Apartment A2

My first apartment had bumpy, uneven floors and a tick in the walls. I was living in the old apartment when she broke up with me. The second night I spent there she and I went around the apartment and had sex in every one of its rooms. This was before I’d even gotten any furniture moved in. My bed would remain on the floor where I first dropped it for the entirety of my time living there.

We had sex in every room that night: mine, the closet, the living room, even my roommates room, right next to the frame of his bed, a cold painted steel frame leaning against the wall. She was on all fours and I was on my knees too, right where he’d eventually put his bed, right next to his picture of Jesus.

She sat on the ledge in front of the sink in the kitchen and I fucked here there too. I was bumpy and uneven and paunchy and she was perfect, fit and slim; dark, olive skin; callous and still fragile.

After she’d broken up with me it was never very easy to do dishes again, to stand in front of the sink, facing in, my hands down in the water, my finger tips wet and pruning, hesitating and burning down there. If I left the window open the steam would rush up in my face and sometimes the pilot light in the stove would blow out too and the room would smell like gas. It got a lot easier eventually, and even now I just hate doing dishes for all the normal reasons, for all the reasons I had for hating to do the dishes when I was young, before things got complicated. Before sex and kitchen sinks had anything to do with one another the way they sometimes do now.



Caleb, the no fun apt. room A2

To My Friends...

All things have to end…

All things must end, no matter how much we all would wish it otherwise, no matter how much we tear, beg and fight. The gods don’t care how much we pray or yell, we just get dragged away kicking and screaming in the end.

I think that perhaps it’s that helplessness that makes it so difficult. That intense desire to just have things stay the same, for stability, but the knowledge that change in inevitable.

My own impulse is always to hold on for too long, to not give up, to battle until I’m bloody and tried, until I’m lying on the floor my chest heaving for exertion and my eyes wet with tears, until I can no longer even think.

It’s a noble thing to end things when you know it’s time, I doubt I ever could. I know that I would wait until it was too late. I don’t know if I even realize that it’s over until it’s too late, until things have gotten so twisted that they cannot be fixed. Sometimes I wish I could just get out earlier, sometimes I wish I could keep those fond memories without the bitter, that I could have the clairvoyance to know when it was time to bow out. It’s a hard thing, no… a brutally painful thing to crush someone so close to you, to crush yourself, even when you know you have to.

But that’s just the thing… once you know you have to do it, there is no turning around. You stare down form the precipice, the pit of your stomach in your throat, your heart aching inside your rib cage, just knowing… Knowing that everything that once was is gone, that no matter what you do, nothing will ever be the same again. It doesn’t matter whether you want to jump or not, you know at that instant that you must someday, there is never any going back.

I remember it all too well, steeling myself for that fall, ripping myself away from what I was closest to, what I wanted the most. But I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t think, I couldn’t move without crying…and so I just stood there like a statue, both of us understanding what had to be said, what had to be done, what was inevitable. And those memories were the worst, because that’s what you’re really tearing myself away from, not the future, but the past. Those raw, throbbing memories, those happy, sicky-sweet, haunting visions that will some day be wrapped all neatly in cellophane, but are now demons, just rip at you until you can’t even move.

I could try all the clichéd old phrases in some vain attempt to have this all make sense, to try to explain something, but I know none of them will help. Who even wants to be helped when things are like this? All you want is to not feel anymore.

And so I just sit here, wrapped in the darkness around me, safe yet so vulnerable at the same time, thinking, feeling… imagining how you must be feeling, remembering, wondering. I wish I had some words of comfort, something to make everything better, to make it all make sense. But it doesn’t… it’s completely senseless. Even Camelot fell, Kennedy was shot, and the day succumbs to the night again and again until someday the world ends. So, I bang out this rambling nonsense, hoping that it will help on some level, even if it will only help me. Because, in the end, I’m not even sure who this is for… is it for you two? Or is it for me? Or perhaps it’s just for all of us… for humanity. I think maybe in the end that’s the only comfort in any of this, just knowing that we are all here together, separated by so much, but united in the fact that we all feel. We feel the sorrow, the loss, the remorse, and the joy separately, but also together.

That’s all I have, my shot in the dark, my attempt at understanding and my hope that on some level, someday I can be of help.


“And if you'd 'a took to me like
A gull takes to the wind.
Well, I'd 'a jumped from my tree
And I'd a danced like the king of the eyesores
And the rest of our lives would 'a fared well.” – The Shins, New Slang

NORAD of Camelot

I'm not really sure if anyone understands human relationships, or how they even can. I know that I don't, and I'd bet the farm that I never will. I'm pretty sure that it takes truly understanding the other person to have that sort of connection, and who even understands themselves that well? How is it even possible? It's getting to the point where I'm beginning to think that human social interactions are just too complex for our species' intelligence. I have never met any two humans that have a relationship that can be said to be easy that truly care for one another. That can't be said about dogs or rabbits or pigmy marmosets, can it? Do dolphins passive-aggressively torture one another? Do they get into fights for no reason? Do they play mind games with one another and obsess over every little thing until they go insane? No, they fight or play or ignore one another, or whatever else, but they don't really have so many problems. I'm not saying they aren't complex creatures, any of them, but I can't imagine it being the same.

Even the relationships that seem the stablest, the best, the happiest, rarely are. People put up these walls and act as if they are happy together, but everyone bickers and fights. And I believe that's what shakes my foundation in all of this the most... no one really seems to have that happy of a relationship, even those relationships that I always took for granted as being wonderful really aren't once you peel off the outer coat. Everyone has their problems, and maybe that's how it is supposed to be, maybe there is some philosophical reason for it, but damned if I know what. So how am I supposed to be happy, how am I supposed to make things work with anyone if those relationships that seem so happy are just farces? It's like finding out JFK cheated on Jackie, or about Lancelot and Guinevere... how odd is it that both our Camelots fell prey to the same virus? I know that I'm probably over-reacting, that this is just how life works, that relationships are hard work and they can work out as long as both parties care enough, but it just seems like it would be so much easier to be a frog or something. Maybe someday I'll figure it all out, but I have my doubts.

People are just neurotic, as old George here shows.