Month: July 2024

There are worse things to want

RachelLeave a comment

i can do everything a normal girl can do except shut the fuck up

there’s a part of me that thought it would end up correcting itself you know like somehow things would settle and my stupid heart would listen to my stupid brain and just this once for once in my stupid life i could love the right person

but i couldn’t even manage that

i don’t think i can say this
i don’t think it works like this
i don’t think this is something i should want
there are worse things to want but not like this

you called me important and the realization of what that meant startled me more than anything else
you told me once that we were a matched set and if people didn’t see that they were blind
no one else ever wanted to duet in my car no one else got my stupid references no one else ever wanted to commit to the bit and it felt like building a scene it felt like improv it felt like yes and yes and yes and and and 

and god who wants to hear about this
i already spend so much time sifting through old hurts and new pain unearthing all these old traumas like some sort of emotional paleontologist excavating wounds from the mesozoic era
who in their right mind wants to hear about all the black spots on the map of the life i used to share with you

maybe i could pretend i have a brain injury
maybe i could actually give myself a brain injury
maybe i could drive my car straight into a ravine
maybe i could lay down in the street
maybe i’ll get lucky and get struck by lightning and the resulting injury will give me the type of amnesia that erases you completely from my memory

i wish one of us had the courage to say what really happened
i wish i could tell you
i wish

something fun that i do is make bad choices

i am no longer looking for an exit sign but god the worst parts of you made me want one
choking on the laugh caught in my throat because it was so much easier to be compliant than it was to lose
our song was a one-hit wonder about a woman loving a man who could never ever love her back and jesus fucking christ that is way too on the nose even for me
your wife came around the corner and when she introduced herself i have never in my life wished harder for the earth to just open up and swallow me whole

you look like a young richard dreyfuss which weirdly kind of does it for me
you look like winona ryder if she was caught in a wind tunnel
you look like a young david duchovny if i squint and tilt my head to the side
you look
you look like
you look like every boy who ignored me in high school
you look like you listen exclusively to the arcade fire and have extremely strong opinions about neon bible

another fun thing that i do is never learn from my mistakes

i looked at you and thought who the fuck is this clown
i looked at you and a wave of affection hit me so hard i felt like i was getting a nosebleed
i looked at you and i realized that there are worse things to want

you know that sort of glow you feel when you’re driving back from a really great time with people you care about and who care about you

i just

i thought you had taken that from me and i thought it would never happen again
but the feeling settled into me on the way home last night and it was like i had the sunset in my veins

and it was the closest i’ve felt to poetry in so goddamn long

we ran out of words, and so we drank.

RachelLeave a comment

After the breakup Kevin threw away all his records, just threw them away, and he tells her about how just looking at them, piled up in plastic milk crates under the window in his living room, it made him sick, made him want to puke. He boxed them up three days after his girlfriend told him that she wanted to see other people and Green Is Blues and Hello Nasty and Frampton Comes Alive!, everything, everything, it all went flying into the trash when he realized she wasn’t coming back. Kevin’s hands rattle in his lap as he talks, picking at the bandage tape wound all the way up to the knuckles of his left hand, and just looking at him makes Holly want to cry.

Holly knows Kevin the way you know anyone you see maybe once a week, that sort of localized osmosis that comes from shared social contact, occasional occupation o the same space. Kevin smokes Marlboro reds; Kevin drinks White Russians; Kevin spent an entire evening two weeks ago putting nine dollars’ worth of borrowed quarters into the jukebox, playing Green Day and Springsteen and Modern Baseball and exactly one Stevie Nicks song, just because Holly asked him nicely. The girlfriend was there – Layla? Lila? Dark eyes, lovely, distant; she sat apart from Kevin and his friends, far from Holly and hers, staring at her phone in the corner by the dartboard. Holly glances over at that space now, the big picture window fogging from the bodies crammed inside, momentarily distracted by the darts sailing toward their target: double ring, triple ring, bullseye, wall.

In Kevin’s pockets there is only: ten dollars, lint, guitar pick, keys. He pats the front of his shirt and comes up empty; Holly slides her Camels across the wire table they’ve been sitting at, leans over to light it for him when the spark doesn’t catch, his hands shaking too much to be steady. “We were friends,” he says, keeps saying, palm opening and closing, the tape around it dirty. “Like you and – what’s the fuck, that guy, whosit, fuckin’ Jim, the one you used to –”

Holly chokes on smoke, coughs through it. She’s three drinks in but still painfully sober, and what can she say? She already spends so much of her time sifting through old hurts, new pain, unearthing all her traumas like some sort of emotional paleontologist, excavating wounds from the Mesozoic Era. Who wants to hear about the numbers she can’t call, the places she can’t visit? Sitting on the tile floor of the shower, the water cranked so hot it feels cold; sitting at the table, head in her hands, music drifting down from the apartment upstairs – I have my own life, and I am stronger than you know. She wishes she had a better story. She wants a better story.

Holly stubs out her cigarette, finishes her drink. Kevin slumps forward, taped hand over his face. Beyond them, in the parking lot, the lights flicker.