Collision

This is quickly becoming sort of a posting ground for a series of essays, the direction of which I'm not entirely sure of. I know it's helping, though, so I'll continue. Another Bukowskian foray.

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Collision

Like nothing else, it started with a car crash.

The drunkard in the white pickup had barreled into the sedan behind us, crumpling and smushing it against my month-old car, which would never see the road again. The person in the car behind us, whoever he ever was, was in critical condition when he left the site of the accident. I fished my armor out from underneath his crippled and crumpled car, along with my hammer which had been thrown in the back as refuse after a confused glance from the clean-up crewman.
All the while, I’d told her to stay in the car, to not look. There are some things you can’t forget. She didn’t listen. Even then, she didn’t listen.
Standing on the side of the freeway, labor day weekend, my car along with three others being the cause of the backup that seemed to stretch back along the road forever in a bifurcated river of red and white fire, I kept her against the embankment, between me and the divider, as if my body would have stopped another lush out of control, as if I could have protected her. She came out the worse for the wreck, the seat belt had scraped and bruised her up, but she wasn’t injured. I think I received some minor cuts from the flying glass. I remember being shocked, surprised at the moment of impact. I don’t remember pain. I don’t remember fear. I remember wanting to know, right away, if she was okay.
A tow truck came after the police said I couldn’t call my own. I gave the man my keys, and never got my keychain back, which she’d bought for me in the first week or so of our courtship (she always bought me things). I don’t think I ever got over the guilt of losing that stupid keychain. I liked it, I think that was the worst thing.
The tow truck driver offered to take us to the impound lot so we could call someone to come and get us. Five minutes away from the crash site, I heard him talking to his boss on his walkie-talkie, who said to ditch us somewhere. He left us at a gas station off the freeway. I called my parents and they came and got us both. She came home with me. We didn’t want to say goodbye just yet.
My parents went to sleep upstairs, and we laid down in my bed. We held each other for a long time, talking, still shook up and afraid to let go of each other.

“I think I love you.” She said.
“I don’t think. I know.”

She asked me what I thought about sex. I said that we’d have to be careful, take all the proper precautions, all the mechanical and sensible things that you need to say to keep from having a family before you’re thirty, and to fully remove any kind of romanticism from the act. She told me she wanted to do it with me. We’d never been with anyone else before.
I left for New York soon after that, and the night before she gave me head for the first time. She’d never done it before, and it was just fine. I was gone for a few days, for her birthday, and I brought her back some dumbshit shirt that I thought she could use to sleep in. I wore it to bed a few nights to give it my scent. She’d tell me later that she loved it. I don’t think I ever saw the fucking thing again.
We dicked around for two more months, our mouths and hands exploring each other, always planning on getting a hotel room, making it right, doing the thing up so it was a bit of an event. One night, we were making out on the couch, one more in a long line of heated sessions that seemed to be leading somewhere but never did.

“I want you.”
“I think… I should take you into my room. I should put on a condom, and make love to you.”
“Okay.”

And we did. Not understanding the mechanics as I do now, it took a while before I managed to work it in. Once I felt it slide into her, felt the warmth around me, she gasped. She breathed in little bursts. At one point, she told me, “Max, it’s starting to feel good.” Then I came.
We laid there together. I think. I don’t remember, but we must have. She glowed afterward, whatever actually ended up happening.

Two years later, she left. I’d lost my job a year before, and she’d put up with me as long as she could. The week after I’d finally gotten a new, steady job, she said she was leaving. I never got the chance to live with her. I never got the chance to propose. We fought all the time, screamed at each other. And she’d slapped me in the face. More than once.
And I loved it.

That Guy

I wrote this just now. I feel better. I think I've been reading too much Bukowski of late.

I'm applying to grad schools right now, and part of that is looking over my transcripts and seeing all the awards and recognitions and grants and such I've recieved over my academic career, and fuck if people don't have a lot of faith in my ability. It's funny how much better I feel just from looking over all my old accomplishments. Just to feel good about myself, like I used to, is a wonderful thing indeed.

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That Guy

Off the top of my head, I don’t know when it actually happened. Not the esoteric, unknown loss, but the actual event. I remember it, vividly, but I’ve never been one for dates, and no, it was a Thursday, because my new job had only allowed me two days off a week, and I wanted to spend that one with her. I’d called her in the morning, preparing for our day together, and just at the end of the conversation, she’d said goodbye and then my name. She’d said, “Goodbye, Max.” And I knew.

“Do you even want to see me?”
And strained, like an admission, like a sudden realization, “no.”

