"Of Silhouettes and Dominoes" by Kristin O'Brassil
After awhile, everything starts blending together. Sweat and spiced rum drip from the counter into a puddle on the floor, adding to the sticky mess you step over on your way out the door every morning. The daily paper is piling up in the corner of your kitchen - four years worth of ignored sports sections with coffee stains, and you're getting more than a little tired of saving every miniscule piece of your life. You begin to tell yourself that if you keep saving every little thing, and play hero for every slightly broken girl you meet, eventually one of them will have the power to save you in return. Of course, this might happen a little sooner if you could remember their names. Obviously, in a world where parents can no longer explain the birds and the bees to their children with that good old phrase "Well son, when a man and a woman love each other...", that's not the easiest thing. It's not like half the country needs to know the name of the person they're going to bed with anymore. It's a lot easier to duck out of their apartment the morning after and rush back to your minimum wage job before you get canned and move along to the next face you don't recognize, the next boss you hate, the next body you step over to get out of the house every morning.
Sooner or later, you can't keep track of the seasons, or daylight. Everything blends together under the fluorescent light bulb you use to keep yourself sane. You don't want to admit it, but slowly, the realization that every crumb of knowledge you've collected up till now is going to fail you. Between scraps of paper that tell you the best places to stake out when you're lonely in Chicago and an untouched copy of The Bell Jar, your weakness is turning into slightly more than an inability to talk to the people standing next to you on the subway. Thirty years of regrets and peanut butter are stuck to the roof of your mouth. Eventually, they won't notice you. You and your mud-stained Doc Martens from a leftover nineteen-nineties obsession you never managed to shake off.
You've acquired a fear of vanity, clinging to your pseudo self-deprecation. It's not what you believe, it's just what you've been shown. When you do speak, you spew fragments that start and stop from a tongue that used to quote Yeats and Joyce under your breath at any given moment. You've lost your affinity for description. What used to turn up as six pages explaining a ten second frame of time has become two incoherent sentences about an unimportant moment because you've lost your talent for noticing details.
Or that's all that you'll let on. But if someone were to go through your desk and comb through your sketchbooks there's pages upon pages of the way it felt to comb your fingers through her hair. A second by second account of your last night together that you spent counting the freckles down her back after she'd already fallen asleep. Before all the others, before the liquid poison, before the overwhelming silence. I remembered the entire ink-blurred page of you not remembering the color of her eyes, but I promise you, I promise I will remember for you. Her eyes are green, her name is Grace, and she left you.
That's all you need to know. These are the facts that you cannot escape. You have no secrets. You have sold them all to the man who hides his patience between slivers of the souls of trees. Oh, but you never did like metaphors. I'm talking about paper, John, and I'm talking about the rest of your life. The rest of your life that will continue to repeat from midnight to mid-morning for the next forty-something years. You're the modern-age brothers of Joseph, selling your childhood into slavery. Your mind creates divine tragedies in your every nightmare. In truth, I'm tired of watching you wake up with sweaty palms and chattering teeth every time you swear you feel her beside you.
This is all I've ever wanted, John. I've burned myself into the grey matter that you've wasted away on coffee and alcohol. My name is Grace, John, and I'm inside every breath you take. You told me so many times that you swore I was a part of you. And I am, sweet darling, I am. I'm the tension in your heartstrings. I'm your carbon monoxide. I'm your ghost. I don't know which one of us chose this, that night on the pier. I just want you to know that the water was warm, and I'm feeling alright. When everything starts blending together, this is all you need to know.
|
