(no subject)
Airport
She’s at the airport, stepping out from the gate, confident in her stride, the same snake of rhinestones shifting along the rigid knob of her right ankle. Funny how I notice that detail first. She has exquisite ankles. Monica is not beautiful, though, not in the way that makes men want to hide their crotches behind notebooks. She is more alive than anything else; that was her beauty, her spark. She could never put together a decent outfit. Even now, she’s wearing a black skirt that’s just a little too long over the knee, nylons just a shade too dark for her apricot skin, and a purple cardigan that swallows her breasts and arms, yet strains across her shoulders. She walks with a swagger, ungainly, lacking grace.
I find myself part elated, part panicked to find that nobody is here to pick her up. No significant other, no lad-in-distress, no withdrawn beatnik hiding behind a bushy beard to trade remarks with her. She always loved the tortured ones, prided herself on being able to untangle their woes with a flick of her lips or perhaps muddle their minds even more. I wonder what she’s doing back here, back in this corn country that devoured her spirit until she flew away to claim a new one. I wonder if she’ll remember me; have I changed so much since high school, since we made out on the couch in frantic rebellion, since the love we had redefined beyond the point of comprehension?
I saw her in a Newsweek blurb a couple months ago, the hair a bit shorter, but still the same mouse brown, like tree bark spun into fibrous nets around her cheeks and neck. The journalists had noted the opening of her “adult” studio, some warehouse in Virginia that she had fixed up and turned it into a factory for fantasy, where the sexually depraved came to carry out whatever nightmares happened to capture their desires. It hadn’t surprised me at all; creating reality from illusion always was Monica’s strength. She catered to the imagination in everyone; that’s what made the studio such a fucking success - it was not elusive or shameful or judgmental. You paid your fee, she arranged your thing, and everyone won. You had to hand it to the girl: preying on society’s warped sense of copulation was a sure-fire high return game. Not that it would last, nothing worth it ever does, but Monica had common sense. Her revenue went to a cornucopia of other establishments, well-rounded in their estates.
When I read that article, I wondered why I hadn’t married her. I would’ve been set for life. But Monica was unattainable. Still is, as she turns to the side of the streaming march of passengers and sets her purse on one of the terminal waiting seats. I swear that’s the same purse she took to prom. Monica was always generous with her money unless it came to herself. Hell, I think I still owe her twenty bucks. She’s shifting through her purse now, a ragtag black oval with silver trim; I recall how she likes silver, never gold, too rich, she used to say, too rash and unforgiving. Silver is the moon’s shadow, the tint between black and white, where the world can be anything you make it. Monica waxed poetic over everything.
I remember the first day I met Monica. Her father had been overseeing some project, and she had been transplanted into our midst back during the middle of high school. Fresh off the west coast into small-town-population-8000, she had shocked me and a dozen others with her green eye-shadow and rhinestone anklet. That anklet had made her seem so exotic, so misplaced, so undeniably sexy. We were 16 and tired of tumbling silly blonde wheat girls in the hay. She came in and grew like ivy around our hearts. She told me how AIDS came from monkeys and stole my sketchbook and hugged me when she found my most private drawings endearing. Monica was a great hugger; she’d slide her soft arms just under your armpits, but not quite where it’d hurt your ribs, and she’d always smile up at you before burying the right side of her face into your shoulder, her small, tight breasts pressing like reassuring pillows against your chest. She usually wore t-shirts, big ones that hid how tiny she really was. I used to cradle her hips like bird wings, so fragile, yet strong enough to bear the weight of a child.
I only thought of children once with Monica, and that was when I fucked her, some languid evening spring of senior year. I was staying in Iowa for college and she was off to New York somewhere exciting in the fall. I would miss her, tapping my door at midnight with an apologetic ice cream cone, tilting her head back into a pool of sunlight, studying the clouds and slapping me when I made lewd comments about their apparent shapes, throwing charcoal at me during summer barbeques, buying me sketch paper that came in monthly shipments at the bookstore. She was my first taste of laughter and unbound joy, of brash honesty about all things human, and a mind that glittered as fiercly as her rhinestones in the porch lights, and that night it was just too much after hearing about her acceptance letter and seeing the film over her chocolate eyes and knowing they would not be here next year. I couldn’t bear it and selfishly thought I would plant a baby between us so we couldn’t possibly leave each other. Maybe she thought the same. Out there in the crackling grass with an orchestra of crickets, it was easy to think thoughts of fertility and family, but I knew she hated this dull little midwestern town with its cows and rat-tail rednecks, and she was the only beautiful thing out here that wasn’t fertilized with manure and masked with arrogant ignorance. When she let me in, I knew it hurt her, it hurt me too, the unaccustomed strain and the sudden fear that we didn’t want a baby, no matter what the mantling stars said or the cool thunderstorm breeze, and even if there was a baby, she would go to New York and nothing as simple as another life would stop her.
