Where Does the Time Go?

It’s 1 AM. I feel like I just got off work. I should be asleep already if I’m being honest.

While I waited for the bus, I thought about the time I thought you were moving out-of-state. I don’t know the last time I saw you. I can’t imagine the next time I will. But in that moment, panic set it. In that moment from years ago, I felt a desperate need to cling to whatever part of you that I could.

I’m pushing and pulling in too many directions. I want to write. I want to relax. I want to stay informed. I want to draw. I want to just maybe have a little fun for a couple minutes and then I’ll get focused on writing. I want to get some rest and deal with everything tomorrow when I can be more productive, but that’s what I said the day before and that’s what I said the day before that so, no, I need to actually try to be productive like I tried to do the day before and tried to do the day before that.

There are so many people I used to know. We both used to know. Maybe you still do. I wouldn’t know. I can’t recall where you were headed or why you were headed there. You weren’t the first to set your sights across state lines and others did what you didn’t. But something deep in me hurt at the prospect of losing you.

It feels like just yesterday, I was staying out til bar close and going to work the following morning. It seems impossible that I used to spend 3 hours a day commuting and I still had about the same amount of free time I have now when I get home. I don’t know where my energy went. I don’t know if all my bad habits caught up with me. I’m mentally, emotionally, and physically drained every second of the portion of the day that belongs to me, not a company.

The ingrate has no real understanding of object permanence. Tell me I can’t have it and I want it. But take it away when I’m not looking and see just how much I treasure it. The boy with too many toys doesn’t notice when one goes missing until he wants to play with that particular one.

Unacknowledged Presence

These rooms with closed windows and a gust of wind. These halls with flickering lights. We’ve been cultured to fear the unknown. We’ve been cultured to assume the worst of strangers. But everyone and everything is simply trying to coexist. I find comfort in your presence. More comfort in not needing to acknowledge it. No need to conjure you; you’ll arrive in due time.

With you watching over me, I will try to catch up on sleep. With you watching over me, I feel alright. Nothing more sincere than what we have. Nothing more true than this. No guaranteed future. All we have is this moment. Words would cheapen it. You’re there. I’m here. Humanity has twisted the definition of “company” to add unnecessary pressure.

You’ve existed since time immemorial. Maybe that’s why we co-habitat like an old couple. Through the honey moon phase. Through the fighting. We’ve found our footing. All the things you used to do that rubbed me wrong and my many faux pas have become comfortingly familiar. The chill on my neck tells me you’re close by. No point in speaking. You know I appreciate you. I know you’re happy to haunt someone like me.

Some people tell their friends. Some people call exorcists. I have no reason to bring attention to a perfectly comfortable situation. When you wail, I let you wail. When the time is right, I’ll fog up a mirror and wait to watch what your finger draws across it. But most days, you’re there; I’m here. We both know it. Why waste words?

Proximity Crush

I watch Uncut Gems to relax. Let the Irishman wash over me. This is my comfort zone. This is my happy place. I don’t know what tomorrow brings. I don’t know how I’ll survive. I don’t know who will still return my calls and who has deleted my number from their phone. The earth is edging ever closer to uninhabitability and I have the luxury of being one of the last millions of people to truly realize it, I’m sure. The fascist creep is the same. My comfort will remain. Is it helping anything to make a concerted effort to be concerned as I watch everything fall apart or am I wasting the last few “good” years?

Untitled

I’ll dance Volk at your wedding. I’ll mumble incantations under my breath at your funeral.

I hope your husband has a big dick and a big enough heart to let his guard down around you. I hope you don’t lie awake in bed at night thinking about how every decision you’ve ever made, whether actively or passively, has led to this exact moment and you won’t find out what’s behind the other doors. I hope you don’t start your day looking at a stranger over your morning coffee and think about how there’s some Palestinian-who-never-got-a-chance-to-become-a-refugee-because-the-IDF-shot-him-dead-for-throwing-a-rock-during-a-protest-at-the-border who could have loved you better. There’s not a man who lost his job and then his home and then his life as he froze to death on the streets of Chicago who was destined to be your soulmate so here you are. Or perhaps a teenager gunned down at school or he survived school, but got busted for something or other no one really remembers and the judge decided to make an example out of him and threw the book at him and after a decade inside with no end in sight he took his own life or maybe he did his time and got out, but found the job market less than welcoming to an ex-con so he went back to selling drugs or tried out selling his body and a cop or maybe a civilian who was taking advantage of anti-sex trafficking laws got him in a secluded area and now you’ll never raise a child together. Or maybe he had the misfortune of being a Uighur Muslim in China or Rohingya Muslim in Myanmar. Or maybe he’s still alive: that nice Latino man ICE deported for a decade old unpaid parking ticket. Or maybe he’s white: that angry young man screaming about how you’d burn in hell as you entered the clinic. You went inside and had the procedure done and that man went his own way. Or he’d already gone his own way too long ago and now there was no redemptive quality left in him, any signs of your true one and only long ago vanquished from his body. Or maybe you lost him in a way that isn’t so dull, something that would make headlines: one day he came home from school and his mentally unstable mother decided to lock him in a closet and feed him less and less with each passing day and after a neighbor had not seen the boy-who-would-have-grown-up-to-become-the-love-of-your-life for a month, they decided to call the police.

I hope you don’t ponder these alternate lives with other (better?) lovers while browsing the Craigslist Missed Connections section because anti-sex trafficking laws got rid of the men for women section and all the other personals. Because you picked the man you’re with and confirmed to Regis Philbin that it was, in fact, your final answer.

