Even Though I Don't Miss You Page 2

  I'm visualizing the letters that make up your name, but my brain has written it in Courier and the font size is too small and I feel irritated by it.

  At a bar, you touched my knee repeatedly.

  I happen to believe that people outside of myself can't incite feelings in me, that the feelings I am capable of feeling are the ones that I will feel when my body finds that it is the time to feel them, regardless of who happens to be near or against me at the time.

  The touching seemed to be accidental at first, a very slight touch with the back of your hand during dramatic gesturing during climactic points in our conversation. We were drinking whiskey.

  I said, "Happiness is my new favorite thing to talk about because it makes me feel horrible."

  We talked about the different ways happiness is portrayed in books and movies. Finding happiness, losing happiness, cultivating happiness.

  You said, "Happiness is so nice that it almost makes life worth living."

  My friend Megan was talking to your less attractive friend. She had started drinking before we went out so that she would have the courage to appear composed and confident in front of you, but ended up talking to your less attractive friend and looking a little sad and drunk.

  I attempted to make a non-pathetic and non-convoluted smile for Megan but a pathetic and convoluted one was all I could come up with. She didn't look at me and I thought maybe I shouldn't've smiled at all.

  You made constant eye contact as you talked to me and your eyes were both too close together and too close to my eyes, which are having trouble figuring out what to look at.

  Everything I said to you was so funny that I didn't want to stop talking to you and miss any of the funny things that might come out of me.

  It is something to consider, if we're making a list things to consider, that most relationships are mirrors of yourself, and that those who you choose to be around is largely dependant on what you want to see in yourself at that time. There wasn't even enough time to say all the funny things I was thinking of, so I began excitedly typing them into my phone.

  You said, "Who are you texting?"

  I said, "I'm not texting."

  You said, "I have the confidence to talk to you about happiness because I am drunk and because you gave me a nickname earlier today."

  I said, "What was the nickname?"

  You answered, or began to answer, but I couldn't hear the answer over the increasing volume of the bar noise.

  You said, "Do you have a lot of ex-boyfriends?"

  And I said, "No."

  You said, "Do you stalk them on the internet?"

  "No."

  You said, "Yes you do. Everyone does."

  I said, "I don't."

  You said, "You don't go on their Facebook pages and stalk them?"

  And I said, "I've been to their Facebook pages but not very often."

  You said, "Yes you do. Everyone does."

  And I said, "No, I don't. You're projecting."

  And you said, "I'll admit it. I stalk my ex-girlfriends on Facebook. Everyone does it. I'll admit I do it."

  I felt this compassion for you suddenly, which isn't something I feel a lot. I imagined you alone in your apartment, masturbating and trying to write an online dating profile based on the clues about yourself you think you've found on your ex-girlfriends' Facebook pages.

  I said, "I don't know. I don't think so."

  At the bar, I ordered another whiskey, even though I wanted beer, because I had told everybody that I was gluten-free and we had this whole conversation about how I couldn't drink beer. My stupid whiskey came and I stupid drank it.

  "I wrote a story," you said, in a tone that indicated to me that you thought you had revealed something intimate about yourself.

  If we were actors I think the camera would zoom in a little to appreciate the calculated tempo of my eyes as they shift from Point A (the top of your left shoulder) to Point B (your left eyebrow) to Point C (a hair on your chin) to Point D (a freckle on your cheek).

  Megan and I had been on her porch earlier, sharing nostalgia for when we were teenagers, for when we lived together and shared everything, yelled goodnight to each other from our rooms on opposite sides of the apartment, and fought about the chore chart. She said we would never have the same closeness again.

  On her porch I thought she was referring to our proximity, but I was beginning to think she meant something else.

  I said, "What is the story about?"

  It had been a few minutes since you touched my knee, and I wished that you would touch it, and you did touch it, and I felt silly for having wished it, and I wished you hadn't've touched it. You touched it again later and I felt silly again, but to a slightly lesser degree.

  Once when we were fighting I went around the apartment pretending to water the plants. When I was done I said, "I've watered all the plants no thanks to you." A few days later I remembered that I hadn't actually watered the plants, and I checked them and they were very dry. I was mad that you hadn't thought of watering the plants, even after the comment I had made a few days prior about you not watering them. So I pretended to water all the plants again and picked a fight with you about how I shouldn't even have to water the plants since they were mostly yours. A few days later I was mad about something else but I checked the plants again. The plants were looking pretty bad so I said, "The plants are dying, I guess I'll water them like always."

  I remember I had said, "Do you hate me?"

  And you had said, "Yes." Then you said, "I hate you."

