Melodramatic Stroboscopic Picture Show In Words: A Love Affair

She had always been unhappy. And it couldn’t be helped. He loved her. And it couldn’t be helped. She fought with him that he didn’t really love her. And it couldn’t be helped. He fought back with her that he really did. And it couldn’t be helped. For ages she told him that they needed to take a break. And it couldn’t be helped. And for ages he resisted her saying that they needed take a break. And it couldn’t be helped. To try to spice things up between them, she brought an old sex book she had owned to his bed. And it couldn’t be helped. He tried to ignore the oily stains that had been on the book’s cover. And it couldn’t be helped.

She told him all her problems she had with life the next day on the phone for half an hour. It couldn’t be helped. Unable to speak a single word himself, he listened to her problems and felt exasperated listening. It couldn’t be helped. The next day after that, she did it again, filling him with her problems. It couldn’t be helped. He felt beside himself, listening again. It couldn’t be helped. She felt that they were finally at a new beginning, that she was opening up to him again. It couldn’t be helped. He told her that they needed to take a break. It couldn’t be helped. She broke down and sobbed. It couldn’t be helped. He listened to her sobbing for an hour on the phone. It couldn’t be helped.

The next day, he sought to recant their taking a break. It couldn’t be helped. She denied his request that they not take a break. It couldn’t be helped. She skipped his birthday when it came. It couldn’t be helped. He felt pain. It couldn’t be helped. She sent him text messages indicating that she was inclined to let the whole thing go. It couldn’t be helped. He panicked and missed her terribly. It couldn’t be helped. She sent him a picture of her wearing his locket. It couldn’t be helped. He felt love seeing her wearing the locket, the same one which he wore, too. It couldn’t be helped. She messaged him a picture of her engagement ring, now carefully placed in a little house of sticks and bark and stone he had once built for it for her. It couldn’t be helped.

He felt love for her, holding onto hope from that sweet picture. It couldn’t be helped. She sent him more texts telling him she couldn’t talk. It couldn’t be helped. He felt despair. It couldn’t be helped. She sent him text messages that she felt relieved and had discovered a new, happy social life. It couldn’t be helped. He felt deeper and deeper loneliness, missing her. It couldn’t be helped. She sent him messages that said she would let him him know when she could talk to him. It couldn’t be helped. He respected her request for space. It couldn’t be helped. She sent him more messages telling him to let it be. It couldn’t be helped. He sent her messages that told her he loved and missed her. It couldn’t be helped.

She sent him messages indicating that she had no intention of returning to their relationship the way it was. It couldn’t be helped. He felt some hope, that indeed they could change the way their relationship had been. It couldn’t be helped. She sent him texts that she wanted their relationship to be over. It couldn’t be helped. He sent her messages that indicated he was lonely and missed her. It couldn’t be helped. She sent him texts that said she was worried about him but would not help him. It couldn’t be helped. He arranged with her to pick up his belongings at her house. It couldn’t be helped. She agreed and told him she did not want to see him and to be gone with his belongings by the afternoon. It couldn’t be helped.

He was stunned to find every stitch and scrap, from his tube of face moisturizer that had been in his drawer in the bathroom, to his running shoes in the closet, had been already neatly bagged and boxed in the little, dark room he had worked in down her basement when he got there. It couldn’t be helped. She weeks before had removed from her sight any sign and any remnant ever associated with him from her house. It couldn’t be helped. After packing all his belongings into his car, he bought and lay dozens of roses for her in her house—in hallways, in the kitchen, on the staircase, upon her bed, and wrote her short love notes telling her he would do anything to be with her again, and drove away. It couldn’t be helped.

After therapy and work, she came home and changed out of her work clothes to go out with her date for dinner. It couldn’t be helped. After he had left, he had turned back to see her in person and to beg her to speak with him. It couldn’t be helped. Having left the front and the back doors of her house flung open, she shouted down the staircase from her bedroom that she would be right there. It couldn’t be helped. He’d rapped on the back glass door, just open enough, and called out to her. It couldn’t be helped. She came downstairs and when she saw him, she screamed and screamed and screamed. It couldn’t be helped. He followed her outside where she was screaming and screaming to her car. It couldn’t be helped.

She screamed and screamed for him to leave her alone. It couldn’t be helped. He begged her on his knees, “Please! Please! Please!” It couldn’t be helped. Her date appeared behind him in the driveway and claimed the police were on their way. It couldn’t be helped. While he believed this was not true, he also didn’t care if it had been. It couldn’t be helped. She ran to her date’s car waiting for her on the street. It couldn’t be helped. Afterwards, he struggled and fought for her for weeks. It couldn’t be helped. She held her ground against him. It couldn’t be helped. He sneaked into his friend’s house nearby who had plenty of guns and put a bullet through his beautiful head. It couldn’t be helped.

