No One Else Will Do

Sam wrote several books that only a few people have noticed. Many more stories and poems. An anthology, or two, of short stories. Childrens books no one's child reads. Dozens more unpublished in notes and broken thoughts. Titles linger. Lines, words, ideas, yet to be birthed, of which he murmurs in the emptiness of night for only his pillow to hear. If his pillow could talk, it would say great things about him. Sam is true to his words, it might say. Pillows know such things of people — the way dogs know such things.

Some things Sam wrote when he was alone and brokenhearted — or so he thought then. But he long felt as much as some things hurt, he never knew what a broken heart really was. Other things came when he was alone and happy. He has never wrote for money, nor will he. A person is compromised once they do. Especially if they begin to depend upon that money to make a living.  A person that doesn't write for the love of writing is hardly a writer. They are as literary carpetbaggers.

Sam wrote while he was in a cage about being free and while he was free about being in a cage. He wrote while he was with someone, as well. They were not for them at all. Nor did he ever pretend as though they were. Which is why they didn't relate to them, and why he felt that pall of guilt over him because he was living in such a way with a person he didn't truly love or desire. If they did read them, they read them with a languid sort of morbidity — as though they knew they were not the matter and as though they sought only to delve into his psyche to decide how long to stay. Sam wrote for someone else because no one else will do.

He knew it then, as well, or felt it, though he didn't consciously grasp it. He didn't solicit their opinion or press them of their thoughts because those words
were a betrayal of sorts — as sinister as sneaking off to a hotel across town and making love to some barlette. Writing of another woman is far more sensual than fucking one. The woman he wrote for is a woman who he, at times, didn't think to exist, which, coupled with his betrayal, cast him to the ninth circle of Hell in his Treachery and all the effects thereof, he thought. Beneath all the other monsters — eight circles of them — and between Judas and Lucifer. God forgive me for cheating anyone out of their due happiness, he prayed. And though he witnessed them stumble further into the same loveless abyss, or worse, he prayed to be absolved still of his part in their lovelessness.

He bore terrible guilt to want more than his lot. To want more than that which life ever gave him or that which he went out and got. Or of that which didn't rot in the dank cellar where he cast and plot, where he wrote how I ought to love and how he ought not. How silly people are to think they can define or make rules of love. To place it upon some timeline or schedule.

We buck so ardently against our upbringing to be so unsettled, he considered. To be malcontents in that way and have the audacity to hope for something more. Not something that can so easily be displaced, or replaced, as it is manipulated. How many couples do you know that would not move on in a week or two if parted by some unfortunate fate, or act of betrayal? As though someone else's betrayal absolves them of their love.

Sam desired frankness not politeese. Impetousness not some scripted and revised script as seen on TV. To be a part of some two person act that plays along with what everyone else does. He wanted someone with the power to devastate him. Someone he coud not live without and without whom he would be wholly and emotionally bankrupt and devastated. Someone he invests everything in and who invests everything in him. Someone with whom, if death doth steal her, he hath stolen him as well. "Does that Shakespearean romanticism no longer exist?" he pined into his pillow.

So he carried on in life creating her so fancifully in his mind for years because he couldn't have her in reality — never really expecting to meet her. What are the odds, after all? He wrote out of necessity because he couldn't bear the enormous weight of her absence and the lonliness of life without convincing himself of the thought that she existed. And though she may have only ink for blood, paper for body, and an everchanging setting, fields of interests, occupations, eye colors, and a wide breadth of ages she has lived through, she is, in fact, all the same living person.

"Man, are you mad?" a friend asked, questioning his desire to live "consumed by fiction" and not with some past ex the friend admired in a lustful way Sam could no longer. Sam countered that she's less fictitious than anyone he has ever dated, or anyone out there on a website scrolling through fifty men for one, for now, with that unholy asterisk that he too can be replaced at any given moment, if need be, just like her IPhone. That vaunted disclaimer. To what depth is that love? That is heresy.

"If that is reality, man, please, leave me alone to my fiction and the pleasure of myself and my delusions! Let me ruin in the self-destruction of my hope that there is someone more."

Nothing returned. The friend considered him crazy and let it alone. Everyone is crazy in some sort of way. Still he drooled over Sam's ex and wished he could have been so intimate with her. Perhaps he would pose it to Sam, that he could ask her out. Maybe he would anyway.

Sam defined this unknown lover as he wished for her to appear. But as various as she had been, she exists in some form. That he firmly believes. So he often wonders how closely what he writes resembles her. What things are the same and what things are different? Perhaps she lives someplace else. Somewhere not here. Perhaps she is too young or old for him. Maybe she is a continent away. Across an ocean. Perhaps she was never born, or born too long ago. Or maybe she is across the street and he is just unaware because he doesn't know his neighbors and he doesn't get out as often as he would like. He is busy at home, reading and writing of her. He is writing of her in bed, late, skipping sleep to express something of someone he wishes to find or that he may have found already, but it is a secret best kept and he is a vault. He hopes that she is just around the corner rather than in a cemetery, but the love would be no matter and no less.

