It can only be called an epiphany when one realizes that popsicles have replaced blowjobs in one’s life. You see, writhing within the constraints of this unintentional celibacy, I’ve developed a strange obsession with popsicles. Soft fudgepops to be exact – the hard fruity ones I find to be most unsatisfactory in their rigidness. But the fudgepops… there’s the obvious taste of velvety chocolate of course, but there’s also that…. slight give as I lave the contours with the flat of my tongue, smoothing the corners and lapping up the creamy drops melting from my hot breath.

Of course, I was completely oblivious to this unconscious fellatio until just a minute ago when I stood up, opened the freezer, and grabbed my fifth popsicle of the night.

Now that the medication is decreasing in my bloodstream, I am aware of a tightening in my body, somewhere in front of the base of my spine. The most apt description I can give is the winding of a mechanical doll, I feel at once both lighter yet compacted beneath the weight of sexual tension; it’s almost predatory, this feeling like a lioness who has slept too long and awakens to the smell of blood fresh-spilled.

I had made up my mind a moment ago to just say Fuck It to everything, put in for a few more weeks of vacation, and fly to Hawaii to meet and visit with you – until I read your most recent entries and realized that perhaps now is a bad time, perhaps I stayed quiet for too long, perhaps I realized things too late…

But maybe – no, definitely – I am in a fragile state, clinging to gossamer desires whipped by the wind. And it would seem like we hardly even know each other but at the same time, know things about each other that not even our best friends know. I admit I’m scared of what I might saydofeel, scared of even my own motivations for doing whatever it is I impulsively do, scared that the things which I believe to be honestly Right and Good are just smooth fabrications of my own psyche trying to repair itself…. But then, would you refuse me the chance to heal at the cost of your own sentiments, although the risk that I am Right in feeling this way would give you a lifetime of passionate peace?

And it’s not like I ask too much of anybody – I think I try not to put too much faith in people – but right now, at this point in my life, I feel so rejected by everyone I want to be with, that it would only take three words to capture flag of my heart:

Come to me.

“Can I ask you a question?”
“Um…. Sure….”
“Are you practicing for a big event, or is this a long line of invisible people?” I ask, gesturing to the velvet ropes that slither across the sidewalk. I’m a little drunk on moderately priced wine at this point.
The young black man, shorter than most men in that I only have to look up a few inches to meet his eyes, diverts his attention from the message he’s texting and glances around thinking god knows what about the woman standing in front of him in yoga pants and a pajama top with a shitfaced grin shining on her face.
“It’s for a private birthday party,” he finally states.
“Oh….. how come it’s private?”
“Ummmm…… it’s for my business partner. It doesn’t start until 9, that’s why there’s no one here yet.”
“Will there be famous people here? Coming in limos and stuff?”
“Probably…..” At this point, a large black man – SECURITY, his shirt screams in white reflective letters – comes rolling up to the velvet rope that separates me from … I guess his boss. I turn to him and start asking him questions as they come to me. Lots and lots of strange questions that can only come from wine-induced mania. A third man joins us on the sidewalk, and while he stands as tall as the first bouncer, his body is more defined, bulk that is necessary for action rather than intimidation; and I can see if he didn’t have the small smile of amusement on his lips, he would be very intimidating indeed. Before I can turn the headlights of my unblinking curiousity to him, a woman with a Red Bull backpack taps me on the arm and inquires if I’d like a free can.
“Yes please,” and she hands me one, but even as it leaves her fingers, condensation making the rod sweat in the gleam of lamplight, I ask her “Is there any truth to the ‘scientific’ studies on the internet about Red Bull and alcohol being a lethal combination?”
She is stunned but bravely stammers “….. I – I uh…. haven’t seen any bad affects from it. There’s really nothing in there that you wouldn’t consume on a regular basis already.”
“Is there such a thing as Too Much Red Bull? ‘Cuz I drink a lot of it,” I fire at her before she can turn away.
“It’s just vitamins…. You’re body absorbs as much as it can of it and then you urinate the rest.” I mentally applaud her for not blushing when she says “urinate” in front of a club and its bouncers.
“So if I drink my own pee, I’d be getting the full dose then? Because I saw it on an episode of CSI…..”
At this point, she’s nodding her head faintly, backing away, but has the presence of mind to call out “I wouldn’t recommend it!” before she escapes into the crowds.
I turn back to the slimmer bouncer – dark hair groomed back in a suave wave, mediterranean, or possibly middle eastern, I guess from the faintest accent. I ask him question after question about the club, the building, the event, one hand on the velvet rope between us.
A black woman stops to my left, nudging the rope with a creamy-skinned knee. I turn to look at her and take in the too-short denim skirt, the out-of-date peasant blouse cinched to emphasize her unpleasantly too-large breasts, hair artificially straightened to a reflective gloss with streaks of blond and red….. maybe it’s a wig…… Such a shame to wrap up natural beauty in cheap packaging, I thought to myself. Her eyes flick to me, then cut away, then flick to me again and I hold her attention with “Hi, will you be performing at the party tonight?”
“No….”
“Oh,” and I wait to see if she gets the implied insult. “Are you hoping to g0et in then?”
She gives a nervous giggle and glances up at the bouncers with false modesty. I imagine her flashing her price and promises in just a few practiced and subtle movements to the men in front of us.
I smile at her, and I don’t know if she’s ever received a smile without malice before because she raises one side of her face in a twitch – a grimace? a returned smile? – and then hides her features in the shadows of her hair. The handsome bouncer answers more questions then unexpectedly asks if I’d like a tour of the place before the guests started arriving.
With one step over the velvet ropes, I’m invited into low ceilings and draped walls and wide halls of the club. He tells me where the VIP booths are. He shows me where the dance floors sprawl. He reveals to me that the club was once a porn studio, and the darkness, the humidity, and the pulsing music become a womb of anticipated pleasures.
As I leave the club, still dizzy and foggy from wine, I catch the curious stares of people dining on the street, loitering on the benches, lined up at the club entrance. What is it? I hear their silent inquiries. What is it about you – dressed in yoga pants and a pajama top, hair mussed from carelessness – that gives you invitation to cross velvet ropes? I shrug as if to respond to everything they ask of me.

