The panacea: writing is the cure

On fire

Firehouse, Week 1

I'm at home with a case of the pleasant nerves.  I'm primping and wearing my favorite jacket, donning eye shadow and cute jeans that say, I'm serious but I'm hot.  I'm on my way to the rural firehouse five minutes from my house to apply as a volunteer and I am not above looking shit-kicky sexy in order to sweeten the deal.  Professional firewomen everywhere, I am sorry for setting your careers back one generation.  I put on lip gloss, Baby Doll pink, and leave the house with self-satisfied determination.

I miss the exit and, by the time I make my way back through the infrequent exits off the highway and the 'pass by the gas station, stop by the church' directions, I'm ten minutes late when I walk into the weekly drill meeting.  The first thing I think is, BOYS.  It's a roomful of twenty-something boys in navy bicep-friendly t's that read first responder, uniform slacks, and lace-up, mean looking boots.  There are two women and I read them like competition as I settle into a seat toward the back and wait.

The next twenty minutes are straight out of The Office, or maybe Parks and Recreation.  The meeting leader is slow and older and his face is covered in flesh-toned moles that I want to scrape from his face so he can be happy again.  He could be a lot better looking.  He speaks in a rolling monotone and reads out the minutes from the last meeting, explores the business of a check which may or may not have been appropriately or not appropriately appropriated for gear alloted to someone who has already left the firehouse on not entirely respectable terms, ahem, and then he instigates the nominating of new officers for the year, and would anyone like to suggest anyone for a post?

I have arrived to the monthly business meeting instead of to the hose and ladder workout I was expecting to see in the yard of the firehouse.  By the time it's over I have introduced myself and become aware that the cool kids sit in the back, right behind me, where they talk friendly shit to each other and splay large, still-pubescent limbs full of overly projected masculine purpose.  

I approach the fire chief afterwards and explain what I am doing there.  I'm a nursing student, I want into the emergency department, and this is the place to start.  I want to be here for the next year and a half, staying weekends and going out on their largely medical calls, so that when hiring time comes at the end of my program I can slip right into ED work; or, unthinkably, discover in volunteering that I am not cut out for emergency medicine.  The chief is looking over my head every few words and clearly needed elsewhere so I cut the conversation short, embarrassed to be the obviously useless tiny girl in a house full of jockeying giant dudes and aged, belly-rich, seasoned firefighters.  I feel humored at best and shuffle out, forgetting that I am supposed to follow mole man around for a tour of the equipment.

Firehouse, Week 2

This time I know I'll be working and I'm looking forward to it.  I've injured my left leg by running on flattened and loosening shoes, and I'm missing my daily dose self-induced adrenaline.  I feel like fire hoses are going to fix that for me.  Also maybe boys.

The chief can't remember my name and some poor kid is forced to leave the dick-measuring pack of boys deciding which truck to ride in so that I can get boots, jacket and pants.  He pulls things from the dryer, assembles them into tops and bottom, and has me try them on.  They fit the same way my scrubs did when I first bought them: like something I snuck from my daddy. He finds me a different jacket and a pair of suspenders, then boots which may or may not be too small.   I ca n't reach my back suspenders and instead ask him to do them for me, then quickly realize my mistake.  He's been treating me like a member of his team; an annoying, useless member, but still, a potential firefighter.  It occurs to me that none, not one of the dudes scrabbling around between the trucks has asked someone to help them with their suspenders.  Ever.

"God, newbie!," he exclaims to cover up the awkward, and he snaps me up in the back.

Suddenly there I am trudging through the fire house in Rescue Me uniform, looking for a fire truck to throw my ass into.  We're driving up the road to a school for evolutions.  I have no idea what they are.  I hop into an empty chartreuse ambulance and someone shoves me a helmet through the door.  The driver asks my name and makes sure I'm belted in, and I eye the supplies above me with my rookie nursing brain while the diesel engine kicks in.

