I think I’ll do the pleasure and bring you along for the ride. But first, make sure you are ready, emotionally and physically, for the story. This is very intimate, symbolic, and the best is yet to come. Hopefully this will spark your memory of us when things seemed out of place but perfect. Here is how it all started.
I wouldn’t say we met at a bar but it didn’t make the moment any more different. I guess we actually met--you would tell me farther down our relationship road--a long time before this bar encounter. You saw me at a Philly’s game when I was in 5th grade and you were in 7th. I never asked how you remembered this, or how you knew that my face was the one that you stared at, how you could trace back the lines of maturity to our roots. But when we finally met on equal terms, at that defunct bar in lower west Philadelphia, is a memory we can both say we had.
I raised my drink -- which I think was an Irish car bomb -- and waved you down, a gesture that signifies the waver and the receiver, while you noticed my hand scrubbing the dirt out of the air. Your eyes widened like a puppy getting its much wanted attention. You tried so hard that night to look beautiful and I could tell even from the other side of the bar. Your hair whipped back likes vines growing on a deck with your eyes matching your dress, midnight purple, and you even put on perfume which sent me back to the Black Sea, the smell of salt water being evaporated by the peer-less sun, shining and brightening, until the sand cools off and the people come out.
This bar was not ready for you, your presence, your beauty, you as a human either. No one even gave you the time of the day while you were ashamed of yourself, flaunting vanity after you got your first job after college. It wasn’t your fault sweetie, if I can even call you that anymore, but that bar was shit compared to you. It had no appeal to its masses, it had stained floors from after parties and warped bars from their mediocre bartenders and this laid back style they were trying to preserve from the 70s. All in all, you had it going on and this place was embarrassed to have such a fine specimen.
After my wave’s invisible frequency met you and gathered you up from your abase state, we began walking towards each other like two siblings reuniting after living at separate foster homes but our love wasn’t unconditional, it was very very accountable. We were responsible with our actions.
“Sorry I’m a little distracted.” You said while I reached for your hand that was idling on the table.
“I don’t know if I can do this. It always catches me off guard and ends worse then expected.” I told you when you went and kissed me on the left cheek.”
We tried to hold back every word we spoke to each other at that round table. Both exchanging greetings but not knowing where to go after that, sitting in that backward limbo between a communication breakdown or a hyper connection. It was hard to let go, for me, since I have never done this to such a nice woman. Scoped them out at a bar and called them to me, I only did that to the kind that I thought would agree to my advances. But you were much different.
We talked for a few hours, making formal eye contact, while also joking around heinously about our current states of living. You, a some sort of consultant that I never fully understood and you didn’t necessarily want, and me, a tasteless museum curator. We hated who we have become even though we celebrated our lives like we knew no better. Schools, childhood, theology, everything anyone new talks about but it felt finally right with you because usually when you try to talk about your life and what you are up to, it just sounds like you are talking out your ass, but this time it felt like you were actually corresponding to my words as if each sentence coming from our lips made sense to each other and we could embrace the fact that this is normalcy but it was perfectly articulated. Every single word swirled around our individualities which helped us form our identity to one another and we both conformed to it and sulked in it.
Just like any memory though when we start to visualize that moment of bliss we get sucked into it like a vacuum. Everything looks and smells the same after my feet left the ground I was currently standing on and went back in time. I got to live in it like a lucid dream each time seeing new results. We got up after drinking a few. I held you around the waist fingering your satin dress between my index finger and my thumb. It had violet flower prints on it from neck to your thighs. We kept stumbling over our feet while we tried to replicate each others pace toward the dance floor. Well it really was just an open spot in the bar without any chairs or tables but we made it our own area. Over the barfly’s they played Chuck Berry- You Never Can Tell.
“I can’t even hear the vocals.” You said with your hair in your face.
“Yeah me neither but I am making up the words in my head.”
You chuckled and held me tighter underneath the shifting primary colored lights that the bar must use primarily on disco nights. We swayed drunkenly using each other for support that we much needed. You grabbed so hard that my arms were sore the next day. I tripped when the song ended and smashed your sandaled toes.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”
“It’s fine.”
