Objects in Mirror

I often wonder about people I don't see anymore — as to what happened to them. What became of their life. That sort of thing. Especially those I have been intimate with. Plugged into. Made the beast with two backs with. Known in the biblical sense. Assaulted with a friendly weapon. Did the bam bam in the ham. Passed the gravy. However kindly you want to put it. 

I mostly think that they no longer exist because that is much easier to imagine than them doing other things with other people, being that the world is all about our own perception. It is stupidity to expect two people to perceive anything the same. So it is as though when I last saw them, shortly thereafter, they combusted and dissipated like a puff of smoke. The way Roman candles do. That is the fate of most people I've known. They just — poof — and go away. 

But others I see randomly — more like comets that reoccur — in traffic at a red light, or behind me in the rearview mirror. Or maybe at the grocery store at a distance mulling over which cereal to buy, which meat, which tomatoes. I think to say hello in some amiable way. To honk my horn and wave at them. To smile. To push my cart over to them and to remind them of the time we did something utterly fantastic as though to get reassurance that it actually happened because I am not sure that it really ever did. That we shared some significant moment together and I wasn't simply delusional. But I never do. 

I avoid them unless it cannnot be helped. Unless, we make eye contact at a range that I cannot feign nearsightedness. Or if I cannot blame a faulty memory for a lack of recognition. And then it is an awkward hello, how are you, how are the kids, all the while I just want to ask, in some cases, why did we ever fall out of love? Or sometimes, why were we in love at all? Why did you end it? Why did I? Why haven't you called or written me? I suppose people just don't write to inquire about an ex, of all people. That could be perceived as interest and that is the last thing they would want anyone to think — that they're hung up on an ex. So they live in a state of infinte avoidance and make mistake after mistake to bury someone ten people ago. 

I sometimes wonder was I not even worth a Christmas card, a birthday wish, a happy father's day text, or a thank you to a kind, albeit drunk, message I once sent all those years ago? Was I so easily disposed of that they would be across a rack of cantaloupes, looking away, or faking poor vision. I wonder if I ever really knew them at all, or if it was just a sophisticated delusion. I can still smell, taste and feel some of them. I dream of some, but not of the others. 

Perhaps they only look like someone I used to know. The woman in my rearview and I were never intimate at all. She never stuck her sunburnt knee in my crotch on our first date as she drank a pickle martini in that posh bar. No. That was someone else. Even if it was her, though, it was someone else. We are not who we were years ago, after all. We are entirely different people now, you see. No one stays the same. Not even if they want to. Everyday we become someone new, it's only that we have to lug the baggage of our old selves around — that's what confuses things — that and the expectation of, and the conformity to us being assigned to who we've always been, which is why no one ever believes that people really do change. 

But maybe I have dementia and my quixotic mind is failing me, sparking like a cheap gas station lighter that's had it. Maybe I never polished her porpoise, or shucked her oyster. Maybe we never drank or had dinners, or laughed at each other's bad jokes, or went on any trips to a beach somewhere. Never were engaged. Never married. Maybe that theatre was all in my mind where I proposed and I conjured up actors who each had a role. I saw it in a movie, perhaps. Dreamt it all. The mural on the ceiling is but a figment of my grandiose imagination that runs wild at times. Or, more simply, it is what is painted on the inside of my skull. Maybe it was all just a dream — the ring, the debt, the heartache. Maybe I never parted that pink sea. 

What do they wonder, those both I fail to see and those who fail to see me? What do they think as I avoid them or they avoid me? As they see my eyes in the rearview mirror or as they see me fondling those green bananas, or in line at the pharmacy for some pills to make me happy because life isn't cutting it and it hasn't been for quite a while since I took off the glasses of conformity. Meaningless sex and alcohol and a purposeless job serve as a terrible life jacket. What does it matter what anyone thinks of me or what I think of them? Must I keep my own secrets? The past is gone and it ain't ever coming back. It's not even in the rearview anymore. Those were two different people, years ago. They're dust. 

