Getting My House in Order

After you left, I mostly did a lot of nothing.

I took walks around my new town—you know, the one we were going to move to together but you didn’t because of something about money, but it wasn’t really money, it was your mother or the distance or something else, most likely the fact that you were letting me go—and had long phone calls with Casey about his terrible relationship, and then shorter calls with Rico about the demise of my own. We’d talk really late because of the time difference, into the part of the night where nobody else in town could possibly be awake but me, and I lay still and sin-heavy, like a gargoyle in the dark, muttering into the phone next to my face on the pillow. I looked in vain for a good bar in this empty little hamlet out in the woods by the fat-mouthed, over-exposed river, some kind of watering hole where the local yee-haws would tie one on and watch Patriots games and square dance and stupid shit like that. There was nothing. This town has nothing but a rat-shit pizza parlor and a grocery store full of greasy, scabbed kids bagging groceries for ancient beings, and a lot of things that close in the mid-afternoon.

At night, when snow blows all around, the town looks like the town from Gilmore Girls after some kind of nuclear fallout.

It looks the way I imagine most towns will look after The Rapture: devoid of beauty, spare.

However, there is a liquor store. I thought that maybe developing a drinking problem would be in my best interest. The girl who works the counter is quiet-voiced and sanguine-headed and I thought she was cute when I first started going there. Then she stopped wearing a mask and I saw the burned curl of her mouth and smelled her eruption of breath and stopped looking at her when I paid for my six-dollar bottles of cabernet sauvignon.

What I’m saying, Giorgia, is that after you left, I just drank and smoked by my window, staring with church-dead eyes at this over-growing world unspooling out beyond my cocoon, one without your guidance, your leash, except for when I drank so much that I’d walk outside and smoke on the street and stare off at the two or three cars that’d pass by while I was out there on closed-down Main Street late at night, naked but for a t-shirt and sweatpants, shoeless, harboring a vacancy in my eyes that would have scared you. I wonder what people in those cars thought when they saw me out there alone so late in a town where nobody ever goes outside.

They probably thought nothing at all.

I thought a lot about what I miss about us. And I thought about what I don’t miss.

I miss the way you’d rub my shoulders when I’d run out of Ambien and couldn’t sleep, how you’d talk me down when I felt manic panic creeping up on me, and the way you’d tell me no, go back to bed when I tried to rise early with moon-sprung energy in the mornings, hours before I had to get up.

I miss the way we did things that people did in the YA books I’ve always liked, like the way you taught me how to dance that night, and then we drank tequila with your brother and I did the white-man overbite groove to Chingy and Nelly and a bunch of other shit while he laughed.

On that same note, I miss when we sat out on your roof and listened to your favorite song, “Nights” by Frank Ocean, and we kissed with nervous mouths and you looked at the moon and talked about the moon like it was your friend, calling it “she”, and even though I thought that was a little weird, a little pretentious, it was in a good way, like a lot of things about you.

I liked everything you ever did.

You spoke in a way that made words sound new to me again, all the time. You reinvented everything. We made out through the whole song and I wanted to cry but I didn’t, I had no reason to, it was just that low-grade metallic hum of new love crawling through my throat and cheeks and jostling my very core. It made me feel like Dawson and like you were Joey Potter, cooling against the sky by the hard slant of shingles, which made me feel young and not old, which is important. It was also accurate, since in the end you did not choose me, but hey.

I do not miss the way you acted when I took Ambien and stayed up too late. You thought I was dangerous and crazy. Yes, I was naked and dancing to music that was only in my head, and yes I was eating shredded cheese straight from the bag in the middle of the bathroom, flicking the light on and off and staring out at your parents’ pool and wanting to swim in it, and eventually swimming in it, and needing you to pull me out because the drug made pool water feel like outer space.

I miss the way you lied and said I was good at fucking you, that I was handsome and that girls liked my face. I miss the way you asked me to shave it all the time so you could see my mouth, even though we both know I am unsightly in my mediocrity and that my translucent neck skin makes me look like Nosferatu.

I miss the way you could tell our story better than I could ever write it, and how I hope to hell you haven’t.

I do not miss the way you left me with a fever in the new apartment we were going to share right after I got my first COVID shot, when my fever was spiking and I was laying there being dramatic and you left.

I do not miss the way you are not mine anymore.