There are three stations up at the school.  One of them is for the strapping testosterone dudes, all of whom have been training for a while.  I guess.  They each have a destructive weapon of some kind--axe, chainsaw--and they strut off happily to practice breaking shit.  I totally want into that club.  My job is to practice gearing up in air tank and mask, with helmet on and seals complete, all within 60 seconds.  I can barely get the straps to tighten and there are two guys dick measuring over my head about how I'm supposed to do everything.  At some point I look up, half way through my third try, and there is a semicircle of men standing around, watching.  

"Jesus," I say with embarrassment, "I have an audience!"  Is it that interesting to watch a woman clutch D rings and struggle with the pressure gauge?

"Just wait til you start fire academy," one of them says.  "Then you'll have twenty people watching you."  Oh.  I have it wrong again.  They're not watching because I'm a girl they're watching because this is what we do, we try shit and watch each other flail on the way to getting it right.

I move on to hydrants and hoses, learn how many gallons leave the truck in one minute (750), and before I know it the time is past 9 pm.  I need to get home to my boys.  The chief drives me down the hill.  He talks about how this fire station stays open because of volunteers.  He'll get me my own entrance code, he says, and I can come by whenever I like.  I should come this week to get better boots and also some equipment.  I should bring my kids any, any time.  Family comes first.

I am about to get my own hook at the fire station and when I take my kids to visit, there will be a pair of boots, pants and suspenders squinched around them in case of emergency, waiting for their curious feet.  My boots. 

Watching

She leans in close, eyes glinting a little and teeth set with satisfaction.  I'm dizzy and the air seems thin because I've drunk to the bottom of my tea mug.  

"If I could," she stops for a moment and catches the laugh in her throat.  "If I could, I would fit you with a hidden camera and watch every second."

I'm at morning coffee with one of my beloved alpha-female friends.  This one in particular, Mama to all and way more outgoing than she believes herself to be, is the author of my current maybe-something with the single dad from school.  "OMG," she wrote one night on facebook, "I love living through you." When I prevaricate about whether this is the right time or how to go about it, she shuts me up fast. "I've worked way too hard for this," she tells me.  "Don't you go and fuck up my fun."  

The poor man, I think.  He has no idea what's hit him.  She's been working on me and waiting for a year and a half, pursing her lips and tolerating his waning attempts to save his marriage and my constant Michael upset.  He's hilarious and calming and she's absolutely right that I should be looking.  I'm just not sure if it's time yet.

We sledded with him and some other families this weekend.  He arrived in a perfectly clean car, managed his three children without apparent effort, and filled out the shoulders of his t-shirt with satisfying confidence.  When I doubled over with laughter because my kid was pouting and had face-planted in the snow with me on top of him, he didn't look at me like I was an asshole.  Right around the time he mentioned making meatballs with a melon-baller, I told him I was convinced he was on something.  Who does so much with that kind of humor and ease?

"So," my girlfriend asked me at some point during that day,"what do you think?"  I told her I didn't think he was interested.  He was friendly but not more so to me than to anyone else, and the bond between him and his children seemed to subsume him a little.  He is obviously a father first, and I wondered if he could really focus past them yet.

He emailed my friend the next day to ask if I was seeing anyone.  

I woke the next morning full of anxiety about this burgeoning interest.  I could totally fuck this up.  I could end up hated because what I have to offer, what I want, is casual fun and comfortable companionship and plenty of room to make my life my own.  What if I open him up and crush him with my unavailability?  I picture him raw and wanting on the inside and myself a needed salve.  Which is ridiculously arrogant.

The whole point of this time is to try, and be honest, and find out.  So instead of writing the story before it even begins, I'm going to wait and find out.  Because maybe he wants the same thing; maybe, like The Hick, he becomes an irreplaceable friend.  Because all the way through my bones, he feels like someone I could stand next to. 

