thebrito’s blog

We must come to believe certain things;
all your insecurities are honey for me,
oh and likewise, oh and but,
you move beneath dispassionate clouds,
while I am too often a slug without my snail shell;
it’s inane, isn’t it, you can say it
because I know you think so,
fearing the salt monster when it isn’t a thing,
feeling an absence that hasn’t
materialized or dissolved or
what have you.

My person is based
on rejection of persons
and they on ignorance of me.
I feel I have swallowed a hammer.
In laymen’s terms,
I’ve swallowed some laymen’s shit.
Oh Jesus Christ.

I feel like the kiss that moves along
the inside of your thigh: inevitable.

I am the sun, splitting our view of the
universe, the universe for God’s sake!
I come up and over the moon; I’m
god damn liquid fire! I’m hot birds
on a wire! The last walk of Jesus Christ!
Van Gogh’s teary superstitions.
History’s latest unchecked revisions.
Cancerous sub- and sub-divisions.

And yet!, and yet!, and yet!,
and yet!, tomorrow never knows.

I am my own
old song and dance;
months into
weeks into days,
tedious subdivisions.

I pivot on my axis,
there to each horizon see
a meaningful conglomeration.

You spur that plain
old song and dance,
don’t you? Well
don’t you?

I’ve arrived late enough
to hear the punchline
but not the joke.
There was laughter.

I

I’ve grown steadily beyond
the wooden picture frame.
Offsetting the wallpaper,
green stripes, goddamn,
just existing is treasonous.

Hack me up as my body
unwinds, thick like jungle
vines, your discerning eye
your machete, because
indeed you have a knack.

Ambition, purpose, the
Grand Scheme of Things;
you see why I am afraid?

Universes coalesce,
fucking science class,
oh yes, and ethics as
well. Jealous of a

II

terrorist, peace of mind
that came, I won’t use the pun
but goddamn how it is and isn’t,
serrated edges: I tried for a while to make
sense and then I thought better of it,
or did I?, no I didn’t.

Was it ever any use to
say, You think too much.
? Well no it wasn’t,
counseling with cancer,
never How does that feel,
no one honestly wants to know, just
You’re making this uncomfortable for me,
So sorry.

III

I feel copacetic, just this
moment. Or perhaps I
am humoring someone.
Nothing is ever wrong.
Who could hate anyone?

I’m climbing grassy green
hills and in the distance
there is nothing, not as
far as I can tell. The trees
so jealously guard their
infinitesimal prize as if
even being is too much:
clap hands, trees, oh
glorious nothing, I’m
madly obsessed, I
thought of naked life
yesterday, and then
again today.

[Author's note: The word was "white," but I was already going to do this story.

8/10. I'm happy about this one. I said a lot about sexuality, so I hope people don't just glaze over and think this is a weird story.]

