People Don't Fall in Love Like they do in the Movies | Alexander T. Damle

Encounter

            Though thy soul speaks loud into the deep empty night to those stars around immediate you lie usually silent for want of words somehow fitting, they shine bright and yet you’re all burnt out, used up, tossed off, crumpled fast food wrapper.

            Late at night having an emotional break down and you can’t sleep because you don’t sleep so you scream at the walls and blast sad music whose singers you fall in love with because the voices you can talk to because you don’t have to worry about them talking back and they say the voices are all in your head but that doesn’t mean they don’t scream too and sometimes you have to tell the voices to fuck off and you know that’s a bad sign but all you have now is bad signs.

            And yet her you’re talking to and it’s easy, and she’s not like the voices, she doesn’t make you want to curl up into a ball in the corner and pound your head against the wall and take a long knife and cut your arms and you’re talking to her and it’s easy.

            On that first night the voices for some reason lay silent, and you used to think and sometimes still think that the voices are your voice too, and without them never would you have anything to say, and yet that night you spoke loud and you had something to say without having to think what you’re supposed to say.

            And she was so beautiful but you didn’t notice, you didn’t notice she was laughing at your jokes, that she seemed to actually take an interest and it was good and that was the last time it was easy but not the last time it was good.

            A galleon is pitched heavy long across the waves as above stars shine bright for want of lights to drown them out, and the moon hangs in gentle crescent, and somewhere below deck the captain sits, feather to page, his words stretched out and hung all lackadaisical, and he spent as much time making the woman’s name look beautiful at page’s top as he did in crafting all the words lain below.

            Worthless, your words are worthless, you type like it matters, like it will be read, all is nought but cliche, and that goes for the world too.

            Gas fires light the Texas night.

            A girl sketches out on Oxy on backstreet of Tangiers.

            Could use a drink.

            After you talked to her you went home and when you did the voices came back and this time you couldn’t block them out and they screamed and screamed and screamed, and you begged and you pleaded and they didn’t listen.

            Keep on.

            Persevere.

            The ship captain now guides his ship cutting through waves threaten to engulf even the stars, and yet he does not bow and he does not break and somewhere below deck, a bottle of ink is overturned onto a stack of papers and all is obscured.

            After much consternation on the subject, you ask her to an old movie and you regret it immediately.

Motion Picture

            Don’t you have a different record to freak out to? Another record to sit with your eyes hanging all Basset Hound, fingers missing keystrokes, tired but cannot sleep, bowed but never breaking? Somehow you believe that having old voices sympathetic, carried on from a you you thought you ended makes it easier.

            Nothing makes it easier, bullet worming between ear and temple excepted.

            The movie was a disaster because of course it was a disaster. Not for her, and not for us, but for me, because, well, that’s how I tend to make these things.

            Rival gangs/spy agencies/pick your trope line up across a bridge, snipers waiting in the rafters, right hands under leather jackets/peacoats, old Springsteen number beats out, then right at mid-bridge, kid drops the briefcase and everyone starts shooting everyone.

            Can’t scream because of sleeping bodies separated by cheap drywall, can hear everything, nothing for him to hear, not but shuddering gasping body singular at rest but restless, want to cry so bad but can’t cry, so hard to cry anymore.

            Into the cave the gondolier paddles, leaving night sky behind, world now enlightened only by single torch (oil burning) hung from front of gondola, cave walls, dappled with imperfections, hung with moss, can’t see into the water, too dark, going forwards the sky behind disappears too now and it’s just the gondolier and his gondola and the walls of the cave and inwards he keeps on because it has narrowed too tight to turn and he doesn’t like paddling backwards, too much work, so on he goes and around each pipe bend of cave walls he expects to find but never does and on and on the walls curve, minutes hours days weeks months years life till death, waking moment and sleep, always the cave.

            Used to be an artist, but now he just jerks off and rubs his jizzm onto the page, calls it art. No one can really tell much of a difference between the artist before and the husk now.

            Want to hurt like want to be high, want to pound fist into wall until blood flows liberally in vaguely tragic patterns reminiscent of 700 year old glass running down its own pane, want to shoot up, not as addiction, but affectation, all an affectation.

            Movie was David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago, shown with intermission as intended by artist (without jizzm stains), used the toilet three times. Thought somehow this would be a deal breaker in her book. Afterwards rather than drinks she said she had to go home to do a secret santa with her flatmates and you walked home together and you didn’t even hug and she made some casual remark about getting drinks and you figured it was all just a line and you figured that was that, another first date without a second and

            I wish I could just set off across the American waste on the back of a motorcycle and maybe curve south, go through the other Americas, jungle and desert and mountain and plains and beaches and small towns and cities and all that out there and yet you’re here and maybe that’s good and things are good but they’re probably not.

