be gratis?”
The barista looks back at me
nonplussed after telling me that 2.95 is the damaged incurred.
I take another swig, tilting
my head back. For some reason I feel emotionally impelled to say the word,
“ahhh” after every sip, as if I am in a dated 80’s instant coffee commercial.
I feel like I am about ready
to lose everything inside of me.
“I
mean...What about all those poems I wrote for you...What about coming up here.
I thought this is what you wanted.”
Megan
responds quietly by saying, David, I already told you. I become quiet. I am
going to emotionally erupt. I tell her that I need to go to the Mens room. She
says she is going to talk to someone over here at Daytons to verify if ther
person she needs to talk to . I tell her to meet me back here, at the hat rack,
come five minutes.
I reach for
the bathroom. Thankfully
I find
myself in the bathroom in the mall, a welling sadness aches and corrodes behind
my skull. I don’t want Megan to see me cry but for the moment I can help
it—everything inexplicably leaks from the center of my face, I try momentarily
glancing at my visage in the mirror but see only the hard bruised red of a boy
who has failed. I snuff the tears up in
a chorus of snorts. I mentally cogitate that I still have half of the trip ahead of me. My whole face
is composed of cubist and trigometric
shades of red. The wet prisms swelling my optical periphery of this world make
gives everything the appearance of being upside down, like I am suffocating and
trapped in a snow globe., I can’t breath. Part of me wants to throw up the
hash brown and eggs I recently consumed for breakfast. Part of me wants to go
home, just wants to leave. Wants to spend the night on a bus stop, curl in the
diffracted planks of the elongated sidewalk sunrise in the morning. Part of me
wants to take the thumb size photograph inside her wallet of the boy Megan is
in love with, whip out my cock, alight it over the porcelain uterus of the
urinal and douse it in the acidic sting of my own urine.
Part of me just wants to cry.
“I turn the
cold water on and try not to look at how bruised and battered my visage appears
in the mirror. The last time I looked in a mirror was the condom dispenser
inside the gas station before we bought cigarettes.
“Okay,” I
tell myself, slathering icy drips of cold water across the salty latitudinal
lines skiing from my sockets to my chin, “Okay. You can get through this.
You’ll be oh-kay.”
***
After I leave the bathroom I find Megan waiting for me in
the center of the department store, near a hat stand. I don’t want her to look
at me I don’t want her to note that I have been crying.
As I stand next to her Megan shoots me a look inquiring if everything
is okay. I try to divert attention. I don’t want her to scrutinize my face.
“Here,” I
say, grapping the red hat, and pushing it down on her head, “Now you look just
like Paddington bear.
Not to be
outdone Megan grabs a nearby derby cap and quickly plants it on the top of my
head, much to the chagrin of my self conscious hair.
I walk out of the bathroom, pleading with whatever overhead
Diety there is that Megan will fail to notice the planetary swerves around my
eyelids.
“You
alright?” Megan asks me.
I don't want Megan to see
that I've been crying, to see the weak red lines streaked across the interior
globes of my iris. She has just taken off the Paddington bear cap. We are
walking towards the entrance doors to Dayton’s. Megan looks at me kinds funny.
We have decided to do the only thing are age bracket really avails us an
opportunity to do over the weekend, we have decided to see a movie. Megan then
stops and tells me to look at her
I turn my head.
“Your eyes are so blue,” She
says. “Your eyes change color. I could have sworn they were green.”
The movie theatre is located inside the western slant of the mall. I’ve been in Appleton less than twenty-four, spending eight hours alone groping the rectangular fluff of the pillow on my downstairs mattress and it seems weird that 30 percent of the time I have spent basked in Megan’s presence have been spent facing the same direction watching illuminated narratives flicker across a televised plateau. Megan looks at me and smiles. Self-consciously I wonder if she can discern that my sockets sentimentally erupted in the MENs bathroom at Daytons.
She inquires what movie I wish to see.
Part of me wonders if she can sense the expired rivulets of
salt trilling down my face,
We stand if front of the movie theatre, all listed with
titles in embellish fonts, none of which look particularly alluring.
Megan tells me that she wants to see something good.
The third sequel to the Mighty Ducks starts in less than an
hour. A movie called THAT THING THAT YOU DO staring Tom Hanks and Liv Tyler is
playing. So is a movie called THE CHAMBER. I make the brazen pointing to the
light bulb-alighted rectangular placard
advertising the Tom Hanks before telling the every time anyone asks me that
question (i.e, what is that thing that you do?) I always inform them that it’s
called masturbation. Megan shoots me a
look as if signaling me to stop trying to perform bland stand-up esp. when we
are in public and someone from her highschool might be working behind the
ticket booth.
“Which flick do you want to see?”
I tell her I really want to see Mighty Ducks three. She tilts
her head in jilted pinwheel fashion back in my direction before informing me to
answer the previous addressed query by uttering the syllables really. Figuring
I have already made Megan scowl more today than she has over the discourse of a
lifetime I refrain from making a flippant comment about saying that we should
go see THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT because invariably that is how this night is
going to end.
“Let’s Go see 2 Days in the Valley.” I state, iterating
again that I am something of a drooling Tarentino buff.
