[Writer's Note: I should have given the people within these stories names by now; it would have been easier for both of us. Starting with this essay there will be names given to the characters important enough to earn the random pulling of them from a baby name book. Also, when possible, there will be pictures to coincide with the essays. Why? Because all of us to a certain degree like picture books. That's all]
I was sleepwalking through life. Graduation and the Summer of Me came and went. As my friends started in on the new semester I was working full-time, stocking CDs and DVDs, describing to blue-haired biddies what a FM Modulator was, and why they needed one if they wanted to upgrade their movie collection without having to upgrade their television. I don’t know if I was avoiding “the future” but at the very least I wasn’t thinking much about it. I woke up, I went to work, I came home, downed a MD 20/20, played video games with my roommates, listened to some music, thought about writing, didn’t write, and then went to bed. The next day I’d wake up and do the same thing over again. Isolated from a social life that going to classes naturally provides, and even more isolated by the location of our house in relation to where the action happened, aside from the girlfriend of one of my roommates I didn’t have much in the way of interaction with the opposite sex.
From time-to-time one of my ex-girlfriends, Natalie, would come over, we’d have a few drinks, watch a movie, and then she’d leave, go home to her boyfriend, and I’d lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling. One night we had a party, and one of the girls who showed up was another ex-girlfriend, Vanessa. Before long we had isolated ourselves from the rest of the people, we got talking about the past, and how our relationship ended. When we hugged as she left old feelings started to wash over me. I went in my room and made a mix-CD of a bunch of songs which reminded me of her. The next night, after spending my entire work day thinking about Vanessa, I sat down at my desk and wrote a sprawling thought that I called The Late Night Confession:
Sometimes, the shadows of life become extremely hard to escape. These lonely, desolate places take shape in some sort of hypnotic, addictive way and before we know it, we’re stuck like flies to a window on a mid-summer day wanting with all of our ill-willed might to get back outside, away from the captivity that has squandered us for so long. When little in life goes right it becomes hard to distinguish the things to strive for. Somewhere on our paths to peace and inner bliss we get sort of sidetracked, a fallen compromise reflecting the dreams that we think inevitably, and matter-of-factly are going to pass us by. I was in one of those moments—well depending on how long a moment is gauged—until the other day when I saw you smile at me from across the porch. I knew all at once that I’d remembered you and all your magnificence all along. Trying to forget you, or get over you was hard. But it wasn’t as hard as the refrain to jump up out of my seat to hug you, and tell you how much I missed having your eyes to lose myself in, was. Ok, I’m not as prophetic, or outright, as I’d like to be. Hell, my attempts always seemed to fall a little shorter than I had intended. But when you’ve got one foot dragging behind—whatever the reason may be—it’s hard to focus forward, no matter how much you want to. When you smiled at me, your laugh reminding me of all the things I meant to tell you on rainy nights in July, I can’t believe I let myself, the opportunity to grasp the most obvious feeling that honesty has ever brought to me, slip away. I wanted redemption in an instant, spread cautiously out over whatever time it might take. Somewhere in your voice I sensed that our thoughts were walking hand in hand again as they did long before we ever let ourselves admit that we wanted to do the same. I don’t know why I didn’t tell you the other night everything that I was feeling. I don’t know, perhaps words like that—or this—would have just gotten in the way, adding pressure, or some unnecessary expectations, to a situation, to a feeling that has always simply and inevitably come naturally. Images of the yesterdays that I laid awake thinking of you; the countless days that we went without a word betraying our thoughts, or ambitions, to attempt to right the fictitious wrongs, raced in and out of my head during those silent but comfortable moments where we traded short, hopefully unnoticed, glances at each other. If it would have been a full-fledged game of staring I know I would have lost. I was always lost somewhere in your being you. At that moment, and all these moments since I wouldn’t, or didn’t, expect anything different.
