by Gabby Bess
Paige’s iPhone vibrated and then lit up in her hands. The screen dis- played a text message from Adam that said, “I haven’t been feeling well lately.” “I’ve been trying to figure out what’s going on with you,” Paige responded, “and you don’t talk to me about how you feel or anything that’s going on with you. When I’m not feeling well I want to talk to you about it because you make me feel better. But apparently when you’re not feeling well you want nothing to do with me. What am I doing that makes you feel that way?” Adam said that he just felt shitty and wasn’t really interacting with anyone lately. When you’re stressed, Paige thought, you want to go to comforting things. You want to be around and talk only to the people that make you feel good and comfortable. By this logic, Paige could only assume that this distance was because she was no longer a person that made Adam feel good and comfortable.
Paige attempted to question Adam as to why he was being despon- dent and evasive. She approached the situation from sadness–from complete bewilderment and ignorance as to why he would act this way. Paige had a sadness that was so desperate that it could not yet turn into anger. This sadness did not yet know how to be angry. Paige knew that a reaction of anger chanced the possibility that she would only receive anger in return. She knew that her anger could turn her into “the crazy girlfriend.” Paige did not have the privilege of anger, no matter how deserved. Anger could cause her legitimate, rational, and rightful questions to be ignored. Paige’s chest started to tighten and she could feel the anxiety physically overwhelming her body. Slowly, as if her own mind wanted to torture her with what was about to happen. Paige closed her eyes and thought about the white milk against the white floor. Inconsequential, she tried to remind herself. She knew that this was happening, this crushing feeling inside her ribcage and between her lungs, but she also knew that it would stop happening and that other things would happen, eventually.
at night we could look so happy
THE THEMATIC CONTENT OF 1AM TEXTS
My roommate is out of town.
Let’s do something that will make us feel less alone.
I CAN KEEP YOU
Adam and I are in a hospital.
Adam is conscious and only slightly injured.
I am slightly there in the memory of Adam’s hospital room, looking in from the wooden kitchen table of his childhood home that fits the expanse of our two bodies, peripherally touching, like a bed that we share
for the first time.
We visit Adam’s parents’ house and this prompts him to tell me more of his clumsy childhood.
I keep Adam’s stories and I keep my own, still afraid to trust some- one with my vulnerability.
Adam, 23, lays his head on my lap and Adam’s face, age 8, is able to grimace and his nerves can still send pain signals to his brain.
The doctor prods at his arm with a metal object: “Does this hurt?”
“Yes.”
“Does this hurt?”
“Yes.”
He is only eight years old.
He only recently learned how inline roller-skate and 30 minutes ago he learned that golden retrievers could seem like bears when they are chasing him on the road behind his house.
In the bed next to his, separated by a curtain partition, there is a woman dancing in a coma.
Well, not dancing but just kind of laying still with her eyes closed, being very quiet, and taking fluids intravenously; she is drooling, but less than one would think. If one ever thinks about a coma patient’s drool output.
But Adam doesn’t think of that because he is eight years old and he is scared, but excited.
He thinks about how he is going to be able to wear a brightly col- ored cast.
He thinks about being very popular when he goes back to school the next week.
In a memory I watch him as an eight year old and I watch him now, at 23, laying next to me as I pet his head. Our bodies are oriented as crushed bones on the opposite of whatever.
His healed arm wraps around my body to pull me closer.
I CAN MARRY YOU
On the drive to Adam’s apartment we discuss the proper protocol for drug deals after posing the philosophical question:
What should you do if your drug dealer doesn’t text you back?
Should I text him again? Does the three-day rule apply in this situ- ation?
We drive past the gas station and u-turn on a one-way street.
In front of the 7-11 we stand dumbly when the doors do not open automatically for us. Amazed that there is something outside of us that will not let us in.
Outside of his apartment the neighborhood cat sleeps under a car.
I bend down to look at the sleeping cat. I watch her suffer from the constraints of being a soft, fuzzy, hand-sized thing.
I know that she does not want to be touched.
I used to grab at her and she would run to pick at dead things at the far end of the parking lot.
She is happier there, with the dead things, than she would be un- derneath my needy palm.
At 7-11 we bought toothbrushes and orange juice and now, in the dark of Adam’s room, I watch him brush his teeth.
“Did you smoke today?” I ask.
“Yes. But it’s your fault. You weren’t around to distract me with better vices.”
We made a deal that day:
Every time he wanted to smoke a cigarette, we would have sex instead.
I am tired.
That night, when I am naked and he is clothed, his eyes become scared and hungry.
He turns to me and says, “You make me believe in God and holi- days, if God and holidays are abstractions for intense longing.”
Tenderly rubbing over my thighs and my back, he tells me that he just doesn’t know what to do with me, like I am a problem to be endured or dealt with.
I turn to lay on my back, eyes flirting furiously with the ceiling tiles. I am quiet.
