you see a blue austin healy sports car with a white racing stripe and think of how your dad used to tell you it was his dream car growing up. too bad he only visits you in nightmares now, and your older coworkers have taken his roll in a bizarre way. and now even the coworker you were recently separated from is giving you nightmares because you miss him so much. maybe it's because you know he covers up the pain with laughs just like you do, even though his father and sister burning in a house fire when he was a kid is a far bigger cross than you'll ever bear, hopefully. you become envious of his son and wish your own biological father, "the Sperm Donor," as your mother used to call him during her fits of rage, was half as cool as he is. it's fitting that the damn small penis mobile was driving away from you as you saw it today. it's been six months since you've seen or spoken to him and he hasn't responded to the heartfelt letter--the letter whose delivery you had to make alone ultimately convinced you to leave such a selfish person.
you see an ad in a magazine for a cell phone with an elderly demographic and think of how funny it would've been if you could still text her with a picture of it in remembrance of the laughs you once shared. too bad you can never end anything on a good note, even for the twenty-first time. speaking of which, you hope her new age is treating her well and the new guys at the new bars are buying her fresh drinks. even the ones you inadvertently turn into enemies deserve to have fun. but that term is relative; capote said that "the Enemy was anyone who was someone he wanted to be or who had anything he wanted to have." try to deny your jealous nature all you like, the dead men always seem to sum you up better than you'd like to admit; the ones worth reading, anyway.
and you can't even seem to focus on that anymore, your supposed favorite hobby. you force yourself through a hundred pages a day on weekends to make up for your sins, but it's not the same. you roll around in your bed with your nose in the pages in between naps for the forty-eight hours that used to be designated for other more productive ventures. but there's really no one to see anymore, at least not until night falls and you buy a case of beer with a denomination higher than twelve and hope it's enough to get you through the night, at least until three in the morning when mcdonald's starts selling your new favorite vice: sausage egg and cheese mcgriddles. the beer isn't the only substitute which has developed a tolerance, though; it now takes three of those breakfast sandwiches to fill the void for the evening, each at forty-five grams of fat. which you are starting to feel, between all the grease and beer and lethargic hours spent wasting away in--how did she put it once?--"your prison cell of a room."
which only reminds me that you're right and they're right and you hate that they know that they are. you can't escape this, even though part of you never seems to want to anyway. the Misery has become a joke, an association you're almost proud of, though you'd never admit it in person. you can't change that the past is always there to laugh. your best friend chuckles with you as you both drive past a billboard that says something to the effect of "learn to love history." the sideways glances are enough to express the shared notion that neither of you ever well, the skeletons will never stop tapdancing in your respective closets, and you might as well have them perform at your next party. the party, you realize, that will be bittersweet for you because he's leaving for real and you don't think you can cope with that. it was convenient to have that safety net, it outweighed the "Alternative" that taps you on your shoulder and winks on those melodramatic movie script days. who else will ever understand you like he does? the ones you think you did sure didn't. you see the drunken, lazy-eyed pictures from the party and realize it sums you up perfectly. then you see the one where the ink can't quite hide the scars because of the lighting and realize you're not fooling anyone anymore, you're a lush and a crybaby and a bit of a hypocrite, but at least you're still trying.
but trying for what? exactly what you swore you'd never do again? waking up fully clothed in your own piss and vomit? is the hendrix death appealing to you? and what happened to avoiding the entrapping nature of the headboard notching game? and the break-up sex and the make-up sex and the "how many drinks is this going to cost me?" sex and the whiskey dick "let me try again in the morning" sex and the "i'm really sorry, but it was just sex" sex that makes you feel shallower afterwards than you did twenty agonizingly awkward minutes before the five-second orgasm. you see the love-stains on your sheets and smell the different perfumes in your pillowcase and change them all, though you'd rather just burn them.
ironically, that's all you truly want: to burn for someone, and to hope someone will burn for you in return. she claims to never have seen the passion, but it's the one thing i feel i've held true to all this time, during all these phases. i am dmitri karamazov, my good intentions are flawed by my blind willingness to sacrifice anything to achieve whatever it is that fuels me at the moment. ok, so "whomever" is probably more appropriate.
but maybe all isn't lost. you see the last message she sent and try not to let yourself get too excited. someone as sincere as you? someone as beautiful and dark-featured as the one you (and your ex) knew you really wanted to be with, like the mystery girl whose face you have tattooed on your arm? someone as poetic, or pseudopoetic? as well-read? as intelligent, or quasismart? but, most importantly, as hurt. because it's no fun living if you can't laugh at death, can't acknowledge its presence and its grasp on your fragile state. it's coming--like a slow train or a speeding bullet, but it's fucking coming, baby. and you can't wait to take that other train...the one to see her again in a few weeks, for the first time in a long time. cross your fingers kid, it's helped you before. and hey, capote was right yet again: "the compulsively superstitious person is also very often a serious believer in fate."
currently reading:
"in cold blood" by truman capote.
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