                When Celeste Marian lost her virginity for the first time, she was fifteen, sprawled across her great white bed, a little nervous, but only a little. Before that, she nearly lost her virginity to a tampon at the age of eleven in a bathroom at Six Flags, while her mother tried to tell her through the door just what to do, and she was more than a little confused about what was happening to her body, but that is another story. Here, she lost it to Brad Marshall, whose virginity was buried, quite unappreciated, in the distant past.
                As she climbed atop the throne upon which she would be deflowered, she felt vaguely the energy between her legs, which was a mad swarming compared to the gentle fluttering in her belly. Passing through her were currents connected to other things; she was a conductor of love scenes in movies, of lyrics in songs, of the things her friends had told her. Sex was a hodgepodge of things one could only imagine from the other side of the hill. It was distinctly mythic, an experience that could not be felt in its explanation. It was obscured; she felt that everything was cloudy and clumsy as Brad Marshall climbed on top of her, although it might have just been the beer.
                As he looked down at her, there was no denying that she was quite a specimen. Some girls just don’t need to make an effort. Celeste was ahead of them all. When a girl is just pretty enough, she’ll be ostracized and gossiped about until she knows her place, but Celeste, well, she was ahead of that, too. While her body was exquisite, most people were concerned about the way that the exquisite body would fit into clothes. When girls were happy with their bodies but disturbed by this rule, the clothes became sluttier, erring more on the side of body than clothing. Celeste didn’t have to make a distinction; she wore what she wore, so that from day to day boys sitting behind her would either lay heavily into imagination, or scramble to the bathroom after class because there was nothing left to it.
                What sort of girl could inspire masturbation, the sort of masturbation that can’t wait until the end of the school day, in a plethora of ADD boys, was a question indeed. Most kids did not think about the nature of sex appeal; in middle school sixth graders and seventh graders learned from eighth graders that big boobs were good, and they had to agree, so everywhere they saw them they felt that they were in the headlights, confused, gravitating like moths toward the light, while small-chested girls stood off to the side nursing their insecurities silently, with “Slut!” beneath their breath, but feeling equally confused. In this way the grand system of sluts and jerks and prudes and wanna-bes developed, a vine around the tree of social interaction.
                Brad Marshall was one of these confused, instinctive people, putting his penis where it felt good because it felt good and why follow the logic anywhere? As she spread her legs, and as he did put his penis where it felt good because it felt good, a more thoughtful guy might have noted that the tremendously confounding appeal of the legendary Celeste Marian lay in her apparent innocence, however false. She did not ever address her sexuality. At school, a pimply boy (whose charm lay in his gentle personality, which would aid him greatly when the world was not so cruel, but he didn’t know or didn’t feel it) would sit across the room during one of those damned “Socratic seminars” not listening to this one kid talk ignorantly about feminism in an astoundingly offensive way, but instead looking at Celeste’s nipples, which poked the thin cotton camisole to make themselves known, and she would be focusing her attention on the aforementioned ignorant kid, with the tip of a pen against her succulent lips absent-mindedly, and in all this the pimply boy would feel greatly uncomfortable and worthless, but on top of everything, it would somehow seem as if that thin camisole was just something that Celeste had thrown on, that she had been too lazy to put on a bra, she didn’t care, and this was certainly supported by her blonde hair, which was completely naturally, and fell about her face in soft cascades and somehow seemed to be the hair she had slept with, and somehow it was just that she was resting her pen against her lips because she was deep in thought, considering the philosophical and social implications of what that one kid was saying, and after all she made very good grades for a girl so fucking hot. Even the nerdiest of kids, completely aware of the paucity of his social situation, of his chances with any girl, especially Celeste Marian, could still be duped into thinking that she wasn’t trying to be this perennial sex symbol.
                But to say this is to unfairly suggest that she tried at all. There is no evidence of this. In fact, a great component of her innocence was her effortlessness when it came to her looks. Because for every little bit that she tried, her innocence went away. Effort could be measured in makeup; the lids of sluts were heavy with eyeshadow, but Celeste wore none, freely batting her eyes as though there were something in it, but there never was. If she tried at all, no one ever knew it.
                So, as all the bits of what sex was supposed to be rushed through her like jigsaw pieces to different puzzles, Celeste Marian, who had so far sucked numerous dicks and been fucked by even more fingers, felt the great member of Brad Marshall (not as great as the other girls had made it out to be, not by far) push inside her. Her insides felt tight, and her hymen stretched until it tore, and she winced. The worst was over, she figured, except that the feeling stuck around for longer than she supposed it would. For this, she felt lied to, except there was no one specifically to blame. But he began to heave himself against her, clumsily, as always, and the look on his face seemed to say that he felt good. She began to feel good as well; the pain seemed to orbit this point between her legs, the only point at which they were connected, and then make steadily longer arcs away. When she looked into his face, he seemed far away as well. She didn’t know what she had expected. They were boyfriend and girlfriend, but it had been just a month, and what did that mean? Her mind struggled to pick up some great boulder, some coarse imitation of Atlas, but she quickly gave up and concentrated on the dull pleasure between her legs. If that’s what he was doing, that’s what she would do. They were two people engaging in two different activities that only happened to involve each other.