Still curved towards me, he tells me about how he would like to have a child with me so that it could be beautiful.
“Love, love, love,” he hums. He is singing the words to a song that I do not know.
He remembers the episode of The Conan O’Brien Show where Conan O’Brien becomes an ordained minister for free online so that night the two of us become ordained ministers for free through an online Universalist Unitarian church.
With our newfound powers, we marry the tables to the chairs and the bedside lamp to the nightstand using The Naked Lunch as a bible stand-in.
Tonight everything has joined in union, arbitrarily. The bedside lamp did not protest to its new life on the nightstand. I feel happy but not in love. But I don’t feel sad so, as a wife, I sleep well.
THINGS THAT I PUT INTO SARAH’S MOUTH
I.
“The only girl I ever loved was born with roses in her eyes...” The song with that lyric plays on the outdoor speakers, sounding some- thing like summertime, like cherries under my thumbnails and red dripping down the front of my blouse. But in the mountains it is cold. There are tea lights that are dim. In the woodshed behind Sarah’s house there is a small purple something hanging from a chair:
“Why do you have such a small belt? Is it a baby belt?” “No... it’s a dog belt.”
We laugh and forget the word for collar.
We run out of the shed, past a lake and a family graveyard. We don’t know those bones but I know what it feels like to know a dead girl. Her text messages are in my phone. I don’t look at them but I keep them there. It seems fucked up to delete a dead girl’s texts. It seems pointless. She is already gone. I know that it is only productive to think of what is here. Only what is here can think of me. But still, I think about the dead girl while I look at the girl sitting next to me, on a bench suspended from a tree. Sarah is like the dead girl, like me. Bipolar.
“Sarah.”
“Yeah?”
“Do you want to switch?”
I trade the carrot that I am smoking out of for Sarah’s apple. She
asks me if I want to shotgun. I nod my head up and down and the motion causes my face to feel cold. I feel excited to touch Sarah’s lips. Sarah takes a hit from the carrot and inhales. I press my lips, slightly opened, against hers as she exhales into my mouth.
II.
I’m on campus a day earlier than the last day of winter break. I walk up two flights of steps to get from my second floor dorm room to Sarah’s third floor dorm room. I knock on the door and hope that she is on campus a day earlier than the last day of winter break too. Sarah opens the door. She is wearing plaid flannel pajama pants and a grey tank top. I ask her if she wants to walk around or sit or stand or lay down with me. We decide to walk. I watch her put on jeans and a sweater.
We walk to the 7-11 and then we walk through the Crim Dell Mead- ow. We sit in the leaves next to two bronzed statues of a couple in love. The guy statue is lying down on his side and the girl statue is sitting upright. She is reading a letter. Sarah and I mimic their poses and eat black pepper kettle chips.
Sarah takes out a pack of lucky strikes and talks about pelicans and the 50s. Her face becomes animated and she uses her hands to make pelicans and abstract art in the air in front of our faces. She talks about how her grandfather locked himself in his basement and drew portraits of pelicans from memory until he died. She lifts up her shirt to show me a pelican tattoo that I’ve seen before. I look at the tattoo again and I take the cigarette out of Sarah’s mouth and place it into the mouth of the statue. We watch the statue smoke and think about taking an Instagram picture.
III.
In the attic of our building we sit on an old couch and watch a show about pets that have killed their owners but Sarah isn’t really paying attention to the show about pets that have killed their owners. She is on her laptop showing her breasts and her ass to strangers on Cha- troulette. I throw pieces of popcorn at Sarah’s body to try to win over her attention from strangers on the Internet. Sarah turns to me and concentrates on my hand. I lob a piece of popcorn into the air and she catches it in her mouth.
“Where did you get the popcorn?”
“I found it on the floor next to the couch. It should be OK.”
After a few minutes Sarah becomes bored of Chatroulette and inter- ested in the show about pets that have killed their owners. We both eat the floor popcorn and watch the TV as a man is eaten alive by his pet komodo dragons. We then watch as the komodo dragons subsist off of his flesh until the police arrive, weeks later.
(if possible)
HOW TO LIVE
On the edge of my bathtub I watch a girl lick cum off of her face and smile.
I can cry while watching porn when it reminds me of sex
with someone that I loved who now loves somewhere else.
When the girl in the video kind of does something
that she thinks is sexy but the guy laughs instead of thinking it’s sexy. When the sex is slow and it takes some time
to figure out how to change positions without pulling out.
My heart pushes up this heart stuff. I can feel it when strangers that look like us are fucking. We exist somewhere in there.
EVERYONE WAS HAPPY
Everyone was happy,
even if it was only for a very brief period of time. Repeat this 30 times.
I saw a small boy, probably six or seven, petting his dog on the side of a suburban road. He seemed happy.
I turned left across a four-lane road.
