Some hearts are like dark bedrooms, all greyscale and silence. Hers was a canopy bed with parabolic curtains on every post. The bed is soft. When you lay down you sink into it, deeper, deeper. You can stare up from that bed and see nothing but a blank ceiling. The ceiling is darker here than the rest of the room, an artist’s trick to focus one’s attention to the walls. But here, there, and other places are her words written in pencil. It’s impossible to see them without searching for them, but she knows where they are and what they say. They’re the things she wants to say but cannot, not to anyone around her. But they’re special, so special to her that she saves them just in case. For what, she does not know.
On the right is the dresser and it’s mirror reflecting the room beyond the room. Inside are her clothes stacked in neat, orderly piles so that she always knows where everything is. Her hiding spaces are here, too. Her vibrator, a sheathe of photographs, the one thin journal she couldn’t bring herself to destroy when she felt she had to destroy the rest.
In the closet are her dresses. Some she has worn many times but stopped, others she still wears and a few she has only worn once. At the feet of the dresses are boxes of shoes. There are five; a good pair of tennis shoes, black pumps, a pair of black flats, white ankle strap sandles and a set of red heels. Above the dresses on the shelf, also in it’s box, is a pair of thigh-highs. These were worn once. She had wanted to feel sexy.
To the left of the bed, at the head, is a nightstand with a lamp. It’s a tiffany, her grandmothers. She likes to read at night by it’s light. There’s a glass of water too, a quarter full, just in case.
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They were in a car accident. They were arguing about the radio and it grew heated and he was looking at her instead of the road. He missed turn in the road and he lost control. The car rolled, bounced, rolled again, ended on it’s hood. It lurched, stopped. The underside smoked and began to burn, the flames reaching towards the sky. He opened his door, rolled out. His vision was a haze and he had a terrible, terrible headache. He didn’t know where he was. He looked around him, his vision a blurry dreamscape. He remembered what had happened. He turned to the car and watched. He saw her inside hanging upside down by her seatbelt. He saw the flames above the car and he sat down. All he felt was an ache in his head and nothing.
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She dreamed she was in a dark field full of grass. The moon was a sliver. She looked around her. In the distance were the shadows of trees. Nearby was a large object towering above the trees. She couldn’t make out. She walked closer and saw that it was a head, his head, laying halfway on it’s side. She could see his eyes staring off into the distance and not moving. She waited and the head waited, too. It felt like that at any moment it would notice her and turn, it’s giant eyes blinking and watching her. She took a step closer, timidly. She took another, then another until she was standing at the base of the head. She touched the skin. It was metal. It was hard and unforgiving. She saw nearby that there was a door and she opened it and stepped inside.
The door closed behind her and all around her were red splotches floating around her like fat fireflies. There was a hum, a crackle and a buzz.
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Once, she sat on the ledge of the window of her 26th story apartment. Cars looked like little blocks from so high and the wind blew her hair this way and that. She was wearing a teal scarf and the wind blew that, too.
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A rhythmic beeping tickled the edges of her consciousness. She woke up. Blinked. Beep. She turned and saw a cardiac monitor measuring her heartbeats. Everything around her was very white and very still.
Soon she talked to a nurse. She told the nurse that yes, she was feeling fine and that yes, she knew who she was. She answered all the questions. She asked some of her own. She found out she had been in a coma for three months. She found out that they were concerned about brain damage. She felt fine. Just a little groggy is all.
Later, when they left her alone, she worried. When she got home what would she see? When she got home would he be there? When she got home would he greet her with an “I can explain…”? When she opened the door would she see him standing there in the hallway, his head beginning to swell until it distorted, crackle-hissed like television white noise and disappeared? When she got home would it be a door upon a door upon a door, a ceaseless train of things irritatingly shut in front of her?
She fell back asleep. She did not wake up.
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When she wrote in her journals she would write notes in the margins. These were those fleeting ideas that she wanted to capture for later use, the ones she wanted to remember. When she was done she would filter it all into a nice, orderly piece, but in the beginning nearly every part of the page was used. There, at the beginning, words are written at every angle.
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End.
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Notes in the margins:
Please say something.
Okay, and how long will that take?
I want to say I love you I love you I love you I love you but I know…those words (and the objects/things/heart/feelings/force/absolutefuckingneed behind them) would not change a thing.
How long will we choose to stay with the things we know don’t work, the things we know are wrong? * or * I wonder: how long will you choose the awful familiar instead of stepping into the terrifying unknown? …neither?
I love you
Sometimes I feel I understand you so well, so powerfully, and yet I understand nothing.
If you leave, who will touch me like this?
Like sex, the feel of your chest to mine, my lips on your shoulder as I slide inside you.
iloveyouiloveyouiloveyouiloveyouiloveyou
Losing my mind is such a common theme.
We will all die alone and unloved
If we take a memory and bottle it up we can keep it forever. When everything is packaged up nice and tight all we need to know is that it’s there and we can let it go, we can forget it forever. It’ll be waiting for us should we ever need to come back for it, no?
iloveyouiloveyouiloveyouiloveyouiloveyou iloveyouiloveyouiloveyouiloveyouiloveyou iloveyouiloveyouiloveyouiloveyouiloveyou iloveyouiloveyouiloveyouiloveyouiloveyou iloveyouiloveyouiloveyouiloveyouiloveyou iloveyouiloveyouiloveyouiloveyouiloveyou iloveyouiloveyouiloveyouiloveyouiloveyou iloveyouiloveyouiloveyouiloveyouiloveyou iloveyouiloveyouiloveyouiloveyouiloveyou iloveyouiloveyouiloveyouiloveyouiloveyou
I can’t, I just can’t…I don’t know what to do.
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I wonder…do the margin notes add more colour or do they take away?
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