She had cried. Monica never cried, tears were for the weak, she insisted, like the stereotypical guy, but she was not male, and I had cried too, so maybe we were both weak. Behind the tears, our souls were in painful delight of this exuberant discovery and the reflective aftermath, her hips resting against me in an illusion of comfort. I felt so helplessly protective, soft flesh beneath my own conquering body and she said she would go away to the east, and I would stay here and wither, my talents lost in the barnyard shuffle. Never, I vowed, her hair in my lap, the silver vent of her belly button gazing like a single eye into the sky, and we fell asleep naked outside.
I loved her enough to let go, but having set her free, I wasted away. “Never” became “now.” I was lost in the barnyard shuffle, then in modernity. All the ambition and motivation I had left with Monica, riding with all her worldly possessions in her father’s truck to the allure of the Big Apple. There’s an airport here now, and a computer store, and talk of a Starbucks. The world was coming in, continuing where Monica left off. I’m not even needed in the corn fields anymore; machines are less demanding about pay and easier to take care of. So I clean up after the suits and khakis, the stockbrokers and start-ups looking for some nice quite, cheap place to settle and set up their workstations and laptops. They are destroying this little Hicksville even while trying to take shelter here.
I still draw, private drawings in black notebooks bound with twine. Images of the sun and squirrels, erotic girls lying in the sun, erotic girls lying with squirrels; it doesn’t matter. Now I want to draw her, here in the airport. She probably doesn’t see me looking. She’s still digging through her purse, balanced precariously on velvet black heels that highlight the lower gems of her anklet, those rhinestones flickering in the airport’s florescent lights, the same way they flickered in the moonlight after we fucked and scarred our bodies for each other. They say you never forget your first, but surely she’s forgotten me, little me, standing here in a janitor’s faded overalls with the Delta Airlines logo pinned over my heart.
I dare not move, mop in hand, water cart frozen, watching her roll her eyes in frustration as her purse search is fruitless. She hefts the purse upon her shoulder, shakes off disappointment, starts walking again. She is walking towards me. The sickle motion of her thighs are enthralling; she has put on muscle since I last saw her; they are fluid beneath the skirt fabric and there is no wedding ring, I notice. She is approaching; I am hypnotized, the round face, lips molded into a thin line…how could I have let her go? Monica never wore lipstick, but she had a mouth that, if parted just the right width, could bring sight back to the blind, better than any son of god.
After all these years, I still worship her. Maybe that’s sad, maybe that’s a sign of holiness. The distance doesn’t matter, the lost communication, the timespan; she is here right now; could it be she came back for me? Could it be we would start again, beneath the canopy sky engulfed in each other’s arms, held in an embracing….
“Fuck! Shit! Hey, watch it!”
She recovers from tripping. My mop clatters on the marble floor. She is kicking it out of the way, brusquely, with savage intent. I catch a full frame of her face, dark, dark syrup eyes, frustration, annoyance, anger, but above all, life! So very alive…
but no recognition. She exhales like a disgruntled thoroughbred and trots off, finally kicking her right ankle free of the mop. She has a press meeting, an aging father stowed in the local nursing home, and an empire to consider. She cannot be bothered by a janitor and his clumsy mop. She whips by, heels clicking like glass pellets on the marble floor. I stare after her fluttering hair; it leaves a trail of daffodil scent swirling maddeningly in my nostrils.
A flash catches my eyes. Her rhinestones, a chain-link of stars across the floor tiles, strung along the slick surface in abandon. She doesn’t even spare it a glance.
<3
Oh Gosh. I really really love my friends.
I can't describe the overwhelming feeling of gratitude and salvation after something so simple-seeming as a talk or a chat or a glance and touch. Like a cool breeze in comparison to the hot flow of visceral wounds deep inside a still-beating heart. Destruction at its most magnaminously magnificent can be suddenly broken so easily by the mellifluous feel of an open listener.
They say Scorpios value relationships intensely, and that couldn't be truer for me. [Particularly to two people for pulling me out of that sucking darkness; you know who you are.] Also, Amanda, if you read this thing, infinite thanks for providing me with a source of entertainment the past couple days. Thank you all!
Sorry for getting sappy there.