Two lanes headed southbound.
Two lanes headed northbound.
Or east or west my sense of direction is confused.
A smiling woman in a sad blue car sped up behind me swerved around me, turned left before the light turned red, then crashed into a pole.
On the courtyard of a liberal arts campus
a guy, a twenty-something, is giving a tour to prospective freshmen. A girl, not quite a twenty-something, walks across the courtyard. The tour guide turns from his group of prospective freshmen
and points to the girl walking across the courtyard.
She smiles like a smoker and waves with one hand
while she uses the other to hold her sundress down against the wind. The tour guide turns back to his group of prospective freshmen
and says,
“I have found the person that I want to spend the rest of my life with.” All of a sudden it smells like vanilla.
BAD BITCH
We mapped out every conceivable route through the subways of New York
in our search to find Jay Z to show him our poetry, unsolicited. In the process our bodies shrunk, feeling humbled. After a period of 3 to 6 months,
Jay Z politely declined our poetry in a form
rejection letter that I printed out and framed
and often look at now as it sits on the edge of my desk in my corner office with a view. I look back
on the whole thing fondly and have a laugh
with you as we catch up over drinks.
Here is a graph:
I call you a bitch in a way that means ‘Girl Power’
Jay Z calls you a bad bitch in a way means ‘Dope Girl’ From what we were to CEOs
Of The Word Bitch,
we started from the bottom
and now we are still at the bottom,
buried in a mattress like drug money.
That night we felt empowered to stand
on the bar singing, LADIES IS PIMPS TOO
and I GIVE UP ON LIFE. Damn, I took it
so much to heart that I couldn’t even sleep with those words inside of my chest.
Nearing 4am I was still taking pictures of my veins through the near-translucent skin on my breasts and the undersides of my forearms to place
in an eBay listing. I sold my blood
for its street value: The Blood of a Young-Girl
The money
I received is harmless and secret, buried in a mattress that I have diagrammed here: This portion is for the dollar
This portion is for feminism
This portion is for The Blueprint 1-3
This portion is for sleeping
This portion is for turning, sleepless
WE CAN PLAY THAT GAME WHERE WE PRETEND THAT WE ARE IN A DOCUMENTARY ABOUT THE INTRICACIES OF HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS
Is “sell out” still a dirty word?
Because that’s what I’m going to name my first born child, if it’s a girl or a stack of 100 dollar bills.
A tiny human that expresses wanting emotions using crying and nonsense syllables
is called a baby—
Tight like a baby
Small dick like a baby
Soft like a baby
Innocent like a baby
Cry like a baby
New like a baby
Accidental like a baby
Closed eyes like a baby
You call me baby
and in your hands that is what I become as we sit cross-legged on your bed,
bare mattress to carpet,
watching TV shows on my MacBook because you can’t afford furniture yet.
Laughing inwardly at the NBC comedy Thursday lineup, our knees express wanting emotions as they bump together. We know that these shows won’t last another season
but we are laughing now and next year
we can laugh about something else.
With both hands
I hold the large, pale orange
that we shoplifted from Whole Foods earlier that day.
You take the large orange from me and in your hands it becomes
a tiny grapefruit
I FEEL OF GREAT IMPORTANCE, HISTORICALLY
Something unnamable pushes against our faces and overtakes us,
creating the womblike sensation that we knew of before birth and that I can sometimes remember when you hold me here, like this:
[I position my arms
around myself to show you what you look like
and what I feel like. It is inefficient and unillumin
ating.] To the same effect, I try to communicate
several specific ideas in this way, with my arms performing useless actions at you.
I feel of great importance, historically,
when you manage to look at me with some understanding, even if it is only out of politeness. Our bodies
can only exhibit actions as outcome of movement,
this is our unfortunate way of being. Though my intention was to move closer to you, you view me as far away
in some distant space doing curious, indiscernible,
things with my arms.
From some distant space, I am still trying
to communicate with you. This time, through a long email that patiently delineates the plot of a movie with characters that remind me of us, and includes helpful links to starred reviews and the movie’s IMDb page.
recent google searches (#1)
DINING ALONE AT PLAZA AZTECA
Adam was always sending Caitlin quotes from books that she hasn’t read and probably will never read.
They used quotes as a form of conversation because they didn’t have anything else to say to each other.
Instead of talking about current events, pop culture, or emailing YouTube video links back and forth, Adam and Caitlin talked about the past. The unchanging events of fictional characters with lives that were more interesting than their own.
Adam liked to point out quotes that seemed to abstractly apply to their current situation.
Through Adam, Caitlin has read Phillip Roth:
[“This made me laugh,” Adam said.]
“Just as I am about to unlock the door, imagining I have covered my tracks, my heart lurches at the sight of what is hanging like snot to the toe of my shoe. I am the Roskolnikov of jerking off—the sticky evidence is everywhere!”