As good as you get

…and what if this is as good as it gets?

Well my dear, those crucial last words were some of the final utterances to seal my conviction towards leaving that city. It became a city built of remorse and regret, and of you stalking me. It became a metropolis of broken promises all gathered up on glittered street corners. I could block your phone number, and take enough doses of sleep deprivation to nearly forget about you, about your sticky kisses and your handprints on my back. Somehow though, you still left messages, little telltale notes as though you were screaming through the veil of the underworld, as though you somehow breached the realm of the dead to put a cold necrotic hand on my underbelly. This analogy had you all but still and buried.

You made silly little reasons to call and stop by. Crap we had collected before your fateful little trip home, stuff we were going to own collectively when we lived together, you needed that motley bag of yard sale items immediately. Just could handle the possibility of me slipping town with Salvation Army quality novelty mugs, a vintage Saltine’s tin and your vibrator.

I hope you liked everything I left you, because it indeed was everything physical that connected you to me. That little wooden man that greeted me to Pennsylvania so long ago, he became a visage of our struggle when I bored his tiny heart out. It surely was not a heart that kept us together anyhow my dear. Every picture, even a sticky note that I had wrote your phone number on when I solicited it from my called ID after our first phone call. Your hair ties that you left on my sheets, a bracelet slightly bent from fast paced undressing, a sweater that was left squatting for land rights in my closet so long ago. It all came together how much of you I had inhaled in our brisk months together and how little capacity there was for me to breathe. So I expunged the acrid aroma.

So little sleep… I look at the mirror, I’m disheveled. I have hair shaped like my sleep patterns and a beard that needs trimming and sideburns that need weeding. I cut it all off, and it was nice. I forgot about the mirror for damn near a month, and everyday was a great hair day.

So with a fell swoop I dropped you and vanity in the same receptacle to compete for food and/or attention. It all felt free. I was in charge of my genitals, and only my genitals; and soon I did not worry about your precocious vulva and its frequent flyer miles.

In the timeline this is about where you intercede, cutting nice peaceful violin solo’s in half with your prepubescent banshees wail, all sitting neatly in my voice mail box.

“Don’t forget the pictures you took of me, I want them!”

Yes its true dear, I took nearly three hundred pictures of you in various poses, non poses, and states of undress. I assumed you wanted our memories together, as these were tickets into times when things might just have been as good as they get. Maybe you did want them for the powers of good, yet something oscillated within me that grew contemptuous at you showing a new person our intimate memories, perhaps you and this new person engaged in some coital activity. Either way, I didn’t have long to decide whether to make the effort for you.

I started writing this goddamn wonderful play called Law Boy Forever. Don’t ask me what possessed my spirit or my fingers for that matter to begin me on scripting a play, but the first page was rife with symbolism and accuracy of emotion. I smiled a huge smile at how well it wrapped up my emotional longings to quit from your constrictions.

… and then, as it so happens in the land of opportunity, the platters of my hard drive ceased to spin and locked up the screen with a final glimpse of Law Boys exploits, well the fictional one anyhow, as he has already planted his flag on your dimpled ass.

Can it end that easily? Thousands of images, videos, writings, digitized memories, damn near a human life, gone to star stuff when a little speck of dust lodges between two dervishes of magnetic plates and jams them to a stop? You bet it’s that easy.

Another job well done of emptying you from my memory; lets thank my slow old friend called entropy. What timing really; I took your cheating screw and immortalized him as a massive testiculed and super hero outfitted lawyer, contrasted his ideology with a sharply underwritten wit towards the subtlety of human passions and then ripped it all magnetically and irretrievably asunder.

So what was left between us now? …you’re stalking abilities?

You did surprise me when you first stopped by, didn’t know you had the sack for it really. Thought you might have enough respect to leave dead things buried to decompose naturally. You came in a little skirt and a slinky tank top, and the notion that you meant something to me. You’re an arrogant little girl. “My stuff!” you shriek with your body. I can’t help but shut the door, it’s a protective action.

The second and last time I saw you were much the same. I hadn’t slept right for weeks; you came and feigned some pity for obviously I looked pitiful. We sat in the summer morning sun, me having slept for nearly two hours and still reeling in the daylight, wrinkled clothes, reeking of fast food. It was a solid rock wall in front of the apartment and you put your little butt daintily down and wiggled it into a crevasse or depression in the stone.

We could have talked about anything, solved anything, my walls were down, I was a fresh person. Instead you ask me how long it will take to here get from upstate New York. I reply with arbitrary figures and you retort with how you were wondering that with the company you would be receiving if “They” would be getting into town soon.

Your old habits are so intentional and they spill through the cracks in your character.

There are two genders, male and female. In most languages one conjugates either a masculine or feminine denotation into the word they are using. He or She would be proper examples of referring to a singular piece of gendered company. It was once in the habit of poor grammarists to attempt political correctness by saying “they” instead of “he” or “she”, particularly when it was assuming the presence of a non participant character.

“So what is HIS name?” I say.

With a shock and a startled laugh you begin the whole game again, but you play yo-yo with my heart no more, because the string that should tether it to your finger was long ago severed by the penis of your lover.

As a play writer would insist, this is my exit, and Ill pat you on the head as I pass and remind you that you have taken the last moment we will ever again have together and turned it into a forgettable sour memory.

Really, that’s all we will have for an exit. Shortly after that I started driving. Not just because of you, but because you are a piece of the city and the city itself lies to me. So Ill pack everything I own into the backseat, prioritize and compromise, discard memories that I wont want to drag 2,200 miles with me.

Ill make promises to myself that I can keep. Ill keep Elizabeth’s advice at hand “Don’t take any shit!”

“I want my fucking pictures!”

You make it fun to check the phone, though you probably don’t understand the word “no” or “don’t ever” for that matter. You had to bother me just as I was delighting in seeing palm trees for the very first time. You don’t understand that these photographic bits of data have spilled out of existence forever; and I promised you that our last meeting was the final straw so I can’t bear to tell you either.

So will you just sit and wait, discovering all the little time bombs I have left for you in our fragile city? Will you just go back to grad-school with you clique-ish friends like you always have in the past, talk about more boys and their endearments and spend the next few years of your cancer remission passing your tits around the lobby? Will you dig your little hand into your tight cotton under things and dream about movie stars and glossy lipstick, law degrees and dancing your little heart out to change the world?

Well my dear, you can pirouette tight formations and toe off on a high kick for justice, but that balance of needed things can only be found when I stopped dancing and instead put you down.

See, now I’m far away, immune to your visits and letters and phone calls. I’ve found a life that I couldn’t have with you and your lubricious ways.

The best part; is I know now that I never needed you around for me to be in love. I know that when worms were crawling out of your body or when josh was your secret second life or when all you could eat was a cheap fruity breakfast cereal; that you were indeed just limited to being crazy.

So take that. Enjoy your cramped narcissistic classrooms and narrow narcissistic company, enjoy boys from the big apple, and smile that homecoming queen smile, wave like Jacqueline fucking Kennedy before she had to tuck that boy’s brains back into his head.

I found so many awful things in you where I never expected to find them. Just the same, I have found love where I had once neglected to look. That will teach me, but I am willing to learn, because for me at least things are only getting better…