Hipster Love Stories: Paul and Marina

She met him for dinner in a restaurant she hadn’t been to since it was terribly cold outside.  He was an old friend from Los Angeles, back when she used to dance until the wee Los Angeles morning hours, which in any other cosmopolitan city would have still been considered a modest time; without fail, Marina had usually been in bed by 2:30 in the morning, not the 4 or 5 a.m. routine which she had recently become disturbingly accustomed to.  New York had been detrimental to her health and wellbeing in a variety of ways, a good night’s sleep being one of them.

Paul was running late and so Marina sat on the bench outside while her bare legs became the feeding ground for mosquitoes.  She had sweet blood; mosquitoes loved her.

The last time she had been here, sometime in March, it was raining and she was till terribly sad from a boy who said he no longer loved her just a few months before.  She sat across from a Virgo and a Leo, eating roasted Brussels sprouts with bits of bacon, trying not to talk about what would only make her more miserable.  Marina felt better now.  Just as winter had lifted, so had her spirits.

Paul arrived, fixing his green bicycle to a black pole.  In the five years they had known each other, Marina thought he still looked the same, though she was secretly afraid that this wasn’t the case.  She was afraid that her eyes were becoming accustomed to the signs of aging, which meant that she was looking older now, too, whether or not she wanted to admit it.  “Hey!” he said, holding her in a friendly hug that brought with it many years of comfortable familiarity.

The menu had changed, as menus often did in New York City.  Everyone was very into local produce, artisanal chocolates, animals that had been given names and treated justly before taken to slaughter.  The burger on your plate this evening came from a cow named Buddy.  He lived a nice life on an upstate farm until just the other day.  Literally, there was a place like this.  Marina had been there.

They ordered grilled cantaloupe wrapped in proscuitto, a summer watermelon gazpacho, and potato gnocchi.  Later, they would debate dessert.  Marina didn’t like fruit with chocolate and Paul didn’t like tarts of any kind.  Eventually they decided on a trio of ice creams that should generally stick to being infused into such things as candles and soaps, face tonics and your grandmother’s perfume: powdery lavender, rose water hibiscus leaf, bitter orange essence.

Paul was older than Marina by a few years and was still single.  They talked about dating because it so often became the topic of conversation between she and her friends.  Love and the pursuit of said love was an irritatingly ubiquitous, universally understood concept, as easily discussed as the weather.

He told Marina about a girl he fell in love with who fell in love with someone else.  “How long did it take to get over it?” she asked, leaning across their small table covered in half-finished plates of food, hoping to procure some wisdom from someone who had been through it all.  Horrible as he had been, Marina was still not over her own ex-boyfriend.  “I don’t know if I have yet,” Paul said in response.  It had been three years.  Marina groaned.  It was not the answer she had hoped for.  She wanted something brief and concrete, a number like 6 months or 9 months.  “I don’t know if I ever will,” he continued.  No, this was not what Marina had in mind at all.

When it was Marina’s turn to wax philosophic on heartbreak, she brought up another boyfriend, who was less of a boyfriend than he had been a rebound.  “I was so horrible to him,” she said, holding the sides of her temples in both palms, pulling her hair out of her face and shaking her head in emphasis.  She continued, admitting to Paul that any subsequent travesty that befell her was likely a result of karma.

She picked up a glass and put it to her lips.  “I did give him fair warning though.  I told him I was going to rip his heart out.”  It was kind of like that restaurant that named their cows before killing them to make everyone feel a bit better about themselves.  In the end, however, that cow just ended up being a hamburger waiting to be consumed and digested.

Marina hadn’t known what a rebound was, as this boy had been her first.  She met him after a boy – a different boy, the first boy to really hurt her – had told her he didn’t love her anymore.  Will – that was his name – was everything her ex-boyfriend wasn’t: communicative, masculine, supportive.  Immediately, she thought she was in love again, that this person was THE one.  But as the weeks turned into months, her fondness for him began to erode like the beach after a storm, crumbling and falling away in the bright light of reality, after the fog of her last relationship began to burn off.

Timing was and would always be everything.  There was nothing but timing, because timing put you in a certain place at a certain time, that may or may not have been the right place.  Timing could certainly put you in the wrong place at the wrong time – like that woman whose chimney fell through her roof and happened to fall right on top of her.  For whatever reason, she happened to be standing RIGHT THERE at THAT MOMENT – not in the kitchen, not in the bathroom, but right in that very spot in her living room, so seemingly benign.  Out of all the square feet in her 1200 square-foot home, she happened to choose the one that would lead to her chimney-induced death.  Falling in love with people at the wrong time could be like these chimneys.  Totally and utterly catastrophic.

