Part I

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You goddamned chimp. 

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Instead of hitting the grindstone, working your fanny off for a Fortune 100, you write, and you draw, and now, you're begging like an orphan begs for coins for your new girl's lips. Those smacking things. You dream about those lips every night, yessir, every night following that hot as heck afternoon you lock eyes with pretty Wily for the first time. Imagine now, this here’s the important bit: Wily’s got the most kissable lips this side of Generation X. Big and puffy. They move together, intertwined like soul mates. Dance partners. 

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Wily wears a sweet, most eatable perfume that you'd bet anything must taste like roasted caramel, which is the color of her skin. It’s a smell you come to recognize a neighborhood away. It lags behind her, street corner to street corner, inside of L cars and outside upon the swirling platforms buried by snow. Yessir, it follows her like some hobo bewitching passerby with a slurred speech or a hoarse cough, up the block, down: she sticks on people.

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You and Wily are pretty familiar right away. You read fairy tales and Marquez and Soyinka and Dickens since the newspapers are too sad to stomach. You like the air turned down cold at night. You watch cartoons with your skeletons crunched-up into the sofa cushions, sitting at odd angles like somebody swapped your bones out for those caving, half-sunk floorboards on old war ships. You’ve got these boyish dimples cut into your rounded cheeks. Wily, a couple of cute craters smoothed into the small of her lower back. At the movies you take your first crack at brandishing a lover’s wisdom, sighing in her ear how each day, there are so many old war ships that vanish and become forgotten. You’re brushing over her dimples with the tips of your fingers. It’s a big load of crap. But she nods and grabs your hand; she loves it when you’re serious. 

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Huh. 

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Until Wily comes along, you never feel insecure enough to want to sound smart for a girl. When you tell Ma what it is Wily does to you, she grabs you by your nose and begs you to marry her.

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And the best part: You and Wily even listen to the same music. You stumble through the classics, the eras out of order: Ma Rainey and Grandmaster Flex, acid jazz and Talib, the Duke with his puffing cheeks on over to the oldies, spinsters, and then you step out of the time machine and vibe to all the new crisp: Chance and Kaytranada, Erykah and Kendrick. You and Wily hit a mash of local impromptus in Bucktown and Englewood, a couple house parties in La Grange. It’s a real spark. Soon, people are always calling you what you've started calling yourself: You and Wily. You think you're in love since you've been told that love is the feeling of your heart growing heavy in your chest. When she presses her lips together and looks at you, you practically fly. Anyway, the real truth is: she really does warm you up. You run hot with her locked there on your arm. You smile often. You dream about her naked. You sin. You think with two hearts instead of just the one. You play pretend and like it. You pray the naked away. You sin again. But you don’t believe in dogma: you’re a romantic, but even romantics have brains.

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The first time she puts her lips on you they’re sort of wet, which makes you think yours might be too dry. Always hotter or wetter or colder than you prepare for. She’s a better kisser than you are but she keeps you around anyway. She asks you, right outside the predatory birds exhibit at the Lincoln Park Zoo if you have your mother’s or father’s lips and you’re afraid to answer. That’s a dangerous question. You’re not sure if she reads psychology or if she’s a stargazer or another life form altogether and so you answer neither. Or both. Whatever, why is she even asking you that anyway? Look there, you point to a tree branch arched above her head, The buzzards are waking up, yessir. Wily’s got her hands on her hips, unamused. Afterwards, she gives you the silent treatment until you finally confess: It depends on the day, bub. 

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You lay with her tender after your first fight. The fight has to do with sharing space or taking time or, again, both or neither; yessir, you can't remember it happened so long ago. It all goes down barely two weeks into you and Wily going official, so you’ve still got barrels of patience to make up tender that night, see. 

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On the first day of spring, she’s a little sad after she sniffs out your weed, which you keep hidden inside a DVD collection of The Roots Live Performance at The Washington Monument. How’d she even find it? you ask. She doesn’t answer, instead she asks if you’re withholding any other dirties from her. So you forget about your question, you reassure her. Come’ere bub, you wrap your arm around Wily’s waist and you say in earnest, If only she could read a transcript of what your heart is gossiping: of how she speeds you up and down. She says you sound sweet. She kisses you on your bare chest, all along the ridges of the scar you'll always have from surgery. You're sweet, she keeps saying. You're my sweet, sweet boy. No you're not, you say back, serious as ever. She shushes you, don't ruin the moment. She shushes you again, softer, don't you dare. 

