So I just woke up from this odd dream, and I felt like I had to type it out immediately or I'd forget. I was out to dinner with an old friend, let's call him B for the sake of non-disclosure. We were at Green Mesquite BBQ, (which in real life is amazing, and not at all full of jerks). He and I were catching up, and talking about how much we've changed in the past few years, and really grown as people. We laughed about what terrible assholes we used to be, and consoled each other as we talked about how every time we went back to our home town people could never see that we really had changed. We still got the same wary glances and people still watched our every move just waiting for us to fuck up again. Then we started talking about Uchi, an amazing sushi place, and the legal council for Green Mesquite came over and told us we needed to stop talking about other restaurants. B got pissed off and threatened to walk out, and they told us to just keep our voices down.
Anyway, before the dream got all weird and absurd, it could have been any conversation I've had in the past few years. I know I'm an evil asshole now, but I used to be a much more evil lady, with even less morals and no real concern for who I hurt in my climb up. I thought of human emotion as a game, and loved to see just how far it took for me to break a person down entirely. I smoked too much, I drank too much, I did every drug I could get my little claws into. I was a compulsive cheater. And because I was a brutally honest bitch, I was really bad at being a compulsive cheater, and didn't try that hard to be secretive about it.
I wish I could tell you that I had some massive epiphany after some great tragedy that changed my ways. But honestly, when I moved away from that little town (or as a friend called it once, that "cesspool of drama and filth") none of it seemed right anymore. I don't mean morally right, I mean... like it just didn't sit well with me, like a pair of shoes that is a little too tight around the toes. Maybe that is what a conscience feels like. I don't know, I'm still not perfect. Anyway, being a totally evil fuck just didn't seem to jive right in Austin, so I quit. And it's been... maybe 3 or 4 years now, and every time I go back into that cesspool I get the same looks of admonishment and disgust. It hurts, but I guess I can't really blame them for not seeing that I totally won't fuck their boyfriends anymore.
Tangentially, I was challenged by a friend of mine a while back to write something NOT dark and depressing. I initially very easily created two characters that were madly in love, and happy. Like I said in my last post, I didn't give them names because I am HORRIBLE at that, but shaping these two people was easy. And then I got stuck for a few months. If I can't write anything dark and twisty, where is the conflict? I got the advice from someone to "take those people, and rip them apart, and see what they do". I laid around for another long period of time trying to figure out what I could possibly use to rip them apart, and then I thought, "Write what you know". And the rest just came flowing out like a little river of words.
So here's my experiment in something NOT dark and twisty. Or only marginally dark and twisty.
What You Know
She was no beauty.
She was not an elegant exotic gorgeous person, she was simple and pretty. She was not an orchid of a woman, she was a daisy. But he loved her.
He loved the way her lips hung open when she concentrated, the way her eyes shone when she thought dirty things, he loved the spot where her neck met her shoulder blade. The way that most people ache when their loved one is thousands of miles away, he ached when he was lying underneath her, because no matter how tightly he crushed her to him, she was never close enough, and he wanted more.
It all started in late November. The brisk cold air came down from the north and stung every inch of skin that was not covered, and kissed every strand of hair with its crystalline lips. They were moving. As they hauled boxes up the three flights of stairs to their new chic apartment, they would briefly kiss each other every time they passed. First floor, kiss. Second floor, kiss. Third floor, kiss. And so on.
They stood outside the old dusty moving van and looked at the last box they had left, the last box of his massive book collection, packaged neatly and labeled by her steady hand. He grinned at her and made a mock look of exhaustion, or, to be more truthful (and what would a tale of love be without a soupcon of truth?), a half mocking look. They had been working all day, first to get the new apartment clean, then to lay down shelf liner, plan out the furniture arrangements, and finally drive the 30 miles in from their old house in the suburbs. They had gone through a six pack of cheap beer between the two of them, but neither was drunk, just pleasantly exhausted, and ready to start their new life together in the city.
He reached down to lift the final box, and she spotted a spider in the back of the van. She screamed. He tensed when he should have flexed, used his back when he should have used his legs, and fell to the pavement. She screamed again, and her wail was only superseded by the cries of the ambulance whooping its way to the hospital. She held his hand in the back and whispered softly in his ear all the way there.
