I could tell that Mavis was dismayed by my bored lack of liturgy, so I made a big show of slowly prying the lid off the can while I tried to come up with something moving to say. “Is it tacky to Instagram this?” I asked her, but before she could answer, a car full of hooting and laughing teenagers crunched through the gravel at the top of the hill and parked next to the idling Toyota, and I for real was not trying to explain just what the fuck we were doing to a bunch of children who were about to go skinny-dipping in my father’s cremains. “It’s bad manners just to dump him in the water! Shouldn’t you at least say something nice?!” Mavis asked, a borderline hysterical edge creeping into her voice. I waited for the wind to die down while keeping an anxious eye on the cutoff shorts and tank tops untying the boat from their SUV above us. “Thanks for always cutting my meat into tiny pieces,” I said finally, tipping the can toward the gently rippling waves. The sun sparkled on the surface of the water…which remained blissfully undisturbed, as nothing was coming out of that fucking can.
“If I have to touch these ashes with my bare hands I am going to kill myself,” I barked at Mavis, who stood downriver, wringing her hands nervously and keeping her eyes trained on the whooping and hollering kids stripping down to their bikinis up by the car. I shook the can a little harder. Still nothing. What a fucking asshole, undoubtedly mocking me from the other side of the rainbow bridge. “Stop embarrassing me!” I hissed, banging the side of the container to loosen him up (gross) before violently shaking it out over the water. As the better part of the cremains shook loose from where they had settled, a huge gust of wind came from the east. OF FUCKING COURSE.
Mavis’s face was like Munch’s Scream painting, all horrified wide eyes and open mouth, as I turned toward her with my dead father’s charred bones and fingernails splattered across my face and crackling between my teeth. It was like coming home from a day at the beach, except replace “sand” with “gritty Sam Irby penis and entrails” lining my nostrils and in between my toes.
“FUCK!!!” I shouted, tasting burned human flesh on my tongue as I shook eyeballs and elbows off my dress. What hadn’t ended up in my face hole was floating like a large clump of dust slowly down the Cumberland River. Is that really all there is? I’ve had more pomp and circumstance while taking out the fucking recycling. Horrified, I stood frozen at the edge of the water.
—
As we climbed back up the hill, past those children whose lives I would be living if happiness weren’t a goddamned lie, I could feel bits and particles squelching between my toes; I made a mental note that this would be the last day of my life that I was going to ever wear motherfucking flip-flops. Mavis drove to Bolton’s Spicy Chicken & Fish so we could get a couple of pieces to take back to the hotel, and I stood outside the car in the parking lot bent over a trash can shaking out my hair and digging little black specks out of my ears while she flirted with the old dude frying up her catfish inside the restaurant. I tossed the gold funeral-home can in a dumpster and said one last thank-you to my father for blessing me with short, fat fingers that couldn’t get as deep into my ear canals as I needed them to go. When we got back to the hotel, I contemplated plucking out each of my eyelashes one by one, shaving my entire body (eyebrows included), then hosing it down with bleach, but SVU was on, plus we had just gotten some ribs, so instead I took a Klonopin and brushed my teeth in the hot shower, wondering which of my dad’s parts I was watching ride a frothy cloud of extra-strength dandruff shampoo down the drain. Roll credits, sad trombone.
I’m in Love and It’s Boring
I found the apartment in the rental listings of the Chicago Reader. The ad was for a “spacious, airy, unbelievably huge!” one-bedroom not far from the one my roommate and I were currently arguing about dirty dishes in. “$600 a month! No credit check! No deposit! Move in today!!!” I called the number and was bounced between receptionists before finally getting one who could help. We scheduled a viewing for later that day, and I was pleasantly surprised to find an apartment that really was massive, not the shoe box I’d been expecting, with large windows that flooded the space with light and gleaming hardwood floors. I knew I wanted it the minute I crossed the threshold, but I went through the motions of peeking into the closet and checking the water pressure in the shower so the landlord could rest assured that I was a Serious Person. I offered him the first two months’ rent in cash on the spot, and he handed me a basic lease to sign and said I could move in whenever I wanted. After I closed the door behind him, I sat on the closed toilet and texted my boyfriend: “Dude, I found us the perfect place.”
