Waffles and guns

You’re nine years old, wandering around in a mostly closed mall with a cousin, three years ahead of you. This was before they started closing off the bits of the mall with the closed shops; before all the new security, maybe before all the crime, who knows, you were young, you accepted the world as it was. In any case, you’re with your older cousin, and you discuss whether to get a soda or not; it’ll be a while yet before your grown-ups reappear, and you’ve got some coins in your pocket- thick coins without holes in them, old coins. The only bit of the mall still alive is the grocery shop. (This means it’s not late, even though it feels that way- back then, a shop staying open after seven in the evening was unheard of.) You suggest going in there to further consider the purchase of a soda. But your cousin says no, we can’t do that. She points to the plastic bag she’s carrying, you can’t remember what she carried in it. Look, she says. Your attention is supposed to be on the logo printed on the bag; it’s the same as the one above the entrance to the grocery shop. That’s why we can’t go in there, your cousin says, she’s not even patronising. You can’t go in the grocery shop because she has a bag from there already and this is, this is wrong.

You’re nine years old, and you start to understand about the rules that aren’t written down anywhere and no one will tell you about.

This cousin of yours, she was the closest thing you had to a hero. The last time she called, you didn’t even answer, the last time she invited you to spend time, you rejected, because you had other things to do- or maybe you didn’t. She’s not your hero anymore. A couple of years ago she married, before that she traded education for a job as a maid, and before that she had a violent boyfriend. But when you were seven, she taught you about Michael Jackson and hairspray. When you were ten, she told you Kurt Cobain was dead, and when you asked who that was, why she had the name written on the back of her hand, she played Nevermind to you, from one end of summer to the other. You built a treehouse together and used it to store both the romance magazines you didn’t want your fathers to see, and the magazines you didn’t want your fathers to know you had stolen from them.

You’ll remember that summer, reading strange words about skin and looking at strange skin pictures, you’ll remember it as though it was briefer than the time you sat waiting at a café table somewhere on the Canary Islands, covering for your fourteen year-old cousin who was meeting a man somewhere else. (She was sorry about the t-shirt, it had widened when he put his head under it.)

On the way home that night, your cousin and the blonde friend spoke in English, because it was cool, they smoked secret cigarettes while you paced two steps behind. You felt angry and alone, and you frowned at them when they laughed over brightly coloured drinks offered to them by other men, and you didn’t know that it wouldn’t be very long before you would discover these rules, too, the rules that one night got your cousin cornered in a deserted street by two very large men. That summer, after the birthdays, your cousin acquired a new wardrobe of tight fabric and a straps, and you didn’t see one another so much anymore. You were on your own when you discovered these rules.

The first time you broke one of the old rules, the written rules, you were a couple of years older and running away from home. You think it was the longest summer in your life. It was, as you recall, the last summer you would say no to the beer bottles offered to you outside of festival tents. The first time you’d watch a sunrise sharing a thermo-cup of tea with someone who enticed you more than the people you knew in school; the first time you would go through several days without sleep. You slept in a man’s bed, but didn’t anticipate it when he tried to kiss you. (You hadn’t been kissed before.) When you got home, you bought new clothes, considered yourself in a mirror, and watched Fight Club because someone had made you think you should. You tucked away your new secrets in a diary, together with reports on changes in appearance and a long-lasting, ever present, goodbye to the old rules.

The last time you saw your old classmates, at the graduation party by the beach, you had to decide who to sit with; the ones who thought you were one of them for lack of choice, or the ones who said you were one of them because you were cool. This girl with a lazy eye generously offered you beer, and you said yes. Later in the evening she bit your thigh and kissed another girl; you laughed as much as they did, and for a moment you belonged, and you knew how the world worked. She taught you how to smoke your first cigarette, and later on you made someone older buy you your first Lucky Strikes. (You would learn to get creative in order to convince shop clerks you were old enough for your bad habits. Once, you’d develop a whole fake identity as a psychology student.)

Your old treehouse was torn down, years ago. You don’t know what happened to the pictures, the magazines, the flashlight mounted on the wall. Your lip is pierced; it was raining that day, and your friend had a needle driven through her tongue, and you shrugged and thought about Michael Jackson and hairspray. Most of the sunrises are spent in solitude. Over the years, you have had many homes; full ashtrays, brightly coloured drinks. If anyone asks, you’ll boldly state that you make the rules now, but you don’t eat in front of people you don’t know very well, and you like to avoid conversation about wars and the world, because you’ve found it so difficult to believe in anything.

