you could see lots of other things

a story

It was cold that night. You could see your breath, and if you looked close enough, lots of other things. After the meeting she came up to me, put her arms around me and asked me to go to coffee. I did not refuse. Anyone else could have asked me and I would have said no. But it was Sarah. Everything else was secondary when it was Sarah. In just a few minutes I was parking my car, and then I was standing next to her in the coffee line. My mind wandered…to the familiar maw I knew since adolescence, the one that never really left me. I was watching the back of her head, her hair, the nape of her neck—and then she’d turn to look at me and not realize I was stealing.  And I stood stealing glances; I became the boyish figure I’d become so desperate at pretending not to be any more.

She bought me a cup of tea, despite my protests. She refused, pushing at me, smiling at me and for the second time that night, I was disarmed. Her eyes were jewels and before them I lost composure, confidence, any sort of defense I’d carefully constructed to ensure The Crush never happened again. But here she was. Here we were. Just the warm glow of it was enough. It always was.

We went outside to sit with the rest of the crowd that had straggled in from the meeting, most of them her friends. I started to get a chair, but she stopped me. Don’t you have a story to tell me? she asked. We sat alone. She had a red sweatshirt on with the hood pulled over her face—a delicate eiderdown kind of beautiful and a different kind every time I saw her. She asked if they should go inside where it was warmer. I wanted to let her smoke. It looked like she needed to. I figured that distractions were a necessary evil and given the circumstances, one of us needed to be outwardly distracting; my inner turmoil was just enough and just visible. 

So we sat on a wire table and looked at each other. Then, it got difficult because I always forget where to start or what to say, so I played with my tea. I stirred it, but there was no cream and no sugar it. I steeped the bag. The steam rose like thin fingers between us. She smoked, careful to blow her smoke away from me but she kept her eyes on me. And then I began to contemplate what we were there for; I had to tell her my story. I did.

 I told it to her, haltingly at first, and then it came out—in freshets and I never looked at her once I don’t think. I focused on the ash tray, fidgeted with the coffee cup, felt guilty about everything she was hearing. I told her that I, like her, did not know how to eat. I was a 32 year old man who didn’t know how to eat.  It had been many years and that I felt broken behind it.  Something she said shook me out of hiding and denial and shame. Something she said made me tell on myself. I thanked her. We talked about the disease of humanity. She asked me why I felt broken behind it. It had something to do with not feeling like I was enough, I said. I think you’re enough, she almost whispered. Here eyes intent and I bowed my head, stirring the tea, watching the steam, feeling the weight of truths disclosed. I could not help what I felt for her, but I could only imply that and never tell her. That was for later—or not at all.

 We shared and struggled, there on the sidewalk with many people around us. She told me she was afraid to get well, that healthy people scared her. I looked at her intently. I told her that she probably scared her. She sighed, reached for her cigarettes and turned to steal a glance at the boy sitting not twenty feet from her, the one that raped her.

That is when I dug my nails into my neck. It was very painful, though at the time I was fantasizing about it being his neck. Her face peeked out of the hood, tears welling up, but she laughed, and smoked and lined her feet up perfectly under the table, telling me she knew laughing wasn’t good. But after trying so hard to get better, she went ahead and picked a boy that did this to her. My eyes were razors on her, bulging, blinking, hurting, dying, trying to remember just how many times beautiful women told me things like this. 

That was the second time in two years I saw the dawn murdered–innocence immolated, God standing and laughing among the broken pieces. I could almost hear the circus music come screaming out of the celestial speakers above; all hell breaking loose Above; bets being swapped and angels running around smacking people upside the head with the Love Arrow–but me. Just the circus music. That was the most painful part of it, knowing that it was there not in some delusional fractal sense but in the truest sense of the word. Just irony incarnate. Just this beautiful girl telling me she’d been raped. Just shadows on the walls of childhood. Time stood still; that was the cliché. It didn’t really, though. It continued for that horrific pregnant moment where two humans wonder what the other one is thinking—one with an empty one sided crush yearning for youth in the beauty of the girl-woman; the other just blowing smoke, passing time, playing the consciously unconscious game taught by all the men who loved by raping, violating and abusing. It wasn’t her fault; she knows not what she does…but that one wears thin.

Her friends approached us then, oblivious to what she’d been talking about and oblivious still that anything had happened to her because she hadn’t told them about her self. She hugged me then—not a rock or a sway or a gentle tight hug, but just a hug.

I know that her history is like every woman I’ve tried to love. I know that deep down there is not a person there, but an empty shell upon which only chaos exists, emptiness, anger, self degradation and dissociation.

But I care for her deeply and feel that she moves things inside of me—and we rarely talk. Every now and again, but not often.

 I think about her a lot and wonder if we’ll ever talk like that again. And I know that she knows I wonder this and therein lies the power, the beginning of the game. That’s all I know and this is how it ends, here, with thoughts and her in the world somewhere and me here writing about it by lamplight, candlelight, by the demons festering somewhere beneath the surface and aura they all love so much.

I think she said Hawaii. She loved the ocean. And running in the sand. Water baby, I think she said. Erratic and vague and clearly being vague, I think she said. And surfer boys with tufts of sun-bleached hair and lissome surf-toned bodies, with requisite muscles and cloaked intentions. Sunsets punctuated by bong hits and long bouts of slow anesthetic love making in the dunes, atop blankets, near thickets and betwixt palm trees, damaged bloody clams acting out original violation under the moonscape and tragic rhythm of all mankind doomed to repeat the horror of abuse, dysfunction and avoidance. I think she said Hawaii. That’s where she disappeared to, but I don’t know for sure. But I know we

And in the end, iIt was all whimper, no bang…much as I deluded myself that I might be able to rescue her. The last time I saw her she waited on my table at the Crocodile Café That was two years ago—an eon, a relationship, a shame-fest ago, an eternity. She was aloof, distant and hiding. Despite (or perhaps because of)  all of that being out in the open she was aloof and distant. But what else could you expect?

This is the way of the world. Where if something doesn’t work out, you just get a new one. If something’s broken don’t fix it or repair it, just throw the old one away. Just damage it some more and hope like hell that it gets fixed by proxy or default.

This is the way of the world.

You sip tea an arm’s length from your attacker, you act nonchalant. You avoid those that offer anything in the way of stability. You run from love offered as if an asp.    

This was the way of your world.

You embraced the thing that was most unattainable and dance sheepishly around the thing that avails itself to you.