7:30 p.m. - 04.20.2004
Fever/BEING
I've had a bad day. One of those melancholy, sad days that you just can't explain. In class today (Fiction Seminar) we watched The Last Picture Show, which I had never seen before. It was so sadly beautiful. I'm supposed to write a commentary on it, but it's the last thing I want to do. I just want to let it be in my head.
I'm not writing anything and my semester is over in 5 weeks. I have a terrible block, I don't even feel like working against it and I need to write at least 150 pages over the next 35 days. To quote Virginia Woolf, "I feel no great impulse, no fever; only a great pressure of difficulty. Why write it then? Why write at all?"
I desperately wish I could feel that fever again. I'm searching through old notebooks and files in an attempt to locate it. Here's something I found that I wrote a while back, when I had it.
BEING
I don't know which one of us stopped smiling first, or which one of us stopped talking to the other in public first. We may have decided this, unknowingly at the same time, keeping the things that happened between us like a secret...leaving them in his smallish, dirty white walled, nothing but a bed, bedroom. Or in my green-walled, vacuumed, dusted, fresh-sheets, purple hanging lantern, bedroom. Maybe that's the way we wanted it, no judgement from anyone else. No..."I-told-you-so's"...no... "Oh-god-but-he's-crazy"...no..."I'm-only-saying-this-for-your-own-good." Just us, quiet, seeing each other up close, but not speaking, when anyone else is around.
Me, the next day, not showering that morning because I don't want to wash him off of me yet, not ready to let him go yet, same clothes that he took off of me last night, that lay in a pile on his floor until early in the morning.
Him, still sleeping, on the black cotton sheets that are half pulled off, the bottom left corner curled up, holding his foot, stuck in the sheet, tangled. Me, sliding off the bed at the end of it, standing up backwards, still looking at him, careful not to knock over his piles of videos, piles of books, pile of piles.
I grab my clothes bending down, still naked, aware of him breathing heavily, naked, lying on his stomach, head turned towards me as I stand there, not turned towards where I had been sleeping, next to him.
I was awake for hours, hoping he would wake up, and remember me there, before I had to leave. His face then facing mine, and lying there I tried to count his eyelashes, dark black, as they were closed over his black-brown eyes.
"I want you to be happy," he always says to me. "I want you to be with other people if you want to, to feel good," he always says, searching my face for a sign. I show him no signs at all.
So sometimes I lie, I tell him about other people, men, women, it doesn't matter because they’re all lies. I tell him about things that I do with them, and he always asks for more...sweating, flashing eyes, on top of me, holding my hands to the bed, lacing his fingers with mine, the underside of his forearms holding mine down.
"You feel so good, baby," he always says, calling me "baby" over and over again, almost cooing, like he was really talking to a baby, or at least a little girl. This is new, this "baby" thing.
That was how it was the first time I saw him: walking into the record store where I worked, his head down, then lifting his head up, smiling a slow smile at me, eyes liquid, shoulders strong, his dark hair shining with some sort of something in it. Right then I knew what it was to be with him, and I knew it would be just like this. Empty, alone, like I was never there at all.
