Consolation files

For the two months you held the lease on a one-bedroom apartment in North Brooklyn, you didn't have time to paint or buy furniture or even develop any significant memories of your own in there. I took that liberty for you, barging in late on a Sunday evening.

"Can I come over?" I huffed, after a series of incomplete phone tags.
"Yeah, sure... is everything okay? You sound weird."
"No it's not. And no I don't."

I waited the duration of about 3 episodes of Party Down on Netflix on the clunky old CRT television I gave you, rendered redundant when my apartment acquired a flatscreen. We sat on the floor, sipping tea from brown murky mugs you found at the Salvation Army. They looked like a product of an intermediate pottery thrower. I toggled through more episodes, thinking that in probably another 30 minutes the walk home will feel much longer than the walk here.

I decided to multitask episode selection with weeping on the floor in your living room with no furniture. Well, that's not entirely true. There was that oriental rug from your grandmother. It was the only material legacy from your family that you expressed approval of. I figured having an emotional rupture on it could only appreciate it in value.

You didn't say anything. You could feel the cabin pressure drop right before I did. I knew I chose the right person to rage my adolescent sorrow to when you said nothing at all and instead tucked me into the space between your neck and your left shoulder, away from some unseen detonation of explosive devastation. I didn't mean to bring that to your helm, except that I did. How many times have you seen me in pieces before; I imagine you were just glad that it wasn't you this time who was the cause of it.
Except that you said "I'm sorry" into my hair, like you were.

Better people have done worse than seeking consolation from someone who didn't love them back because someone else didn't either. It always comes back to original sins. If romance was original I might revisit it, but it feels deceptively renewed each time. So I do.

I generally try to avoid having original feelings in front of relative strangers. Some of them just can't help themselves though. Heartbreak might even be the most indulgent and self-important one yet. It loves to linger. Always the same but manages to reinvent itself each time. It's the Madonna in the arena of crappy ways to feel. How many times can we feel the same kind of awful and never get bored with it?

We stayed in that uncomfortable tangle, on the floor, for as long as it took for the despairing hiccups to come every few seconds apart, like measuring thunder. The storm is now 3 miles away. Now 5 miles away. Now 10. Was it sympathy or guilt you were feeling then? Did it matter?

Consolation is reciprocal by nature. Done right, no one should feel alone. Successful, in a room with two people and even less furniture, the world contextualizes itself to correct what it neglected when you got what you deserved. Or when you didn't. When you gave up too much of all of you, and the meager profits you made, you gambled.

Love is tendered without justice, that much I knew. It's not the currency you are supposed to save, though I'm frugal by nature. Love won't pay for your sins. Its investments are rarely wise and often foolish, but it is transactions like this one that make me glad that at one point, I bet it all on you.

let it run mild

You always talk about the women you've loved in terms of how they left you. You rarely mention how they came to you. Did you woo them for weeks the way you did me? Did they fall for it? Maybe one wanted you more than you did her. Maybe the tables turn.

The pattern suggests that I would leave you too. It also implies a sense of sequential return. That I would know you again the way I knew you then. We rarely revise. The things you learned have brought you back to me so they must not have been very novel.

There were moments when I thought it would be much more convenient if I loved you better. If I knew how to. If I told you things in earnest that I maybe didn't mean yet, but because you needed to hear them and I wanted you to know that I wanted the same things as you. Lying wouldn't save either of us though. No one said it, but neither would love.

The comfort we found was a way to correct the time we spent under the scrutiny of misery and doubt. Undefined affection in your best friend's kitchen is better than the definitive night moves of any other cad. I held a glass of water in one hand and your face in the other.
I played with the buttons on your shirt. They were inscribed from their former owner. I tried not to think about the time I told you I couldn't reconcile physical intimacy without compatible emotions. Just throwing that out there like some teenage white flag. It might as well have been. Wishful morals always crumble to juvenile excuses. Sometimes it's better to leave morals out of love. While you're at it, just leave love out of it too.

There's no way to describe to someone that feeble attempt your heart makes at entertaining one's advances. It barely blushes. It takes your flattery and yawns. It's a sentimental sneer-- there is no more offensive reaction than none at all.