  I drank two full glasses of water, one after the other, because my body couldn't cry while it was drinking water. To believe in evolution is to believe that these kinds of bodily responses have somehow supported the survival of our species.

  Before the do-you-hate-me-yes-I-hate-you, I felt like we were living some kind of Truman Show rip-off, in which I was an actor hired to make you believe certain things about your life, and you were Truman, except that you were cognizant the whole time of the fact that I was acting. But we kept living this way because neither of us wanted to talk openly about the situation for fear of what might happen if we were both aware that we were both aware that we were both aware.

  I thought I was done writing about you after I did a Find and Replace for your name in all my Word documents and replaced your name with forward-slash. After the Find and Replace, I felt like I was only one person again. It felt bad, like nobody else was me with me. You weren't taking part in my being anymore so I was only myself. I don't know how else to say it.

  It didn't turn out to be a very practical choice to do the shitty things I did to you. I didn't consider that I might grow into someone who could no longer rationalize treating someone so poorly. And writing poems isn't really the most efficient way of relieving guilt.

  I want to squint right now to help explain what I'm feeling but this poem can only ever be words.

  Please accept this poem as a formal cryptic nameless public half-apology. It means something to me to see the words written out, like I have a choice to believe them or not. So many hundreds of times I've woken up in the middle of the night with this mysterious bad feeling, and when I'm just about to give up trying to place why I feel bad, I think of what I did to you and my heart gets hot. I don't know if for you or for you-in-quotations, which would indicate that I have something more in mind than what is immediately apparent, which I don't really know what that would be, so probably you without quotations.

  Maybe it's condescending of me, and further damaging to you, to assume I had an impact on your wellbeing that warrants this kind of nighttime mania. I will add this to my giant list of shitty things I've done to you. In fact, I am prepared to add any number of things to my giant shitty list.

  Sometimes the sun is so elusive, like it knows it has a place in my heart. Is it pointless to compare you to the sun? Does it seem inappropriate to describe the sun as haunting?

  I wish you could see all the backspacing and rety
ping I've done to get here. Maybe things would be different if you knew about all the backspacing and retyping.

  Somewhere in the infinitely expanding universe there must be another living entity with a set of feelings that compares to the feelings I have, and I hope that whoever or whatever is experiencing those feelings also has the psychic inclination to write a book of poetry and send it to my home address for my own shallow, desperate consumption. I feel pretty optimistic about this happening, actually.

  I'm going to try not to hold you to any specific standards. You've asked me not to, so I'm going to try not to.

  I hated it when you would disregard another girl's feelings. I only wanted you to disregard my feelings.

  It seems like you're moving slightly away from me and it makes me afraid of the Laws of the Universe but I'm afraid to mention it because the phrase "Laws of the Universe" seems so 80's.

  You can't capture something that is casually walking away. A vehicle in motion can never reach its goal, unless the goal is to remain completely stationary, in which case there's no point in even getting there. Meaning movement is a ruse, which is a metaphor for life. Although I hope you're not looking for answers. I write for a blog about fairies and I've been brainstorming for four months about what I should post to your wall for your birthday.

  When I use an umbrella (an object I have a hard time associating with you in any way — is it that there was no rain when we were together?) I experience that umbrella as lacking the wash of you that contaminates much of my life. I have trouble even addressing the umbrella because I'm not certain I know where I stand with it.

  It probably seems like I've never read Catcher in the Rye, but I want to point out that I am desperately trying to convey that I've read it very recently.

  When I kissed myself on the hand I was kissing it in the way I used to, imagining my mouth was your mouth, and my hand your hand, that I was you kissing your own hand.

  I was trying to retain some kind of closeness with you, your mouth, and your hand.

  Out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw you but it was just the folds of my pillow. But you looked kind of hot.

  I think I must have some kind of thing for romance. Some kind of sick thing.

  I guess the mass of all things you love in the world is less than or equal to the combined weight of all the hearts you've mishandled. I guess that's something most people already know by the time they're my age.

  I don't know why I'm explaining this. Everybody has already done what I've done and thinks what I think.

  I think I'm at a point in my life.

  I said, "You look disappointed by something."

  You said, "You're not hurting anyone's feelings, Chelsea."

  Anyone with the loosest grasp of the theory of evolution should have known that I was bound to pick up the phone at this time each night and scroll through my contact list just to see your name float across the screen as some kind of concrete proof that you still exist in the world, as if that indicated that you were somehow taking part in this lonely internal struggle.

  Loosest grasp.