It is this thing that I was contemplating when I saw her. It was at the grocery. We had been together for only a year four years before and it had ended abruptly and sourly. She was never to send me a Christmas card and I was to never send her one, either. My friends said she was a terrible person and I wanted to believe so for that makes it easy. It is not your fault when there is blame to be cast upon someone or something evil. I'm sure her friends said the same things of me, if they said anything at all, but I don't care about that.

I had heard she called me a monster. I would argue that I was not worthy of that moniker in that I am far too meek to be considered monstrous, just as she might argue that she was not guilty of being as ghastly as I remember her last, the effect of a bipolar mood disorder, or whatever it was the holisitic doctor she went to refused to diagnose and what he blamed on "environmental factors" and chiropractic issues. 

But we were far passed that. I wondered as I saw her looking at cans of soup which it was, and if time hadn't erased the sourness of our parting as often it does. Wounds that become scars that become silver streaks of absolute nothingness. Residual things one can look at as either wasted time or a learned experience. How aptly we become numb to such terrible wounds inflicted by lovers lost, but how badly they sting for that little while, worse than anything. 

I wasn't drunk at all in the traditional sense, but I was intoxicated on what I saw in her first, and it was as though she were suddenly new to me again. I suppose it had been long enough for me to see her that way and time had dulled whatever tragedy that once made me revile her. The beautiful Audrey Hepburn-type look and grace she possessed so naturally. Her doe-like features, which falsely gave her the look of innocence. The soft sophisticated allure of her slender body and the compelling impishness of her large thoughtful amber-brown eyes which seemed to constantly ponder something profound and shimmer as they did. I was transfixed there in front of the oatmeal pretending to deliberate upon a particular flavor when all I deliberated upon was her. She was born again to me and I was the pastor who brought her up out of the water of some green lake — new. 

Our carts were heading towards each other so we were bound to cross unless one of us pretended to need something behind us and turned the cart to avoid the other. I wondered if she might, considering how it ended, change course to avoid me. I was certainly the villain in her story and she might assume that she was as much in mine if she was at all capable of accepting responsibility or caring that much about anything beyond herself. That would be a new development, if so. A new wonderful attribute she previously had not among her many others. 

But she selected her soup and carried on — cream of chicken. And there we crossed paths in front of the rice and sugar and she looked at me, directly, and I looked at her as though I could read something in her eyes that I could not read at all. She grinned, but went on as though I were foreign to her and she owed me nothing but the courtesy of an empty gesture she'd fickly dole out to any stranger. The rickety front-left wheel of her cart squawling a sad sort of goodbye, the lament of a missed opportunity to rekindle or resolve something that died far too soon. 

I didn't know what to think of the grin or the simple pass. I couldn't recall if I had grinned or if I was too stunned to make an expression at all. But confused by the nature of that simple smile she offered me, I stopped my cart and turned to ask for clarification, prefaced by a simple greeting. 

"Hello, Elle." 

Elle was short for Eleanor. Her mother named her after Eleanor Roosevelt, but fortunately she bore no resemblance to her namesake. In fact, she might be the only person I've ever met who bore no particular resemblance to anyone else, rather, others seemed to bear a likeness to her. The aforemetioned Audrey Hepburn lacked other features that Elle possesed most abundantly. She had an embarassment of beauty, but in such a modest way that made the commonest of men, particularly old men, feel as though she were somehow attainable. Maybe she was, I abhored, still thinking of the incident years removed. She stopped her cart and turned to acknowledge me. 

"Hello," she offered plainly as I hopelessly scanned the contents of her cart. She gave me a look, and for a moment I thought she was feigning nearsightedness on me. Or maybe the advanced avoidance tactic of cataracts or total blindness. But she bit her lip and gave me a generic, how have you been, and I answered, accordingly. 

"That is good," she replied. Then the last vestige of that first grin vanished from her face, and she dismissed me with the ever popular coup de grâce of — "Well, it was good seeing you." 

