Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Beautiful Toxicity

I thought about holding her hand too tightly. I thought about pain, maybe a little about ecstasy; sometimes they're the same, sometimes they don't exist. Most times there's just apathy, right? We sat facing the veranda and smoked it into waves, but it wasn't for the moment, so we relocated.

I change my mind so much, I change it over and over and I think of my mind in the same way I think of the piss stained couch maybe that soaked in my mom's house when I was a kid. We relocated to anywhere I wanted us to. King of her castle I was for a night or two, two years into the past and three drinks too many. Yes, my lips could cling to her gown. Yes, my hand could paint circles on her back. Yes, yes, yes! I wanted "yes" and who wants "no?" She said "yes," we wandered around a Wendy's parking lot. She said "yes" and we went to the most putrid smelling parking garage I could find.

"There's beauty in filth." I said to her with my serious eyes trying to get a serious feeling and failing. "But there isn't really, is there?" She said nothing and I kept talking and I wondered if even she thought she was there with me, smelling what had to be shit, sitting on a curve that had to be toxic, watching a blank street with no cars.  "This road is our canvas!" I said. A blank is not a blank canvas; it's sadder, more likely to provoke melancholy, and that it did. We were feeling sadness drape itself around us and we both hid under the same veil, apart. I'm not sure if I could say we were ever together. But my hand did touch her lap, and her smooth skin did glide, so smoothly, so obliviously, so-so.

She said "yeah," and "whatever" and "okay" and yada yada that eventually blends together, because they aren't words. Words express something, they signify, but there was nothing to signify and I might as well have been sitting with the sex doll my friends bought as a joke for me during Christmas of last year.

She was too beautiful with the Wendy's streetlamp bouncing a beautifully muddy light onto her cheeks as she looked forward, played with something in her purse, kicked a rock. "She should be a model!" I'd tell my friends both before and after "we." The idea of her extreme beauty knocked me off my feet. I wanted her to look into my shy eyes, cut me off in the middle of some silly rambling, and tell me I was beautiful and worthy.  I wanted to be worthy of her glance. I could prove I was interesting. I could prove I was good, whatever the fuck that means. "She's fucking beautiful," echoed in my ears and I couldn't hear the real world. I tried to hallucinate, but couldn't. O asylum! O escape! O this was the apex of drudgery.

I took her to the shitty sights this night. I let her walk in crap and rub her chilly arms, cover her nose, whatever. Even in the crap she was perfect, saying "yes" with not a touch of humanity. Picture that, the flies are buzzing around her mascara covered face and she's slapping them every other minute, and she can't say "Hey douche! Take me home!" She just sat, and I watched her and spoke, as if everything were in line. I spoke, she listened and her straightened eyelashes poked up while underneath somber ridden eyes peered through her purse. 

 "Let's leave." I smiled and she smiled back. Squealing and straining, dripping smelly drops onto the road, my car took us through the swaying red lights "GO, go, GO!" That's the life I wanted to live. That's the life we lived and still I didn't feel anything. Stopped on the sidewalk in front of her house I saw hair falling into her face. "It must be uncomfortable," I thought. It had to be. I took my little pointer finger and I poked her face then dragged it along until the hair was behind an ear. I could almost hear her saying I was beautiful just then, but the crickets outside were the only sound creeping into us. I went to kiss her and her lips tightened. Sitting back, always back, never forward, I guess, I was ready for us to sit there for eternity and my car to become oblivion and her face a statue to be admired and worshipped and cursed. I was ready for the blackness to settle in, but the streetlamps were still hitting the windshield.

I hit my steering wheel and the car awoke with a shout down the street, and her body came alive with a flinch of painful fear. Her eyes became heavy and she began to fall asleep. As she floated into dreams, I stayed in mine and let my eyes absorb her, until even the moving of her chest under the gentle breath of life seemed ancient, and she became my statue.

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