Katie Flynn
I've been living with him without him forever, but as of this week, the light in my apartment felt wrong. Recurring dreams were the first sign something had to give. Airport dreams, in which I get the feeling I've been living in the terminal for quite some time, then wake up feeling apocalyptic to the early morning sound of someone picking through recyclables out front. Multiplied enough times over, five cents become more than pocket change. After a certain number of years, carrying a number of recurring dreams, it becomes difficult to ignore the fact that part of you is alive, and part is not.
I opened the window that morning to the first smell of summer in March. to the ice cream shop air of the Baskin Robbins two doors down and to the smoke pouring from Halal carts. There was something fresh but old, some memory of all the springs before, and a memory of the last time we stood face to face. Eyes to mirror. That first smell of the season to come was the final blow. Still in the dead center of my youth, I've forced myself to act on the long-standing fact that I have to find him if I ever want to live a normal life. It might be impossible, but it couldn't hurt to try, it can only help, in any event.
When I left home, I had the foresight to bring enough for two to three days. Although, I was pretty sure it would be longer. It hadn't rained in twenty-five years, and drought ends, at least in movies, with a torrential downpour. but I figured there was no harm in pretending it was only a short trip. No matter how long I was away, it was probably only necessary to bring enough to look presentable through the weekend. After that, things would be different. He and I would hav finished with a hopefully brief, if tense reunion, and I would have decided where I could possibly go next, if anywhere.
Having sorted out what happened among us all, I could finally be completely by myself. By Monday I might be standing along on a small patch of grass overlooking the river, overlooking the old house. I could be perfectly alright if not entirely absolved. However things went, I would be across the country after a few days spent driving. I was just old enough to rent a car. I had just enough money. So I took the train to the airport, and from there I went west, like an old pioneer. That same kind of terrified hope for a new life and some degree of dread at leaving behind the old. Because I knew as I walked through the park to the station that the jazz musicians and street side cafes would feel different when I returned to the city.
I've saved, then blown my savings, for a road trip to nowhere so many times. But for all the daydreaming, so many forgotten nights and long weekends in a number of cities, lost in carefully tuned dialogues with strangers and made-up people- I was inevitably left disappointed time and time again. My enduring inability to be satiated was the death of me, once upon atime. I could never decided if it was his fault or mine. Best to return to the spot where he killed us both. It was all I could think of to do.
First stop was Chicago, after twelve straight hours of driving, in a decent hotel full of middle-class families on vacation and people traveling for business. and I spent two days here, the city where we first met in a little synagogue. I couldn't find my way back if I tried for the rest of my life. This was where we began, amidst the scuit of dirty snow still underfoot in April, rats weaving beneath the third rail at clark & Division, and the legacy of Jon Burge lingering in the way people hold their bodies against the howl of police sirens. It was the last place things were good between us. Where he taught me to be patient and promised me I would find moments of it all worthwhile.
"You'll be walking down Devon one day with the wind making you want to die," he said, or something along those lines, "but then you'll step into a restaurant or a bar and feel the humid air, see the windows all fogged over like a car that some teenagers have been fucking in. You will take off your coat. You will take a short and it will burn your throat all the way down. Then you'll start to find good things everywhere the orange glow of the apartment windows off Lake Short against the bitter dark in January, the lots of snap peas at the Peterson Community Garden, fifty-cent pool and two-fifty Schiltz, and the rattle-stomp of the Aragon with its absurd ceiling painted with stars. You'll notice, every room in winter has the same scent that wooly, long-haired dogs do, the same damp mix of sweat and slush, which wafts off the necks of women when they unwinf scarves from around their throats after stepping in from the cold." These are good things. But he also taught me, without meaning to, that you can squint across the lake from Montrose or Hollywood and look and look and it just doesn't give you anyhting, refuses to end, refuses to show you the glimpse of Michigan that you know lives on the other side but you just can't quite believe is there.
Chicago was where I found him, but also where I began to slowly lose him. After two days there, on my way to the west coast, I had come up empty. Because I already understood why and where we intersected. Just because. All over. I was driving with the hope of coming to some realization as to why things ended the way they did. Who killed who, if blame could be placed at all? And I would only find that in San Francisco, in the dark, in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Having spent nearly a third of my money in Chicago, I stayed in cheap motels for the rest of the trip. All cigarette burns on the biege carpet, last renovated somewhere in the early nineties. The dirt and gloom kept me up all night. when I got to my final destination it would be different. I wouldn't mind sleeping in my car, if things went as planned. That was how at peace I would be. Unafraid of perverted truckers of the night. I could rest easy, parked in a Walmart parking lot after stopovers in Kansas City and rEno, where I would watch people meet and kiss in the lobby of a hotel I couldn't afford. I felt almost ready to look him in the eye, which were once my eyes too.
Now San Francisco draws closer. Just outside the city limits, I drive without thinking and page through lost memoreis, recalled sporadically adn sparsley, just enough to confirm there was a time we were the same person. Not brothe rand sister, or father and daughter, although it sometimes feels that way. His guilt is my own, and my undue sense of loss was his fault.
I stop at a diner and order coffee, black and scalding hot. There's a nostalgic sort of comfort in the empty coffee cups and wine glasses on tables. I watch old friends meeting under syrupy hald-darkness, and ask, Were we here, at some point? Did we pass through? This would be so much easier if I could remember you as mroe than a memory. the waitress is young but looks worn out, in a mint green apron and striped paper hat. She asks if I feel okay, because I don't look too good. I tell her I've been driving forever. I do not specify how long forever is or will be.
"Where you going?" she asks, making conversation as she sets her notepad down on the table. I can't tell if she's just curious or wants to reassure me. I can't decide what I want from her, or if I want to burden her with the truth, not fully knowing what the truth is. I'm unable to describe the part of me long since melted into a puddle like the Wicked Witch of the West, and certainly unable to describe him, and who he is to me. There's really nothing to say except that I've been permanently cast as the villain of my own story. But of course, I don't actually say this. I just tell the waitress where I came from and wehre I'm headed. She tells me, as if I don't know, that it's a long trip to take alone, at which point I finish my cofee as quickly as possible. Tip her very well, then get back to the final leg of my trip. Nearly there now.
We're not together anymore, but I can almost (almost) remember when we were. Together is the wrong word, but I don't think there's a right one. I was once trapped inside his broken body. Now, a few decades gone by and come back around, I think I may be stuck forever in the town where we lived. He was nobody special, but I believe that the dead are permanently embedded in the land that bore them. Never fully gone, even after they're forgotten. I'll probably find him and have nothing to say. I've already talked to myself about everything that matters and even more that does not. I am chasing someone lost to an inhospitable world, And I've decided I will not be going back to where I've been.
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