                But he came rather quickly, and then he pulled out, letting her fall suddenly through a hole that had not previously been. She told herself that it was good, it was how it was supposed to be, and it fit some of the ideas she had had, in some way, so somehow, it was good. This is what she told herself.
                But there was that significant bloodstain that she had not been considering. It horrified her, this dark crimson spot in the center of the soft white sheets – it was like a Gottlieb painting – even though she had obviously known that it would happen. How could something natural feel so disturbing?
                Of course, Brad Marshall was too busy; too busy to spoon, which she hadn’t particularly wanted anyway, and definitely too busy to drive her to the store to buy another set of sheets. He was off, and she wondered only in passing just what he could possibly be so busy with, then she looked up “how to remove blood stains” on Google, which gathered an unnerving number of hits, but also to the fact that she could pick between hydrogen peroxide, spit, toothpaste, and simple soap. She went with soap and, as she began to rub away any hint of her prurience, she thought about just how strange it was to have to hide oneself away like this. It was all so obvious; death of innocence, bleeding out into the clean whiteness. How contrived.
                So it was perhaps a little less contrived to her when they broke up, a week later, with hardly a sharp splinter sticking out from the point of separation. This did not jive, exactly, with the way things ought to have been. She should have at least been upset (she did manage to force out a tear), like in those TV shows about California, but with her feelings in flux she began to think that everything might very well be a substitute for everything else. They had had sex a few more times before the break, in the pockets of time that her parents would leave, and once in a car, but each of these times was the same, whether she was on top or underneath or turned around, it felt the same, and she began to intuit that he was a clumsy, even though the girls claimed otherwise, because, and here was the most disturbing part, she bled every single time. She was fast becoming skilled with the soapy brush, and thought that she could easily work for the mafia getting stains off of walls and fancy tablecloths. Then Brad Marshall told her, “It isn’t working out,” which might have been a substitute for, “I’m seeing someone else,” or, “I think I like men,” or, “I’m tired of your vagina;” any or all of them could have been the truth. And so he went off, presumably to find some other girl, some other vagina, not because there was anyone more aesthetically compelling (there wasn’t), but because this was the way of most boys given medication for neurological problems they didn’t have raised in upper-middle class neighborhoods where the most fun thing they could do was get drunk and then hijack a shopping cart in the Wal-Mart parking lot and then drive it into those bushes with sharp leaves. Needless to say, Celeste did not take it personally, except for the fact that Brad Marshall, on his quest for social domination of the kind that would fall apart when he failed to make it through his first year of college, would probably tell everyone that he had been the first guy to bang Celeste Marian, and that he had dumped her mercilessly; he would say she was a bitch or something vague like that, which she proactively refuted in her head, because she thought she was a rather sweet person.
                This, in fact, is just what he did. She went about school seething that day, but only inwardly, because on the outside she was beautiful and smart and probably a virgin even when Brad Marshall said otherwise. She would give everyone the eyes that said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” and then beneath that, simultaneously and impossibly, “Who are you going to believe, hm?” Everybody silently cast their votes, with most girls claiming guilty in their jealousy, and most boys claiming innocent in their hope, but all of them secretly knowing that they couldn’t know anything. It was Celeste Marian, after all.
                She could make substitution her own. She would substitute Brad Marshall for someone else. She would substitute the moderately irritating pleasure with something less… ephemeral. Within a week she was she was on top of Andrew Rollins on top of her bed again. It was better than with Chase Marshall, and it was better for doing the work herself, but it felt wrong, because there was that pinch at the beginning. Always the sharp feeling of tearing, as if her body was made of paper, as if she was not supposed to be doing this at all. When she felt the blood trickling, she rode him harder, in frustration, as he searched her face for a thought of him. Boys such as him were not incapable of love. It could be drawn out by time, or by a girl so fantastically womanly, such as Celeste Marian. But her vacant look told him all that he needed to know.
                When he came, that was it; it didn’t seem fair to her that a woman’s orgasm was so dependent upon the man. If she could finish first, he would still have time. But he was like the guy who said the party was over just when he got tired. She slid off, annoyed, and he rolled over to kiss her, smearing blood on the sheets in the process. She turned her face so that his lips only landed on her chin. She was already thinking of scrubbing the sheets.
