Langosta
After so long with one person, you accumulate a lot of shit. I mean stuff, just things, that are all around you, all the time. Things that have grown beyond just something that reminds you of them, things that you need or are part of you now more than they were before. Things you can’t get rid of. Things you won’t.
Walking around my home, now, there are things all over the place that keep sparking off little memories, little narratives that run through my head too quick to really register in any respect apart from the quick twinge of pain. Especially with her, who defined her feelings through possessions, who defined love through what she could give and what she could get, there are too many things here to get away from. Were I to divest myself of all these many, many things, it would be bare in here. Stark and empty. I’m not sure that would be such a bad thing anymore.
There’s a little plush lobster on a table near my bed. His name is Pinche. I won him out of one of those arcade claw-grabby machines, which is already something amazing as the grip on those mechanical appendages can be likened to that of a seventy-year-old arthritic woman. Even then, I doubt Maude would have much difficulty picking up a stuffed teddy bear. I won it, retrieved it, one summer when we were spending time at the beach house my family rents out for a few weeks in August every year. There was a pavilion-type area nearby, and we’d gone there to spend time together, playing games and riding ferris wheels and all the things you do with someone you’re excited to be with but would really never bother doing by yourself. These are things to do and places to be when you’re with someone else, just to have something to do and somewhere to be together.
We played a rolling-ball-poker game, where you rolled handballs down a ramp to a grid of holes designated as playing cards, and tried to get the best poker hand you could. You won tickets the better the hand was. We played skiball, which I think exists only so that the five percent of the population who excels at skiball can impress people around them at least once in their lives. The game exists, for the rest of us, to humiliate while in front of a ramp and a series of hoops, a circumstance one is rarely afforded in this life.
And we took pictures in one of those photo booths. Like you do. We sat in the booth, took two pictures smiling, two pictures kissing. Like you do. We waited for ten minutes while they developed, and were rewarded with four grainy, black-and-white reproductions of our spontaneous affection. We divided the pictures between us, later, cutting them apart and each getting one regular, one amorous. We would show them to people. See how wild and in love we are? See how we couldn’t keep apart even long enough to take a picture? O, we tried, but eventually our love overcame us. See how we couldn’t keep from kissing each other there, in the sight of the camera and all of God’s arcade-going creations.
Like you do.
Glowing, we walked back to the house. We were about halfway there when I realized I didn’t have the little lobster with me anymore. We retraced our steps and found him, alone and cold, on the street near the rear entrance to the arcade. I felt terrible. Not just because I’d left behind such a helpless little thing, but because I’d left behind something that was of us. Something that had been born from our union. I know that seems overdramatic, that some stupid little plush animal shouldn’t have held such heavy and immediate significance to me, but it did. Once, when I got extremely sunburned, she called me her langosta, and when it faded to pink I became her camerone. I was always some kind of sea life or another, unless I was a bear from a popular bread line. Those little epitaphs stuck with me. What else can I say?
We picked him up and I tucked him securely into my pocket, making sure I wouldn’t lose him again. She fawned over the little crustacean, and I thought it was adorable. I still love the things that she loved, how they made her act. How they made her what I liked the most about her. To this day, when something happens to me that I know, were I to tell her about it, would make her coo and sigh and speak in that wasteful baby-language I resent the fact that I can’t tell her about it. I hate the fact that I won’t get to bask in her reaction, that I won’t get to experience that foolishness. There were plenty of things that started to annoy me about her as we neared the end, plenty of things that I just couldn’t stand anymore. I don’t think that was ever one of them.
The lobster came back with us, and survived the trip inland and into my home.
Next year, at the same arcade, she wanted to take pictures in the fucking photo booth, and I didn’t. She got mad, and stormed away. I didn’t see the point. We’d already done it, and I knew if we did it again we’d take two pictures smiling, two pictures kissing. And we would let ourselves think it was spontaneous, and flirty, and just how we were in our O-So-Loving lives. It would be false. It would be stupid. You shouldn’t do things just because they are the things you are supposed to do.
And now that lobster sits over there, its acrylic eyes staring at nothing at all, and it’s red, red plush carapace stands out amongst all the sundry curios I have accumulated over a lifetime of attributing too much meaning to too, too many things.