The doctor had used a bunch of big terms that neither of them had understood, despite their education. He had pulled a muscle in his back, torn something, ripped something else. Why the short bald man in the ER hadn’t just said that, she couldn’t tell. She wondered what it was that had made the doctor so bitter, that had made his bedside manner completely disappear over the years. She was given a prescription for painkillers, and sent home.
Such a small slip of paper. Hard to imagine that such a flimsy little thing could do so much damage. Of course, it wasn’t that specific slip that really caused the confluence of events to follow. To be fair to the little slip of paper, it didn’t even know what it was, much less why it had been ripped down from a tree and stamped with ink and tossed around so, and eventually this poor little piece of a prescription pad found its new home in a landfill, rotting until it was no more. But this story isn’t about the unfair treatment of paper, so you must forgive the author a meandering tangent.
No, it was the fact the papers kept coming. Or to be more precise, that the little pieces of unfairly treated paper were traded for bottles, and the (most likely) poorly treated bottles were holding in little white pills. Good things come in small packages, so they say, and these tiny white pills were no different.
At first he could only feel the pain. The hot searing pain followed by the dull ache, followed by the inextinguishable exhaustion. But as time went by, as it’s wont to do, the pain lessened, and faded, and went away completely. But the pills didn’t.
It became habit for him to take a pill before bedtime, so that he could make it through the night. And of course when he could feel a shadow of the old pain come back. Or when he had a headache. And perhaps when he was feeling irritable, because they made him calm. And since they made him comfortable, he’d take one when he was feeling cold. And one before he took a shower, because that was just a lovely experience. And eventually, he would take one when he began to feel a little strange. Not that he knew that the strange feeling was sobriety creeping back in, he just knew that it was a queer feeling and he didn’t like it, and the pills made it go away.
And all this time, the unlovely but loving girl stayed by him. It took her awhile to notice the pattern, to notice the problem. He had left his job due to his severe injury, and hadn’t gone back due to the pain. So she worked overtime, nights and weekends just to make ends meet. She would come back from a 12 hour shift to find him sitting in the same spot on the sofa as when she left. He wouldn’t shower for days at a time. He didn’t want to have conversations, and when she tried to engage him, he was angry and petulant. He had never had a temper before, but now he was quick to rage, and while he never actually hit her, he had raised his hand once and sent her crying to their bedroom for hours over a small comment on his teeth.
They were no longer making love. Shit, she could no longer get him to fuck her, much less anything more meaningful. He was always too tired, in too much pain, too messed up to even get it started, much less finish. She could feel the void growing in between them, but was at a loss as to how to fix it. How to fix him. How to fix the relationship.
She started going out. She had never been much of a drinker, but she found herself downtown almost every night. At first it was just because she didn’t want to go home after work. She didn’t want to see his pale and skinny body, so different from the body she’d fallen in love with. She didn’t want to deal with the bickering and the forced apologies that followed. So she went to bars, and eventually to dance clubs, because when she moved her unlovely body it made her feel alive again. To stomp her heels to the pounding bass beats and swing her hair around her face, sweating under the lights and the closeness of a hundred other writhing bodies, she felt her heart pulse and could forget.
The first man she went home with was nothing special. She was sweaty and drunk and lonely and this man was there. As they rocked back and forth on his dirty futon, she screamed with every bit of breath in her body. She screamed all the frustrations she’d felt for so long, she screamed for the life she was living, she screamed for the man she had at home, not for the one thrusting inside her. She screamed so loud that even when a fist was placed inside her mouth to make her quiet, she could still be heard. She screamed until all the dogs in the neighborhood were barking with her, howling for the pain they could hear in her voice, even if the man on top of her could not. Only when they were done and she got up to clean herself off did she realize what she had done.
A cheater. She was a cheater now, she thought. A whore. Someone who did… a one night stand? Is that what she had just done? Isn’t that what her friends in college had called it? She quickly grabbed her clothes and went home, stopping on the way to gag out the side of her car. She took a shower until the hot water ran out, scrubbing her skin until she was raw and red, like her eyes. That was the last time she screamed to the stars and the heavens, but that was not the last time she went home with a stranger.
