Still, some days I dream of something bigger.
When I met him I was pretty drunk. Scratch that, I was shit faced. It's the best way to put it. I couldn't keep from turning my head for more than a few seconds. To try and transcribe what I was saying isn't a possibility--I was shit-faced.
Little blonde twinky kid with glasses; twinky: gay slang for too fucking skinny. And he was, I could've used him to stir my drink. It amazes me, especially when I'm spirit-drowned, how sharp bone really is. It amazes me, when the skin and flesh underneath can't hide the angular contours of a jaw or a cheek or whatever the hell you call the bone in the forehead. Cranium? That seems too big. Then again, a bunch of stuff is amazing then...everything seems big.
But stir-stick's friend was quiet enough, and cute, and brown. I'm into ethnic--what can I say? Mexican hottie with Sonic the Hedgehog hair occasionally commenting to friends, glued to the screen of his phone. What a smile. So aloof. I was the white on his brown rice. He eyed me once, twice, I scooted down the bar top to sit next to him and that's it. History. We left, got sandwiches at Cheeba Hut, he took me home, I blew him in my driveway. Amazing. Big-in-the-moment.
It does it's job. It's not
so small. It certainly isn't too big. It's average. And that's how things have panned out. Average.
I love him. Well, he makes me feel, and that's new. That sounds so angsty, so Vampire-teen, but not really.
When I was 15 they started medicating me. I felt too much, or so the shrink, a small withered old rodent, said. I liked him, he was crotchety and reminded me of a male Miss. Havisham; completely, utterly, totally, adverbally, embittered.
I was ADD or ADHD or both and far too empathetic for my own good. I had the potential for manic behavior. Mr. Havisham established this by asking whether or not, if I felt compelled, I'd buy a plane ticket to Florida. I responded that I would, why? He told me a story about an ex-patient who would frequently spend her rent money on plane tickets to Florida. She would never actually go, he said, but she felt that she might want to, so purchased the tickets in case. I asked him if it was legal to talk about other patients and explained I didn't have rent to pay, I was only 15 and I'd never really considered Florida a priority. I'd been to Disney World as a kid. He said, still, the potential was there.
The medication focused me, I'll give it that. It hyper-focused me, on whatever I was studying or doing or thinking about. Sometimes it made me puke, I often forgot to eat, I cried, a lot. My grades went up, I stopped smoking pot, my mother frequently said "Your back!" I still don't know what that means. Where had I gone?
In a space-ship shaped minivan my friends confronted me--had an intervention thing. I had been crying again, I was always crying, I never used to cry. I used to be a little obnoxious, a little sensitive, a little neurotic and nit-picky, but I had never cried. They took the medication bottle away. They dumped it down a grate in the sidewalk, out the door of the van that had pulled over. I watched it fall through, watched a few of the white pills start to sink and dissolve. I cried. It was better after.
I worked on control. I didn't master it until I was 23. It took a while. I tortured people with my sensitivity.
Before Cheeba Hut there was another guy. Tall, artistic, dimples, green-yellow eyes. And so, so big. Sometimes just thinking about the size of it made me sneak around back and look in his bedroom window. I'd watch him undress, sit down naked at the computer, I'd watch him. I imagine the size of it. I still miss it. He knew I was watching. We acknowledged it. Sat down naked together. It was big. It was the biggest I've had so far. Then, after he went back to his wife and I moved in with his mother for six months, I got a handle on it. I left on the train. I grew up. I didn't feel things so much. I wish we had slept together.
I learned to play big games, to play with people, to manipulate; I won, a lot.
Then we went on our second date. After the sandwiches. I was 28 and I had blown him in my driveway when everything was big. He brought me a live daisy because I told him, when I was drunk, that I didn't like when cut flowers died, it made me sad, I probably said melancholy, I remember using it, I was drunk, nothing is sad when your drunk, only kind of. It was a good date. It was Valentine's day.
The next Valentine's day we had pizza and beer at Chicago bar because neither one of us wanted to get dressed up. We had reservations elsewhere. After a year, and we'd lived together since July, we didn't want to get dressed up. We had pizza and beer and did homework and went to bed. He got a "Beers of the World" card and tried a few on the list. I had two IPAs. The pizza was good, and he took two of the four leftover pieces to work for lunch, I had the other two for dinner the next night and made him BBQ pork chops and homemade garlic and onion mashed potatoes. We watched something on the DVR. We slept.
My father was an actuary. He did math. He predicted the future with numbers. I can't even remember my zip code. I know other things. Dad was an infidel, in the non-nuanced sense of the word. He was just fucking unfaithful. My parents are divorced and neither has moved on--it's been almost ten years. When my sister died and he flew down from Boston mom and dad slept in the same bed. I'm pretty sure they fucked. My bed wasn't so far away that I couldn't hear. It's alright though. My mother had cancer. They had to scoop out her womb, three months before her youngest child suffocated in her sleep. It's okay because they couldn't make anything else, because the whole thing was pretty much old-hat anyway.
We had been dating a month, after the sandwiches, and had almost agreed on exclusivity. Maybe we had by that time, but I started a fight before I left for San Francisco and undid whatever we had done. I did it on purpose. I met a couple, two guys, the night before I came home to him, in a bar in Berkley where I was staying. I don't remember their names. The sex was interrupted by a nap, and then it continued. We showered together two hours before I got on the plane. Three hours before he picked me up at the airport and I hugged and kissed him hello. Three hours before I apologized for the argument I'd started three weeks earlier.
The other guy found out a year later, his wife had been cheating on him the whole time. Even while she was pregnant with their second child. I guess it wasn't big enough, not for her.
His mom who I lived with said I needed to get over him, she had a Master's in Psych and worked in the field at a local hospital. She told me I had tics I had to get under control. Something called "forced speech." That's when I decided to get on the train.
My Father dealt in loss and recovery of numbers--of money. Then he snapped. 2 million a year, a 6500 sq. ft. house, his sons, his wife, and his baby girl, all gone. Crack habit. Prostitute habit. A wrecked Harley. His step-father's BMW obliterated. Now he cuts my Nana's lawn and takes her grocery shopping. He watches a lot of "Law and Order" in Massachusetts.
I'm moving on to the last beer in the fridge and I have to pee. He calls my name from the bedroom. I zip up and turn the corner, ask him whats wrong. He mumbles. I just stand and wait, he'll move to words in a minute. His hedgehog hair is askew. I was going to ask you if the air is on, he says. Yes, babe, yes it is, go back to sleep. I'm almost done. I'll be in in a minute. Okay, he says, I just had a dream that I killed the biggest mosquito. All this stuff came out of it. It was so big, babe. It was black and big and scary, but it had pretty wings. He keeps telling me how big it was, and I think that, even though it's kind of a boring thing, it really matters to him.
Even though it's kind of average, its big enough for me.
