Story Fragments

She sat back, and stared at him. The dimly lit restaurant cast shadows on his features. The result was very attractive. His moist eyes glistened behind the shadows created by his high cheek bones. He really was beautiful, but she just couldn’t abide his comment, regardless of her situation.

“Who vilified the Gold Digger?”

“What?” he had a nervous smile in his eyes. The semi-prescient sense from her tone warning him his comments struck a nerve.

“Who vilified the Gold Digger?” she said again.

“If this is a serious question, I don’t have the answer for you. If it’s a joke my response might be Kanye? Jamie Foxx? They seem like a safe place to start pointing fingers.”

She decided to give up on this one, or at least she wasn’t going to play this from her typical playbook. She looked back at him and returned the smile. He was bating her, hoping for something, but like all the other men in his position—wealthy, handsome, ambitious— he was already anticipating a back and forth he’d have to guide her through. His face said I desperately want a reparté, so much so that I’m willing to hold your hand through it. 

“How much money did you make last year? Honestly. I’m not an auditor or ‘the face’ for an elaborate heist. How much money did you make last year?”

He paused for a moment, the smile never leaving his face, never breaking eye contact. “I think my taxes said 1.7 million.” He was going to play.

“How much of that do you think you spent on nights out like this? How much do you think you spent on wining and dining your next conquest? Did you buy any gifts? I bet you buy really great gifts. You’re probably scientific about it, maybe you even have a formula for it. Hotel rooms and vacations? No you wouldn’t go on vacation with someone. Too much time. So how much?” 

“Well, you seem to have me figured out. How much do you think I spent.”

She paused to consider this. Her face pinched a bit to compute the mental math. The delay was merely her way of accepting his challenge. She had agreed to go about this differently, but that didn’t mean she would be bitchy to him. She refused to be anything less than sexy even in taking a man down a peg. She wanted him to want her even as he learned that he wasn’t going to get her.

“I’d guess you didn’t make it through the thirty first without spending at least 150 chasing.”

A momentary look came across his face, it told her she wasn’t far off. Close enough to keep this going.

“How much of that strange was worth it? How many of those nights ended with a lack-luster grunt in the dark? Your energies spent, an itch scratched but not quite satisfied? How many of those mornings began with a hard-on you’d rather just jerk-off in the shower than prolong the façade of interest any longer? She rolls over and rouses you or wakes as you sneak to the shower. You can see the scene, right? Your faces are interchangeable for anyone else’s. This is an archetypical story, the specifics don’t really matter. You’re just following the script.”

He was leaning back in the chair now. He had yet to break his gaze. He still smiled but instead of the patronizing knowing in his eyes, she found a quizzical puzzlement. A look that said he wasn’t sure if he’d like where this would end up, but he was willing to keep playing.

“I think it’s safe to say most.” He sat up. “There were a handful of memorable encounters. An interesting setting. An interesting request. An interesting technique. But not many memorable people.” His forehead showed a deep pensive wrinkle, but still a smile persisted. “The play has an incredible plot, all of the right devices, but the characters were all wrong.”

Now she leaned in, the position of power had shifted. To any onlooker their smiles would have indicated a comfortable date— the conversation hadn’t broken, their postures seemed comfortable— but their body language would belie the interplay below the surface. She was throwing body blows with each of her accurate assessments. He leaned in to these blows as if to say is that all you’ve got? 

“And how many of those women did you prey upon? How many of them were interns? How many of them were people who were persuaded by your position of power? Weak fawns who fell victim to this gaze? A secretary, maybe? A waitress?”

“More than a few.”

“Is there even any sport in it?”

“In some, certainly, but even a hunter wouldn’t pass by a lame doe. He needs to eat. Not every meal needs to posses some badge of an honorable hunt. Not every hunt needs a story.” 

“But this is my point. You sit there and deride Gold Diggers, but what makes you different? Men use their positions of power constantly in sex. In fact, they fabricate it when it doesn’t exist— maybe they rent a car, borrow a friends apartment, dress in a manner that well exceeds their income. Men lean on their power like a crutch.”

“Of course. Why wouldn’t we? It works. Time tested, lover approved. I suppose it lacks a certain originality, but if it ain’t broke, right?”

