They’re dead again, wrapped around her. My arms. I can’t feel them, can’t move them. They’re wrapped around her and they’re hers now. She took them. No, that isn't fair, is it? I mean, she didn’t force me to, right? Yes. I think. Well, I don’t know. Figure that out and it all makes sense. They’re dead either way; it doesn’t really matter whose fault it is.
And here I am, lying in the dark, not knowing what to do. Again. And she’s sleeping, soundlessly, perfectly, beautifully. Again. And I’m thinking poetry into the night that will never be recovered in the morning because dull sleep will have killed it, and it won’t be recorded tonight because the cat’s got my tongue and my girlfriend’s got my arms. I wonder how many words have been lost to the night because I didn’t want to wake her up.
So here we are. After 22 years of life, here we are. If my life were a story, if our life together was a story, leading up to this moment, would anyone want to read it? Probably not. There are some, as that hack writing professor says, “exciting incidents,” but they are few and far between. And the language is flat and boring, because everything anyone’s ever said to me was something someone actually said. Nothing you’d want to read in a book.
That’s why the only things I can get published are whiny college poems about how hard it is to be smart, and bullshit sci-fi stories. Only what’s been expressed, or created. Nothing that’s been transformed. Nothing that would help people, that would change people. No stories that would actually happen to people, and do.
Stories like us. Me, and the beautiful perfect girl who stole my heart and killed my arms. God, I used to lie awake half the night just watching her sleep, just hearing her breathe. Now all I can think about are my arms. I wonder if they used to fall asleep like this in the beginning, or if I just never noticed it like I do now. Every night. And it’s only been two years. Christ, my parents were married five times that long and I never forgave them for splitting up.
I shouldn’t be complaining: it’s been good, most of it. Well it’s not like she can hear me anyway. The last half of the country will get divorces when people start hearing each other’s thoughts.
What was it, four years ago that I was a senior in high school, trying to go out with anything that moved? And now that I’ve found the woman that I was so sure was my soul mate, I just want to run away, drive away from our apartment and never look back.
Why did I want a girlfriend so bad? God knows I was horny enough, but that wasn’t it. Did I just want someone to write poetry to? Loneliness? Did I just want to prove my parents wrong about the world?
I did want one, though. Naturally, it didn’t happen until my sophomore year of college; she practically fell out of the sky, just when I didn’t think I needed anybody. I guess that’s the way it’s always been. I was sitting outside the library, talking to my friends, and she just walked up to the table, looked at me, and said you’re Alex Hudson right?
You’re very good at this game, I told her, smiling and reaching out a hand.
I read your stuff in the paper; you’re a good writer, she said, shaking my hand gently.
Hey, looks and brains, I said (she laughed at that, thank God).
My name is Janice, she said, but I didn’t know how to spell it then.
I asked her. I always ask people how to spell their names when I meet them. Be surprised how much you can learn.
She smiled. J-e-n-i-s-e.
It’s perfect, I thought. It tasted right, in my head. I knew it would look beautiful on paper. And so I asked her out, and she said yes. She wasn’t a writer, but she was a singer who loved to read, and she wrote a poem occasionally when she felt something so strongly, so personally that she couldn’t sing it in someone else’s words. Two months later I told her that I loved her, whispering it in her ear at a Ben Folds concert while he was singing our song. We were alone in the crowd, and she looked up at me with those shiny, sparkling eyes she gets when she’s really happy, and that smile that stretches out like it’s running away from something and she said, yes, you do. We laughed at each other and that night, while we were lying on my bed, she rolled over and whispered I love you too.
I held her so tight that night my arms must have fallen asleep, but fuck if I would have noticed, or cared. All I could see, or feel, was her. Not just her body, but that night I felt like I could look through her, and see everything about her, wrapped up tight in my arms and backed up close against me so neither of us would fall off the twin bed.
I still remember the way it felt to love her like that, but I can’t for the life of me reach it anymore. Where does it go, that kind of love? It isn’t just in the balls like my friends think. And it can’t just be the newness of things, because I still feel it every now and then, and sometimes it’s when we’re doing stuff we’ve done a thousand times, like just walking around the block. Maybe it’s not newness, but rather the absence of oldness, the feeling that it isn’t becoming boring. The absence of oldness; close to newness but not. And there have been plenty of times when I still get that feeling, like I’m translucent, but full.
All those magic moments scattered like pearls on flat, boring silk in my memory. It’s so easy to remember our first Christmas together, Valentine’s dates, birthdays, anniversaries. The first time she took me in her arms and killed any doubt in my mind that Christians are wrong about sex. The day we moved into our apartment, just a half-mile from school, with her mother all blubbery and teary, and mine stoic and aloof, but crumbling on the inside, and her dad giving me a brisk handshake and a reminder, half-jokingly (I hope) that he owned a gun.
