Metaphysics

            One of the things I do is think of scenarios that would make you unattractive to me. It makes this life I’m in, the one where I love you, more bearable.

            You don’t suffer in these imaginings, you merely transform in one way or another in your sleep and wake to be a different you, a you I can treat normally. I fear the descriptions of these transformations you’d find offensive and insensitive, since most often they are of an aesthetic nature, exposing my simplicity and lack of nuance. I’ve never been able to find beauty in the grotesque, for instance. 

            But your capacity to empathize with a variety of types is a quality I’ve always admired. Sometimes, in my scenarios, you wake without this quality. Your wit often withers, as well. Once every other month your sarcasm sloughs off, along with a few key gestures.

            These different yous make me feel at ease with myself. I’ll call people up and talk for minutes at a time; I’ve placed the mirror back on the closet door, for now. I even splurged on a new bed—thicker and softer, if smaller. Sleep is nearly instant, like a merciful bludgeon. I don’t recall my dreams anymore, which can be good.

            Every morning’s the same, though: I wake hoping you’ve thought me into someone different, someone you might want.

Cliche

            I call you Never. Never have you. You’ll Never love me. Never be another like you. Never take that hat off, an arc above you, a shadow to hide in; a cute secret. Also—the secrets of mine you keep, or have forgotten, tossed and toed to ash like your menthols, things that have burned quick their pleasure. Hiding, though, that’s what we’ve done, in different ways. So it’s not only your laconic confidence, the burst of laughter at a squirrel on television, the pure simplicity of you, the carving away of the unnecessary and without even trying becoming atypical. The mystery of you is right in front of me—how you’re boyish in your beauty; emotions don’t show easily. I hurt sometimes to hear you tell me you care about me in some way. How are you this calm and unperturbed, when every earth inside me splits? You’re terribly un-needing. Of me, at least. And so that day, driving silent on the highway, when you reached out and took my hand: I remember it as a child waking might recall his dream of flight, still believing it real.

Mountain Dew

            You twist your drink tab to mark it as yours. Why’d no one else think of that? It would’ve saved me a lot of trouble. I don’t mean people confusing my drink for theirs (though you know how apoplectic I get about other lips on things of mine). I mean the trouble—all the trouble it’s caused, this soda can you forgot. Green and warm, the coagulated remnants at the rim. You left it here in a rush one day, giddy to meet someone. I trace the lip where your lips once were. I make sure I don’t move too fast lest I touch the bent tab, your subtle pivot of identity. What a frightful thought, if I were to accidentally straighten it out.

Cliché (part 2)

            The sun sat with us on the bank, a dusty gold orb wrinkled and opalescent in the creek. It gave us space, not wanting to intrude, the leaves uncaring, catching pockets of breeze randomly, gleefully. Head on your lap, between sun and moon, I listened to the creek crinkle, the limbs snap, the birds bounce and bellow.

            These woods. The long-known but newly discovered.

            Your hands, languorous through my hair. In a little while, we’ll be out in the open again, walking along a gravel path that feels too walked upon by others (walking with you, perhaps?). But here, this tilt of light, a perfect trace of fingers, the underside of your chin, never seen at quite this angle. No one has ever been quite like us, at this moment. We’ve got an answer now for that Ben Affleck and Liz Tyler animal cracker scene from Pearl Harbor, back when we weren’t embarrassed to believe it profound, somehow.

            The creek moon is slipping away in the current, slipping and then rising over the bank. There’s pressure in the darkening sky. Maybe it’s your hand, urging us along, back to motion, to leaving this momentary peace. I lift my head from your lap, like the drowned jerked from a euphoric death.

It Always Starts the Same (interlude)

            I wish she would call, so I could ignore it. But then, if I ignore it, will she no longer want to call me, and go on about her business? I’m not sure. So, maybe, I will answer when she calls. But then she will not know my anxiety; will think everything is as it should be. She will not know I am angry, and I will be angry when we finish speaking, that she does not know. So, I will ignore her call. This will give me my only pleasure, a vindication. She will probably only be calling to urge an apology from me, anyway. But what if she is calling to apologize? Maybe, then, I will answer when she calls. When, though, when will she call?

Midnight (noon)

            I cannot write if I’m not anxious about you, or you are not angry with me in some way. I guess it’s not really a craft, after all; not for me, at least, regardless of the days I’ve spent pretending I’m constructing a story as one would a shed or a deck, as I’ve been told—as it’s been hammered in—it should be. As you’re well aware (and made perfectly clear), I was never good with my hands, so these analogies mean little, much as I might try.

