Goodbye January, you jerky drunk!

FEBRUARY 5, 2013

First: Happy Birthday to my buddy William Burroughs, you brilliant, gorgeous junky.  100 years ago you showed up and made things way more awesome. Thank you for helping “get” that wildly sad, scared, vulnerable mark inside.

This is how today feels:

Goodbye January, you jerky drunk.

The end of January, when you realize it is now February, it's like... It's like amazing.  It is like having a mean drunk living in your basement for so long and then having him leave.   Even though he is down there like everyday, you hardly see him, but you can hear his shitty classic rock music.  It makes  every last breath you breathe overly enormous.  You know it smells like piss and a cheap ciggies down there.  It smells the way everyyone understand that  everything old shag carpet that smell. When he leaves you it is like this:  you wake up morning earlier than normal -- because you feel weirdly happy that there were moments of your childhood that were golden, especially conflated with all the dark.  And then you strain to hear the his terrible music, to smell the loser type smells.  And then you get it right way: he is gone.  You worry for a minute:  How will he make it out there if he no longer lives in my shitfuck basement?  And then you realize, very much like snowshoeing under night lamps in the woods of your small town makes you recognize, you knew he was never there forever.  He rambled on and then you breathe.

Confession: When January is over, I am relieved. We are all relieved.  But every broken girl misses their broken down, drunk boyfriend if they knew how to fuck. 

I wrote the following on an index card.  It is bad writing becasue it is not me: I am straining to sound confident.  And this is not me.

Have you ever gone on a date with someone who was not downright ugly, but who was maybe too skinny, had a boyish face when you were looking for something more manly, and maybe the dudes jeans looking like they’d fit your 13 year old son?  I have.  Have you ever sat, just a little bit embarrassed in a small town coffee shop with this guy, like you were being nice by hanging out with the guy?  Did you find that though he was pleasant; he spoke in very general terms and you mistook this for a sort of dull personality?  Please let me have done that for you.

About two years ago I was on a break.  The love of my life had “done me wrong” and I was looking for one of those basic, nice guys; maybe you read about one or you saw on an afterschool special when you were latch key kid in New England when you were in middle school.  As I was dreaming about a nice guy (I was willing to give up not having to work, fun sex, good conversation, everything; I just wanted someone to really, really like me!) my nebbish little neighbor headed down the hill and knocked on my door. 

^^^ Dumb. Dumb realtionship, and ever dumber writing about said relationship,.  I am writing this sentence now in 2000 fucking 16.  I remember very little of what this moron even said to me, but I remember fucking him like it was last Tuesday.  And like every guy who ties sex and his ego together, he would grin in a mean creepy way if he read this.  But the dood does not even read, so whatever. 

Here is something that I wrote a few weeks ago:

2016--Hardly readable.  Whenever I try to make my life with M. sound magially real, it comes out forced and boring.  B/c it is forced and boring.  A sexless, loveless marriage is depressing to experience and snoringly boring to read about. 

We went to look at houses once.  Angry little cottages with sad, brown stained planks and tiny, mean-eyed windows.  Each and every yard looked torched as though love had never been idea, not even in the beginning.  What happened, I wondered.  You asked, Why?  The realtor told us, “These poor people; they lost their lake.”  We went through some houses with our eyes forward as if not wanting to rubber neck at an awesome, fiery wreck. If we shuddered to think this about this town, these people, their houses, then why is it that there was one slanted ceiling in one little room that made me think, “Now, how darling?” It was in this room, at the top of the stairs, a dandelion on a migraine-laden day. I touched the sandy wallpaper and why is it that I felt was ours? I saw that paper, its light green vines and I see it still, like decisive cursive depicting a warm day: sailboats swishing beyond where you can no longer see and Nabokov spotting a new butterfly while he loafed under a tree. We had always known this room, even before we met each other, before this town lost their lake.

I imagined our lives in that house, our son building block condos and stretching out wooden train track on the wide pined floor boards.  I imagined it with such intensity it echoes in my mind years later louder than a memory.  As if we were among those people of this lost lake.  We could hear the deafening silence of no longer cicadas and a burnt landscape.  It is so much better to see this, to feel the scratch of this wall, cold but familiar under my hand than to think of where we were, that house where we left each other.  In that little room, we would have “alwawpeoirg erpigjerg.”

Is it easier to remember this room than it is to remember the dirt bag apartment we kept running from, the old house we could never fix, your tiny water view apartment I learned to love you again in? If we had landed in the town with the scorched lake, would I have been better able to save us.  Could I have stayed with you even longer?   In that room I knew I loved you.  

 (After these paragraphs I wrote a singular sentence underneath that reads, “Don’t let me be lonely.”)

Here is something else, too.  Sometimes, I still remember the rage I felt trapped with the ugly, unhappy alkie and weird stuff comes out.  Weird stuff that if refined and mybe embroidered over would look a bit like poetry -- not M. now, I am referring to boring guy who was a good lay. 

Your dead brother’s fucking guitar: you sold at your lame assed yard sale for like twenty bucks b/c you are a sad sack.  And then, your other dead brother’s china cabinet:  you kept taking my shit out of when you were mad at me and drunk.   I try to construct these little poems about you and me and our stupid five months together, three of which took place in the ratty, rented New Englander on L. Street. Nothing happened that could really be knotted into poetry, ostensibly. I watched my son withdraw and your son, so loud!  So much noise! So much, holy, holy fuck: take over everyone’s last iota of energy. (But yes, I still care about him; I will foever, probably). We had a lot of sex and it seemed like you learned all your night moves from an eighties porno when and maybe just a little bit from when you were fucking some chick in a seedy, North Fuckin’  Shore apartment.  She prolly had shitty teeth and a big ass.  It was prolly yer sister’s friend.  The one who was ten years older than you, which would have made her like 34 at the time while you were like 24 and slightly coked out or so you say.  I make up so much shit about you b/c you never told me anything. 

But…whatever. Sounds so very much like: “I’ll forgetter.”

Catching so many fish like shooting stars in the night that only you and I could see.  Like fire works on a driveway.

Or—

Catching so many fish like shooting stars. Fireworks crackling on the driveway.