I’m stuck to Carl’s couch like a fly in flypaper. I don’t know if it’s the drink or the guilt
from the thought of leaving after I drink or maybe its because I just took a 9
minute long tequila shit and my legs feel like slinkies and the idea of walking
back home with knees so wobbly and ass so swampy is unfavorable. Whatever my reasoning for staying, I feel
myself sinking into Carl’s couch as if by anchor, as if by unearthly gravitational
restrictions. (We’d weigh the most on Jupiter.)
“I’m not wholly Christian or wholly Buddhist or even wholly
a Theist. I’m an individual, a collection of insular and outward perceptions. I’m
a Carl-ologist.” Carl says with a look that is surprising less glib and self-satisfied
than one would assume someone who qualifies his religious affiliations with
nomenclature derived from his own (fucking) name. Carl is thin chinned and full
faced, dark handsome eyes but the haircut of someone definitively uncreative.
Standard white guy coif.
He goes on about his ideology, moving his hands like a chef
or a politician who can’t quite read the cue cards and its interesting but
behind all of my nods and ‘Oh really’ are thoughts of you. My face is the set and this conversation in
the play and everything is going well on stage but behind the scenes, hundreds
of tiny you’s are dressed in black, manipulating switching working my eyebrows
and pursing my lips like and making me expel assuring grunts. Carl has no idea
that I’m run by you, that I’m only a shell that houses thoughts of you and your
nasally voice and your lips a baby when you sleep.
“We all try too hard to portray ourselves as greater than
perception allows.” Carl’s eyes are a razor whip and for a second I think he’s
on to me but then his glance warms and he swans his head up and strokes his
neck hair and with a puckish laugh says; ‘Myself included.’ And I’m safe, back
to feigning attention back to being drowned in thoughts of your hair and your tiny
hands and your nasally voice and I’m choked up because I like Carl, he’s a
friend from work and he told me how his best friend made advances on his
girlfriend and how his he and his Father’s relationship is strained and I want to
be his friend and listen to Carl-ology (even though the hubris it takes to name
a spiritual denomination after yourself is nauseating.) but it’s been 7 days
since I had me some of you, one week since we shared spit and sweat and secrets,
half a fortnight since I heard that shitty little nasally voice.
“This world is a place of fugazi accountability. So many of
us chalk this life up to happenstance. No regard for the meaning of existence.”
He begins to slow his speaking, as if he believe his thoughts are evading me,
as if his speed is blinding. I let him, looking at Carl you’d never think he
had this in him. This sort of heady naval gazing is usually reserved for more disheveled
looking folk.
He brings up Descartes and its deep but all I want is to be
buried deep inside of you.
Buried in you.
6 feet inside you being eaten by earthworms and having my
body become a maggot nest. I can’t shake you, not like a dog shakes off water
or the way your hips shake into the psyche of your costumers. (Can we not all
them costumers, costumers are people who shop at Walgreens for Fritos and chap stick.)
“Our existence is dependent on our perceptions alone Adam.” He takes a pull for the bottle and he’s
speaking fire and I’d moved if I wasn’t so sunk into the couch and drowning in
you.
I want to get up and leave but you can’t leave a man with
his head so far in the clouds. Maybe clouds work like Rorschach blots. Maybe
one day I’ll drive you to the dentist
and your hands will be on my knee and I’ll get sappy and cry looking at
your hand, pie crust brown.
Carl brings up his dead mother in a quote to utterly heart blisteringly
sad that I won’t paraphrase. Tears well up and I feel bad because I kill my mom
off in every story I write.
He says that for 3 months after she died he would her voice,
in those nebulous moments after waking up. When the brain is between our
conceptualized reality and the infinitude of sleep, he’d hear his mom, call
from some sprit province.
I image you doing that hand stand against your wall, I image
you holding a baby and looking at me and I’ve never felt further away from
anything and it’s gross that sometimes I’m so empty. It’s gross that I let this black soot fill my
lungs.
I watched you cry and dance blind folded one night.
Sometimes the weight of all this gets to me.
“There is nothing that can change the past. There is nothing
that can change the moment we just had.” Carl exhaled with clarity and genius and
(again) no glibness.
And I knew nothing more important would be said that night.
So I left.
(I coulda done better.)
(I coulda done better.)