“The reason it works is because you can prey on some biological imperative, that our desire to make babies is stronger than yours. Women who want to find ‘Mr Right’ have to sift through mountains of men like you. They have to take a leap of faith to find out if you suck, or if that charming warmth in your eye is real. Could you be as sweet as your eyes are implying? And of course, YOU aren’t, so they slog on through the others. Those women are doomed. They so desperately want you to be good, they’ll let you in no matter the cost.

“But this makes my point perfectly. You use what you have to make things work for what you want. You want something warm and wet, and you get it. A Gold Digger is just a derogatory term for men to call women who see what they want and take it in their own way. Are you better because you want sex and take it instead of money? If you think so, I have to tell you I don’t see it.

“You spent time ascending an imaginary career ladder. Going to school, shaking hands, kissing babies. All of that was so that you could find yourself in the position you’re in, to have something to appeal to the opposite sex. I spent my time eating right, taking care of my body, doing pilates, doing yoga, doing kegels. You studied business, I studied business men. What makes us different?”

His smile had dulled. His mouth kept the crescent shape, but his eyes showed something else. His eyes told the same story the tautness in his pants told. 

There was this day when I was in first grade. A girl in my class, I think her name was Allison, her older sister came to class to drop something off for her. She was a sixth-grader. I can’t remember what she looked like but I vividly remember thinking I will never be a sixth-grader. Some primitive sense of infinity existed between me and the sixth grade, the limit I could approach but never achieve.

It is so vivid I can still see the hallway I was in when I thought it— the texture of the light, that it was winter, that it was early afternoon, that I was walking to music. It’s hard to describe how that feeling ruminated.

My whole life was ahead of me. It was so big I could hardly grasp it. I was seven, trying to reflect on something that was almost double the span my current existence in to the future. How could I ever become 12? Get through all of elementary school?

The air tonight is warm, not hot, and the breeze is cool and sweet. I’m driving home from Elise’s house with the windows all the way down. There is no music playing. There are no clouds in the sky. There are no other cars  with me on the tree-lined roads. It’s dark and beautiful. This moment feels strangely akin to that first grade hallway. Like this is something I will remember when I’m 32, double my current age.

I just touched a girls vagina for the first time.

It sounds vulgar when I think about it so discretely. But it’s significant. It feels so significant.

I can’t concretely remember having as distinct a thought about a vagina when I first started paying attention to girls, not like the sixth-grade moment anyway. I guess that was probably a slow transition, something that cam on over months or years, not a concrete singular thought. You see a girl, she looks pretty and you get a tickle somewhere you can’t describe. Then you see a girl and the tickle is stronger, and the itch is begging to be scratched. And then you realize you want to see her budding breasts and her day-of-the-week underwear. And then it’s all down hill, the thoughts will never subsist.

But this. The vagina moment. That is something different. It was magical. I smell my fingers so that I don’t forget how magnificent it was. This car ride is one of those burnt in moments, like the long off-white hallway in first-grade. I’m in love with this moment. I’m more in love with this moment than I’m in love the girl. Elise. I’m sorry for that, but it’s true.

What’s left now? I’m about half-way home, turning the corner on to Wallace Road. This car ride will end. I’ll wake up in the morning and there probably wont be another moment I’ll remember forever, not tomorrow anyway. Who knows when the next one will come? When do these permanent memory moments stop coming? They’re already coming fewer and farther between. There are fewer experiences that are entirely new.

Now that I’ve been entranced by the musky perfume of Elise’s vagina, I want more. Desperately. In fact, I’m at half-mast just thinking about it. But maybe I should wait. Maybe I don’t want to have sex. Because that is almost assuredly my next moment, and I don’t want to waste it.

The air is sweet. The wind is coursing through the cabin of my Chevy and I feel so good it hurts. Maybe I’ll pull over and stare at the sky for a while.

“That’s a reasonable point, but here is my question— do they poop?”

“Why does it matter if they poop? Seriously, why does it matter?”

“Because, you’re asking me to enter in to this world where people are bitten by dead people and reanimated in to dead people—”

“Living dead people.”

“Fine. Whatever. The point is, I’m required to engage in such a massive scientific suspension of disbelief, literally across the board, I just want to know if they poop.”

“But you still haven’t answered my question. Why does it matter?”

“BECAUSE! They are literally mowing on innards on the regular. Like just straight devouring peoples entrails and what not. Devouring entire humans. Have you ever been to a Brazilian steakhouse?”

“Of course.”

“And did you eat more than usual? Or more than you might normally consume?”

“Oh, yes, absolutely. I actually loosened my belt like something out of a cartoon.”

