Dog

Conifer Garden

pressings

[the imperceptible furrow]

I have begun to notice the telltale signs of a burgeoning furrow in my brow. It has always been in the same spot, but now, now there is a shadow there when my face is still because it must rest in the muscles of my face more when I am not paying attention, and it troubles me that my recent state of mind means that I sit with a crease between my eyebrows, a skeptical glance, a puzzlement and soon, it will be permanent. Sometimes I get up and go the bathroom and when I catch sight of myself, almost like a surprise, because I don't always recognize the face that stares out from that glass, I see it, the furrow, and I force my face to relax until it is gone.

Also, there is the recent exhaustion I face on a nearly daily basis, where I want nothing more than to crawl into bed at nine o clock and sleep until the next time it is nine o clock and hope that no one notices that I am hiding away from them, haven't been to a bar in over two weeks, haven't talked about myself in two weeks, haven't cared in two weeks, just want to sleep. I'd guess that I might be depressed but there's nothing really to be depressed about. And if there was, it would have began sooner than two weeks ago. Two weeks ago (and just a bit longer) I had The Fall, which has become an important event in my world and I suspect the marker of my getting older, because I have not been the same girl since then.

It is cold here now and unlike before, I must have gloves and a hat and a scarf and I am a whiny baby without them, my coat snuggled under my chin, three layers on top, two layers on bottom, I am a bundled mass attempting to block out any chills. I used to be immune to the cold. I used to laugh at the cold. Now it laughs at me.

When did I begin to enjoy prunes? Really, prunes? I remember when he offered me one. It was the first time I had ever seen a prune up close. He kept his in the refrigerator, in a plastic container and when he peeled open the lid the smell offended me. It was like if you could smell wetness, if wetness had a smell mixed with a sickly sweet forgery of raisins. They had a similar wrinkle, but they were so big. And some of them were puckered and dimpled and others were like grotesque belly buttons and he shoved the bucket under my nose to make me see them up close and that smell filled my nostrils and I was so grossed out. He thought I was just grossed out because they were prunes and prunes aren't cool. He asked me, the way he asked me everything, the reason I loved him so, if I had actually ever eaten a prune because I might find that I quite liked them. He smiled and I ate one and he was right, I did quite like it. Now, I don't keep my prunes in the fridge, I keep them in my pantry and I try to eat five a day.

[time passing]

"She's been sober for a year," she told me. I can't quite say why this statement has been pinballing through my mind and setting off all the bumpers. The initial ones were all typical, shock, alarm, awe. Then as the details emerged, I felt a sense of affirmation, a prim nodding of the secretary in my mind who manages all the affronts incurred against my good name and even in that moment I could not resist saying, see, this is why I stopped being her friend. After that, I just felt kind of sad for her, that she's obviously looking for something and still hasn't found it yet, and maybe this is it for her. I hope so.

there was a suggestion that sobriety was part of growing up. I don't know what that means. I wish I did. I wish I hadn't held on to a semblance of what felt good for so long because I'm stuck now, this is it, I'm in the rut, I look up from the curb and see everyone passing me by, I'm in that last group of marathon runners who trained for nine months only to end up walking it, bathed in sweat which makes the perfect mask for tears. If I ever grow up it might be because I leave Chicago, because I'll be forced to do something else, anything else. Or it might be a slow steady crawl toward adulthood that I've already seen the signs of and once again I will know it's because I'm a late bloomer.

I want to be steered, to be shown what to do, because the ways that I used to do things haven't been working for me anymore. The impetuous decisions based on nothing more than a whim, it has failed me two years in a row. That has been my saving grace for two years, the one thing I could rest my fucking laurels on when cornered about what exactly I was doing with my life, I could say, with a sense of smugness and pretentiousness, I'm applying to grad school. Or, I'm applying for a master's degree. Even just the idea that I could say such a thing was a novelty, so I said it as often as possible. And now, it seems I've been bested, having failed to win those odds two years in a row, maybe I will not bother this year. Even then I could not say I will not bother. Part of me still wants to apply, part of me still considers it, and probably will until January 4th passes and I can say with a sigh of relief, maybe next year. And maybe the year after, ad infinitum until I die.

[them]

He comes to me at night for assurances. It has a pattern now, like everything; a couple weeks go by, I haven't heard a word, and I usually break my vow of silence. Lately it's him that wanders into my scope, greedy with questions, searching for love, wanting someone to tell him it's all gonna be alright. I do the best I can, for my heart is not for him and my answers seem to drop into an endless well of his own narcissistic making. I imagine all the good times we could have had if this well was absent, but even then, I was never someone he wanted that way, though somehow he desires the mother hen in me and I love soothing him. It makes no sense to anyone else, and so he will remain an enigmatic stain on my subconscious.

