1.
The window is open to let October into the Sahara. Record one more invasion. For the last time, though neither of us know it then, she’s breathing slowly on top of me and I am staring at the ceiling. The room is too hot and our bodies are too hot, and then the room is cool so we toss most of the blankets on the floor and sleep as conjoined twins might be accustomed under a single sheet. For two weeks after that night I don’t wash my bedding; I have convinced myself it still smells like her.
2.
Directions are fed into my ear as the sky turns dark. The four of us are a unit. Devotees. Mission complete and arrive with the music in the house too loud and the lights too dim. The wine is out of the car into the kitchen and I get my first bottle in me. Everything feels perfect by bottle two. There is a girl there whose name I don’t remember. I spend the night talking and eventually drinking with her. Upstairs and closed curtains, she tells me I’m the first boy who’s ever kissed her. I tell her she’s the first girl I’ve ever kissed properly and she giggles and teases me, asking who uses words like properly? I take another drink and proceed to get sick. She steps back and my head cracks on the floor. I feel someone take the last of two full bottles from next to me while I’m doubled over. Footsteps rattle the floorboards under my head as they lead out of the room. The door closes.
3.
Across the country the sun is setting. The bars are filling, highways are clogged arteries and closed tracheii. It’s ritual asphyxiation, and it’s how she wants to stay young. Living that past. Moonlight mingles with her cigarette smoke while she explains. Job opportunities. New cities. The expectations of displaced rural youth. You can hear her permanence when she says I’m not coming back.
4.
The end of that night yields a brilliantly sunny morning. Softly falling, the snow refuses to stick. I watch the scene through the window while another body sleeps next to me. At 10 AM I get a call telling me that my sister is in the hospital. My father’s voice is hoarse on the other end of the phone while he tells me the doctor has given her something called Naltrexone. I tell him I don’t know what that is, and he starts crying. I let him know I’ll be at the hospital as soon as I can. Over the course of the next fifteen minutes clothes that are not mine are tossed wildly from the floor into the air - where they dive, parabolic, back onto the floor - as part of a somewhat frantic effort to find my pants. Before he hangs up my father says something about prison. The phone beeps in my ear and while I reach to put it on the nightstand it goes off again. The display is beaming at me, the cheap plastic is rattling and vibrating against itself in my hand. It’s screen and speakers trumpet an alarm: It’s her birthday. She is eighteen. Happy birthday.
5.
There’s no maximum occupancy, no decibel limits, no age restrictions. All the rules are unwritten. You want to scream, bleed. A room full of people wishing the same selfish thought and no one’s going to tell them they’re in the wrong. No one’s going to say Stop being that way, or When did you say word one to them last? A room full of hate gets dulled by proximity, because no matter how rational you are there will still be a person laying in a pine box at the end of the hall after you’ve spoken your mind.
6.
The truth is something you build up a tolerance for. It’s the bitter grounds. It’s the nights spent on bathroom floors begging the door stay shut. It’s the crawl to the couch before letting yourself pass out. I’m never going to tell you no. Every single time you give yourself this, every single time you want to sneak a peek, go ahead. But don’t play detective, don’t try to piece together cut up batches of parts; different ages; beginnings, endings; yours and not yours, mine and not mine. If they don’t fit you can’t plug the gaps any way you want. If you do, it’ll leave you laying face up staring at the ceiling when all you want to do is sleep.
7.
My family is heading to my Uncle Charlie’s to visit and to celebrate Independence Day. When we get there I am the first through the door and my victory over my siblings in a race up the stairs is cut short by the sight of his shoes twisting slowly clockwise, pausing, and retracing their own movements in the air. A stampede halts. My mother screams and reaches for my father. My sister is crying on the floor. My nine year old brother is held outside while I am told to take my sister into the hall with him. Someone calls the police. The metal chair I am seated in sits unevenly and clicks against the floor when I shift my weight. The noise cuts through the booms and pops of fireworks sounding outside the station. When I am asked to recount the events I start by telling the police that I thought his room smelled like bad onions. The cop has a pudgy face and a mustache. I start to tell him more, but he cuts me off by asking me to keep the details relevant. Then he says to start at the beginning.
February 01, 2010, 9:39pm