It became a habit for her. Come home after work, make dinner, avoid eye contact with him, get dressed to go out, dance until she was sticky, fuck until she was worse, and come home at three or four in the morning. It wasn’t that she no longer loved him. Quite the contrary. She loved him more than she could bear. She loved him so much she couldn’t stand to watch him kill himself. She loved him so much she couldn’t leave him. But she had this burning need that he could not fill. It was never about the sex for her. She needed to feel wanted. She needed someone to look at her with lust and desire, and not with either blurry confusion or rage.
One night after a mediocre evening with a tall Norwegian, she came home to find him sitting on the steps outside their apartment. He had the cold calm look in his eyes that as of late always betrayed something horrifying beneath the surface. He had a lazy smile and took a long drag off of his cigarette.
“You’ve been busy I see,” he stated with a drawl, and blew his smoke up into the night sky.
“I went… out.”
“Shh…, I don’t need your explanations, and I don’t want your lies. I know where you’ve been, and I know what you’ve been doing.” His voice stayed at a calm level, and his eyes shone in the moonlight. She said nothing. “What, nothing to say for yourself? Don’t you want to tell me you’re sorry? Don’t you want to beg for my forgiveness?” She stared at the cold little gray pebbles that made up the asphalt, and tried to count them. She tried to see little faces in the hodgepodge of streaks of dust. He finally broke his smirking glare and frowned. “You don’t have anything to say, do you? My god, this is over isn’t it?” He put his head in his hands and sobbed. “If you still loved me, you’d fight for this. You’d fight with me. You’d argue your case, and beg and scream. But you don’t give a shit about me anymore. You don’t care about us anymore.” She let a tear fall down her face, and said nothing.
Months passed. The sheets of the proverbial calendar flew off like an old black and white cartoon. She got herself an efficiency apartment and a promotion. She said “I will,” and “You can,” to many more men over the years, but never “I do.” Eventually she had almost forgotten about him. Or rather, her brain had almost forgot, but the heart and the body have their own sets of memories, and those are so much brighter and more full of color that they almost never fade completely,. Until one day she saw him again.
It was on the Metro, of all the silly and unfortunate places to see an exboyfriend. Tightly packed in a small metal car that stunk of whiskey and body odor, she clung her briefcase to her side like it was the holy grail, and teetered on her sensible heels. She swept her newly sheared hair behind her ears and smoothed down her navy blue skirt. A man bumped into her almost knocking her down, and she turned to glare at what was most likely a homeless man that was the source of the stench. But it was HIM.
His breath caught in his throat, and suddenly his tongue felt too big for his mouth, and his lips felt raw and sticky. His hands were shaking and there was no way he could speak. She saw his confusion and disarray and giggled. She clasped a hand to her mouth, ashamed that she had laughed at him at such a crucial moment. A grin swept across his face, and he began to chuckle. Soon they were laughing so hard they thought they would never stop.
An old woman sits in a seat on the Metro, trying to read a newspaper, and wondering who those awful people are that are laughing and kissing behind her. She wonders if they know how obnoxious they are being, and grimaces. She decides to get off on the yellow line a stop or two early. “Ah well,” she thinks, “Let them enjoy it while they can. It will never last.”
She was not an elegant exotic gorgeous person, she was simple and pretty. She was not an orchid of a woman, she was a daisy. But he loved her.
He loved the way her lips hung open when she concentrated, the way her eyes shone when she thought dirty things, he loved the spot where her neck met her shoulder blade. The way that most people ache when their loved one is thousands of miles away, he ached when he was lying underneath her, because no matter how tightly he crushed her to him, she was never close enough, and he wanted more.
It all started in late November. The brisk cold air came down from the north and stung every inch of skin that was not covered, and kissed every strand of hair with its crystalline lips. They were moving. As they hauled boxes up the three flights of stairs to their new chic apartment, they would briefly kiss each other every time they passed. First floor, kiss. Second floor, kiss. Third floor, kiss. And so on.