When I was in love with Zachary Jones, I knew it, because my stomach used to hurt whenever I thought about his face, and I would drag myself barefoot around that apartment we were supposed to be sharing, drinking cold vodka in my pajamas while listening to “Wake Up Alone” by Amy Winehouse and waiting for him to text me. I knew it was love, because I was twenty-six and had crashed my 1987 Honda Accord in the parking lot outside of Pizzeria Aroma when, over the cell phone I shouldn’t have been talking on while driving, he said “I love you” and sounded like he meant it. I knew it was love, because he gave me a mix CD three weeks after he ghosted on my birthday party. The party was also supposed to be a “this is my actual boyfriend, not just some imaginary guy I’ve been talking your ear off about” party, so I sat there pink-cheeked and burning with shame while everyone asked where he was, again.
—
It was always my young dream to fall in love with a DJ. I was a very earnest clubgoer, and when I wasn’t shuffling around the dance floors at Slick’s and Sinibar and Betty’s Blue Star, I was studying records at Gramaphone. I fantasized about hauling bags of house records to my car from the Darkroom at 2:00 a.m., my clothes damp with sweat, sticky with spilled drinks and reeking of cigarette smoke. I daydreamed about late nights fighting through crowds to fetch bottles of water from the bar for the faceless imaginary boyfriend hunched over the tables, oversize headphones bobbing as he nodded to the beat. I barely slept, toiling all day at my various jobs before racing home to slam a quick dinner and draw on some eyeliner before leaving right back out to go to the club.
I met Zac at an MF Doom show at Sonotheque, a place I loved so much I cried when it closed. I was actually there with another dude, this younger kid, Jason, who I was trying to figure out whether or not I had feelings for, and Zac stood watching us huddled together shouting unintelligibly into each other’s ears. When I realized this giant human nursing the same beer for forty-five minutes was staring at me, I figured it was because I was wearing gym shoes in a disco and tried to hide my feet behind my bag. For two hours, he watched me over the heads of tiny backpackers furiously composing battle raps in their heads until the show ended and the lights went up and everyone scattered like roaches to the darkest corners of the room. Zac had disappeared (had I dreamed him?), so I hovered awkwardly near the bar waiting for my friends to pee and close their tabs and tried to shake off that shy, embarrassed feeling you get when you think someone likes you but you figure out they were really interested in your friend or some shit.
I smelled him before I saw him, clean like soap yet spicy and masculine. All of a sudden, a stubbled cheek pressed against mine as he bent close to speak. His lips smelled like Carmex. “Is that dude you were sitting with your boyfriend?” His voice pierced my heart like a knife, and my voice caught in my throat. I shook my head, deciding right then and there that my feelings for Jason were most definitely of the friendly variety. He asked for my number, and I mentally had to calculate whether there was enough money in my bank account to get my cell phone reactivated by the time he was going to call me. I could probably hustle up a freelance copyediting job right quick and get Sprint their money, so if he was one of these cool guys and waited a few days, I’d be all good. But what if he, you know, liked me liked me and tried to call later that day? Then I’d either look like a broke bitch or a lying asshole, and, yeah, I’m probably both, but he ain’t gotta know that yet. I
snatched a pen off the bar and wrote down the number to the house phone I had initially sneered at when my roommate insisted (thank goodness for sensible people). He smiled, revealing a row of perfect teeth that stood in stark contrast to his deep chocolate skin even in the almost-dark, and enveloped my hand in his big bear paw. My insides turned to jelly, and I fought the desire to get on my tiptoes and kiss him.
