ham fisted theatrics

Up here, well away from that, because the ceilings were so high but the furniture was also low, you felt awkward, but in a way where you knew as soon as you got used to that feeling, it would mean you were a new, better version of yourself.




So far they’d been having sex at odd times. For instance, ten in the morning, four times right in a row, and then not at all for days and days. The way intensity and boredom refused to be rhythmic was very off-putting, and very dissatisfying, but it was a nice kind of dissatisfaction. It was the kind that made you wonder if there was something wrong with you instead of the kind that made you wonder what was wrong with the other person, and then subsequently, why you weren’t more tolerant of this thing you were sure was wrong with this other person. It was romantic, in the way she was pretty sure that word could mean “adventurous” instead of what we had come to think of as romantic, like, "love."




Where is all this money coming from, she wondered one time about everyone around her and everyone she’d met since coming up here, before scolding herself that absolutely no one around her and no one she’d met thought that, ever, and that mutual refusal to think it or speak it aloud is probably what created the effect, and the effect just managed to become reality. She hated herself for violating the code they never spoke aloud regarding the thing they never thought about, and from then on, whenever she thought something she wished she hadn’t, she would try to hear it in her head in HIS voice, the old boyfriend with the average-sized apartment, which in her memory was warm but not in a cozy way and full of flies and street noise and was basically entirely too life-y, in the sense that real life, really real life, was too imperfect, and in it, you were always tired and annoyed at everyone, and you were just too IN IT, basically. Conversations never went how you thought they would go or ended when they should. In life-life, no one seemed to know how to close a door the right way or when it was the right time to do so.

She would try to hear things the old her (the her she was before she came up here) might have thought in his voice. Then, in her head, in what she hoped was her new voice, without any Kansas in it, she would tell him to shut the fuck up.




There’d been maybe two parties at the house in the time she’d been up here and they’d been to lots more. There was one night at one party where, by the end of it, she knew she’d talked a lot, because though she was drunk, she remembered saying certain things, and her voice was raw and she hadn’t even been smoking or shouting over the music that much, but as she thought back on all the stuff she said, she was pretty sure she had gone the entire evening without making a statement or asking a question.




She thought about him, down there, thinking about how she probably never thought about him, and she thought about how, except for this thought that she was having at this moment, he was right.

She thought about how little he knew about where she was or who she was with, but she knew that he knew enough to extrapolate, and knew that if he knew how close what she imagined him extrapolating was to how it actually was and who she was actually with and what she was actually doing, he would kill himself. Or rather, he would think about killing himself, at various times, with varying degrees of intensity, in between doing normal stuff like feeding the cats or putting DVDs that had been left out, shiny side up, on the coffee table, back into their cases. He would never actually do it. If she was honest with herself, that was kind of his main problem, was that he would just keep living, no poetry to it at all. She knew she was supposed to think there was nothing really wrong with that, the default position of just being alive in the actual world, the basic nobility of just being around. She knew if you tried to articulate to most people just what it was that was so distasteful about it, about him, and her sense of relief about being away from it all, they would think you were shallow. She knew she wasn’t shallow. It really was not about purses or clothes or even about him, and here by “him” she meant the new guy with the high-ceilinged house. It was about actually living the kind of life she had always had to believe existed somewhere, for someone, or else she could not understand anyone wanting to exist at all.




There was a Monday where she fully forgot it was a Monday until she saw a school bus dropping kids off at 3:30 in the afternoon when they were parked outside of his friend’s art-space in the barrio waiting for his friend to come outside with a sack full of sunglasses.