“You Don’t Know Me,” Ben Folds
“We talked about you while you were in the bathroom,” she announces to him as he pulls his chair back out from the table, scraping it quietly and as respectfully as seems possible. “And, in the spirit of honesty, we said you were the whole package.”
As soon as he had gotten up, loping away in the fashion of a much taller man, she had turned to me with authority.
“You should date him and be nice.”
“I can’t be nice,” I said automatically, almost before she finished her command. Don’t you think I’ve thought about it with the desperation the lonely can always summon? About how he would probably adore me absolutely and completely? How he’d write songs and music for me and kiss me with all the passion that he keeps inside with no one to give it to save his piano?
I search him for any trace of blush. Nothing. But he still flinches when I touch him. Intimidated? Embarassed? There are, after all, other people here. And I just want to kiss him so badly. Hard. Here.
“But,” I say, glancing first to him and then to her, “we said you need a nice girl. And we don’t know any nice girls.”
“I Don’t Think So,” Priscilla Ahn
“I saw him the other day,” he reports. “Just over there, with his bicycle.”
I have been in town less than half an hour, and already the ex-boyfriend news brigade is on the scene.
“Said he had a month left.”
A month of what? His lease? His job? Cancer treatments? Could literally be anything for all I know.
“The season, you know?” he says. “One more month and he’s done. Then he’ll be out all the time.”
Right. I did know that, but I had swept it to the back of my mind along with all the other bits of information I still hold about him: the hours-long training routine, the preferred contemptible electronica music, how he takes his coffee with brown sugar instead of white.
“I didn’t ask him about you.”
24 July 2008
She might need to leave soon, you know.
There’s too much here and not enough
All at the exact same time.
Too much light and not enough stars, so that she notices the drowning.
Too many “friends” and not enough friends who will do anything for you and who you’d ask to do it.
Too many numbers and not enough notes.
Too much sex and not enough of what goes with it.
She’s losing people along the way, and not sure what she gets.
But here it feels like she gets nothing but competition and criticism and tips for next time.
When she’s supposed to
Do It Better.
Next time she’ll be gone, so you can feel it over someone else.
She’s going to see more stars.
“Kiss Me Goodbye,” Johnathan Rice
18 July 2008
The bar, down the stairs and to the left, is hot, dark, and humid when I arrive, rather like Hell but with more puddles and fewer open flames. Underground. No air.
Opposite the long counter with the bottles and the hipster-thin bartender is the open space for the band. Only one of the three really matters, though, and he’s already there, standing under what seems to be the only light in the place, set into the low ceiling.
He tunes his instrument, sips a beer, tunes more, slightly. For no particular reason, I can’t take my eyes off him. Well, no particular reason that would be obvious to anyone else.
He’s the reason I’m here in this dwntown hole. He couldn’t make it to dinner because of set up for this show, so I quickly, easily, unthinkingly change my entire schedule for the evening just to be able to look at him. Without shame. Because I look anyway, but I probably should hide it better.
I can’t remember when we met, sometimes a few years ago with friends and drinks, likely. I just remember wanting and, at one point, having. Watching and noticing for so long has left me with piles of images of him in my mind, almost as if he were mine to be tracking.
He’s not.
She’s there, too, talking to one of the others of the three. My heart sinks, just a little, before I perk it back up again. I don’t know why I’m surprised.
It used to, at first, be really easy to dislike her. Clearly, she had what I wanted and didn’t really seem to be all that worthy of it anyway. Now, though, she’s a friend, with humor and caring. Further complicating my openly gawking.
The trio hikes up the instruments and the energy and begin to play. I stare directly at him, his head bowed and bobbing rhythmically, his fingers moving up and down the neck and strings thoughtfully, plucking, striking, stroking.
***
Musicians are attractive to women for a reason. Men, take note: it’s the rhythm. The rhythm they feel in their song we imagine will translate seamlessly to their rhythm in body, in bed.
Another good reason: the hands. God, it turns us on to watch a musician’s hands. Any hands, really; a carpenter would be good, too, for example. But a musician, with the rhythm and the hands…
***
He’s still directly under the light, and I’m situated beneath the one opposite, feeling absurdly like this gives us some sort of connection.
His fingers move not so much deftly as fluidly on the gleaming strings, mostly fingertips but occasionally the side of the index finger bringing sound, smooth and low. I know there are calluses on those fingers, rubbed rough from the ridges on the strings.
The nails are kept short, the fingertips rather blunt and rounded. I’m watching too emotionally, my breath catching in my throat with music surrounding me. I can feel it and I am fantasizing about meeting him in the bathroom and feeling more than that on skin and below — I start shifting in my seat.
She’s next to me, of course, the only other person I know in this bar besides him.