            Nights—well, nights are easier. Anxiety comes with little trouble; it elbows through the cans and bottles that sloppily try to stop it at the door. With a flick of its wrist it can make me feel worthless—or ugly or dirty or whatever else it believes will liven the party, having quickly made besties with the cans, the bottles.

            Each night I think it could finally be the end; that my mind will dry up along with my ink. And I can’t say if I wish for this. You I wish for, undoubtedly.

            But—so I find myself writing you in your absence, and in the lonesome throb of morning, I must believe you’ll still not want me. The night’s not far away, after all, and I need, desperately, to write.

Ghosts

            Fuck it, the day just began. Any minute you won’t be here.

            I should probably rush into the kitchen to get the coffee started. It makes me feel so pleasant and literary to sip and stare at the leaves fluttering in the forest and imagine I’m waiting for you. If there were even an infinitesimal chance of your arrival, of course, it wouldn’t be imagination. Even hope needs an inkling.

            People—those few who make their way around here from time to time—tell me they see you in town quite often. They don’t even know it hurts me to hear this (silence being one of your main stipulations). Just making conversation with a terrible conversationalist. People who don’t even care, have never thought twice about you in any meaningful way, and they see you, speak with you.

            But are they seeing a ghost, or am I? I wonder how much more of you might be here than out there. Out there, perhaps, is only a fleshy vapor, while here you emanate from these thick, swirling leaves and quiver across contorted glass.

            Maybe you won’t arrive because you are already here. That’s delusional, of course. But when was the last time you expected something different?

            There’s only a shuffling of silhouettes now, an empty black dance of limbs. Even the window turns inward. By midnight you will not have arrived. I should probably get a nightcap ready.

            The morning will come quickly, and I need to be prepared if there are more people, people who might once again speak of you. And I must prepare for you, for the moments you don’t appear.

The Only Thing Infinite

           She allows you to love her, though she does not love you.

            But she allows you the things of love, its acknowledged parts.

           You have never been happier than with this person who does not love you. After each extended, daily conversation—your until now unspoken secrets a hint at the true depths in your possession—you feel bright, confident, gorgeous: these things you never feel.

            Those moments in-between months when she allows your naked touch—when she is, it seems possible, excited by it—your body transcends speech; you almost believe in the biblically sacred.

            These things, you say to her, they are enough. More than enough. Who would ever dream of more?

            When two days go by without her call, against all logic your heart rattles ceaselessly and you don’t answer other people’s calls, irritated at their need for you. You’re furious at your own need, though. But just a call, really, that’s all you really need. Reassurance. Your voice and mind—that voice in your mind—will not stop shaking on that third day. Everything’s fine, she says, why wouldn’t it be?

            And though she doesn’t ask, you reply that yes, everything is fine here too. You don’t know why it wouldn’t be.

            After two months go by and your subtle hints and hard, meaningful stares are softly diverted, so skillfully redirected, you live in intermittent streams of panic. You no longer remember your own adequacy, what you were like before. Your memory of what it was like with her, that has faded because it wasn’t the same ‘you,’ was it? If only once more, you think. That’s all I need. Something to remember.

            When she lies naked across the bed that third month, you try to engrave her in your mind, every inch of her. But her flesh fades to flatness, abstraction, with a sleeve, a sheath of denim, a passive-aggressive veiling. You tell her you know that this won’t be forever, that you know she doesn’t love you; that when she falls in love, everything will have to end. The idea that she could fall in love, when you are all she sees, this keeps you hopeful that she may never fall in love.

            You tell her you love her.

            You are the other you again. This is all you need.

            Of course, you are not the only person that she sees. Your conversations are a few a week, now, humorous and friendly. You meet often for lunch, some movies, etc. Wherever she can meet you. She will drive out of her way and never complain. A true friend.

            This is comfortable, you tell yourself. Now there are no hours and days of anxious loathing, no missteps and jumbled, impulsive thoughts. But something has begun to bubble at the back of your brain. Today, you think. Just today I will kiss her, and I will tell her something no one else knows. That’s all I need, after all. I will answer her call with a secret and a kiss.

            You think hard on this as you watch the phone, the buzz of her between your lips and ears.

(IX) Conflagration

            He realized that everything he ever wrote was about her; so he gathered flames in a field and his words in the fire, and watched her burn.

            Ash drifted through the air; seeped grayly into the night’s secret skin.

– Adam Cheshire

Author’s Note: “Note on the Impossible Persistence of Imaginary Ashley” is, for me, a raw but hopefully poetic look at the often untenable results when parts of us are hidden from the world, whether that be a secret love or secret desires. There’s incredibly painful loneliness when the only other person sharing that secret has gone away, through choice or unexpected tragedy.