It could've been then that I lost you. It's poor timing for honesty or romance. We weren't waiting for each other. We were waiting for certainty. It's a lot like swimming in dark water. The unseen swell beneath is always what's kept us afloat. Certainty always sinks, that's for sure. You don't latch onto that unless you're prepared to drown.

the other half

I had spent the week prodding, reminding myself to forget. To stay busy and for Christ's sake, to hold my tongue. For months, you had been holding it for me. Your hands are still on my neck.
I'm getting better at forgetting the way you said I am. They weigh less than your beliefs, scored over and over again with dull memories.

Those lessons are never learned. They hover, pecking at crumbs of morality. Now if only I can remember why I chucked them in the first place. They leave no trail back to you or anyone else I've witheld confession from, just a buffet of the things I use to believe.

I see ghosts in cafes, hunched over graph-checked notebooks, their chambray-laden backs taunting mountains. I'm gutted. I would flip the table from underneath you in one second if I believed you would appreciate it. But it isn't you. It never is. It isn't funny when it isn't you.

You are found, rather your sepia-drenched attitude that I could never look straight in the eye is, when I criss-cross the pharmacy aisles. It carries a case of Keystone Light to the counter and glints at me, later writing on some Missed Connection, "Should of said hello."

"You should have," I reply, half in correction, and in half-staff earnest. I never check those anymore, but I had an instinct. The instinct for the cross-over, when reality becomes virtual reality.

We must be good to be bad. Because one cannot exist without the other, but mostly because I can't stand to be good to you any longer. Forgiveness isn't measured in flesh. It carries its own weight around your neck. It is non-transferrable.

I would urge your distance, but things are duller when you aren't around. To torment, to confess, possess, and altogether to forgive each other the burdens of half-heartedness. Not that I'd even know what to do with the other half, had I it.

wayward voids

The night you met the love of your life (or so you thought) you went home with me. Or did I go home with you? Even though the party was at the home of a friend of yours, I accepted the invitation with trepidation and privilege in equal measure.

I knew she had your heart the moment you saw her. To be fair, a Belgian singer with cascading waves of auburn hair and fair skin in a cream-colored satin gown would grab any man's adoring gaze, but I knew she set your heart ablaze. You made no argument about that. I'm not stupid-- I wasn't about to walk through that fire. That may in fact have been the moment I seized an escape from our circuitous courtship that inevitably would dissipate the same way smoke does, slowly and silently curling into the ether.

Two years later, you would tell me you proposed to her that same night. You told her she was the most beautiful woman you've seen and she must marry you. Of course she said no, you weirdo. And of course she remembered you, you weirdo.
Your best decoy was always a generous heap of romance and flattery. That it tends to lean on the earnest side does nothing to save you, only further implicate your cause. You're a romantic demagogue and you had met your faction.

Two years after that night, you told me she left you for a Brazilian guitar player and had broken that earnest heart of yours. I wasn't surprised. A woman who entertains a marriage proposal as an introduction would totally run away with a Brazilian guitar player. And still. You didn't wish her ill and you didn't hate her at all.

"You were very much in love with her," I reiterated.
"Yes, I was completely in love with her."

I asked you if you still kept in touch and you said of course. You had lost her but to forsake her would create an even more painful and gaping void. The loss of someone you love and who understands and accepts you in ways most others don't, would damage the more integral parts of yourself. Your new self, after knowing and loving this person.

"It's like chopping off a limb," you explained.


We never acknowledged our void. Somehow we managed to fill it with a fond distance and other less complex lovers. I doubt it existed at all probably. I marvel at our comprehension of how this kind of love works. Neither self-possessed, nor yearning, and seemingly needing no cultivation. It exists beside us, not within us. In small gestures, in forgiveness, and the knowledge that we are just as potent as our last encounter, and just as dangerous. We never belonged to each other and we may never, not completely anyway. No risk, no void.

My last faction tried explaining the void to me. I didn't understand it then, perhaps because my practiced separation evened the battle grounds. Or perhaps just because we had never understood or accepted each other the way we should have. Whether my absence created the trenches that he had wagered they would, I haven't heard about them since. The landscape dipped, but I was at least sure-footed enough while heading out the door. He never chased after me. Not once.

"I will always chase after you," you told me. And then you did.

Despite respite

It hadn't even been a full day and night. The initial tilt had become isolation, and then a swift possession of gestures. What warmed up as a dizzy waltz became a full-blown gospel choir of near dementia. Was it the Lord, our Father who art in Jersey, inside him or some other sinister marionette?
Whatever it was leaked milk-tears from his eyes. His head was too heavy to hold them all. It hung low as the moon.

