One for the NASCAR Lovers

Memory #142

I remember standing outside of Centennial High School, in Glendale, Arizona after taking my SATs, with all that fear of realizing I had to actually do something with my life, bitch slapping me like the pimp responsibility would turn out to be. At that exact moment, life was fucking my face and making me deep throat decisions like, Where will you work for the rest of your life? Who will you marry? How many children will you have? Will you be happy? Are you happy now? Does college make a difference in a persons’ life? Does anything make a difference in a persons’ life? Then, while charring beneath that “dry heat,” and seeping into the ether of that smattering of a mostly empty parking lot, I saw this blonde girl in a shitty, silver, 4-door sedan (if I was more of a man then, I may have been able to identify it further) drive past me. She was going over the speed limit, which was only 15mph, but it seemed rebellious at the time because that’s what I wanted to see. She had purple sunglasses on (they might have also been brown) and, most importantly, she had Ha Ha by Mates of State shouting as loud as it would go on her blown-out stereo and she was dancing, slightly. I wanted her to be my girlfriend. I remember this, but not many other things.

Yes, I Do

You wanted to be loved, so you spasmed out an unlocked zipper, always shining to the world, like the glint off some frumped lady’s diamond everyone can gather around and seethe green over. You wanted to hate so you accidentally ran into doors and lamps and started throwing rocks into the river, but that escalated to keyboards through computer monitors, laptops halved, car doors keyed, wooden front ones too, once, you even burned a pentagram into a stranger’s couch with the cherry from your cigarette before throwing rocks and milk in his pool. You wanted to be problematic so you told people you loved them and then didn’t, because problems are change and it’s easy to change, so it’s easy to cause problems. You are a crushed, empty beer can on the handrail of a second-story porch that the wind will knock off the next time it gets cloudy. It’s cloudy today and you want to spit on the woman without a jacket because she won’t notice the lugie between drops. You wanted to be on the Internet. Well, here you are, tattoos and tits and all. There are certain people you stay close enough with your whole life just so that their friends know to notify you when they die. You are that to me.

Satan is my Lucky Number

            I see your success and want to kill everyone who knows you. I know it isn’t real, but on the Internet, success is always real and that’s all anyone sees of you. I saw my reflection and suddenly realized why you did what you did. I looked like I wanted to put my head through a window and I still do. Every time I think of how I fucked up, I catch another view of how you will always be a tapeworm in my heart, how, when I am fucking other women to attempt a compensation for your absence, I will realize emphatically, like being held under water during P.E. in elementary school, that, for the remainder of my span as a human, you will eat any chance I had at being happy with anyone but you. You will be at my table for all of my existence because of one fucking night when we talked about serial killers and you put the camouflage leggings wrapping your skin over my waist while we slept in blood and glass on your bedsheets, shot through with cigarette burns. Concerning the contingency of things, Spinoza was completely correct.

            A man I know fairly well told me that the women I will and have loved will be rings within a tree trunk. We discussed that, no matter how much someone tries to paint over or rub out the dark edges of those eternal circles, they will permanently endure all time and faked hatred and heads through windows. You are the first circle in my trunk and when everyone sees me, years deeper in existence, with a woman in her thirties, they will imagine her to be this worked-for outer ring, a halo of my soul, they will think they know that I now know what love is because I am older. But wisdom is a bruise, not a band-aid. Wisdom is knowing when to guillotine one’s senses, in hopes that new ones grow in its place, like a Hydra, or a lizard tail of understanding. But mostly, wisdom is a callus over the soft spots of our baby skull hearts that will never blister and fall off in the heel a sock.