The Inescapable

Morning streams in through the window veiled by a pale, translucent curtain across a square room with squarely-kept bed sheets and watches and notebooks and pens and maps sorted neatly atop dressers. In this new morning I am created. I am first short on the pillow when he raises his head, until he stands, and I stretch across the floor and up the wall. I cross the room with him all the way to the bathroom door. In the sheltered, windowless darkness of the bathroom I disappear.

The day passes much like any other. I follow him from meeting to meeting. He discusses Railowsky business, and my mouth moves in conjunction with his. He greets his guests, and I extend my flat claw towards theirs. The others and me, we touch. I feel nothing.

Eventually night comes. He might be in his well-groomed den, out in California commissioning new railways to be built, or at the River City Hotel seeking some company for at least just tonight. In these hours he pushes me to the corners—dulling lamps and closing curtains. He shuts doors, walks along walls. If he had left a bathroom light on from a hurried morning and I am cast starkly against a back wall, his breath will jump. He will curse at me, with the same mouth we used to gain three hundred more miles between here and Arkansas. I am silent.

After a few moments he steadies himself and I tumble after him quietly to bed. I tip this way and that, drunk from a long day of following and obeying, of fulfilling everything that had been cast before me with perfect precision, with no protest.

With his last move he extinguishes the last bedside lamp and rests easy, as I have gone. There is no light to create me, and no eye to see me. Perhaps for these reasons he can only sleep at night, when the darkness closes in around him, and all that’s left is just his own singular self in the room. He won’t say. But for eight hours I will wait in anticipation of my creation. In the morning the man will have forgotten that I am here. He will glance up from his pillow and wonder whether today will be the first day he can evade his shadow. And I will be there to reassure him that today will be just like yesterday, and we will continue our happy and comfortable life together.

What the fuck is this

Love? What the holy fuck. It's god awful. It's consuming.

It's a drug. Maybe it's worse than a drug, but I'm too young to know. When you have it, there's nothing in the world that feels more natural or more warm. Love lets you know there's a reason to live, it gives you reason. But then it's gone. And like a drug there are withdrawals, though I have to say I've never really experienced drug withdrawals. Maybe I'm wrought-iron. But love, when it's gone you feel nothing but a vacuum of existence. You, me. I feel empty. I keep looking for something to fill that, and maybe that's my biggest flaw as a person. Maybe that's the core of my issues with my mother, because she never showed me the kind of everlasting love that comes with family, the kind that everyone deserves. I've seen it in other families, had a taste for it, but it was always a tease. I knew it was connected to my own sexual relationships, and that it was superficial at best (even if genuine).

The problem is lust can fill that hole almost as well as love can. It can make you believe anything. The kick is that it's temporary. In the end you realize you're just as alone as you were before. The difference is someone else is there, feeling lonely, trying to use you to fill their hole too. And this looks to be the most unlike-Love thing that can possibly be.

Create something for yourself no one can take away. Perhaps derive a form of self-love, just not the narcissistic kind. Maybe I need to seek a constant state of serenity and contentment rather than chase the highs and lows of romantic love. Or perhaps I need to seek both, but if only one have the former.

Bah. This is too much work.

The Entire Month of July

I don’t know why I remember this one summer night more than all the others. It’s pretty typical of the summer I’ve had so far—all of us kids meeting up in the parking lot behind the tennis courts. It’s the park where me and a guy came years ago to escape parental restraints. Over there, by the chain-link baseball backing we got close to kissing but never did. Tonight, though, Daniel and Andrew are tossing a Frisbee back and forth. I’m leaning on the trunk of Andrew’s car, the cigarette smoke wafting its way up to my eye no matter how many times I try to match the direction of the wind. Andrew’s just caught the Frisbee perfectly, and his eyes blink over in my direction. He looks back to Daniel and thinks I didn’t see him. I gaze past him too, not wanting to admit I’d been watching him either. The sky is a shit brown behind the clip-art perfect skyline the woods make, and I don’t care that it’s pollution from the power plant across the lake that clouds our view of the stars. The Frisbee hits the pavement and makes a god-awful scraping sound. Daniel grins none-too-innocently up at me as he brings the Frisbee off the pavement, but I know he’s playing the part of a lady killer with only two goes at sex under the belt. I raise an eyebrow and a corner of the mouth back at him, continuing our little game of false seduction. I toss the cigarette butt behind me. My hand feels empty and restless. I focus on Andrew in front of me. He’s talking something about what to do tonight. Like every other night this summer.