The day is arriving that I will meet him again, he only knows my past self from years ago, and I wonder what he will see in my future self, if he will have the same lure to me he once had, I am terrified that he will and even more concerned that I will not be able to deny him. Meeting him again has loomed over me these past two weeks (strangely coincided with my abrupt descent into exhaustion) and I know it's not worth the effort of trying to imagine how it will go, what I should wear, how much of a wall to hold up, but I endlessly find myself scraping away at those thoughts, even when I reprimand myself I still wander back absentmindedly and imagine it all. And it might seriously turn out to be nothing. A joke.

Except there is him and he has captured me with so many moments, so many reasons, but this one in particular might be the exact moment I fell like a great thunderous tree, boom! he was sitting in my kitchen and we were talking, talking about nothing, which we seem to do so well, and he was smiling and happy and we had already spent two hours next to each other, but there was no rush, and my roommate was in the other room unaware, but in the middle of saying something, he was struck by me and he whispered that I looked wonderful and me, typical me, I shied away and refused the compliment, even waved my hand as if to bat it away, but his sincerity in that moment, his carefulness in that moment was exceptional and I crashed.

Xmas Tree

our park

The leaves from the willow trees have covered the dying grass like a blanket. They've been cemented there by snow and ice. They are long and taper at both ends, yellowing, brownish, finger-like. Occasionally there is a slender branch tossed by the wind, stripped of leaves, but lying on top of them because it doesn't know how not to hold the leaves.

The ground crunches under my feet, and the park, my park, our park has undergone a drastic change from when I first encountered it with her, lying in the chaotic grass of summer and looking up into the sky at the stars. The prairie we watched change and grow is flattened, with signs posted detailing it's imminent burning. To imagine that it might someday be a razed, singed, blackened scab on the ground and in six months be full and lush and tower over me is incredible. The trees we watched change are barren now, and all the cement those leaves obscured make the park seem smaller now, less of an oasis.

What catches my eyes the most are the baseball diamonds, like an ice-skating rink, the street lamps cast long gold garland across its mirrored surface and at night, they look like silver circles. I remember how we used to race across them to chase the fog, finding that it could only be seen from far away, and discovering that the sandy surface was soft, like walking on sponges and now it is covered with a disc of ice that I skate on in my sneakers.

To say that I miss her is far too simple. Every single day I think of her, every single day I am disappointed by someone and I know in that instant, had she been there, her appreciation of my observations, my thoughts, my words would have been paramount and the person I am with cannot ever compare to her. In a way, it's worse that I knew her, because it hurts that much more that I don't know her anymore. It makes everything unbearable again. To be known, to be appreciated, to be loved, she gave me that so freely that I felt as happy as I have ever been in my life. I only hope I was able to return that gift to her.

Today was the first day since she has been gone that I traipsed through our park and it was the most I have missed her since her departure, the most angry I have been that she left (even though I do sincerely wish her well and hope she finds what she is looking for, but still angry in a selfish way) and the most sadness that my friend is gone.

Oh boy!

City scape

the burnham

It's funny how he the love of my lifetime seeps in my mind. His namesake, by coincidence, is the same as one whose architectural imprint from over a hundred years ago is still visible downtown. His friends, who slowly are becoming my friends. His habits, which slowly are becoming my habits. His ideas, which slowly became my ideas too.

I know that I will never forget him. I know that I will instantly be able to replay some of the most amazing moments of my life and they will involve him. Yet, the other side of the coin is that so many of my unhappy times involve him. We had the kind of love that hurts, the kind of love that burns, the kind of love that is manic depressive, because when it was good, it was so good and when it was bad, it was really bad.

For a while I ignored all these niggling memories which seemed to encompass the entire city (there's where we had our first date, there's where we had our last fight), neighborhoods of thoughts, playgrounds full of our time together. I just stomped past them and pretended they didn't exist. Sometimes I would imagine moving away just to rid myself of thoughts of him. Because it seems that there isn't a beach we didn't crawl on, a street we didn't walk together, a place we hadn't been.

It has been a year now.

Slowly time has scrubbed away some of it. The biggest relief was his job, the place he worked, the reason we met, it closed and has something new there, something totally different. It is hard even to remember how it used to be. And maybe, someday I will feel that way about the rest of it, the rest of the memories I have surrounding him.

One of his friends told me a story that made my heart hurt for him, because really, he is still a man, a man with feelings, a man who is trying to find his way in the world, so I cannot hate him, despite who he was for me. His friend detailed how they traveled to her, the new woman, twenty hours in a truck with his stuff piled up behind him. And when they arrived, they unloaded it all, an array of boxes littering her apartment. His kitchenware was most prominent, he loved to cook, and she balked at exactly how he had ruined her clean floor with his dirty boxes. They had just settled on the couch, probably with a cooling beer they bought on the way, and he got up, sweaty, exhausted, worn out, and without a word, he cleaned the entire floor.