“Exactly. That is my point. And afterwards, after all the meat sweats and regret and reevaluation of your life and your decisions, you probably took a massive shit. That is how that works.”

“Correct, sir. Several.”

“So if you eat an above average amount of meat and that happens, what happens when a zombie eats an entire human? Why aren’t we willing to cover off on that? Why isn’t Atlanta just straight up covered in zombie shit in the first season of walking dead? Why don’t we see a scene of a zombie getting cross-bowed while popping a squat?”

“Not artful? I don’t know. I mean, I’m not going to lie, I don’t really want to see that.”

“I don’t want to see it either. Really. I just want it to be addressed. What about the scientific rigor?”

“Seriously? You need zombies to take shits to get in to a show? You like plenty of shows where you’ve never seen the characters use the bathroom.”

“Yeah, and they’re less real to me.”

“I’ve never seen you poop. How do I even know you’re real?”

“You don’t. How do you feel about that? Now you’ll always wonder if I’m a cyborg, or a hallucination. A ghost, maybe. I bet Haley Joel Osmet never saw Bruce Willis drop one.”

“Fair points.”

“You see, souls are universal.”

I considered what he was saying to me. Or, thinking to me, I guess. This was all so dizzying. 

“I’ve been connected to you for years. Since as long as I could remember I’ve seen you.” he said.

“You can see me? How can you see me?” my mind immediately retreating to my most private memories, fearing that I was being watched in every fleeting moment of secrecy and inward retreat. That even my modesty was some sort of public profanity. Every intimacy reveled. There was nothing unseen. My cheeks rouged with blood. He’d seen it all. 

“How could you watch me for so long without saying anything? How dare you? Are you some sort of sick voyeur?” I was still speaking out loud, not used to the idea that speaking wasn’t necessary.

“No.” he replied. It was a soft, soothing thought. It touched me somewhere deep down. It was a comfort that I’d never felt from words spoken in person. “When I say I’ve seen you, I mean I perceived you with my minds eye. I look on things with my eyes, but to truly see something you have to see it completely. There is no mystery when I see you. No deceptions or veneers. I’m aware of you with my whole being.”

“But…” I was struggling. It was hard to process my thoughts while still directing an attentive thought his way. How could it be possible. “but you aren’t even from this— you aren’t even from here. We’re not the…”

He was more practiced at this idea. Communicating with his mind was not a new modality of expression, he was a skilled orator and I was merely a toddler growing frustrated at my inability to clearly express myself. But like a nurturing adult who patiently attends to the toddler, using all signals to understand the child’s intentions beyond their linguistic abilities, he would respond without finishing my thoughts. As if there was never a question of my meaning. 

“A soul mate isn’t a choice, you see. It is an absolute. It doesn’t matter that we are not the same, or that we don’t exist in some arbitrary local space within the galaxy. You and I are counterparts, and the comfort we feel— that I feel, in this connection— is a forgone truth.” He paused to make sure I was still with him, and because he was in my mind he knew that I was, and so he finished. “That we are not together, indeed, may be a gift. The pain of being close to you without the ability to join physically would be a pain I could not endure.”

In that moment I felt the pain he was speaking of. I was beginning to feel him without thinking. I’d never felt anything like that before. 

Relax. 

Relax.

Take it easy. 

It’s not a big deal.

Just think about something else.

Think about something slow and easy.

Something that is tempered and even and cadenced.

Not so fast, no so quick, not so staccato, slow, slow, slow, slow.

There isn’t anything else, it’s just me here in the moment, take it in.

Deep breath, deep breath, deep breath, deep breath, deep, deep, deep, deep.

Deep. Too deep. So. Oh. 

Yeah.

“Was that good?”

I was born today.

And The Fade is beginning.

I’ve already begun to forget the meaning of life, the moment of creation, the complexities of the universe that are bestowed upon us through a connection with divinity.

I still understand, I still remember, that the forgetting is part of the process. This is The Fade. Right now I am just my soul, but today I begin to convene with my body. I begin the merger in to one.

I can still almost see myself in a third person sense. I feel my body, that it is there at least. But the controls don’t make sense. My intention, my will, it doesn’t mesh with the wires and fibers of my flesh. Every moment though, every involuntary wiggle, shake, and thrust of my feet and toes and lips feels incrementally more familiar. I begin to remember.