A day or so later I gave Vanessa my written confession, along with the CD. In the days after the party I had allowed my mind to fill in all of the spaces in between the time we were together and the present, and I thought what life would have been like if we hadn’t taken a left-turn on each other a year-and-a-half prior. The situation, what I was feeling, it seemed organic the way that beginnings—or the rekindling of relationships—do, and it didn’t feel like I was walking down a one-way street. We traded emails; we talked for hours at night on the phone. But for everything we were saying to each other what I was waiting to hear never came. Before long we were back to being strangers.
In the weeks after I spent more time alone in my bedroom, listening to Blood On The Tracks, thinking about the possibilities of winning lotteries I never bought tickets to, watching High Fidelity too many times. One night after work I was climbing the steps to the living room, ready for another uneventful Wednesday night when my roommate handed me the phone. I asked who it was, and he said it was, Kara, a friend of mine from Erie, who I had a Fiction writing class with. When I said, “Hello” into the phone I heard the voice of someone from my long ago past in Rochester. Molly called me by a nickname that only she, her sister, Charlotte, and a few other old time friends used. I was in shock; my mind or mouth had no idea what to say. “Holy shit,” was the best I could come up with, and I said it a few times until the voice on the other end said, “I know.” Apparently Kara was out at a bar when she overheard a conversation about Rochester. Admitting her eavesdrop Kara told Molly and Charlotte that she had a friend in Edinboro who was from Rochester. When the girls asked, Kara told them. Of the tens of thousands of people in Erie, Pennsylvania, and the million or so in the Greater Rochester, New York region, three girls, one of whom minutes before was a complete stranger, all happened to know the same person: Me. Disbelief, laughter and a phone call ensued. An hour or so later, with my roommate and his girlfriend in tow, I met the three of them at the bar. The first person I saw was Molly, then my friend, Kara, and then the Charlotte. I was dating Charlotte when I moved to Edinboro and she to Erie, but I always secretly loved her sister Molly. I hadn’t seen either of them in three years, and Molly was just as stunning as I remembered her; eyes like cut glass, a smile that made that cold October night feel like mid-July. My knees went cliché on me; I couldn’t take my eyes off of Molly. So much so that I didn’t see Kara kiss me. For most of the night I was using her as a sounding board, telling her what my feelings for Molly used to be, how uncomfortable it was to see Charlotte, how much I still apparently cared for Molly. Kara heard exactly nothing I said, flat out just didn’t care, or was turned on by the competition. In the back of my mind I always thought Kara had feelings for me, but I never thought too much about them. With her lips planted against mine I didn’t have a choice anymore.
A couple days later Kara and I laid on my bed and watched High Fidelity. Nothing physical happened but the tension was thick in the air; ever since she forced her lips on me I thought a lot about her; her assertiveness was a turn-on, and my mind started in on the possibilities. That night we talked in hypotheticals, off-handed one of us said something about one-day going to New York City together. A few days later we went.
It had been just over a year since 9/11 but the city was still covered with missing faces, love messages written in crayon by the hands of parentless children, and flower bouquets that had long ago rotted, but nobody had the nerve to remove. Kara and I stayed in a hotel I’d stayed in many times before, sometimes with other girlfriends. Since I started staying in hotels I had done that a lot, stay at the same places where I’d stayed with someone else before. It wasn’t out of spite, or trying to relive memories that had passed me by; it was always a matter of comfort, going with what I knew. As we checked in I tried to drum up certain memories, certain faces, and it didn’t work. That made me smile, and for that I found Kara more endearing. That night we ventured out into the city and for a few hours just took in the sights, the smell of a place both of us loved so much. We didn’t go too far, choosing instead to save it for the next day. After we got back to the hotel, we ordered a couple of pizzas, and ate until we couldn’t eat anymore. With our backs to each other, lying on the same bed, I listened to the silence, tried to gauge if there was the possibility of magic in the air. She was living with another guy, a guy that she’d been with for years, but she said they were having the sort of problems that don’t get solved. I thought about that, getting involved with someone who was involved enough with someone to be living with them, and it bothered me. Not enough to not sleep in the same bed with her, but enough to where I didn’t initiate anything.
