I always remember our conversations, but usually on a level that appears whenever I’m doing something else, like starting my car or lifting weights, or just thinking of something other than what I should be doing. It’s funny; she’s the one I’ve talked to the most since I left Portland, even if she’s still there. Conversation is easy with her, even if I’m nervous, even if we’re just shooting the shit, because I wanted to make it seem like there was absolutely nothing to the whimsy that drew me to her in the first place. It’s easy to remember that there’s no future with her, because there’s not even really a present or a past, so it’s easy for me to hear her tell the stories behind the stories she writes about, because at the very least it’s someone telling me something other than some carefully orchestrated means of avoiding the truth, the necessity, the things that need to be said. It’s all out there with her, how she’s not the kind to have anyone’s baby, so I don’t even mention it, and the fear that I have about being lonely evaporates with the sound of her voice, because she’s where I am, only by choice, and it makes it easier for me to not have what I want, because she’s there to ask me exactly what that is, even though I don’t have an answer.
She asked me that once when I was beginning this new break, the beginning of my end, and I was talking about my grand plans or my grand lack-of-a-plan, I was telling her about how I was broken by it and she asked me
“well, what do you want?”
and I felt stupid when I talked to her, like I always do, because I didn’t have an answer, I never do when I talk to the ones that are smarter than I, that’s why I like to listen and set up my fiefdom from a distance, watching them as they adventure through whatever and wherever, it’s safer this way, really, I learned it as a lad even as my heart ached before it really knew how to, this is how I cut my teeth, watching a phone line away while someone else made someone else what they wanted, even as what I wanted slipped further and further away,
and the empty pit in my heart expands and swallows everything around it except my brain, cursing me to be aware of everything even as my dreams quickly wash into nothingness,
leaving only her voice and the comfortable world it comes from.
i won’t be coy, when i say “her,” i mean “everyone,” because naming names only gets me in trouble and zero ain’t about the trouble anymore, only the need, the ache, the one that you can’t fuck or scream away.
Time’s up.
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