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Something still weighs on you, though. An unexplained heaviness. So, you drop your pulse until night calls and, as you’ve come to expect by now, it's another sleepless night for you. So you go for a long, long walk, picking your way through the landfills tucked away in the shadowy crooks of the city, where the asphalt’s growing grass. You shuffle slowly between barracks of dying lampposts, beneath the spray of the moon, and you think it looks like the lake’s been turned upside down on top of you. The maple trees lining the curbsides are showing leafless, gaunt and bending and black. You awaken from your reverie near the mom and pop shops over in Old Town, where your parents work, and you walk across Division Street with your eyes shut, hoping for something, anything, to hit. You cut south in search of the river. You have no clue what time it is. You start whistling a Mary Poppins number as soon as you hear the slow, moody current close by. Then, you point your toes east in the direction of Navy Pier and let your mind wander completely. You end up on a bus stop bench planted in the heart of the chocolate factory district. Your favorite part of town. You replay your conversation from earlier with Wily over and over, looping your words, hers, in your head all the way through the pink of dawn into the thirsting blows of first daybreak. With the sun fully showing you marvel at cloudless skies rife with jet streams for hours as the traffic grows from a polite trickle, a leaking faucet, into a clogged tailpipe - bumper to bumper. The homeless emerge ritualistcally from their hiding spots. Black and white suits, hoisting newspapers, rush the sidewalks like a herd of elephants. The entire goddamned world’s spinning round and round, yessir, round again, but there you sit, ruminating still, indeed, still as a rock. You don't know if it's the smell of chocolate in the air or if it's something else which compels you to rededicate yourself to your training, but you do. You decide while sitting alone on that tearaway bench that hanging around Wily so much is making you sound slimy - vulnerable - like a nasally Hawthorne beautician or a pop star.

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A month later, Wily throws a fit after you bail on her last minute. You remind her you can’t keep ditching training. She's all dolled up for a baby shower, her sister’s. Don’t you make me choose between training and her, you say to Wily. It doesn't move her. She's unhappy. You feel bad. You really do. So what you do, to ease the blow, is you pull her in and you hold Wily something gracious, tight to your scarred chest, despite all the mucking up she does. And, wouldn't you know it, you even end up skipping the rotten training for her. Which creates a landslide - you, abandoning it altogether.

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So now that you're no longer training, you spend even more time with Wily. You're green, you really are, and like any green soul condemned to first love, you fight with Wily, tooth and nail, and you learn from it, and you make up for it. Again and again. You learn that fights are inevitable; and you accept that fighting with Wily is natural you naive and good-intentioned and traumatized boy and you prepare for hell accordingly by dusting off the old family armor. At first, it's easy. You swat her first bites back like flies. You've got the beginnings of endurance on your side. The only problem is, the flies keep on buzzing up and up, zippier and zappier. Stronger, more vicious. The more you swat, the more they keep coming. The flies are multiplying. Taking hormones. 

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The next big fight you’re barely able to keep yourself calm, barely - however, to the utmost, you’re perfectly attentive in your reconciliation. That said, it's clear that things are going south. She can tell as much as you can. You know it. You see it in the way she’s always sizing you up: first your face, then, always, sweeping low to your feet. You start to call it her famous look-down, and of course like the bastard you really are you only say so when she's within earshot. 

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During a training sprint five weeks later, you yell at each other, her shrill, you deep - outside of Wesley’s Tavern no less - and you resolve it with all the proper dirge for respect sometime deep in the sweat-filled crotch of night. But you're beginning to feel the effects of it all, Wily’s wearing you thinner and thinner. You're so tired the next day that you take the train from Ogilvie to Lake Forest to Ogilvie. There and back with your forehead pressed against the window, sleeping and dreaming, the trees shuddering past over the tips of fence posts, waving farewell, perhaps. Whatever. You're too tired to care. Not even a week goes by before Wily “catches” you training with a pretty girl. Over at the library. She grows quiet, distant. You can tell she sees it like some big betrayal. Old Judas, Old Buddy, you start to call yourself. She drags you along for coffee to kick you around a bit, claims you're impossible to please. You’re steaming hot. You refuse to respond. What a crock. But you wise up and you realize you'd be thinking the same stinking thing. You really would, yessir. After a week of hardly talking to her, giving her her space, Wily, you say, You’re twice the girl she'll ever be. Don't you worry a thing. Wily gives you the faintest smile, turns reproachful anyhow. 

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The quiet streak continues, except this time it completely throws off the orbit of night. Now you’re only doing it face to face, and Wily doesn’t smile or laugh or anything. You don't try to smile or laugh for her either. It's petty, but you're a petty guy. For a full Chicago winter, it’s hollowed out sex. The sheets whiffling around like paper. All you hear is the wind and neither of you hold onto the other with any high order. You don't care enough to shave. She doesn't either. Then, out of nowhere, there's a whole weekend you don't leave the bedroom, not even for food. You fuck like dogs, chase each other’s tails round and round. A couple of rabids. Savage things. You almost cry Monday morning during your Uncle John’s nuptials, all in your coffee and everything (which you'd later appeal to Wily, in a joking way, by saying the coffee wouldn't have tasted any less like seawater anyhow), because you just know there's something horrible that's coming. But you squelch the urge to cry and string your tears out to dry high and tight. 