It was a simple and tragic goodbye that meant, "I'm not interested." I had given it many times before to others so I recognized it in a jiff. There I stood confused as to how I didn't elicit some sort of a more dramatic reaction, good or otherwise. I simply got played off with the most generic and thoughtless of responses there was to offer. 

"Bunkum!" I raged to myself. She was faking it. She was being deliberately indignant by pretending I was a stranger. So I decided to pursue her for an answer being that I was never one for things unresolved or any sort of ambiguity. I turned my cart and told her that she looked beautiful. Better than ever. She said thank you, without turning — while selecting ketchup and dijon mustard and that expensive organic mayonnaise I always wondered who bought. Every compliment I gave her, she simply thanked me and carried on. Then, at last, I said that I would have expected a different sort of reaction, which got her to stop and engage. 

"What sort of reaction would that have been?" she asked bluntly.

"I'm not sure. Something." 

I recalled when we first met that I had flattered her senseless because I was so taken by her. A barage of very extravagant yet sincere obsequious adulation worthy of Shakespeare himself flowed from my tongue. And she smiled and said to me, "Flattery will get you everywhere, love."

She stood in front of me and looked me in the eyes. It reminded me of the time we were engaged. When under the Heavens of that opulent theatre ceiling, the light blue sky and puffy-white clouds, perfect lighting, music, and oil-painted cherubs playing gold harps and flying about as though amused by us, that I asked her to marry me, and she replied with an emphatic yes. Maybe it was all in good humor as I was some sort of prey of hers. One she played with. One that she slowly devoured night after night. Eventually, I would be useless, consumed entirely. All that would be left would be my bones. She had been swept up in emotion, the way people drown, as she'd later describe our engagement. 

It was when money and differences of opinion didn't matter and there wasn't anyone besides us to consider. No trespassers or unwarranted guests of the worst sort.  

"Look," she leveled. "This is — awkward for me. So, about a year ago I was in a terrible car accident. I don't know how I survived. The highway patrolman said that to me. The doctors said it. But I recovered. Only thing is, I lost my memory. I can remember certain things from being a kid. Dogs I had. Things about school. Friends. That sort of thing. But everything in the past four or five years is gone. Completely erased. So, I will assume that I knew you sometime during that time? Maybe? I'm sorry — but I don't recall you."

What was there to say? But I managed a clumsy inarticulate response. 

"Oh. I'm sorry, Elle. Um. Wow. Wow! But thank God you are still with us. Um. Well, I'm — I'm — Pete. Pete Best. We — um — this is — uh — well. This is awkward for me. We met at a Christmas party a few years back and — uh — I — um — I never got to talk to you again. I never even got your number. But I never forgot you."

"Awe! Well, hello, Pete. Does my traumatic brain injury scare you off? You can call it TBD, if you'd rather. It's friendlier that way. Not quite as — imposing." 

"No. Um. No. Not in the least. We're all sort of injured or damaged in some way, aren't we? You date long enough and, well, that sort of thing is bound to happen."

"Well, I suppose that depends upon who you date," she contested, chuckling, holding a bag of hazelnut coffee, then tossing it into the cart. "One ought to be — discerning in such matters."

"True," I concurred. "But people can be deceiving." 

It was all a complete fucking lie. My name wasn't Pete Best. Pete Best was the drummer of the Beatles before Ringo. The guy who got kicked out before they got famous. I don't know why I chose his name. He just came to mind. She looked at me and smiled as she had when we were new. When I told good jokes or when I listened to her boring stories of the insurance industry as though they were fascinating. When I rubbed sunscreen on her back on some faraway beach. When she was perfect before she was broken. Inevitably broken like glass is broken and either swept up and thrown away or glued back together depending on the severity of the shatter and the value of the object broken. Or was it I that was broken and it is only my own narrow-minded persepctive that lead me to the former. Perhaps, affairs are as trivial as cheating on a diet, or a biology test, and I am simply just too damn old-fashioned. I'm an outmoded relic of a bygone era.

