I.
___
I had come up with a new approach:
___
I was going to stay simple in my bed, boxers and a t-shirt, and just notice the ways the light would fall on me, the constant changing folds of color that moved when I did, the enormous weight of the sun beating down, only barely broken up by the window above me.
___
This would take a few hours, I guessed, before I would find the need to find something embarrassing in my hands.
___
Whatever it was we had held between us, I had hit below the belt in most instances. I had spent many inorganic moments trellising a type of want I wanted only to be shot back with blank verse:
___
“I don’t think so.”
____
Or, better still:
____
“Try again.”
___
He was going to be the one, of what I didn’t yet know. Of many? Of a few? I took my feeling in my gut to be wise beyond their years and yet I hadn’t even had breakfast yet.
___
We had bonded initially over the word “panties”, or, rather, our lack of respect for it, and how it disrespects our opposite gender in a way as to render it juvenile. Neither of us had had much experience with those who wore them, so our theories stayed in the abstract.
___
There once was an attempt at finding a tangible moment that we could share about them, but with one of us in them, we could only laugh and share jokes, furthering our opinion as opinions often reach, into the moment in the future when the then mixed memory would be used as a weapon against one of us by the other.
___
We had held each other by cute names neither of us could even much remember later. Now, when I hear “jezzy” I don’t think of how my past had somewhat warranted a reference to Jezebel. I only think of jazz and the inherent improvisation of all relationships, romantic or otherwise.
___
There are tricks to not picking up a phone, most of which involve looking at it and imagine something searing hot, something you wouldn’t want to touch, at least without gloves (with a huge cushion of padding) to dull the singe.
____
There were times where we would talk. Moments of suggesting a restaurant, a public place, to see how things were going, without being stuck in staid air. These would more often than not leave one of us standing outside the public place with a jumble of text in our hands, lacking completely in capital letters.
____
Another approach: sit on the toilet long enough that something (a sneeze, a shit, a smile) comes out of you.
___
I had thought of calling, too, as a too easy way to be done with it. Like a neighbor who always cooks the most amazing meals at the most inopportune times, it was a way to lug myself out of bed, knock on the door, and simply ask, knowingly, foolishly, “what’s cookin’?” They (the neighbors) would just look at me with a spoon in their hand and ask what the fuck I was doing bothering them at this hour.
___
And I stand there saying I only wanted a lick, of whatever it was that she had holding in her hand.
____
___
___
II.
____
I could see the phone as an instrument that no longer even had its initial use to me anymore. I would spend more hours looking at images, other people’s words, playing games of solitaire for hours upon end rather than actually speaking to anyone whose voice I could ever recognize.
___
The most I would do would be to spend a few minutes on it with my mother, repeating, “yes, you’ve told me that before” in-between awkward moments of silence where I was sure her phone had fallen dead.
___
As a general rule, I keep friends available for moments when I’m feeling especially abundant, and these days that now only includes a woman who spends her time walking too many poodles in Central Park to pay for everything her wealthy lover will not provide (coffee, apparently) and a guy that wants to sleep with me (but “only sleep in a sleep sort of way”) and sends me messages on my phone that confuse me, since they will, more often than not, include a blurred photo of what I assume to be his penis.
___
Though it could be anyone’s, I guess.
___
I will have budget dinners with these people, with and without their poodles and penises, and I will talk at length about the “fickle finger of fate” like I was Shirley MacLaine. They will tell me their own sordid tales of fingers and fates, and I will wince and smile at their own embarrassments, even while their fingers are always pointed directly at me while speaking, even while choking down a worthless dessert.
___
___
___
III.
____
I made sure that I had enough supplemental pills and liquids left in the house before I did it.
__
There was no one there to answer, no one left to be concerned about.
___
I was going to hang up. But left a message, unsure if even the intended audience was going to be the recipient by that point:
____
Hi, hi, hello. It’s me. I just wanted to let you know that I’m calling, and you probably could tell that I’m calling because I called, since this will totally be in the past by the time you get it. I want you to know a lot of things, I guess, the kinds of things that normally get shouted out in karaoke bars. The things, I guess, you already know and are afraid to hear since you don’t pick up – or you could just not care. But we were dried up toilet water on the street that nobody wanted to live. We were the kind of thing you would call “toxic” and I would call “unusual, or obvious”. We were the couple that people would strain their eyes to see what was going on, even while knowing every couple was different. We were what my mother wanted and how you hated my mother. We were candies on the bed, but only on the most obvious of holidays. I don’t want you to ever think that I dislike you, even as I hate you now. I want you to know that. I want you to know this. I want you to know that or this or whatever it is that you don’t already know.
___
Call me, please.
___
___
___
____
___
