bagheera78
An excerpt from the unwritten journals of 2004.
I took a cab home from the Los Angeles International airport to find the apartment empty and the new peach sheets on the bed, mussed up and worn, slept in but as though someone had left in a hurry, the comforter piled high in a heap in the center of the bed and the wicker Ikea lamp on in the corner of the room.
I thought something tragic had happened. His cell phone was sitting on the marble bar in the living room, dead to the world. I had waited at the airport for hours announcing his name, scanning the crowd for his face.
When he walked through the door he looked at me dully, as though I’d just come back from the supermarket and not from Bombay. I asked where he'd been and he said he'd gone to drop L off at the airport. I thought she'd left the previous day, my friend, staying with him in our apartment because I couldn't be back in time. He said they'd looked for me at the terminal, that she wanted to see me. I should have seen his lies then, and hers. And hers.
She left me a book about a woman whose best friend has an affair with her husband. And still I didn't see it. So great was my trust and so deep my faith in feminine bonds and the lure of unconditional friendship.
That was the only year I didn't keep a journal, so now my memories of that time are confined to my scant remembrances. Joni Mitchell. A phone call to the university psychiatrist. Spinoza, my needy tabby. Or was that the summer before?
I didn't keep a journal, as if my memory wasn't worth recording. It was the only time in all my life that I tried to harder to forget than to remember. I gave myself away in tiny ebbs and flows, a beach eroding at night, lonely fishermen waiting for the big one.
There was nothing to remember in those days except the hapless longing for love in all the wrong places. Los Angeles corrupted him, turned him cold and ambitious and in me he saw indolence and mundanity. In me he saw the dirty dishes and the parking tickets and all the little things he wanted to transcend, all the things that kept him grounded. And in trying to tie him to the earth so he wouldn't fly away I lost myself, I forgot who I was or why I had come to this alien seasonless city where I had no friends and the ones I had would betray me like flies abandoning fruitcake for rubber tires. And I stopped keeping a journal and I stopped remembering.
And in the erosive ebbs and flows I disappeared into the inky ocean where the reflections of stars are like the specters of the fireflies that stopped coming around on warm summer nights.
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I took a cab home from the Los Angeles International airport to find the apartment empty and the new peach sheets on the bed, mussed up and worn, slept in but as though someone had left in a hurry, the comforter piled high in a heap in the center of the bed and the wicker Ikea lamp on in the corner of the room.
I thought something tragic had happened. His cell phone was sitting on the marble bar in the living room, dead to the world. I had waited at the airport for hours announcing his name, scanning the crowd for his face.
When he walked through the door he looked at me dully, as though I’d just come back from the supermarket and not from Bombay. I asked where he'd been and he said he'd gone to drop L off at the airport. I thought she'd left the previous day, my friend, staying with him in our apartment because I couldn't be back in time. He said they'd looked for me at the terminal, that she wanted to see me. I should have seen his lies then, and hers. And hers.
She left me a book about a woman whose best friend has an affair with her husband. And still I didn't see it. So great was my trust and so deep my faith in feminine bonds and the lure of unconditional friendship.
That was the only year I didn't keep a journal, so now my memories of that time are confined to my scant remembrances. Joni Mitchell. A phone call to the university psychiatrist. Spinoza, my needy tabby. Or was that the summer before?
I didn't keep a journal, as if my memory wasn't worth recording. It was the only time in all my life that I tried to harder to forget than to remember. I gave myself away in tiny ebbs and flows, a beach eroding at night, lonely fishermen waiting for the big one.
There was nothing to remember in those days except the hapless longing for love in all the wrong places. Los Angeles corrupted him, turned him cold and ambitious and in me he saw indolence and mundanity. In me he saw the dirty dishes and the parking tickets and all the little things he wanted to transcend, all the things that kept him grounded. And in trying to tie him to the earth so he wouldn't fly away I lost myself, I forgot who I was or why I had come to this alien seasonless city where I had no friends and the ones I had would betray me like flies abandoning fruitcake for rubber tires. And I stopped keeping a journal and I stopped remembering.
And in the erosive ebbs and flows I disappeared into the inky ocean where the reflections of stars are like the specters of the fireflies that stopped coming around on warm summer nights.
Poll Rate this entry