just another easy-to-believe tragicomedy

Think it was 1990.

Funny how you can’t remember dates when you’ve been alone for so long.

Seems like somebody was always pulling a gun on me in those days. Something about sleeping with women I wasn’t supposed to be sleeping with. Fortunately, I never got shot. Little muscle pain every now and then. A few broken bones here and there. But that’s what opioids were invented for. 

Eventually, I’d move on.

Usually meet some woman with a flushed face and puffy eyes living in a sleepyheaded little town, not unlike some of those burgs in Cheshire County, New Hampshire.

She’d ask about my past and I’d shrug a little and mumble something about "kicking a dead horse," and she’d look at me like I had no sense of humor and wonder who the hell this was this American stereotype; but somehow we’d always end up locked in a static embrace after trying to achieve a higher form of bliss.

Come morning, she’d wake up with neck pain from using my knee cap as a pillow and I’d have cramps from attempting to perform one of those tantric methods, so we’d take a non-habit forming prescription pain killer, because that’s what they were invented for, and spend the rest of the day determining which one of us could go through a needle’s eye without overdosing.

We’d come down off an inauthentic high a few hours later and she’d ask me some trick question like, "So, what did you, ditch your inert and restless life in search of a more authentic experience?"

I’d show a polite grin and say something like, "Just on a one-man mission to find something morally positive," and she’d sort of accept that, but I could tell she’d be thinking I was just another one of those t-shirted slackers trying like hell to break away from his family’s pathological path… and she was right… always searching for the ring of truth by going down blind alleys, always ending up stranded in the middle of a mythic American dream.

Then she’d go into the kitchen and start mixing screwdrivers in those little juice boxes and I’d go off on another one of my lonesome ruminations and suddenly begin not to trust my memory at all.

She’d return twenty ten minutes later, drained and pale, hand me my drink, glance anxiously at the clock, force a smile, say, "I’ve always felt I was capable of great friendships and kindnesses. But I am strange. I do come from a different place."

Suddenly, her eyes would fill with tears and I’d reach out and take her hand. "Well, at least you’re not somebody whose worldview is often obscured by an inability to fathom much of anything, like me," I’d say and she’d smile and make some comment like, "So much dysfunction and chaos in your backstory, man, so much existential absurdity."

As usual, I’d have no comment, no argument, and wouldn’t even feel guilty about it at all.

There’d be a silent but perceptible grinding of teeth there and with that, she’d lock the door, and we’d go back to bed.

Because that’s what beds were invented for.