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One morning while you're sitting in your study concentrating your pen on training, on the art of drawing (you've put down the writing for awhile) - yessir, you're in the middle of executing a perfect swan swoop, setting a working centrifuge into the gold ribbing of a Seminole amulet dangling over the chest of one of your creations - she drags you away from your desk, sits you down, and she confesses she’s in a lot of pain. She says it'll pass, except that that’s why she doesn’t moan anymore when you lay together. You don't know what to say. Things are bad. So bad, you’re hardly fucking. A month later, you aren't at all. Finally, at long last, after you've exhausted all the patience of your soul, you arrive at the most terrible conclusion... a conclusion you saw coming only once, when a lightning storm that brought with it a grandfathered nightmare tore you away from sleep for a full week: you are completely, utterly unwilling to sleep with Wily.

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You try to salvage the wreckage. You start flinging all these adjectives and adverbs and modifiers around loving and fucking to appease one another:

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I love you.

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I love you more.

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But it’s a sham. Your mouths are each a thesaurus filled with worn-out synonyms. But words, at least, provide something, anything, to pass the shame. She parries with the same sort of intellectual judo. Mind puzzles. Traps. You and Wily are hardly how you used to be. You don’t resolve big fights with your hearts anymore, just with more and more words:

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I love you more.

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I love you most.

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It sounds dull, I know, all that cheese ball, baby talk crap, but you both reason it’s okay for a bit. You begin acting out your favorite TV shows. Exchanging lines. And for a minute, you cool down because talking past one another is something different. It’s easy, actually. Now there are two TV’s in your bedroom. A teleprompter beside the sink of your kitchen. There’s a perfect, prettied sheen of red, a red glow, blasting through the red curtains overlooking your living room - and it makes the whole room look like a grand old concert hall. But there's something about those curtains terrifies you. She picked them out. Maybe that's it. Whenever you pass it you hold your breath, as if you’re swimming through blood. It gives you goosebumps. Then one day, when you can’t stand them, the curtains, any longer – or rather, when you can't stand the color red, the color of your forgone love life; not for one more goddamned ticking second you can't – you claw the curtains down to the ground in a fit of rage and the light of snow, white as a dove, drives through the thickness of the room like a sign from God. It feels as if a curse has been lifted, and you can breathe again. 

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Out of nowhere, your world and your words turn tender once more. You talk about the good times. There’s laughter. You remember how she wheezes like an old hag when she’s really laughing hard. The way her lips curl up and up. She’s beautiful again. Laughter makes everything beautiful again - like in the movies. You decide for the good of all that laughter must be some bastard of self-correction, the best tool man and woman ever made together. 

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Alas, for so many, your folks included, this sort of ephemeral love isn't built to last. This, your first love, falls apart as swiftly as it was arranged. She takes a joke about her landing strip all serious and makes a scene at Millennium Park, while you’re out staggering along the ice in the cruel of February like a runaway gimp. All over some useless barb you throw at her. You tell Wily she’s really not a terribly graceful skater. Then the bait on the hook: and not a terribly graceful shaver, either. She shakes her head exaggeratedly at you. She’s trying to be cute. She wiggles her nose. But you’ve had it with the cold and so your tone is harsh. She whimpers; you throw your hands up, holler about how it’s always the same with her. 

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Here come the tears, shining on her cheeks like the watermark of angels. And... but... you're just so mad with her, so goddamned mad all the time... you want to stop from saying the awful things you're about to say to her but you can’t – your mouth is running away from home, from your lips. You hiss at her. She recoils. You say harshly, Wily, take it like a goddamned joke for once. You stand tall. You tower over her. You say, Her pussy must be shooting smoke up her ass like usual, that it's probably best she airs it out away from you. Over at the Field Museum or something. It’s not a nice thing to say. You never thought you could talk to Wily that way, the same way you curse up your enemies. She lets out the saddest moan you've ever heard. You start to apologize but she’s moaning so -

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All of a sudden, she’s shrieking like a madwoman, like she’s lost a goddamn child or something. She's completely lost it and so have you. You're trading pitch for pitch, trying with a certain dose of insanity to outperform each other. Back and forth to her, back and forth to you. Then with the flourish of something final, you yell at her in front of the whole frozen wonderland so loud, so piercing, that even the schoolchildren four blocks west can hear the girl you name: Fuck the face of her miserable, burning bush. You're so mad that you crack your shadow on the ice into pieces with the blade of your skate. Why’s she gotta nag on everything. Nag on you. Nag all the goddamn time?  Why, why, why? Why, Wily, why? 

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It’s cold and your tongue is thick. In fact, you’re wagging your tongue like you did as a kid all those years ago, when you’d catch yourself in the mirror, pretending to be the greatest ever. 

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You think your joke about God’s fiery bush is a little bit funny since you’re both questioning your faith, but this time she’s beyond reason. Inconsolable. It’s a bad joke, you tell her, It’s just a bad, bad joke. You say you're sorry. You really are sorry, too. And you try to hug her but she pushes you away. She can’t even look up from the ice.

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And so this is it: 

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The slide. 

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This one’s supreme. 

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This is the moment when you realize how everything’s been building and building to this final note, when your words wilt to wisps and every clock resembles a countdown. This is the moment when your candor slips and your walk breaks. The moment your smile fades into oblivion, and you start to find you're having a hell of a time swallowing your own saliva. This is the moment when you understand how, just as the sex fell from its high place for you and Wily, so too will your words. Irreconcilably. 