The bottle says take two but I take one.
This bottle says take one but I take 4.
That bottle is full because I don’t want that particular pill anymore.
Slowly I play with the dosages of my medication to try and pull some emotion from the sleepwalking that is my life, and try to hide the alarm I feel when I hear my own forced laugh start edging towards hysteria.

A few nights ago, I dreamt that you came back to us. You stood on the doorstep and, speechless, I put my arms around your neck and held you close. I cried for everything that I’d lost when you left, and I wondered if you knew how shitty and fucked up it was, but at the same time, I was just so glad to see you again that tears of happiness and relief blinded me.

The respite between cigarettes gets smaller, and empty beer bottles on my desk fill with ash and stubs of cancer sticks. I hate how my life has become. And even though people tell me that it could be worse, that I could be missing a leg or an eye or be covered in scabs and burns or dying, a happy maniacal anger sometimes pushes the numbness out, and I want to break everything breakable in my house,

because I could be happy if he would only let me love him

or at least, if you had told me the truth almost 4 years ago, if you had been honest, Mickey, when I asked you if Beau was a good guy – someone decent who would never break my heart and I asked you with words uncolored, with motives unhidden, “Should I stay with him? Will he be strong and noble and gift me with a family of my own?” and you weighed words in your head, letting them fall in an order that could have been the first footsteps of a great adventure, and said “Yes. He is a good man.”

I miss you, Mickey, because you were a wonderful constant in my life until you left.

I honestly don’t fucking know how anyone can stand to live in this fucked up world. I’ll tell you why I do it, though, why I keep insisting on wasting oxygen – it’s because I’m a coward. If there’s one thing I’ve developed an obsessive fear about, it’s trying to kill myself…. and failing. I mean, that would be the utmost in pain, wouldn’t it? Waking up in the hospital with half your face blown off?

How would you explain that without admitting that you tried – and FAILED – to commit suicide?

Sometimes, I feel like installing a zipper in my skin so I can peel if off and pretend to be someone else.

Because there are many things I miss and how I am now… this body, this life – it’s not right to want these things and still be who I am right now.

I miss going to the farmer’s market and digging my fingers into the sacks of pinto beans when no one is looking.

I miss lining up for movies on opening night, buying the largest size popcorn and the super mega coke and finishing half of it before the movie starts, then having to pee real bad but not wanting to leave in the middle of the show.

I miss wearing high heels and skirts with long fringed hems that tickle my calves as I dance.

I miss winters – winters that are full of Christmas anticipation, snow, and vacation plans.