Megan assents with her chin. I tell her that I don’t know
much about the movie but that purportedly it’s really well written and really witty and kinda film-noirish and
the plot is suppose to be intentionally convoluted.
Megan looks back at me as if she doesn’t know what to say. I
walk up to the ticket booth, configure my fingers in the universally
acknowledged splayed-twin dactyled emblem of peace and say two for two days.
Megan says that we still
have and hour-fifteen minutes before the movie convenes and without asking what
want to do suggests that maybe we can just hang out in a park or something.
I nod my head as if in
orchestral assenting tempo, telling her that I would love to.
***
As we lie down in the park that looks like one continuous
golf course fairway I begin to talk about the fashion in which the autumnal
light seems to hit the side of her body, reflecting in a way that is almost
stainglass-like. I talk about just how perfect a weekend I am having regardless
of Megan’s insistence that we are too just quote really different people
end-quote. I tell Megan how her presence has enriched my life. How it has been
a blessing. How some of the best times I have had not only with a woman but
with a human being in general have been accompanied by the sound of her voice,
the syllables of her spirit, the hidden alphabet of her breath. Wind continues
to zip and rake over the sides of our bodies. I tell Megan to come here. I lie down in a supine position, as if I am
practicing for conserving space in my coffin. I ask Megan if she can feel it.
If she can feel what my nineteen year old poetic palette dictates as the
thundering tranquility of all mankind. Megan remains silent, although she is
lying down next to me. Part of me wants to rappel the limbs of my arms around
her body like ropes and slip inside the coy hyphen of her smile. Instead I
close my eyes and try not to envision the meltdown of almost nuclear
proportions that transpired in the coffee
shop earlier that morning. I try not to think about what the guys will say when
I come back to P-town, my red duffel bag in one hand, the shards of my recently
severed heart pocketed in the other. I try not to think about how embarrassed
Megan must feel that I showed up at her doorstep handing her every poetic pulse
of my being one thin line of weak tea stanzas at a time. Turning on one side,
my elbow crooked in geometrical positions, my left palm pressed into my head, I
reach out and grab one fiber of Megan’s hair that is limp, bowing almost wth
wayward reverence into her forehead.
I then begin to quote her poetry.
I quote Rumi. I invite her to come to the orchard in spring.
I tell her that there will be wine and sweethearts in the pomegranate flowers.
I tell her that if she does not come, these do not matter. I tell her that if
she does come, these do not matter. I quote Shams of Tabriz. I mutter five
different pronouns and then kick open the gate to the garden of mystic lovers.
I talk about these not being true distinctions. I fish out a Marlboro light
from my pocket and fire it up with the lighter adorned with an old world atlas
of the globe. I take intermittent puffs,
reverting back to Rumi, gesticulating about Birds making Great Sky circles,
telling the doe-cheeked presence of my muse that there are hundreds of ways to
kneel and kiss the ground. Quoting her my mantra of “Let the Beauty you Love be
what you do.” Tell her afterwards, using the word intrinsic, saying
intrinsically who you are.
Flicking the dregs of the cigarette in an arch like fashion
into the arena of invisible molecules in front of us I begin to quote Whitman.
“This poem
is the poem that made me want to really be a poet.” I tell her. “It’s the poem
I read in front of my high school at a unity day festival last year.
As I begin
to shovel out the sentiments of my chest, conveying to Megan in Whitmanesque
verse how I have somehow perceived to be with those I like is metaphysically
enough, a golden trapezoid of light seems to split through the elderly fingers
of the half naked trees, settling near Megan’s kneecap. As with the poetry
reading last night, the look etched into Megan’s lips look like she is bathing
a new born daughter, slowly baptizing gentle suds across her back, but still,
delicate of the creatures every breath. I am telling Megan that being
surrounded by beautiful breathing laughing curious flesh is enough. I am telling
Megan that to look upon them or to smell them just for a moment. I am asking
Megan what is this then, lost in the aching tranquility of her attentive
expressions, lost in the slants of light ricocheting through the frames of tree
limbs, lost in the way her eyes are pensively looking down into the direction
of my purple Doc Marten
Megan tells
me that it is beautiful. I ask Megan if it is okay if I hold her just for a
second. She remains silent before her chin wobbles for an assenting nod.
A gust of
wind splashes across the back of our bodies. Megan’s head is tucked into the
area code between chin and shoulder blade. I want to perform a cannonball with
my lips and plant kisses on her forehead. Instead, I give her a quick embrace,
a squeeze, not quite as tight as the reeling embrace that punctuated last night
where it felt like Megan was trying to
enter my body by squeezing herself through my navel. Involuntarily I begin to
play with errant strands of her hair, brushing them over to the side of her face.
I tell
Megan that the autumn air is invigorating and that what the two of us can
collectively define as “this” feels peaceful. Megan replies by stating that we
have less than a half-hour to get back to the mall before the movie convenes. I close my eyes and sop up the earth, the
rolled carpet of wind tickling the back of my neck, the blanket of pure light
from the sun lingering above us, the pure unfiltered swelling blue of the
perfect autumnal day, the bulbous puffs of a cloud occasionally skating past
and the scent in my arms of the girl of my dream.
“We need to
hurry up or we are going to be late for the movie, David.” Megan says.
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