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Indeed, your words do sour. Shrivel up completely. You struggle to separate her words from yours: yours and hers, the both, go from tender to gracious. Attentive to respectful. Reproachful. Then it's straight to gutter talk. You spit on your hands, show her your grit. You display your mocking strength. Eventually, every stinking glance from you or Wily is met by battle. Every off comment, war. And every spat is adorned with revile:

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Profanities.

 

Insults that sting. 

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She calls you a fag even though you both hate the word fag. Afterwards she says she hates the word hate, now. You tell her that’s what love is but she’s looking out across the polish of the lake. Not listening. You start calling her Wily again. Like she’s a stranger. You’re smoking a lot of pot now and the world’s sitting on itself all loony and deflated, the way it had before you met Wily. The way it had before S.D. affirmed your odd query into love. You’re slow to wake up. Slow to move. Slow to wit, hunger, ambition. You slog around everywhere. You slog around all the time. Yet, someplace deep down, you know you’re too invested to give up so easy. Go figure.

 

You start to wonder, Maybe it’s worth taking out a thirty-year mortgage on a smelly property over on Planet Slog. Just you and Wily. You and old Wily. You roll the words around in your mouth, testing the electricity of it all. Maybe it’s worth it, you think. Maybe it’s not. Maybe’s still better than nothing, you say to yourself with your tongue out in the mirror. You reason that marrying Wily couldn’t be so bad. That you could be happy with her. 

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Huh. 

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You park outside of Alfie’s Jewelers with a perfect grand, all cash, stuffed into your front pocket. But you never go inside. You're petrified. You can’t move an inch, not a centimeter, not an arm or a finger or a leg. You convince yourself you’ve got one chance to leave and the only thing stopping you is a goddamn rock sitting in a goddamn display case. You feel sick. But you manage to stir yourself to action. You race back home. You pack up to skip town - after three and a half years of giving yourself to the torment of loving another. 

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And so it is. There you are, you chimp. Shoving clocks and spools of thread and your lamp and wax paper and a clipboard and a woodshop protractor into suitcases and duffel bags. You are trying to scratch the itch that gets you far, far away from Chicago. Far, far away from her. You decide to take the asphalt all the way out west. To wherever the road ends. Then reality sets in: you still have to say goodbye to Wily. 

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You’re not so indecent.

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You go to her place to show her your full trunk. The very second she opens the front door, you wished you'd run when you had the chance to. She’s wearing a red dress and red pumps and has the reddest lips. She looks prettier than the day you met her. Strangely, when you look on her, all you see are curtains closing. The very ones you ripped, stripped down, that you tore to shreds like you were compelled by some sort of backwater mania. On that day that seemed to have happened a lifetime ago. Back when you thought you had lifted an unnamable curse while Wily was leagues away, blowing her nose at her old man’s funeral. You gashed those curtains up good, so good, she nearly punched your eyes out over it. And now, she’s standing ahead, looking down at you from in front of her doorway. She's showing you the way in but she's wearing red, so much red, and all you can think about is how this is your last chance. You start getting this feeling like the world’s spinning. You want to sit down. You feel dizzy. Sick. So goddamned sick. Your feet are stuck to the cement. You're half-there, paralyzed on the stairwell in front of her, half-alive. 

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You look on her without judgment one last time. You really do. How sad your girl looks. How small and sad. You share one final look and in that look, you realize you’re terrified of one another. Her eyes are smoky and red and lovely. Yours, like usual, are dry, admitting to nothing.  

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You embrace. Wily bites your bottom lip with her teeth and she draws blood. She leaves a tidy scar that will remain there until the day you die. A reminder. Her big, puffy lips are trembling. 

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You know it’s over but your tongue is missing. 

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She presses her lips on you and says what you can’t:

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It’s gone cold, Lowe. 

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Part II

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Her friends warn you she’s seeing a handsome therapist and has been practicing an ancient Chinese sparring tactic. Wily’s not thinking about you anymore, so that you’ll go away. You hurt her bad, they say. Right in the place where love hurts: all over, in between, above, below; but mostly, beyond.  

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She's the one who called it off, you remind them, wincing.  

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Just talk to her – and listen.

 

So you're not sure why - it may be just your standard dose of curiosity, might be something more - regardless, you resolve to arrange The Meeting. 

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At first, you’re nervous about reconnecting after such a long, long break. There’s too much to say. And when there’s too much to say, usually it comes out all wrong for you. (Actually, it almost always does.). But you load your clip anyhow. Fire her a message.

 

A week later she replies, asking you if you’ll walk the asphalt strip beside North Beach. That crummy old path which winds parallel to LSD where you and her used to walk and talk and hold hands and play innocent little mind games whenever it rained, eavesdropping on the thunder and admiring the white caps blowing up the lake. 

 

There’s a chance of hail, you respond. Let’s stick with coffee.  

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It's strange, isn't it? You, arriving at the agreed upon location early.  (People do change.). 