Paul laughed at Marina’s recounting of each and every horror, how she had played him like a cruel marionette, violently yanking strings.  “I didn’t know,” she said, true and earnest, genuinely shocked by her capacity for cruelty.  “I didn’t know what a rebound was.”

“Go home,” Paul instructed, “And listen to Sebadoh ‘Rebound.’  Look up the lyrics.  It’s all there.”  They were the words of wisdom for a man who had nearly seen it all, older and wiser though still vaguely confused by it all.  Later, when Marina got home, she did.

Heart-broken and attractive

A sad, sloppy mess

Lookin’ for approval

And easily impressed

Beware they say, but why would I listen?

I need to know what I’ve been missing

I’m no one you can trust

All little-boy lonely with curious lust

Confusion turns me upside down

Lost as quickly as I’m found

But soon enough it turns around

On the rebound

Call it fate or true love, never forced romance

Fell into a new love

Maybe perfect love by chance

Beware they say, but why would I listen

When it feels this good?

No one lives their life

Doing all the things they say they should

Confusion turns me upside down

Lost as quickly as I’m found

But soon enough it turns around

On the rebound

Yep.  That sounded about right.

Field Trip Part II

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She missed the fucking train.  Carly had managed to grab onto the black rubber bit of the door with a few fingertips as they were closing, with the intent of yanking them apart by the sheer force of her rage and tiny little arms. But she hadn’t made in time.  Carly felt the rubber press against both sides of two fingers, an indication that she had lost the battle.  And so she let them close, banging on the buffed metal door as it pulled away from the station as though it were a cab in the middle of the street.  All that was missing was the “Go fuck yourself!” that generally followed…

Hipster Love Stories: Theresa and Bradley

He found out she was in town.  She didn’t want to tell him because their breakup was all too new and fresh, but she had run into a mutual not-so-friend outside of Intelligentsia while standing on the gray sidewalk and feeling the sun on her sallow skin.

“Theresa!” he squealed, pulling one arm around her neck and kissing the side of her face.  Theresa squirmed under the affection because she knew it was phony and unearned.

Mike was always a terrible gossip – a queeny stylist who prided himself on “wacky” combinations of bodysuits and combat boots, neon tights and hooped earrings.  Nylon Magazine.  Dress-Me-Up-Like-It’s-1993-Again-and-I’m-in-Second-Grade bullshit.  Theresa never had respect for his work, which was likely why she never had respect for him.

“What the fuck are you doing in Silverlake?  I mean, why aren’t you in New York?”

His voice grated at the inside of her soul.  He looked at her with eyes that attempted vibrancy.  He only appeared engaged for the sake of being engaged.  Mike was an awful little snake.  For many reasons, Theresa wanted to run.

“I’m just here for work.  For a job.  I go back tomorrow,” she said.

The truth was that Theresa was in LA to see her new boyfriend, someone she had met a short time after being dumped by Bradley.  She hadn’t told anyone because it made her feel like a bad person, even though she was the one who got broken up with.  She didn’t want anyone to hate her; she hated the idea of people hating her.

“Have you seen Bradley?” he asked.  He stared at her, unblinking, waiting for a response so that he could act accordingly.  He wanted blood.

Mike knew Bradley through work, leaving the two of them in a gray area that didn’t qualify their relationship as real friendship.  They were “peripherally involved” one could say.  Bradley felt the same way about Mike as Theresa did, tolerating him with a hidden contempt.  Mike was an obnoxious, selfish, dramatic loose canon and everyone in the industry knew it.

“No,” Theresa said, still sheepish about the whole thing.  “Please don’t tell him I’m in town.  And don’t tell him that I said not to tell him I am in town.”

“Of course,” he said, placing his creepy little hand with its silver rings and knotted friendship bracelets on her shoulder.  “I’d never do that.  If you don’t want to see him, you don’t want to see him.”

Thirty minutes later Theresa got a text message from Bradley.

You’re in town?  : /

Motherfucker.  She was going to kill Mike the next time she saw him, string him up by the stupid feathers he had glued into his shoulder-length hippy hair.