"Well," she said, "if you'd like my number now, still, I'll give it to you — Pete was it?"

"Yes. Yes." I smiled. Was it possible? This rebirth? A redo? One in which my pride was not fouled, but restored. It was something out of a terrible soap opera. I took her number and thanked her and we parted ways. We ran into each other twice more at the grocery before leaving and we smiled at each other a little more emphatically than before. Fate, it seemed, had intervened on our behalf. It was perhaps unsatisfied with our previous tragic ending, so it found a way to give us a new life. Or so I told myself. It didn't blame either of us. It wasn't me that lied. It was fate that lied for me. It had control of my brain and my tongue. I am, after all, but an empty vessel, a slave to fate.

I texted her a few days later — the customary waiting period duly observed. Like the waiting period for buying a handgun. I asked her to go to the winery where we had our first official date because it had gone so well and I selfishly wanted to relieve it. I wanted to cancel any memory I had of anyone other. She was even lovelier this time around. It appeared the accident had done wonders for her. She claimed it cured her bipolarism, but said she doesn't like to talk about it. She also said she found God, as though he were in her sock drawer. 

She grinned and looked out onto the lake the way she had all those years before. It was as though there were all the same boats out there, the same clouds. It was as though they had recovened for us. It was like time had just rewound itself to the day of our first date. It hadn't, of course, but it was as though it had. 

After the winery, we ate pizza in the same small dock joint. Something involving a plank. A pirate. A parrot. I wasn't quite sure of the name. She told me many of the same stories. I wanted to tell her that we had done this all before, and the more I thought of it, the more like an imposter I felt. Like I was deceiving her. Or that I was some sort of virtue thief, though my pockets were empty, and truly there was nothing virtuous of her to pilfer.

But every time I seemed ready to confess and to tell her that we had dated before, and it ended disastrously because she had been unfaithful, she said something that made me hold back. She said that she had never had a better first date in her life with an accompanying grin that I adored so well and to which she drew her wine glass for a sip that became a sup — the wine stem she held somehow luridly in her supple fingers. 

And so inside of me, my belief in the absolution of truth perished and the thought died and the obituary of it was eloquently written without any words. I kept the empty bottle of wine we drank, which rolled around in the floorboard of my car the way the one years ago did as well. I hadn't the heart to tell her. Or rather, I was selfish and didn't want to tell her because I didn't want it to end again. I loved her and I suppose that it hadn't ever left me, despite the bitterness of our separation and that cancerous betrayal.  

All things end. It is inevitable. Either they end in death or they end in boredom or incompatiblity or hurt and betrayal. Is one way less hurtful than the others? But how often do we get a chance to redo that which we once so loved and to possibly rewrite it. It was a delusion to believe that I could right a terrible wrong I never wrote, but delusional I was no less. And now that she didn't suffer any sort of mental disorder, so she said, perhaps there was a chance and forgiveness was more a reasonable accomodation — or maybe revenge was in order and I could extract it if I could simply learn to unlove her while loving her. 

For the next two months we dated as we had before. I had the engagement ring I had given her before in my pocket ready to give again in the right moment. My only fear was meeting family or friends who I had met before, who might expose me for the charlatan I was and remind her that she had been unfaithful drunk, as she was when she met me, unfaithful to someone else. Those who might tell her that my name wasn't, in fact, Pete Best, that it was Jacob Frank. Yes, Jacob Frank, descendant of Anne Frank — the girl who wrote the diary. Only I hadn't inherited Anne's sense of tragic optimism. I was no sort of Pollyanna as much as I pretended myself to be. I often feel the world is a terrible place, not the bright, beautiful bubbly place that Anne saw it to be while she was hidden away in the squaller of a Dutch attic, hiding from the scourge of humanity. How sweltering it must have been in the summertime in that garret, I considered.  