They stood outside the old dusty moving van and looked at the last box they had left, the last box of his massive book collection, packaged neatly and labeled by her steady hand. He grinned at her and made a mock look of exhaustion, or, to be more truthful (and what would a tale of love be without a soupcon of truth?), a half mocking look. They had been working all day, first to get the new apartment clean, then to lay down shelf liner, plan out the furniture arrangements, and finally drive the 30 miles in from their old house in the suburbs. They had gone through a six pack of cheap beer between the two of them, but neither was drunk, just pleasantly exhausted, and ready to start their new life together in the city.
He reached down to lift the final box, and she spotted a spider in the back of the van. She screamed. He tensed when he should have flexed, used his back when he should have used his legs, and fell to the pavement. She screamed again, and her wail was only superseded by the cries of the ambulance whooping its way to the hospital. She held his hand in the back and whispered softly in his ear all the way there.
The doctor had used a bunch of big terms that neither of them had understood, despite their education. He had pulled a muscle in his back, torn something, ripped something else. Why the short bald man in the ER hadn’t just said that, she couldn’t tell. She wondered what it was that had made the doctor so bitter, that had made his bedside manner completely disappear over the years. She was given a prescription for painkillers, and sent home.
Such a small slip of paper. Hard to imagine that such a flimsy little thing could do so much damage. Of course, it wasn’t that specific slip that really caused the confluence of events to follow. To be fair to the little slip of paper, it didn’t even know what it was, much less why it had been ripped down from a tree and stamped with ink and tossed around so, and eventually this poor little piece of a prescription pad found its new home in a landfill, rotting until it was no more. But this story isn’t about the unfair treatment of paper, so you must forgive the author a meandering tangent.
No, it was the fact the papers kept coming. Or to be more precise, that the little pieces of unfairly treated paper were traded for bottles, and the (most likely) poorly treated bottles were holding in little white pills. Good things come in small packages, so they say, and these tiny white pills were no different.
At first he could only feel the pain. The hot searing pain followed by the dull ache, followed by the inextinguishable exhaustion. But as time went by, as it’s wont to do, the pain lessened, and faded, and went away completely. But the pills didn’t.
It became habit for him to take a pill before bedtime, so that he could make it through the night. And of course when he could feel a shadow of the old pain come back. Or when he had a headache. And perhaps when he was feeling irritable, because they made him calm. And since they made him comfortable, he’d take one when he was feeling cold. And one before he took a shower, because that was just a lovely experience. And eventually, he would take one when he began to feel a little strange. Not that he knew that the strange feeling was sobriety creeping back in, he just knew that it was a queer feeling and he didn’t like it, and the pills made it go away.
And all this time, the unlovely but loving girl stayed by him. It took her awhile to notice the pattern, to notice the problem. He had left his job due to his severe injury, and hadn’t gone back due to the pain. So she worked overtime, nights and weekends just to make ends meet. She would come back from a 12 hour shift to find him sitting in the same spot on the sofa as when she left. He wouldn’t shower for days at a time. He didn’t want to have conversations, and when she tried to engage him, he was angry and petulant. He had never had a temper before, but now he was quick to rage, and while he never actually hit her, he had raised his hand once and sent her crying to their bedroom for hours over a small comment on his teeth.
They were no longer making love. Shit, she could no longer get him to fuck her, much less anything more meaningful. He was always too tired, in too much pain, too messed up to even get it started, much less finish. She could feel the void growing in between them, but was at a loss as to how to fix it. How to fix him. How to fix the relationship.
She started going out. She had never been much of a drinker, but she found herself downtown almost every night. At first it was just because she didn’t want to go home after work. She didn’t want to see his pale and skinny body, so different from the body she’d fallen in love with. She didn’t want to deal with the bickering and the forced apologies that followed. So she went to bars, and eventually to dance clubs, because when she moved her unlovely body it made her feel alive again. To stomp her heels to the pounding bass beats and swing her hair around her face, sweating under the lights and the closeness of a hundred other writhing bodies, she felt her heart pulse and could forget.