You’re still not sure you understand about your cousin’s plastic bag and the grocery shop and the myriad of rules people make up, skipping over the cracks in the paved streets, chasing the four-leaf clover; but you don’t frown so much anymore. You wait until you understand. Summer is just around the corner. You’re not nine years old; you’re just old enough to know you don’t know everything yet.

We’re in the rooms where women come and go and the radio announces, crackled voice of authority, that we’re in a montage scene, a fade-out, a blur. I had forgotten how, many years ago, I sang this song to someone, in a dark room, in a telephone that wasn’t mine. How this song, and that gesture, was one step on the way to finding another: and we were young, and we believed in forevers, and we believed that we would go against the world, together. We did. So many years of talking shit about one another’s love lifes and finding union in anger and misery. Fade-out. Cut.

In the rooms where people wait and wait. Music, music is never the plot, we know this. But it sneaks up on you from previous paragraphs; a cheap storytelling technique, nearly a plot device. Sneaks up on you:

In the rooms where people avoid one another’s glances, the music which tells a story of your past unfolds itself, and you don’t get a warning, and you think if this was visual media you would be unaffected and the effects would merely be there for your audience’s sake, but you are your audience, and you are watching yourself, in the light of the songs that were with you when you learned how to dream.

You wish, even if briefly, that you were less familiar with the storyteller’s tricks and intentions.

1
(Hello) There’s someone I’d like you to meet. X does your job and does it better than you. X is well liked and we like X more than you. You may have expected us to be able to read minds, but allow us to demonstrate we obviously can’t: Mr X is on the cover of the metaphoric Time Magazine, love, tell us - do you mind?

2
A false memory is a memory of an event that did not happen or is a distortion of an event that did occur as determined by externally corroborated facts.

“Therapists who adopt a suggestive approach when the patient tries to recall memories, are at risk of creating false memories whose content is related to the suggestion used. This is particularly true of situations in which the therapist is trying to account for a patient’s symptoms in terms, for instance, of a possible trauma in their past.”

3
I’ve seen it before, he says. Yes, I’ve seen it before too. Frown, scepticism in the corner of his mouth. I made decisions last time, I don’t say. My new year’s resolution? It’s Don’t do stupid shit. I don’t say this either. Don’t fucking underestimate my intelligence, I don’t say. Just be cool with him for a while, he says.

I promise I’m nowhere near uncool, I say. You’re right, I don’t say. I was blind until you brought it up and now I don’t know who to be angry with, I don’t say. Are you overestimating me, I don’t ask.

I used to dream, I don’t say. I woke at 3:04 am as faces blended with each other and I wanted to scream. I don’t want to say much at all. Don’t do stupid shit.

1
Of course I don’t mind. Of course it’s fine. Of course, I’m not going to have you digging through your most polite ways to say I’m second best.

2
But I don’t know if this did not happen. I don’t know if this is a distortion. I know shitty and I know sleepless. I know no suggestive therapist. I know any number of suggestive news stories, everyday entertainment, noble causes. The suggestion is written in concrete if you decide to look at it that way. I don’t know if this is a distortion. Fuck you.

3
It all comes down to distance and dreams. I’ll leave it at that, hun, but I need a few promises: Do not tie my name to the virtues you need the most. Do not, in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence, view me as the saviour of any kind of heart. Don’t expect me to have a heart at your disposal. Don’t be drawn to me for my principles and then expect to be the exception. I don’t make exceptions. And know this: I know about blindness. It’s all distance and dreams.

It is my decision to share my triumph with you. I did not know it when I first took your old dog tags from the tobacco box they’d been stored in. No, I could not have explained why i did that, beyond the obvious: mortification at having lost the first relic, the mourner’s need to obtain another.

The past days, they’ve highlighted all those things in myself which encourage self loathing: not because of the qualities by themselves, but because of my awareness of them, my frustration with them, and the absence of any effort to rid myself of them. I have no concept of time. I willingly allow fiction to devour me as soon as it appears the alternative comes with sharper teeth. I panic easily. I spend the time thinking of possible escape routes, rather than the task at hand. A pathetic domino effect: I break any other appointment I may have had. I know how to be thorough in my messes.

But - to fill in the circle back to my first paragraph - I finished. I have not shown it yet, have not even prepared my work for its evaluation, but it has been finished. I fidget with the cold metal chain around my neck, and suggest to myself the idea that I did it for you. That I do it for you.

And I am lying. My choices are not made in your name, but in mine. This has been and will be the truth; I would have liked to say I do this for you. I, however, take pride in my thickheaded behaviour; It is a victory, more so than a loss, that, ultimately, I am only ever my own agent.