The courtship was amazing. Until I met him, I had been an unwitting victim of a lot of Netflix and Chilling, except that wasn’t a thing then. Let’s just say I spent a lot of nights on various boyfriendly futons watching HBO for whatever amount of time is long enough to feel like a not-prostitute before having unenthusiastic sex. I was twenty-five, man. No one was asking me to dinner! It was like, “Oh, hey, cool, you gave me your number at that De La show! Wanna come over and watch me and my roommates play Resident Evil for three hours?” So I would say yeah, and shave my legs, and get all my shit on, and go to some kid’s house to watch him smoke weed and play Xbox, and then when he lost, we’d go to his room and have loser sex atop the pizza boxes and Jordans and DVDs scattered across his bed. And by “have sex” I mean “lie stiff as a board with all my muscles taut so his roommates wouldn’t hear the bed squeaking.” Lather, rinse, repeat for the entirety of my early twenties until this adult human male picked a time and a restaurant that served food on real plates. In the cab on the way home, I whispered to myself, “This is it.”
I knew it was love because he was busy with school, and I was not busy—at least, not busy in big and important ways—and it’s cute when you’re not busy to mail care packages to your boyfriend who literally lives thirty minutes away but hasn’t called in a week because he is so fucking busy. That inner cringe when a friend asks “Have you ever even been in his house?” is obviously what love feels like. I was in a pretty hopeless place: working too much, sick all the time, desperate to be loved in a real way. I needed an anchor, and into my lap one fell. He talked about helping me finish school and taking me on tropical vacations and didn’t care that I can’t have babies. How did I get so lucky?! And all I would have to do in return was wait, while trying not to drown.
I became pretty good at pretending to be a super-chill girlfriend, but sometimes I felt like I was really going to lose my shit pacing around that apartment waiting for updates: would he get out of class early enough to hang out tonight? Could he take Saturday night off from work to meet me out for a drink? What about if I drove to the hospital during his lunch break and just made googly eyes at him in the harshly lit cafeteria for a few minutes? Hours stretched to days, and days stretched to weeks, and there I was trying to be cool while pining for someone too unavailable to be my boyfriend, secretly delighting in the agony because it was proof that I was actually—no, fucking finally—in an adult romantic relationship. I would bore my increasingly irritated friends with melodramatic whining about how my one true love didn’t have time to hang out because of his chemistry final, then sit alone in this new apartment I’d rented so I could give him a key without being disrespectful to my now ex-roommate. A key he used maybe three times over the course of our entire relationship. Because he never found the time to come over.
I knew I was in love, because even though I spent my weekends locked in my crib organizing my ketchups and moping around to heartbreak music, it was worth it because I could finally relate to what the hell those bitches were singing about. I had mastered the unrequited crush early in life; every boy who leaned over to help me solve a geometry problem or who smacked a volleyball back over the net before it smashed into my face became the object of my never-ending devotion. Until he asked someone else to homecoming and I learned, again, that just because a dude runs across the whole school with the clarinet you left behind in the band room tucked under his arm to bring it to your Latin American history class doesn’t mean he’s in love with you. Sometimes people can be decent. So I gathered all the songs about loneliness and longing and made bleak mixtapes to listen to while ripping pictures of Christian Slater out of back issues of YM and Seventeen. And that was fine, but what I really wanted was a reason to sing all the tortured, love-gone-wrong songs. What I really wanted was to sing “Tear in Your Hand” at the top of my lungs and mean it.
I had sex one time in high school, but that was a joke. As soon as he squirted that thick ribbon of cum all over my pubes and inner thigh before I’d even begun to enjoy myself, I decided that I wouldn’t be doing that with a person I might have to do a group project on NAFTA with ever fucking again. In my later teens, I’d learn the hard way that sex doesn’t equal undying romantic feelings. But boy, those first few lessons were brutal. They resulted in many “Yo, I thought we were just homies who kicked it sometimes” conversations. So when I finally happened upon this handsome stranger, one who had all the hobbies and interests of the prototypical lovers I breathlessly detailed in my journals, one who took me on dates that he paid for, one who made actual love instead of trying to fuck me in the face, I thought it was kismet. It had to be. So what if he didn’t ever have time to have long philosophical talks with me or fit a quick lunch into his grad school schedule? He told me he loved me and wanted to spend his life with me, and he proved it by never ever calling or using the extra toothbrush I’d carefully arranged in the medicine cabinet in what should have been our bathroom. All I had when I moved was some pots and pans and the shit in my bedroom, so the dining room and living room and guest room sat cold and empty for the entire time I lived there letting the words to “Carrion” by Fiona Apple echo through the empty spaces, waiting for him to give me a reason to fill them up.
