2 Shorts That Went Nowhere

(These were drafted on 6/17/07 and forgotten, because they were going nowhere.)

Love is like a bruise. You nearly always get it when you're not looking - especially when you're not looking.

Love bruises. Love is bruises.

Love appears like a bruise, like when you misjudge the distance between yourself and the object you are trying to avoid running into but manage to anyway. Love is the bruise that aches and also the one that doesn't ache which you eventually forget about. Sometimes love is the multi-hued shiner that leaves you awed and a little freaked out; sometimes it is so ugly you wish for it to go away. Of course, it only goes away when it's ready, not when you wish of it. But when Love leaves, it leaves bruises.

I have bruises. I get them all the time, walking into things, hitting things, getting hit by things. They are all accidental; I guess I misjudge. A lot.

:::

I never developed my favorite snapshot of her. I cannot remember when I took it, but it is my favorite.

In it, she is posed on the couch, one arm flung over her head, grasping the headrest, her head resting in the crook of her arm. I am also in the picture, she is looking down at me, intently. Her ass rests at the edge of the seat, her knees apart; one leg is slung over my shoulder, foot pointed, toes running up and down my back, her other leg folded, heel resting against a buttock. My cheek rests against the inside of her thigh, my hair blanketing her knee and shin.

I never developed the photo because I never took it.

Sometimes, late at night, before nodding off, I wonder if she were even real. Maybe I had imagined her all this time.

No. I have a mental snapshot of her, of us, have I not?

And my body is a diary of her and of us, it remembers things that my mind cannot recall, things my memory no longer is a hundred percent sure of: My cheek remembers the silken pillow of her inner thigh, my back the callouses on her foot, my tongue her body in entirety, her essence.

My eyes are twin lenses that captured a single image of her and me. Single, meaning 'one'; one, meaning no 'her' no 'me', one meaning only 'us'.

It is my favorite snapshot, but I never could develop it.

Under The Table

Under the table, she is holding my hand.

" ... free?" Suddenly I become aware that a question is being addressed to me. I look over at Jon, who is looking expectantly at me.

"I'm sorry, what did you say?"

"Which planet were you on? Geez! I asked if you would be free this weekend. Mandy and I are planning to drive into J.B. for seafood. You coming?"

"I, er -" I hesitate, confronted with a rock and a hard place - or, by my oldest and best friend, and ...

Under the table, she is squeezing my hand.

"And don't give your dumb 'but I don't wanna be a lamppost' excuse. I'm sick of hearing that - we," Jon emphasizes, "are sick of hearing that. Come up with a better excuse, lah. How much longer will you continue flogging that dead horse of an excuse?"

"But -"

"But what?" Jon interrupts, and bulldozes ahead. "You love seafood. We love seafood. That's all there is to it. It's not as if we're inviting you to join us for a ménage à trois, okay?"

I don't want to, but I blush anyway, and cough when my iced tea goes down the wrong way.

Under the table, she is stroking my palm with her thumb.

"Wait!" Mandy holds up a finger. "Hold that thought while I visit the little girls' room," she says, sliding out of the booth. She gives me a look over her shoulder. "You need to use the little girls' room as well?"

I follow her, hearing Jon's amused and condescending snort behind me. He calls after us, "Don't know why you girls always have to go to the toilet in pairs! What are you afraid of - getting stuck in the toilet bowl? What do you do in there, anyway?"

The rest room is small: a sink and mirror takes up half the space while the other half is occupied by a toilet stall. Mandy pulls me in with her and locks the door behind us.

What we do in there is fuck.

"You're coming with us this Saturday," Mandy says after she collapses on me, her breath still ragged with panting. I feel her heart beating in her chest on my breast, the subtle skips beneath her skin on the pulse point on her neck with my lips.

"I don't think that's a good idea." My words are muffled in the crook of her neck, but she hears them clearly.

"Why not? Come on, it'll be fun, and I won't have to miss you."

"We can't ... I must stop ..." I start to say, but my words sound hollow, even to my ears. I suppose repeating them so very often has worn off its original veneer of veracity and sincerity.

Mandy merely smiles. Even a mere dimpled smile of hers quickens my blood. "Yeah? Well, go on, then; go confess to Jon: go tell him his girlfriend and his best friend have been fucking each other - I dare you."

She doesn't mean it.

Or maybe she does; she means it as much as I do my words.

"This is not living dangerously," I say, more to myself than her. Lately, I have been preoccupied with the notion of living dangerously.

Mandy laughs. I think about how I always love making her laugh - just not this way.

She says, "This is living recklessly. Living dangerously is when we're in J.B. and the three of us are sharing a room, and I crawl into your bed after Jon has fallen asleep and fuck you till morning."

She pushes herself off me and unlocks the door. We takes turn washing our hands at the sink, adjusting our clothes. She reapplies her make-up while I check myself for traces of her lipstick.

We share a look in the mirror.

"I can't do it, and you can't do it," she says softly and, suddenly, seriously. "That's why we are where we are."

Then she flashes her sunny grin. "But I think I like this living recklessly."

She takes my hand. "Still, it's not enough. I want to live dangerously, and I want you to live dangerously with me."

This is not living dangerously, I think; but then she kisses me and I stop thinking.

She lets go of my hand before we step out of the ladies' room.

