Viewing entries tagged
LOSS

A SHORTHAND

A SHORTHAND

While I’m not quite sure why an iPhone’s battery can deplete so rapidly, I do know that I spent a great deal of time this weekend either charging my phone or kicking it into “low power mode.”  And sticking with that lifelong personal trait of mine not to fully comprehend science-y stuff, I can’t say with certainty what a low power mode does, but I can tell you that the light at the very top of the screen turns yellow and yellow is my very favorite color – as is evidenced by the fact that I wear black all the time.  There’s a real part of me that believes the batteries in our phones are preprogrammed to shrivel up and die – much as I pray that one person I hate will also do imminently – whenever Apple is set to release a new version, but that could just be the conspiracy theorist inside of me running amok because I’m sure no gigantic corporation would ever do anything unseemly, like futz with its products simply to inspire rabid customer consumption. Anyway, I digress; what I am trying to communicate here is that I was away from my phone for much of the weekend because it needed to be plugged into a wall and I chose not to spend all of my time sitting next to a wall because it was gorgeous outside and I am so pale that I think I might soon be considered my very own species.

At one point while my phone was not within its standard arm’s reach, I received a voicemail from one of my oldest friends.  It’s funny:  many of the people in my life who call will never leave a message.  I guess they just expect that I’ll notice I missed a call and return it and really, who wants to wait out all of those rings?  But this is a guy I knew back in the days when call waiting had recently become a glorious new invention and answering machines were still tabletop devices you ran to while praying the red light would be flickering because that flicker maybe meant someone good had reached out to you.  As a caller, I’ve spent a lot of long seconds of my life praying that I’d get the machine instead of the actual person because there were moments I guess I felt too nervous or tired or annoyed to talk for real, but at the same time I always hated how my voice sounded on messages.  You have such a sweet voice, a guy I used to really care about said to me more than a few times – but I wasn’t looking to sound sweet.  I always wanted to sound when I spoke like Stevie Nicks sounds when she sings and well, let’s just say I don’t.

DECLARATIONS

DECLARATIONS

Declarations.  They’re kind of like this:  powerful, grounding – and supremely inconvenient.  They come from a place of strength sometimes, from that area inside of you that forces you to declare that you know better.  But sometimes they slink back inside of you when you inhale with a sudden start and they settle into a location that might be in close proximity to your stomach because that’s where you begin to feel an odd sort of fluttering.

Declarations, I have found, are much like resolutions.  They are made with the best of intentions.  They are only made sometimes.  And like a resolution and just about every pair of gloves I have ever owned in my entire life, I forget about them until they go so far missing that I can hardly remember what it was that I declared in the first place.

SWEET SMELLING CLOSURE

SWEET SMELLING CLOSURE

Somewhere in the back of a closet or in some middle layer of a landfill in Buffalo there exists a half-full (yes, I’m choosing optimism) bottle of some kind of Armani perfume I wore during that one year and never again since.  I can see the bottle if I concentrate really hard.  It is shaped like a sideways oval and it has a simple top to it and after a while I just kept it in the medicine cabinet there so I could stop worrying that my perfume would explode mid-flight or mid-eight-hour-drive and saturate every pair of jeans I owned that made my ass look cute.  I also kept q-tips, deodorant, lotion that smelled like verbena, and a toothbrush in that medicine cabinet and, towards the end, a hair dryer too.  By the time it all fell apart, I could have moved into that bathroom.  By the time it all fell apart, I didn’t want any semblance of a literal reminder of the time when I was happy.

FORGIVENESS

FORGIVENESS

Loss is a nasty motherfucker that tastes bitter when you lick it with your tongue.  But you know what’s not a nasty motherfucker that tastes bitter when you lick it with your tongue?

Me.

If I knew more about biblical stories, I’d maybe be able to make some shrewd comparison between what I have gone through recently and what somebody like Jonah or John – or Satan – once went through, but though I read the Bible for a Biblical and Classical Literature class in college (This is a great book, I thought back then), I guess a lot of it didn’t sink in the way the lines of Reservoir Dogs have.