Maybe

Dixon Street.  She lived on Dixon Street.

Little white house with a chain link fence to keep the dog in.  Neighbors so close you could hear their television at night.  Forced hello’s in the morning and goodnight’s while you walk the dog.  Every perfect little life that most people hope they get.

She lived in that house because it was her parents house.  They passed it down to her when they bought a luxury RV and decided to travel the country on their retirement.  She lived there but it wasn’t her dream, just a stepping stone.

I saw her one day as she was mowing the front lawn.  She was wearing a pair of skimpy running shorts and a running bra.  Her hair was bundled up on top of her head in a perfectly messy bun that looked as if it was designed that way.  She looked amazing doing a mundane task.  I could have watched her mow that lawn for hours, but sitting at a stop sign for that long becomes suspicious.

I wish I could have asked her out right then and there.  I considered it.  Even later that evening I thought about walking up to her door and knocking on it and telling her how beautiful she is and asking if she would like to get something to eat.  But it all just sounded so fantastic and ridiculous that it would never amount to anything.

So I just let it be.  An observation as I drive by.  A treat.  An enjoyment.  Something that could possibly be but isn’t, however never fully denied to never be.  She’ll live as something special.  She’ll live on as something pure and never was but always could have possibly been.

And then he kissed me

We talked about random things.  We talked about silly things and got to know each other.  He was nice and kind and inquisitive but not creepy.  He was equally interested in knowing things about me than he was talking about himself.  He wasn’t secretive or evasive.  It was a great first conversation and I left it smiling.

Then we talked about what we were doing.  What we like to do and where we’ve been.  We talked about the past and things we’d love to do in the future.  Some of the things he’s done that I’d love to do.  We joked about doing the same thing but at different times in the same place.  We reminisced and fantasized along the same plane of existence.

After that we talked about our actions.  Things we do and ways we act.  Various likes and dislikes and how we can’t understand how other people don’t share our likes or dislikes.  We came up with cutesy nicknames for each other based on these and teased each other based on others.  The words adorable and cute were bandied about in my direction and I told him to stop making me smile so much because my cheeks are starting to hurt.

Eventually the conversations led to something slightly more risque.  It was hot and I was hot and he seemed hot.  I was more empirically hot in the sense that I was sweating from the heat, while I found him more and more appealing with every conversation we had.  I looked forward to them.  When he would text me and say hello I would light up.  I had to contain myself slightly because I didn’t want to seem too eager and come off as desperate.
He asked what I was doing and I told him, purposefully, that I was folding laundry in slightly more than no clothing.  His attention was always readily available but his tone changed.  His words went from fun and flirty to flirty and suggestive.  I suggested just as much and we suggested each other doing very suggestive things.
We slipped back, comfortably, into our usual conversation of silly and fun to goodnight and in bed.  A smile permanently plastered on my face as I drifted off to sleep.  

Soon after we decided to get together to test the chemistry and physics, to see if the pull was just as strong and the reactions at the same intensity.  We met and we shared a drink.  We smiled and laughed.  The laughs were genuine and held in reserve for fear of looking too comfortable.  I don’t know why.
The drinks turned into more drinks which turned into a bit of food.  I can eat in front of him?  Wow.
Hours might have gone by, or just a single one I’m not really sure.  It was a great time, just as good as our texting and then better on top of it.  Better because I could see his blue eyes behind his glasses.  I could watch his smile when I did something dumb that he said was adorable.  There was even that moment I got to feel his hand along mine while his fingers dragged over my palm to see if he could make me shiver.  It was amazing and I didn’t want it to end, but it had to.

We got to my car, because he walked me to my car.  We smiled our goodbyes and hugged our regrets behind them.  We stood under the streetlight which, itself, was under the stars.  The busy, warm night was all around us and even though it couldn’t have gone any better I wish it wouldn’t have stopped and was a little sad that it was ending.  Would this be the best night we had together and it only just began?  I’m always so negative.

And then he kissed me.

Do you see me?

“This is basically like a menu for people.”