But we blinded each other from the start. After such a night it felt like we had no other place to go. We anted things to work out, we tried so hard to make things happen and strived for completeness between us but after a few attempts we knew what failure felt like. It has occurred in our lives more times than one and we didn’t want to call it out but we had to face the facts. We couldn’t just live knowing that nothing would succumb like that night, deeply embedded in my memory, could never be matched even if I loved you and you loved me, it wasn’t worth it. We both could remember and we would never forget and that is all that counts, living in the moments of selfishness and selflessness and trying to find the perfect equilibrium between happiness and loneliness and in that moment, one that will never leave, we finally found that bliss that we have always searched for in others and the great thing is we didn’t stay blinded for too long and we responsibly made the right decision to break things off when our relationship was still utterly perfect.
It’s hard to call something perfect that only lasted a few moments in our entire lifetime but you left me when everything was so smooth. She wouldn’t return my calls, my letters, my emails, voice mails so the blame is on her for ending this seamless commitment we had. It was only a few moments that washed away like the sea does forever. Now we are neighbors but never talk, just gesture, like that wave I performed on you, towards each other trying to flare our senses back to our memories that still exist, floating, in time.
But, I still tried to do something to relive that memory. I tried over and over like a wave continuously splashes on shore. I would write letters trying to find myself. In each letter I wrote, to each word had to fit inside the envelope on a single page. No one wants to be bogged down by too many pages of something un-original. I have read other people’s letters over the years and even though they were from different authors some being professional and other ones being from friends and family and they felt so dated. These letters didn’t have any attachment to them, nothing emotional but the same cliche metaphors forcing themselves on the page like they copied one another. But I didn’t want that staleness disgracing your eyes, sulking in the words one by one like I imagined you would do with those bright time lit eyes peering over some lost connection, each word bouncing off your memory, reminding you of that night or possibly
future nights that could occur.
Sincerely,
Jean Hansen
***
I don’t know how time works, the mechanism that moves all day, and the differences between the past, present, and future and how they overlap each other. Memories don’t just flash concurrently providing me with actuality but they, as I assume with everyone else, work sporadically. If time is just another layer on top of our lives, the ones we experience every day when we work watching the clock pace between numerical signs or trying to get the right amount of sleep. But if each moment is stacked up by minutes and dispersed by seconds and constantly moving at the same rate then where does the last second go? I’ll have flash dreams about that night, maybe just a picture of the sapphire blazed ring you had on your right index finger. But am I having this memory because it still exists throughout time or because I remember it. I wish time worked just like on a camcorder where you could reverse whenever you wanted. Just stop filming, just stop time, and be able to watch it all over again. Re-enact the same scene over until we were finally done with it and forget it like the rest of the family films. We all film, we all live, but we hardly ever re-watch those events we decided were important to film, to capture forever, like each moment we undeniably live but we hardly ever look back or peak for to long and get stuck in a forgettable period. I have kept the shoes that I wore twenty years ago just because. There is no actual reason for it, it’s just so I can hold onto something to stimulate my senses so I can send myself back.
Most of the time, I don’t know the difference between a dream, a moment, and a story that I might have read, been told, or hear through my increasing ability to eavesdrop. I’ll just sit at a diner, order a cup of coffee, and listen to the voices of strangers communicate around me and imagine a place where all these stories I hear could take place. Mrs. Dobson’s dog got loose the other day and ended up coming back wet and muddy with seaweed wrapped around her while that same day John from the corner store Deli was fishing and thought he saw something humongous in the water wadding after his boat. I’m busy tying loose ends to stories, presumptions and implied notions to flesh out my own world; a place for you and I to live and where I won’t be confused anymore by these intertwining moments of memory, time and remembering.
But there is something else that bothers me with all these theories and dimension and how we all get caught up in it like a mosquito gets lured into the cobweb. We know where we are and we also, necessity demands it, know what the date is and these time zone requires the time to be universal so we can, globally, live in the same world via time. In America, at 9, you are usually at your job and in China, at 9, you are at your job as well. But it’s not at the exact same time because our nine o’clock is different than your 9 o’clock. It doesn’t matter who you are because each time keeper, like a watch or a cell phone, run off of different time. Time is only relative to the person that values it. We need to save time or go back in time but you also hear “I want this day to be over with.” It’s like we are all confused, not just me, on why time dictates us and how we all deal with this universal theory of things coming and going from the smallest of fractions which are humans and other living organisms to much bigger things like planets, solar systems, galaxies and eventually the universe which all start off being born and then eventually, which is contributed by our life span, die. I used to work at many places, one time a clothing store and another time I was a park ranger but each job felt exactly the same. I always thought it be exciting and full of experiences until I got there. Then it was just me, waiting to be with you, looking at the clock or my watch or for my manager to let me go home. Just so I could live.
