Category: 20 Minutes

Everyday Everything

She was his everyday everything, and he realized he would never replace – or fill – the part of his heart that he had devoted to her. It’s not that it was off limits, for he had tried to reach it every day since he last called her his love. Instead, the void was simply too enormously significant to fill with any other memory.

He had loved since, but it was never the same. Everything felt like some crude high school mock-up, not a Broadway set. The pinnacle of his recent loves was, to be austere, the destruction of the set pieces and, equally, the black absence of the negative space when it was over. In that space, he could see through to what was left of his shattered and failing memories.

Loop and again, he couldn’t get her out of his mind. But the sad thing was, his memories were fading – not much faster than the basal sliding of a ten-thousand year glacier – but fading nonetheless. Stored sensations that he once carried in and around him now seemed as far away as the migrating sea gulls circling above the summer bay. He devoted hours of his days to trying to remember the details that mattered most – the ones he now missed the most. God, damn it. The beginning wasn’t right and there was no end.

It wasn’t much of a leap to presume that in spite of the bad and the worse, the fighting and the distance, the intrusions by others and the exclusions by one another he could have had her for the rest of his life. They could have persevered.

Love is perseverance he would say aloud when there was nothing else he could do to calm his hands which shook from anger. He would fold them together and say aloud that love is perseverance. That sturdy set around him both walling him in and walling him out.

Written from 11:45pm to 12:15am on Sunday, November 8 and Monday, November 9 of 2009 in my childhood bedroom in Traverse City, Michigan.

That Shower

The piercing stream of water from the corroded shower head sounded like Indian calls made by young innocently racist boys and girls of the 1940s as they played Cowboys and Indians in the streets of some supposedly Utopian town that hid all of its horrible truths from the collective conscience of anyone with the power to make a difference or the will to care. My body was chilled and pale as I stood in the center of the dimly lit bathroom. As I stepped into the upright shower, I noticed the grout, dirty brown between the small cream tiles. On the rack hanging down from the shower head was a thin bar of marbled green and white soap cracked from non-use. Beside the soap was a brandless bottle of generic watered-down shampoo so thin and mild that I could have poured it in my eyes and felt nothing but a twinge of pain before blinking it away. The water was lukewarm, even after running on hot for ten minutes.

Written from 11:15 pm to 11:35 pm on Monday, August 24, 2009 in my bedroom in Traverse City, Michigan.

CNN International

Watching the international CNN station anchored by a woman with a vague British accent at 1am when I should be sleeping, but can’t because the temperature in the room I’m subletting is swealtering and the Chicago humidity hasn’t been rained out yet by the thunderstorms rolling through daily, is comforting. Comforting like being in your bed at home. Comforting like walking into an air conditioned room on a hot day. Comforting like kissing someone you’ve kissed ten thousand times.

The woman’s accent, the cricket highlights and the semi-canned clips that remind me of a windowless hotel room in Shanghai combine to remind me that some intangible force that is exponentially larger than anything I could ever dream of comprehending comes and goes with each passing day.

Yet, here I am, sitting at my desk above the shadows of street lights lining up the minutiae of my daily life like dominoes.

Written from 6:25pm to 6:45pm on Monday, June 29th, 2009 at the new Starbucks on Halsted Street north of Greektown, Chicago, IL.

Yellow Line Two

A thin yellow light dissected the hotel room where Will and Sarah slept in a mess of cheap white sheets. The digital clock on the bedside table glowed bright green in Will’s cloudy eyes. He reached to snooze and hit volume, causing the harsh buzz to blare and startle Sarah. She jerked her head off the pillow and said, “Turn it off.”

Five minutes later it went off again, waking them from the deep after-sleep that would be the last comfort of their day. Sarah was up and out of bed in seconds, naked and cold. She glanced in the large mirror on the wall at the foot of the bed as she walked by to see that she was the same outline as the day before. Her hair fell down to the middle of her back and over her shoulders. She had vacant light blue eyes that set heavy upon their chosen subject. Her cheeks, ribs and hipbones were like jagged rocks protruding from a calm ocean, moving harshly under her taught skin.

She reached into her purse on the dresser and fished around for cigarettes. “Where are the smokes?” she asked. Will moaned. “What the f–k. Where are they?”

“Last night, I don’t know. They’re probably in the shower.”

Sarah walked to the bathroom and caught herself in the mirror. Again. The fluorescent light was harsh and unflattering. Will saw her pause.

Yellow Line One

Gone broke in my car and got nothin’ to listen to. I’m bored with two hours down and twenty to go on a plain old worn down road with a bump in the middle and no yellow line. The dust blows if I roll down the window, and my back sweats a sweaty hole in my seat if I roll it up. Doesn’t even seem like AC’s been invented yet with this old beater I’m rollin’ around in. It’s breathin’ too damn hard to worry about something so sophisticated as conditioning of the air.

I squint ahead to see what I can see, and what I see is mostly a light gray line splitting two green fields and a stray black and white dairy cow mooing on the left. No big red barn ’cause that’d be asking too much of this dust bowl landscape I, for some reason, chose to cross in the July heat. That’s a July heat with an emphasis on the Jew, like you hear people say in movies about southerners. I’ve never met a true southerner with a true accent, so I guess I’m just speculating my memory on a motion picture. But that’s the best I got, and if you were here you’d get that I gotta speculate on anything I can to keep on the pencil line-road.

In Her Eyes

He stood, half seated on the antique writing table in the hallway. His stomach lurched. She turned off the hallway light. He surrendered to the darkness and slipped further down the front of the table until he was seated on the floor with his head on his knees. The weight of his error pinned him to this moment. He looked up again in her direction like knowing prey anticipating the first strike of its attacker. But there was nothing coming. Through the darkness there was only the blackness of her eye sockets, highlighted below by her cheekbones.

He looked through his tears and said, “I know what you’re thinking.”

Anger overtook him and he thrust his elbows into the weak old wood of the table until it began to crack. The lamp that sat atop the table fell and shattered on the floor. Glass scattered around him. He pumped forward and back again with so much force that his body was kicked away. Laying in glass, elbows bleeding, he screamed and pounded his fists until the pain absolved his lack of control.

There was a sincerity to her existence in his life that he desperately wanted to understand. But could not. She loved him and did not lie when she told him so. He could not stretch far enough through the darkness to reach her. Even if he was seated beside her, their arms entangled, looking into her cold blue eyes his empathy for her love would be insufficient. The fact that he could not try hard enough to make successful something that was not meant to succeed infuriated him.

Written from 2:15 am to 2:35 am in my bedroom in Traverse City, MI.

Two Of Everything Good, Please

“I’ll take two,” I told the young waitress behind the counter wearing a pale blue dress and filthy grease-stained apron. Her blond hair was pulled back tightly into a bun that looked like a small abandoned barrel of hay. In a hurried motion she swept her untrimmed bangs behind her right ear. As her fingernails, painted black, came back to her side I noticed she wore no earrings. There were two sets of holes but no earrings to dangle from or loop through them.

“Anything else,” she asked.

I stared at her and imagined that she was wearing strands of diamonds from each of the holes in her ears — that the diamonds radiated a bright white light that washed over the painful blue fluorescence. When I looked through my imagination, though, I saw that her eyes smoldered — perhaps with impatience — in the pits of her face and her ears were still unadorned.

“No. Thank you.”

Written from 12:05 am to 12:26 am on Monday, December 15, 2008 in my apartment in Concord, NH.