February, Day Of
Some time on Sunday. Some day in February
it was proving to be an ugly day, the pavement outside already wet with sticky and unsweetened apathy.
the day was too early for me to begin, but i couldn’t get back to sleep after waking up in the middle of the night, the small cherry pit of last night’s encounter still lodged in my throat.
i wasn’t sure that i had actually seen him, there on the sidewalk by the flashing neon sign smoking a cigarette.
by the time my brain put the familiar eyes with his familiar lips, lighting up in kindred familiar flashing lights the name which i have for months not touched with my tongue, it was too late.
all so suddenly our faces were close to one another again, speaking about irrelevant and mundane things. i asked how he was, he asked how i was, and yet we both knew we didn’t really care.
underneath those familiarities was a severance that had long ago been tightly packaged, sealed, and shipped to another planet, a previous reality far from the right now, the reality that did not link us as one anymore.
we nodded our heads in unison and smiled when we were supposed to, completing with ease the tasks we had assigned to us as human being to human being.
it was an act of civility, the kindness we doted upon each other. an irreconcilable service we both had the duty of carrying out, no matter how transparent our mutual disdain was, we tried our best to be good to each other again. we each forced responses which frayed like hay falling from our mouths, runny in a sunny-side up kind of way with the consistency of oppressive optimism dripping off the ends of our non-invasive questions.
it was like we were fighting a war of positives, each person trying to out-compliment each other, if not to only make the other aware of just how happy they are for them. my ammunition was the defused love-bombs he threw into my battle field when i was nineteen. his ammunition was knowing i would do it all over again. still, we fought fair.
even then, the higher we made our voices sound, and the more we codeswitched into pathetic linguistic manipulation, the more we inevitably tried to convince each other of a sort of mutual understanding: that this meeting was neither significant nor dignified, that it was a reality we were both forced to choose, willing or unwilling, that it was so great to see you, i hope everything else has been treating you nicely.
it was just something you do sometimes, pretending for someone else. there is love in there, isn’t there? that convivial ingenuity you pour out for the sake of someone else to make yourself look like a good person. even when you feel like you’re not.
i felt dirty after speaking, my hands messy from digging the grave of a life meant to stay under the ground. i walked to the subway station under the pizzeria’s yellow lightbulbs and thought i tasted blood, and then soil. grave-digger was not a vocation i wanted to add to my resume this year.
when i woke up the next day there was still dirt under my fingernails, my head throbbing, the sky gray.
//
the day that i now was being asked to prematurely begin was an objectively bad one.
it was one of those days that asked too much of you. when all you wanted to do was sit under the covers with your hands down your pants watching the mirror and deluding yourself of the fact that the wellbutrin did in fact zap your sex drive like a tesla coil, the day asked you to do your laundry, to make dinner, to get up and seize me!
these kinds of days always made me want to throw my hands up to the sky and ask god to reprieve me of whatever work i had of being a human that day. i did this a lot, actually, not just on ugly days.
it was becoming a routine basically, this sort of imperious brooding. it essentially immobilized me. made me think out of a smaller, less used, futile part of my brain. i was lucky in these days if i was able to look someone in the eye or have a conversation outside of the transactional prompts i had stored in my brain’s recent files. no, yes, thank you, i’m sorry?
i eventually got out of bed. if only to sit in the shower and let the water run over me, i still got out of bed.
through the leukwarm water i asked god nicely and persistently to tell me what it was that he needed from me. i didn’t hear from him, but figured he was busy, or he was thinking. when i got out i ransacked my fridge, hoping that there was an apple somewhere i could eat. i looked on the fire escape for a snake to kill. i searched my freezer for the human rib i’ve read about that would save my temperance. i couldn’t find it, obviously, only the nearly-rotted ingredients which i would serve my platter of what more is there, what pity am i! lunch on.
the fruit would never rot, no matter how long it took for me to eat it. the only rotting came from inside, somewhere beneath the shadows, somewhere from this rotten feeling of being unwillingly alive.
i called god up again. is it supposed to feel this empty? are the clouds supposed to be this gray? how old is old when it comes to mustard?
still no answer.