All this is layered being on a structure less filing cabinet being filed under dates and times. Memories come first whenever we try to pick up something from our past to talk about, reference and critique and we dignify these with a stamp of importance because we learned about ourselves or maybe even the world by viewing. We got in a car accident, it was never our fault, but we either blame our neighbors, possibly strangers, or we regret something we did in the process of the accident; “Damn I should have never tried to take that yellow light or we even think we are getting punished by spirituality. Then comes moments, just slight figments of our actual memory and sprinkled in with some fictional hue because that situation is still unclear to us. You were thinking something else before you had that moment, that epiphany, and it hasn’t directly affected your light yet so you haven’t classified it. Moments are brief but can be outstanding but they have a higher ratio to be lost then memories. Memories can inhabit moments, and a memory is made up of many moments but why does some of them, like ideas or specific dates or previous engagements, get lost in the transmission of life. Do they flicker on and off, will our minds transmit them when we least expect them, or do they just simultaneously get lost instantly and so does time. Or is our memory so layered that to knit pick through the cobwebs of all the seconds, days, eras we live through get fogged out by bigger, more important pieces of data to our lives such as memories and certain moments.
As you can see, my mind is often confused and the only way to bear with these glimpses of possible layers of memory or fictional accounts could and would leave me un-determined most of my life but usually I just try to soak it all in and apply all my implications and call it a day. I hear stories most often from my past that I am clueless too. People will ground me in a place such as the Deer Field National Park and how I helped the children fish during that vacation but I won’t actually remember my being there. All I can remember are the stories people expressed after the trip like they were just imaginative and every phrase they uttered about this vacation was just figurative. Other times, I’ll think something happened that never actually did like someone stole something from me or they were malevolent towards me. I have this theory that the reason you go crazy and finally completely lose it is when you diagnose reality with your perception of it and you can’t comprehend what is fiction and/or false from what reality and time negate. I would say to the person trying to commit suicide “Life isn’t slipping away from you but quite the contrary. You are being pummeled by reality and it’s making you lose your sense of common sense.”
***
I just found this letter written on my computer from a month ago. I tried sending it to you but I never got a response back so I was just curious if you ever got it. Actually I have a lot of questions about the letter, less about you getting it and your reception to its substance. That is all up to you to explore, if you even got it. If you didn’t then let me know so I can send it to you. But I was just inquisitive on most of the things I put in the letter. Actually I’ll just add it to this letter so you are not distracted by all of these ponderings I have accumulated.
Dear Beth,
I found a new thing recently and that was something called poetry. I don’t really know how to explain it but it feels like I can finally say something after so long.
I feel like I do better with the blankest period. And it makes all the syntax seem so subtle
because I am me again.
And now that we are starting to talk again,
Remember those tulips that sprouted last spring on the south of our rental house?
I’m sorry...
They burst on contact revealing their bliss.
You don’t come around anymore, so you missed it.
And can you recall the bed we made together every morning
after the long nights of forceless bonding?
Well I pawned it to that thrift store on the other side of town.
You didn’t call me back after I left you the voicemail, asking if you wanted it.
I wish I didn’t but I just could not fall asleep in between those pillows like I used to
Life seemed better when we were roommates but I think that was just my delusion.
I never talk out loud anymore after that full day we screamed at each other
I think I lost my voice inside my own head after replaying that moment so many times
I am still searching for it with little prevail.
I wish you didn’t graduate or I never dropped out.
You might have moved on but I am just cemented to this house with
a desolate flower bed,
sleeping on a couch I found in front of those old peoples house across the street after they faded into death,
no voice,
and hundreds of letters so I can write you everyday even though you have never responded to one of them.
