Venn Diagram

A Poem by Chris Miller

Narrative Poem. Honestly, I'm not really sure what I'm doing.

I blur my eyes and all of the lights pop like fireworks. The lettering on the street signs fuse into fuzzy white lines. I blur them, then clear them in rapid succession and the lights expand and shrink and expand again. I look at you and see a distorted memory I struggle to remember. The familiar shapes are there, but they're bleary, like looking through thick, water stained glass. This is how I prefer to remember you, the way you were before, when you still had your contours and you weren't so symmetrical. Before you were full of corrugated dreams.
I remember your unkempt hair. I remember taking the 5 up to your place and how the smoke from the east drifted across the freeway and it smelled like the fourth of July. How everything looked like it was being filtered through 8mm film. I remember your sun dress spinning on the record player, and how we moved at break neck speeds when we drank and stained the streets. I remember pressing my freshly stamped wrist up against yours so you could get into the club.
I remember first meeting you at that house party and telling you the story that my grandfather would recall, about his childhood in Ciudad de Carmen, when he would wake up before dawn and watch the poor ratas in their ramshackle boats fish young men's bodies out of the gulf because the statue of Santa Carmen at the bottom of the waters had found their love too strong, but the beating in their hearts drove them to look into her eyes before they drowned. How the women went mad without the men. I called you Santa Carmen and we had sex for the first time on my friend's hide-a-bed. I remember your father winking at me whenever he would catch me spacing out into the warmth of your pupils.
But he's passed now, and your sensibilities have been frayed by his death at the hands of the spirit of the American Dream. That's when you changed. That's when your head took over for your heart, when your heart turned to stone. That's what I mean when I sarcastically say you have a heart of gold. Maybe my heart took over for my brain. Maybe we're like a venn diagram being pulled apart slowly like some cruel magic trick.
You're talking to me, but I'm not really listening.
"I don't know." I say.
I make the lights in the windows of the skyscrapers explode and then it hits me, that feeling I sometimes get that time is slowing down to a halt, and the answers to every unanswered question I've ever had are right in front of me, and if I can just hold on to this feeling for a second longer, I could grasp them and finally Understand. But as soon as it comes, the feeling disappears, and time picks back up and I'm in the car with you again.
You told me the other day that you want to work on all of your little quirks. I hated you for that...
We're going to a dinner party. I hate dinner parties; the conversations scatter like the swirling wind and I'll patiently wait for my turn to speak. I'll conversate with your coworker's boyfriend while you and I share cold stares from room to room. The only thing to drink will be wine, which I also hate, but I won't be able to stand being sober, so I'll drink it anyway. It makes me sweat, which makes me self conscious. You'll immediately notice and try a little too hard to incorporate me into the conversations. "I don't know." I'll say.
Its quiet in the car now. My eyes are no longer blurred and it hits me how tense the air is. I cut the silence with an uncontrollable laughter.
"What's so funny?" You say.
I just keep laughing.
"Well what's so F*****G funny that you can't say it?"
"I don't know."
And the street lights pop, and the taillights pop, and the traffic lights pop.