There was a night that I got stuck in an elevator with the gymnast. We had gone to a concert in downtown Indianapolis and parked in a big garage there that had lots of signs posted listing lots of rules. After the concert we got in an elevator along with about four other guys. I kind of felt like it was a bad idea at the time. When the elevator doors wouldn’t let us out onto the fourth floor I felt the nearness of each of the elevator’s chrome walls. It was a precarious moment. I sort of looked at the four guys I didn’t know and there was a weird charge of static pulsing from the desires of their collected consciousness. I wondered how long social laws would hold. I drew mental pictures of myself punching the throats of the other men in the elevator to keep them off the gymnast. We tried pushing different buttons for a while and holding down the the door open button and all sorts of things. There were some long minutes there. I can’t remember what I did, but I figured out how to get the elevator to go back down to the first floor and open up. Ten minutes of recycled elevator air and six bewildered bodies spilled out. I laughed along with the gymnast. “I really thought we were going to be jammed in an elevator for the rest of the night,” she said. “Holy crap yeah. I was sort of fighting off a mounting sensation of panic,” I said. She fell asleep during the hour drive back. I felt good because of the trust she placed in me. I wanted to drive and drive.
I’m not sure what’s easier, to lose track of who you are or never know to begin with. I’m pretty sure that I’ve lost track of the lost track. For years I invested more into a video game than real life. Whenever I finally stopped I had dreams about the game. I still dream about it. You can’t do something for years and merely forget about it. It sticks with you. I started believing that I was not a social person in order to stay on the computer deep into the nights I should have been meeting people or reckoning the earth like Walt Whitman advised. Once, during my senior year of high school my best friend and I took a bike ride and plunged down a long, steep hill. I could hear him yelling behind me, “This makes you know you’re alive!” I had a weird sort of ache. I had been standing on the outside of it for a long time.
I think some people are probably born with a poorly calibrated fate. Like maybe some people were fated to meet one day at a park but the mechanisms were off by just enough to ruin what was supposed to get the ball rolling on an impossibly happy lifetime. Jack trips, falls down the hill and Jill is facing the opposite direction in a yoga pose. They don’t get married to the cheers and happy laughter of their best friends three months later like fate had written down in its books and in another five years, when Jack is supposed to grab Jill and keep her from mindlessly walking into traffic on a Saturday morning, she is killed by a businessman speeding to the airport in his jaguar.
One night the gymnast got her car stuck in an ice-covered parking lot. One of the cooks at Ruby Tuesday’s tried to push it out for about two minutes and then shrugged his shoulders and drove off in his truck. It was the beginning of a storm that would leave me barricaded indoors for a week. She text messaged me for help so I started up the Volvo and inched my way down McGalliard to the mall. Twelve minutes it took to drive two miles. There was the fight to see through the snow dropping onto the windshield and wheels never finding traction. At Ruby Tuesday’s she still believed we could get her car to move. I put her backpack in my car and took her hand. I fishtailed my way to her apartment and told her I loved her. I guess if I hadn’t been able to pick her up an emergency team would have done the job. They wouldn’t have done it because they loved her though. But then again, on their way home they might not have felt so unappreciated.
There was a girl I was talking to there for a while that had a really messed up phone. She could answer calls and hear the other person talking but she couldn’t reply. The thing is about her, she was sort of not a big talker anyway. A normal conversation with her usually amounted to her never making a reply. She even told me she just wanted to hear me, so that I should just call and talk. This kind of sounds great at first, free license to jabber on and on. Honestly though, it wasn’t so great. The normal signs that someone is listening weren’t there—the faint sound of someone taking a breath or the mmm of understanding. Without those things I felt slightly like a crazy person. Mumbling incoherently to no one. But the timer kept on going, assuring me that she hadn’t hung up. I talked to her like that for an hour one night. And afterward I felt sort of off kilter. I went deep into the recesses of myself and said unguarded things. I started wondering if she thought I really was crazy. I told her I was done talking and wished I could hear her voice just once. I told her I loved her and I hung up the phone and felt the same as when the call was still going on. There was still the vacant feeling of being alone.
