Bone Circus--another excerpt

This one is told from the viewpoint of a character that's dead at the beginning of the story. Unless I break up the whole thing into multiple short stories. (These ARE honestly connected, I promise...but I've left out transitional pieces because I haven

 

I hate this.  Sometimes I feel like I can drink until I forget my name, forget my address, where I work and who I am.  I’ve drank ‘til I forgot whether I was left-handed or not, and I’ve drank ‘til I forgot I hate mashed potatoes, and ended up eating a whole plateful.

But I can’t drink ‘til she’s gone; drink until she’s just another face, another set of eyes and smiles and heartbreak.  Maybe it’s sentimentality; maybe I don’t want to forget Johanna; maybe I’ve been living with this ache for so damn long I don’t know how to live without it. 

Hell, that’s not sentiment, it’s masochism.

It’s just hard, especially on nights like this, the sort of  nights we’d stroll through the park and maybe lie down, watch the clouds trespass against the moon.  Nights when she’d reach her hands up, lace her fingers together around the back of my neck, thumbs flirting with my hairline, and whisper “I love you, Nickoli.”  She always whispered it, even when we were alone.  She added reverence to the words.  Or maybe she just said it quiet so I wouldn’t hear the lie, so I’d feel her breath as she said it, and believe her.

Heh, not that believing’s ever been my problem.  I knew from the start that I didn’t deserve Johanna—no one deserves Johanna—but she loved me, or I thought she did, and that was enough.  I’d wanted all my life for something to believe in—from my grandmother’s stories about fairies and goblins to the bigger, more abstract lies of justice and honor and love.  And love.

I shouldn’t be thinking like this, not on a night like tonight, and certainly not after drinking what I’ve been drinking.  But I guess going out of my way to not think about it is just like thinking about, so I’d might as well go ahead and wallow in it. 

It’s just that…she felt more real than anything else I have ever known.  I’d go to work, I’d paint or write, play poker with the guys, listen to the radio, and I felt like it was all a dream.  Everything else in my life became wait-time, passing the hours and minutes until she’d walk in, black hair flowing down her back, and solidify the rest of the world.

We didn’t fight; or we did, but not big fights, and they weren’t why she left.  Truth is, I don’t know why she left.  Just one day, we were looking up at the stars, and she was right next to me but at that moment I knew the stars were closer than she was.  “Nickoli,” she said, eyes blacker than I’d ever seen them, and then she seemed like she was going to say something else but didn’t.  Instead, she smiled, that crooked Johanna-smile that makes you think the whole world is on your side, and pointed to a falling star.  “Close your eyes,” she told me, “make a wish.”

Eyes closed on an early summer night, you’d be amazed at how much you don’t really need them.  There were cicadas buzzing all around, skin-prickling breezes and dew on the grass.  The smell of salt from the sea, and cigarette and marijuana smoke from some of the other people in the park, enjoying the night.  There was a brief smell of lilies that faded almost as soon as I registered it. 

Maybe that was when I opened my eyes.  Maybe it was when I could no longer hear Johanna’s breathing.  But I opened my eyes, and she wasn’t there.  She’d left a chain of paperclips, the “bracelet” I’d made her in the boring dream-time at work.

It was only weeks later, when I hadn’t seen her and she wasn’t answering her phone, that I realized she had left me.  No questions, no discussion, no “we need to work on this.”  Just a shooting star and a chain of bent metal.  And it was only then that I realized I hadn’t made a wish.  Why would I?  What would I have wished for then, at that happy moment, with Johanna smiling to me that the world was beautiful and we were in love?  There wasn’t a thing I wanted at that moment, and that was the moment it all slipped away.

It was two years ago, this whole thing, and now I’m nearing thirty and feeling even older.  I get mad at myself sometimes, when I realize that I’m still waiting for her.  She’s not coming back, and on most levels I know that.  But that doesn’t make the moments without her feel any less like wait-time.  It doesn’t keep me from expecting her, deep down in the secret parts of my heart that I won’t admit, to come through my door, the same black hair, the same thick lashes and glistening eyes, the same smile.  It doesn’t keep her from my thoughts.  Everything I write is about her, every picture her portrait. 

If there’s anything that time and acceptance have brought me, it’s that, even if only in an ironic way, I can be grateful for the whole experience.  She’s helped me write, she’s helped me draw.  Not just stuff about us, though at first it was, but about how she looked at the world.  You can’t be in love with someone without picking up, at least a little, how they see things.  I saw a little girl the other day, in the south slums, face smudged and clothes tattered.  She was lying on the pavement, chin propped up on her tiny hands, legs kicking absently behind her (Is this a trademark of little girls?  When do they outgrow it?), encouraging a dandelion that was growing from a crack in the sidewalk.  It’s not something I would have noticed if I hadn’t met Johanna, and now it’s one of my favorite paintings.  Sometimes I wonder, what the heck did I paint before I met her?

Still hurts, though.