without me
or, the last thing on my mind
✩
Everything is music. Frogs swimming in the same pond, even if we didn’t know it yet. Sitting ducks, multiplying. Old Yeller, on my shelf, on my couch, and eating my big pity steak before trotting to my euthanasia on Lewis Avenue. Borrow me, leave me clean / You can see I don’t know nothing about nothing / Tell me where you want me.1 I need space. Can I still text you on your birthday? Of course. Okay. Now, walk away. There goes the best gosh darn dog in the West.
We need to talk. The ancient text. I say that I hate limbo. Just do it / Just do it, don’t wait.2 Then again, I think about the tonal shifts that have knocked the wind out of me. At the park, a Judas date-turned-dumping. Phone calls announcing death. Weekends at my dad’s house on Maple. There’s something I need to tell you. You should sit down.
I am reminded that it never gets easier. All the things you want to tell the one person you can’t talk to. The plans that now pass, unfruitfully, on your calendar. The photos developed after it’s over. All that decays on the vine. Spoiled rotten. Getting what I deserve (good). Getting what I deserve (bad). Who would have known that a boy like him would have entered me lightly?3 In the light and dark. In the soft and hard. Was I careless or too accommodating? Maybe I’ll still write that song.
I share a tune with a friend and say that I really like the corner of 70s folk that feels like a cozy woodland storybook. Later, cooking, I put on a Donovan record and become unbearably claustrophobic. I want to throw something. It can’t always be sunny days whiling away the afternoon with a goddamn pan flute. Life is not much like that. Blue skies, but it’s still freezing. I shiver under my skirt, a naïve pink flowered thing. Look out my window / The sun is shining / I’m waving, smiling.4
I pick a fight with my boyfriend when he yawns three times while I’m telling him a story. It’s 1:00 AM, and he’s exhausted. I become unreasonable and cruel. I make him cry and go to bed without apologizing. What is the fight really about? I want a pat on the back for doing a good job at seeming normal, even in my devastation. Going to work, to the grocery store, to every plan with a sedated smile. Talking about my feelings rather than feeling them. Only crying while very drunk. I give people what they don’t ask for and expect them to be grateful.
That night, I dream of every man. With the first, we shed tears of joy in the back of a movie theater. Reunited, at last. We can’t believe our eyes. Next, at my ex’s apartment, I kiss a stranger—a railthin blond, not my type. After, I apologize to my ex for being such a slut. This leads to us fucking like wild animals. The last one walks me home. We giggle wondering, now what? By strolling down my path, he was going the wrong direction. We say goodbye, yearning, happy and sad. He turns to leave, and I wake up. Could have loved you better, didn’t mean to be unkind / That was the last thing on my mind.5
The project, it seems, is to stop using other people to understand myself. To not obliterate my singularity in the pursuit of people-pleasing. There is no us without me. Well, it seems there is no us at all. You say, it’s so hard / But it feels simple to me / It feels so simple to me / So I’ve been trying to stop trying / To be like someone you’d still like.6 If every figure in a dream is also a representation of the self, perhaps I can get closer to deciphering my desires. Expansion, independence, abundance, to be full, to go the wrong way, to be okay, to turn around entirely. At the end, all my selves have gone their separate ways, and I am finally alone. I sit on a bench and the dogs and toddlers look at me longingly. I return to the perfume I wore three years ago. It smells organic for how synthetic it is. Warm for how cold it is. Listen to everyone, but don’t tell everyone everything. I stand in a room full of equipment and people watching a kettle build to a boil. Take 2. I bring the clapperboard down, and we start again.
✩
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“Old Yeller,” Slow Hollows
“Thunder,” Lana Del Rey
“Cocoon,” Björk
“Waving, Smiling,” Angel Olsen
“The Last Thing On My Mind,” Gram Parsons
“Cats,” Mitski