I had a friend for a while that was never confident that I really liked him. I tried to tell him that I never even thought about it—but after he kept on bringing it up it wasn’t true anymore. I started thinking about it and realized he made me feel uncomfortable. He told me once that he made a list of all his best friends and that I was on that list, but that he thought about what my list must look like and didn’t think that his name was on it. He waited to say this until I was in his truck an hour from home. After that I kind of kept my distance. I hadn’t talked to him for about three months and then all of the sudden he’s on the phone with me asking how things have been. I was in the middle of being at a loss for words when he told me that he’d been earning some extra money recently and that he thought I’d be interested in hearing about a great money making opportunity. I groaned. I had a girlfriend about eight years ago that went in for something similar. I can’t really remember what either of them told me we’d be selling together, but my ex girlfriend started never being able to spend time with me because she was always at some rich guy’s house to learn how to run her own business. The rich guy had an outdoor pool and basketball court. He had a grill and a big patio for everyone to sit and eat his hamburgers while he told them how he used to salt the fries at BurgerTown until one day he started his own business and now look, he’s got on a fancy apron and he’s flipping burgers on his own time. Well, I was never really too excited about the program. People that join pyramid schemes never recognize the distance that is or isn’t between people. They don’t realize that having someone to talk to or eat a hamburger with is something that you can’t quite put a dollar sign on. People like that can’t eat a hamburger with their own brother without worrying about how much it’s costing them. So, when the guy was telling me about how having this business was sort of like having someone from the treasury department show up at the front door with briefcases full of money all the time, I hung up the phone.
“What’s your favorite cereal?” the trim blonde haired lawyer asked. “Honey, uh, something of oats” I replied, “the one with the honey dripping onto the flakes on the box.” “I know the one,” she said. Three days later a cereal box was delivered by mail, covered in a graffiti of hearts and “i love u’s”. Every second day she sent me a declaration of wind tossed love. There were watercolor pictures, photographs, button up shirts and long letters about how she felt. She felt great apparently—blown away by love. It didn’t last very long. Six weeks if you want to know. Being loved like that is actually kind of dangerous. If someone ever tries to tell you that it is better to have loved and lost, watch out. They probably just want to have some sort of quick fling and then return to their ordinary life. The problem is that it takes a real long time for life to feel ordinary again after having one of those Nicholas Sparks experiences. Four years later and I sometimes feel a muted sliver of hope when I go for the mail.
Once there was a cat that thought he had met the last cat he’d ever need to meet. She had nice legs and laughed at the cat’s jokes. Her smile was really nice and betrayed an ironic sense of humor and a really clever wit. Whenever the cat made funny jokes, she’d come up with a joke that was better, and in this way they’d spend their evenings together. Now the strange thing was that it was terrifically easy for the cats to notice each other. They noticed each other right away, but then all the noticing kind of dried up. The two cats kind of came close to it but they never fell in love.
The cat realized the whole noticing thing was something like a pitfall. He couldn’t ever really love the girls he noticed the most. It seemed like love could have blossomed out of all the noticing, but the noticing never seemed to leave enough room for love.
Something that is crazy about people is that sometimes they do more than hide who they are from you. If someone’s hides who they are, they just don’t say anything. They just raise their eyebrows and look away. I do this sometimes with controversial people. I know about the arguments they want to have. When people do more than hide its because they are playing a game against you. I had a girlfriend that was playing a game with me for as long as we were together. She got really good at pretending to be me. I’d start in on a conversation with her and within a minute and a half she’d have my tone mirrored as well as intonation and facial expression. When you have a loyal pet, like a collie, the collie will do this. The collie will sense its owner’s mood and respond. When people do this it feels odd. Its like playing a bad game of checkers with someone. If you mirror the other person’s moves, move for move, it things usually end in stalemate. All the checkers get pushed to the middle and the game withers. This same thing happens when someone mirrors your personality. They start responding the same way to things as you would and all the sudden it feels odd to respond at all. Like trying to talk on a phone that has an echo effect or walking down a hall of mirrors, these things are engineered to give people an uneasy feeling. I don’t entirely know why it is that people decide to play games against other people. But people generally like to play games to win. My old girlfriend won I think. She copied me until neither of us could move anymore, but neither of us decided to play again. Now when she sees me she just raises her eyebrow and looks off to the middle distance.
Losing all your teeth is a lot like going through a lifetime of failed relationships. The first loss is always kind of the most traumatic. Even if people tell you about how it will hurt, there’s really nothing there to help you understand what kind of pain you’re going to have to deal with. But suddenly it appears. This awful thing that wrenches your guts. And blood. And after its over there’s a hole that you can fit your tongue inside. The hole goes away I guess but not fast enough that you don’t discover how tender the thing really is. You can’t let anything get near the tender part for a long time, and then even once it’s all sort of healed, you still feel weary, because who wants to test it out to see if it will still hurt or not?
Then the teeth start dropping like flies. Two gone almost at once sometimes. It doesn’t make any sense in the moment really. How on earth could there be two different holes to deal with. There’s no direction you can turn without running into the problem, so you just don’t eat for a while because it’s too hard to deal with. I will say that sometimes it feels good to just yank that thing out. To taste the blood in your mouth and know that it’s over. I guess something I still havn’t figured out how it is that the last few left don’t really seem to hurt quite as much. By then there are methods for making it a painless process. You push gently over a period of days and then it slides out almost by itself. But then the last one goes and there’s nothing left. Just these crazy things to remember.