But I wasn't related to Anne Frank, anymore. I couldn't be. Now I was Pete Best. All I had to do was to avoid her family for the rest of my life. Or perhaps, dye my hair. Or perhaps, have a dramtic nose job or facelift or rely upon their poor memory of me. It had been four years, after all. But then she told me it was time to meet the family and I panicked. I put it off as long as I could put it off. I postponed it. I cancelled. I rescheduled and cancelled again. But it was unavoidable and the ring burned a hole in my pocket. 

We had drinks at the bar where we met. The pickle vodka bar. But all I could see in that jar of pickles was a jar of dicks. Dicks, galore. The jar was screaming her infidelity and my mood continued to worsen with that belittling pickle parade in my mind. Maybe I would end it there and then. I could turn the tables and tell her that I was sorry, but I wasn't ready for a committed relationship. She wasn't the one for me. I was burying the bone with an ex, but it didn't really mean anything. I was drunk. Words that still live in infamy in my soul. 

I didn't want to meet her parents again. Her kooky narcissistic mom and her dad who was like an oak tree and had the personality of sawdust. I thought about all those dicks she admitted to taking once when drunk. Her entire dicktory, as we joked of it. From high school to college to just before she met me. There they all were, floating right before my eyes as she made small talk with the pretty bartender about insurance rates and deductibles. All those pickles in a jar of vodka were ghosts of dicks past. And the vodka was ambiotic fluid for bastard babies that never got to be born. Just floating there for me to see. Only me. Screaming — Hello, you asshole. Hello!

Oh, fuck. I had to tell her. I couldn't just break it off and get revenge. I was no good at revenge. I couldn't. I didn't want it. I'd leave it to her. I was tragically in love with her and didn't know what else to say or do. I went to the bathroom and splashed water on my hopeless face that stared back at me like I was a dope and it was ashamed of me. 

Some old man was in a stall taking a shit. It was the only problem in his life — that shit. He was married and overweight and didn't have another care in the world. He was straining like Elvis once was straining on an absurd gold toilet in Graceland. He groaned, "Lord, ah-mighty" and then his sphincter opened and the Kraken was released with a loud and mighty roar. He might have been praying. But once that shit was over, he'd wash his hands and go back to his table and eat, and all his problems would be over. He couldn't understand problems like mine. I was a damn wreck. I was a walking six foot constipation. He emerged from the toilet and washed his hands, as expected. Then he looked me over in the mirror. 

"Well," he sighed, "time to go home and disappoint the wife."

That was his one-liner in my life. I'd probably never see him again. I went back to the bar and Elle asked if I was okay. 

"Yeah. I'm fine, love. Fine."

"I thought you were in there beating someone's guts."

"No one suitable, love."

The old man passed and winked at me and Elle laughed. "Do a little gland to gland combat in the shitter? Grease the old loaf pan? Glaze the hairy donut?" 

"I'm going to jam your clam and smash your pisser," I warned her.  

"Ooh," she grinned. "Butter my biscuit?"

We played a crude game that started long ago where when one of us would sense the other was upset, we would recite crude euphemisms for sex, usually with an invitation, to make the other laugh. I began it again when we got back together as I had introduced it to her before, and she took right up despite her newfound religion. The more absurd the expression, the funnier it was. Also, the more clandestinely we did so amongst mixed company without them knowing what we were talking about, the more waggish it was. 

But I wasn't fine, of course. I was terrible. I felt I was about to be exposed because I would blurt something out. Or we would see someone I knew and they'd say hello to me — Hello, Jacob — not hello, Pete. Or she'd see the credit card receipt with my real name on it. And then I'd have to tell her. I'd have to explain how our relationship ended and there was no pretty way to put it. It was ugly. It ended in chaos and disorder and it remained in my mind like an unmade bed. Like a dirty dog or sink full of dishes. Like the Hindenburg — burning, burning, burning. I'd have to remind her of what she did. Then there'd be a complete autopsy. It was why we broke up. Neither of us could forgive her, but now it only required me to forgive. And I was as forgiving as Jesus on the cross now that my pride pardoned. 

Then she smiled at me and sipped on her pickle martini. "I have something to tell you, please don't be mad," she begged. 