Weight is what filled the void where that animal spirit bended and billowed within. I was unfamiliar until then, like a motion detector. A shy ghost. Without the spirit to defy science, what was once my pet had just become biology-- in my futile arms, reduced to geometrics and physiology.

If he was scared, I couldn't tell if the fight was to stay or leave. I stayed to feel the shift. He bucked. Something awakened inside him, knocked for release and demanded expulsion.
Lastly, the breath. I'm always perplexed at how something so visceral remains invisible, nearly undetectable. A neck rests like wet leaves against my jeans. No wild eyes, just still glass. Still everything.

Raising his limp form, suddenly heavy for his size, I considered CPR and then thought against it, afraid to breathe a demon back into his body, as if what would come back would not be the same, but a feral spook, resentful for the invocation.
That manual resuscitation would not work did not even occur to me. It is a uniquely mad moment when a phantom reality settles and you truly believe that if you willed it, you could do anything. Like bring back the dead, for instance. I won't mention the stopping of time because you just wouldn't believe me. It lasts not even a minute, but long enough for you to become formally acquainted with a part of yourself that will always be reserved to fill a depth created by the love that clings to your own senseless resolve. Desperation is to Godliness.

I stared and stared, watching the atoms and ions which become visible behind my eyes in the rare moment when you are seeing-- really seeing-- what your heart knows. They are moved by some breeze I don't feel but they make quick work, solidifying the furry vessel that just a moment ago I was desperately trying to hydrate with Pedialyte in a tiny turkey baster to the mouth. I didn't think to close his eyes before they too stuck.

I waited for the stiffness to take. I waited for the warm to leave. For it to change its mind. To trail it for questioning and brutalize it into creeping back into its body. But these forces won't humor me, not today. Today they enforce the only thing we know for sure, more than circumstance and sin. They bring to me, in serpents' jaws, a reminder of inevitability. I never heard it coming, I only felt the sting.

something borrowed, something nevermind

I fed him the first night I met him, sitting on my stoop, a wedge of pot pie from a Tupperware container.  I knew before he was finished that this would be the last time I would want to do anything nurturing. Not that I wouldn't, just that I wouldn't necessarily want to.

When it's this cold outside, you have to make a firm decision before stepping out into the elements. What kind of behavior attracts the kind of heat necessary to make it bearable. It's funny because I am what I need towards any body else, though the magnets are rarely well matched. Somehow we come as close as we are, veering away and back around again.

It's a real life thrill, of scientific expectation. If I relented all of my expectation to science, I can be better prepared... for the elements, for the chemistry that denies itself over and over, for the haphazard variables that aways seep into misguided assurance. My body speaks in languages that do not translate to my heart. How could I ever expect it to speak to anyone else's?


Imagine my chagrin when he got up to get a beer from the fridge and demanded, "So in the time in takes me to get a beer, tell me one interesting thing about yourself."

"No." I don't mean to be difficult, but this is shocking, the unabashed dullness. Part of me is relieved. I never know what to say to interesting people anyway.

My efforts at becoming a more amenable and kinder person have vanished with that meager attempt at posturing. He cares about the kind of person I am about as much as I care about the double standards that are bound to intervene-- that is to say, not very much. Of all the men to underwhelm let it be you, mid-thirties and single struggling musician/freelancer.
He tells me I'm too young for him. If I rolled my eyes he didn't mention it. Perhaps he was a rooster in his past life. Perhaps I was a jester.

"I think you drew blood," He said, touching his lip. He pulled away, examining.
"Let me see," I offered, eager to see my handiwork. "Hmm, too dark to tell." I shrugged and he returned, more timid than before. I shouldn't be, but I can't help but be pleased with myself.

I think if I can inhabit the negative space I reserve for others, I will feel more in control. It's just another thing to own, but it is excess. Control is worth nothing if you don't want what's underneath it. So rarely am I allowed the kind of arrogance to not want anything from a person...

I remember the ones I use to want as one remembers an injury. The intensity is an intellectual memory, not an emotional one. I take inventory of them only as a scrawled reference to the things I hope to feel. It's a pleasure to have somebody, but the greater satisfaction to belong to them.

We would have them but we would not be owning them. Not tonight and perhaps not ever. With nothing to hide and even less to offer, I took no prisoners, just an Advil on the way out.

Last Fox-mas I gave you my heart