Friday Without a Drink. Memory Lane. My Obsession. Rophie.

…Odd to be home on a Friday night. A Saturday night.
How long has it been since I stood in a bar?
Since I hovered over a vodka tonic.
Saw my face behind bottles in the mirror.

I fill the bottom of a bowl with olive oil. Sprinkle paprika. Dip pieces of bread.

A simple pleasure, the way I spend some part of the evening.

…Watching Arsenic and Old Lace in the afternoon. Carey Grant, Mortimer Brewster. I played that part in HS, our rez production, not bad save the performances, and those not even that bad, BS bloodying my nose when he tied me to the chair, me holding the phone a good foot from my head in accidentally exaggerated effort not to smear my makeup, BB giving me hickeys at the cast party at my house.

It makes me get out the Year Book. Look at people’s faces. My own face.
15 years ago.
None of them, none of us, strangers.

I didn’t think life was simple then. But I know it was simpler.

And I get my phone list, want to call people I used to know. JC, BS, SM, PR.
Young faced, there in the Year Book.
Sort of ready for our marriages, our divorces, our children.

I graduated with 30.
This was Montana, small town.

I was a virgin and that didn’t make me innocent but I was pretty much innocent just the same; and those friends of mine, most of them weren’t, but they were only a little less innocent than I was.

We thought we’d known each other forever.
We thought the world was small.
We thought that what was out in the world beyond what we knew would prove to be magical.

Thinking like that, it got some of us in trouble. Depending on what you think trouble is.

…In truth, most of those thirty didn’t leave. Maybe five of us.
That’s the rez, that’s how it typically is.

…I’ve got the list out, but I don’t call anybody.
I could. I could say, Hey, JC, you remember?
Hey, BS, you remember.

Hey, let’s time trip, you wanna?

…I can see them in their costumes.

I can hear them say their lines.

We always look back. We, almost all of us, say: those were the days.
And someday, not even that long from now, I’ll be talking about this time now like that.

And I’ll be digging out lists, thinking to get back in touch with you.
And whoever it is the future me will think the present me is, I’ll be yearning to get in touch with him too.

…My obsessive nature.
Convalescing in workout pants. They have a string you can tie and an elastic band so you don’t have to.

Somehow, this elastic band becomes twisted. I follow it with my finger.
I twist it.
I turn it.
I want it to be all uniform, all one way, but when I maneuver one half to the same plane as the other I find the other shifts away.

Finally I give up. It shouldn’t matter.

Then I can feel it on my hips, against my abdomen.

I try to relax. Try to ignore it.

No. I go back at it, pushing my fingers in the little holes where the string comes out. Twisting, turning. Finally, it’s the scissors, me making bigger holes into which I can insert more fingers.

Nothing works.

These workout pants betraying me.

And eventually, they’re gutted, they’re rendered dead, like a patient in an ill-performed and sadly unnecessary operation, the doctor was not a madman, but he shouldn’t have been holding the scalpel. Look at the mess he’s made.

…Sort of missing the bar, the bars. I hear from friends who are making those journeys. Who are fortifying for them.

Girls dressing up, sipping wine, telling me the names of places they may go.

I sit over the corpse of my workout pants, wondering: when will I go out again?

…And I get to thinking about what it is that we search for.

We think we’re looking for love, but that’s not true. Or maybe it is true and it is our vision of love that is false.

We’re looking for somebody to hold our hands when it is dark.

To watch our backs amongst enemies. This is what we call care.

To witness the things we witness, as if they aren’t real if we see them alone. This is what we call sharing.

Love. We think we’re looking for it. Does anybody real go out just to get laid anymore?

I suppose.

…And I think about how I build walls, put up barbwire, trick myself to keep a girl from getting very far inside of me, very close to me, although consciously this is precisely what I want, a woman close.

The traps I build.
The shifting sand and fall away floor.

Those that have come across my heart did so by accident. There was no map. There was only some stumbling journey. I didn’t recognize her progress until it was too late to stop, and how sweet a moment that is.

Can that accident be counted on to happen again?

I imagine a different kind of rophie, a thing a woman can slip into your drink that will tear down all the fuckups of your childhood or your gender or your bloodline or whatever it is that keeps you suddenly dodging, against your will, her advances; that will still you, immediately and fully surrender you.