Suburbs

Its a working title. A short story i've been working on about a relationship that steemed over a lifetime.

  We used to think our lives were just one bad dream after the next; time is an abstract idea when all you do is wait to wake up. So we filled the empty plots with everything imaginable. Our teenage years passed by in what felt like minutes, we played instruments neither of us could stand and ate foods we’d soon hate. We'd cut class and go to museums to look at paintings we thought depicted reality with an unreal sense. We would just “get by” in school because grades were obsolete in a world of ungodly fictitious events and wars we'll never understand. We read whatever we pleased and made love after Nabokov taught us that love was blunt and sometimes greedy. After everything on our long list was complete we compiled new lists with more daring challenges and fears and eventually conquered the world that consisted to us, of small perimeters and a variety of multicolored walls.

    College slipped past us, maybe because we had so much to determine is so short of a time span. We would go out at 4 am to sip strong liquors and pretend we could be anything we wanted; we gathered minor facts of the day and extended them in our minds to see where they led and created in these short discussions, religions we would soon call our own. Then was when and how we finally decided the way we were to survive each day to the next. 

    After graduation we imagined we were both suffering from some rare head trauma and coma induced in a hospital somewhere placed in the exact same room and even though we still believed there would be this grand entrance into the world we created together we needed to live our “lives” now, because we were foolishly waiting for a savior that would never come. We got jobs on different sides of town. You died your hair dark and painted your lips red, I feared you’d changed forever and I was almost right but without each other we broke bones too often and had to find some mutual ground.  In our 30's we still thought marriage was just a piece of paper and love could never be justified with it, but a child that was a different story. It was the perfect way to show one another that “forever” was not just another one of those printed words. 

    The miscarriage happened sometime between the thriving thirties and factual forty’s we listened to Carole King & Dusty Springfield all night long and drank so much we could hardly breathe. Breathing we thought, kept us from so much happiness it was unbelievable. We couldn’t close our eyes for 14 days and then slept for a month straight, after that it was over. The light returned to your eyes and your heavy heart filled the room again.

    Near the middle of our lives we acquired a sense that life was horrible if all you had were possessions to show for it. So we gave all of our things away and moved to a small village in Indonesia to calm our thoughts. We imagined an afterlife that would pay all our medical bills and save our aged blood. By 60 I couldn't recognize myself in the mirror but you; you looked just as beautiful as the first day you told me you needed me in your life. 

      Sometimes when I wake up from dreaming of you I’m sure that you were the silver lining everyone kept mentioning. I tried to remember if the world we made out of thin air had a clock that turned back time and froze it. I miss you more still and as I grow wiser and begin to forget your exact scent and sound of your voice I can’t help but picture you reading Doctor Faustus on a beach in Versailles living a life only two children could think up.

Reviews

[Seshat Nidaba]

I liked this JJ, it speaks to me of youth and change.