5. I told him I was tired of the snow and the winter and the cold. I couldn’t
take the bone tingling chill a minute more. I whined that icicles had formed
on my balls and pushed him away when he offered to melt them. I spouted diatribes
about why Pittsburgh was the worst place to live on earth. Then I pouted like
a petulant child for weeks. I wouldn’t even let him touch me because his hands
were cold.
I woke up one morning to find tickets to Morocco on
my pillow. It was warm there.
4. I insisted that I didn’t want to go back to school. I put up a mean fight
for over a year. I resisted his tuition offer, his rational ‘you need a degree’
arguments, his soft suggestion that we move to a new city
with an even better art school. I screamed that higher education was overrated
and that a real artist needed to be schooled in the hard knocks.
He changed the locks on the loft one day and told me not to come back until I
was a college student again. I enrolled at Carnegie Mellon eight days later and
then had some of the best years of my life balancing academics and art.
3. Molly died on a Sunday. She was on the back of some asshole’s motorcycle
just after sunrise on her way home from god knows what.
After I came out to my parents and broke up their marriage she was hardly going
to turn out normal. Her anger manifested into typical teenage rebellion, but
thing went awry when she met James. He was a drug dealer with a penchant for
speed in all forms. They hit railroad tracks going 90 and the rest was tangled
limbs and dental records.
He took care of everything, like I knew he would, but more importantly he took
care of me. For what seemed like months there was no talking, no sex, no food,
no laughter…and he waited. He rubbed my back and kissed my temples and forced
me to shower and fucking waited. And when I was ready he was there, and then we
talked, we fucked, we ate and I finally laughed again.
2. I’d been hinting, more like begging, for months. I was out of school and
doing well at work, it seemed like time for something new. I promised it would
be my responsibility (though we both knew that wasn’t true). I left newspaper
clippings on the counter and small dog collars on his pillow. One morning he
actually tried to choke me with one.
Months passed, I’d long since given up, but then I woke up one morning and
there she was. A soft, perfect little brown ball curled up beside me in bed
with a black rhinestone collar on. She was warm and smelled like only a puppy can.
He let me name her Muffy even though it nearly killed him and when she cried
all night from her crate he was the one who got up and brought her into the bed
with us.
He was the one she ended up loving more, and I understood.
1. I left him for a guitar player, a blue haired bassist named Travis. I’d just
had my 25th birthday, Brian had conveniently been out of town on business.
It was half a decade after Ethan, but I know the whole musician thing still
smarted. Just like the first time, it had nothing to do with loving someone
else and everything to do with needing him to love me more. Ridiculous though
it was…
Travis was totally unaffected by Brian’s existence. It was probably all the
pot, but he didn’t even mind that I kept fucking Brian at least once a week. I
think Brian minded though. After about six months Brian stopped being around
when I stopped by and stopped returning my drunken ‘do you love me?’ phone
calls.
And then Brian went and died on me. He had a heart attack while he was dick
deep in some beautiful Latin boy in the backroom at Babylon on
a packed Saturday night. It was the talk of the town for months. The phone rang
while I was coming, dick deep in Travis for the third time that night, it was
Lindsay half hysterical.
I sat on the edge of my bed and cried all night.
The next week I got very official notice that Brian had left me half of
everything. The other half to Gus of course. I felt so guilty over his
obviously unchanged will that I went a little crazy. I threatened his lawyer in
broad daylight, insisting he would die if he didn’t find a way to give Gus all
of Brian’s estate.
That’s when the lawyer gave me a letter he was supposed to turn over only in
the event of an emergency.
Don’t queen out just take it. I want you to have it. You left months ago, so
it’s not a mistake. I hope you never read this (and if you repeat the contents
to anyone I will come back from the dead to kill your little white ass) but if
you do, of course I loved you. You were always such an idiot.
Do something great with the money. I don’t mean charity or some bullshit like
that. Buy a place in New York,
move to Paris, whatever.
Have an amazing life, you deserve it.
And don’t forget to lube up before you die, I’ll be damn horny by the time you
get here.
I keep the letter in a box on my dresser and I didn’t ever tell anyone what was
in it. I have a million other reasons to keep loving him.
Feedback to throughthelens78@yahoo.com