i really hadn’t meant to love him. i like to think it actually crept up on me, like a menacing shadow in an already dark alley. there i was, alone in a city that i loved and that obviously loved me back, even when i littered it’s streets with cigarette butts and complained of it’s intolerable heat. i was capable for what felt like the first time in my life, although it wasn’t. I’ve been capable for a long time. the city had an astonishing ability to make everything feel like it was happening for the first time. perhaps that was it; perhaps i had felt this before and the city’s zeal had made it feel new-fangled.
nonetheless, i had fallen in love with him. i loved him for his ridiculously unkempt beard. for his strange collection of polyester pants. for the exaggerated inflection his voice took after an hour of smoking joints on his balcony. it seemed, however, that just as quickly and unexpectedly as it had started, he managed to end everything. and i felt naked. not naked in the sense that he had stripped me of anything. but more in the way one feels when one must jump from a situation of naked-ness into a place where one should be clothed. from the shower into the living room to answer a ringing telephone. from one’s bed to the window to flick a cigarette with a towering tip of ash.
and as if my sudden naked-ness was not uncomfortable enough, when he was through ending everything, i began to feel my naked body take on a deep pink. i was now naked and sunburned: in our favorite bar, seeing him dance with anyone within eyeshot (a steaming blister would rise on my subtle shoulder). in my room, listening to a song he had stupidly commented on after sex (my neck would burn, collecting tiny beads of sweat). now he hadn’t crept into my life like a shadow, he had invaded my mind with a fucking tank and built himself a desert fort of sandbags. i hated him and loved him at the same time and what is one to do in that situation but drink the entire contents of every bottle in one’s fridge and make the inevitable phone call - followed by an awkward invitation to meet up, maybe smoke a joint? it sounded like a friendly offering on my behalf, but free drugs were the only way i knew he’d come.
“we haven’t really talked that much,” i said, half accepting such as the truth and half hoping he’d disagree. but there isn’t much to disagree with when the obvious is stated, no matter how slanted i leaned inward. but we had talked much. i had talked to him in every word i spoke since i met him. when states, even oceans, were between us, my tongue spelled his name to a clerk at a train station, to louise, sitting across from me at a cafe table. i had said things. i had engaged in discourse. but he would not know of that. he would not know what i had built for us and only because it was not real. not real, in that it never actually occurred, but real to me because i devised it capable. his ignorance was entirely expected, but flickered like a knife turning.
however, to recognize guilt one must, at least at some point, have been guilty just the same. and i was guilty, maybe even more so than he; he who spoke so easily and taught me to do the same. his guilt laid in his convincing me with words enormously easy - i was guilty for being persuaded by them. and that was just the silky surface. i had committed worse. my expectations had always been conceited. i, who looks to my reflection from the corner of my eye and expects to see something more than what i know is there. i, who sways my belief, entertaining the idea that a person who is notoriously late might arrive early. i am as guilty as he; this i know.
“we haven’t really talked that much,” i said. and “i know,” his response. and i am unaware how situations provided for his speech, but nonetheless, a speech he delivered. he said he had been done with me for some time, that we had had our fun, that he expected more of me in vein of our ending, which i wanted to remind him in all respects was painfully easy. he said he had always considered my long-thought words to be sensationally cliché. “i am a cliché,” i thought. and for more than a fleeting moment, far after i walked down the street alone, even after i exhaled into my pillows — i agreed. but: i soon (soon being nearly a year later) came to understand that my mistake was not loving him, or believing his empty words. my mistake was my too long agreement that my love, my thoughts, my words, my nakedness, my sunburn- were cliché.