She wasn’t wrong.  Dating had become a strange phenomenon.  There wasn’t any spark or meet cute involved anymore.  Now it was similar to the way a couple picks a sperm donor or, as Melody said, the way a person picks their food off of a menu.

“Yeah, but Mel, attraction plays a role things anyway right?  I mean, come on, when you’re seeing someone from across the room, as all the songs say, you’re only noticing them because of their looks right?  So, here you are.  Seeing someone from across the city.”

“Not the same,” she was still a romantic.

“Of course it is,” I wasn’t.

She shook her head in response, “no it isn’t.  Not even close.  You can’t get that feeling from a picture of a person you’ve never known before.  Someone you’ve never seen before.  It’s not the same.”

“Fine, tell me why then.”

She turned towards me with her hands in front of her.  They were pointing at me like arrows and she was attacking my assumption that online dating and meeting someone in the real world for the first time are the same.  She was riding her horse and she was going to die on it in battle.

“So many reasons!”

“Such as?”

“Pictures lie, for starters.  Its a snapshot of a person.  They might be pretty but what if they have a terrible voice.  What if they walk funny.  What if they smell bad?”

I laughed, “so you’re reason why online dating isn’t as good is even more superficial than online dating?  Wow Mel.  Wow.”

“No!”  She laughed and pushed me, “it’s the reality.  The reality of all of your senses telling you that someone is the one.  Or, potentially.  You can watch the way they interact with other people.  You can see the way their smile slowly creeps across their face.  The sound of their laugh, a genuine laugh, when someone says something funny.”

She stopped for a second and dropped her eyes from my face and looked at her shoes.

“The way your body trembles the first time they brush up against you in the slightest way and you catch the scent of them whether its cologne or the soap they use or just their natural smell.”

She paused again and fidgeted.

“You remember those things.  They mean something.  They develop in your head and fester until you become obsessed with them.  You make up fake conversations that you have with them about the first time you noticed them and you pretend they noticed you for the first time then too.  It’s a story you create in your head because the reality is they don’t know you exist and you’re too afraid they won’t care when they find out you do.”

Melody wiped her eyes and sniffled then picked her head up and smiled at me.

“Why would you want to deprive yourself of that by meeting someone online, huh?  Isn’t it grand?  Doesn’t it sound wonderful?”

She tried to laugh it off and turn to the computer.  She clicked through a few profiles.  She found someone who looked nice.  He wasn’t too attractive but he wasn’t someone who spent most of their life in dark hallways either.

“He’ll do I guess.”

“I guess?”  I looked at her with my forehead making all kinds of squiggly lines.

“Yeah I don’t know.  He seems nice.”

“Mel, you don’t want someone who seems nice.  You want someone who seems amazing.  You want-,” I stopped this time.  She picked her head up and looked me in the eyes with tears floating on the brink of escape and I stopped talking just to stare at her.

You don’t always remember the moment you really noticed someone.  You always knew them and who they were and you looked at them hundreds, if not thousands of time, but you never can remember the moment when you first noticed something specific about them.  Like the way they smile or the motion they wave their hand in when they pull their hair behind their ear.

Right then I noticed the way she looked at me with her teary, reddened eyes and I looked back at her and my mind spoke up out of turn and asked if I had ever noticed how beautiful she was when she cried.

I shook my head.  I couldn’t answer.  I couldn’t say out loud that I hadn’t and talk to myself like a psycho, but I did notice.  I saw her looking at me and staring into my eyes and she was so beautiful that I wanted to kiss her.

I didn’t though.  I couldn’t.  I didn’t even know what that was.  Why was I looking at her like that after all of these years of knowing her?  It didn’t make sense.

I shook my head and mumbled something.  She turned away and we decided that online dating would have to wait.  We went out for ice cream instead and sat on a bench until the sun fell and the moon splashed stars across the sky.  We talked and laughed and sat in silence.  It was one of the best days of that summer and I’ll never forget it.  It was the day that I realized I liked her.  It was the day when I truly understood what she meant about online dating.  It was the day I saw how beautiful she was when she cried and when I vowed to never see her cry again.