The emoticon was one that she had used often during their post-breakup communication.  It was meant to relay confusion, sadness, and the fact that she couldn’t eat more than three pieces of Trader Joe’s sushi over the course of a day.  Now he was using it.

Theresa lied, saying to Bradley that she was going to tell him even though this was a lie.  Damage control.  She asked if he hated her.  “Never,” he wrote.  He asked her to come over and see his new apartment, an industrial loft somewhere near downtown.  She couldn’t say no and so she said yes.

Three hours later she was standing in front of his metal door, knocking passively.  He opened the door, the light behind him soft and music floating through the expansive loft – good and folksy music, music with a heart.  It saddened her immediately.

Five steps in, she began to cry.  To her right she saw remnants from their house together: their sofa, his chair, a giant photograph of birds flying over a gray sea.  Everything they had was still together, though they had fallen apart.  She looked at their old living room, only now it lived in a different building and came without her in it all the time.

Bradley tried to hug her, to wrap his skinny arms around her skinny arms, but Theresa composed herself before he could get them all the way around, asking for a tour of the apartment to get away from affection she didn’t want to miss anymore.

Theresa tried to keep her sadness at bay while she peered into his bedroom, a long and narrow rectangle filled with more familiar things.  Her crappy yellow dresser, the broken coffee table from the Fairfax flea market he helped her haggle down to $40, his modern bookshelf and his modern bed.

But she could no longer control herself, confronted with evidence of their disintegrated love.  She began to cry again.

Bradley had been quiet the whole time, watching her from behind as she walked silently through the corridors of his apartment.  It felt different with her in it.  It felt like it used to feel when they were together and, for a minute, Bradley thought that he could have it all back.

He regretted the things he had done to her.  He regretted the things he had said.  Theresa was a complex beast who often found herself mentally exhausted by her own unrelenting questions about her life and her future.  They met when they were both too young and Bradley didn’t know how to help her.  He found complexity to be bothersome and so he avoided it entirely.  But now he missed her and her crazy brain.  He missed the way her lip quivered when she got upset.  He missed how she got mad at people for cutting her off while she was driving.  He missed how she made the same goddamn turkey sandwich every day.  These were the things you forgot about when you had to tell someone you didn’t want to be with them anymore, because they were the quiet reasons to stay.

Bradley sat on his/ their couch, now worn with two year’s use.  Theresa stood above him, avoiding sitting down because she knew that he would try to kiss her.  She knew that he would try to hug her from the side like a little boy and tell her he missed her.  Theresa knew that this would happen and she didn’t want to cry anymore.

“Come heerrreeeeee,” he wined with arms outstretched.

Theresa continued to stare out the window until he grabbed onto her legs with both arms, pulling her closer and onto the couch.  She sat there, stiff, not wanting to reciprocate on account of her new boyfriend that she couldn’t tell him about.

“Will you give me another chance?” he asked, but Theresa couldn’t.  She couldn’t and it was tearing her apart.  For the first time in their entire history together, Bradley was trying to be open.  He wanted her back and was telling her he wanted her back and Theresa cried because it was already too late.

She stared at the concrete floor and the rug of his she never liked.  She kept staring at nothing as he held onto her at the waist and looked at her with very sad, very blue eyes and then she told him that she was on the other side of a bridge and she wasn’t looking back from where she came from yet because it was too soon.  She pointed at her chest and said to him, “I know inside here that I can’t be with you right now.  I don’t want you to wait for me.  I can’t have you wait for me.”

Theresa couldn’t bear to say the words and Bradley couldn’t bear to hear them.  And so they sat there, in silence, on their old couch, holding each other, waiting for one of them to let go.

 

Field Trip

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Hipster Love Stories: Leslie

Their plane came down over a city of dead trees and sad backyards.  Los Angeles, with its strict gridlines and repetitive rows of boxed one-story houses, glistened in her memory, disappearing swiftly as they approached the ground.  Leslie looked out the window through the tired eyes of a sleepless flight chasing sunshine too quickly across the globe, rushing towards it with a stupid haste.  Just a week before she had been in the same place, crying into her sweater and struggling to breathe.  She felt better.  Relieved.  Less burdened by her own thoughts.

She was home.  Her other home.  Back to her peeling paint city, dirty as it ever was.