To believe in someone so entirely meaningful and unique is dangerous because there is a good chance you'll never meet her and so you spend your life alone or you spend it with substitutes. As much as he detested statistics and mathematical probabilities, Sam considered that there is a statistical probability that he'd never know her. That his entire life will be spent dreaming and pass him by and she will not make herself known to him, nor he to her, because fate isn't in his favor or it doesn't have only him to consider.

And so in some kitchen in a small apartment in New York City, someplace he has never been and wouldn't ever go unless he knew she was there, a beautiful woman names the rat that frequents her apartment, Romeo, in place of him. And she gets drunk, probably too often, and pines not over an ex-boyfriend, but over the person she has never met, but who certainly exists, she inexplicably knows, because she can feel that he is out there. Somewhere.

But for now, the rat will have to do. Perhaps he will turn into that person if she kisses him, she considers after a night out before she drunkenly belts out the Meatloaf song that she would do anything for love, but she won't do that, which her neighbor interrupts to tell her to shut the fuck up.

Sam would be the rat if it meant being so near to her. He would take that risk of being killed by the super, or fed poison, or being eaten by angry cats in the building just to crawl through her wall and see her face. He would live a life as the rat if it meant in the end he could be with her. As detestable as rats were to him, there was nothing he wouldn't do to know her. Maybe she sensed this, too, and for this reason she was kind to her nightly intruder. Maybe she would write a story about that rat and it would come true.

She could have had almost anyone at the bar, as every night it goes for her, giving them impressions of her soul as keepsakes, rubbing her soul thin, but they would not do. She has had her odious share of blunders trailing her reputation like tin cans as we all do. They're all the same because, they aren't you. There are guys who are like you in some sort of way. Who might have briefly satisfied her loneliness. Who once adored her and made her laugh and who might have matched wits with her for a while and told bad jokes to her and who might even have done that thing with their tongue that you dream to do to her, but they're still not you and only you will do.

There is at least one thing or two they wouldn't do, or one thing or two that makes them not you. They wouldn't sacrifice a kidney or a heart, even. If it ever came to it. But you would. Without hesitation. They wouldn't understand her fondness for the rat and not kill it. They wouldn't tolerate and embrace it because she loves it and so they love it, too.
They wouldn't leave their phone out on the counter, or not instinctively look at other women when they pass because they are so enamoured with her that no one else exists in that way. Every other woman pales in comparison, as they do to you.

They wouldn't walk seventeen blocks carrying her home because she wore heels out that night and you couldn't find a taxi for three blocks and when you got to four and found one you just wanted to go on carrying her because she was drunk and laughing as you've never heard her laugh before. It is one of those moments you will not want to forget. Though she is drunk and will not remember tomorrow. It doesn't matter because you will.

She is there. You are here — those fateful three words written on maps so you can get your bearings and learn where it is you need to go. If it was only so easy. But you can feel her. When she loses her keys you know she left them in the door. When she watches a movie you know when she will curl her leg up under her and exhale. You know when she wants ice cream and when she is sad. You yawn when she yawns and you stare up at the dark ceiling as she stares up at a dark ceiling. When she longs for you in that empty and lonely bed, nearly passed out and dreaming of you. Your face isn't clear to her. It isn't what matters. Just as her face isn't what matters to you. It is much deeper. It is in the soul somewhere buried like a fat ruby in a pirate treasure. X marks the spot. It is the energy within you and that within her and you would know it if you happened to sit next to her just once. You'd look at her and know. She would know, too. And everything would suddenly make sense as it has never made sense before to both of you.

The books Sam has written are upon a shelf somewhere. In an online store. On a blog that can be reached from anywhere in the world with the right combination of keystrokes, or with a little luck. Even someone in New York City, or Moscow, or Toledo, who he has never had the chance to carry seventeen blocks with her heels slung over his shoulder because he didn't want her feet to get dirty. Even a rat, skilled enough, could fumble with a phone and there he would be. He would suddenly appear on Facebook or somehwere on her kitchen counter. Romeo, the rat, hath intervened on their behalf. Love is a splendid thing. The most valuable thing to own, yet cheapest thing to buy because it is free. Those books, those stories, they will survive him. And in that, whether she is alive yet or not, he may still know her and she may know him.

He likes to think she writes, too. He assumes that she writes. Maybe she stays up late and loses sleep because she writes better when everyone is sleeping. Or maybe she is out of practice, but will fall in love with it again and they can trade letters soon. He likes to think that she might find his book by chance, maybe in a bargain bin, or read a story he posted somewhere, quite by accident, and find it compelling and necessary to respond because it spoke to her. It arouses her and in her great arousal she realized suddenly the great deficit she has had to bear but that she seeks to immediately remedy no matter what it takes. No matter the discomfort, or the fear of the risk. That of giving someone else the entirety of your heart and not just a facsimile. He likes to think she knows that she is one in a million and not of a million. That the tide is affected by her moods and the sun revolves around her.

He hopes she realizes that the only reason he writes is in hopes to find her. Not for money or fame or attention any of sort. For her to read someday and think, "All this for me?" Maybe she will catch a train here, he dreams, because trains are far more romantic than planes. But even if he is in a cemetery when she finds him, he hopes it may stir deep in her still in knowing it was for only her that he wrote. May something in those words speak so directly to her that it cannot be ignored. May it live in her, and excite her, as the dream of her once spoke to and lived so passionately in him. As it does now, and as it shall always.