Tag: flash nonfiction

(the pros and cons of being without you)

in

• There’s a part of me that feels like I’m suffering from the emotional equivalent of minor brain damage: I’m dizzy, I can’t concentrate, I’m getting dehydrated. I’m relearning how to do all sorts of small things over again that I’d never thought twice about before – making phone calls, dining at restaurants, going to the movies alone – but I can still add and subtract and recite the Pledge of Allegiance, I’m managing to tie my shoes just fine. 

• I met your mother in the grocery store and even if her words were polite and pleasant I still felt like I was chewing on glass throughout the whole conversation, walking in bare feet over nine yards of glowing coals without any end in sight. I was like her daughter, she told me once, the hidden favorite, the lost child she raised in the basement; I could always turn to her for help if I needed it. So much for that. 

• Austin was supposed to be cowboy boots and whiskey, horror movies and indie bookstores and a tiny apartment in the middle of the city, close to a new favorite restaurant, the library, my school. Austin was supposed to be a fresh start and trips to the Gulf, driving backcountry roads under an enormous starlit sky. I shouldn’t miss what never was, but there you are. 

• Last night there was a Deadly Women marathon on one channel and three Jean-Claude Van Damme movies in a row on another and I hate that I made it six digits into your phone number before I even realized what I was doing. 

• I know that love is not an accountant’s ledger of favors and promises, but it’s hard to not look back and tally up our profits, sort through the files and split our history between the neatness of numbers, even columns adding up to zero. I put more in than I ever received and it’s hard not to be bitter, pushing through the paperwork to find this was just a Ponzi scheme, a two-bit scam run by an experienced crook. Like a fool I signed over my life’s savings without reading the fine print, ignored the suspicious feeling in my gut and let myself be blinded by a white-toothed smile, the promise of a solid future. It is hard, knowing the truth: that this was all a long con, that I am just another mark, crying over an emptied account.

out

• I don’t have to pretend to like modern art anymore – you might think a fifteen-minute video of a man staring at a camera, covered in bees, is “a visionary approach to the genre,” but I certainly don’t. The same for plain white canvases the size of houses, spider-prints on woodblocks, the poor man’s Andy Warhol etching dented soup cans with Orwell quotes and nautical stars. Have fun trolling through endless rooms of ridiculous industrial light installations without me – I’ll be at the bar. 

• There is a moment where my aunt asks me how you are doing and it feels nice, not having to lie and say that you are thinking of going back to school, that you are working on a novel, that you are looking to leave your dead-end job and find another with better pay, reasonable hours. It feels good not having to make excuses. 

• Our mutual friends like me better. It’s petty, but it’s true. 

• If I want to go to bars alone and kiss attractive strangers without guilt, I can. If I want to spend my evening hours writing and doing laundry instead of sleeping, I can. If I want to ugly cry while watching The Goodbye Girl after a long day at work, I can. If I want to play Jefferson Starship’s “We Built This City” on a continuous two-hour loop, you can roll your eyes and fake-strangle yourself all you want but I will never have to justify my inexplicable love of this terrible song – my love of anything – to you again. 

• My love is not afraid of fire, your sad rustic rabble gathering in the town square. My love snaps and sparks like a livewire, my love is a hissing, screaming monster rising from a laboratory slab and one day I will find someone who will appreciate the black-and-white beehive of my hair, my fragile, electrified heart. I will find someone with a square jaw, maybe, bolts screwed into his neck, a limited vocabulary, I will find someone who will love me in all my fanged glory, whose scars of creation will rightly match mine. My love will burn villages, peasant. You’d best find a priest, or a pitchfork.

1.

The first thing I ever shoplift is lipstick. I do not know how old I am, only that I am old enough to walk to the Rite Aid at the corner unattended, flanked on either side of the wide blacktop shoulder by Alicia and Jeila – fifth grade, I think. Fourth at the earliest. Alicia is tall and athletic and Jeila is red-haired and skinny; both of my hands could completely circle her waist if she let me, and I feel like a small hippopotamus walking between them, two sets of hands on my coat collar like fingers wrapped around the hook of a leash. Alicia likes to steal and Jeila likes to egg her on and I am caught in the middle, torn between wanting to be good and wanting to join in, and Jeila watches the register while Alicia nudges me closer to the rack, looming high up before me like a wall ready to be scaled.

I take the one closest to me: deep red, dark red. Revlon, I think. $9.95 in a gold and black tube.

We go home. We do not get caught, not that day. My mother drives me to my grandmother’s afterward, and I play with the lipstick in the pocket of my coat the whole drive over, sequester myself away in the downstairs bathroom once I’m left alone. I’ve never put on makeup before: it’s been warmed by my pocket and smears across my face like thick, waxy paint, sticks to my teeth like bloody meat. Women in the movies have red lips, perfect hair, they have hearts that turn either black or bleeding depending on the music swell and this is the first moment where I see myself reflected in them: there, in the tiny, wood-paneled bathroom with the oil portrait of my aunt on the wall, I can see myself years ahead in a desert, in a laboratory, in a film noir bar with my hair loose and legs for days, smoky eyes and lips like spades split in half while I tell some gun-toting scoundrel where he could find the diamonds, the kidnapped ambassador’s daughter. I am not a girl, here, but a woman: a woman with weight, a woman with power.

I stare in the mirror for what feels like hours imagining an impossible future, fraught with danger, intrigue, romance. My grandmother finds me there and sighs, her whole body sagging with the weight of unshed disappointment as she breaks the spell the mirror has set over me, sets to cleaning the whole mess off; she swipes dry tissues over my mouth and my face is pink from nose to chin, the nails of her free hand dig into my jaw as she turns my head this way and that, looking for traces she might have missed. My throat is dry. My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth.

“I wanted –” I start, unsure of how to finish, “I wanted to look like –”

My grandmother shakes her head. “Oh, honey, don’t,” she says, “Men don’t want girls who look like this.”

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