And I cried there, in my bed having just woken up. I tried to talk her out of it as best I could. I still saw her that night to pick up the camera we’d bought together, which I’d said I wanted back just for an excuse to see her. I’d packed up all of her things in a garbage bag and brought it along, expecting to take it back as I’d done before. At the end of the night the camera was with me, and the bag was with her, my little black heart inside it.
We’d talked in the car in the parking lot of a bookstore in Newport. We’d cried together, held each other, her acting like the decision was just as hard for her to make as it was for me to accept. She said she loved me, that she knew we’d be together again someday. That we’d be married and have a child and name him after a character in a movie that shared my last name. She said she felt pretty when some boy named Roland in a class she was taking had said she looked pretty. She kissed me there, in the parking lot, and later when I dropped her off she kissed me again. I stopped her just before, tried to collect myself, tried to prepare myself to remember this last kiss as best as I could. I tried to remember every moment of it. But kisses don’t work like that. They’re instants. They’re time, and when they pass they’re gone. It’s not like sex. Fucking comes back easy, and often when you’re alone. But kisses leave and never return, given so easily and taken so joyfully, they’re too much in the moment to ever be remembered.

I didn’t talk to her for a few days, she’d gone to Europe with a friend. A trip she’d been planning when we were still together. Part of me wondered if she wanted to fuck some Italian boy and didn’t want the guilt. Part of me knew she’d never do that. Neither part was really right, I guess.
When she got back, she wrote and called me on the same day, telling me she thought about me everyday she’d been gone. Telling me she was still thinking about me all the time, and that she loved me. Foolishly, I felt that it was enough. I felt fine, like it would all work out in time, and I’ve always been convinced that I have time. There are always hours in the morning, secreted away for the crunch. There were always weeks and months and years to be utilized. Nothing had a deadline. Everything would work out.
I texted her one day to find out her shirt size. I wanted to get her a shirt I’d seen, as if that would make it better. As if it would fix whatever was broken. It was late, and we went back and forth for a while, her never giving me a good answer. I’d try the next day.
I called after work, after this new job I’d gotten partly just to make her happy. She was at a theme park I’d always wanted to take her to but had never had the time. She couldn’t talk. I asked the shirt size again. She said she was with the boy from class. I tried to call a few more times, and she seemed bothered. I stopped calling.
The next day, at work, riddled with it, absolutely saturated by it, I sent her another message telling her I needed to talk to her. She couldn’t do it tonight. Well, that just wasn’t good enough for me. I called her, and she didn’t answer. Over and over again I called, needing to talk to her, needing to know what was going on. Finally she answered, said she only did so because he’d told her to, and said that I needed to stop calling. She had someone new in her life now, and they had an honest shot. This was less than a week after she’d told me she was thinking about me every day. Less than a week after she’d loved me.
It was in the small hours, and dark, and I was going nuts thinking about her with him. I started to drive, wanting to go to the beach, wanting to look over the cliffs where I’d first told her, in no uncertain terms, that I wanted to be with her forever, and had actually meant it. That I fully expected to spend my life with her, and had believed myself more than I ever had before when dealing with a woman. A girl.
Halfway there I got off the freeway and turned toward her house. I tried to remember the trip, the last time I’d be driving to her house. That part, I can remember. That part stays with me.
I parked down the block and across the street. It was around 3am, and her house was black. I waited for a while, just wanting to see her get home, just wanting to know when they’d be apart so I could talk to her. She didn’t show, and after half an hour I called again. This time, it was,

“I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”
“That’s exactly what I called to tell you.”
“Well, good. Then it’s mutual.”

But I didn’t let her go. I wanted to understand how this could happen. How something so pure became so ugly, so low. I wanted to know what had changed in the last week. I needed to understand to let her go.

“There are so many means things I can say right now. I don’t want to be mean.”
“I know, baby! I know you don’t, you’re a nice person!”

I pleaded and begged. I flattered and cried. She threatened me with him, who she was apparently with. Said that he was getting mad, and I didn’t want a mad him. That she didn’t want a mad him. Like I gave a shit. I asked if I could call her when she got home. When was she getting home?

“I’m not coming home tonight.”
“… what does that mean?”
“I’m spending the night with Roland.”

Roland. I could never compete with that name.

Finally, I’m asking her to talk to me. To explain it to me. She’s saying I’m annoying, that I should get over it. What’s my problem? That we had been in love. Even with him, even then, she couldn’t say we weren’t. Then, suddenly, a man’s voice, just for a second.

“Dude… man…”

And then silence.

I was sitting in my car outside my ex-girlfriend’s house at three in the morning, tears on my cheeks and a cannonball in my stomach. The phone was still warm in my hand, either from being pressed so hard into my face for from whatever nuclear power source sat inside. I saw what I was, then. I had become “that guy.” I didn’t know if other guys like me became like this for the same reasons, but I didn’t want to think so. I wanted to stand for something more. I wanted to have fought for something worthwhile, not just refused to let go of something out of stubbornness and denial.
I left, drove to the beach and spent a while looking out over the waves. It was cold, and I didn’t stay for too long, but I sat there with this knot in my chest that still hasn’t quite straightened out, deciding what in God’s glorious rapture I was going to do. I didn’t know, then. I still don’t, really.