The next day we covered a big chunk of the city, from tourist staples, to seedy Canal Street backrooms chock full of knockoff designer purses. We snuck into the grand ballroom at the Waldorf Astoria, rode the elevators up and down. Outside of the hotel we met a guy with a dog named Bob. To complete the self-made Serendipity tour Kara wanted to go to Central Park and see the ice rink where John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale fell in love. In the park there was a tent set up and a small group of people were gathering to go inside. We asked one of the security guards what was going on and he said there was a concert, some guy he’d never heard of, but apparently good enough to have a record deal. Kara and I decided to check it out. The guy’s name was Howie Day, and neither of us had heard of him either. But we decided to give it a shot.
We took a seat on the grass of Central Park, and silently felt out our level of interest in one another under the cover of an obtrusive, uninspiring tent. Using loop pedals, some digital effects, and his guitar, Howie Day made the half-empty room feel full, like a blanket-wrapped embrace in mid-December. Kara and I kept looking at each other, giving silent validations that indeed we were both in on the secret, in on the moment, that what we were experiencing was, and would probably forever remain, one of those moments, the ones that exist as clichés in movies like Serendipity but never seem to make the jump into anyone’s real life, where time stops, facial expressions freeze their way into your memory, where you fight the cynical urge to blink because you’re sure it can’t really be happening. But it was happening, and after the first couple of songs I didn’t want to breathe because I didn’t want that moment, or Day’s singing to end. I was trying my best to write his lyrics into my memory; I wanted to remember everything. But eventually the last strum of the last song came and I couldn’t remember anything: the names of the songs, the atmospheric rhythm that him patting his guitar gave off, the clever wordplay, what the hell brought us there in the first place.
We filed out into the Manhattan night, high on life and short on words to describe what we both just experienced. We took turns saying some variation of “Wasn’t that awesome?” to each other as we meandered our way through the Saturday night traffic. We came across a Virgin Megastore and went in. I thumbed through the CDs until I came across Howie Day’s Australia. The album cover was a lot like I felt: the blurred silhouette of a guy looking out on someplace specific to him and the person taking the picture, but a mystery to anyone else trying to find something familiar to root themselves in. When Kara and I returned to reality, and we tried to describe this night to our closest friends, no matter what we said our words were going to be midgets—even if we used Australia as a backing track—because words always seem to diminish the most important moments in life to anyone on the outside looking in. We tried our best to stretch that Saturday for all it was worth, fighting through tried feet, and heavy eyes. I sensed this was going to be our pinnacle; there was nowhere else to go but down, but I tried my best to purge the cynical thoughts that were storming the gates of my heart. She was going to return to the unhappy life of living with her boyfriend, and I was going to have to go back mine, stocking CDs, and watching John Cusack movies until I was blue in the face. Love or something like it wasn’t going to be as easy as finding Central Park was; you don’t just ease yourself out of a year’s long relationship into the arms of someone else, no matter how infatuated you are with them, or how much you tell them you want it to happen. If I wanted the chance at something more with Kara this was the situation I was going to have to deal with.
That following week Australia became my soundtrack. I listened to “Ghost” as if it were the only song anyone had ever written.
“Lately i’ve been thinking
Lately i’ve been dreaming with you
I’m so resistant to this type of thinking
Oh now it’s shining throughI was alone for the last time
before my nights’ vacation with you
alive from the first now I’m denied
by the ghost of you”
I hadn’t lost Kara—how do you lose something that was never yours to begin with?—but it felt that way, despite our plan to hang out Halloween night. She made it clear she was going to spend the night, and in not so roundabout terms inferred what would take place between us when she did. But plans or promises didn’t matter, as concrete as they seemed, I couldn’t shake the situation, her living with her boyfriend, and I didn’t see how us sleeping together would do anything but throw more fuel on a fire I had no power to put out.