Worse than missing you

There are plenty of bad things in the world.  Horrible things that dwarf any kind of silly, minuscule problem that most people deal with on a daily basis, but sometimes that doesn’t matter.  Sometimes there is only the problem in front of you and the feelings inside of you that you’re experiencing.  So, right now, deep inside of me, the worst thing in the world I can think of is living the rest of my life and never knowing what it feels like to kiss your lips.

An off way to Netflix and chill

I was thinking of some of the things I’ve written and wanted to drop an excerpt here from a semi written story.  I’m probably half way to two-thirds finished with it.  I keep telling myself I’ll jump back into it but every time I try I stare at the page and nothing comes to me.  I did lose the muse who was the inspiration for it so that’s probably got my head in knots.

Anyways, this is towards the beginning.  The two main characters, the narrator and the object of his affection, are on a phone date.  They work together but through different companies in the same town.  They’ve never met but she’s decided to save him from a night alone on New Year’s Eve watching the movie New Year’s Eve.

 

The movie restarted and we both hit play at the same time.  I could hear her making the Netflix sound as if she were hitting her own set of drums.  We were going on as if we had known each other for years and we had never even met.

The pizza came to the door with the cute girl.  I didn’t even put the phone down. I gave her the just-a-minute finger and pulled out a $20 and closed the door without saying a thing to her as I was listening to Annie go off about how Bon Jovi should not be in movies and how he should rarely be allowed to sing.  Which I then broke into a rendition of Livin’ On A Prayer, or at least the chorus because it was the only part of the song that I knew.

The movie ran on and neither of us stopped it.  She set the phone done to run off for two minutes and thirty-four seconds which I assume was to use the bathroom but she wouldn’t confess.

“A lady never tells,” she proclaimed in a Queen Elizabeth voice.

By the time the credits rolled we had completely stopped paying attention to the movie for at least half an hour.  We were talking about random things in our lives and making them seem as ridiculous as possible.

She was talking about her cat and how she was hoping to end up a cat lady one day.  There was a reference to how she’s already got some long-term plans set up by walking up and down the halls of the building calling a cats name that doesn’t exist.  She also said that for two weeks straight she went out and bought large bags of cat litter and carried them through the lobby making sure she was seen every day by someone.  I laughed and called her full of shit.

“You did not!”

“Are you questioning the all mighty cat lady?  My goal is to one day have my body found in my apartment four days after I’ve died and my multitude of cats slowly peeling the flesh from my bones as they eat me.  I’ll have left a note declaring that I will be reborn as Cat-woman and have a saucy leather piece laid out neatly on the couch. You’ll see someday. You’ll all see.”

I would interject, “this is one of the rare cases where sexism isn’t fair to men.  If I were to say something similar to that you would have hung up and probably asked to be transferred positions at work or at least warn the police about me.  But you do it and it’s adorable.”

I could hear her shriek in protest, “adorable?!  You obviously have no experience with crazy women, Evan.  Crazy ex-girlfriends. Run of the mill stalker types. Give me a few weeks and I’ll be hiding outside in your bushes to make sure you’re not talking with your female neighbors.  Just you wait.”

The conversation ran on like that with both of us offering ridiculous statements based on some truths.  We would have talked even longer if both of us weren’t startled and yelled out at the same time, “what the hell?”  

I looked through my window and saw the sky lit up with pink and blue lights.  For a second I didn’t realize what it was and it dawned on me, we had talked right through New Year’s.  The soft popping of fireworks could be heard through the window and the lights continued to brighten the dark sky.  Annie was silent on her end of the phone, most likely doing the same thing I was. We watched the sky together from our own part of the city and sat in silence until she said softly on the other line.

“Happy New Year, Evan.”

“Happy New Year, Annie,” I said back in a smile.

“This was fun,” she said back.

“We’ll have to do it again some time.  Maybe next time we might be in the same room.”