When she got on the subway she felt alive and not dead.  The previous two weeks she had spent pent up in her own thoughts, the masochistic running of a movie made of disappearing memories through her head – how he said thank you to servers in excess, his second choice of beer if the bar didn’t carry Stella Artois, the bent bristles of his abused toothbrush.  She had to remove these memories, replacing them with the things that she had thought about before she met him.  Success, work, paying bills, other stupid boys built for breaking hearts.

On the subway the air was still and deathly hot.  Leslie’s body had acclimated to the absurd Los Angeles climate.  Sunny days.  Seventy degrees.  Bare legs.  She felt sweat rush to the surface of her skin and cling to her button-up shirt.  Her cashmere sweater, leather jacket, and sleeping-bag-esque jacket ramped her resting temperature dangerously close to overheating.  She felt her heart race in her chest and her breath shorten.  She looked around at the 8 a.m. work crowd – a hangdog group if ever there was one – and wondered why anyone would want to live in a city that made them look so awful.  Leslie looked better, having stayed in the sun long enough to acquire a healthier flush and a few new freckles.

An hour and fifteen minutes later, she heaved her luggage above ground, rolling down Cornelia Street at 10 a.m.  Spring had snuck in while she was away.  The breath still escaped her lips visibly if she huffed hard enough, expelling the air and turning into magical steam, but her bare hands did not burn as she walked – a welcome change.

The birds had come back, chirping like idiots and jumping through naked trees.  They conned you into thinking that they were perched in lush and verdant trees overhead.  In this, the birds were liars, preemptively stoking your desire for summer three months before it was scheduled to arrive.

She opened her door, pushing aside shoes and stacks of mail, coming home to the mess that she had left: piles of clothes in the bathroom strew over small white tiles, dishes in the sink, an unmade bed.  The vegetables she had unfortunately purchased the morning she left had gone bad; the kale rendered a sickly shade of lime green.  All of it was evidence of how little she had cared about anything else but being sad.  She just wanted so desperately to leave, and so she left.

Leslie peeled off her layers and crawled into her messy white bed.  She grabbed her cell phone filled with too much of him – the things she was too weak to remove until just now.  She thumbed through photographs, pressing DELETE while keeping her vision protectively blurred, not wanting to make sense out of shapes she knew pertained to him.  When she was done with that, she moved onto emails that she had stupidly held onto and then reread for some sort of clarity as to what she had done or what happened to them.  She would never find anything here that would make her feel better and so she removed them, too.

And when she was done, she picked up the pieces – her clothes, her sheets, her dishes – and she made all it right again.

Hipster Love Stories: Ricky and Lydia

He lied to his friends, telling them he was going to Los Angeles for work and not to get over Lydia.  There was too much in New York that reminded him of her.  Even his apartment, which he had cleaned four times since they broke up, was still haunted.  He found strands of her hair everywhere.  This was something he used to enjoy – annoying as it sometimes was – because it meant that she was his.  Rick was the only person in the universe that got to pull strands of Lydia’s hair out of a cashmere sweater.  Now he couldn’t wait for the day that he never saw those telltale blonde strings again.

It was nearly eighty degrees outside, forty degrees warmer than back home.  Ricky lay on the hot concrete next to his father’s pool, feeling heat from above and below.  He felt spoiled, being able to leave New York on a whim.  He didn’t want to be in the city anymore and so he left.  His life afforded such emotional lavishness.  This was one of the perks of being a working actor.

Ricky wanted to bleach out every memory of her.  He wanted to drown her voice in a swimming pool of saline water.  The sun beat down on his white winter body and he felt the details of her begin to blur.

“Ricky!”

He heard Ramona call at him from the French doors leading into the kitchen.  Ramona was his father’s housekeeper.  After his dad had divorced Ricky’s mother, he had hired Ramona to take care of him even though he was a grown man.  Ricky’s mother, of course, criticized this move.  “The man can’t fold his own clothes.”  “Hope she signed a prenup.”  “At least it will save his next girlfriend from the reality that is your father.”  His mother was an angry person, which was likely why his father had divorced her.

“Ricky, do you want a smoothie?”

Ramona loved Ricky and Ricky let her.  When he arrived, there was always cut pineapple in the fridge and pulp-free orange juice.  He sometimes wondered if any woman would be capable of knowing him as well as Ramona.  She was like a mom, only with no strings attached.  Women always came with strings – big, thick, knotted stretches of rope used to anchor cruise ships.  Lydia had had plenty of these: daddy issues, body issues, whatever.  Ramona didn’t have any.  Ramona was complete, unadulterated, unabridged love.  Ricky liked to think that this wasn’t just because she was employed by his father.