The apartment was so empty that night, so fresh. Every blank wall a possibility. It’s dark now, but if I could see I’d see bookshelves filled, CDs, pictures everywhere of friends and relatives, and the moments together we’d wanted on film, joking that someday we’d want to reminisce and be too old to do it legitimately. I could cry now, actually cry, remembering that.
I put my nose to her back, feel her breathing, and wonder if she knows how close I am to bolting, how close I’ve been? I wonder if it’s the same for her. A year ago there was nothing like that to wonder about. If I doubted something she knew and vice versa. If I was afraid or nervous, or anything about anything, I told her. So why haven’t I talked to her about this? What filled in that open path between us, and who shoveled it in? I suppose we both must have.
I lift my head a little and look around, trying to see into the dark, see things blank and promising the way they were that first night, when we were too happy, too horny to sleep.
Maybe it will be empty again soon—graduation is only a few months away, and who knows what’s happening after that. Haven’t heard back from grad schools, either of us. Jesus. Graduation. What if there’s no more school after this? It’ll just be time to get a job and get married. Bam. One half of my life over, the other half starts. I promised her I’d ask her to marry me after graduation. Wait. No, that’s not true. She made me promise to wait to ask until after graduation. I wanted to marry her the day after we’d moved in together, a year ago.
A year ago I almost begged her to marry me and now I don’t know if I want to be home when she wakes up. Nice. Great. Real fair to her. But...what the fuck is fair? If this feeling stays, and I choke on the routine and monotony, is it fair to her or me to swallow the shit and try to stick it out, even if I don’t love her? No matter how much of that sparkly feeling we lose, we still like each other at the bottom, and don’t want each other to be unhappy. I could probably stick it out longer than my father, but that’s not saying much. Would it be fair to leave, and break every sacred promise I have in me, and free her, and free myself, free us both to the rest of the world?
I should. I should go tonight. I should slip out of bed and drive across town to my mother’s and crash on the couch, and get her sympathy in the morning before facing Jenise’s wrath.
Wrath? No. She’d be crushed. Maybe even surprised. If I left like that, just slunk off and left in the middle of the night, it would crush her. Like that night I said maybe I should go for a while, maybe we should take a break, and she looked it me like I had just stabbed her in the back and spit in her face at the same time. But not mad. Just—that: crushed.
No, I can’t do that. I can’t crush her. Not after the poetry, the dancing, the singing in the rain. Not after I sold her on this life that I didn’t want to be a lie, this life that had to be real if we both believed in it. But if I stay, it can’t be to not crush her. I don’t know why, but that’s not enough, that doesn’t mean as much as it used to. Maybe I’ve just gotten used to it. Ah that’s not fair either—God how this runs round in circles.
That’s what it all is though: circles. I’ve figured that much out at least. When I was a kid, when I was in high school, I used to think that it was a straight line. That we were born, struggled for sixteen years, then threw off the burden of our parents like a wet coat and shot off like an arrow into the world. Then when I was just going into college I didn’t think any of it was real, I thought the whole thing was bullshit. But now I know: circles. I threw off my parents, yes, but just like they threw off theirs: blindly, violently, for the sake of throwing them off. But no matter how hard you do it we all circle back to them. We’re all paying penance for the sins of our fathers, the silence of our mothers.
But maybe I can end it. Maybe I can avoid it, step outside of it, remove myself from it by studying it, free myself and my children. Or maybe not. I asked my mom once, If you could go back and change it, and say No to my dad, would you?
And she looked at me and said No, I wouldn't. You were worth it.
But...she didn't know back then. If she had then, before she had me, maybe she would have said no and stopped it all. But I don't know. What am I doing? I love this girl, I really fucking do. And I'm acting like divorce is the family curse, like just because my parents split up I have to. Fuck that. No—I will not play this game any longer. It's not fair to me, and it's not fair to her. I made a promise to her that she was the one I'd take up arms with, that if I lost everything but her that I'd have enough to start over. I will stay true to that. I will not side with failure, with broken hearts and dishes. It is my turn now, not theirs. They had theirs, and blew it. She and I will make our own cycle. We'll live here in Long Beach like we planned, move out to the suburbs like we planned, and make a life better than the scraps they left us. We will leave our children a legacy of love and trust, not pain and abandonment.
I have sworn all this before, willed it to happen, and it has felt just as real as it does now, but that hasn't held up. So now I swear too that even if I know it will fall apart, even if my parents are a prophecy and not an end in themselves, I will stick it out. The good is as real as the bad; I won't forget that like they did. I do not want to be my father, so I won't. Because I don't want to turn her into my mother any more than I want her to turn into hers.
Look at her. She’s beautiful, and I do love her. And maybe I won't always, but I'll try. And if I can't, I won't leave her, leave them. Not like that.
Now—kiss her on the back of the neck there where it is warm and fragrant and alive. Yes. The clock says: past one. I close my eyes; it is time to sleep now.
BIO: Mike Guardabascio is a graduate student at CSULB. He has published over a hundred articles, reviews, stories, and the occasional poem in publications in and around Long Beach.