My father, the one I still know to be responsible for drawing my soul from the ether, he looks at me with awe. Shock and maybe even fear darts in to his eyes in the spaces between each moment, but they always return to awe. It’s this undulating, sinusoid of love and fear that makes me feel safe as I begin to lose my connection with the universe. I know that in a few weeks I will have lost all of this knowledge and I will begin my crawl back towards attempting to reconvene with It. But he makes me feel safe in that process. Of losing myself and beginning to find it again.

My mothers eyes possess only love. They are laser beams of light, and joy and optimism. It’s in her eyes that I know I can proceed with this journey, because she knows I will make it. I’m not the first, and as other babies cry in the nursery, new voices being added every few hours, it is clear I won’t be the last. But there is something in her eyes, a warmth, that I can feel down here beyond this new foreign body. I can feel it here in my soul. Love is what connects it all, me to myself.

Since my birth, my consciousness has begun to connect more with my body. As my eyes get heavy, my thoughts slow greatly. This process of waking and sleeping must be what connects the two, the body and soul, so closely. I begin to blink, fighting to stay awake, to keep the moments that I can still understand. But as they both stare at me, I’m ok with the coming slumber. They’ll be there when I wake. Love will be there when I wake.

At some point, I got the idea stuck in my head. 

“I’ll try everything once, the saying goes.”

I’m so skinny and long, I thought it made sense. Take advantage of the opportunity while it still exists. You know? ‘Cause everyone always talks about how you’ll get fat when you turn whatever their age is minus one. It’s the N+1 of fatness. Age-1= “when you’ll get fat.” I’m going to get fat someday, or something, so, I’ll eat everything now.

But whatever. I don’t know. I just started doing it.

I’d just pick things up and put them in my mouth. I don’t even think about it, really. A penny. A cotton ball. A piece of moss. I’ve eaten a scab. I’ve tried to eat a banana peel. I ate grass. Actually, I’ve eaten a lot of different types of grass. Strofoam— which, by the way, is pretty easy to eat. Bark mulch totally tastes like dirt. Which I’ve also eaten. Tanning lotion tastes much different than it smells. Boogers. Coffee grounds don’t go down easy and a cigarette made me throw up. Tin foil hurt coming out, and I swear I felt it moving through my intestines. I ate three chicken bones, which I later found out might have killed me, but I probably still would have eaten them anyway. I ate a dixie cup that held a jello shot when I was at a party. Everyone thought I was a crazy party girl, but I just figured it would be easier to eat the cup if the jello was in it.

I guess it’s stubbornness? Maybe? I don’t know. I had an intro to psychology class, and they said it’s a compulsion if you feel like you have to do it. I don’t. I don’t really care. I just feel like there isn’t anything better I could be doing with my life. At least this gives me goals.

I refused to believe it. It was that simple.

Deep down, I think, I always knew it was true. But in the casual meanderings of my mind, the insignificant passing thoughts, it couldn’t have been further from the truth.

In my thoughts, I drove her wild. In my thoughts, my furtive glances were reciprocated. In my thoughts, I was the man she had been waiting for her entire life. In my thoughts, it was all very real.

In reality, she probably never noticed me starring at her. In reality, I might have seemed nice if she had noticed, but not likely her dream come true. In reality, I was just someone else.

But my denial persisted. My imagination was strong. And at some point, I’m not really sure when, the fantasy became the reality.

I’ve thought about this often since we began dating, when given a chance to reflect on the absurdity of it all. Of the fact that love fell so easily in to my lap, almost as if it was being dragged there by some outside force. And I’ve realized, maybe denial isn’t always a bad thing. Maybe, if there is truth in the idea of collapsing a reality you believe in hard enough, then denial could be seen as an evolutionary trait. The people who could deny the hardest could accomplish the most. 

At least that’s what I choose to believe. And as my fingers caress the soft skin on the nape of her neck as she slowly fades in to sleep, I have to admit—my powers of denial are strong. You might say I have a lot to show for it.

I was just never in to it. I was they type that dressed for gym and never exerted myself. It’s not that I’m not in tune with my body, I just don’t like the intensity that people take to sports and exercise. I like slow movements. Calibrated and specific.

I’m not sure if that has anything to do with why I never got in to smart phones and social media and all of that. It just seemed so rapid and erratic. I didn’t want to.

So when the running started, you could imagine my confusion and disgust. 

