I cry every morning before I leave for ICC. I stop brushing my teeth because I don’t want to look in the mirror and see the spilled traces of her reflection staring back at me as if lost. I am able to place my contacts on the lid of my pupils without fully looking in the mirror. For reasons that probably have to do with allergies my eyes are almost always red. I go into the bathroom at ICC and plant Visine tears in the once skateboard rink white. I take the roll of film that has the pictures I optically clipped of Megan and myself standing in front of the dry-skinned birch in a front yard in a subdivision that makes me poetically break out in a monotone-sopped variation of Somewhere I have Never Traveled Gladly and Beyond and leave it buried in the bottom drawer of my writers desk, beneath the incessant filed up spiraled notebooks I have used to chronicle the sojourn via poetic meter of loss.
I haven't shaved since we kissed. Whatever her lips planted in the center of my face I want to cultivate and grow.
The Monday I come back Kyle is waiting under the front battlement of ICC with Russ, chain smoking cigarettes, getting ready for class. I see him beneath the shadow of the bridge next to Russ wearing his captain America nipple-pog sized button.
I don't feel like talking with anyone. He flags me over. He has a cheesy smile glued on his face.
"So, did you come back with anything?" He inquires, sounding as if Megan is a venereal disease. He gives me a nudge to the ribcage.
I don't want to talk. I have been crying so much the interior of my lips feels like I used an upside down salt shaker for an inhaler.
"I had a great time," I tell Kyle, not bullshiting. He still has a cheesy grin glued to the interior of his visage. He inquires if I got laid. He inquires if I am going up there to see her again next month, say for thanksgiving. He asks if I am going splurge all my money and fly up there again.
I am pissed. I want to go somewhere off by myself in the fucking russet parabolic swerve that is Illinois central College and read Whitman or Kerouac or work on my pending TRAINSPOTTING paper for Paul Resnick's novel into film. Both Kyle and Russ are bobbing up an down in full-bladder jilts, inquiring what happen. I try to turn the conversation to the weekend I missed in Peoria. did they see Second City on tour? How was the group at One world and Lums. Finally I relent.
" Look, I guess things just didn't go as I thought they would," I add.
They look back at me as if they have just been stunned dead in laser tag.
"I mean, I had the time of my life in a way. I love her more than I can spill into a Raymond Carver minimalist sentence of glory. But it just didn't...."
I pause. I outstretch my hand as if a pastor shaking hands with the parishioner's after second service on sunday morning. I try not to think about myself as a jaded protagonist in someone else's failed romantic narrative. I try not to think of myself in the third person singular even though I do. I try not to think that every time quote he looks into the mirror he (meaning Megan's) sees her face. There is a bottle of shaving cream scrunching its beak next to him. There are tooth-brushes and razor blades. There is soap and cologne and other utensil’s to make his sodden countenance appear more appealing. There is his face, he is sure it is his face. His head sprouting through the tube veins stumped out of his neck.
I look down and say yeah. Both Kyle and Russ stare into the direction of their shoelaces and ash.
"Dude, "Kyle says, calling me Dude because he always addresses me as Dude every time he talks.
'You need to get in the bookstore. They are looking for holiday help. You should be a shoe-in with the experience you gleaned from working at Barnes & Nobles last summer."
"Yeah," I tell him. I look down. All I want to do is go off somewhere and write for a couple of hours. For a lifetime. For days.
***
Frogger informs me that I am no fun because I refuse to go with him to the opening night premier of Romeo plus sign Juliet. I have been back from Appleton two weeks. My face looks like a nest of abandon baseball fields; intermittent patches of scattered sawdust flavored follicles.
"You're no fun." He wheezes.
"Matt, I'm heartbroken. I can't sleep. Every time I look in the mirror I somehow see her face looking back at me plus I see my face look backing at me through the Plexiglas in an airplane window in bumfuck Wisconsin. The last thing I want to do is to monopolize my Friday night watching a movie about unrequited love mingled with iambic-pentameter."
Frogger again tells me I'm no fun. He tells me that he has been looking forward to this rendition ever since I turned him on to the English language and coerced him to take a vested interest in the written word.
"Who's all going?" I inquire.
He says the usual Lums Bums minus maybe Pat.
"Yeah, I guess I can go," I concede. Frogger asks me if I miss Megan. He asks me if I'm thinking about getting back together with good old Kitty Pekoswksi.
"No, it's over. Everything is over with everyone. It just is." I hark back, informing Frogger that I will pick him up at eight.
***
The lady who is interviewing me has glasses that
look like dual hubble telescopes loafing on the front of her chin. Her name is
Diane. My resume is impeccable. I tell her that the reason I left Barnes and
Nobles was because I wanted to spend more time studying until I realized that I
needed money as well. I tell her about the books I read. About Walt Whitman and
Allen Ginsberg. She notes that she had a prof. in college who used to recite
HOWL from memory.
One week ago I was eating at the pizza King in
Appleton, Wisconsin with a girl who wanted nothing to do with me.
“What I’d like to do is to offer you a job for the
holidays. If it works out that you like it here we’ll see about having you on
full-time or as many hours you can muster with the class load you are taking.”
***
On the ride home after the movie Frogger keeps jouncing back and forth stating that his life is now complete. I remember being a junior in high school and making a joke about my best friend Pat at Lums, correlating his love life to Juliet's interface with the wet Nurse because fucking Pat its always, "Bye a and bye I come," and the table as a whole just looking back at me nonplussed. Frogger inquires again if I liked it. I felt Megan's breath in every single sentence and all I can think about is the first kiss, sin from my lips o trespass sweetly urged.
"So you liked it?" Frogger intones.
"Give me my sin again."
I look back up at my reflection in the windshield and see her.
***
It is autumn and it is two weeks after and there is the French press and coffee I brew almost intentionally too strong and there is the sun, dribbling through the living room window in what looks like golden clots of blood treacling down from some vacation bible school variation of an angel. I realize watching this that somehow the crazy sojourn to appelton Wisconsin of all bumfuck places has for some reason been just for itself. That the longing I felt trying to feel like I was one viable unit with Megan, that the whole summer with Kristina rock and good ol’ Pat Mullowney and working all hours of the clock and reeling down Sarah Lafonti's pants down to the caps of her knees in the front seat of my car and the scent of Lorlei Filzens one piece swimsuit and all this; driving around and chasing the staggering taste of summer in every cigarette and watching in the rearview mirror as Amber Dickey chases my car home and falling asleep with the svelte china of Kitty Pekowski’s arms lassoed around my neck like some sort of holiday wreath only to go home and realized that she somehow clasped the cubed K necklace around my neck without my knowledge. That the whole summer, the whole fuckin’ last four years has been perhaps for itself, for no tangible diploma-scepter seeking end result and that the whole sojourn and seeking was done to sate an inexplicable loneliness burrowing inside the transparent washing machine of my chest that will never go away.
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