Why I love raising boys

"Sweety," I say to my 10 year old, "will you help me remember that I need to go..." I pause here to collect my thoughts.  

My son steps right in, his comic timing impeccable.  "Commando?"

Early spring

I love those spring-loaded cabinet doors.  Is that what they're called?  I push them just a little and poong! they spring open into my hand.  The force of their opening isn't proportionate to the soft little press of my fingertips, and I guess that's what I like about them.  They fall open from gentleness.

I was in the mall yesterday sitting on a bench in the changing room of American Eagle.  A stonewashed pair of booty jeans was halfway down my legs, bunched just above the knee and on sale for only $29.95, and I was staring at the wall.  My mouth wasn't entirely closed.  All I could think was, He proposed.  He proposed, he proposed, he proposed.  He proposed and I said no.  There was a girl on a bench in a mall and I didn't know who she was.  There was an echo in the jeans and my skin hung slack.

"Hon, are you okay?"  Carol stood beside me, righteous ass spilling pleasantly out the top of some dark-wash slim boot cuts and head cocked slightly to the side.  We'd been across half the mall, my $75 of Sephora gift card loose and waiting in my wallet, and I hadn't found a single thing I wanted.  Mekong bronze eye shadow, perfect glitter peach something, new colors of lipstick: I had no receptors for them. I had no ganas at all.

I came home and took to my bed.  This was okay because, I reasoned, I had run that morning.  I had broken through the connective tissue of depression that surrounded my bed, risked death or dementia in the popping of emotional tendons and given myself 8 miles of love.  So that evening I let myself just lay there and pretend that things would get better if I laid there longer.  I stared at the ceiling and told my friends to distract me on the phone because, oh my god, he proposed, and my sweatshirt collected motes and dead skin cells and the dust mites roamed my face.

Then today my mother called and when I heard her voice, concerned and empathetic, I felt the grief poong through my cells.  I rushed off the phone and broke into tears.  I felt guilty for not wanting to marry him, guilty that things felt different, guilty that I wasn't choosing a life of financial ease and support with waking the kids at 7 am when I could have had all that, he promised me all that and more. I was aghast at the loss before me and I cried and cried and cried.  I stopped to wonder if I was making a gruesome mistake even though I know better.

I flew open and now I feel a little bit better.

Running to stand still

I'm on my fifth mile when I think I see his car.  A Mercedes slips by me, black and flat in the back and headed for his street.  Oh god, is that him?  I watch the back of his car, wondering, waiting for it to turn at the right place and confirm that after two months, we have finally run across each other on accident. I reflect that my ass looks good and my running wear does not clash horribly.  I am even wearing tidy pigtails.  It's a good day to be seen. 

Except.  Everything is different now.

He emailed me yesterday, two months into a 6-month separation I agreed to but didn't want in the end, to ask if we could talk.  I said no.  This last month has been magical for me.  The hick, who is in fact not disposable at all and feels more like a lifelong friend, recommended a peanut butter banana sandwich before my run, and suddenly I could go on for miles and like it.  Endorphins kicked in. Happiness occurred.  And the more of that I had, the more I let myself be...myself.  I say fuck you more often and the people who laugh and hug me are the people who stick.  I love my life.

I didn't want to know what he thought or wanted.  I wanted to keep living in this sweet pocket of self care and laughing.  I wanted the sandwich and the running shoes and the quiet of my own spot, my own emotional territory.  I pissed in the doorway of my house and asked him to wait for April.

He didn't.

He responded with reasons and needs I would not refuse.  He pulled deeply on my decency and my desire to care for those I love, my desire to be fair.  So I drove up the hill again last night.  That fucking hill is a story of catering to his world more than to my own, my car driving up over and over while his remained in the carport and he awaited my enjoyment of his liquor, his music, his acres of trees, his dog and his giant flat screen t.v.  I drove and parked and shook my head.  I can't fucking believe I'm here.  I walked inside to the clean shave of his face and the new presents for his girl and the things he needed to say.