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She throws you a cute little wave, a block away, and you gesture in like. You're leaning against a phoneless phone booth while she waits for the WALK sign to flash. Even from afar you can tell she’s really been thinking about you because when she spots you on the street corner, her eyes light up like they used to, then become small, and then become wet. The smallness and wetness is different from before. Something new. She has never ever let you see her cry. (Her parents say she cries ugly, like she’s middle-aged already.).  

 

Here comes the rain, a dreary drizzle. You let a low whistle. She's strutting across the crosswalk in black heels, -click-clack-click-, wearing your favorite dress - the black backless piece that droops to her sternum in the front. It shows her proportions off magnificently and only makes you miss her more.  

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Nice to see you, W.

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Nice to see you, too, L.

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She and you share a too-brief hug that’s charged with all sorts of confusing love molecules. When you release, you feel awful; or meek; or subhuman - any strong synonym will will do. Like you’ve been processing inside an MRI machine for a thousand years; been made translucent, weak from the radiation bombs:  

 

She always could see through you.  

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You open the door for her and she enters the coffeehouse. A little bell above the rusted door jamb rings: 

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Ding! Ding! 

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As she passes, she leaves a puff of perfume, frankincense, hovering in her wake.  You sniff at her low cunning. It's the stench of your mother. (These are extraordinary measures she's taking, you think). And you very nearly collapse. (She knows you too well for your own good.). You steady yourself by humming a famous mariner's ballad, which you've forgotten the name of, and then you follow her inside.  

  

Inside it's almost completely empty.  

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You order your drinks and sit down at a corner table. The coffeehouse smells bitter, a hair (a burnt hair maybe) on the nutty side. It’s pretty normal, sitting across from her. You’re tip-tapping the Bond theme on the rim of your mug and looking into her eyes. While she prattles away about pencil-permanent melodramas, you have a daydream you’re transfigured into a lice-sized bird and you fall in, drenching your wings flightless.  

 

Ding-a-ling-ding! 

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A different little bell, this time at the espresso counter, rings you come to and you do. You screw your mouth around and try and break her spell. Under the table, where she can't see what your hands are doing, you gesture like you're made of magic, and you aim your fingers at her, playing gentle, inverted scales over an invisible piano.  

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Shame, she must be immune to your magic, because it doesn't work. You lean back in your seat, taking the moment in. On the whole, you mull, sipping now with newfound vigor, watching her mouth move in strange, unexpected ovals as she mouths her words, well, she’s treated you remarkably decent for as long as you've known each other (the break-up aside). Galaxies form with less controversy than that simple reality. She’s always been like, supernaturally forgiving. Far more conversational about her feelings than you could ever hope to be. (And the same shit still flies.).  Except, well, the thing is, she still can’t properly answer you why she did it.  

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So you allow the conversation to ebb and flow. Never sweating to say more than you need. She recounts a funny story from two summers' ago about the time she dumped anthrax in your underwear after reading your column about the ails of dating a woman who can’t cook. The two of you laugh and accidentally bump feet under the table. She mocks like you’ve just stabbed her in the heart.  

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You realize then what you miss most about her is her sense of humor. You realize also you’re towing a dangerous line admitting to such a thing … 

 

Too late - 

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You hear the good in her again. Yes, you do. It lives. (It lives!). Her charm returns; floats towards you like a butterfly in a shitstorm. She, once again, assuming the role of the heartfelt beaut to your heartfelt beast. You want badly to reach out to her. To catch her up in your net. To hold her again. 

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But you never flex. 

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Instead, you note her pain. It's there. Apparent. It’s real and it hurts. She says so with a big, earnest smile. Shirks. Confesses it used to make her wretch.  You don't know how or why, and it only peripherally matters to you, really... still, you can tell she hasn’t tried justifying what went down between the two of you: your bipolar relationship filled with intense highs and backbreaking lows; your turmoils; your victories; none of it. Least of all, the riot of emotion rising up to blot out the road to redemption (nearly halfway paved) that twists and turns like the memory of You and Her, and whatever Us'd meant once upon a time. Not yet.  

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That’s why she laughs:  

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She can’t let go.  

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Whenever it is she does let go, does start justifying everything, S.D. warns you while razoring the white stuff from his face over the sink at the gym, take to the hills, Philo. And don’t look back. She’ll turn you into stone with her eyes. 

 

Girls know voodoo.  

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After an hour of perfectly familiar conversation, the ghost of your relationship's past creeps into you without warning. You turn green; anxious and green. On a whim you raise spine. You stand and shout a lie. You put your hand in hers and say you have a dentist appointment you're already twenty minutes late for. Then, you promptly gather your things. She grows quiet, knowing. Waves the server down, picks up the bill (all cash); a pre-mediated gesture to illustrate how much she’s changed or something.  