            Evidence A. you’re listening to the record you listen to when things aren’t good, it itself a suicide note. You’ve never written a suicide note.

            Writing from the story’s middle, doesn’t work with true stories any better than it does with fiction but you have to write something you just have to write something because if you don’t write anything then you’re not a writer, isn’t that what you always say?

Boozing

            And yet despite previously told prophecies that was not the end, for drinks did happen, with time, and you drank and you talked, you both, long into the night, closing your favorite bar (only time you’ve ever done that) and that was also a good night but not a great night and so much you fucked up, opportunities lost, a woman like her, not going to wait around.

            Make your bets and make them well, poker face on.

            Trying to cry. Trying your best to cry but can’t cry. Need a dead lover to picture, some great personal tragedy to regret.

            Bourgeois self obsession made manifest on page and in mirror, more masturbation, pushups and pullups and sets and routines and protein shakes and health foods and calorie counts and carefully assembled outfits, and no one gives a shit but the one staring back forlornly in the mirror, all that preening and yet it’s never enough, face in the magazine stares up at you and it’s not your face because faces don’t work that way.

            And then she says she has something kind of awkward to tell you and this is the moment you were all kinds of braced for, yet just those words a part of you fractures a little and then she says she has a long distance open relationship and this you weren’t expecting, and it’s not the relationship, that doesn’t bother you, not really, you have enough potential deal breakers yourself that you have to accept whatever you get with any potential partners, after all, aren’t the years long self-hate that is the running conversations with the voices in your head close enough to an open relationship? What does bother you is even talking about a relationship, not ready for this, not even close, so used to girls going on first dates with you that they assume are just friendly meet-ups, then never talking to you again. You can’t even deal with the idea that a girl might be into you. Breaks you.

            After the date you know you should kiss her, but you don’t and you don’t even really consider it. Too drunk to think, too tired, too broken, used up, tired, this whole dating thing has fucked up too many times for you to even consider it going right this time.

A Return to the Land of Oz

            Then Christmas comes and you two go your parting ways, and you talk sporadically for those couple of weeks, and it eats you up inside and she mentions in your talk, just to clarify, that she is indeed single, and you say you’re single too and it takes her a couple days to get back to you, and in those couple of days everything hurts and you want to throw up and you can barely eat and you can’t sleep and you know it’s absurd, it’s just a few dates, you’re doing exactly what you shouldn’t do and you’re building it up way beyond anything reasonable, and you wish you’d get in a potentially lethal car crash.

            Icy roads, traded paint, twisted metal, smell of burnt breaks, flaming gasoline, snow coming down hard, half light, blood.

            You get back and you get drinks again, somewhere different, and it all feels wrong this time, and when you use the bathroom you stare at yourself and you ask yourself what you’re doing, and whether you actually care for this girl, if you aren’t just looking for something to fall in love with because you’re so fucking lonely, another excuse to not kill yourself for a couple more months.

            You walk home together again and you stand staring each other caught in the light of Edinburgh streetlamps, as a faint rain beats down, and you stare at each other, and she smiles, and you lean in then stop and it would be so easy but you don’t kiss her, and eventually she breaks the moment and kisses you on the cheek, then gives a little wave as she walks off, and that kiss and that wave melt your heart a little bit and you feel the moisture from her lips on your cheek as you walk up to your apartment.

            Then the kiss dries and all you can think about is that you didn’t kiss her and she’s going to lose interest, got to take a chance, too scared she’ll pull away and then you’ll wake up in hospital bed, all the events of the past few weeks just another overly hopeful pipe dream, an excuse to believe you can make yourself better.

            Mental patient howl. Beat the walls, bloody cement, bloody foam, bloody straightjacket, no drug strong enough to fix you quiet.

Late Late Nights

            You’re not a jealous person, and yet all you feel is jealous, when she so much as talks to another guy and you’ve only gone on a few dates.

You’re an absolute joke, you thought you’d changed? You thought you were ready for a relationship with this cool, funny, smart, outgoing, beautiful woman? You’re going to shatter her like China, like everything that ever makes the mistake of getting close to you by choice rather than circumstance.

            And yet you’re going out with her again tomorrow. Some people never learn.

To be continued.