The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance: B-Side

She mourned the recent death of her fiancé by going out on dates. That is how she grieved. For there was no use hanging around and moping. There was no use feeling sorry for him or for herself. She deserved a life of joy and joyfulness. After all, wasn’t that what the tattoo on her backside read in Latin, just above her buttocks in permanent  blue: “Inveniens Gaudium”? And the truth was, he hadn’t been the showboat anyway of her life. Judgmental and cruel at times, he could walk the rice paper path like a monk and never leave a trace. But, the truth was really in his essence: boy-like, full of wonder, like an Elephant’s Child’s mind full of “insatiable curiosity.” If one were to pass out gold stars for good human behavior with strangers, many a new star-lit constellations would fill the painted skies.

Almost everybody who met him had left him blinking their eyes in open human wonder and delight. In supermarkets, barber shops, railway stations. That was how he was, touched with a lightness of being and gaiety that was like the cheerful song of birds. These ways of his would not stop her for a moment, however. She’d dine, and undress, and pull through a continuous orgasm of amazing sex without him. No use sitting on the shelf like unused bed sheets and turning gray and brittle there for nothing like that innocent lost girl folding linen warns against in that poem by Brecht, who instead was destined to live her own life to the fullest, and be a woman completely manifest. No sense in hanging onto the past. It was just as Jesus had said, “Let the dead bury the dead.”

And besides, where had he been for her? What had he done for her lately?  Fuck  Eddie Murphy! He’d done nothing. He hadn’t been there. When she was down and in need, where was he for her then? True, he had once repaired and painted white her crumbling garage; he had once patched her roof; he had once changed the basement pump; he had for a spell from time to time minded her children when she had slipped into the coma of her depressions. True, he had battled off her irrational and abusive ex (chronic guilty reminder of her past life mired in poor choices, sickness, mistakes & misdirection). True, he had protected her from her mother’s mania (who’d beaten her to tears as no child a mother ever should). True, he had amused her boys endlessly every night at supper (when at the table she had been a maternal ghost). So what!

He had been such a bastard. Her past was her past. He was always judging her by that. That was who she had been then. She had changed, she had changed, she had changed. And where the fuck was he? Last winter, he had abandoned her, abandoned her when she had really, really needed him. He had abandoned her! She had been all alone. He’d just come on the weekends and fuck her and leave, leaving her alone again. She didn’t need a man like that. He hadn’t been her partner like that. That’s not a partner.

She would find a man who loved her the way she deserved. Where had this dead fiancé whose diamond ring (which she had bought with her own hard-earned money) that she wore for nothing for the four years they were engaged for nothing who would never have married her anyway been? She was an ageless goddess. She, without him, was an amazing, powerful woman who had now become fully herself. She was an amazing, phenomenal woman. She’d enjoy her life for what it was—“Life as itself now,” and sleep with and date and fuck and love again whosoever she pleased. Whether he’d been dead two months, two years, or a day, what difference did it make?

Terry Hernshaw

Most of my colleagues had urged me on. They had had belief in me. Others who knew me intimately had sometimes said, upon parting, “You’re a great person, but I felt I was deceived.” That was a silly thing to have said, since I myself could not have known. The great Titanic sank. Machu Picchu is an empty ruin. The Twin Towers have fallen. Busily builders build, climbers climb, workers work, farmers farm. Canoe. Kayak. Row. A, B, C. Alpha, beta, gamma. Blessed by the great guru, I had become at peace with myself. For a minute if not for a day. My spirit I would cast across the lake as rose petals had blown in the wind. My sparkle is eternal, my shine radiant, my mother home.