People had been walking faster and faster for years. I guess it was inevitable. Speed walking, at some point, was just not fast enough. People began running between destinations. The pace of culture just ran out of control, literally. Accelerating like a cancerous tumor, with each duplication, amplifying it’s speed ever so slightly. A staged increase in pacing you might not notice until you take a step back. But it happened.

I sometimes try to imagine the first person who started it. They’re swaying rapidly and unnaturally, speed walking, they’re hip flexors aching from the pace, but they’re rushing somewhere. Somewhere clearly very important. I can hear them, because in my mind they actually yell out, “Fuck it!” And they take off. Someone sees them, and they begin to worry they are missing something, so they start running too. And so it cascaded. 

Walking is dangerous now. But I refuse to run. I’ve found that the slower I move, the safer it is. I move through the crowd with deliberate steps, like an old woman doing Tai Chi in the park, breathing evenly and commanding each stride. The crowds split around me like a stone in a stream. My pace is so different, it’s as if I’m perceived as an inanimate object. A person shaped garbage can or pillar.

I’ve become an observer of culture as a whole. I can’t participate anymore, not in a physical sense. But I’ve found myself in the spaces between the torrent. I’ve found a calm in the chaos. It can be lonely, but I’d rather watch others run through their lives than sprint through mine.

At dinner tonight there was a passing reference to Sam. It was a moment that became awkward, not because I cared, but because the other person felt like it was rude to mention some previous moment in my life.

It’s been four years since we broke up.

It’s strange. It’s normal. It’s human. It’s painful.

To say that I have moved on is a complete lie. To say that I am holding on is untrue.

It’s the funny thing that happens when you are being honest with yourself about history. Nothing can be forgotten, nothing can be undone. I’m not sure when I started being honest about this. A week ago? A month ago? Am I even being honest? I think so. I want to think so. 

The thing is, you want to put it behind you. “Move on,” is the thing that is universally said. Every fucking person who ever gives relationship advice says the same god damned thing. “Oh, my god, you are just way too good for him anyway. It’s time to move on.” 

Why does everyone take that approach? Like the only way in which you can let go of a situation is by being dishonest about it?

Did I try to tell myself I was too good for him for a while? Yes. Do I actually believe that to be true? No. Is it because I have a self deprecating outlook on myself and a negative self image? No. I just think it didn’t work.

I think it’s become a cliche to say something like “if only things were different— things might have worked out differently.” Of course they would have. That is what you call a tautology. It is obvious. But to think that things weren’t necessarily destined to fail, that maybe there was a chance that things could have worked out, but for some reason something happened that was out of our control, maybe a freak accident or a butterfly flapping it’s wings in the Cashmir region of india, that this is the reason things somehow left our control? I would much rather believe this. That it wasn’t our fault at all. That love escaped us completely out of either of our control. Not destiny, just outside forces.

Why is that such anathema?

Why is it better to look back and say, “I thought I was madly in love with him, but it must have been something I ate, because he was a disgusting excuse for a man.” Why is it better to think that you lost all faculties of judgement for two years than to think that a circumstance arose that was strong enough to tear two people apart?

You don’t have to hold out hope that he is going to come back. I know he is not going to come back. I know I’m not going to go back to him. But I’m willing to put myself out there on a limb and to say that when I was with him I was truly in love. And In the same breath, I’m willing to say that it is over.

I am going to be 33 next week. I recently read an article online that said that I can look forward to my 80s with a reasonable certainty but that anything longer than that will be a genetic anomaly. That means that I have another 50 or so years to live. What is wrong with saying I gave two of those to him? That leaves me with another 80 to dole out to whomever I choose.  I think I can handle saying that I truly loved someone for two years and then it ended? Yes. I can handle that.

I’m fairly certain that there will be fleeting moments in almost every week for the rest of my 50 years that vividly flash memories of his chest as the morning light splashes through the window in his bedroom, or vague stroboscopic pictures of us tumbling around in a laughter that would not abate until muscular pain gripped the back of my head as the facial muscles around my skull began to cramp.

I like that. It is my history. There is no changing it. The reel of time doesn’t stop for a cut and splice. And so I will enjoy the flashes of him in the moments when some association brings him rushing back. I will soak in the joy his face brings as it skitters past my minds eye, and I will relish in the sorrow his absence brings, like a muscle soreness the day after a very long run. The ache is ever present, but you know it’s a pain carried by growth. And so you grimace, you wince a bit, but you smile too. And that’s nice.