I drove home and cried in my bed. I tried to find some scent of her left over in my blankets, in the pillowcase, sniffing around like a bloodhound. There was nothing.

Sing the Sorrow

Good or bad idea, this is the best I could come up with.

There is too much to say, and so much that I'll never be able to tell her, and O so much more that I simply need to get out of me. All this shit and blood that needs to be excised from me somehow. I figure if I put it somewhere, somewhere where someone could see it, it might make a difference for me. All these thoughts and recurring thoughts that I can't stop thinking thinking thinking, if I put them here maybe they'll leave me alone. Maybe I can heal up and a hard, callous scar will emerge where now there is only an opening. A laceration. An ulcer. Gaping and leaking and keeping me awake.

I'll start with this, the first little tidbit of sad bastard music that will no doubt start the deluge. With me comes the flood, and I open the gates to purge myself. Something has to be done. Life has to be lived, good idea or bad.

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I am not going to write this.

I am not going to talk about how I'm sitting, here, teetering on tears, waiting for her to call and knowing she's just as likely to call at any time saying she's sorry for what she said as she is to never call again. It's enough to make a man turn to religion.

And it would be one thing if I knew, from the start, that this is what it was going to be. That it would be a clean break, if tinted by vendetta, but I'm not going to write about how hurt it made me, and how crazy I was driven when she was with him when I called, and how pathetic and young I felt when I kept calling, knowing I couldn't stop, knowing it was the wrong thing to do.

And I'm not going to write about how I didn't know they were together together until she finally told me they had an honest shot, when it was too late anyhow thanks to me. And thank god that only means they're dating, and that any potentially exponential meaning for that "together" is conveniently unknown to me. I'm not going to write about how she's sleeping with him.

I'm not going to write about it.

I won't write about how she loved me, how she told me so. How she called me to tell me she thought about me the entire time we were apart, before the fall. Before my mistakes. I will not write about how she wanted me in her life, of how nothing was going to change. Of how the pictures wouldn't come down, and the songs would still mean the same things, and her heart wouldn't twist under his weight. I won't write about that.

Fuck, I can barely even think about it.

And I can't write about how I realize her being gone doesn't make me sad. It makes me empty. There was something there, in my gut, and now that it's gone it has left a hole in me. I can't bring myself to write about how I called her, knowing she was with him, knowing it was the end, knowing it would drive her far away enough that there would be no going back, especially not with how stubborn she always was, especially with me. I can't write about how every time I called her, everything she said, knowing she was talking to me in his bed, and that I was annoying, and wrong, and the past. And I can't write that I ate her words and I swallowed that delicious misery until it filled me to the brim, and I overflowed, just to fill me. Just to make me whole.

I can't write about how I want to know it all. I just can't write about how I want to know when they were first together, like that together. Was it before or after she told me she still loved me? I can't write about wanting to go back to just not being together, rather than this. Not about her hating me, suddenly, without motivation. I can't write that she doesn't have to hate me to be with him. I can't write that she thinks she does. But this is not about him, in any way. This is about me, and my faith.

I can't possibly write about how I wanted to win her back, but refused to play the game. I never learned that game. I don't like the rules.

I shouldn't write that I loved myself until myself wasn't enough for her. I shouldn't write that every time I check, I'm looking for her. That I saw an old picture, and my knees shook. I shouldn't write that half the day she's a slut, a bitch, a fucking whore, and the other half she's the thing I need most in the world. I shouldn't write that I don't need to be with her, that I don't need to be her friend, that I don't even need to talk to her. Just so long as I know she understands.

And I really shouldn't write about how much longer I'll be able to stand it until I call her again. About how I worry she thinks I'm not calling because of him. About how the whole conceit of calling has become such a defining portion of love that it renders the feeling so digital it gets lost during transmission. I shouldn't write that I know how she feels. I shouldn't write that I've thought the same things she though when she ended it. I shouldn't write I was thinking about it myself.

I shouldn't write that I love her.

I really shouldn't.

But I can. And I did. And I know she's reading this right now, because she can't turn away anymore than I can, even if she wants to think she can. Because as much as she wants to give this new thing of hers a shot, and as much as she thinks she can't with me still in her mind, she loves me.

Love, Jude, real love is something so important the world should fall down before it's let go, and we have it. Even with him, you can't tell me we don't. I know you think things have to be this way for you to do this, but they don't. I'm not scared anymore. We need to talk.

Call me. Stop whatever you're doing, because I swear it can't be more important than this. Nothing is in the world. Call me, quick.

I'll wait.