Seconds later, we are back at the table with my best friend and her boyfriend, discussing the eating places and malls we are going to hit in J.B. this weekend.

Under the table, she is holding my hand.



(for Collective Rantings)

What Might Or Might Not Have Happened At What Might Have Been The Midpoint Of The Corner Of The Road

These are the facts:

1. It seemed to have happened for me after it had transpired.
2. The thought of what might have just happened occurred to me after it was all over.
3. What might have happened might not have happened.
4. What might have happened might have happened only to me.
5. This is all in retrospect.

This is what might or might not have happened:

Three seconds.

(Five seconds, tops.)

It was late in the afternoon - or perhaps early in the evening. The sun was still bright and warm, though not as scorching as it had been at noon. As I alighted from the bus, I thought peripherally about how the sun was always behind me - every morning as I walk to the bus stop; every evening as I walk home from the bus stop - its rays lasering microscopic flakes of epidermis off me; how the sun was not just literally behind me but also on my back, oppressing me with its harsh, scratchy blanket of heat.

That was when it might or might not have happened.

Exactly where it might or might not have happened was almost at the midpoint of a corner in the road. Almost. I am not quite sure now, you understand; it might or might not have happened at the center of a corner of a road.

In any case, I alighted from the bus and was headed for home. Along the way was a tight turn in the road, and I was just at the midpoint of the curve (or thereabouts) when a car rounded the corner.

I cannot remember the make or even the color of the car.

At the moment the car and I might or might not be at the center of the corner in the road, there was just a breath of air between skin and metal. And at that very moment of precarious proximity, I had raised my left hand to adjust the strap of my bag on my shoulder, and my head turned left, in the direction of the car.

What was it that had caught my attention? Did I do a doubletake? I suppose I will never find out; after all, it might or might not have happened.

In the passeger seat was a female whose face I never saw. All I remember of her now - and then - is her long black hair, straight.

At that very moment, perhaps she had turned to look out the window. Maybe the sudden movement of my left hand swinging up to adjust my bag strap caught her attention. I do not know if she did a doubletake, but I thought she had been staring through the window at me as I had her.

In a flash, the moment had dissipated, the only remnant of evidence of its existence in time was a faint trail of exhaust fumes, diffusing just as quickly.

Then it occurred to me that the girl in the car might have been Louise, an old friend. Maybe it was Louise in that car; maybe she had recognized me - maybe that was why she was looking me; maybe the recognition was what caused her to take a (longer) second look.

As I continued on my way home, my steps ponderous, I thought, If that was indeed Louise, then she should've seen the bracelet on my hand. (It it not really a bracelet but a necklace I wore wound twice around my wrist.) Louise would've recognized the bracelet/necklace because she was the one who had given it to me.

After that, I kept waiting for my cellphone to ring. Louise, I knew, was back from Paris for a couple of months, and as I was anticipating her call, I contemplated giving her one.

However, the nearer I got to my house, the less certain I became about the whole 'incident'. By the time I had locked the front gates behind me and opened the front door, I was not even sure if it had actually taken place. Perhaps I had daydreamed it.

There are so many uncertainties about it; even what little facts I could gather are ambiguous. I never did receive a call from Louise, nor did I make one to her.

But all that is not important; perhaps then - or later - but not now, not this very moment. After all,

What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

I shall have forever to wonder, until the line between what had happened and what had not becomes impossibly indistingushable, and memory and fiction melds into something that is both and neither.

Which is all very well.

Human kind, after all, cannot bear very much reality.

Alone At The Table

This morning, my girlfriend sat down to breakfast with me. I made us scrambled eggs, toast, and coffee. She nursed a mug of coffee and chain-smoked. Coffee and cigarettes: with those, she never seems to be in want of anything, never seems to want anything.

I ate the eggs swimming in a pool of silence and watched smoke unravel lazily in wisps from the glowing tip of her cigarette. Much like how she disentangles her long limbs from mine every morning - deliberately but without thought, unhurried.

Time moves at a different pace in her universe than me; perhaps much slower, perhaps it doesn't move at all. More than once have I thought of her as the still point of the turning world.

"So," she finally said, then said nothing at all. The eggs cleanly polished off, I started to work my jaws methodically on the toast, watching her.

It is never difficult to imagine a body of water between the two of us. When I'm around her, I feel everything around and about me slows down - my heart, my breathing, my thoughts - as if my body and my self unconsciously realize that the only way to meet her is to be where she is: at the still point of the turning world.

The crunch of toast in my ears sounded like a rush of bubbles underwater. I imagined kicking my legs hard, working my arms vigorously; I imagined swimming my way to her, out of my body, into hers; I imagined I would find the woman I love there, and she had been waiting for me to swim to her all along.

Suddenly, the familiar smell of her filled my nose. I realized then she had stopped, on her way out of the kitchenette, to plant a kiss on my hair. I grabbed her hand before she could pass me by, pulled her in for a kiss, hard and deep; whether to plunge into her or pull her out, I didn't know.

But she disentangled herself from me - deliberately but without thought, unhurried.

"Where are you?" I asked her.

She gave me a slow lovely smile. "There," she told me, and left the kitchenette, mug of coffee and a cigarette in hand.

Alone at the table, for the very first time, I went with her.