  I repeated for you a string of words that I had been told and I asked you to drive me to work. I cried in the car. It felt like I was crying in the car not because of the string of words that I had heard and repeated to you, which was an upsetting string of words, but because I had forgotten a piece of paperwork that I needed to bring with me to work. When I called my boss and explained the paperwork and explained why I was crying, he told me not to come to work and not to worry about the paperwork, and I cried for what felt like this massive desire to go to work and do paperwork. Instead, you took me to a thrift store and I bought Nascar-themed bed sheets while feeling generally okay (and feeling down on myself about feeling generally okay).

  At some point I started crying because I remembered something disgusting and horrible I had said years ago. I tried to think of the awful string of words as I cried about this, hoping that the crying would count for both things.

  The next day I didn't cry at all, though I almost cried when you singed some of my eyelashes off by playing with a lighter too close to my face. I felt sorry for you for singeing off my eyelashes. You must have felt so clumsy and ridiculous.

  I'm starting to feel a bit anxious over how high my heart rate must be because of the anxiety I have over how wound up I am over the panicky feeling I experienced a few seconds after I woke up. I usually only experience that kind of waking panic when something has happened that makes me feel startled when I remember it (after having been asleep not thinking of it), even though, intellectually, I understand that it was only some kind of random panicky feeling that I had experienced, and that most people probably experience things like that once in a while without throwing themselves into an anxiety feedback loop, which in itself is anxiety-inducing.

  Maybe I'm just late for work.

  Sometimes when I'm at work I think, "I work here," and try to imagine looking at myself in the mirror instead of doing any work.

  My manager once told me I reminded her of one of our customers. Then she asked someone on the other side of the room to do something that was part of my job while I stood there halfheartedly looking around for something to do.

  You said, "It seems like you're strategically planning your mental breakdown so it fucks over your manager at work."

  I said, "I'm just trying to fuck over anyone I can these days."

  The beautiful thing about life is that you can just hit CTRL Z whenever you say something you shouldn't've said.

  I usually wake up inspired to write the next great American novel and by midmorning I've settled on writing the next great American soup can copy.

  This is how you can enjoy the present while dreading the future, regretting the past, and not even honestly enjoying the present.

  I love my job because I get to work alone. I can cry as much as I want to.

  In the movie version of this poem you will be played by a revolving cast of similar-looking actors, causing viewers to feel confused about and unattached to your character. Any personal connection your character may have with the protagonist (played by me) will be shallow, minor, and fleeting.

  The last time you texted me, you addressed me as "Anise," so I think there must be some confusion about my phone number, or it got entered into a new phone incorrectly, or you don't have it anymore.

  I am watching a skull walk toward me and then pass me and then walk away from me, propelled forward by interior nonsense resembling sense. Now the skull is gone.

  I said something horrible and I can't take it back because it has been said already. It is history. For the rest of my life I'll be the kind of person who says the kind of thing that I said.

  Before I said it, I had been having a lot of trouble sleeping. I would stay up counting seconds in my head, trying to be as accurate as possible, trying to count sixty in just the time it took my digital clock to turn a minute.

  There is something about you that makes me want to have a bad day on purpose so I will have something to write about in my diary.

  Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you, I'm keeping a diary now.

  You would say, "That is so stupid, you're being irrational, don't do that," with your glass raised halfway to your mouth.

  It's possible that I am hearing something different than what you think that you are saying. It's possible, in a world where it isn't possible to confirm that we are seeing the same colors in the same way as one another, it is possible that certain breakdowns in communication are possible. It's possible, for example, that you are experiencing the air density differently than I am. It's possible that you are experiencing the word 'commitment' differently than I am. How could it surprise me, given how layered and complex the world is, and how our personal experiences interfere with our perception?

  There is something about you that makes me want to cry into the phone and possibly yell, and then use what you say to try to calm me down against you at another time, or gossip abo
ut it later behind your back.

  You lied on top of my back and I said, "What do you want?" and you didn't say anything and I said, "Answer me."

  You said, "I don't know. I'm just doing this."

  I felt bad for you. What I want and what I want are usually two different things.

  My hands hurt from how much I've typed about you in my life. Perhaps the muscles in my hands wouldn't be so strong if I hadn't had to type all these things about you. It makes one wonder, doesn't it? Doesn't it make one wonder? Doesn't it just fill you with wonder? Or doesn't it?

  I wonder how improbable is it that I should be drinking whiskey and feeling sorry for myself (in an obviously original way) tonight?

  How many millions of years of evolution did it take (I'm yelling this part! I'm angry!) for humanity to arrive at a point where I might aimlessly type symbols into a machine that I can't begin to understand, hoping to find clarity while feeling definitively drunk?