August 23, 2005 - 10:44 p.m.
you stole five cent candies from the 7-11 and I thought you were so cool
because your last name was Bond
just like in the movies
in your parent's oversized house,
you took advantage of their passion for vacationing, celebrating their almost constant absence in contemplations of our own adolescent boredom and the newness of two-week spurts of puppy lust
I used to get sick to my stomach when we were almost alone together
I should have seen it coming
the long hair didn't quite sustain the illusion,
but I enjoyed the camping
you were the underdog, the surprise win
a boy who would have failed my mom's class, and most of the others, if not for my positive influence. you provided the drugs, I showed you how to pass. older, but not wiser, I taught you a few things about pre-dinner blow jobs and smiling sincerely at parents
you lucked out with a girlfriend who was so unpossessive it was wierd. Sending you off to the strip club, telling your friends that we did it, just so they'd never know we hadn't.
something changed the minute I figured out what all this jealousy was about
Bea, the girl who got the boy i thought i wanted, when all I really wanted was her.
you, the girl, I got, that never got away from my heart and still messes me around with all the worry you cause and the baffling array of bad relationships I've followed you through.
so cocky in French class, so young by the lake in my parent's car, pretending to be shocked.
Testing the waters to find out if I was sure.
drawn together like Italics, leaning in to whisper. We knew, but still tried to find the answer in safe waters called Burlington Bay. "Are you afraid of breaking the box you built?"
I was. But I was angry that you asked.
Cat eyes, that smell, like a fly strip you caught me. In a moment of change, you embodied it. You changed me, gutted in the blue black water of my back-yard pool, I was a fish in water, finally, lapping myself and finding no footing below. Sinking. It's the beer, i told myself, as each time things got this way, the late-night cigarettes by the harbour and our funny three-piece pseudo gang, arriving at our own time in the future where paths intersect and all it took was a phone call.
then hers. the first crazy, blond and foreign sounding, but just as easy in Belleville as the city. Capturing life as it moves, or stays. Just shy of your critical eye, except when the portrait is the self.
what next. Introductions on couches, half-naked as the roommates stumbled through the door and did not leave. my first time and the cycle begins, my angelina, the dental hygienist with the tattoos. I fell hard. Good thing we spent so much time fucking and so little talking. It was a beautiful few months.
the directions she gave, led me to the last, but I ended up in her shared one-bedroom, traipsing through her ex-lover's sheets, while she romped one thin wall away. Our trajectories to the bathroom between moments of vibration, started off well and ended not so much.
you are more present than the lover I almost loved, the teflon pan, girl-boy who took me for granted but shared things I can't, hadn't before, or again. not the same way, above ground, in hot, white-washed rooms, lazily by lakes, wrapt in white sheets and plaid cliche drenched blankets watching birds as my mind reeled on mushrooms. You could never handle that you weren't the only one who noticed me. You wanted to be the only shiny thing in the room.
my second lesson in Greek, the constant dancer, sex never ever over, the party never finished. you kissed other women in front of me, more than once. I said it mattered. it did then. you realized too late; when you became the other woman.
the third, the smile and wisdom of unlearned lessons, parties with wine and strange rides home from parents who seem mercifully forgiving about the new and mysterious friends that show up in my bed. the smile remains.
i should have known by the corner of your smirk that you were up to something, like three of my exes. Now you just mince, smirking about the one you think you pulled over.
the innocent. martyred and left to remind me of all my transgressions. they pile up like rotting vegetables, soft, vaguely alive. I was supposed to be the way out of all this. Instead I traded places, and you've kept me there to define your hate. If there was a worst thing, I did it. I won't say but, but there are a few. maybe you can be happy now.
sitting at tables, absorbed in the reflection of your eyes, we talk, almost like we know eachother. Calculated but still sincere somehow. Perhaps it is the convenient similarity of our language that allows us to read so readily between eachother's lines. I will never be tired of the way you smile with your eyes, even after your lips regain their composure. Somewhere we missed a long train-ride where we were both supposed to get on, and instead, we have been passing eachother, smiling, but never going the same direction.
so coy, such a way without words, few and empassioned, you swept me off my feet like no one else ever has. The perfect leading man, a leo, but nothing so much as in your own eyes. sadly. it was just supposed to be fun,
until it got ugly. and I just stayed sad.
she was the undoing, the pulling apart of the hypocritical be.want.have.do.
she still looks too good to be real, and probably is. I don't know. because I don't know her. but I will always watch. the pink panties were a shock, so was the morning. and the next. the one I regret, but not for what we did. but for why and what happens next.
the toothbrush came home that night, and didn't find a new home until you invited me in the day after, after that long cold hike through goosebumped morning, when I came back to your door unrelenting. We kept your neighbours up all year, ate cinnamon buns, poridge and slept with the fan on. We grew, to bigger rooms, with furnishings that belonged to us, and decorated the walls with paint and the floors with a kitten and too many pairs of shoes. we look out our window and smile and scream and still smile as we're cursing eachother. the whole place is you
on the surface and me in the threads, cracks, closets and drawers bursting,
we share the habits and smell
the bills and shiny small-appliances. this is love, without the blinding inconvenience of newness, or need, or surface. it is clean. so clean that I can smell it.
nothing but shoes in our closet, no point in pretending. because i know,
and the mess is always just surface, feigning stains, masking the burried tracks of endless trips across the field, the hundreds of coffee cups and the accumulation of days
that began with a conscious decision
that this must be the place
your voice errupts like nothing I have ever heard. Each time we get to this point I swear to myself that I have never laughed this hard. How did we get here. to the moment when future is just the spot on the tip of my tongue, read and ready to spill, as easily deduced as my afternoon's mischief... laid out for you in trails of empty glasses, mislaid towels and the number of quarters in my pockets.