I laughed, “why ruin a good thing?  We get along so well on the phone. It’ll be a long distance thing.”

She laughed back, “yeah.  Good point. If it ain’t broke, right?”

“Uh huh.”

“Well,” she said, “we made it into next year.  I guess I’ll talk with you in a day or so.”

“Unless you’re bored and want to watch a movie again,” I said half jokingly but mostly seriously.  I could hear her smile on the other end.

“Goodnight Evan.”

“‘Night Annie.”

Compliments

“I love the way you write,” she said, and it was the beginning of the end.

It was the beginning of the beginning, but I’ve always fallen for easy compliments on things I’m self conscious about.  My hair.  My clothes.  My voice and my writing.  All it took was sincerity in her voice, perceived or actual, and I was overlooking a vast ravine and wanting to jump into the nothingness just to hear her say it again.

“Sorry, what?”  Never take a compliment for a compliment unless you hear them say it twice.  You may have misheard it and they said something different, or they were just being nice and will dismiss anything said previous.

“Your writing,” she held the piece of paper and shook it as if it had bells hanging from the edges, “I love the way you put words down.  The expressiveness.  The visuals.  The oddity and randomness of it.  I really like a lot.”

Does she really like it a lot or does she love it?

“Thanks.  Yeah.  I don’t know.  I just kind of dump my mind onto paper sometimes.  I don’t really know where it comes from.”

“Well its nice.  You should do it more often.”

Now it’s just nice.  I should have just said thanks and left it at that.

I nodded and smiled a closed-lip half smile and kept my head down.  I wanted to write some more but nothing was coming into my head.  Nothing except that she might have been staring at me.  I was too nervous to look up and confirm it so my pen just swirled around the letters on the newspaper in front of me where I had been writing in the margins.

It was out of boredom really.  Sitting random places doing random things.  My cellphone was the high quality, super rare kind that could still only make phone calls.  It probably could take pictures too but computers nowadays didn’t have the sophistication to handle the tens of hundreds of pixels it was capable of capturing.  So busying myself like everyone else in the room with their necks crooked and faces glowing against the light of the tiny screen wasn’t really an option.
So I would grab a piece of paper nearby and entertain myself.  Often times it would be a newspaper or a magazine.  I’d never take a current one in case someone wanted to read it, but there was usually a day old paper laying around so I would grab that and paint the canvas with my nonsense.

Most of the time it was literally complete nonsense.  I would keep my head down and listen to the conversations going on around me.  I would start writing parts of them and then take off from there into a world of the bizarre pieced together with fragments of reality.  When I was done, or my time was up, I would leave the little piece of brilliance on the table for someone else to enjoy or become perplexed by, either way it was out of my head and splashed across the page and I’d never even remember what it was a few hours later.

I wasn’t even sure anybody read any of it.  I thought someone might read a few words and then furrow their brow at the oddness then toss the paper in the trash.  I didn’t think people actually sat down and made it through everything.  It was a chore, and I partially did it as a joke.  I would sometimes end the writing saying that the reader has wasted minutes of their life they’ll never get back reading my nonsense.  Yet, here she was seemingly reading every word.

I finally let my eyes come up for air and took a quick glance at her.  She wasn’t staring at me but it looked as if she might have been side-eyeing my paper as the tip of my pen swirled along the words of the bold headline.  Was she waiting for me to write more so she could watch?  Strange.

When I brought my eyes up and not-so-smoothly took a look at her to see if she was watching me she noticed and caught my eyes with a smile.

“Well ran dry?”  she asked.

I shook my head, “no just the right inspiration hasn’t come along yet.”

“Oh.  What kind of inspiration do you need?”

I looked down away from her engaging smile and interrogating eyes, “I kind of know it when I see or hear it.  It takes a hold of me and my mind unfurls like a flower.  I don’t really control it.”

“Unfurls like a flower huh?”

I nodded.

“That’s kind of poetic.  Those visuals I was talking about.”

