The Death of a dream, and the birth of a Pulchritudinous load of horseshit

We need not to be let alone.
We need to be really bothered once in a while.
How long is it since you were really bothered?
About something important,
about something real?
- Ray Bradbury

Some truths are better left subjective. I'm just putting that out there because I don't want you to be unrealistically expectant of what this story is going to accomplish, and by that I mean, I'm not going to try to expound on universal truths. For example, I'm not unbelievably talented and she wasn't incredibly beautiful but she told me I was the former and I believed she was the latter. It wasn't true for everyone, but we believed it anyway. I would at the light box from the window behind me in her wide limpid eyes and tell her what you would probably consider a lie. “You are incredibly beautiful.” And then I got a reward, we reinforced our subjective truths with little treats to make them easier to swallow. Sometimes she would laugh her embarrassed thank you laugh, which was electric to me. Other times she would give me a little peck kiss, too fast for me to reciprocate. When it was my turn to give her treats I would write her a little story, unless we were cuddling, and then I would tell her one on the fly. She was incredibly beautiful and I was unbelievably talented. Got it? Good. Because it wasn't until later that I met the woman who was actually the most beautiful girl in the world (unbelievably self-critical, in fact, but shh! That comes later.)

Just putting that out there.

The year was 2005 and I was kinda dating this girl who loved Ben Gibbard, whom she would call with unearned and disarmingly informal familiarity Benjamin Gibbard so I kinda loved Benjamin Gibbard also because A) I liked her B) The guy was hipster cool and C) it was one of those rare occasions when I felt more masculine than my girlfriend's fantasy guy. Kinda girlfriend. Key distinction there. Anyhoo I was faithful to her and she was wonderful and she loved me, and she was legal. We spent our days blithely slipping into nights and lived for the weekends, never asking or even allowing ourselves to verbalize the question that lingered at the edge of all our clandestine thoughts and dreams: “What are we going to do with our lives?”

But the weeks had somehow stretched into several increasingly cozy months in our 2^nd story court apartment downtown with a view of the backside of Schreiner and Weeks. She worked and I took classes, I worked while she studied and nights we would return at almost the same time, eat together and I would turn on the brown peanut lamp and drink vodka+cider while we watched jeopardy. She knit baby clothes for her nieces and nephews. Our apartment smelled like Graham crackers and cardboard. Life was good.

We shared a sock drawer in our bureau. Sometimes on Sunday mornings we built forts out of pillows and watched the light filter different colors through the blankets.

It was a late afternoon in February that was so cold that I decided not to go to class. I was working on writing a story to submit to a Fiction Contest, the Honeybird I think, and so the cold was more an excuse than a reason to stay in, but I had been working on it all day when she called and said that she was staying out with some friends and wouldn't be home until later.

I didn't think anything of it. Not consciously anyway but I must have stored away some resentment. Or perhaps it triggered some secret stash of resentment I had been hoarding for just such an occasion. In any event, she arrived about an hour after Jeopardy was over and tripped just slightly as she removed her boots by the door so I knew in a moment that she was drunk and trying to hide it.
“Have a good day?”
She told me how she had been out with her best friend Kelly and how they had gone to Mickies and she had met the man who they had both later agreed would be her future husband. This irked me but I let it go and turned on my brown peanut lamp. We ate bad leftover pizza and neither of us said anything as we watched Grey's Anatomy (since this was back when every episode was amazing, even the repeats). But it ended and then a National Geographic show about African wildlife came on and when I looked over she was asleep on our futon. Oh that really pissed me off and I couldn't tell you why. So basically, I shuffled off to resume writing.

I was doing a lot of slash back then. It wasn't high art exactly, but it was elite in its literaryness, for hook-up fiction anyway. I had my own desk with a picture of Poe and a window of the world and usually words poured out because I was young and inspired, at that heavenly balance of egolessness and pride, and perfectly suited to this artform I'd “found” but that night I wrote a little before getting stuck hanging on a word and so there I was. Lights off in the building and everything's aglow by my white computer light, my foot tapping madly and the nighttime calling from its portal. I put on clean clothes, went downstairs and slipped into the night.

At Mickies I shook off my overcoat. Two guys with white jerseys were making smalltalk about the weather and sports scores. One team was in downfall, another, inexplicably on the rise-- isn't that always the way? One system blowing in out of the west, pushing away another, to the east. A girl was squawking drunkenly to her top heavy girlfriend,

“They're my favorite new band in forever!”
“Sometimes they bother me. But I love how they're just having fun, mmkay?”

I made my way onto a seat and my eyes briefly connected with those of a guy with thin slicked-back hair and a beige coat.
“Nice coat.”

There is nothing better in life than a good honest pretentious conversation. An older guy in a coat like that had promise and I knew it. But this was back before I was making all my important life decisions based on fear, and I was happy. When a few drinks down I could forget who I was. When being pretentious was a game and not merely a thoughtless affect. How naïve I was.

A few drinks in and I had forgotten who I was. A drinking style I had taken to calling sledgehammering “The Adorashun of tha Myshtick Lamp? Ish widely considered to be tha single most influential painting. Um Everr.”
“Would you care for a cigarette?”
“Shure.”

If I did have a thoughtless affect at this time it was that I loved Lucky Strikes because I intrinsically thought of them as incredible harbingers of style and I couldn't fathom why or how they had ever been denigrated to a second class cigarette in this country. We lit up and both attempted not to shake it was so cold. He asked about what brought me there. Suddenly it all poured out of me.
“I went to a fundraiser for retards for her!”
I started crying.

It even started to rain. A cold rain pouring in vengeful strokes. I felt a loneliness I hadn't known since childhood wash over me. I felt wholly alien to the world for a spineshiver second. It's the most important thing to make a connection, even if it feels like you it's the least likely thing your secret heart want to do. I know this now. I didn't know it then. Instead what I knew was that too many whiskeys and the smoke in the rain was going to make me sick.

Feet slipping in the slush and mud and icy grass and shit, I stumbled into the apartment.

Everything was over.

Sometimes I like to sit on the floor of my closet. There's a flashlight in there, in a box beside where her shoes used to be, and I'd take it out and hold it in my teeth and carve little ditties into the wood with a swiss army knife. Just, putting it out there, in there. Yesterday while I was moving things out of that closet I noticed where I had written:

I did it for love/ if I did it/ I did it for love

Everything was over.

And then I met the most beautiful girl in the world.