January As Usual- A work in progress.

This is yet unfinished. I started it in January, of course, while still miserably alone in my Atlanta apartment. Now Im in a house in Ohio. Not much has changed. Its cheap, and trite, and disgustingly cliche, but heregoes.

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”—Oscar Wilde.



January as usual, he thought. January is never really an extraordinary month. After the optimism of New Years wears off, which is generally a few days, or the next morning depending on what he had been doing or how much he had drank--January left him with the scurf of last years emotions piled on his heavy heart. No, he thought, January was never a good month. He walked slowly, deliberately tracing his steps through the snow in the staggered pattern she left just ahead of him. She was pretty, he thought. She is not much more than that, he thought. He told himself she was all he had, and pushed the uncertainty into its place in the back of his mind. He was always so organized.
Past the snowy windows in the warm lit homes, he was following her back to her apartment on the east side. She was talking now, she was always talking and laughing and smiling and finding the good in things. That’s why she was with him, he thought. She can find the good in anything. He heard the vague semblance of a question through the fog of his mind, and nodded "yes" without knowing what he had agreed to. It didn’t matter. She would remind him of it later, with the smile, and with the laugh. Sometimes he hated that laugh.
They were at the iced concrete steps of her apartment now. It was a brick building, cracking and old with a peeling red painted door. The Christmas wreath was still up and wouldn’t be taken down until after spring. She never thought of these things as he did. That’s why they were perfect for each other, she had said. He kissed her goodnight on her cold flushed cheek and she made plans for their lunch tomorrow. He had not intended eating lunch. He never really ever intended to eat, and took to losing weight whenever she went out of town. He never left town.
After the door shut with a slight frozen groan, he turned and started towards the north end of the city; tightening the scarf she had given him around his throat and passing a wall that had “My hand thinks I’m an artist but my heart knows I’m a poet” spray painted amidst the gang graffiti. He did not yet feel like going home. The building lights flickered on, blotchily illuminating the streets as the sky grayed and darkened. It got dark so early now he often heard people complaining of being tired at seven o’clock. He was always tired, but he never slept. She had made him go to the doctor for it once a few years ago and he got a little bottle full of big pills to take. He told her that they helped, but he still hadn’t broken the seal.
Snowflakes sailed lazily to the ground around him as he opened the door to the small pub that he liked to go to without her. The warm rush of heated air tinged with cigarette smoke and the stench of cheap perfume that greeted him felt like home. He unraveled the scarf that was now damp and sticky from the cold sweat that comes from freezing all winter and hung it up with his jacked on the dirty coat rack near the door. He sank into the padded vinyl barstool and a moment later was delivered a drink without ever having said a word.
The bartender was a wide round woman, though not unpretty. She had very long straight dark hair and a voice as smooth as her skin. He liked just listening to her, and if he smiled enough, and laughed every so often she would talk the whole night. She would talk about her son, and how proud she was of his grades in school, of her freshly painted apartment, and of her mother who meant well but never let her be her own person. People are never just them, they are always tainted, he thought, they always belong to someone, or something. Everyone is a slave to some vice or guilt, or worse to some virtue or well meaning intention.
It was long past midnight and the neon signs had blurred before they went out. He stepped out into the freezing street once again and began home. He lived two blocks away, but in the iced needle air it felt like miles. Someone was behind him but he didn’t know who she was. He never knew who she was, and he liked it that way. Tonight she had red lips and warm hands and laughed far too much—god, was everything that funny?
They made it to his apartment and he opened the door without looking for the keys. He never locked the door; if people wanted to steal things, then by all means, take them, he had said. It was cold and stark in the fluorescent lighting of the hall as they fumbled through the kitchen and into the bedroom. He fell backwards onto the bed and knocked over a cup full of cold week old coffee that was sitting on the nightstand, and heard her laugh. Then the lights went out.
The next morning he woke up to the sound of garbage trucks in the alley beneath him. There was frost on the window, making the pale, sick light that came through it even grayer. Everything was gray. There was a note sitting on his dresser that smelled like the alcohol and cheap perfume of the pub, he threw it out without opening it. The bathroom tiles made a soft sound when the skin of his feet met their surface, stopping at the sink. The mirror was dusty and speckled with flecks of toothpaste, but through it he could still see his reflection. He was thin and pale, almost gaunt and his eyes matched the fog outside in color and haziness. He splashed water on his face from the tap and stepped into a pair of last week’s dirty jeans.
He made his way down to the café that she had arranged to meet him for their lunch. He was early this time, a rare occurrence. He didn’t like being early to anything because that meant sitting alone and awkward listening to the petty selfish gossip of everyone around. No one ever talks about anything important; no one ever talks of anything of substance or meaning. No one ever has any substance or meaning. Nothing does, he thought. There is no truth; there is no reality or meaning or purpose. There is only me, he thought. Hubristic thoughts are always so charming.