You kiss her cheek goodbye, still green, pursing your lips tight to keep from vomiting in her hair. However, leaving her is never an easy appointment. A hotness puffs out her nostrils, bullish, a hotness that makes you want her right there and then. She's grazing gently over the skin on your forearms with her fingertips now, the back of her head pressed against your lower belly. You smile softly using only your lips, both of you,  solemnly, gazing upside-down upon one another, before the blur of a gull, a scream  across the window, snaps the puppet strings that had been slyly pulling you into reverie,  snaps you back into the smelly coffeehouse and your too-large pewter sweater and too small Levi's... and then, like the blur in the window, you blast off and take to the city  alone, straining with the desperation of a pathological liar to keep your neck from  twisting back.  

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You decide S.D. must be a prophet:  

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Because what happens once she does start justifying everything, well: the coffee banter turns to shit. You see her everywhere, fawning like a shadow in the sun. Swinging her hips around as if she owed the hobos and street cleaners and window washers attending to their outdoor duties a fiction novel. (And not to mention she's surely been doing yoga or something, since it's obvious she's looking even sexier than she did the night you took her to that noplace spaghetti kitchen over on Taylor Street for your first date.). Always with a pack of hyenas yipping at her heels, eyeing her ass as if it were supper.  

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So naturally, you get jealous:  

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You do, you do.  

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You’re just a man:

 

So you are, so you are. 

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The calm of sleep evades you for weeks. The act of living itself begins to morph into this (here we go) torturous trans-Nubian hallucinogenic experience (phew!): a grouchy series of long blinks and ten minute naps rationed like meals in Guantanamo:  you get just enough stuff to preserve some witless threshold of cognition. You try sleeping on the floor, the bathtub, your kitchen counter. Nothing works. She's taking up rent in your head. Consuming all your patience. Eating you alive.  

 

In a last ditch effort, you duct tape a bed pillow around your head for mental insulation. Then, flinging your legs back like a determined Catalan toro, you charge full  blast into anything that's hard enough to hopefully knock you out. It doesn't help. None of  your creative enterprises do. You can't keep her out. Nothing can.  

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Now, and most mercilessly, you’re exhausted by day:  

​

Seething by night:  

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The world lags, drifting seconds-, minutes-, hours-, days-, weeks-, months- behind  the aim of your eyes...  

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Only by the grace of some extraordinary power are you able to restrain yourself  from asking her her company one ordinary Tuesday evening in October - you're  embarrassingly horny - it's true. It's disastrous. So to replace her, the thought of her,  you’re pacing on the back deck, madly, beneath the twinkling of the stars during this,  your latest hour of desperation. You can't sleep again. And you still have a column due to  the editor's desk at noon that'll require the better of you, the bulk of your patience and  attention. Humbug. You grab a bottle of whiskey from the kitchen and start pulling on it.  You're already dehydrated, feeling woozy after the third grip. The alcohol burns like the  bitch, but soon the cold spot in your chest is warm. Soon you're drunk. The thing is, you want her terribly in your arms. You want her long hair draped  like a curtain across your chest. Her egg-shaped head resting on your stomach. Her long, naked legs splayed in a v across her side of the bed (the side facing the window). Oh, how you'd lick the small of her back, thumb her dimples. Oh, how you would, you would.  

 

But you resist.  

​

You remind yourself why you'd split in the first place. The reasons are too numerous, too compelling for a recount. You exercise your resolve, no matter how peevishly. Not because you want to, because you don't have a choice.  

 

In another life, you imagine, wordlessly, you might’ve taken her back out of cowardice. In another life, you might’ve ruled the spiritual millions as his holiness the Buddha; granted her eternal pardon. In that other life, she was a pelican, and you were a big orange carp, and she scooped you up in her big canteen beak to feed you to her pelican-family for supper. 

​

Women. 

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You don't write a damn thing that night. Not one word.  

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Meanwhile, she keeps pounding your phone lines, wailing away at the yellow paint like a deadbeat:  

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Let's try again! Let's try again! Let's try again!

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A few weeks later she approaches you at Vinny’s – it’s getting wicked late and the bar has its lights on, is almost empty – asking you why it is you never pick up... and for the first time you seriously start to wonder if she’s crazy… if she might even be crazy enough to pull a pistol from her purse, wave it around in your face like an amateur pimp.  You feel guilty for even entertaining such a rushed judgment and yet, at parallel, you also feel strangely and wonderfully inspired that a girl could drive herself crazy over you. (And by proxy of a lover's paradox, you over her.). Hell, when it really comes down to it,  you wish you could be with her. You wish that love, the big general idea of it, was something so simple as relentlessly following your heart. She had yours once. Maybe...  Ah, but had it been love? Now you're forced into asking that impossible-to-answer  question. Now you're not so sure. Because this, this pettiness she's breathed into you, this sure isn't love. This is a recurrent drunk dream where you get to 'do' her somewhere venal. Maybe on a muddy infield diamond or behind a dumpster in some graffiti-ripped alley near the projects she grew up in.  

​

However, you must say, since you dream in color, always have, you dream about her in other ways, too. In certain dreams, you forget you ever stumbled into a spinster as  wicked as she. These dreams, you think, are the saddest of the lot. (And you wake up with your eyes crusted over, mornings after, with your cheeks chapped from the salt of  your tears).  