The torture of loving someone through difficult circumstances seemed so glamorous in music and on television. I knew I was in love, because opposite work schedules and organic chemistry were conspiring to keep the two of us apart. What cruel irony to meet the seven-foot-tall record-collecting beefcake of my dreams only to be prioritized somewhere between “get a root canal” and “study for the MCAT” on his to-do list! I spent years of my life romanticizing something that amounted to little more than the kind of relationship a person has with her high school boyfriend once they’ve gone away to separate colleges and he forgets there’s someone pining for him halfway across the country. The gut-wrenching pain of casual rejection was my oxygen as I waited for him to put his stethoscope down long enough to help me pick out a couch. At least I got a lot of shit done while waiting for him to finish school. I circled a lot of particleboard furniture in the IKEA catalog, fucked a couple of muscular jerks with fat fetishes I brought home from the gym, and read the entire Harry Potter series during the summer I unknowingly was waiting for him to dump me. God, I was dumb and cautiously optimistic for way longer than I should’ve been. I mean, “in love.”
How do I know I’m in love if I don’t want to kill myself all the time? Mavis is the nicest person I’ve ever met, and it was hard to recognize I was in love with her because she never let so much time elapse between “hey wats up winky-face emoji” texts that I had deleted her number and had to respond, “NEW PHONE WHO DIS.” She has never replied “…uh okay sure” when I tell her I love her. She’s never patted me on the back while telling me that she thinks of me as a really good friend despite our regular carnal relations; never said, “Nah, I don’t read your shit because you really aren’t that funny to me”; never disappeared for a month and then popped back up all nonchalant. She has never, not even once, made me miserable. How is it possible that what we have is even real?
You know how when you’re in your mid- to late thirties, and you’re dreaming about where you are going to live hopefully by age forty-two, and you’re picturing your reasonably affordable one-bedroom apartment in a moderately safe and attractive neighborhood: who is living there with you? Is it the withholder? The serial cheater? What about the commitment-phobe, or perhaps the grifter? Yeah, no. It’s none of those. It’s some mythical being you haven’t met yet, one who doesn’t have any suspicious Facebook activity that can trigger hour
s of pointless scrolling down strangers’ profiles, looking for infidelity clues.
I have developed a very special set of skills as a coping mechanism for falling in love with shitty people. I can go days at a time without so much as a smoke signal. I have no problem eating in a restaurant alone or living without physical contact for weeks or believing that a person who definitely was sleeping with several other women was also somehow devoted to me. That’s the deal, right, that it’s not real unless it feels like someone reached into your chest to pull your heart out while you stand by helplessly? I can work with that. I have not, however, figured out what to do when a person I am romantically involved with keeps her word and looks after my feelings. If Mavis showed up at a reading, drunk and inexplicably wet, and heckled me onstage, I would know how to handle that kind of love. I understand a love that argues with you in public and occasionally puts down your body and knocks on your door only at midnight.
I’ve never been loved like this before, and I resist it, every day, because I do not deserve it. Real love feels less like a throbbing, pulsing animal begging for its freedom and beating against the inside of my chest and more like, “Hey, that place you like had fish tacos today and I got you some while I was out,” as it sets a bag spotted with grease on the dining room table. It’s not a game you don’t understand the rules of, or a test you never got the materials to study for. It never leaves you wondering who could possibly be texting at 3:00 a.m. or what you could possibly do to make it come home and stay there. It’s fucking boring, dude. I don’t walk around mired in uneasiness, waiting for the other shoe to drop. No parsing through spun tales about why it took her so long to come back from the store; no checking her e-mails or calling her job to make sure she’s actually there; no sitting in my car outside her house at dawn to make sure she’s alone when she leaves. This feels safe and steadfast and predictable and secure. It’s boring as shit. And it’s easily the best thing I’ve ever felt.
We Are Never Meeting in Real Life. Page 17