NAMELESS PRONOUNS

           She used to sit underneath trees agreeing with everything she read. Riding bikes out there to read in the heat and feel alone. To revel and role in aloneness, to feel apart. Winding into the grass under the trees like something trying to de-metamorphize, like something rejecting a gift because it's a gift. Like something organic.

            She used to stare at him chalkily, brittle, like the idea in her head created a version of him that would break and die as it faded from her consciousness. We suppose that's what he was for.

            She used to pry his eye-lids open with her fingers and stare into them. What she saw we cannot say.

            Sometimes she asked him if she could rip off his scabs. He said yes. He thinks he knows what it's like to truly feel alone.

.     .     .

            When he sleeps he rarely dreams and seems to fear his dreams. Sometimes he allows himself believe that his life is a dream. Allows himself to forget something, or pretend to forget something.

            His idea of her, after so long, is mainly conceptual. She rolls in and out of form, from memory to fantasy, from sycophantic love to bitter disdain around his brain. Sometimes gaining a physical weight, interfering with his balance. When he thinks of her now his vision becomes wobbly and objects seem to reject their boundaries, wanting instead to float freely and absorb. Not to be contained by what he believed, by physical law.

            She does still exist though, he thinks. Walking and talking and doing. Why can't he imagine what she might actually be doing? Did he even know her? He has a hard time even picturing her face, the same problem he had with his mother, and he feels guilty.

            He feels abandoned.

.     .     .

            She does too.

            He didn't fight--not really--but struggled impotently against himself and against something we all knew was inevitable. She imagined him bundled up shivering uncontrollably, teeth clattering for attention like a waiter dropping dishes.

            Sometimes, suddenly, she just remembers things. These memories are like pockets of gas that get trapped in the sediment and muck at the bottom of old swamps. Sometimes they are released and disturb the swamp's otherwise serene surface. Sometimes these disturbances ripple.

            He used to close his eyes and feel her as if trying to read her, as if trying to gain some ancient tactile understanding of her being. He could move so quickly from there back to the moment, that she distrusted his smile. Sometimes it seemed to her like the barring of teeth, a wolfish snarl.

            She was wary, guarded. Often scathing and maybe nasty. Fierce, loyal to her kind but small and ultimately scared. Yet she had a lot and was generous with it. He had never felt so filled as he did with her and she knew it and she tried to feel it too but couldn't. Or still does. Or never did, we don't know.

            She gives and doesn't need gifts. Gifts aren't gifts to her as oranges aren't gifts to the orange tree.

.     .     .

            Her eyes brown and his blue, they often stared at each other. But what did they see? He used her, we felt, as a prop, something to adorn him, to impress his own feelings about himself. Like a Barbie he could fuck--but that isn't quite fair. He thought about that aspect of their relationship and thoroughly rejected it as paranoid hogwash. Paranoid? He believed that paranoia was the practice of giving too much weight to innocuous takings of place, witnessing a random occurrence and then believing that it somehow effects (or is effected by) your life. But alas he knew not how to appropriately proportion his care. He found himself asking questions like, "do things not matter?", and connecting altogether too much with song lyrics. So he became anxious about how much attention, exactly, something deserved. How can one know, in the moment, how important something really is? He became paranoid about becoming paranoid in some fucked up Greek tragedy of a self-imposed horror. And he thought about that. And then he thought about labyrinths.           

.     .     .

            She used to lay in the exciting yet disorienting darkness of a new bed, her face illuminated by her telephone screen. Her soft brown eyes turned graphite and distant in the LED light, reminiscent of gargoyles. Her thumbs tapping glass without any discernible rhythm. Creating words that were both true and weren't. She did love him, she even said it out loud, and maybe someday somehow it would make sense but she doubted it. The person next to her would roll over and she'd click off the screen.

            He used to think of her like as a fox and loved her, how is so often the case, for the very qualities that caused him such trouble. He loved paradoxes, studied them, and was convinced they didn't exist. Yet he found that it was impossible to believe nothing, for even that, frustratingly, qualifies as belief. He tried to wallow endlessly in the arena of opinion, but was ousted just as endlessly. He often has full conversations with her in his head, planning a biting or acidic remark for every possible chance meeting. He is ashamed.

.     .     .

            She lived wild under the tree, forgetting and remembering, containing and releasing like only nature can. A fox, a part of the earth. Believing that what she reads is true and that what she feels is right. Acting in accordance with natural law.

           The first night, after weeks of coy courtship, that their attraction actualized, she had been wearing a mask with pointy ears. Perhaps if he hadn't been so preoccupied with paranoia, this might have struck him as foreboding. For him, reality and fiction seemed to tip into each other and he had a tendency to think metaphorically, to think of himself as a character. So he tried to ignore the majority of his misgivings, for its no fun for the main character to know he's in a story.

           She brushes off cat-calls and seems to enjoy a certain level of objectification, which is uncomfortable for everybody. She's a feminist and maybe he's not politically correct, but he's sensitive, actually too much so. When she asked him to slap her (in the face!) he smiled despite himself and played along. He always plays along. Sometimes so well that his fiction can't be distinguished his reality. That's his problem though, he doesn't know stories from life, words from truth. 

            She told him that her parents weren't feeling people like they were, that her parents rarely spoke. But what good is speaking without understanding? She's tough; she thinks she's had to be. Life, it seems, is inherently difficult. She knows herself and her opinions with such ferocity that they appear contrived. The ferocity at least does. The fox is cunning and can invariably escape, but to where and to what we must ask.

            He seems to remember being a wolf once, enjoying the company of proven few and daring to adventure. But now, admittedly, he feels collared and dependent. Unsure. Licking with self-hatred. He remembers the way they used to lay, fox and hound, equal and opposite reactions. Asymptotic lines. He remembers how he used to slap her ass because he felt like it was expected to further the narrative and she smiled like it was an expected result. She appeased him and indulged him because it was fun; she liked to make him feel good.

           As much as he might like to think that she stored emotions inside him just so she could strip them away and leave him a simple shelf, an empty bookcase, that just wasn't true. It hurts her just as much as it hurts him, why can't he see that? Why can't they understand that their reactions, although opposing, are fundamentally the same? Natural? Based on the same inherent principles and acted out for the same authentic reasons? Combustion always releases both carbon and oxygen.

.     .     .

            He fucks because he can and supposes he wants to but sometimes feels compelled to. It makes him feel good to make other people feel good. Or at least it did. Recently, he found himself asking whether or not the sex he was having, right at that very moment, was any good. And then he immediately thought that that thought should be written down. He thought it would be appropriate for his character to cry, but waited until he was in the car or the shower.

            Sex for her was a distraction and a style and was therefore supremely important. They worked well together. Hiding themselves in different ways through the same act. Finding themselves in each other. Sometimes she forgot he was there. Sometimes he forgot he was there. This is when they were happiest.

            He liked it when she was big spoon. In the dark warmth, after hours of silent contact, with closed eyes and steady breath, she would clasp her hands around his penis as if claiming it but also protecting it. Him. Sometimes they would fall asleep like that.

            If he were a prescient man he may have viewed the bite marks she left on his chest and shoulders from a different perspective. But he refuses to believe that he's merely a tale.

            Can you love someone that you hate? Can you hate someone without loving them? Mutual exclusivity does not exist in his mind and so he tip toes. She sees things starkly and with divisions like an organized planner and so she stomps. The same note on different octaves, capable of both harmony and discord. He thinks that chemicals and music and narratives are all the same and the only thing that he knows is that he misses her.

           .     .     .

             Although she is long gone and this story is long over, he still pours over these pages as if they're evidence of her existence. Proof that he's more than a character.