“Yes, please, Ramona.”

He watched her disappeared back into the darkness of his father’s Spanish revival home.  Ricky turned his face back into the sun, keeping his eyes tightly shut, listening to Siouxsie and The Banshees sing “Dear Prudence” over the Bose outdoor speakers.

LA already felt safer.  He had no way of contextualizing Lydia’s day according to his own.  In New York, his time was still tied to her time.  He knew at 12:20 she was standing in line at her favorite deli ordering a turkey sandwich on rye toast with hot mustard.  He knew at 3:45 she was tired and irritable and she would have a coffee to make the feeling go away.  At around 6:15 she would email him, asking where he was.  If she were in a good mood, she would ask if he wanted to meet her for dinner.  If she was in a bad mood, she would say nothing, only ask about his day.  But here, under a hot desert sun, Lydia’s day – her mornings, her afternoons, her evenings – were all irrelevant and placeless within Ricky’s own world.

As the hours passed, he felt her slipping away on a breeze.  He hoped this was a sustainable detox.  His inevitable return to reality made him nervous, afraid he would be incapable of maintaining such sun-induced forgetfulness.  New York awaited him; he would eventually have to go back.

Ricky watched Freddy scoop leaves out of the pool.  Freddy was fourteen years old, the son of rich parents who still believed in instilling a work ethic in their children who would be given million-plus trust funds when they turned eighteen.  Ricky’s father paid him $20 a week to clean the pool, which Freddy used to buy pot with.  His parents knew, but they didn’t care; they were more concerned that he was learning the value of money.

“Gross.”

Freddy was bent over the filter, its lid removed and placed near Freddy’s foot.

“What’s up, dude?”

“Look.”

Ricky peeled himself away from the floor and walked the circumference of the pool to the where Freddy was.  There, curled into a small ball, was a wet, drowned, and totally dead squirrel.

“How the hell did that get in there?” Ricky asked, his hands falling somewhere between the bare skin at his hips and his swim trunks.

“Maybe he swam in from the pool?”

“Do squirrels swim?”

Freddy looked up from his place on the ground, just above the dead squirrel, and shrugged his shoulders.

“Ricky!”

It was Ramona walking across the green lawn with a pink smoothie in a plastic cup.  He could see condensation build around it, the cold contents in a losing battle with the heat of the outside air.

Ramona reached the boys, both of whom continued to stare at drowned thing below.  “What are you looking at, Freddy?” she asked, looking down.  “Oh, my,” Ramona said, there being no need to answer at that point.  “Does it smell?”

Freddy bent closer to the filter.

“Yo, dude.  Don’t do that,” Ricky said.

“What should we do with it?”

“Bury it?”

The three of them stood quietly for a moment, torn between reverence and disgust, no one wanting to touch or disturb the body.  If his father were here, he would hire someone to remove it.  He would call animal control or something needless because his father was a rich person who had forgotten how to be a man.  Without thinking, Ricky grabbed the filter and removed it from its circular hole.  He felt the saturated weight of the squirrel as he walked across the yard, grass sliding between his toes.  He turned the corner to where the trashcans were placed out of sight and lifted the black lid, turning the filter basket over and listening to the loud thud of the squirrel meeting its empty bottom.  And for the first time in weeks, Ricky had a five-minute window where he didn’t think about Lydia, not even once.

Hipster Love Stories: Tina and Jared

Manhattan Avenue lived in perpetual spring, selling fake flowers year-round in violent shades of neon.  Hot pink, tangerine, cobalt.  Valentine’s Day cards and candies sat propped in windows.  “50% Off” the signs read.  Tina scoffed, wondering why anyone spent money on that garbage to begin with – preconceived affection, a consumerist vision of what love is supposed to be, corporations making money on something that didn’t exist.  “Love,” Tina mused.  “Bullshit.”

Tina walked in the cold, hoping the fresh air would cure her bad humor.  She had been bitter and angry for the better part of two weeks, cooped up in her apartment thinking of Jared the boy who told her he loved her and then took it away like a cruel magic trick.  Before today, it had been too cold even to venture outside and take a distracting walk.  And so Tina just let her malaise brew.

People waited outside Five Leaves for brunch, the sun glaring off of their Ray Bans and shiny, unwashed hair.  Tina didn’t understand people who waited in line for brunch.  In her opinion, nothing was worth the wait.  Eggs were just eggs – you could get decent enough ones down the street at Eleanor’s.  And aside from that, Tina was quite capable of just cooking eggs at home.