I miss the way you invited me to your New Year’s Eve party before we ever dated, before you left the forty-year-old postal worker (you were twenty-two, remember?) for me, back when we were just classmates falling asleep side by side in that dark and hot film adaptations class, the one with the big, portly, pill-head professor who fell, crashed out in her sad rolling chair, before the rest of us in front of every film, the class where I woke up that time during Turn of the Screw and you’d turned toward me and your avalanche of dark curls was to my nose and I smelled your watermelon conditioner, yes, but mostly I smelled the earthen realness of your scalp until you woke up and I pretended I was still asleep.

You invited me to New Year’s and I got there and it was a dozen of your friends, people I’d never met, and I felt the way I’d always felt anywhere with more than three adult humans present: sweaty, overdressed in my too-big tan blazer that needed to be dry cleaned, holding a bottle of red wine and not smiling back at people and being too stoned and looking at the floor.

You gave me a hug and you were wearing a leather skirt and fine stockings and black boots and your hair was gelled and ever-large and you gave me a kiss on the cheek and I felt it burn there for hours. I panicked and drank the bottle of red wine and a bottle of somebody’s Moscato by midnight and went out and smoked a joint and stared at the moon and felt profound and then nothing. I woke up in the morning covered in magenta-red-purple hellishness. I thought I’d fucking killed somebody, I swear to God, like I’d split open a pregnant lady. It looked like afterbirth everywhere. Insides. Red everywhere: on the floor, the wall, your elegant white comforter, the goddamned motherfucking ceiling. I miss that, the way you let me clean up and pay you back and you didn’t tell anyone and loved me soon after.

I miss the way you couldn’t be without me when lockdown happened, so you just asked me to move in. I was manic (I’d just written an unreadable 80,000 word story in three weeks, I did not sleep, I ran seven miles a day, I smoked pot naked in the garage and Facetimed you all night so we could both listen to all the echoes in that musty place while my family slept) and I think you knew it, which made it okay, even if I knew nothing at all.

I don’t miss the way you texted that guy that time and I took it wrong, and I hate that I can’t even remember the specifics. All I remember is being a prick.

I miss the way writing all this bullshit I write felt like a task of great importance because I knew you’d be reading it. Now I might as well be whispering into air.

I don’t miss the way I never felt I deserved you, all the way until I really, truly didn’t anymore.

I miss the sharp wet ink of your eyes on me while we went at each other in the grass that morning in August down by the tobacco fields a billion miles from anyone, and how I just wanted to take you in that moment and drive us somewhere, somewhere far to the south, and never let anybody but me ever touch your candy-pink tongue and your night-black-velvet-thick blast of heavenly curls ever again, just keep you for myself, my ghastly, waning self, laying claim to your measurements, grappling with the way your finite ridges and valleys contrast with your unending reach.

I miss hearing you sing the song you wrote about my unpublishable blemish of a novel, the song that made me feel like I was actually on this planet in a tangible way. I heard you sing it for the first time in the afterglow of my parents’ absence in that empty house and you made that shell something of a cathedral when it was so late there were no other sounds but the roar of wind in the forest and the bedazzled swell of your sound.

I don’t miss the way I’d skip doses of my medicine because our schedules had evaporated and I’d start to feel jittery, and then you felt it was your responsibility to fix me, even though you can’t fix fundamental misshapenness behind the eyes.

I don’t miss the way you’d poke and pull at yourself, hating the shape I was—fuck it, am, permanently, wired to be—so addicted to.

I miss the way you told me to do it inside you every time because of your IUD. The way you’d cross your pretty beige ankles behind my white, skeletal back and squeeze me in when you got there, loud, a crescendo just for my consumption, the air conditioner soaking up the rise and fall of your call.

I don’t miss the way your IUD failed that weekend away in New Hampshire—my birthday, the one where you wore the red bikini I loved from the summer and let me do it in front of the mirror like I liked with your legs over my shoulders (of course, this was constant, this was as natural as breath in our lungs and sweat on our legs when we went at it) and the heel of your foot in my mouth—and I got you pregnant.

I don’t miss the way I neglected to film every moment of our year of dramedy and smut; such hubris I had, to think my memory would capture your sweet breaths, the glamor of your broken sleep, your inertia, your low-slung chaos. The relentless conditionality of your love.