                The next time they had sex, it was in his bed. She bled again, and he still came first. He said, “Sometimes it takes a few times for it to break completely.” She ended it, and, three guys later, was beginning to think her hymen was like in that movie, THE THING THAT WOULDN’T DIE. It just didn’t make any sense. But at school, she was the same Celeste Marian as always, even with rumors like flies about her face. The rumors helped, actually; when it was just Brad Marshall claiming that he had been “the taker,” it was at least possible, even if Celeste’s stride showed no signs of fatigue. But, several weeks later, with five guys all claiming her virginity, announcing that they had seen the blood (“I got some on me!”), well, people became extremely dubious. It seemed like a conspiracy, quite honestly, as if people were simultaneously going insane, feeling their fantasies of Celeste (everyone obviously had them) to be true, or maybe all of these guys were attempting to commandeer the high school hierarchy with the same dumb lie. But these ideas were half-baked, somehow, so people were left to wonder; even the rare kids who knew better couldn’t help but take interest. Everyday new speculations would be born of insignificant things like what Celeste was wearing or what sort of grade she got on a test. They tried desperately to discern the tenuous strands that tied together this spider web of a mystery.
                As the weeks wore into months, it became less the stuff of daily news and more the stuff of legend. Although she let up on the sexual activity considerably (on occasions she would think, “What’s the point?” and then get horny again), but every month or two a new boy would make his way into the club that had fast gone from elite to conspicuous. People would turn this over in their minds, and then throw it away. Some of them would chide, “I suppose you’re going to tell me she bled,” and he would say, “Exactly!” and then realize his mistake.
                Each boy, of course, thought that every other boy was a liar, because, well, she really had bled for him. But there was no friction, because each of them had silently come to the same conclusion: that sex with Celeste Marian was like sex with every other hot girl. They all missed her from time to time (she never went back to any of them, lest they find out the truth), of course, and they still jerked themselves off to the thought of her, but she could easily be substituted for Nancy Perkins, or Ashley Cohn, or any of the slightly less-hot girls who, for some reason they wasted no time thinking of, suddenly faded from view when they put their penises where it felt good because it felt good. Life was not as dynamic as a horny sixth grader might have guessed.
                When the local high schools pooled into a grand senior high, school-specific suburban legends began to mingle. Naturally, the tale of Celeste Marian’s various lost virginities rose like scum to the surface. Six hundred people took passionately to the task of evaluating her. Undeniably, she was the prettiest girl in school. Each of the other queen bees felt annoyed, quite simply, by her very presence. She outshone even the bustiest seniors, some of whom had supposedly been videotaped for Girl’s Gone Wild at college parties. (It made them feel cool to go to college parties.) The most irritating thing about it all was that she seemed to not to know just how hot she was, somehow. Some of them thought, “The slut doesn’t even like to wear bras. Like, doesn’t she care?” except that “care” sounded like “cyaire.”
                At the eve of the chance to change one’s image, Celeste was feeling rather conflicted. Inside, she wanted to change her habits, because she typically attracted the sort of drooling Neanderthals (guys and girls) that, at this point, she was having a hard time even pretending to tolerate. It was true that she was naturally intelligent, to the point that school required little effort, whereas these people were clearly not, but she liked to think that if she had been less genetically favored she still would have tried not to be a blubbering idiot. She wondered if it was possible to tactfully shirk the advances of guys who only wanted her vagina and girls who only wanted the safety of her social aura.
                On the other hand, what would she be giving up? She couldn’t say that she didn’t like being a legend. And she felt that her turgid social calendar hid an insidious bareness that her mind was not prepared to deal with should she find herself with too much free time, and without male attention that was disgusting and at the same time flattering.
                Essentially, too much was unknown. But she realized this in herself, this fear of change, and couldn’t say that it was admirable. So she took the middle road, as reasonably as she could. She decided to swear off boys until… well, she hadn’t though it out. She let that loose end dangle freely in the wind. She only knew that she did not need boys, not at this point in time. When the primal part of her faintly cried out about sex as a natural activity and a healthy stress relief, et cetera et cetera, she reminded herself that there was little pleasure to be gained from such dude-bros and two-pump chumps. So she quit, cold turkey. She knew that this, at least, could not hurt her image. There were already so many stories about how she was and was not a virgin, and this, she guessed correctly, would be diluted in the vast sea of new thoughts. She would then become mysterious and unattainable. She could accept these advances, even if it meant that there would be subsequent whispers of, “But she never puts out.” Nancy Perkins and Ashley Cohn “put out” notoriously, and they were fast becoming crack whores. “Putting out” was not on the to-do list.
                The social climate was not unanticipated, because Celeste Marian really had quite a knack for these sorts of things, but not everything was as she had expected. There was Michael Fool, for example.
                Michael Fool was trendy, good-looking, and a genius (said some), but he also didn’t seem to give a shit. He wrote in the school newspaper, which is the only reason anybody ever read it. He introduced everybody to bands and movies that no one had ever heard of yet everyone seemed to like, and in the end nobody felt like he had been an ass about it. For that matter, it was as if he was friends with everybody, and completely without shame. He was even nice to Chris Harkin, the kid who ate pencils.