The first man she went home with was nothing special. She was sweaty and drunk and lonely and this man was there. As they rocked back and forth on his dirty futon, she screamed with every bit of breath in her body. She screamed all the frustrations she’d felt for so long, she screamed for the life she was living, she screamed for the man she had at home, not for the one thrusting inside her. She screamed so loud that even when a fist was placed inside her mouth to make her quiet, she could still be heard. She screamed until all the dogs in the neighborhood were barking with her, howling for the pain they could hear in her voice, even if the man on top of her could not. Only when they were done and she got up to clean herself off did she realize what she had done.
A cheater. She was a cheater now, she thought. A whore. Someone who did… a one night stand? Is that what she had just done? Isn’t that what her friends in college had called it? She quickly grabbed her clothes and went home, stopping on the way to gag out the side of her car. She took a shower until the hot water ran out, scrubbing her skin until she was raw and red, like her eyes. That was the last time she screamed to the stars and the heavens, but that was not the last time she went home with a stranger.
It became a habit for her. Come home after work, make dinner, avoid eye contact with him, get dressed to go out, dance until she was sticky, fuck until she was worse, and come home at three or four in the morning. It wasn’t that she no longer loved him. Quite the contrary. She loved him more than she could bear. She loved him so much she couldn’t stand to watch him kill himself. She loved him so much she couldn’t leave him. But she had this burning need that he could not fill. It was never about the sex for her. She needed to feel wanted. She needed someone to look at her with lust and desire, and not with either blurry confusion or rage.
One night after a mediocre evening with a tall Norwegian, she came home to find him sitting on the steps outside their apartment. He had the cold calm look in his eyes that as of late always betrayed something horrifying beneath the surface. He had a lazy smile and took a long drag off of his cigarette.
“You’ve been busy I see,” he stated with a drawl, and blew his smoke up into the night sky.
“I went… out.”
“Shh…, I don’t need your explanations, and I don’t want your lies. I know where you’ve been, and I know what you’ve been doing.” His voice stayed at a calm level, and his eyes shone in the moonlight. She said nothing. “What, nothing to say for yourself? Don’t you want to tell me you’re sorry? Don’t you want to beg for my forgiveness?” She stared at the cold little gray pebbles that made up the asphalt, and tried to count them. She tried to see little faces in the hodgepodge of streaks of dust. He finally broke his smirking glare and frowned. “You don’t have anything to say, do you? My god, this is over isn’t it?” He put his head in his hands and sobbed. “If you still loved me, you’d fight for this. You’d fight with me. You’d argue your case, and beg and scream. But you don’t give a shit about me anymore. You don’t care about us anymore.” She let a tear fall down her face, and said nothing.
Months passed. The sheets of the proverbial calendar flew off like an old black and white cartoon. She got herself an efficiency apartment and a promotion. She said “I will,” and “You can,” to many more men over the years, but never “I do.” Eventually she had almost forgotten about him. Or rather, her brain had almost forgot, but the heart and the body have their own sets of memories, and those are so much brighter and more full of color that they almost never fade completely,. Until one day she saw him again.
It was on the Metro, of all the silly and unfortunate places to see an exboyfriend. Tightly packed in a small metal car that stunk of whiskey and body odor, she clung her briefcase to her side like it was the holy grail, and teetered on her sensible heels. She swept her newly sheared hair behind her ears and smoothed down her navy blue skirt. A man bumped into her almost knocking her down, and she turned to glare at what was most likely a homeless man that was the source of the stench. But it was HIM.
His breath caught in his throat, and suddenly his tongue felt too big for his mouth, and his lips felt raw and sticky. His hands were shaking and there was no way he could speak. She saw his confusion and disarray and giggled. She clasped a hand to her mouth, ashamed that she had laughed at him at such a crucial moment. A grin swept across his face, and he began to chuckle. Soon they were laughing so hard they thought they would never stop.
An old woman sits in a seat on the Metro, trying to read a newspaper, and wondering who those awful people are that are laughing and kissing behind her. She wonders if they know how obnoxious they are being, and grimaces. She decides to get off on the yellow line a stop or two early. “Ah well,” she thinks, “Let them enjoy it while they can. It will never last.”
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