The writer in me, the revenge-monger in me moreso, wants to see him doing this on his hands and knees in an endless array of checkerboard linoleum, but it probably wasn't that bad. And the crossed arms of his lover, maybe didn't happen. The ridicule he faced in his friend's eyes though, yes, that was bad. He wouldn't like that very much.

But he made his bed and he finally decided to lie in it. I hope he finds that he is the problem, not us, not womankind, not the scourge of relationships, but him. He doesn't know what he wants, but he does know that he doesn't want to work hard at it, but maybe she has shown him that it is even harder work to love her than it was to love me. I didn't make it easy on him. I tell everyone that, because it would be so convenient for me to let everyone believe he was the villian, but I didn't make it easy for him to love me. Part of the reason it got so hard for him is because he gave up. He didn't put in the work of building a foundation, he just wanted to live in a half built home. He was in a rush to get to somewhere that wasn't ready yet.

I am sad that he never responded to my white flag, but not disappointed. I had a feeling when faced with my love, my caring of him as a human being in the world, with no hatred for who he had been, he wouldn't be comfortable with that. His regrets and sorrows are too big for white flags, and the heaps and heaps of drugs and alcohol he tried to rub them away with only made them stick around longer.

I look at us now with a sense of intrigue. How could I have let such a mess of a man into my life? The idea of us being together now seems ridiculous. And yet, I was a different bird back then, exactly seven years ago yesterday was our first date. We shared ourselves like two dresses being unravelled, and the love he had for me was brilliant. It's too bad he burned out so quickly. It's too bad that I discovered the facade of his life and was unable to keep quiet about its holes. But now, there is nothing to feel bad about. Whatever he is doing, where ever he is, he is not my problem anymore. And for that, I am grateful.

just let me rest in peace

I haven't mentioned the magnetic disc in a while. It's because of a series of events have fallen so fast, like dominoes, that I haven't bothered recalling them, the order of them, the line of them, the 1-2-3 steps. He has vanished from my life, much to my relief. I spent so much time fervently trying to forget him, but it was impossible without his absence.

Constantly running into him on the street, interacting with him (or not interacting with him) at my bar, seeing his profile in my periphery while at work, it was a constant reminder, a scraping of the scab, a misery. Then, like a secret wish fulfilled, the bar sank, a titanic disaster that we all knew was coming at some point and felt no surprise when we discovered that our bar, my bar, the place I've spent the last three frustrated years of my life trying to find some sense or rapport or affinity, was closing. It was hard to be sad, because of course I love that place, except lately, he ruined it for me, but I will never see him again.

Imagine after a few weeks, as the sting of what was began to fade, as I began to heal, despite the show he put on for me the last time I saw him--

it was the goodbye party-which was so fitting, for he was the only person I wanted to say goodbye forever to-and he wore his biggest grin and his crooked glasses, and he was just so jovial. he was everywhere and nowhere, I heard his laugh across the bar but couldn't find his eyes. I wanted to say the words that would make things not weird between us, but I couldn't find them. We talked about some things, all things I could tell he was tortured by having to talk to me about them. At one drunken point, I drove my finger through the air and poked his shoulder and reminded him he had one of my books, the only line between us that hadn't been severed and then I told him to just keep it. goodbye forever.

I breathed with a sigh of relief and flitted away into the party and forgot him until I opened the doors after a smoke outside and saw the image that has been burned into my brain and will not go away despite anguished mental scrubbing. She was next to him. The moony girl I've known all along was his. His hand was on the top of her thigh, that place where the hips meet the leg, and she had her back to him and was dancing against him as he sat in a barstool, king of the manor, with a shit eating grin and our eyes met and finally his cover was blown, this mouse was his; the pretense was gone, he didn't have that same discretion he'd always had about her, he was no longer sparing me the pain, because it was the end and no one cared anymore; and they looked so comfortable together, so perfect together, she will marry him, I thought to myself, and a flash flood of jealously filled me and suddenly there wasn't enough alcohol in all the world to make that go away.

I still fondle that image absentmindedly, shaming myself when I realize that I was thinking of that yet again, because it really shouldn't hurt that bad and he really wasn't good for me anyway, but nothing I say about it works, because that's what happens when your heart is broken, even a little bit, it just takes time to wear away that pain.

I left the party early, even though it was my bar, even though it was early, even though I wanted to stay, because I couldn't stand to hear his laugh, to see his owlish eyes sweeping past me as if I didn't exist. Maybe I can finally put all that to rest, I thought, maybe this is the end of having to think about him, the end of knowing him, the end of everything.

--a few days ago I had a dream about him. I don't dream very often. If I do I tend to forget them soon after waking. Sometimes I dream with awareness in the lapses between my alarm and its snoozing. I rarely dream about people I know in real life. When I realized he had wandered into my dream I woke up, startled and angry, mad that even though I haven't seen him in weeks, he infiltrated my dreams. I wish for the same carelessness he holds for me, the same indifference when it comes to him. I hope one day I can look over him and see nothing but a ghost.