                In class he drew remarkable pictures of essentially anything and everything in his notebook, which people would sometimes flip through in wonderment when he went to the bathroom. Once, when a teacher witnessed him doodling, she said, “Mr. Fool, now what is it that I just said?” and he quoted her, verbatim, on the relationship between feminism and realism in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, all without looking up. While the teacher huffed in obvious frustration about the merits of “letting one’s teacher know that one is paying attention” or some such nonsense, Celeste Marian was there on this occasion. She began to feel pangs of something, but it was difficult for her to discern…
                Without meaning to, she took an interest in him. In English class, they were often the only two people who ever had anything to contribute to class discussions. They had dialogues without ever really speaking to each other. He, for the most part, seemed not to be interested at all, which ground at the very base of her mind like nails on a chalkboard. It also aroused her. This was as opposed to the dirty looks she got everyday, which only temporarily soothed her ego. She had just never met anyone as enigmatic as herself.
                And it was to her advantage, because there are always words surrounding enigmas. Beneath rumors of her purity lay rumors of his. He had never had a girlfriend, so they said. Celeste Marian, being Celeste Marian, might have supposed that “they” were not to be trusted, but she also had nothing else to go on. And, in this case, they were basically right.
                Michael Fool gave a shit about many things beneath his pretense of giving that shit about nothing. He was especially concerned with purity. No one knew why this was, but it was undeniably so. He had never held hands with a girl, “because they’re dirty,” he would say, faux-jokingly. While he was nice to everyone, girls at parties always noted his serious aversion. In middle school, seven minutes in heaven had been a no-go. This, along with his singularly exquisite sense of style, was the reason for rumors of his homosexuality.  People generally did not believe these to be true, however, so new theories arose, of how his mother beat him, and of how he’d been touched by his aunt. No one believed these, either. But it didn’t really matter. He didn’t give a shit. Not about the rumors, and not about the jealous girls who proposed them.
                Celeste did not give a shit about them either. She was the exception to the rule, and she knew it. This was her motivation for doing many things she ought not to have done. She was the exception, and she could get away with it.
                But what she resolved to do was so absurd a thing for Celeste Marian to do that “resolved” was hardly the word for it. She was never sure of herself. Synapses fired angrily back and forth for the duration of her premeditation. But, at the end of English, she found herself pulling Michael Fool aside and asking him if he would like to go out to dinner. She felt the eyes of everyone. She could not have felt safe in the janitorial closet, because she was Celeste Marian and he was Michael Fool. She could already feel the words surging in peoples’ chests like the disgusting creature in Alien.
                He agreed, to her slight surprise. She honestly did not know what would happen. She didn’t know what she was even doing, really. For the rest of the day, she walked around cursing herself inside and being the unshakeable Celeste Marian on the outside.
                At dinner, he was quite the gentleman. He picked her up and then he paid for them both as if he had been the one to ask her. But she knew this was not submission, but another force entirely. When they talked, she realized that she had never known what it was like to speak with someone who wasn’t an idiot. Who, quite frankly, did not seem to want to get into her pants. She felt love (so that’s what those pangs were) and disappointment, sweetly wrapped together.
                There were more dinners, in which he became increasingly less standoffish but only in the context of himself, and more movies, in which they held hands finally. But he wouldn’t kiss her at nights. During the day she saw him around, talking to anyone and everyone, and she felt jealous. She felt suspicious of every single girl. She thought, “Who am I?” and there was no answer. He spent his only alone time with her, and yet she felt increasingly neurotic.
                After more dates than she had ever collectively had, she knew she couldn’t take it anymore. With a mouthful of Thai food she spontaneously proclaimed the works, with no stops, the don’t-you-think-I’m-pretty-why-don’t-you-touch-me-is-there-someone-else, which started with a vague nonchalance but quickly brought her near tears, which was strange because Celeste Marian does not cry about boys. In fact, hadn’t she sworn them off…? He calmed her down and kissed her. His lips were moist and warm, and she wondered if he really had never done this before. He didn’t explain himself, but she was beginning to understand, anyway.
                How should the boy who had never held hands before feel about the girl whose virginity was claimed by a multitude of predatory guys? The division would stay, and it would widen, perhaps.
                 So, on a weekend when her parents were conveniently out of town, she lured him. It was as simple as that, and she wasn’t proud, but she also didn’t know how else to move past the issue. He showed up thinking that he’d have dinner with her and her parents, and she was alone with a bottle of wine. It was the most romantic thing she had ever experienced or done, which isn’t saying much for Celeste Marian.
                With the wine as his nepenthe, he was moved to laughter and she to urgency. She kissed him frantically, all the way up the stairs, and then onto the bed where her virginity had been repeatedly lost. They undressed, and with her above him, kissing his neck, he felt warm behind his eyelids but he also felt words rushing back through him, about every single boy he’d ever heard of touching her. Suddenly her hot breath was not arousing but oppressive. She eased herself onto him, ever so slowly, and then began to move.
                When they came they came together, like no one ever does. He felt something trickling on his thigh, and when he looked, he saw blood. He sighed his relief and kissed her. She grimaced on the inside, but on the outside she was still Celeste Marian.