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In the rarest of your dreams, it's April (the season of thunderstorms), and the event  horizon is tomorrow: and you're ten million leagues away from her and S.D. and the rest of your dependents, skinny dipping with an ageless Madonna, she, singing  softly on the lam, pushing her innocent charm into your ear off the coast of Cozymel and lulling you to sleep with her saccharine voice, that is, before you, turning to the sea, you, the thane of your own dreamscape, you break from the sea, as was foretold, and you become  completely and unchangeably unafraid of the sea and all of its properties (and then, of  course, once you're rested and once the sea has been whipped to your will, your Madonna  lets you globetrot all the blindingly famous divas-of-the-day hanging from your arms, because, so you assure her, it's harmless fun and they actually like you.).  Anyway - count your stars lucky, her tone, you know, hers, it stands the test at Vinny’s. No signs of dread. No whining. No bitchiness: the matriarch of pomp. (So it’s not completely evil and dead between you, yet.). Her voice is lacking the punitive  damage you’re accustomed to dealing with in times of war. For that, you’re seriously thankful. The Exes Seven, her predecessors, had worn theirs like mothers in black. Mocking you in the personal and collective voice of sorrow.  

​

What happens that night is you stay and talk with her under the green veranda at Vinny's for twenty minutes and it feels like five hours. Then you head over to Clark St., which is busier than Addison this time of night, hail her a cab. You kiss her cheek  goodbye. (You almost grab her by her wrist.). She throws at you a dagger of a look, a look you think might contain all the pain on the planet. Then she shakes her head, undoes her hair, and bends to the car. You close the yellow door behind her and wander off towards home, listening for the gulls of the lake for proof, not knowing which street leads you back.

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A sorrowful voice, you wheeze, addressing your dog Scooter the next morning without opening your mouth, is something a person comes to observe more and more  frequently over time. There's sorrow everywhere, in every hour, hanging from  everybody’s lips like tattooed drool.  

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It’s not even dawn and you're awake and feeling hungover. Scoot barks at you.  You take the bark as some manner of affirmation. You bark back. Scoot quits wagging his  tail and drops his ear to his shoulder without blinking. He flops his purple tongue over his  muzzle. Scoot approves of most of your critical opines on romance in the modern age,  much to the chagrin of your readers. You think this particular gem about voiced sorrow  might actually be worth writing down for them, your readers, to swish around in their  mouths and gargle in their craniums.

 

You slug a glass of water then pop open a handful of ibuprofen. Then you drop to a knee and pet Scoot with your fingertips because it’s becoming  of you and it makes you feel good.  

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Mid-belly rub, however, you’re arrowed by a thought: she gave you that dog.  

 

You inspect Scoot closely.  

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You wonder if she’s buried a camera behind Scoot’s eyes, if it’s possible she’s looking at you right now - that maybe she gave you the dog for this very reason, to keep your indecent mind trained on her in an indirect way. 

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You wonder if crazy is contagious.  

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Scoot lifts his paw, as if to say:  

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Now kiss the paw.  

​

Upon further review: every word she’s ever spoken to you since the split, you confess to your boys while the five of you are getting tanked at a neighbor’s patio barbecue, every word has been polite and lovely and fits her mouth without sin like the color red. 

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 Bullshit!  

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 Cockaninny!  

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 To hell with the witch! 

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They lock you in a chokehold and demand that you quit talking about her, and to quit talking so stinking … pretty.  

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You wriggle your way out.  

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Every word she's ever said, you tell them, pleading for them to understand, has belonged to her. There ain’t nobody else.

 

But as soon as you say so, the proverbial winds heave themselves south. To hell with climate change, you think, these winds have a mind of their own. When you run into her at Wesley's Tavern with your heart changed, open to the possibilities, she’s stone.  Gone from understanding to unrelenting. Now every word she hocks your direction is laced with subdued venom (she did take you with her fang, after all). She’s with her girlfriends, the Skank Gang, by the look of them, auditioning a slick looking bunch of medical school students from Northwestern who’ve got second-generation Rolexes and barrels of goop mushed into their hair.

 

You took too long.  

​

That night you settle in on the sofa wearing the cat and dog pajamas she got you for Christmas, stroking your inner thighs, and the phone must ring a million times. Scoot scampers off with his ears pointing to the ceiling, into your dump of a bedroom because  he's got sensitive hearing. You never end up answering the phone. Never even peep the caller ID. Instead, you move over to your favorite spot in the apartment, the leather armchair, and you cross your legs. You play with your waistband and fiddle with the pen slotted behind your ear. Out of sheer boredom, or so you tell yourself, you attempt to reproduce your confrontations with her at Wesley's and Vinny’s. So you focus on the blank wall space above the television. There are vague and mesmerizing shapes and colors and rhythms that you project onto the wall with your eyes:  

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Spin, love spin.  

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You play the very familiar game that everybody plays at a lover’s wake, fixating:  Why did she say that? How did she say this? Is she better off without me? Without Scoot? Did I goof?  