I don’t know if it was being conveyed on the outside of my skin but on the inside I was feeling flush and blushing.  I’m not used to praise or admiration in anything I do.  It always felt fake whenever anyone would say something nice and I never know how to take a compliment.  I froze and she kept talking.  I felt like I was sweating.  I completely forgot how to communicate with another person.

“I uh, yeah.  I don’t know.  I-, uh, uh huh.  I’m like-, uh, heh,” I wanted to bang my head on the desk and groan so loud but she was still staring at me, or at least it felt like she was.  She was still sitting there trying to engage with me and my tongue’s decided to swell three sizes too big and cut the circulation off to my brain.

“You know you could just write about me,” she tilted her head down and tried to catch my lowered eyes.  I looked up with my mouth slightly open in surprise.

“Uh…huh?”  I always gave the most eloquent responses when confused.  This is why I preferred to communicate in written word, I could write a hundred times better than I could speak.

“Me.  If you don’t know what to write about then write about me.  Make me a character.”

She was smiling.  Why was she smiling?  Write about her?  What?

“What would I even write about?”  I had forgotten about my awkwardness and engaged in the puzzle of what/huh/what are you talking about.

“I don’t know.  You’re the writer.  I’m just trying to give you some inspiration.  Selfishly of course.  I want to read what you’re going to write next and if its about me I’m curious to see where you’ll take that story so, yeah.  You can just write about this, right here.  Our conversation.  A back and forth and see where it goes.”

I wish she would stop making eye contact.  It’s so annoyingly polite and she was being too nice.  It felt like a trap but I couldn’t help it if it was.  She was asking me to write.  She requested my words written down for her.  The abyss was long and wide and never ending and I was going to fill it with words for her.  About her.
They would build a bridge from one end to the next and she could walk along it and peer over the edge to see all of the beautiful things I’d constructed below.

And all it took was for her to say, I love the way you write.

Write write rewrite

Phoning it in is kind of stupid, right?

If you’re going to write something, right it well.  Of course that can’t all be done on the first try.  Finished master pieces seem like they flow and you can’t help but romanticize the idea of words flowing like water from your fingertips.  Perfection pouring out.

But it doesn’t work like that.

Great writers, and great writing, takes effort.  It takes pain.  It takes time and love and passion.  It takes lust and desire.  It takes everything in you spread across the page or the screen.  It needs to be you.  All of you and everything in you.

So when you write, and when I say you I mean me, write.  Focus on what you’re doing and write.  Take it out of you and write.  Pull it from you and write.  Make it personal.  Make it real.  Make it hurt.  Make it feel like Sunday morning.  Make it feel like the look she gives you when you say something perfect.

Don’t just get something down.  Write.  Write again.  Rewrite it and then write some more.

A constant interest

Circling back to you.  Over and over again I’ve been coming back to you.

I need to feed.  I’ve got a hunger and looking won’t satisfy it.  I need my hands and mouth to get involved.  Squeezing and pulling.  I want sounds and touch.  I need that shiver.

The jolt has got a hold of me.  The curiosity.  The pounding of my heart and the laser focus of my brain.  Nothing else is going to be good enough until I’m full of you.  Until I’m satiated.  Until I’m wasted with a drunken look on my face having indulged too much, yet not regretting a thing.

I’m inching closer to jumping in the pool.

I’ll have my eyes open.

There won’t be a smile on my face, but I will be licking my lips.

Let’s go.

88 mph

I want you against the wall.

I want you on the bed.

I want you wrapped around me.

I want you pressed tight into me.

I want you when you look at me right before you kiss me.

I want you freshly out of the shower when your hair is still dripping wet.

I want you when you fall asleep in my lap watching movies late on a Saturday night.

I want you to look at me while your dark hair hangs down over half of your face.

I want you when you stare at me when I’ve said something stupid.

I want you when you’re crying because you’re upset.

I want you when you’re crying because you’re happy.

I want you in your shoes.

I want you in your dress.

I want you in your lipstick.

I want you with your rabbit ears and fake eyelashes.

I want you all around everywhere and in between.

I just want you.