I sometimes think you don’t live where you told me but it hardly matters anymore.
I found serenity between the pen and the page and each word
I write,
I terminate it until I think about the next.
Then it tells me it’s still there.
It’s the only thing I do anymore and I do it for you.
Can you come back?
This place and everything in it feels hollow and sparse without your gentleness.
It is in need of your delicate touch to live on another day.
Yours Truly,
Jean Hanson
So I was just trying to figure out about some of the content I had put into this letter and maybe it slipped my memory or I could have just made it up but did we ever possibly live together? I thought we just met that one night at the bar but if we did live together some of the things I have been wondering about would finally fit into some of the gaps in my mind. These gaps seem to expand over time and the less I know about a given time period like maybe our relationship, the more fictional it becomes. The least I can do is make up some more stories about us because not only does it incoherently make you imaginable to me and everyone I might end up telling in the future but it also cripples me. It digs me into a deeper hole while I search for the truth. That is the hilarious thing about the truth, the more and more you search for it the farther and deeper you separate yourself from the ground where you once were.
If I don't receive any response to this letter I'll just think that this original letter was true and I'll spin my web of memories until I try to find where exactly I lost reality and escaped into this treacherous lie I live.
***
Maybe we are just getting mixed up in the post office. My address could be intercepting other people’s letters and my name might not actually be Jean. I don’t remember ever being called Jean and my family called me Jacob. They told me to pass the green peas at dinner today but honestly, maybe they got mixed up when they went to the movies last night and the leading man named Jacob and they just reversibly called me his name by mistake. I now feel bad sending you these letters and journal entries but I feel like I have an outlet to finally say what I need to get across. Hopefully it all makes sense in the end when I either stop mailing these because my hands had enough of this mystery or I cease to write. I don’t really do much anymore besides write because it feels like I am me but a figment too, the author, and that authority surprises me quite frequently. Ever since I never got your letter back explaining the letter I sent you, I have become completely detached from your reality. I went out to the closest hardware store and bought as much string as I could for twenty bucks. I took it out in the field behind my parents house and tied one end of the string to my neck and the other to a base of a tree. I let go and let the wind sail me through the dispensing energy of memories that perspire from us when we soak up more experiences. I saw a child’s imagination of him running through an owl’s feathers until he took over the beast and flew it to safety, I smelt a carrot cake being baked in an apartment, and I kept floating so high that it felt like my head became a satellite orbiting the earth. All I can recall was being mesmerized by the cloud formations, the feel of security while I observed our societal approaches. I couldn’t make out any towns but I could see civilizations from hundreds of miles up. When I was finally done being free and wanted to come down, I floated down slowly like a balloon being weighed down by its own mass and I finally touched the grass that, at that time, sent shivers through my nervous system. They are called blades of glass and each one was filleting my exposed feet until I ran inside and jumped on my computer chair to tell the whole world outside of my room which is you. Only you. You, me and the atmospherical pressure of memories which we know as gravity. It’s the weight, the restraint, the seclusion that pins you down and makes you view life as a game of cards rather then a game of skill. To deal with it is to accept it.
But the ability made me remember and brought so many moments back to me like they used to come. I felt young again and by that I mean I could easily navigate my memories. Remember when we took that ride on the hot air balloon when we were vacationing in Kansas. The blue sky reminded me of that lake that we could see to the west. We both joked about it.
“Wouldn’t it be great if we could just jump from here into that lake.”
“Yeah dive right in. It would be like skydiving without a parachute. I would totally do it.”
“Me too, if I wasn’t afraid of heights.”