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Eventually, you realize – to dwell is to rot. So you turn away from the wall. You eye your messy little apartment and make a big decision – no painting you’ll ever own will be hung above the television.  

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In your head, when it comes to love, and falling out of it, you decide you'll always come out on top. Love is just so … addicting. So impossible to shake. It comes in rounds, like a boxing match or an interminable supply of ammunition. You yell it to anybody on the street who will listen.  

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Most of the folks at whom you yell, they don't listen. In fact, they give you the stiff arm. Especially the elderly. You figure it's because they've seen and done it all; don't prize your amateur bullshit. Plus, and as your mother'd called after you on mornings before dropping you and your brothers off at school, only fools take mind from people who yell.  

 

You keep on yelling anyhow.  

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When you verbally accost a sun-dried beatnik doubled-over from osteoporosis and a blind couple fording the cracks on the sidewalk, accost them with your unresolved rancor - the spit of love - you apologize blandly. All you're able to say is you’re not acting like yourself. 

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This isn't even about you. 

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You decide the following day that S.D. must be an idiot:  

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There ain't no use running from this, you tell him like it's news, love travels faster than the speed of light and an F1 combined.  

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Good jesus, he calls to you from somewhere within the swathe-grey depths of the steam room, this withdrawal is wearing horribly on you. Makes your face long like the dog's. Go and find yourself a beauty queen, find -  

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Someone else to give advice to? You? I think you ought to, S.D.. Your advice is about as worthless as chapped ass...  

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You're hit with a dead arm you never see coming.  

  

 So, it's official now. You’re a mope.  

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 You go around, zapping the fun out of everything:  

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 Zap! Zap!  

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Killing every joke with a big yawn right at the punch line:  

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Zap! Zap!  

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It’s a tough current to slog through, this episodic depression, but you slog on.  Your weight fluctuates, sure. And your face blows up with acne. Partly because each night before bed, you realize, you've forgotten to wash the sheets again. Ah, well. You lay with the bed bugs anyhow. Who hasn't? You leave the television on until morning. Who  wouldn't? Not even the late-night broadcasting slate can make you laugh - and yet,  somehow - you slog on.  

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With time you learn to tell yourself it’s a big sea out there, that girls are basically fish, and there are more fish than there are mouths to feed (many of which tend to their aquatic acreage completely undocumented), swimming way, way down, deep below. You learn about patience and the art of the catch. (It seems easy at first, but it isn't.).  Afterwards, when you think you’re ready to trust yourself again, you clutch your net at your side, near-frozen, peering over the edge -

 

A year later, you’re still peering over, telling yourself the same thing.

 

Three months after that:  

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Cast your net, fool – you write in big cursive letters on your bathroom mirror, with the cherry blossom lipstick she left on top of your nightstand all those years ago.  

 

Eventually, the red runs dry.  

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* * * 

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So here’s the short of it. She hasn’t morphed the memory of you too harshly yet. You on the other hand think she must either be a total psycho-emotional wreck (which explains why she’s seeing the therapist) or maybe she's got faith there’s this shimmering hope for her and you. That maybe hope is an immortal, constantly-recharging burst of energy, like our sun.

 

All you can do, in the event that the dread of her name holds and she keeps coming after you in your thoughts and dreams, is to offer to pitch in for the sailcloth and cannonballs. Salute your sins. Weep sincerely, if you must. Coin her eyes and push her adrift. Bury her at sea. You discover your respect for the dead as soon as you lay her to rest.

 

You and her will always be subtle enemies. Always. Forever.  

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Getoverit.  

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 You haven't a clue how to getoverit, but the writing makes you less jealous, and that's a start. 

​

***

  

As the seasons change robes, exchanging brown muggery for green, green for auburn, auburn for white, you witness your anger fade, your disappointment fade, your resentment fade. You're more yourself than you've been in a long, long time. And on the coldest day of the year, mid-snow angel, wet-throated, taking wind to cheek while facing the sky, you are struck by the happiest thought you've had in years, a happy thought that  unburdens you. The happy thought goes a little something like this: all things fade: and  so, she fades the same way you fade: slowly, abjectly, without intention or a footnote to  pay her reference... and as more and more days pass, the clarity of her face in your mind  begins to become less defined, vague, more and more faceless, fading in and fading out, just how this version of you fades right along with her, in and out... and what happens is, with time, when there's distance enough, you think you're ready to put her behind you for good, to make her into a sometimes fond, sometimes scaly memory:  

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And once you do that, you tell yourself, you can't look back:  

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And you write this down, you will it into an attitude of sorts, let it become what it must, that is, the beautification of your solitary wit; your greatest prize: that, being, the ageless wonder which fires to life once you spark that certain sacred reservoir which blooms hot and fast inside of you, and which contains in it also the real and inspired possibility of reinventing yourself in order to wield a new and infinitely bitter, infinitely lethal sense of comic timing whenever it is your young heart is in pain, to deal with the pain:

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Forgiveness and lost love, ha!, there’s no mixing. It’s all just oil and rainbows on the water.