Yet, I reasoned you would be able to appreciate the gesture. It is winter. It feels like the very same incessant winter since they buried you. I have a small victory in my pocket, and I have learned to share it with you.

The heat sinks into cobblestones and stretches of pavement, clouds over, dusts down, blends with the rotting vegetables changing hands in the street, clouded over, dusted down by the sea.

They call it the city of poets now, on envelope fronts and newspaper stamps. Poets fled this town, I was taught. Poets were imprisoned, their abilities questioned, forgotten about, hushed down. This I was taught, I know, and I watch the large vehicles float by, the faces of these poets smeared out in large print, their names calligraphed and golden.

Sometimes he would come, when she was still much younger than he was, to read to them. He knew about stories. He carried books. This I was told. Sometimes he would try to teach them the words. He chose the words which never had reason to flee, ones never clouded over, dusted down.

“I was creative too.” Shifting feet, dry paintbrushes on canvas landscapes. “Until I laid off the cocaine, y’know.” I know about stories. These I am told.

One lighter patiently changing hands, collecting brief touches, carrying conversations. Future is seeping in, under the clouds, under the dust. We exchange words, these alternate futures and I. The one adjusts her face in a mirror, the second alters her intonation at a telephone. I, the third, the fourth, the fifteenth, find myself speaking their language - considering, at length, whether to be ashamed of this practise, of borrowing a tongue I rid myself of as soon as I knew how to. There is safety in abandoned houses. There is pride in the unchanging. This I was taught.

“How did Noah build all the cages”, the one says, “to keep all the animals in?”

You grow older.

You learn that the puzzle pieces to make a person aren’t as many as you thought back when you first opened the box. You come to recognise traits in the new people you meet; each one tearing another bit out of the posters of past heroes in your heart. You name a tone of voice after the first to use it; you refer to the particular twist of a smile by the name of he who first showed it to you. Scents become places; the sounds translate to years. You cry - because you, too, are built out of pieces duplicated and found in other people’s boxes, because one of those pieces is imprinted with the childhood ideas of snowflakes.

You will have no part in this conversation. You feel justified in that this eager voice, this oddly improper laugh, is a puzzle you solved once already, under a different name, in a different street. You consider the ease with which you lapse back into melancholy; you are inspired to smile as you close your eyes and face the April sun.

You remember, with a bit of an effort, that the snow, once it’s fallen, turns out yellowed and filthy.

“When you start writing your novels, I have quite the life story to tell you.”

In the shop; we’re quiet and aimless; I suppose we needed some groceries but neither of us keep lists. It doesn’t work that way. Maybe this thing will cheer someone up - or that one - maybe we should learn to talk to each other beyond what can be said after all the whisky, beyond the brief exchange of jokes in the car. Maybe I need to learn about the talking: The words don’t come easy. My mouth is shut tight.

“I’ll hang up now. I know it’s not easy to talk, for either of us.”

A thousand insufficiencies nailed to my voice. Was that the only thing she said to me that corresponded with my reality, and not just hers? Countless more things were said to the contrary; statements to make you twist and struggle and turn; and run, run, run. Her daughter asks if I will help carry the coffin. I say yes, if that’s what you want. I didn’t, four years ago. I was drunk and spent days with another drunk man; the talk came easier over that café table than it ever has between anyone in this house, in this town. He stops by the counter and asks if I am okay with this one rather than that one.

“It tastes a little less like nothing”, he says.

And I am lost in the outdated November. I nod with my mouth full of nothing. I never got the story she intended, but there’s enough of them still; Of course, I’ll help carry the coffin.

“Why do you do that for?”, asked the ponytail boy.
“Don’t you know?”, said the prettiest girl in the world. She had just opened a new pack of marlboro’s. The first thing she did was to remove one of the cigarettes and put it back in, but with the filter down. “It’s for luck!”
“You have to have a lucky cigarette”, the other girl agreed.
“That’s silly”, said the ponytail boy.
“That’s fantastic”, I said.

And, at that particular café table, three years ago, luck seemed to matter a lot. There was snow, and borrowed gloves. The prettiest girl and I listened to Ben Folds and ran around in the studios at night, being far younger than I can remember having been ever before. Luck was real and solid.

So why, today, does it only ever comes into play when ordering airplane tickets?

Today I saw a yellow dinosaur in a tree. Then, I received a phone call from 2002.
Overall, I like the world better when I leave my glasses at home.