He promised me everything.  Everything.  I won't even say those things publicly, I won't write them down, because they speak so well of his need and his hope.  They make me want to wrap him up in my arms, cover your ears, oh sweet baby him and make him safe from such unretractable exposure.  All was answered for him, all resolved. He knew, finally and absolutely, and all that was left was for me to fall headlong into the life I had so long begged him for.

I didn't.

I told him how much I loved him and that I am single.  And then I told him how much I love my life now, how conditional our life had felt and how good it feels to wake up and make choices based only on who I am and not on what will keep him from leaving again.  I told him, oh god, I told him I had let go.  I hadn't known really for sure if I was ready to say that.  I was a fury of confusion before I left for his house, changing shirts and donning makeup and cussing at and about him.  And then I heard all those acknowledgements and gorgeous, sparkling promises, and I felt them roll away from my impermeable being with wonder and deep regret.  There it was, unrefutable: I was done.  Shit, and thank god, I was done.

The Mercedes turns the wrong way on the wrong street, it might be dropping The Girl off somewhere, it could still be him, and right there in that thought I see that it feels good to be chased and also that this is exactly why I didn't want to talk with him yet.  I don't want to be wondering like this.  I just. Want. To run.

______________________

P.S. No idea why the font issues, typepad is being a bitch.

Boys

"Um," I say, trying to make it sound unrehearsed, "by the way I changed my mind about him."

We're on the phone making movie and ice skating plans but I have just stopped the conversation.  It hovers for a moment, my friend's attention having turned from teaming up bored parents to a sudden crack in my iron resolve.  She waits one beat, two maybe.  It's all suspended over the line and I like that.

"I don't know what you mean," she says.  If I could reach through and pull at the string of her shirt, unwind and steal a little, that's what I'd be doing.  I want some help hooking up but I am never going to say it that clearly.  I'm 33, for god's sake.  Isn't that too old for leaning on matchmakers and fake-accidental meetings?

"I''m game, " I say.  She's been trying to hook us up for over a year now, but I've been way too busy either obsessing over my relationship or obsessing over my break-ups to be capable of such fun.  Casual dating? Just hanging out to see if I like it?  Oh!  The lack of punishment!  I couldn't.

I can, and want to.  If I am going to make light of the hick and of my libido in general, I need to spread out the load.  And explore, and not hide like a nun.  Therefore: attempt at pretend surprise playdate with charming, unflappable single father of three whom I've been watching for over a year.  Possibly he will ask me out?  On a date?  With food and NOT obsessive freaky expectations, and just, fun?

I'm game.

Christmas passed

Here are some recent bits I type-scribbled in the dazzling absence of my children over winter break.

The van is killing me.  I need something new, something that speaks volumes of self value and integrity. Something that says, I haven’t given myself away.  I bought that van to carry other people’s children.  I wanted to know that at any moment, if anyone wanted to be at my party, I could carry them there.

I don’t belong to those people now.  The boys and I could fit neatly into sedans, my stash all over the front seat and the two of them separated by a skinny middle island.  It’s time to buy things that cling to the lines of our family.  I don’t need room for someone who isn’t there, and I don’t need someone to fill what is already a complete.

__________________________________

I wake to the sick mouth of overgrown bacteria and scratching, dried up throat.  There’s a large, dessicated chunk of booger lodged somewhere between my nasal cavity and the swallowing mechanism of my throat: is it in my oropharynx?  It’s headed there, anyway, and if I don’t get rid of it it soon enough I will be forced to taste it.  I pull myself off of the family room couch as animated voices carry in from the living room and I search, blurry-eyed, for a paper and pen.  I press the paper out in front of me and walk out to my family.

“I think it’s moving,” my brother-in-law says as I sway into the living room.  The sign catches his eye.  “Oh! It’s communicating!”

Good Morning, I have written.  I am desperate for a toothbrush.