Anytime someone says they have something to tell you, and please don't be mad, it is something you don't ever want to hear. It is never good news. I knew it. I knew what would come out of her mouth would be terrible. I took a drink and prepared myself. It was all I could do. She was probably going to tell me she mashed the fat with my father who was in a nursing home in Pittsbugh. Then she stopped a waiter and requested a table. 

"Mom and dad are coming. They're up the street and they'll be here in five minutes. I hope you don't mind them joining us. But I really want you to meet them, Pete. It is important to me."

I spilled my drink and nearly choked on a piece of pretzel I nervously chewed. It was over. The SS was coming in and I was going to be sent to the camp. I had zero chance at survival considering I was the most Jewy Jew that's ever been a Jew. Fuck. Oh, fuck. Sometimes there just isn't a better word for it. Sometimes it is the only word there is. I wondered for a moment what Anne might have uttered when those men stormed up the steps and burst into her secret room. I bet it was, "Oh, gumballs."

I had to confess. There was no other way. She had forced my hand. After the waitress cleaned up the drink and got me another, I told her there was something I wanted to tell her. She was quick to interrupt me. 

"You're not breaking up with me, are you?" she asked with a coy grin. 

"No."

"Oh, good. I just don't think I could take that kind of heartbreak right now."

I don't know which of her parents I liked least. Her dad wasn't impressed when he learned I was related to Anne Frank. He looked at me like I was a sissy. Her mom was indifferent all the time to anyone other than herself. Elle told them. She told everyone as though it made me some sort of celebrity. She asked if I had any claim on royalties to her diary. Fuck, I said. I couldn't think of a worse way to make money. I didn't, of course. Nor would I want them. But it was over for me. It was all over. Again. But I couldn't admit it. I couldn't tell her my name wasn't Pete and I was a liar. I couldn't tell her that I secretly wanted to break her heart, as she broke mine, but I ended up falling in love with her again like a damn dope. 

"What is it, baby?" she coaxed. 

"Nothing," I said. 

"Well, let me bun that dog." 

Then she started to laugh. Not chuckle, or chortle, or giggle. But to laugh an uncontrollable eye-watering sort of guffaw that made people turn to look at what was so funny. Like they wanted in on the joke. She put her hand over her mouth and controlled herself long enough to speak. I had never heard her laugh that way before. It was absurd. It was obnoxious. It was like a tranny Hitler in drag speaking to burning torches and piles of burning books for Pride month. Dare you not to dissent! 

"Oh, darling! You know when you approached me in the grocery store, I wasn't sure what to think. Much less, what to say. So, on the fly I concocted that wonderful little fib about being in an accident and," she laughed some more, exorcising the last demons of her humor, "about having memory loss. There was no accident. There is no memory loss. I remember everything. The good — and the bad. I'm sorry. Please don't be mad at me — Pete."

I shook my head in disbelief. What could I say? I had been fooled and her lie was superior to mine. I stared at that jar of pickles. I raged at that pickle jar that maliciously taunted me. It is a wicked game. 

"Relax. The good news is — my parents aren't coming. That was a lie, too. I just wanted to see how you'd react."

"Was I satisfactory?" I scoffed. 

She chuckled. "Oh, don't be mad, Jake. It was — as expected. I wanted a redo. As much as you, obviously. You can't just get a redo, though. When people try again they spend so much time talking about the past they never live in the present. They just dwell on it and it all goes to hell. It ended wrong, Jake. I did an awful thing. Does time absolve me of my sins? Will you forgive me? If God can forgive the entire world, can you forgive me?"

I didn't reply. I remembered suddenly how there was a pickle festival in Pittsburgh that I went to with someone else. There was a marathon. A giant pickle was the mascot and gave everyone hi-fives as they crossed the finish line. 

"Oh, please, Jake! Everyone has been so passionless and freaking boring. No one spelunks the slime cave like you. I wanted to try us again. It was fate that brought us together in that grocery store. Take me home and make mad love to me. Let's pressure wash that quiver bone in this bitch wrinkle."

