Sunday, July 6
Summer storm of the nicest kind outside, and I think I’ll leave the lights off. I don't have so much to say about the time back in New York. I came back to the ocean because, of course, this is the sort of place where summer storms are nicer. And I have spent a while, so long really, quivering in this assurance that it would be ok; cling onto this one thing so tightly and then it will be ok, for the sake of this, to lose everything else.
Well, there was a two-year-life and now there is everything else. It is not so much that I value peace. I value many, though not all, things before peace. It is not so much that I am gracious or really even care to be. I am being opaque. I was a guest there, for a lot of it. My old life, I mean. And it is not so much that I was too gentle for things like wild dogs and self surveillance. It is just, there were things that were mine first too. Summer storms and lace curtains on the edge of the bed. I did not always view things as possessed in this way though, I realize, now - it's been a few months, at least, of starting to think in terms of what belongs to me.
"It is funny when you two talk about raising children on gray rocky shores, because you sure have no problem creating rocky shores," Rose told me in Miami. We'd been up all night,. Poured the liquor from the mini fridge down the drain and stood barefoot in the hotel hallway with a coconut juice, short quick breath. A baseball team had marched down the corridor at sunrise, and it was strange, even then, to watch myself become so shameless. My father video called me from New York, after. His hands made a downhill slope, steep then level, then steep and dropping and; “at a certain point you will not be able to stay,” he had told me. “At a certain point he will deem you problem no matter how determined you are to remain some sort of martyr.”
At the end of the world there is a warplane over the graduation and a psychic in Rhode Island and he is screaming about cocks and his mother at a wedding in Michigan and he is screaming because I am opening my own doors at the hotel in South Beach and he is screaming at me in the apartment, later, it did all blur together. He was taking the art. He was taking his ShitCoin passkeys. He was taking his copy of Generative Energy and I was taking cigarettes, a sweater. I was trying not to be so voyeuristic about it. He was trying to use fewer slurs on the phone.
I was doing front flips on the bed at the Holiday Inn and yelling: I can’t wait for our dry wedding, dry wedding, dry wedding. And he was saying that he drinks with the intention to forget and so it wouldn't come to all of that. Bad habits, strip mall parking lot and Rose was saying my denial was as deep as his was though, there had always been this thing of performance art. I want to party beautifully until we die, he used to tell me. I want to live like Match Point (2005), After Hours (1985), Eyes Wide Shut (1999).
Later, we were walking up spring green hills and he was saying it would be easier, all of it, getting better, getting kinder, getting sober, getting bored, getting pregnant, if I stayed for a while. He wore gym shorts to the airport and returned in a rage. Later, on the floor, tuck my knees close to my chest by the open window and say I love you but my life is so much better when you are not in it and then he'd said how could you. Lie on the floor and he would say I orbit you. Summer storm and I'm texting him like I'm sorry. Because there were many letters and they kept on getting worse. Summer storm in early July and I was texting him even now like, I orbited you too.
Iris came over in the afternoon in Miami. I picked her up in the lobby. I dove for his lost coral in the pool downstairs. The skin on my chest burned easily. I lay on the deck of the pool on the roof with a bloody mary that he bought me and that South Beach vibe, sunglasses, beady eyes. Ok intense girl, he said. How are you doing, Iris said. I didn't like the way he was holding you at dinner after everything he did, Iris said.
In Rhode Island, last summer, we'd still been talking about things like soulmates last summer and we'd been driving in the rain. There had been a quaker church house, red Talbot sweater, a copper pot that we'd hang in New York but not till later and a little old lady.
“You were a soldier wounded in the war in a past life,” the little old lady had told him. She had grabbed my shoulders, all shivering. “And it is a beautiful journey for you and him,” she had told me. “If you are ever pulled apart it will be a difficult and dark journey, but it is a beautiful journey for you and him.”
“And so you cannot leave him,” Iris said in Miami. We liked hotels because of anonymity and aesthetic cohesion. He liked me because of blue eyes and devotion. He liked Miami because everyone was packing heat and I liked symbolism, numerology, gnosticism. “I like when things are fun,” I wrote him. “I like when things are fun and sweet.”
And I showed up late to some basement apartment back in New York. The funny thing is, I had begged him not to go to that final party. I had begged him not to beg me to come. “My wife should think it's hot if I fight someone at a party,” he said later. “I want to get sober and treat you with the affection you deserve,” he had said, first, a few weeks before all of that.
Once, we lived in a glass apartment in the sky. Central air conditioning but the greenhouse roof still made things boil and we'd call it the Boat House like some sort of joke, because floors slanted and careened and because of course, it was the only house. But so quickly, I am taken in as if I’m some sort of orphan. So quickly there are other houses.
"He called and sounds like a horror movie, so you should get the fuck out of the apartment," Rose said in the aftermath. And it was Isabel who screamed first and so I did snap then. He is not a horror movie, just a shark or an orca whale or mostly a boy who is not here. Get out if you want to act scared. And so we did take some things and get out. And I did drive down the coastline because I still just could not stay put.
It had always been a thing of kind of here, there, everywhere with us. High spring humid heat and there'd been no crocodiles in the river, no liquor at the hacker house, just warm beer and tall trees and broken glass and, “I'm looking forward to being very sweet to each other.” he had said.