                  Work had been a bitch. He couldn’t remember when it hadn’t been. Rather than suppose that it was his perception that was off, he clung bitterly to the idea that his days could have been better, on the whole. It was not all relative. It couldn’t have been, because that would have necessitated that these awful days were actually okay days, and that the okay days were actually good days, and he’d be damned if he looked forward to days that were just okay.
                  For her, however, it really was relative. As she sat across from him composing her salad in a white porcelain bowl, he put a large piece of chicken in his mouth and then, without ever having closed his mouth, he began to speak around the chunk of bird:
                  “Work was a bitch.”
                  She nodded blankly. “Oh?” she said, with the slightest bit of coerced interest reluctantly forming the curl of the question mark.
                  “Mm,” he mumbled quickly, as if what he was about to say was not at all contingent upon her pretending to give a shit. “Jack’s an asshole, and he has no idea what he’s doing. Double whammy. A monkey could run this company better.”
                  She continued to nod, having never actually ceased. It had been an okay day, relatively speaking, she figured.
                  “You’re welcome,” she said.
                  “Huh?”
                  “Nothing.”
                  “Say, we have any balsamic vinegar?”
                  She looked vacantly at pantry door. “Somewhere.”
                  He grunted, and in doing so admitted that if she wasn’t willing to go get it, then he didn’t really need it anyway. She responded with silence, an ambiguous gesture which she commonly used and which he never sought to interpret. Life was too short, he figured. For her, it was all relative, and for him, life was too short. These philosophies were not explicitly contradictory, but in this case, they never strove to get along or even to meet. Two trains on separate tracks travelling in opposite directions.
                  It was cliché, the whole lot of it. Neither of them ever thought far back in their minds, because this led to the question: How did I get here? This, in turn, led to the mind’s montage of hundreds of clips from bad movies. Instead, they turned to their philosophies. As she sat up in bed reading some trashy novel she had picked up from the airport weeks earlier, she thought, Well, it could be worse. But thoughts such as these come in pairs; this one was married to, Well, it could be better. Her subconscious spent much of its energy playing the part of bouncer for the sake of that fragile semblance of hope for life.
                  He, on the other hand, had not read a book that wasn’t business-related in twenty years. As he clicked off his bedside lamp he pulled the covers over his head to hint to his wife that, yes, she was still awake. He thought, Life is too damn short.
                  He was not a gerontologist. If he had been, making love to his wife of twenty-nine years might have been at least technically appealing. Instead, he dozed off to thoughts about money, the pursuit of which was far more interesting than his wife’s sagging body. It was a defensible desire, because he knew that it potentially meant a nicer house, a bigger yard, a bigger pool, a nicer retirement, and even nice things for his wife, should he ever get around to that. So it was, Life is too short, why not fill it with nice things? But this mantra, too, had a certain iniquitous duplicity; if life is too short, it frees one from certain moral and societal constraints, but then, life is too short, so where is the solace in that? But a man can stop his logic where he needs it to be.
                  She turned off her light at the end of the chapter, which ended thusly:

                  Maximus lurched forward suddenly, gripping her arms and holding her close against him. “Regina,” he whispered, “You’re all the woman I need.”
                  She could feel his gentle breath in her hair. “OH, Maximus!”
                  “Call me Max,” he said. They locked eyes, and then she felt his manhood pressing against her stomach.

                  She lay in the dark, thinking, What a cliffhanger! Better save the sex for tomorrow night. She fell asleep before him because, although he had had more time like always, he spent it thinking about how she still wasn’t turning off the fucking light.
                  When he finally did fall asleep (“fall” was not always so apt a word for the idea of repose, but in his case it was, if only because of when he hit the bottom), the night commenced to pass at an unreal speed, because there was no one awake to experience it.
                  But suddenly, his feet hit the carpet and he hobbled to the bathroom awkwardly, dropping to the cold tile to unleash his dinner into the toilet bowl. In all its momentum, time came crashing down upon itself. He felt consciousness pressing in even as he begged it not to, thinking that if it would just hold off, he could crawl back into bed and back into sleep without that horrifying hour of wakefulness that afflicted him so often thanks to his swollen prostate.
                  As the last bits of chicken and acid dripped into the toilet, he breathed deeply through his nose. He hated the musky smell. Fully awake now, he stood slowly and turned to stare at his bewildered face in the mirror. He looked as if he had been picked up by a tornado in the night. There was no rhyme or reason to the ravines that ran helter-skelter through his face.
                  When he walked back to the bed, he saw that the window was open, and the curtains were flailing to the side in the night air. His wife was not in the bed.
                  He didn’t know what to think or do, so he lay down. He faced the window, and time was not kind to him. He watched the old oak’s branches move this way and that, and behind them he saw the sky change colors. He finally drifted into a light sort of sleep, like soft thin sheets that the slightest breeze might set loose. When a crow alighted on the window sill, the click stirred him from the place just inside the doorway of sleep. His eyelids lifted just barely, and he saw the black bird sitting there. Before he had time to be surprised or even confused, it transformed into his wife. She walked over to his side.
                  “You look pale,” she said. She felt his head. “And you’re warm.”
                  He could feel his mouth hanging open, but he couldn’t close it. He felt stupid and clumsy. His tongue seemed to fill up his entire mouth, that or he had been chewing on cotton balls in the night, unbeknownst to him. He didn’t know how this could be, but he was pretty sure the bags beneath his eyes were swollen and actually obscuring his vision.
                  “Goodness,” she said. “It’s chilly in here! Did you open the window?”
                  He thought he was shaking his head, but it occurred to him that maybe the world was shaking from side to side, and his head was just in place.
                  “Urgh…” he said.
                  “Oh gee,” she said, looking down with a look on her face that was perhaps a cousin of concern. She felt his forehead again. Her lip made a little pout. “I’ll call work for you, how about that?”
                  He tried to nod, but again, he wasn’t sure. Maybe his body was in revolt, only responding when it felt like responding. He looked at his arm, laid sleepily across his body. Could he move it if he wanted to? Nothing. But then, was he only thinking about moving it, instead of trying to move it? It was as if he was inside his head, and he could not find the controls to anything.
                   She picked up the remote and clicked on the television, without looking at it. “Let me get you something to eat,” she said. “You look awful.” She walked out, and through where she stood he saw the screen.
                  There was a flock of white birds standing in what looked like an African marsh or something. “Urrr…” he said. He reached for the remote, but then, his mind was in it and his body wasn't. He saw his arm in exactly the same position, looking for all the world like it was a dead limb, even turning a light shade of gray. “Brmph…” he said. He couldn’t hear the narration. All he could hear was, “Hrmb brmf fr krbtldj rmm…” as if the television was trying to respond to him in his own language.
                  “Algghh!” he moaned loudly.
                  From downstairs he heard her shout, “Hold on a sec!”
                  “Glrg!”
                  The birds were taking off, all of them at different times but collecting together like they were one patient thing, slow and careful, and then they were all off, all of them at once, moving toward the sky…