As Halloween drew near, I put on my Howie Day blinders, and tried to lose myself in the memory of that night through the songs of Australia. As I was getting ready to leave work on Halloween, Rachael, a girl that I worked with, walked up and asked if I wanted to hang out for a bit. For months we’d been talking about doing such, but nothing came of it. Figuring I had hours before Kara was supposed to show up, I figured what the hell, why not; it was making good on a promise to hang out, an excuse to pre-game, and on a purely vain level, Rachael was hot. We got a bottle of booze and she followed me back to my house.
It didn’t take long for inhibitions to fall by the wayside, and we found ourselves on the deck discussing people that we worked with. She was telling me how much she liked the one guy who worked in my department and half-joking/half-serious I asked Rachael why she didn’t like me. She smiled before leaning in to kiss me. The next thing I knew someone was shaking my foot. “What’s up? Why aren’t you ready?” Kara was standing above me, in full costume, an overnight bag in her hand. I had no idea where I was, what I was supposed to be ready for. “Ok,” I said, and stumbled off to my bedroom to change. This next time I came to Kara screamed, “Who the hell is that?” I looked around the room, had no idea what she was talking about. “Who?” I asked. “That bitch with the purple hair!” she yelled. Pants around my ankles, my shirt wrapped around my head, I turned and saw a half-naked Rachael in my bed, passed out, deep asleep, or dead, I didn’t know. I was in no state of mind to comprehend the situation at hand, beginning with the obvious which was Rachael and I in bed together at different stages of undress. Whatever I said, it set Kara off into a hysterical rage; if it wasn’t nailed down, she did her best Roger Clemens impression with it. When the storm calmed—or her arm tired— I tried to follow her out the door, but only got about two feet before I fell to the floor and gave up. From behind me I heard Rachael ask, “Was that your girlfriend?” “No,” I answered. “Does she know that?” she asked. And the truth was I had no idea how to answer that question.
Kara came back two more times that night and when she’d get there, it became more of the same: Premeditated chaos. As the haze slowly lifted from my head I started thinking about the totality of our time “together,” from that first night in her car on the last day of Fiction class, to that night at the bar, to our trip to New York City, the Howie Day show, all the way to the present. Where at first I felt like a complete pile, the more I thought about it, it wasn’t a matter of me being mean, but more the end being justified by an entire case study of mutual means towards each other. I thought of Day’s song, “Slow Down” and the lyrics:
“An actress
Sooner the better for me
You should know by now
I’m not your friend
You’re raveled up
Just take some time to come undone
You look so tired
I know your type
You storm out
And tear the walls
The portraits down
It’s what you want
It’s how we are”
That was our relationship in a nutshell, but I’d been oblivious to it. As we sat together on that Central Park grass I’d looked beyond the fact that the first time Kara kissed me I was telling her how much I was still in love with another girl. I’d looked past the countless times where she’d call me, screaming at her boyfriend, promising—and making good on it—to throw whatever she could find at him. I completely ignored myself, and how just weeks prior to the beginning of what would become this end with Kara, I was pining over Vanessa, and before her, Natalie. Apparently it didn’t matter who the girl was, I was more or less shopping when I was hungry; everything looks like the best thing ever; you ignore recalls, and expiration dates, and common sense. You settle on something because anything has a devious way of looking like everything you ever wanted. You get hypnotized; captivated by a moment you start thinking that you can turn into forever; infusing qualities into someone as if you’re building a love castle out of broken Popsicle sticks. In that way pop songs and girls are very similar; you can easily manipulate your tastes for whatever tastes good at the moment. Who Kara was, at that point in my life she couldn’t be what I wanted. Howie Day, his music was never going to have a lasting impact on me. But sometimes, when the moon, the stars, and your hormones align just right, anything can sound like magic.