In the end, it wasn't me who lost my mind. So you were speaking as you two in one when you said you had the real sort of breakdown, the other party goers said, at that last party. I nodded. The party goers patted my shoulders. The party goers wanted no part. The texts were warm and made me ill. They took him out. They took me home.
Blue paisley sheets at the home where I grew up and I remind him, for the first time, of the parts of it that were first all mine. Pull the blinds shut tight. Thunder and acid rain. He never bought into ideas of living forever in quite the way his friends did and, “your ideas of eternity become quite juvenile,” he says. Staring at cinched shut cream white shades and, “I’m looking at the ocean right now,” I say. “Don't you want to look at that ocean again?”
The rot hits all at once. It smells like sickness and cruelty I did not know could be true. Lying on the bathroom floor - not my bathroom, I have been taken in like I am some sort of orphan, though I feel strangely less orphaned than ever before. I said I will not leave the party with him and so he said he will not ever come home again. There was discretion and bringing in reinforcement and he’d call first, before anyone else, stilted voice, some sort of laugh, he would like to be the one to break the latest news. He would like to be the one to make me guess.
“Everyone heard you say that when she was your age you were nine,” he tells me on the phone, later.
“That is because when she was my age, I was nine," I tell him on the phone, too.
I talk a lot about decadence and gluttony and our no-beliefs-but-pleasure dumb lives but; for me it has not always been rotten. For me it was the opposite or; I could always see all the rot just drifting around in piles of money and provocation and drugs and alcohol and I do think there were the years of just floating, I've been floating alongside all of this rot and shock of all shocks it got sick. For me it has not always been rotten, though. It is very important that I make that clear.
I did feel I could float around it. I have always been arrogant in a way. I did sit on the floor by an open window and I did lie in the rain in the night on the terrace. I remember laughing very quietly on the terrace. I remember trying to laugh as quietly as we could.
At the end of the world I am working on ontology. Because you always did like to ontologize things, he is laughing on the phone. Because I think six hours in the future and you think in terms of forever, he is saying on the phone.
The end of the world is something like an extinction event, abandon your whole entire life, chinook fighter plane carrier streaking over the graduation and, after the quaker church burned down I decided to get out of town. There were other things too. I threw up lobster and vodka after dinner. The dog bit the neighbor. He called because I asked him to and also to say; he missed the dog, and my family, and a little bit me.
Psychosis felt like dancing, he tells me on the phone. And you felt like tells me what to do and she feels like take it to the internet, he never had a problem, kicked out of the bar, and then it’s have another baby while there's still precious time. Once, it all felt like lie on a Japanese floor mattress, white arched doorway and we wanted to remember it here and, “I wish I could start it all over before you,” he said.
You wake up in the middle of the night in a hotel in the midwest to the sense that you are on the seven hundredth floor and there is no air left.
You wake up. But you were already awake then, weren't you? You go to the bathroom, a normal bathroom, normal for a hotel like this. Small, compact, gray, windowless. You close the door, press your back hard against its now steady frame. You imagine that if you opened it again, you would be met with another bathroom just like this. You imagine a million identical bathrooms extending beyond every wall.
In the car the next day, you tell him that it’s opposite day. On opposite day, you ask him if he loves you over and over again. You revel in hearing him say no. The charade is comforting. He’s driving recklessly. You drive for hours. The land is flat, his hand is on your thigh, he’s saying things he doesn’t mean and then he’s smirking because you're both in on the joke. He tells you to take her feet off the dash. In case there’s a wreck, he says. You tell him that opposite day is over.
“Do you love me?” you ask.
“Yes,” he says.
“Is it opposite day,” you ask?
“No,” he says. “But if it was you’d never know because no means yes and yes means no and…”
He finishes explaining the word play. He explains it well. You get it.
“Do you get it,” he asks.
“Yes,” you say.
You don't like these new rules. You are driving too fast, through a field of sunflowers. You think about how you could ask if the sky is blue and if he said yes then she could know that today was a day for telling the truth. You think about what you left behind.
“I did not mean to leave those drawings behind at the apartment,” I am saying. The cartoons that he made me and I de-magnetized the fridge on accident and could the drawings be for me, and, “that's ok,” he says.
Storm out of another party. He threw cash at me at dinner. Tip over his chair and say the issue is perhaps he never cared and so, it becomes good I was an archivist all along. It is good that nothing bad has ever really happened.
He and I walked to the park. The fountain was spraying droplets mixed with rain. The air was sheened rainbow. The bench was covered in packets of ketchup that he was pushing off and down to the ground. He cleared me a seat. We were sitting not in silence, but in conversation that I did not recall even as it happened.
“He keeps on taking really somber videos of me like he's already eulogizing me as his Dead Wife," I told Rose on the phone.
"Do you know how we could make this even worse?" I asked him.
Walk to a circle of wet chalk on the wet pavement. Bad Luck Spot, the writing on the ground says. Plant my feet firmly in the middle, and I wait for the curse to hit.
WHAT YOU SHOULD DO
Sunday, July 6
From 7pm at KGB Bar — I will be reading at Confessions along with Mara Stoner, Sarah Fradkin, John Padula, Cassidy Grady, Annabel Boardman, and more.
Weekly agenda forthcoming….