The final assay in this escapade of ten-sentence recollections, I ended up with this woman for a couple of years. After everything, I remain perpetually perplexed as to what it was, in the beginning (months before this story), that she saw in me.
I did not want her; content in depression since that September, the weather changed from sweltering to temperate and by November, as the trees fell asleep shedding tawny leaves, I did not want anyone.
The night was possessed of an oneiric air, perhaps tequila derived, and as it progressed it became evident that I was unable to control any element of the adventure; the evening proceeded in cutscenes, in vignettes: First, there were five people affably chatting, laughing about lack and apathy; then the restaurant in which we relaxed was black, everyone else had left, and I sat shattering with a metal mallet a six pack of Guinness in order to extract the bone white nitrogen widgets hidden within; finally, I found myself on my knees in front of a digital readout, toggling knobs, trying to find a radio station playing anything other than the Dead—no connective temporal tissue betwixt these evidently significant minutes. Next, I was standing, an expanse of sticky stamped concrete between us—myself on one side: slumped atop the slab, clinging tenaciously to that stone surface as beneath me my feet slowly slid away, slipping on tile slick with spilled liquor; her on the opposite: a pale, petite, pretty green-eyed girl with Venus fly trap lashes and low-hanging lids which she blinked lazily while tucking clumps of unkempt coffee brown locks behind her ears—and this relative stranger with whom I’d never held a conversation longer than a single sentence was petting the dragon on my tattooed arm, telling me I should never let myself be sad, but instead remember that I was beautiful, a comment at which I giggled, until it became abundantly clear that she was deadly serious, and I shut my mouth, allowing a loud silence to echo through the room.
In the next vignette, I was held captive by her, this girl—two-thirds my weight, eight inches shorter—held nevertheless helplessly, cornered, back to an orange wall, its thick, hideous paint audibly flaking from the friction as I pressed myself ever harder into it, wincing, pinned there as she shivered and begged for my sweater (just to fix her chill for a few minutes, she said); assuming she’d already acquired permission, as she asked, her hands simultaneously snaked their way beneath it attempting theft, so we wrestled a while until I found myself somehow out of it, the sweater, now stretched at the neck, but which she indifferently slipped into, letting it hang lopsided from her shoulders, a trophy; and though I hoped and half-expected her to step away, she instead stepped closer, put her palms beneath my tee and on my goose-pimpled skin, an gesture about which I said defensively, “I don’t shit where I eat, you know, I always say ‘no’ when it comes to coworkers.” But I found us then somehow sitting in my car—oneirically again, as if time had hiccupped and I’d had no part in the decision—and I was stunned to find myself drunkenly driving the long road to her rented colonial home; she issued intentionally awful instructions which led to turn after wrong turn until she selected a satisfying set of songs, pressed play, pointed me in the correct direction and, though I refused two or three times, eventually found success in her attempts and held my hand.
My tires alighted on her driveway and at its utmost end, turn from the street barely completed, trunk abutting a lane of traffic, I shoved the shift into park, twisted my torso ’til I was 2D against my window (far from her threatening presence as I could get), and I offered a goodbye so clipped it could only have sounded like “good riddance”; still, she made a case to continue our ordeal and persisted in a battle of wills: I continued resisting her insistence that I come upstairs ‘cos it could be fun; that I turn my keys, quiet the engine, and come upstairs just for a while; that I’d had too much, I’d over-imbibed, shouldn’t drive any farther, and to stay alive all I need do was climb the stairs; that we didn’t have to fuck, that I could come upstairs to cuddle, ‘cos every once in a while everyone needs to be touched; that I was right where I belonged, and if I relaxed that was a fact she knew I’d soon see, so I should just come with her upstairs already. And then, without explanation or interstitial temporal tissue, inevitably, ineluctably, of course, we were kissing (her fingers gently set upon the reddening curl of my ear, my hands in her hair), both of us leaning in to find ourselves free from our bodies’ weight, suspended in a way semblant of levitation, by seatbelts that refused to stretch and instead supported our heft as I pressed my foot on the brake—and it was unbelievable: The kiss was a curiously delicate, complexly executed affair; it was an allegro arpeggio played in canon by a pair of piccolos; it was an attempt to catch butterflies, pursuing their peregrine route and using only bare hands, intent on a catch, but trepidatious about tearing them in two.
When we separated I was suddenly sober, but she said we had to sing; even unintoxicated, it still felt like a dream, so I didn’t question or particularly resist, just went with her suggestion and we did, we sang along with the song on the stereo—nose-to-nose at first, eyes closed and hands clasped, then we sat upright, eyes wide, and we sang in plain sight, repeating the coda over and over: ”What I used to be will pass away and then you’ll see that all I want now is happiness for you and me.”
Eventually she left and, late, I went on my way, drove home alone reviewing the strange supply of the night’s isolated recollections, those few moments trapped in floating bubbles that might be strung on some intangible anamnestic necklace, and I found the final one—her stepping from the sedan into a brisk wind, onto wet leaves, waving to me good-bye from the other side of the windshield (her tiny hand half-hidden by the sleeve of my sweater), eyes doleful, lips turned slightly down—strangely saddening, but even then, minutes after it had happened, I couldn’t remember how it our time had actually wrapped itself up—how the song and kiss ended, and what happened after; I wondered what made her quit her persistent invitations upstairs—but all I had was that last bubble, a wave goodbye, no before or after, just a frozen fragment of time gone out of joint: again, oneiric. In my own driveway, I found myself reminded by the night of the few lucid dreams I’d had in my life and how they’d gone in a snap from maddening to sublime the second I’d stopped fighting what I knew to be unreality and instead bent acceptingly in whatever nonsensical direction the somnial breeze chose to blow; considering this, unsure if I mightn’t really be asleep or, hell, even dead (How else to explain the stutterstep progression of the evening’s events?), I figured that everything she’d said had been a reasonable suggestion, risk-free (relatively), and perhaps the only way to make sense of everything, so I slammed my Alero into reverse, sped back toward her rented apartment and, calling her cellular on the way, I explained that I was coming back because I had to kiss her again and I’d like to maybe fall asleep beside her, if she didn’t mind.