Your husband is here – or rather I’m here; I’m the one invited, it’s his event – and those don’t look like crocodile tears to me. I hope he never remarries because no one could ever live up to the bar you set.

“Untitled” was the only piece written for a zine entitled Pretend to Be Asleep which was never completed. It was inspired by Suspiria (2018), “Wedding” by Serengeti, and, obviously, politics.

I Do Not Love the Sunrise, but I Fear What Will Happen in the Night

I will stay up past dawn studying every inch of your body, like there will be a test on Monday morning covering everything - the bumps, bruises, scrapes, scars, freckles, every ridge, the feel, the taste. Cramming for the exam, face first in your flesh, fearing I might fail.

I fear forgetting. I forget names and faces, past moments. I offend, but am indifferent. Still, I have caught a glimpse of what I am capable of. Not with you. I refuse.

I love like a Ryan Adams song. I love like I live, never knowing when it will go away but aware it will.

I love like a boxer. I am doing my best “butterfly,” but always prepared to sting – always an arm’s length from the edge of the ring, preparing to rope-a-dope.

I will stay up past dawn, tasting your body. I’ll tell you how I’m prepping for the midterm, but always with one eye on the door. Half of me believes that if I blink, I’ll see your back while you walk through that threshold. This isn’t a study session. This is the final. You’ll leave on winter break and, when you come back, you’ll have a new schedule.

I love like an endangered species, nearly hunted out of existence. I’ll limp with an arrow in my flesh, a trail of blood trickling out. I know they’ll use my own blood against me. I know they’ll track me. But all I have is now. All I can think to do is leave the scene. All I know is barely surviving for a few more hours.

I will stay up past dawn practicing my straight face, strengthening my tear ducts, picking my brave face out of a catalog, readying myself to save face. I will keep my head up. I will be cold. I will not be taken by surprise. I will agree – this has run its course.

I love like someone who doesn’t know how. I love my perception of you. I fear who you truly are and who you want to be. We are two impossible beasts with lovely images superimposed on top of us. I do not love the sunrise, but I fear what will happen in the night so I will stay up past dawn.

“I Do Not Love the Sunrise, but I Fear What Will Happen in the Night” was originally a part of the unpublished You Deserve Each Other zine. The author regrets the reference to Ryan Adams.

The Day Your Assailant Dies

On the day your assailant dies, you will not find out. You will not find out for two more weeks. You will receive the call before you look him up. You will be in your third week of the new school year and wonder if this is a bad omen. You will shrug off superstition and rationalize that there is nothing special about three weeks into the school year, it was inevitable he’d die eventually – if not now, then the first week of winter break or the day after a really great date or your birthday or another potentially significant day. He would die; you would struggle to not let him ruin something which you would put extra significance upon because of the timing of his death coinciding with the shared day. This is simply how things go.

On the day your molester dies, you will finally be old enough to start feeling the full impacts of his actions, his lack of control. You will start to connect the dots and they’ll trace back to his desperate, flailing grasp for power over anyone. He brought you into this without asking and left, once again, selfishly and without warning. You will be angry that he is not here to see the damage he’s done, to look it in the eye. You will feel cheated that you never got to tell him that you did not fall prey, that you are bigger, better, stronger, and braver than he could have ever dreamed of being.

On the day the perpetrator’s years catch up with him, he will be alone. His obituary will be reluctantly written and even more reluctantly paid for by an estranged sister who only bothers because of her need for tradition and her hope that, by doing her part to help history remain recorded, life will somehow become just a slightest bit less chaotic. You will feel sorry for her, but mostly you will hate her. You will spend hours wondering what kind of monster memorializes a monster. A greater monster? A lesser, more pathetic monster?

On the day your abuser finally dies, it will be hard to explain to anyone. He’s dead. You should feel elated. You should feel free. He can’t hurt you now. But that’s not how this works just like this isn’t the day they’ll finally understand any of this. He took something and he could never return it, but, with the finality of his passing, it is impossible to pretend any longer – there’s no going back.

On that day, you will not feel free. You will not feel relieved. You will feel exactly the same way you have felt every single day since he entered your life and never left.

“The Day Your Assailant Dies” was originally a part of the unpublished You Deserve Each Other zine.

Feathers for Armor

Let your feathers protect you. It’s a violent world. Pull a Rushdie if you need to, but come up for air and double down on your efforts. This world will try to kill you and there’s no guarantee that it won’t succeed. It’s currently winning by the way.

You can only fit so many lazy Sundays into one year. You’ve done this before. You’ll do this again. Look around you. This is it. Truly.

Be your own personal Megan Bloomfield. Everyone is retracting their fangs when your back’s not turned. It’s on you to protect your veins. You’ve been Nosferatu with the shades. They took a different approach. Don’t dwell on it. Move on.

It’s all in your head. It’s all in their mouths. You’ll never get the soap close enough to their lips so your only hope is to dump out your waste basket cranium.

Is this where you want to be? Defending your life to a coked-up asshole at a bar? We’ve been over this before; one hand feeds and one hand beats. Wait for the latter to get close enough and tear the flesh from the bone – and then run. Don’t let them put you down. Don’t quench their bloodthirst; quench your own thirst.  The water[s] flow bountifully - when you’re ready.

It’s a nuclear winter year-round out there. You’re not going to survive. Let your feathers keep you warm.

“Feathers for Armor“ was originally published as “Look What They Did to Kanye” in the Historical Fiction zine and was re-titled to reference a different pop star (because the author has not learned their lesson about wealthy people’s inevitable lack of morals) on March 6th, 2020.