I laughed against my will. She always could make me laugh. I paid the check. But all I could think about were those pickles mocking me. I had to stare into her eyes long enough to be dissuaded from leaving and to forget about them. From dissipating into a puff of smoke and vanishing altogether forever. 

"You owe me like — 300 blow jobs. For lost time," I joked. 

She smiled. "Wait. Was that an indirect proposal?"

"An indecent proposal," I replied. 

"Well, we'll start on the ride to my place. And theres nothing indecent about slobbin' your nob."  

We made love that night half-drunk. She tore off the condom and flung it across the room and it stuck to the wall like one of those wacky-wall-crawling octopuses you once could get in a cereal box or a quarter machine. I remember them being purple, but the condom was more like an aborted baby jellyfish. Then she squeezed me and pulled me back inside of her and told me to put more ranch in her Hidden Valley, to punch-fuck her rosebud, to give her the baby battter, absolutely filthy, like in those movies we weren't supposed to watch as kids but we sought like they were the Holy fucking Grail. I pushed into her and shampooed the wookie and she convulsed in satisfaction at the same time she took the baby gravy. Her legs quivering. Her slender body rigid as one having a seizure before relaxing as I slowly softened and withdrew my jimmy javelin from that spasming delightful and lushest of warm wet waterholes of the Serengeti. Where animals delighted in each other and refreshed themselves, observing some strange unnatural truth they didn't otherwise observe before Eve — the whore — ate that apple, or fig, or dick. 

I regretted only that I didn't eat that edible flesh flower like an hors d'oeuvre before I launched my meat rocket into her sausage pocket, but like Little Orphan Annie says, there's always tomorrow. And, per usual, my mind became a zoo afterwards when I'd think of such things as the rudimentary behaviors that are at the core of all things, insects and animals, most obviously. People simply care to conceal it.

Zebras are mean biting sonsofbitches, I've heard. I went to grade school with a girl who had part of her arm bit off by a zebra at one of those nefarious petting farms. Giraffes can kill a lion with a kick of a leg. Leopards can't change their spots. Elephants trample and kill whoever gets in there way when determined. And there I lied in bed as she slept in the paradox of the redo next to me, trying not to think of what she did or who she was before. Trying to absolve my mind of all those pickles. What does it matter, I thought — only that past behavior is the surest predictor of future acts. Not that we can't change. But who ever really lets us? 

I was trying to remember that bullshit about people being different people everyday, which I stole from someone else. Then I thought of a lion mauling a baby water buffalo that cried for its mother in this terrible world we all pretend is so wonderfully hospitable. It was all like a bad dream and I was trapped in an attic of my own making, waiting for the squealing of brakes and bootsteps of goons in the stairwell. 

The TV played on after she fell asleep. The remote fell on the floor between the wall and the bed, and I didn't bother to get it. It went to some religious program and some preacher was talking about Jesus as though they were best friends. He smiled like a horse. He said something about objects in mirror are closer than they appear. Something about one ways. Then I thought about the Christians I know who tell me the world is a wonderful place because God makes it wonderful. Everything is beautiful. Everything is happy. This despite the fact that their God came to Earth and was killed for simply being good. He was marked for death at birth. Maybe when he died he said what I said as I lied there in bed and tried to sleep as she dreamt of her insurance business and who knows what else. 

There I lied, knowing I was doomed to be fucked over again. When her ebb and flow ebbed and flowed and washed ashore the rotten algae and jellyfish of her insanity. But until then, I'd park my meat bus in Tuna Town or launch my bone drone all I could launch it. I'd live as paleo as possible — eat, sex, sleep. Maybe I'd market that mantra on coffee mugs and throw pillows and copyright it. I'd try to get my money's worth before someone else split her hamster. And maybe by then I could be good and noble enough to say what those two wonderful Jews, Anne and Jesus, both said when their time came instead of crying like a little bitch. 

 

"Oh, gumballs."