Close Friends Over Time

My old friend had driven up on his motorcycle and I really wanted to apologize to him. For almost four years I had barely seen him, besides trading emails about which set of snow tires to buy, and some political impertinences. And, just as he had called me about a week before pretty late at night to thank me for a talk that he and I had had while boiling down around a hundred thirty gallons of sap to make maple syrup when the thaw came this past winter about six months ago, I had in return wanted to say I had been sorry not to have been around much as good friend ought to be. There had been such trauma and turmoil in my life, I just didn’t want him to know, I told him. And, I said, really it must have meant not that I was afraid he would have whispered to himself about me, but what I instead might have been whispering about myself. I gave him lunch, some leftover pasta with pesto made from the basil and garlic grown in my garden, and he looked at my gas grill which I had cobbled together from an old rusted one I’d had that for years I was expecting to blow up in my face, and a nice Weber I’d found discarded along the roadside that some people who were not handy at all had ditched, or were too well off to be bothered with. He remarked that he had been impressed, actually, when at a local diner right across from the tall pine trees close by where we both live, I had declined his wish about four years back to sit down in the booth with me and my breakfast companion. There was, he felt, a sort of integrity in my establishing boundaries of privacy like that. But really, if it had been that, it was also that he would have been about to become privy to the world of danger, peril, and deep personal suffering I was just stepping into, despite the gorgeous vistas of the endless Atlantic ocean, the wild spray flung white up on the jagged rocks, and some ordinary summer vacation snapshots of steady Maine lobster boats motoring into the cove at dawn being flipped through at our table before the eggs and toast came. No, I told him, had it really been good, I would have wanted to share everything not hide it all from him. Come over to the pool anytime, he said, before he rode off, no need to call, an invitation he and his wife had been giving me for many years.

Jump Here!

Now this old piece of lie, so the story goes, so the story went, it went something like this. She’d walk there and he’d walk there and then they’d get to this point on the concourse or the causeway or what have you, and as they were approaching, and this was years back, mind you, he’d go to her: “How many days would you remember me if I jumped off right here?” And she’d go something like 58 days, or a week, or 29 hours, or some such reply. And it was all in good, suicidal fun, you see. It wasn’t expected of him to jump for anything. After all, the one that had been on the brinks, the one that had been in the bin, wasn’t him. The one that loved life, why, everybody you had talked to always knew it was him. Her? Well, enough said there. There was enough medical documentation in the files to keep the Easter Bunny happy till Christmas. Of course nobody’d suspected that he’d had such a deep down mordant sense of humor that went quite that deep. But when you look at the crack in the cement, and you come to realize that through freezing and thawing, through freezing and thawing, expanding and contracting the way water does year after year, season after season, it does things to a story-teller’s own mind. See, they’ve got a mind like no other. What they think is funny, like D. B. Cooper with the made-up middle initial like that, is not as funny as it is to other people to whom story-telling is not an art but just a thing to pass the time with, you know, make a marriage go on with destroying each other in a few years. For most people, stories are just like going to the movies. They’re just entertainment. But to other people, why, they are as earnest as coyote’s eyes glowing in the dark. They’ve got a special kind of intelligence, not like IQ-wise, but another kind a lot more seeing and a lot more important than that. They can see themselves in the hunt of things, just way the coyote slipping past the last cool air of dawn most certainly smells if it cannot exactly see its own natural destiny whilst in the midst of being that very destiny. So, too, is the earnestness of the story-teller. And the way it goes, she had said forty-four days. “I will remember you,” she had said, “forty-four days after you jump.” So it got to thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine, and when it was forty-four, that was pretty much the end of it.

My Light Blue Blanket Folds

A little blue man with a rounded blue belly once told me all his woes. He told me that he never rose higher than fetching coins tossed toward a scattered highway basket, where, skirting traffic, he was mocked by other toll-takers safely protected in their metal and glass booths. He claimed to be a hero picking skilletfuls of quarters, nickels, and dimes from the speeding pavement. He told me how a fever killed his sense of smell and wartime cost his hair. Proud though he was to practice fencing with a gentleman whose occupation as a famed ophthalmologist made him feel quick and tall, he was never a guest in that same man’s college drinking club, just a block from Grand Central. He filled me in on the deaths of guppies in his fish tank, boiled alive by accident by a faulty water heater, as a child. And he promptly told me of broken women whom he aptly diagnosed, turning the pages of psychiatric classifications, from a borrowed DSM-5. I felt bad and let him touch me a little bit, and worse to let him go.

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Blue Bottle Collection

He wasn’t available for her, she told him. Not enough. And now, when she needed him, he wasn’t there for her. For his part, he told her, he had been. But then, he said, there was a time when I used to show up and the back door was locked and you didn’t even come downstairs to greet me. And still, he insisted, I showed up, even after that awful commute on I-84, he added. But that was long ago, anyway. It didn’t matter now. Now she was so tired, so exhausted, and everything he said to her, even if there was truth to it, she couldn’t possibly be just the sum of her pathologies, her illnesses, no, nobody could be just that. Could they?

A friend from Algeria Skyped him and said to him that he was at the time of his life when he should be enjoying it. It shouldn’t be a hassle anymore. And as much as that made him bristle, and even a bit angry with his friend, who knows, maybe he was right. But what exactly does that mean “at the time of his life when”? Is there some specific cut-off, say, at age twenty-seven, or thirty-nine, or forty-four, or sixty-three? His friend from Algeria was really only telling him politely that he was wasting his time. He stopped talking about her when they Skyped.