I miss the way you’d play your Jesus Christ Superstar soundtrack while you took your long showers, your effervescence penetrating my drugged rage sleep.

I don’t miss the way I ripped up your ex-boyfriend’s Kansas City Chiefs shirt you used to sleep in in front of you and then threw it in the trash. I also don’t miss the way you’d sleep in his soiled fighting-red linens and make me reach past them to reach for you.

I miss the way we spent the warm months taking walks, eating chicken and steak, seeing nobody because of COVID, judging everyone who hadn’t completely locked down in a state of Edenic privilege like we had.

I miss hearing about all the careers you want to have, all the places you want to see, all the things you want to feel. Now I hear nothing at night but the sound of my shithead bodybuilding neighbor, Jack, working his way through the Cannibal Corpse discography.

I don’t miss the way I’d fight with my family in front of you when we visited and you’d hear me, because then you’d wonder when I’d start to yell at you, too, and I wouldn’t have an answer, so I’d find a way to yell about that, and you’d say I was yelling at you now, just like you suspected. I didn’t doubt you, though I could have sworn I was just screaming into the void.

I miss drinking strong coffee in the driveway at ten o’ clock at night with your little wrinkled European grandparents and listening to them sing in that rollicking tongue and looking at you and hearing your voice and looking at your mother and aunts and friends and wondering whose life am I living?

I don’t miss the amount of time I spent thinking about that Kansas City Chiefs shirt, even though I’m getting déjà vu because, once again, all I can think about is that goddamn shirt on his soft old body and then on your hard young body and then ripped up, thrown in the trash by me, and tears in your eyes like I was crazy, and tears in my eyes like I had been had, like I’d finally figured out something. But then it settled and I blamed Ambien. You blamed me.

I miss the way you taught me how to live again, and then stuck around and lived my new life with me—for a while.

I don’t miss lying to you and telling you I don’t want to kill myself every day. I don’t miss convincing you I can break these patterns, lose my habits.

I really miss when we’d take one of our long walks and break your rule and talk about what life would be like after we got married. I already knew how I’d ask. We’d go to that place in the woods where we’d ducked in during the earliest moments of COVID and stare at each other from afar, when we had to be alone, when nothing was permitted. The place where I felt like a man from 1488 trying to court a local lass in the proper way—many feet apart, no touching, just eyeballs crawling, the flash of an ankle unthinkable.

I’d take you there. I’d explain—explain how you realigned my sense of time, how you injected purpose into my otherwise inconsequential existence, how I want to take fever-dream midnight showers with you for the rest of my life, until my skin’s scalding and falling off, fuck it, ride the lightning—and then I’d ask.

I miss the way your IUD killed my baby.

I miss the way I used to hear things in this apartment other than my own breathing and the sound of other people living robust lives outside these walls.

I don’t miss the way the miscarriage came out in those awful clumps and the way something I put in you took something of you away like that.

I don’t miss the way we never touched each other again.

I miss the way I used to feel restraint, Giorgia, the way I used to feel that the distance you put between your world and mine, your bright, loud home and my dark little hovel, was something you were doing to grow something in that space, but now I feel that I was wrong, that you’re gone, that there’s a reason I can’t see your Instagram anymore, why my texts seem to evaporate into the ether, the way your phone goes not to voicemail but to nothing, and so I’m driving now, slaloming on empty streets alongside the gentle dark unmoving shoreline to you.

I have been drinking, whatever, but it is at the moment when dawn cracks open the pudding of night and digs in with fingers of light and it’s raining just a little and everything shimmers with an aura, like a migraine of love is landing on me like a halo or a crown, whichever, and this is the time for us to go on one of our drives, the fast ones where I never stop feeling your leg, drink coffee somewhere outside in a gazebo with nobody around. I know one. Or even if they are around, whatever—as long as I’m not doing it alone anymore.

Things I know:

You will open your door when I arrive. I’ll leave the car idling, keys in the ignition, ready for our adventure to continue, to pick up like six months never happened. I will even put our song on the stereo, the one by Frank Ocean. You know the one. Its runtime is five minutes, seven seconds. We will be in the car before the breakdown at the end, speeding off to something, your mane dripping rain and your clean face of no makeup will not be nervous and I will drive us straight through it to a pocket of humid, sun-licked relief.