Posts tagged a line made longer

It was nine-o-clock on a Saturday and I was drunk enough to smoke. Piano man was playing on the jukebox. We all sang along. Those who didn’t know the lyrics hummed the first syllables of words and faked the rest. It was a good time. A good night. Then I saw her standing there staring at me. This must have been her bar but I didn’t know it. It’s been over a year and people change. This place was too high class for the woman that said I dented her universe. I could see her collecting her confidence off the floor to walk over to me and I turned away. I didn’t want to deal with this. I was here to forget about someone not ignore people.

She walked over with her head high and her ass out. She remembered something about me.

Driving in the storm, every sharp turn seemed like it could solve my problems. I was in debt for a degree that has done nothing for me. A broken promise from society’s core. I had a brother with everything and did nothing for it. Good looks and luck. The right places at the right times. I did everything right and there was no place for me. I didn’t gamble with my future and still lost everything. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right.

I shouldn’t be doing what I’m doing for money.

I showed her what a man could do and she wanted more. I didn’t turn her into a whore. She always been one lying dormant in a virgin’s body. Her parents did it too her. Denied her everything, even a stable childhood. She needed a vice and I gave it to her. I gave her something that could clear her mind for a moment the first time and last longer for ever orgasm after. I gave her peace.

I love you so much it almost breaks time for me. I’d live and die in your arms in one moment if you never had to let me go. Time has no meaning with you.

I could have been better but never good enough for you. You needed more than just a guy. You needed a man and I was still too much of a child for you. I always would be. It’s how I was raised. The guilt made me stop doing things I loved. I stopped cooking for you. Stopped fucking you like you loved. Stopped calling you baby doll and you stopped being mine.

I’d hate to find out that the only things I like about myself are medical problems, something that can be cured with a pill. That this amazing beauty I feel will go away with the lows that get me in trouble. Will my turn of phrase and outlook change so much that i’ll feel like a stranger to myself? I already feel different enough.

My open mind closed you in my arms and let me feel how gentle a woman could be to another. You kissed like I always wanted to be kissed and touched my body slowly. My body ached for you and you knew how long to let me hurt. Soft skin that been treated as good as mine. Soft lips that kissed all my spots. Hard bites to remind me you knew what you were doing. Teaching me to do things I already knew how to do. You held me after then gave me the sweetest goodbye.

Karma owed me a few more heartbreaks but this one seemed to take me to a place I didn’t think normal people could go. I was dark and dried on the inside. The tears stopped but would start up again randomly. When my mind went blank and I felt what it must be like to be dead. I liked how it felt and knew I wanted to feel it forever.

“So this is real now, it’ll be us and only us?”

“Yes, I don’t want anyone else, can’t think of anyone else, I’ve tried.”

“Why did you try?”

“Because I thought I lost you, I thought my life was over. I thought I lost my future.”

“I’m your future?”

“You my everything, my only thing, the only thing that matters. I love you.”

“I love you too.”

My phone rang and it was her. It was Ella. Her voice was soft and sad. I knew she was still hurt and I knew I couldn’t hurt her anymore. I told her I didn’t sleep with April because I couldn’t get my mind off of her. I told her how I loved her more than ever and more than anyone. That I didn’t love anyone else but her. I lied. I lied a lot, but every lie made her happier so I kept telling them. The part of her that wanted to be happy believed them. I would do anything to make her happy, I loved her in that way; that unsustainable way.

After food and a lot of drink, and a walk back to the beach house we slept together. It wasn’t making love and it wasn’t fucking. It was like we picked up somewhere before we left off. We fell asleep together, woke up around seven and had sex again. This time it was sweeter, it was slower, and it made me think of Ella.

“This isn’t practice, it’s prodigy, playing around”

I wrote that piece of shit years ago. Let me be more specific. I wrote that horse-shit lie years ago before I appreciated practice. Before I read books like Bird by Bird, On Writing, and Writing Down The Bones. Before I understood the importance of daily practice. Before I really tried writing a book.

Right now I’m three chapters into a small novella with a bigger word count than anything I’ve ever written. I’m damn proud of myself and damn ashamed that I haven’t done something like this sooner. At least I can claim ignorance. Growing up I was a natural at a lot of things, better than some people who practiced all the time. So It’s taken over a decade for life to knock me on my ass enough times to realize that practice is something most people actually do, even those people who are really good. Those people practice better.

That’s all I’ve been doing lately, learning how to practice. It’s all about what you’ve heard all your life. Daily goals that you can meet. That gradually get harder when you’ve notice it’s getting too easy to accomplish. That’s where I got practice wrong so many years and gave up so many things.

Running, I gave up running because it made me. I added an extra lap everyday. Every-fucking-day. I ended up in physical therapy with a lot of pain and left with a mild withdrawal to an electrical current cranked up to ten flexing my lower back for me.

So what am I saying? Not much. Nothing that you haven’t heard a million times before from a few hundred people. Practice makes perfect. I’m saying a lot when I say that you have to practice practicing.

I woke up to April knocking on the door. I knew my mother would have called her.

“Mom sent me, we’re both worried”

She still called my parents mom and dad even though we have been broke up over six years ago. Sometime I still think of winning her back. We knew each other since elementary and went to the same summer camp twice. It wasn’t till high school though when we were separated by social constructs of cliques and cliché that we got together. I remember us walking around my block. She was wearing A jacket that said money and I was wearing a jacket that said poor but cost nearly two hundred dollars. She grabbed it and she kissed me first and that’s not how its suppose to work.

She wanted me to be a cog but I couldn’t do that for her or to myself. At least I still had Ella, she was my best lover and only friend. I had acquaintances and other people I’d hang about with but they were all broke artist and would only love me till I had success and leave me then. Ella was different she could be my entire world. She had a level head and curved body. Only if she would talk to me.

I caught the answer blowing in the wind. The sea breeze had freedom in it. It let me think. Yes, about her. Who else could I think about. She could have let me go softer, but I guess there is no soft way to let someone go. Maybe if I was a better man I would have seen it coming or perhaps it would have never came at all. It did though and now she was yesterday. Maybe even last week. I don’t know when I stopped feeling time with her but I did. It took months but the beach had helped. Wearing no shoes had helped. The drinking had not helped at all. Time made me agree with her. She had every right to let me go. She might not have known the names or even that there were others but she did know that I was an artist that was not selling. I refused to be anything else. I took no jobs. Not even the fake ones that were offered to me by my parents and their friends. To be a sixty thousand a year cog in a machine that did nothing but turned by itself.