“It’s funny,” she says, as if she can sense where my gaze has lodged itself. “People are always like, ‘I bet he’s really good with his hands…’ and I’m like, ‘Not…really.’” She shakes her head comically slowly, eyes downcast for a mourning effect.
It’s funny. I never thought so. I seem to remember differently.
***
We were in this grey-sheeted bed, in the dark but for the light filtered from the streetlight through the dark curtains, the time unknown and unimportant.
I am on top, legs tucked up underneath themselves to make room for him between. He’s on his back, skin still humid and slick from the pool, and, more recently, the shower after the pool. His hands, those hands, are on my thighs, hips, chest.
I shift my body upward slightly, and he groans, curling his chest up, head level with my breasts. His hands go to them, followed by his mouth. He tickles my skin lightly and I think it only proper to arch that back, tilt that neck back, let him go further.
I breathe.
“Oh, my God,” he says when he can bring his mouth, lips, tongue away from my skin, no doubt also slick and probably salty at this point as well. “Your boobs are perfect.” Lips back like metal to a magnet.
“Really?” I flinch. “They’re small.” Don’t stop moving.
“God, no. They’re perfect.” He wraps his arms around my lower back, the better, I guess, to bury himself in my perfect chest. To lodge this time in my tired, spinning mind. To make my chest tighten noticeably every single time I see him from then after.
I’ve never been comfortable with these things. Small breasts, flat butt, rather thick, in my mind, waistline. Never been perfect to him in this way before.
***
I laugh – chuckle, really – conspiratorially with her and turn quickly back to the band.
I don’t want to think about that. That he might touch her and let her – God, I can’t think of that.
It helps, however, to think he fumbles with her. Fingers not perfectly rhythmic and pleasing after all. Not confident and stroking. Not cupping one in each hand, overflowing with gentle but very enthusiastic praise. Not tickling her with breath and fingertips.
***
In the morning, he had had to get up to drive a friend home. Early. I rolled onto my stomach, arms cupping my pillow to my head, sad to have him leaving the bed where we have just spent our first night together. I may even have protested sleepily in what I imagined to be seductive, “Stay with me…” type of voice.
He didn’t stay. He tucked the fluffy comforter back up around my shoulder blades, actually closing the gaps between my body and the blanket with his palms.
He leaned down, kissing my forehead in one of the most intimate gestures I can think of.
“Go back to sleep,” he says into my ear. The skin on my back rises in shivers and I shift deeper into the sheets and covers that smell a little like him and a little, now, like me. I guess like us.
***
Now, it doesn’t help to be next to her in the same place. Same space and same time, but different scents and different estimations of the skill of his hands, his fingers. Different, I imagine, amounts of desire.
I can’t imagine she loves his hands the way that I do.
“No I In Threesome,” Interpol
14 July 2008
Heading back to the Institute currently. Feeling pretty agitated about it.
I don’t want to tell the doctor what I’ve been doing and thinking. I don’t want to drive all the way over there on the same route I always had to use all those days and think about all the other people who had to use those same roads last fall just to come see little old emaciated me. I don’t want to admit that I can’t seem to do it the way I used to, but that I’m still trying and failing miserably.
So, on the way over here, I think about him instead.
***
He is tall and thin, with brown hair receding slightly and round brown eyes. Conventionally, movie-starily, he’s not handsome. He seems to have permanent circles of dark cradling his eyes, like someone in perpetual need of one more hour of sleep.
He smiles, though, quick and big, bobbing his head above his broad, square shoulders. He has a small waist and hipbones I’d like to touch, and big hands with thin fingers by which I’d like to be touched.
“Ive never had a one-night stand,” he’s telling me from across a avery small table bedecked with a single votive candle, a leather and laminated menu, and two large wine glasses.
Never? I’m surprised. The man is charming, 26 years old, and a bartender in a college town. So I’m surprised. Before I can say so, though, his face brightens.
“Wait! I did once, but it was a threesome, so…” he cocks his head to one side, spreading his hands to show innocence, a bystander who just couldn’t pass up this little detail of an opportunity.
“Knife Going In,” Tegan and Sara
She brightens so obviously, so visibly as his voice registers on the other end of the phone. She was in a crowded, sporty bar, sitting across from not one but two attractive young gentlemen who happen, comically to be wearing the same shirt.
That doesn’t matter, the environment doesn’t matter. She pushes the salad to the side, preferring to look dainty rather than eating while on the phone; turns to her right, toward the stairwell, away from the the bar glinting with glass bottles and televised baseball games.
“Chivalry,” Thao Nguyen
“I love you.”
He looks a little surprised. I feel a lot surprised. Thrilled. Electric. It sounded good coming out, not rushed or insincere. Intimate and close. Laying on his chest. Blue eyes wide. Mouth crooked up in bright satisfaction.
“I love you, too,” he tells me.