She’s at the airport, stepping out from the gate, confident in her stride, the same snake of rhinestones shifting along the rigid knob of her right ankle. Funny how I notice that detail first. She has exquisite ankles. Monica is not beautiful, though, not in the way that makes men want to hide their crotches behind notebooks. She is more alive than anything else; that was her beauty, her spark. She could never put together a decent outfit. Even now, she’s wearing a black skirt that’s just a little too long over the knee, nylons just a shade too dark for her apricot skin, and a purple cardigan that swallows her breasts and arms, yet strains across her shoulders. She walks with a swagger, ungainly, lacking grace.
I find myself part elated, part panicked to find that nobody is here to pick her up. No significant other, no lad-in-distress, no withdrawn beatnik hiding behind a bushy beard to trade remarks with her. She always loved the tortured ones, prided herself on being able to untangle their woes with a flick of her lips or perhaps muddle their minds even more. I wonder what she’s doing back here, back in this corn country that devoured her spirit until she flew away to claim a new one. I wonder if she’ll remember me; have I changed so much since high school, since we made out on the couch in frantic rebellion, since the love we had redefined beyond the point of comprehension?
I saw her in a Newsweek blurb a couple months ago, the hair a bit shorter, but still the same mouse brown, like tree bark spun into fibrous nets around her cheeks and neck. The journalists had noted the opening of her “adult” studio, some warehouse in Virginia that she had fixed up and turned it into a factory for fantasy, where the sexually depraved came to carry out whatever nightmares happened to capture their desires. It hadn’t surprised me at all; creating reality from illusion always was Monica’s strength. She catered to the imagination in everyone; that’s what made the studio such a fucking success - it was not elusive or shameful or judgmental. You paid your fee, she arranged your thing, and everyone won. You had to hand it to the girl: preying on society’s warped sense of copulation was a sure-fire high return game. Not that it would last, nothing worth it ever does, but Monica had common sense. Her revenue went to a cornucopia of other establishments, well-rounded in their estates.
When I read that article, I wondered why I hadn’t married her. I would’ve been set for life. But Monica was unattainable. Still is, as she turns to the side of the streaming march of passengers and sets her purse on one of the terminal waiting seats. I swear that’s the same purse she took to prom. Monica was always generous with her money unless it came to herself. Hell, I think I still owe her twenty bucks. She’s shifting through her purse now, a ragtag black oval with silver trim; I recall how she likes silver, never gold, too rich, she used to say, too rash and unforgiving. Silver is the moon’s shadow, the tint between black and white, where the world can be anything you make it. Monica waxed poetic over everything.
I remember the first day I met Monica. Her father had been overseeing some project, and she had been transplanted into our midst back during the middle of high school. Fresh off the west coast into small-town-population-8000, she had shocked me and a dozen others with her green eye-shadow and rhinestone anklet. That anklet had made her seem so exotic, so misplaced, so undeniably sexy. We were 16 and tired of tumbling silly blonde wheat girls in the hay. She came in and grew like ivy around our hearts. She told me how AIDS came from monkeys and stole my sketchbook and hugged me when she found my most private drawings endearing. Monica was a great hugger; she’d slide her soft arms just under your armpits, but not quite where it’d hurt your ribs, and she’d always smile up at you before burying the right side of her face into your shoulder, her small, tight breasts pressing like reassuring pillows against your chest. She usually wore t-shirts, big ones that hid how tiny she really was. I used to cradle her hips like bird wings, so fragile, yet strong enough to bear the weight of a child.
I only thought of children once with Monica, and that was when I fucked her, some languid evening spring of senior year. I was staying in Iowa for college and she was off to New York somewhere exciting in the fall. I would miss her, tapping my door at midnight with an apologetic ice cream cone, tilting her head back into a pool of sunlight, studying the clouds and slapping me when I made lewd comments about their apparent shapes, throwing charcoal at me during summer barbeques, buying me sketch paper that came in monthly shipments at the bookstore. She was my first taste of laughter and unbound joy, of brash honesty about all things human, and a mind that glittered as fiercly as her rhinestones in the porch lights, and that night it was just too much after hearing about her acceptance letter and seeing the film over her chocolate eyes and knowing they would not be here next year. I couldn’t bear it and selfishly thought I would plant a baby between us so we couldn’t possibly leave each other. Maybe she thought the same. Out there in the crackling grass with an orchestra of crickets, it was easy to think thoughts of fertility and family, but I knew she hated this dull little midwestern town with its cows and rat-tail rednecks, and she was the only beautiful thing out here that wasn’t fertilized with manure and masked with arrogant ignorance. When she let me in, I knew it hurt her, it hurt me too, the unaccustomed strain and the sudden fear that we didn’t want a baby, no matter what the mantling stars said or the cool thunderstorm breeze, and even if there was a baby, she would go to New York and nothing as simple as another life would stop her.
