PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

I had this old Irish folk song playing in my head when I spotted her walking towards me.  In the middle of the night, before she came under the light, she was so thin, it wasn’t exactly like a shadow but I had this song, and she later told me she saw this movie about a girl who spent most of the two hours talking about life and things life-related and it was all very romantic for her – “that’s why I ended up meeting you” – she admitted at one point.  Aside from this, I remember drinking tea at an ice cream shop on Commonwealth Ave. and sitting across the table from her, my legs extended in this posture like I owned the place even though inside I felt that her dark hair have already wove a snare and as melancholy or foreboding as it would have been, she would ruin my life and end up being my first hate. 

            You forget and forgive everything.  Some moments you don’t, that’s how you end up repeating the same situation, but most mornings and nights you wake up and if you were suicidal the night before, you’re suicidal all throughout the day and even if you smile and grin and smirk and give her a hug instead of a kiss, you still wish maybe it would be better to not be here.  But you forget and forgive.  That is how we get through it all.  The problem is that some mornings you wake up and the moment hits, and there is nothing to be done, the forget and forgive part melts, the moment overtakes, the hug turns into a kiss.

            “I wouldn’t have kissed you anyway,” she later told me.

            I assured her, she would have, but it would not have made any difference.

            The reason me and Sarah broke up wasn’t so much as because she accused me of raping her and got a restraining order against me after spending a week in a mental hospital, trying to, you know, save face or whatever, in front of her Iranian parents – because admitting being possibly maybe probably being raped is better than saying yeah, well, the bruises are there from when he took the knife from me when I tried to stab myself in my jugular – either way you spin it, the real reason is after all that, when she finally lifted the restraining order and apologized and all that, I mean she only lived a few blocks away anyway, the reason we broke up is that I had one of those mornings and when she asked me to take her back, I did.

            Her green eyes, man, she had these hazel green eyes and skin of silk that was way too good for me, for sure, she had to know that, I thought when we first met, but instead I just asked her politely how she was doing.

            She told me fine and how she wasn’t really that hungry. 

            “Me either,” I said, and we just kind of stood there staring at each other, her with her stupid movie, me with my stupid song.  Every restaurant closed except for the tea place. 

            A couple of weeks later I practically moved into her apartment.  Jobless and suicidal, she thought I was an artist.  She probably thought I was a hero at some point.  She thought whatever I wanted her to think because when she wanted me to smile I did.  At one point she offered to give me a thousand dollars so I wouldn’t leave Boston on the account of my rent being due and me not having any money.  Maybe it was an insult, I am not really sure, but I politely stood up from the park bench and walked away. 

            Later that day she fed me some delicious gourmet dinner with weird vegetables that normally I would have hated because she couldn’t cook for shit but it was one of the only times I didn’t leave anything on the plate.  It was the same night she found out I was a pickup artist and chased me around the table with this look in her eyes, the look I saw under the dim street lights that replayed the song when I was falling asleep and to this day, still there, dusty and crawling with pressure, the melody remains and the eyes, despite the make-up, had a glimpse, just a hint, a minor inconsistency that I had only detected when she, you know, threatened my life, the way my mother did the day I left California.

            I guess that is the real reason I left Boston and went back to San Diego – my mother’s eyes when she beat me against the wall and screamed and threatened to tell the cops I hit her if I called them and me, a shell of a man, just curled into a bathtub and shaken, broken, looking up like a broken dog, seeing that rage, and even though I knew it was not rage that was towards me but towards something bigger, because I am not worth that much rage, I’ve only at worst lied and drank here and there, but it was rage at something massive, like maybe the world or since she was religious, maybe it was God for whatever reason he put it all together, either way, the next day I got into my car and left San Diego, while she was at work, just taking some clothes and all the books and notebooks and computers and the weight of 22 years of failed hope how maybe this and that.  I didn’t drive directly to Boston, I stopped at other places first, but the same way I probably thought I could only leave Sarah by taking her back, I for sure thought I could only leave Boston by returning to where it all ended.