when i noticed it was going to be a very bad, no good, soon-to-be slow-moving, anamorphic day, i would bang my head against the wall. usually with about a second break in between,i would collide in sets of three with the wall closest to my bed.
despite each thud landing in the same spot as the days before, my head was small enough that it never really left any mark, only a slimy circle of forehead sweat.
the bedside table would lightly rock when i slammed the middle of my brain into the wall. nothing ever fell, the trinkets and books just performed a light stuttering. it felt harmonic, like an ensemble of perfectly ordered chaos; a choir of coyotes as they circled the prowling house cat. the entire room swayed as one like desolate fisherman cast away at sea, unsuspecting of the oncoming storm.
i would only stop when i felt a sudden cold shoot through my eyes and down into my nose, like the stinging feeling of a ball colliding with the middle of your face on a cold december night. i would also only ever stop if i heard a polite, discrete knocking on my front door.
i suppose it was not unsurprising that my repeated banging against the wall every odd-some days could create some disturbance with the downstairs neighbor. i just didn’t think this time it would be so quickly he would come up.
that day the boy from apartment 2B climbed his set of six stairs, knocked on my front door, and politely asked, “could you just for like an hour or so please, be a little more quiet?”
every time he did this he would place his right arm against the doorframe, leaning his heavy head against the nook of his inner elbow.
each time he dragged up the stairs still in his slippers to tell me to shut the fuck up and stop banging my head on the wall he would put his hand on my shoulder. he would lightly squeeze the top of it with his fingers. he would do this right before he left. it was always how he did this.
it was just me and him in the stairwell that morning, his soft reprimanding echoing white off of the emptiness. i apologized for my being loud, assuring him of a promise which never stuck each time i said it.
he placed his right hand on my left shoulder and pursed his lips together tightly in an attempt to smile at me and then shuffled back down the steps to some desk in some room of his apartment facing a window or some blank wall; back to a world i would never know of.
i went inside and poured myself a glass of water. i drank it quickly, gulping too fast and coughing as a consequence. feeling the pounding headache i gave myself, adding to the throbbing already present at my waking, i was filled with the desire to go upstairs and resume my banging. i wanted an out, and this banging was the least invasive. it was one of the few things i had left after killing my past self.
but i can’t, i told myself, he already told me no.
i watched the shadows flowing over the skylight, grappling with their amorphous shapes, pretending i could be like them, light and changeable.
it only was a blink of perception that deflated my self-sabotage. that’s all it took. one glance. one sheer moment of another person looking in to make me hot with embarrassment, forthright in changing my opinions. my apologies to foucault, the panopticon was honestly a really great invention. defeated, i poured myself another glass of water, this time boiling hot.
i knew i would eventually resent the boy downstairs for making me feel limited in how i could cope with it all. i would never tell him, obviously, because that’s how the best resentment builds.
i suppose i would also never tell him how i loved him for this. how i loved that he ruined my routine. strangely and kindly i loved him for the way he looked out for me, like a shared glance across the train on a tuesday commute, like tattered boots stepping over shattered glass.
somewhere in him was a foreign and motherly companion i hoped would come back up the stairs, back from his world on his own floor, away from me and my self-sabotage. i suppose it was better this way, now that i could sit alone and think about the events of last night, the convivial ingenuity and whether or not i was a good person for striking up a conversation with the ghost that haunts me; those buried dark memories.
sometimes all it takes is someone else looking in for you to see it right. it’s just too bad that i normally keep all my windows covered, all my doors locked.
i drank the water before it was cool enough to put my fingers into. my throat scorched as it slid down and i swallowed.
staring at the wall, wincing from my esophagus' heartbeat, i realized god never answered my questions. god never seemed to even really care about the questions i asked him.
my lunch platter was ready and i still didn’t have an apple, a rib, a serpent. i still didn’t have him, the boy from apartment 2B, my former self, my past lover.
i still didn’t have the day that had already been wasted.
what i did have was my room, my wall, my banging. and even then i didn’t have everything. i had asked for too much from them, from god, just like this ugly sunday morning had asked too much of me. i wondered when i would learn to ask for too little, where i would turn when i got too much, instead of not enough.
when i got upstairs after eating my lunch i put the pillow between my forehead and the wall and i screamed.