I think I already knew. I can tell in the way that he never wants to stop touching me and the way he’ll look at me for a long time, smiling, lost.
I had shown him my childhood house – the yard where I played kickball and dizzied myself with cartwheel contests, the tree that was the only tree I was really ever brave enough to climb. Then I had shown him my mother’s house, the bed where I’ll sleep this summer when I’m away from town, away from him. The cats that are so sweet and fat. The photo of baby me, grinning dimpled while playing with a blue plastic ball that’s about as big as my arms are wide.
“Still smiling,” he observed. Endearing.
Upstairs, I had looked desperately around the room that is mine but is not where I live for something to show him. Framed high school prom photo?
“Beautiful,” he commented, kissing my cheek as I squirmed away. That wasn’t what I wanted to show you.
Then I find it. Of course. The pictures of my did I keep in a little golden box. When he was nineteen, with a dark beard and dark floppy hair, but the same blue eyes. When he got married to my mother. When I was little and he held me on his lap all the time. These are what he needs to see.
Then I knew. It changed. I wanted to show him and tell him and let him. Yes, this probably should happen. Yes, that feels good. Yes.
Driving back to town, I sing. He can tell that I want to play the same three songs over and over because I currently love them. And he knows that.
it just seemed like the most natural idea in the world. It was repeating in my head so much that I was sure he could see it on my face, eyes, lips.
I’m proud and he’s proud. I think.
Last night I let him make me dinner. I let him feed me strawberries dipped in chocolate. This morning I lay in his bed naked as he climbed over me gently to go help a friend. His body is amazing strong skin soft. I am sleepy eyes closed at ease. He leans down from above, close to my ear in his dim bedroom.
“I love you.”
13 April 2008
Right angles used to seem so ressuring
But there are none on you
Your face
So I don’t need them anymore
Your body is not angular
Fluid and strong
But not angular
And now that is what keeps me safe
The right angles seem a little lonely now
Far and not touching
“You’re so soft,” you say
I can embrace that
Because angles are losing their appeal
There are none of your face
***
My mom wrote a poem today, too:
“Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
I’m in Miami
And you’re not”
Good work, Ma.
11 April 2008
I can sleep without you
Probably even beter than with you
Deeper, you know?
Less heat
Less guilt pressure distraction
But I don’t really want to.
I can do things without you
Carry on entire conversations
Less explaining
Less thinking planning justification
But I don’t really want to.
I’d rather
have you here or be with you,
where you are.
It doesn’t matter really,
together.
I can do it alone, sure
But if I could choose
I’d chose you
wherever you happen to be.
I wanted to write you a poem,
something, because I’ve been thinking of you so much,
so much.
I don’t know if this is what I had in mind,
but it’s a start
and I’ll try again
I want to
“Rigged and Ready,” Northstar
Original title – “Early”
23 March 2008
“Does this scarf make me look greenish, pale, sickly?” she fidgets.
“Jesus, that blue brings out her eyes, sparkling clear honest,” he fidgets. “My gut showing?”
“He’s strong,” she observes, rearranging the salt and pepper shakers, balancing rolled-up bits of napkin on top. “I swear, my palms are so sweaty, shaky.” Clasps her fists to hide it.
“Graceful,” he thinks of her hands. “Clean soft sturdy.” He doesn’t like feeling as though a simple handshake might cause irreparable damage to the oh-so delicate recipient. “She could create, play, show with those hands.” He smiles to note his positive appraisal of her fingers, palms, knuckles. “God. Did she notice?” If he had to do it over again, he’d wear that retainer every damn night.
“Nice healthy white,” she decides, glances up, flushes. “Teeth, lips, tongue.” Starts to wonder. Kicks her foot to cover the wondering. Feels her legs, skin, thighs. “That’s right. You just call all attention to yourselves. He must be noticing.” Flexes to cover the movement.
“Real,” he notices self-consciously. “I must smell like a damn locker room.” Is he wearing acceptably clean underclothes? He probably is. Of course. He is.
“Man smell. Soap, skin, fresh,” she deciphers. What would it smell like on her pillow in the morning? Glances around, like people can see what she’s wondering, planning, hoping. Like people are judging the way she is. “Not that I care.” She cares. “I hate these clothes. Trying too hard.”
“She looks good confident.” Feels predictably underdressed by comparison. Of course. He never has nice. Nice enough. Nice looking enough. “Is this place even okay?” Loser. Poor little loser.
“Like it here. New,” she appreciates. “I’m never adventurous creative open to exploring.”
“I could take her somewhere.”
“I’d go with him. If he were there.”
“If she wanted to.”
A young, polished, perky waiter appears, rushes up, leans over the table.
“So…” she says aloud, uncertainly, slowly.
He looks at her, blue scarf and eyes.
“Are you ready?” he says.
