Psychosomatic.

--What is it that brings me awake at five in the morning?
These cough medicine asleep nights long after the cough is gone.
That and other addictions.

Here I am with the morning stars, feeling rather rested just the same.
Nothing grim in this day to follow, unless you consider Lost Highway grim.
Or showing it to forty students grim.
Some of them still nearly newborn into this un-innocent world.
These jobs we give ourselves, bringing darkness, bringing light.

--And Valentine’s Day approaches.
A day for amateurs, really.
The way a real jokester leaves April 1st alone.

Still, one thinks of love. If candy hearts makes you think of love. If red balloons makes you think of love. If people talking about love makes you think of love.

--True story, and it has nothing to do with love:
The first time I thought I was in real love, the girl in question, we’ll call her Megan because that was her name, she went on a trip.

This was college and what made me start to use the word love was that we’d fucked. And for me, well, that was brand new and pretty exciting.

I was a boy.
Nothing new for her, except for maybe the quickness of it all.

Before me, she’d had a live-in boyfriend.
She was an actress and she performed a monologue about the day she kicked him out of her apartment.

So that spring we ate taffy and had sex and I was always listening to They Might Be Giants and taking long runs and thinking about her.

How young was I? I slept in her bed with he night after night with my pants on.

The way I used the word love, it was like this: I love you.
What she said, it was: Does it bother you that I can’t say that?

You can see how wise she was. She probably knew that I didn’t know what I was talking about, either.
That I was referencing a new addiction.
That I was saying want so much I can mistake it for need but will call it love.

And of course, she was wise enough to see the limits of us. That’s she never even feel that.

It only took her a few months to get tired of a boy that acted his age.
Of a lover who knew nothing about physical loving.
The arts of the body.

She went on a trip, and this is close to the part where I have to remind you it is a true story. She went to LA, and the night before, we were making caramel corn. The way we did this, we went to the grocery store and we bought caramels and popcorn. She popped the popcorn, I melted the caramel’s in a green tupperware bowl in her microwave.

I was about to be 19.
And that was a long time ago.
And yes, I can still see that bowl. Yes, it was green.

When the caramels came out of the microwave, I dipped my finger in the goo they had become. I suppose that the high of the mid spring season did that to me. The high of being in the company of the first girl I fucked did that to me.

I can remember how her apartment smelled. I can remember how her hair smelled.

That night, I just didn’t think very well.
I just thought: Wow. That looks good, all that melted caramel.

And stuck my finger in.

That burns. And you can’t get the burning melted caramel off.
You dance around screaming.

(You were always making a fool of yourself before this girl. Like the time you took her to your father’s house in the country because he was away and you leaned against the electric fence, thinking he’d turned it off, and it shot you forward, flinging her things in the air, you screaming like a girl, and the real unscreaming girl, not amused, but faintly disgusted, watching you kneel on the lawn and try to gather yourself).

You scrape the burning caramel off with a red washrag. It was a long time ago, but I can see that rag.

And the blister that followed.

So I was a kid with a blister and she was in LA for a week and I right away wrote her a letter. How sentimental was I? Or at least: how sentimental did I want to appear?

I wrote that it hurt my blister when I typed certain letters.
Hyunjm.
The letters that went with that finger. But that it was a good pain. Because it reminded me of the night we spent before she left. A good blister because I had gotten it in her company.

I don’t know how that struck her. She brought me back a Simpson’s t-shirt.

And now we’re very close to the part that necessitates me telling you that this is a true story.

This was mid spring and before early summer, she’d walk, like a good girl, like a wise girl. Not for the reasons they’d later walk, because I’d tell them to, my passive aggressive lunges for freedom.

(L Cohen writes:
I wanted so much, to have nothing to touch
I’ve always been greedy that way.)

She walked I suppose because she was bored of a boy.
And me, well, of course I thought my heart was broken.

What happened to my finger though, over the course of the second night that followed her walking, it regrew that blister. I woke up and there was a swollen pouch, and approximation of my caramel burn, on the tip of that finger.

This new blister, it didn’t hurt. Didn’t feel like a burn. But there it was, just the same, this risen skin gone clear.

--So Valentine’s Day approaches, and I think on this morning of two blisters nearly fourteen years old, the first girl I meant to fall in love with.

If I could meet that me, I’d want to embrace him, like a father embracing a son, I suppose. I’d want him to see how easy the world around him was. I envy They Might Be Giants. Those long jogs. Easy days on the campus. The world, it was open to him. He was young and un-creased. There was a certain beauty to his innocence.

He fretted so much over so little.

I’d want to save him that fretting.

And I know, I know.

Fourteen years from now, when I’m telling stories about the me that is now present, but will then be past, I’ll think the same thing.

I’ll see him in a haze of innocence, all seem in an open world, fretting unnecessarily.

I’ll miss him.

And so through memory we birth and re-birth ourselves, never quite letting it catch up to the moment.

The grass is always greener in the mind’s eyes, and there is no journey so impossible to re-take.