***
Everything seems to be converging in towards my skull. The air between my ears is becoming dense. I haven’t left my house in 46 days. My room is pitched black and completely trashed, all of my belongings looked like they have been rummaged through like garbage. I am hardly here anymore. Physically I am stuck here, being copied hundreds of times to fill the frame of time, but spiritually or whatever your imagination is held. That is where you can find me. I am inside, my own head, absorbing the information; creating my own; editing the loose ends or remixing them so I look good. I navigate through my brain as if it wasn’t mine. I sift through the lobes, looking for any answers I could find about my world, my life, my story. I couldn’t find anything that I was searching for which I forgot right after I escaped my brain but I think I tangled some of the cables. My head hurts and all I can think about is when everyone left me here. They all screamed at me, putting me down, saying how I was worthless and had no end. They pointed at me and blame their excuses on me, they took their hurt and spread it to me, they didn’t remember the right moments when they started to accuse me. All I could remember when they were scorning me were the times I was grateful to them. No one ever recalls the happy moments when conflicted. When enraged with uselessness, when bogged down by their individualized spatial memory. Anything can be determined bad if looked at from the right angle, just bring in the most cynical of humans and they will tell you. Try not to listen but the door slams. They leave but their memories, the ones they never wanted, stayed like old photographs encompassing me and holding me still. That’s why I went inside my head because it was the last place to go. I tried to find my voice but its just taunting me down a long hallway; I can hear it’s echo but never seem to locate its noise.
I am trapped inside, only being able to see my surroundings if I care to visit my senses but I am stuck on one memory. At the threshold, the glimpses of death when you are still living, all that floods to you is your memories. Living in the present is obsolete so all we can do is enjoy the experiences we had but this flood can’t be labeled. Any memory passes, the one’s that determined who you were, what you did, who you would eventually become, those singular moments that changed your history all seem to arrive at the same destination. It’s our duty as survivors to isolate the wreckage and repair the streams of un-consciousness that deteriorates us.
All that seems to be coming to me is the night we laid out watching the stars as they revolved around us. Or we revolved around them. It felt like all at once, seconds, days, minutes, months, hours, and seasons passed through those constellations as we sky-gazed. We started off on Leo and ended with it. We held hands, my scrawny fingers cresting your sympathetic hand. Your eyes looked apologetic and my body was un-controllable. I tried to control it like it was a dream but all I could do was react. When the show was over and Leo looked and remained like all the other stars, just projectors to our stories, you got up and bent over with your red knees together pointing and kissed me on my perched lips. You left after that moment and walked into the shadows, the fog to my imagination, and I honored Leo like the Egyptians. That was the last time I saw you, nearly 137 days ago. But those days keep looping, layering with other nights such as the one I proposed to you out in the middle of the forest I grew up in and I told you when I was 7 that the clouds showed me a silhouette of you and I knew you would be mine. You cried.
But I still haven’t found you, I can’t stop searching but my mind’s frozen to the temptations of my past life. Most keep going, past this threshold into our unknown. Where have you gone? No one is here to clean up after me anymore, there isn’t anyone to nurse me back to my normal self when I fall ill. Do these memories have to escape to forget them. I wish I was the man that I could of been. You urged me to go with you to the hospital that afternoon. I was laying outside while you were knitting inside trying to finish that green and brown cap for that child down the road.
“I think I need to go to the hospital.” You said while hanging outside the screen door.
I was too busy dwelling in myself to realize what was going on. We see so much humor that I don’t know what and who to take serious anymore. I just kept looking off saying
“I’ll meet you there.”
But it was to late when I eventually arrived. To tell you the truth, I forgot. I was reliving through the moments that I remember the best. Our wedding day, our various vacations around the globe, and many more. I was to busy in my own thoughts to remember you. Even though I was thinking of you the whole time. The doctor called.
“Is this Jacob Shinter?”
“Yes, who is this?”
“It’s Dr. Tello. Your wife just came in two hours ago and I think you should come down here.”
I dropped the phone letting the dial tone keep beeping still. I rushed over the St. Charles Memorial Hospital but it was to late. The doctor knew it and he came to me right away. I saw it in his brown eyes, the look of regret. I pushed through the team of nurses around you and couldn’t believe it. I still can’t. Through our whole life together, seam-less in nature, we never discussed dying on one another. I, for a second, felt betrayed until I saw the smile on your face. Our remaining families were there but I didn’t speak to any of them. We would always be different then them no matter what they said. I went home and here I am now. A senile old man trying to live again, the same life, through my qualitative memories.
The only thing that is left after your memory becomes layered with memory after memory, outlining your existence, putting it in the history book of experienced souls is your name. And my name was Jacob and I wish you could come back Beth. Hopefully our memories will live in the clouds forever raining their delight on these strangers. See you soon.
Till Death Do Us Part,
Jacob Shinter
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