                  “I’m really sorry,” said the voice on the other end of the line. “This is really awful.”
                  She stood in the kitchen, which was finally truly clean, for the first time in who knows how long.
                  She said, “Yes, well, you know what I like to say…” She paused.
                  “Life is just too short. You know?"

For those of you who have already experienced your first year of college, you’ll probably agree with me, and if you haven’t, there are some good lessons in here, so pay attention. Arranged thematically:

1. I really hate metal. I think it’s really awful. It’s playing right now. I really hate it. I really hate metal. Also, I bought Minute Maid Lemonade “MADE WITH REAL LEMONS,” and it’s only 3% lemon juice. What the fuck. I’m never buying anything else from the Coca-Cola Company again.

2. Sex is an absurdly loud activity, especially at four in the morning when I am/was sleeping.

3. Laughing is an absurdly loud activity, and it makes me mad when I imagine that whatever they’re laughing at probably isn’t funny.

4. Everyone is weirder than me. I know, strange but true.

5. Black people can be loud, but white kids who like metal are always louder.

6. If you want a black friend (I do), you’re going to have to try really, really hard, because they don’t want to talk to a cracker like you, and also, you probably shouldn’t say vaguely racist things like “black people can be loud.”

7. I had no idea so many kids liked metal!!!!

8. Somehow, the size of your speakers is inversely proportional to quality of your music and, incidentally, the size of your dick.

9. If you leave mean notes on the door of the annoying guy who plays bass for four hours every day at an impossibly loud volume, it will just encourage him.

10. Psychically willing anger to Bass Guy never works either, for some reason. But also, you can’t knock on his door because you’re inherently a pussy. Also, if you’re Josh, you might knock on his door but the music is actually too loud for him to hear, and then the RA has to get a key to his room, then open the door and say that’s too fucking loud.

11. Archaeology is fucking boring. I don’t care which Native American tribe gets the Kennewick Man. I wouldn’t care if the French somehow finagled George Washington’s body. I wouldn’t care if they raped it. Well, except in the sense that I find the idea of necrophilia vaguely offensive. It’s not more offensive if it’s George Washington, that’s what I’m saying.

12. I need to not be judgmental about the fact that some people are horrible at writing English papers. I am horrible at playing shitty music on bass guitar. Everybody is horrible at something.

13. I FUCKING HATE THIS MUSIC, I WANT IT TO STOP!

14. If you give Josh a one dollar dry-erase board with Chewbacca on it (thanks Jessica), he will draw multiple wookie penises on it.

15. College is only cool if you go to HARVARD or PRINCETON, otherwise you’re a cocksucker!!!!!!

This illusion greatly moves us;
I see the Great Machine!
But you and I, two tiny gears,
so clearly spinning free.

I knew you once, and when we touched,
your grooves fit into me.
But when you moved, you knocked me loose;
lost in the Great Machine.

Oh, it is sad to see myself,
it is sad to think it sad
to take such a look at myself.

Well let’s see, now, afraid
of alopecia, loneliness,
of finding myself inside the

womb that gives birth to
the most pathetic
should-haves could-haves,

well fuck me, if I should
see that somewhere
in space and time, so thank

the lord that I cannot
divine a thing, that
I am carrying on anyway.