I’ll even admit that I miss TV every once in a while – I miss hearing about upcoming solar eclipses or the birth of a new star, an invention that will raise humanity to new self-awareness, or for God’s sake, even the dates of the local carnival and avocado festival.

I miss the nights when I wouldn’t smell booze on Beau’s breath…….

And sometimes I wish he would get so drunk that he rapes me, just so I could feel something….

…. anything…..

I’ve started losing control of my dreams, and they keep bringing me to happiness, making the reality of morning more painful.

I wish I could flip open my phone and press the one key that dials your number so I could talk to you, pour out what’s going on in my head, because you would know what I’m talking about and what it feels like…. at least, I used to think you would know.

So abrupt and so cold, without even giving me a chance to fight for what I thought was a loving future for all of us.

“Sarah, can you please come to the front? …. There’s a cute puuuuuuppy here,” Rochelle’s voice  whines over the PA system. Putting down the dog food I was about to shelve, I skip to the registers, pasting a fake smile on my face. Kneeling, I let the small dog sniff my hand. Coldly, with my face hidden by my hair, I harden my heart against the innocent licking of its tongue.
“It’s so adorable,” I croon softly, and flash a smile at Rochelle before getting up and returning to the back of the store.

I don’t hold puppies anymore.

You have to be a certain kind of crazy to work in a pet store; cementing your mouth closed to the inhumanity of man as fat housewives buy goldfish by the dozen to hand them out as party favors, or fathers in ragged shirts and swollen beerguts allow their ill-mannered and disgusting children to buy “just” a guinea pig to silence their selfish screeching. To work in such an environment, you need to be able to find joy at the smallest, most insignificant thing as watching a baby parrot take its first clumsy flight around a room, or a sick or wounded animal finally opening its eyes to see you. You need to be able to laugh when someone jokes about putting a mouse in a sock and bashing it against a table, because in a deep corner of your brain you are repressing the knowledge that someone out there actually does that for fun.

So I bravely smile when someone I know walks in the door and asks me what I’m doing, working in a pet store with my college degree. “I have nothing better to do,” I always reply. But my heart, to anyone who is willing to listen, whispers “This is where I belong.”

Is this the bargaining stage of grief? Is this where I offer you something in exchange for your help? Because honest to god, Mickey, I have nothing to offer you but my friendship, constant as gravity, and a lifetime of laughter if you would let me.

I wonder if you even need that, though, with all your money and connections, you can spend the rest of your years on permanent vacation, meeting an endless line of people until you forget my face, the sound of my voice. And that which I thought made me unique and special, you will eventually find in someone else.

I have never been good at handling money.

I wonder if I ever will be – wonder that because I’m not brave enough to end this; too hopeful that maybe I can do better elsewhere.

Would I stay here, or move to Nebraska? I heard rent is cheaper in other places. Would I be ok, so far away from home, or would I be able to find a new home elsewhere?

Maybe … Maybe I could move to Virginia and go back to school. Or to New York – I can certainly hide in plain sight, with throngs of strangers wrapping me in a protective layer of ice. Hmmm… snow….

Maybe I’ll meet someone who will teach me how to shoot a gun….

But I would settle for someone who could make love to me.

Alyssa is pregnant again – she cries into the phone and I walk to her, putting an arm around her shoulders and squeezing her tight. I know she didn’t want it, she can’t keep it, she already has one, and can’t possibly earn enough money for two. “It’s going to be ok,” I whisper, but inside my head, I’m thinking how stupid she is for letting this happen again, with a boy/man who can’t even hold down a decent job; she deserves so much better, and I think to myself: this is the true curse of Eve – her daughters will be blind to their own self-worth – blind, hungry imploding stars that take to their bosom anything close enough to reciprocate a fraction of their own gravity.

Alyssa hangs up the phone and puts trembling hands to her face – her hands are so very small – but tears escape through fissures of her cage. I squeeze her to me again, and she sobs once, then breathes deeply, then pulls herself back into a cold and solid pillar. “Thank you,” she whispers. “Thank you for the hug.” I dozen phrases bloom and die without leaving my lips which form into a sad smile, and I turn away from her with the pretense of needing retrieve something from the printer.

The secrets that people tell me, I feel them like hot syrup coating the insides of my skin, warming me and preventing my heart from completely freezing over.

This morning I think of her and hope that she can still feel my arm around her when she lies down in that room and someone comes in to take away something she didn’t want in the first place.