Love and brunch were probably similar in that way.  All of these people willing to wait for forty-five minutes while hunger ate away at their bellies likely thought that Five Leaves was the be all end all.  These people were steadfast in their love for its coffee, its granola, its pancakes, whatever.  The truth was, you could get good food anywhere in New York, at any hour of the day.  Five leaves was just another restaurant.  There were six hundred more within a half-mile radius.

The same went for love.  Love had this way of making you think you needed one specific person.  That this person was “It.”  No one could make you feel like this person or laugh like this person.  This, of course, was a lie.  In a world filled with millions of people, thousands of whom Tina walked past on a daily basis, there had to be more than one person in this world for each person.  But, in the throws of blinding, brain-numbing love, that’s how Tina had felt about Jared.  Now he was gone.  But it was okay – Tina knew that in three months she would feel the same way about someone else.  Anyone could service these fuzzy love needs if we convinced ourselves enough.  It was all just projection, anyway.

Tina walked past laughing friends and judged them all – less because they were waiting in line for brunch and more because she had fallen into a miserable little hole that she was trying to claw her way out of.  None of this was about them; it was all about Jared.

I’m falling in love with you…

Bullshit.

What made Tina the most angry was she didn’t believe him to begin with.  In the back of her cynical little brain – the one that she had cultivated over the course of her twenty-five years here on this earth – she knew he would take it back.  They always took it back.  “I’m falling in love with you,” he said to her, and she said nothing at first because she knew what a person risked when they responded to statements such as this.  She gave him nothing and he said he didn’t mind and for a week, Tina managed to feel in control of her feelings.  Next time she knew just to leave it at that.  There, on the corner of Bedford and Lorimer, Tina vowed never to tell another boy that she loved them.

The park was filled with people with children and people walking dogs.  Obligations.  Tina was happy her only obligation was to herself.  She didn’t need anyone or want anyone.  The thought of a child or a dog or a boyfriend for that matter filled her with the overwhelming sense of self-sacrifice.  Tina took a seat on a bench next to another woman, sitting alone and sunning her painfully white face.

Tina watched planes pass in the distance, moving at a pace that belied its true speed.  They came in rows, one after another after another, at three-minute intervals – huge pieces of metal casually traveling behind one another at four hundred miles per hour.  Tina wanted to be in one of those planes, coming and going, preferably to someplace warm.  Miami, South Africa, Melbourne.  After Jared told her he didn’t love her anymore, she booked a flight to Spain but then cancelled it after looking up the weather.  She’d rather just be depressed in her apartment at no extra cost, then be holed up in some hotel in Barcelona with a day rate in euros.

A couple walked past, holding hands.  Tina cringed.  There should be a moratorium on public displays of affection, if only to maintain her sanity.   She wondered if she would ever hold Jared’s hand again.  Probably not.  Still, she wondered.  If he came back, there would be no reason to put stock in him, aside from her own foolishness.  “Hurt me,” she would say, tying herself down to the tracks and feeling the rope burn at her wrists.

Fucking boys.

Tina was done with them.  All of them.  There was something refreshing about her current frame of mind.  Her brain was unclouded by love.  The excessive happiness she had felt over the last few months had numbed her to the outside world.  Between December and January, all Tina thought about was Jared, which, she imagined, had likely retarded her brain.  Now, she saw the world again with fresh eyes.  Cynical and bitter, but fresh nonetheless.

Another Day, Another Field Trip

Starting this week, I will be featured as a columnist on The Jealous Lover, a Brooklyn-based blog covering music, music, art, and fashion.  Check back every Thursday for more of my Hipster Love Stories.  Click through image below to read “Hipster Love Stories: Maggie and Richard.”

 

HLS: Pam

Pam drove and a song came on the radio, some pop song sung by a man begging a woman to let him love her.  She laughed, cynical and rude, and turned the song up loud on crackling speakers of a car that was nearly as old as she was, singing along because she knew the lyrics.  Pop songs, no matter how much Pam did not care for them, were endlessly memorable, tapping into her subconscious with their easy lyrics and grade school rhymes.  This had something to do with music theory or how all people were similarly simple to manipulate.