Willow, my sister and hostess, is answering before Peter has fully translated for me.  She still has the toothbrush she gave me the last time I came and has it conveniently stored for me next to the bathroom. This forgetting of toothbrushes is apparently a chronic thing.  I suspect it has something to do with my overdeveloped awareness of microbiology; I can’t quite bring myself to put a damp mouth scrubber, covered in dead skin cells and with things that would grow large and orange in a petri dish, into a dirty cosmetic bag lined in a coating of shampoo and lotion, and then put that same scrubber back in my mouth.  I’d rather leave it at home gathering dust and fecal particles out of the bathroom air, and so I actively forget it every time I travel.

_______________________________________

And that's pretty much how I spent the last week: making my family laugh, laughing at them, falling in love with the places I come from and trying to sanitize my self all at the same time.  It was fucking great.  I'm home now from the butter-yellow, peachy light of Marin County and all atumble with the limbs of gangly boys again.  I forget every year how awesome it is to be away from my kids, how much better it makes our family when they live in the arms of others for a while and I go do my thing.  None of the neuroses stick quite as hard when we reunite, and I discover, in the freshness of being with them again, this fundamental truth: I can love them and have my own life.  I must have my own life, in order to love them well.

We've got a few days left and we are about to dust our way through The Hobbit, a box or two of satsumas, and a whole shitload of youtube clips.  Also, there will be more flirting with the hick who really isn't one (or who might actually be the redneck he claims, in which case, more tasty complications).

I play the vulture

I opened up the Huffington Post this morning to find an article on the prescriptions found in Brittany Murphy's bedroom.  Her glossy pout was right there like a half-sipped drink and I couldn't click fast enough, it was all too inviting.  

Polypharmacy!  Possible drug interactions!  There were a good eight or ten drugs listed and I called my fellow nursing student/bff, voice high and gossipy with the thrill of a new case study. 

"Hey it's me and I found a list of Brittany Murphy's prescriptions online and I want you to call me so we can figure out what happened okay bye, love you."  It sounded ridiculously cocky, given the list of things we don't know about her and given the fact that we are baby, infantile, nursing students.  It is ridiculously cocky.  Still.

I made my routine peanut butter and banana morning sandwich and sat down, the dregs of my green tea handily cutting the stick of peanut butter in my throat, with Davis's Drug Guide for Nurses.  This is what we do, we nursing students.  We get case studies and it is our job to sniff out all the crazy and the hope from a list of medical data, history and subjective reporting.  My sister, who is a therapist, once called me during her years of interning to speak jubilantly of a new patient.  Such a fascinating history of trauma!  So many interacting stress and identity factors!  What a privilege to participate in this rich kaleidoscope of a human.  That's pretty much how I feel.  It is delicious, this power to discover pattern in the most important aspects of human life and then to deliver some hope of wellness.

And so I vulture myself over the body of Brittany Murphy.  I blink a little under the imagined stare of her heartbroken lover, father, friends.  I tell myself, though, that if she knew, she would be glad to make me a better nurse; to help me save a life or prevent a death by trying to understand what happened to her.  I don't actually buy this explanation because the truth is I eat up her details like candy; they're too tasty for me to hang them in dignity.  Still, the cover of noble purpose blunts my guilt a little.

People always ask why we care more about celebrities.  I thought about that this morning.  Was it the caramel apple lips?  The heavy bedroom eyes and the well-blonded coiffe, the money, all that airbrushing that makes my ego insatiable?

I don't think so.  I think we actually care this much about everybody.  Celebrities, though, they let us look.  There is no one whose story does not engross me when told honestly.  We're beautiful, aren't we?  All of us.  We try and we complicate and fail and then redeem, and we love to hear one another's secrets.  If I die tomorrow, though, no one will tell you what drugs I was taking.  You will not learn the sordid past of the people who love me.  What makes celebrities unique is that they allow us to feel that we are close, that we know them intimately already, and so their losses feel like our own and their beauty might just say something about who we are. This is the lie we pay them for.