Walking around my home, now, there are things all over the place that keep sparking off little memories, little narratives that run through my head too quick to really register in any respect apart from the quick twinge of pain. Especially with her, who defined her feelings through possessions, who defined love through what she could give and what she could get, there are too many things here to get away from. Were I to divest myself of all these many, many things, it would be bare in here. Stark and empty. I’m not sure that would be such a bad thing anymore.
There’s a little plush lobster on a table near my bed. His name is Pinche. I won him out of one of those arcade claw-grabby machines, which is already something amazing as the grip on those mechanical appendages can be likened to that of a seventy-year-old arthritic woman. Even then, I doubt Maude would have much difficulty picking up a stuffed teddy bear. I won it, retrieved it, one summer when we were spending time at the beach house my family rents out for a few weeks in August every year. There was a pavilion-type area nearby, and we’d gone there to spend time together, playing games and riding ferris wheels and all the things you do with someone you’re excited to be with but would really never bother doing by yourself. These are things to do and places to be when you’re with someone else, just to have something to do and somewhere to be together.
We played a rolling-ball-poker game, where you rolled handballs down a ramp to a grid of holes designated as playing cards, and tried to get the best poker hand you could. You won tickets the better the hand was. We played skiball, which I think exists only so that the five percent of the population who excels at skiball can impress people around them at least once in their lives. The game exists, for the rest of us, to humiliate while in front of a ramp and a series of hoops, a circumstance one is rarely afforded in this life.
And we took pictures in one of those photo booths. Like you do. We sat in the booth, took two pictures smiling, two pictures kissing. Like you do. We waited for ten minutes while they developed, and were rewarded with four grainy, black-and-white reproductions of our spontaneous affection. We divided the pictures between us, later, cutting them apart and each getting one regular, one amorous. We would show them to people. See how wild and in love we are? See how we couldn’t keep apart even long enough to take a picture? O, we tried, but eventually our love overcame us. See how we couldn’t keep from kissing each other there, in the sight of the camera and all of God’s arcade-going creations.
Like you do.
Glowing, we walked back to the house. We were about halfway there when I realized I didn’t have the little lobster with me anymore. We retraced our steps and found him, alone and cold, on the street near the rear entrance to the arcade. I felt terrible. Not just because I’d left behind such a helpless little thing, but because I’d left behind something that was of us. Something that had been born from our union. I know that seems overdramatic, that some stupid little plush animal shouldn’t have held such heavy and immediate significance to me, but it did. Once, when I got extremely sunburned, she called me her langosta, and when it faded to pink I became her camerone. I was always some kind of sea life or another, unless I was a bear from a popular bread line. Those little epitaphs stuck with me. What else can I say?
We picked him up and I tucked him securely into my pocket, making sure I wouldn’t lose him again. She fawned over the little crustacean, and I thought it was adorable. I still love the things that she loved, how they made her act. How they made her what I liked the most about her. To this day, when something happens to me that I know, were I to tell her about it, would make her coo and sigh and speak in that wasteful baby-language I resent the fact that I can’t tell her about it. I hate the fact that I won’t get to bask in her reaction, that I won’t get to experience that foolishness. There were plenty of things that started to annoy me about her as we neared the end, plenty of things that I just couldn’t stand anymore. I don’t think that was ever one of them.
The lobster came back with us, and survived the trip inland and into my home.
Next year, at the same arcade, she wanted to take pictures in the fucking photo booth, and I didn’t. She got mad, and stormed away. I didn’t see the point. We’d already done it, and I knew if we did it again we’d take two pictures smiling, two pictures kissing. And we would let ourselves think it was spontaneous, and flirty, and just how we were in our O-So-Loving lives. It would be false. It would be stupid. You shouldn’t do things just because they are the things you are supposed to do.
And now that lobster sits over there, its acrylic eyes staring at nothing at all, and it’s red, red plush carapace stands out amongst all the sundry curios I have accumulated over a lifetime of attributing too much meaning to too, too many things.
posted by DeadLanguage at 6:26 PM
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