She smiled and pulled up her wooden chair across from his. The sound of the wood scraping on the marble floor made his skin crawl. The waiter was a short, pear shaped man, with red cheeks and red hair, and a smile plastered with condescending politeness across his face. The waiter took their drink orders, just a glass of water for me please, she said, no, no lemon, and cup of black coffee and a coke for him. She said he looked like he needed the coffee, she said he looked a mess. She was always trying to take care of him, always trying to make him take care of himself. He managed to choke about half of the inky dark coffee down just to make her stop telling him how much he looked like he needed it. He lost count of how many times she said that phrase.
She was talking happily now, excited about some new trifle that would be the center of everything she did or breathed for the next few days. It was hard to focus on her through the static of sound, the mangled mixture of words and stories from the other tables and the other people in the café. There were always so many people, saying so many things, telling so many stories, prostituting so many words, and cheapening them. Sometimes he felt like he could see them materialize, big balloon letters hovering momentarily over everyone’s head, watch them floating in the air, and then vanish. Popped by a movement of wind.
She was looking at him with great blue imploring eyes, using that strained, false sounding voice when she asked him if he was paying attention. Of course. Of course he was paying attention, he said, and vomited a few of the words he had caught back to her while stabbing the ice in his empty glass. She smiled, and laughed that laugh, and went on talking about her obese cat, or her aunt’s salon, or some other tedious topic of no real importance. He smiled, and laughed, and agreed, and she was happy. She was almost always happy.
Out of the picture window, he could see everyone hunched over, bundled up, running to get inside from the cold that was cutting their noses and fingers. They all had this twisted look on their faces, like looking through a kaleidoscope, like they had all eaten something sour. A little boy in a blue coat and red hat held his mothers hand and caught snowflakes with the other. A man in a long tan trench coat with a briefcase muttered anxiously into a cell phone. A woman with long hair tucked under her pink picoted toboggan walked quickly with a man in a black pea coat next to her. There are so many people, but there is no one. He is always alone, he thought.
He got the check and signed his name in small sloppy scrawl, and held her mittened hand as they stepped to the street. He was not listening. There was no reason to ever listen to her; she always said something more than once. Everything she thought was a rerun. A quotation. He looked into the café through the picture window and saw all the people he had just been surrounded by. The loud woman with basketball breasts and two small children was in the corner, the pale man with the goatee and coffee in the booth. He loved them, because he did not know them—because they were perfect, and pure. They laughed, and made love, and played on swing sets, and read poetry. They had warm homes with warm friends and families, and—she was hitting his arm and yelling his name—Nick! You aren’t even listening, she said. In the strained odd voice that attempts to hide the truth in a joke she said that he never cared about what she was saying. She said that sometimes she wondered why she even bothered with him. Sometimes he wished she wouldn’t, he thought.
It was hours later and he was underwater. Looking up through the inch and a half of pellucid water above his eyes in the bathtub everything was recognizable but distorted. The showerhead, the curtains, the window facing the apartment complex across the street—all changed, misshapen, warped. This is life, he thought, it’s looking through water.
Still dripping, the sick blue glow of the television in the next room hit the side of his face as he sat at the plastic kitchen table. He was writing on a yellow legal pad with a blue pen trying to transfer this feeling from inside of him to the page. To purge himself of it. He felt like he was being turned inside out—his stomach twisting, tying, spinning, nauseous. Beside him the phone was off the hook, screaming with its dull hum. “I don’t love her” was written three times in hard, dark marks on the paper, like the harder he wrote the more real and convincing it would become.
The icicled cars and buses had pushed through the snow behind her. She was still smiling after saying, “I love you” at her doorstep. He was tired, and he hadn’t thought. He had told her she meant nothing to him. She hadn’t heard what he had said. He let go of her hand and turned to face her. The smile on her face had melted, like the snowflakes in her hair.
In his kitchen the refrigerator hummed, only echoing the silence. She hadn’t said anything. Nothing. The cars continued on the street, and people kept walking by, but she was quiet. The look in her watery eyes was haunting. This is why people break up through impersonal means, through phone or email he thought, because it’s easy, because you don’t have to see them hurt and love them again, if just for that moment. Because you are free while they collapse.
The reality of what he had said, what he had done hit him with real intensity and force. He thought the air had left his lungs and couldn’t breathe; he was being torn apart from the inside. But this is what he needed, he told himself. This is what he wanted. She blinked away the tears that ran warm down her cold face. He felt like that instant might have been the definition of him; his whole purpose was to just to have existed in that moment. He wished he could take that instant and freeze it—to stop that second and have it preserved, perfect and pristine for all time. To be able to step away, and look at everything that was happening right then, to absorb it all, to remember every detail, to really live in that one moment and remember exactly how he felt forever.
Every second was so pure, so painful, that they each cut into him—the tragic look on her face, the snow that fell on her hair, and the traffic that slid past on the iced road. I am heartless, he thought. I do not exist, there is no me, he thought, there is only her, and what she makes of me.
But it was gone. She had turned and locked the red painted door to her apartment, leaving him standing, inches away from the Christmas wreath.