Entry Seven

“We live and die in this city; Laugh and cry in this city.  Even when life gets s****y, we won’t let it keep us down.”  The vocalist was warming up with the band, who had just started into a song.  It was surprisingly good considering that half of the people up there had never played together before.  Add to that that the vocalist was the only person who knew what the song they were performing sounded like and you could see the overall theme of the mess that was occurring in my basement.

The other members of the band were doing their best to play to his vocals, but their reactions were just a second or two behind him.  It did sound a bit messy to a keen ear but the performers were talented enough to keep the whole act just barely together.  

It was just after nine, and the basement was packed and wreaking of alcohol.  Beer cans were already piling up in storage bins I had pulled out of the shed.  The music was loud and the audience was excited.  Once again, I was the private star of the show, even more so then the band.  But even at the center of their attention, I wasn’t entirely there.

In my mind we were dancing in our youth…

The hypnotized listeners grew silent and began jumping and bouncing off of each other like deranged pinballs.  Mosh pits formed in the blink of an eye, seeming almost like an instinctive action.  There were three that I could easily see.  

Kitty began to grind against me, the sweet friction making me want to throw her against the wall and have her right there.  Usually, such carnal desires were easily suppressed, but the music was moving me with wild, unrelenting energy, and it was moving me against her.

Apparently, she shared this idea, forcing me through the wildly ricocheting crowd and without any warning shoving my back into the hard brick wall.  Her unrestrained kisses forcibly made work of my mouth as I flattened against the wall.  My hands ran up and down her back grasping, longing.  Her fingernails carved a path down my forearm and she took my hand in hers.  Careening through the violent ballet she pulled me to the other side of the small room.

Enough of that, I told myself, live in the moment, not in the past.

When he finally did come around he caught me in bad times and a bit off guard.  I was sitting in bed, when he brazenly entered the room.  He didn’t speak, he just walked in circles around the main area of the room.  As he paced around my dorm, and I trying to think of more and more clear ways to ask him where he had been with my cards, his eyes wandered over the things in my room.  I didn’t leave any art out, but there was an important stack of paperwork on my dresser.  His eyes stopped when he found it.  It was a letter saying that I had been denied my housing scholarship.  They questioned whether what I had was real, or if it could even be labeled a disability.  It had been disability enough at the beginning of the semester, before some politician crunched their budget, leaving me out to dry.

He was shocked and saddened by this.  Near immediately he reached for a sketchbook and a pencil, I reached out to stop him, but by the time I was out of bed and across the room it was too late.  Knowing that anything I could do now was futile, I collapsed in a heap on the floor.  I looked up at him in time to see him mouth the word “wow” and see a glimmer of understand flash through his eyes.  He was, after all, the only one who could understand them in the same way I could.  I had allowed him to see a glimpse of the world from my perspective and now he saw ever more.  For a moment he seemed almost scared.

After seeing all he could see in the new book, he turned to a page and began to write.  “I am amazed at this, or possibly the fact that I can understand what this means.  It’s very different to see the world as you do.  Very fascinating.

About the letter, if you need somewhere to stay next semester, my roommate is moving out to stay downtown with his new girlfriend.  We would have to share a room, but you would have a bed, and the whole deal is free.  Only problem is that it’s the Alpha Theta house, and it tends to be a bit noisy and messy, but the room you would be staying in is clean, and the walls are fairly thick.  How about it?  It would save you a lot of money.”

That was one solution.  Before he showed up that I had almost been ready to take my associates degree and leave college entirely, even though I was already a few months into my fourth year.  Yet here he was all of a sudden, like a deus ex machina in shining armor.  Still, I wasn’t too excited about losing my privacy to a roommate.  Actually, I was kind of phobic about that.

I guess that’s why I finally did it.  Not because it would be easier on me financially, but because it was such a normal thing to do, something I had to be comfortable with, and the fact that it scared me so much made it all the  more important to deal with.  I no  longer had my sights set on functional, I wanted to be normal, average to an appropriate degree.   Just like all the other men that had their sights on her. .

No, it wasn’t that I wanted to be normal, I wanted to put myself on equal ground with them.  I wanted to be able to do everything that they could do, without relying on handicaps to win her affection.  As for that grant I had lost, it could rot.

I had to do this, as soon as I could.  I wrote “yes” hastily on the paper and started packing immediately.  He just stood there slack jawed.  I didn’t give any indication more than the single word on the page.  I hadn’t move this fast since we had raced each other up flights of stairs the year before.  

There was no time like the present.  

I moved out of that dump to have her company every day.  I never forgot to take her on dates every so often, even though we spent so much of our free time together.
 
As a child, dates are the only way you may see a girl, you want more and more dates just to see her more and more.  As a love struck child living together seems so perfect.  After all, all of your dates are fun, especially compared to how bored you can get sitting at home.  

As a man, one who has realized that childhood dream of falling asleep next to her each night and waking up next to her each morning, a date, from the viewpoint of your childhood seems unnecessary.  After all the reason you like dates to begin with to begin with was to see her, and now that you can always see her, do they even matter?  

A man realizes that the child is wrong.  The girl he once dated enjoyed the dates too, but she was never a girl at all.  She has been a woman all along and while you may be satisfied with seeing her at home she still longs for a date.  Just because that desire to date died when you moved into her home and became a man, that doesn’t mean a single thing has changed in her mind.

So on a late November afternoon I invited her to a coffee shop with a good reputation that neither of us had yet visited.  I put the ring on her finger myself.  The moment was so beautiful as it slid over her delicate skin.  It was as if all the minute sounds around us fused into an ornate soundtrack to our love.  Her picture perfect beauty swelled in splendor as she smiled so brightly on that day.  That beautiful smile I had seen from her only so rarely.

I can remember visiting a college age boy in the hospital after saving his life.  He had asked me why I couldn’t just end his life.  He said his past was gone, meaningless.  I said to him “your life is still with you.  The past?  You can’t live in the past.  You still have your future, and that’s what’s really important.  Hell, you’re lucky, so lucky, kid.  I have no future, you have no past.  Tell me, which one of us has the most potential?”

On that night, so many years ago, when I had looked up into Kathrynne’s eyes and became entranced by her beauty.  I wish I had known then what I knew now.  I would have gotten back up without protest, Got back in the pit and been happy to never see her again.  

I never wanted to cause the both of us so much pain.  Even seeing her then, that glance, I loved her far too much to allow myself to do to her what I have done.

It doesn’t take long before a man looks down at his hands and grows sick of the blood that covers them.