A warm wind whipped through the open windows of her car but she did not feel free.  She hated that about Los Angeles – its in ability to cooperate or compliment her most miserable moods.  Some days you just needed a rainy fucking day, sitting in your window and bemoaning your fate like the ugliest, most unwanted puppy in the pet shop.  But no, LA, with its trees that were green year-round and its skies that were blue 90% of the time, made you feel like the depressed freak at the Happy Circus, the introverted, gothic sister of the homecoming queen.

The song continued, the singer humming and hawing in a smooth R & B way.  He was trying to pry this woman away from her bad boyfriend, promising her love and protection and material things that girls supposedly care about.  These were things Pam had heard before, nearly verbatim, and she laughed again, amazed at man’s collective ability to feel conviction in love.  She had learned not to trust these convictions, instead seeing them as intense, fleeting things that meant nothing down the line.  There was no use reciprocating in the lies in order to create a grounded reality in emotions, a false sense of permanence.  Change was inevitable in life.  Love was as unstable as anything else.

Pam hated that pop culture immortalized these passing phases, making it appear as though love was as permanent as this very unchangeable song, burned onto CDs and MP3s, fated to exist in this song-state forever.  It would always be 4:07 minutes long and the lyrics would never change.  A finished product.  Pam thought about the man who wrote this song and who he wrote it about and she could bet a million dollars that they were already over, that he was already bored with this girl.  Still, the song lived on as this constant thing, conning listeners that this love was equally definite.  And so love’s lie is propagated like a sourceless rumor.

You should let me love you

Give you everything you want and need

“I need a whole lot more than love,” Pam thought.  Firstly, she had student loans – massive, nasty, Ivy League loans in a degree that got her a job that paid nothing and would likely continue to pay her nothing.  Paying those off would have a tangible, lasting impact on her life in terms of real interest.  A boy, however, with his love and promises, was temporary, despite any professions of the contrary.  Pam felt bad for the poor sucker she dated next and the one after that and the one after that and that and that, each one getting less and less of the real her because the previous ones had taken away her ability to give, the desire to expose herself.  Despite what people said, behind walls could be a quite comfortable place to live.

She felt herself hardening, turning more doubtful of men as she got older.  Pam had stopped believing the things that boys told her, no matter how enthusiastic they were about her or how genuine they seemed.  They were all salesmen, feeding you the right lines to sell you the last lemon on the lot.  They were bankers, taking your money with promises of great returns and buying yachts in the Caribbean for themselves.  They were professional, hammer-wielding destroyers of things.

When the song ended another one came on – this one sad and depressingly and not as easily mocked.  She flipped through immediately before it could drag her down.  Fuck sad songs.  When she Pam was sad, she wanted to listen to Britney Spears.  Pop.  Garbage.  Tasteless and easily swallowed.  She wanted to listen to songs that appealed to the part of her brain that longed to remain in third grade, when the most trying part of her day was realizing that her mother accidentally gave her her brother’s lunch.  Turkey sandwich on white bread and not ham sandwich on wheat.  Back when boys had cooties and she still loved her parents without question because she hadn’t found out they were just people yet.

She stopped at a classic rock station, holding it on a song she recognized.  She held it there until she was sad all over again.  Bob Dylan, you mother fucker.  The man had an uncanny ability to con you into thinking his songs were upbeat and lifting with his squirrely harmonica and a quick guitar, but his lyrics hit your sad button with an creeping force.  Pam didn’t change the song.  She didn’t slam on the shuffle button or sing along.  The song sat next to her in the car and she would travel with it for a time until it was over.  The sun beat down through Pam’s window, bouncing off of her pale thighs and her smudged Ray Ban’s, exposing the dent on the hood of her car along with other damaged things.

HLS: Terry and Michael

Terry stood near the bar, behind other dark bodies waiting for their fix.  If ever there were a time to drink, this was it.  When Terry was younger she drank on a near-nightly basis, just because that’s what you did, especially living in the middle of fucking nowhere.  Eighteen, falling over onto the dirty floors of a frat bar, laughing hysterically in the arms of an equally slammed girlfriend.  Nineteen, trying every vodka on the bottom row of the liquor store shelves (plastic bottle required).  Twenty, nursing her very own bottle of Boon’s Farm Strawberry Wine, the liquor equivalent of soda pop, possessing the ability to get you drunk only by sheer volume of consumption and not actual alcohol content.  Her tastes had been refined by the time she reached the legal drinking age, preferring a sensible Capital Morgan’s on the rocks to anything else, shots if she were feeling particularly miserable.  As Terry got older and the ravages of a hangover began to effect her life in rather unappealing ways, she ratcheted down her drinking quite a bit.  Now, Terry found that she enjoyed a few cocktails at birthday parties, weddings, and work functions.  And, most importantly, after getting totally and utterly destroyed by a boy.