She had cried. Monica never cried, tears were for the weak, she insisted, like the stereotypical guy, but she was not male, and I had cried too, so maybe we were both weak. Behind the tears, our souls were in painful delight of this exuberant discovery and the reflective aftermath, her hips resting against me in an illusion of comfort. I felt so helplessly protective, soft flesh beneath my own conquering body and she said she would go away to the east, and I would stay here and wither, my talents lost in the barnyard shuffle. Never, I vowed, her hair in my lap, the silver vent of her belly button gazing like a single eye into the sky, and we fell asleep naked outside.
I loved her enough to let go, but having set her free, I wasted away. “Never” became “now.” I was lost in the barnyard shuffle, then in modernity. All the ambition and motivation I had left with Monica, riding with all her worldly possessions in her father’s truck to the allure of the Big Apple. There’s an airport here now, and a computer store, and talk of a Starbucks. The world was coming in, continuing where Monica left off. I’m not even needed in the corn fields anymore; machines are less demanding about pay and easier to take care of. So I clean up after the suits and khakis, the stockbrokers and start-ups looking for some nice quite, cheap place to settle and set up their workstations and laptops. They are destroying this little Hicksville even while trying to take shelter here.
I still draw, private drawings in black notebooks bound with twine. Images of the sun and squirrels, erotic girls lying in the sun, erotic girls lying with squirrels; it doesn’t matter. Now I want to draw her, here in the airport. She probably doesn’t see me looking. She’s still digging through her purse, balanced precariously on velvet black heels that highlight the lower gems of her anklet, those rhinestones flickering in the airport’s florescent lights, the same way they flickered in the moonlight after we fucked and scarred our bodies for each other. They say you never forget your first, but surely she’s forgotten me, little me, standing here in a janitor’s faded overalls with the Delta Airlines logo pinned over my heart.
I dare not move, mop in hand, water cart frozen, watching her roll her eyes in frustration as her purse search is fruitless. She hefts the purse upon her shoulder, shakes off disappointment, starts walking again. She is walking towards me. The sickle motion of her thighs are enthralling; she has put on muscle since I last saw her; they are fluid beneath the skirt fabric and there is no wedding ring, I notice. She is approaching; I am hypnotized, the round face, lips molded into a thin line…how could I have let her go? Monica never wore lipstick, but she had a mouth that, if parted just the right width, could bring sight back to the blind, better than any son of god.
After all these years, I still worship her. Maybe that’s sad, maybe that’s a sign of holiness. The distance doesn’t matter, the lost communication, the timespan; she is here right now; could it be she came back for me? Could it be we would start again, beneath the canopy sky engulfed in each other’s arms, held in an embracing….
“Fuck! Shit! Hey, watch it!”
She recovers from tripping. My mop clatters on the marble floor. She is kicking it out of the way, brusquely, with savage intent. I catch a full frame of her face, dark, dark syrup eyes, frustration, annoyance, anger, but above all, life! So very alive…
but no recognition. She exhales like a disgruntled thoroughbred and trots off, finally kicking her right ankle free of the mop. She has a press meeting, an aging father stowed in the local nursing home, and an empire to consider. She cannot be bothered by a janitor and his clumsy mop. She whips by, heels clicking like glass pellets on the marble floor. I stare after her fluttering hair; it leaves a trail of daffodil scent swirling maddeningly in my nostrils.
A flash catches my eyes. Her rhinestones, a chain-link of stars across the floor tiles, strung along the slick surface in abandon. She doesn’t even spare it a glance.
<3
Oh Gosh. I really really love my friends.
I can't describe the overwhelming feeling of gratitude and salvation after something so simple-seeming as a talk or a chat or a glance and touch. Like a cool breeze in comparison to the hot flow of visceral wounds deep inside a still-beating heart. Destruction at its most magnaminously magnificent can be suddenly broken so easily by the mellifluous feel of an open listener.
They say Scorpios value relationships intensely, and that couldn't be truer for me. [Particularly to two people for pulling me out of that sucking darkness; you know who you are.] Also, Amanda, if you read this thing, infinite thanks for providing me with a source of entertainment the past couple days. Thank you all!
Sorry for getting sappy there.