“Renae. This is David.”
Trombone muffled plunger sounds on the opposite end of
the phone.
“Listen, I need to talk to you about something
important.”
Interrogative question mark said very quickly with
docile intent.
“Listen...”
While rehearsing my break-up speech in the full-bodied
bedroom mirror I recently inhabited after the egress of the grand piano, the
same mirror I have been rehearsing my nightly Young Columbus speech in for the
past two weeks I make it a point not to sound as if I am signing for the
hearing impaired and say the word ‘Listen’ every time I start a new paragraph.
I have already failed.
“Listen.”
***
I tell her something that we both know. I tell her
that it just isn’t working out because we never see each other. I tell her that
I love her only I love her as a friend and as a person. I tell her that we
should maybe get together sometime as friends.
I tell her that I would like that a lot.
I tell her that I would like that a lot.
***
It is like I am supposed to cry but I don’t For some
reason it doesn’t hit me that I have seriously wounded a creature who I spent
three months making smile. That she is in tears. That she is spending the whole
afternoon calling up Laura and Amy and Kristi and David. That she will enter
the drape that is mid-January at dusk lost in a swirl of tears.
That she will be all alone.
That she will be all alone.
***
“I mean don’t you feel the same way. We just never see
each other. It just isn’t working out. Maybe we could wait until you start
driving in a couple of months and see what happens then.”
From the other end of the phone it feels as if
everything breaks apart after the every sentence my lips avail. It is the sound
of a chandelier toppling into good wedding china at thanksgiving dinner. It is
a sound of an infant entering the eyelids of the planet in punctuated wails.
It is the sound of hurt. Inside I feel like there is no way I could possibly win the Young Columbus if I can’t stop thinking about the lower limbs of Renae, unclothed, from the naked white of her torso. That there is just no way that whatever God there is would let me win.
I can feel her crying . I can feel her wailing, I
can feel her cursing and screaming and kicking the stuffed animals off the bed
in disconsolate falsetto in the room I have never
seen yet only fantasized about every night for the past four months. I feel her
breaking apart in isosceles triangles made of saline.
I have an erection the whole entire time I telling
her off on the phone.
“I don’t what to talk to you right now,” She’ll add, her voice crackling; crying. From the other end of the phone line I can see the mascara drip and foam lavender pockets below her eyes. Her butterfly lashes have been transmogrified into a Venus flytrap, swatting at the, for some reason, chipper monotone of my voice. There are reassurances that this is the best thing for both of us. I call up Dawn Michelle afterwards and inform her of my unanimous decision. “I wished Death on you!!” She’ll tell me later in the week. She’ll tell me that she has been crying for two days straight now and that David Best offered her an extending wing for which she could wipe her frosty tears on and bite into with malefic incantations directed at VonBehren. Amy will later phone up and, as is the case, as Mama Bear always cups a curled moon palm to her lips and echoes out my voice, and I’ll hopefully adjourn to my parents mattress and remove my spectacles and squint and see myself in the mirror, making sure my steadily intractable hair has remained constant, a bulwark on my brain, and I’ll talk to Amy. Talk to her once again. Tell her that this was inevitable. Tell her that this was the best thing for the both of us as a couple. Spoon-feed her a driblets of my masculinity bullshit. Amy. Reminding me that I gave her a talk all of one month ago about White Trash Pat. About how I reprimanded her and about how I was using her. I adjust the pea-colored Giddeon’s I keep affixed in my back denim pocket at all times, a God who I talk to through the digits on my wristwatch. My first break up outside of Dawn Michelle who phones me up and tells me that her parents kicked her out again, tells me that she is also pouring copious amounts of caffeine down the hatch. Tells me that she is staying out later than she has ever stayed out and that she is fighting with her mom and drinking cheap beers. Slicing the helmet off of Tin Soldiers and marching them down her throat. Spinning around. Telling me that she never intended to give him a blow job, it just sort of happened.
ReplyDelete“Why?” Dawn Michelle, my girlfriend from last summer, in the ice cream social hat, telling me that I look just like that one guy off of BLOSSOM. Dawn Michelle, asking me why it was that I was to break up with Renae Howard and of course the answer remains inscrutable. I just felt like it was the right time, felt like it was that moment in the episode when the slowly encroaching flags planted into the sheet-music soil of the soundtrack seems to brush up against the characters emotions and conflicts and the next thing you know the theme music sputters out in nasal drawl. The credits flash and perhaps even a preview of what is to come. Only there’s no music know. The only music audible is a metallic click that is heard chirping from my right wrist as I fasten the IDENTITY bracelet around the skeletal contours—my cross-country watch buckled around my left wrist. My hair is sculpted with the grease bristles that molds my hair into cement fountain. My reflection beaming back at me. The velocity. It’s time to go. Time to fly.
culled from 2003 edition of text...