She tapped the two gentlemen in front of her on the shoulder, impatient to obliterate any memory of what had happened to her over the course of the last twenty-four hours.  It had only been a year since her heart had been broken badly and it was happening again.  It was her fault; she let it happen.  Michael’s stupid voice persisted in the back of her head –  “I’m sorry” and “I don’t want” playing over again on loop until she could think of nothing else but his phrases of choice, each of them just different words telling her, “I don’t love you.”

“Shot of Patron,” she commanded to the bartender, compulsively picking at the splintered wooden bar with a fingernail while she waited.  She watched him pour from a cold, fat bottle, liquid running over the rim of the shot glass – a dangerously generous pour.  He placed it in front of her on a polite paper napkin accompanied by the saddest looking lime wedge she had ever seen.  Even in the darkened, cavernous lightening of this shitty bar, Terry noticed its sallow green skin, either picked prematurely or left to nearly rot in their refrigerator.  She didn’t care; she didn’t care about anything at the moment with the exception of getting terrifically fucking hammered.

Terry picked up the small glass with her long fingers, the liquor obliged to slosh over the rim and onto her skin.  She knocked it back before any more could escape, biting into her sad little lime wedge and tasting nothing but the bitter sting of alcohol on her tongue.

Her friends were waiting on the dance floor.  These were people who would never intentionally hurt her and around them she felt safe.  Anyone she had ever dated had ended up hurting her and as she threw her fists in the air and felt her legs light and moving underneath her, Terry wondered why she wanted to date anyone in the first place.  She felt the music pulse and wondered what the appeal was and how she was continually able to put the past aside and try again.  The fairy tale didn’t exist, she knew it, but she kept trying.  This perhaps made her stupid by definition.

She had been doing considerably well all evening, stuffing her overwhelming sadness down deep in the vain hope she might be able to bury it there forever.  The tequila cursed through her in a casual way and she felt her limbs loosen and forgive normal structural obligations.  Terry felt the motion of her hips and the passing of her long, thick hair in front of her face.  She felt the buzz and the music and the bodies bumping into her unapologetically.  But there, in the middle of a song with no lyrics and a bass line that stuttered and shook, she felt her heart being ripped from her chest, strings snapping hard and silent, until she felt separated from it entirely, left with a big, gaping hole somewhere under her Chambray shirt.  She knew this feeling well enough and dreaded its ramifications – the doubt and insecurities, the emptiness, the daunting thought of eventually rebuilding.  She pulled her hair in front of her face, hoping that behind its curtain she could perhaps transport herself to a few months before she had ever met Michael.

When the waves of hurt came with greater frequency and intensity, Terry knew she wouldn’t be able to hold it together long enough to get home.  The pain sneaked up on her, crashing down heavy on her shoulders and seizing her chest with its inescapable grip – an emotional stroke, paralyzing and impossible.

Terry left without telling anyone, leaving her friends to dance in their own drunken happiness.  It was cold outside and as Terry held her hand up to hail a cab, she debated stepping in front of the next approaching car just to feel something other than how fucking sad she was.  She was so tired of the psychotic yo-yo of it all.  Loving someone and then trying desperately to hate them when they didn’t want you anymore.  Sitting across from someone and pretending to give a shit about where they were born or if their parents were divorced.  Memorizing what kind of candy they liked as a child and filling their Christmas stockings with endless bunches of it.  Terry wanted to physically to break something – an arm, a hand, anything.  She was just sick of nursing her own stupid heart.

Terry got into the cab, the air sickeningly warm.  The driver didn’t understand where her apartment was.  On the radio someone with a refined British accent talked about some horror in Libya.  She felt herself perspire under her wool pea coat, overcome with acute sensation of being suffocated.  “Ah!” the driver said, “The south side.  Okay, I go.”  Terry was thankful he had figured it out in time.  She didn’t have enough energy in her to summon the amount of aggression and irritation usually required to get cabs to drive over the Williamsburg Bridge on a Saturday night.  She stared out the window, feeling tears well up uncontrollably, then streaming down her face in steady flows while they unburied the last hour, the last week, the last month.