Good night, Brittany Murphy.  I hope that people more qualified than me find out what happened to you, and I'm sorry that you were hurting.  I hope that you had joy.

Lit up

My friend stands outside the club, underaffected jeans slunk over her body and smoke on the way to her mouth.  She looks dubious but sweet and I am happy to see her.  My new Rock and Republic shirt is making me look a bit haggish, its green and black too hard for my face.  I like it anyway.  The parking lot is full of ghetto, boys slinking by in oversize Cadillacs and voices yelling like sharp edges.  

"Eater!" someone says, loud but not shouty, and I know instantly he is talking about me.  "Go get some mashed potatoes, bread maybe."  He's behind me, hanging out of a car and close enough to touch.  The skinny of my jeans and tight designer top suddenly embarrass me a little.  I'm so thin that a baller is trying to feed me soup.

I laugh a little but ignore him, and my friend and I go into the club.  She looks nervous, out of place maybe in all this fuckable flesh because she has buried her own in nondescript.  She's 5 feet 9 inches of motherhood-softened bodacious, with strawberry blond hair down to her butt.  We'd never attract the same guy, I tell her later, but you could definitely work it if you wanted to.  I picture her in '50's dresses and flaring things, her breasts pushed to overflowing and her laugh as thrown back as it always is.  I hope for her a little but then relax.  She has her husband, and he loves her.

I love checking out the women here.  We're at a strip club, where one of my best friends tends bar, and I'm constantly looking over my shoulder at the butter-smooth girls and their black lit bathing suits.  Wow, I think, that is a really nice, tidy little cooch.  I totally want one of those.  My friend reminds me that I am not 21 anymore, and that my own has seen the battering end of two babies' heads.  I frown a little but try to give up the worry.

So far my favorite thing about this place is that the women look a bit like me; some of the women anyway.  There are thin, small booby girls up there getting paid to twirl on a pole and arch their tiny backs, and this relieves me of some pressure.  I have begun to see myself as aged, gross, finished and unwanted over the years, but the skinny strippers strike me as empirical evidence to the contrary.  Somebody out there wants my skinny shit, and that is cool with me.  One point for hotness and the eventual hope of coupling.

Later, in the bathroom, I see a few of them free of the black lights.  There are, in this more honest light, bruises, mosquito bites maybe, ripples where they aren't officially meant to be.  There is everydayness all over them, normality and accessibility and comparability, and I realize again what I always have to remember: the women who look polished have to spend time polishing.  Whether it's black lights, makeup or boob jobs, the shit takes effort and management.

So it's okay that I don't wake up looking like a fresh little stripper.

Boots

The dress cost me $30 and sits on my body like a wooly glove.  It is proving a line I once read in one of my style magazines: it’s all in the shoes and the purse.  I know I’m being looked at as I walk through my day, if for no other reason than that I feel so good in my skin.  The purse cost me $3.50 in store credit but was once worth $100, it’s softened cranberry red faded like a pair of good jeans.  It’s the shoes, then, mostly.  They were a gift from a man I loved once, and might love again as a friend.  I have begun to doubt this second possibility, and this makes it harder to enjoy the shoes, yet here they are making my day.

They’re inches and inches of camel colored calf-belly leather, heeled in wood and wearing slowly in around my feet.  I love these boots.  They make the dress and reveal the woman in it, and I feel like I deserve everything before me when I have them on.  They make me want to write, not for the pull of words on the page but for the paycheck and the admiration and the control over my life.  I don’t want anyone to own my schedule; rather, I want to succeed at this and buy a few more pairs of Frye’s.