I keep expecting to wake up with a hangover, but I don’t. Maybe I’m not drinking enough.

I need to stop remembering. Stop expecting to see an email from you or your name on my phone. I’m trying to kill that last fragment of me that still believes in hope, believes in you.

And I’m reminded of something my mom said to me a few years ago: stop living in the past and live for the future.

I don’t know how to rebuild a future that’s been stolen – how to rebuild it from memory after only having glimpsed it in the shimmering waves of a barren desert.

How horrible dreams can be; how horrid and cruel.

Last night, I dreamt that you came back to us. Uncertain of intentions, both of you looked at each other with suspicion tinged with hope. The things you said – more like images you flashed into my brain – were of some unnamed pain. But I responded with such sharp and keening despair, exploding your doubts and hesitations into shards and shrapnel.

I woke up feeling that all was good,
all was well,
that my storm of fears and hope had washed away the rubble of past wars between you.

But each waking movement gave me weight until I felt like Atlas, with the world between my shoulder blades, its shadow on my face.

---

She is pregnant, but she will not be keeping it. How can she, when she has no money, and it was … unplanned.
She is young, but she feels so very old. Too young to start a family, but too old to get married. Strange ….

The arrangements will be made before she can hear the first heartbeat.

I lie down beside him in bed. He stinks of alcohol.

“You’ve been drinking tonight,” I mumble, turning away to face the wall.

“No I haven’t…. “
“I can smell it on you. Why are you lying?”
“Yeah, I had a drink or two…..”
“Where did you get the alcohol. Did you go to a bar?” I ask, remembering earlier this afternoon that he had a small supper with some guys.
“Yeah.”
“What?!”
“I mean, no, I got it at the Quick-E-Mart.”
“Why do you keep lying to me?…” asshole. I keep my face turned toward the wall and flinch at his touch. He doesn’t know that he has a tell, that I can tell when he’s lying to my face now, because there’s a large difference between how he was before, and how translucent my world has become.

Every night, when I’m driving home from work, I still keep expecting to see your car parked by the sidewalk, or hear you laughing from the upstairs window.

Garbage piles up by the doorway.
I haven’t cleaned the litterbox in weeks. I’ve lost my appetite… which is a good thing, I would say, since I’ve put on some weight since work got tougher.

My thoughts….. more fragmented….. Whatever, I don’t care. The only reason I write here is to nail down these feelings. To …. remember, in case I forget, the reasons why I do the things I (will) do.

I don’t care who is reading this, or what you think, or if I sound self-involved.
I have stopped caring if I go to hell, which is kind of funny if you think about it….
I have stopped wondering….. if hell actually exists.

I saw an advertisement/news blurb for a pill that helps you forget past traumas, and I wonder how possible that is. I wonder if taking it would let me forget strange hands on the inside of my knees, the burning imprint still glowing softly just under my skin, or the afternoon on the patio of the coffee shop when he convinced me to turn myself in to the hospital, the nicotine sparking in my brain, my legs twitching with caffeine. I want to run away, take the pills, and forget the past 4 years.

But at the same time, while I’m wanting these things, I reach for the next pack of cigarettes and wonder how long it will take to smoke myself to death; it brings me a sick pleasure to draw out the possibilities.

Beau keeps working on this project. Studying graphics, taking the necessary photographs. He tries to be optimistic, brave.

But me, I’m fading. Work is…. well, let’s just say I’m not going to get promoted anytime soon…. I try not to let my personal life and work life affect each other, but I think people can tell because they keep asking me what’s wrong- if I’m ok. I think it might be that my laugh is forced, my smile barely lifts my lips, I walk away in the middle of conversations…

I’m cleaning out my room as if I’m moving, but it doesn’t even look like that. I gave Nanette most of my purses and three suitcases worth of clothes. She was grateful, and for some reason, that made me feel bad.

Someone asks me:
Would you rather be with someone who never becomes famous or well known or rich, but works a 9 to 5 job, drinks beer on the porch, works on the family car on the weekends; or someone who *is* famous and rich and showers you with jewelry and purses, shoes and clothes, surprises you with trips to Monte Carlo and Tahiti.

I used to think I wanted one or the other. I used to believe I could have both.

Now all I want is a dog.

But yeah ……. will it become easier to remove myself from the equations…. if everyone can have everyone else without me, will I finally be whole?

I found her phone number on his cell, by the way. I finally know her name. And it repeats in my head like deep bells ringing.