Then there is the issue of land.  I want some.  There was a crush recently, a guy who found me on facebook from years and years ago, from before puberty and marriage and divorce, and when he found my runway photos the floodgates of pursuit were opened.  I started to take an interest around when he told me about the land.  Twenty five acres.  He owns twenty five acres of beauty and mulch and fallen cedar needles and he walks around on it with fireman coveralls, chainsaws, other man-type shit.  I suspect I wanted to sleep with him largely because of his land.  This is how I pictured it.

I’m in a living room covered in tacky old afghans of indeterminate origin and there is a fireplace which is more necessary than it is aesthetic.  I’m wearing tiny Hollister shorts which point out two things about me: 1) I am too old to be wearing tiny shorts, and 2) I am totally pulling them off.  This pairing of facts strikes me as pleasantly scandalous and I want him to notice both.  It’s morning and I’m well-mussed, having arrived too late for sex the night before and yet having nuzzled and burrowed my way through sleep against his body.

He’s been up for hours and I wander out from the bathroom with a sleepy smile.  He offers me coffee; I decline and steep urban, bourgeois tea that will soon get me high as a japanese kite.  I don Uggs and maybe his extra jacket and I throw my feet up on his deck, sipping jasmine scented, stony, bright caffeine while he hauls things around the yard.  Wood has been chopped and I can smell the sap from his gloves.  I’m too sleepy yet for the nerves to set in so I just sit, watching and feeling appreciated. 

I don’t eat breakfast.  He doesn’t let me.  I’m three quarters through the tea, halos and sharp lines having formed on my surroundings as I sipped, when he comes and picks me up.  There are no particular words at this point, just an intention that settles into his bones as he finishes his work, and then the walking toward me like a very sure thing.  He scoops me up and wraps me around his body.  I hold onto my tea, my arm braced against his back and the cup held carefully steady while my legs cling all friendly to him.

I hesitate to let go of the tea because it is something to control and manage, but watching this hesitation means nothing to him.  It is encoded in girl language he cannot decipher.  He lays me on the bed and I see myself from his perspective, disturbingly open and waiting for more of him. 

At this point Carter comes to mind.  Carter could easily be in the room with us, he’s such a constant factor in my choices.  Carter is Toby’s best friend.  Carter is part of my family and I suspect would dearly like to have sex with me, were he given the time.  He is my best childhood friend’s brother, and also the son of my mother’s ex-lover.  While I have loved many men and called them nearly brothers, he is probably the closest thing I have to an actual brother.  He barely talks, largely ignores me, and yet obviously wants to be close when he looks me in the face.  He is someone who will never say I love you or anything like it, but he seems almost desperately loyal.

The last time I saw Carter he was slunk down over a beer, a late-30’s paunch and some fading acne scars saying more than he would probably have liked them to.  His wife had left him, his girlfriend wasn’t having sex with him, and he wasn’t talking about any of this but it was dripping sadly off of him anyway.  I wanted to give him mercy head.

I wanted to look him in the sad, sad face and tell him everything was going to be okay, and shhhhh, and look, doesn’t this feel better?  This is what you deserve.  And then I wanted to remind him what makes the struggles so much fun in the end, why it’s okay that work can be a bitch and your friends are busy with their wives at the end of the day.  I wanted to watch the lights come on again and see the mischief and the funny meanness return to his face, and then the kinetic energy of spring cleaning as he threw his girl to the curb and went to climb something monolithic and granite.  Go, Carter.  I gave you that, and please remember me for it.

I strongly suspect that Toby wishes Carter were here with him.  Sex is something Toby can’t give him, and these boys who have loved each other forever need to save one another in whatever way they can.  I can see the ghost of Carter in front of the window, watching and hoping for cast-offs or a mingled invitation to join.  I don’t want him to, though.  Today is for me, and I can’t be bothered with threesomes.  A threesome would be for them, I the conduit of bromance and lifelong dedication, a high-five over my awkwardly hoping body another mark of the way they belong to each other.  I want them to belong to me.

I want someone, one of them, to fall head over heals and decide that I am staying.