✿
Words by Annie Fish.
(content warning: suicide, substance, and emotional abuse)
I used to have a good memory. People used to say this about me: “you have a good memory.” They don’t really say that anymore. I don’t really know what they say about me anymore. Whatever all this is is a little bit about how I used to have a good memory. Part of whatever all this is is about why I don’t have a good memory anymore, nor a good memory. A lot of it is about other things; the things I still do remember, the things I can’t stop remembering, though I try, every single day, to stop. A lot of this is about thinking on what a good memory is, or what a good memory could possibly be. If I no longer have a good memory, then what kind of memory is left for me to have? As I often say to myself and also no one, “I’m just thinking about it.”
When I am just thinking about when I used to have a good memory (or when I am searching for a good memory), I begin with the memory of Christmas Day in 2016. I was in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I was going there to visit my girlfriend’s parents for Christmas. She’s my ex-girlfriend now. I will call her “my girlfriend” through most of whatever all this is. Technically I was just visiting my girlfriend’s mom; her dad and his husband were on vacation in Puerto Rico. I hadn’t been to Pittsburgh in two years. My girlfriend was from there. She had been there the month previous. Her absentee ballot hadn’t come in, and she took a red-eye home to vote for Hillary Clinton. She said she did it because her mom had voted for Jill Stein.
2016 does not require introduction. It was a banner year for feeling bad, though in hindsight it is almost quaint to remember how freaked out a lot of people were in comparison to how bad we all feel now. I was personally probably upset more from the constant celebrity deaths that had anchored the year than anything else. The day we left for Pittsburgh Carrie Fisher had gone into the hospital. On the Christmas Day I’m about to talk about George Michael was already dead, but I wouldn’t hear about it for a few hours. Carrie Fisher would die the next day. We would stay at my girlfriend’s dad’s house later that week. Debbie Reynolds would die while we were staying there. It was 2016. Everyone was dying.
On Christmas Day 2016 we were in my girlfriend’s mom’s car. We were going to her brother’s house outside of town. We had to go through what felt to me like a huge mountain range to get there. I’m sure it was a lot less huge than it felt. I just didn’t know my way around Pennsylvania. It looked like a different planet to me. My girlfriend was sitting in the backseat with her younger twin brothers. I was in the front seat, which was presented to me as the “gentlemanly” thing to do. This made me nervous. I liked my girlfriend’s mom just fine, and she liked me plenty, and this was far from the first time we’d met, but I still felt anxious about being up there without any sort of protection.
I was tired. We were all tired. We had got up early and went to Church that morning. My girlfriend’s mom is still a practicing Catholic. My girlfriend, her mom, and one of her brothers took the sacrament. Her other brother refused it. He was a practicing drag queen, that probably had something to do with it. It wasn’t my Church, and I was unsure where I stood on the whole thing, that’s why I didn’t take it. We were the only two people who didn’t take the sacrament.
I watched a forest of barren trees melt by the window. The sun was going down. The light felt bright blue. There were a lot of streetlights along the road. They were orange streetlights. A lot of times I will tell people that “streetlight orange” is my favorite color. It’s hard to take a good photograph of that particular shade of orange. It’s hard to hold on to. Most cities are phasing out their orange streetlights. One day my favorite color will no longer exist. The streetlights made the trees the wrong color. I took a few pictures of the trees along the road. They came out blurry. That’s okay, I thought. It looks blurry to me in real life.
We drove up a spiral of a driveway and were at my girlfriend’s uncle’s family’s house. It was gigantic. My girlfriend’s uncle and his family had just amassed a relatively colossal amount of wealth through making YouTube videos. He had been filming skits with his two daughters, who were maybe 10 and 6 years old. They had caught on huge. They had millions of views. YouTube started sending them Big Money. Sponsors gave them money to do Toy Unboxings and Candy Reviews. They had made so much money their accountant told them they had to start spending it unless they wanted to lose it all to taxes. So they bought a huge house in the mountains outside of Pittsburgh. They bought a Mercedes-Benz SUV. I didn’t know Mercedez-Benz made SUVs. It looked ridiculous. He opened the door and the Mercedes-Benz logo was projected from the bottom of the thick car door onto the carport pavement. The projection was crystal clear. “This was optional,” my girlfriend’s uncle said.
There are three ways white people show their wealth. There’s “beige opulence,” which is what you see in one of those black brick and grey steel nightmare blocks that stick out like a sore thumb in residential neighborhoods. They look like they’ve been designed by an IKEA that cost an extra 60,000 dollars a piece. There’s “new opulence,” the kind that makes it obvious the spender is new to the game, where nothing really matches and it’s all a little too shiny, far too reflective. People new to wealth still associate shininess with opulence. People comfortable in wealth stick to matte finishes. My girlfriend’s uncle’s new mansion was full of the reflective kind of wealth. I’ll talk about the third kind later.
The house was in the process of being put together. It had more appliances than furniture. Most of the appliances were not plugged in. They were shiny. They were not made of plastic. My girlfriend’s uncle had me put on his brand new that day VR set. It wasn’t really a VR set as we sort of know them today. It was an earlier kind, the kind that just magnified something that was displayed on your phone. He had a phone specifically for the headset, a different phone than his personal one. He might have also had a business phone, too. His kids had phones, too. The accountant probably told them to buy them. The VR set felt heavy on my head. He asked me what I wanted to see, if I wanted to see the demo. I said “uh, sure,” and a loading circle came up. I was suddenly looking at space. I could count the pixels if I really wanted to, but I didn’t want to be rude. I moved my head around. There was space beneath me, too. If I hadn’t felt the weight of my body as it put a dent in a fresh-bought couch, I would have felt sick. The image faded out. It came back with a view of monks making a sand painting. I looked around. There were monks sitting all around me. It felt like a credit card ad. The image faded out. It came back on a Cirque-de-Soleil-looking clown spinning on ropes. I caught movement in my peripherals. I looked to my right. Three clowns were clapping and looking at the spinning clown. I looked to my left. Three more clowns were clapping. The clown to my immediate left’s eye flicked over at where I was. He did a double take and looked right in my eyes. He nodded at me and pointed. I yelled and ripped the headset off. It felt like he knew me. Like he really couldn’t believe I was there with him, watching his friend spinning in the air. It terrified me. My girlfriend laughed at me. I went outside and looked at my phone. George Michael had died.
Two days later it was my girlfriend’s birthday. We were going to go to three different bars to celebrate. The first one was a rock and roll dive bar that you could smoke inside and play pool at and order the greasiest pierogis I’d ever eaten. When we walked in the bar was playing “Vitamin C” by Can. I ate probably one dozen greasy pierogis. They were delicious. We chose this bar because my girlfriend’s dad had “worked there in the 80s” and my girlfriend drank for free and occasionally I could too. We were also there because two years earlier my girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend had gotten kicked out of the bar, so there was “no chance he’d show up.” The bar played “Vitamin C” by Can another time. The first time I visited Pittsburgh her ex-boyfriend had showed up. I thought he was nice. My girlfriend had yelled at me for saying that.
We left the rock and roll dive bar after the bar played “Vitamin C” by Can for a third time and were driven to a second bar by a friend of ours who had moved back to Pittsburgh to open up a bagel shop. As we climbed into her car I thought about when my girlfriend told me she thought our bagel shop-owning friend was full of shit. I didn’t think she was full of shit. On the drive over to the second bar she had played Mariah’s album Utakata No Hibi real loud. No one who played that record real loud could be that full of shit. When we got to the second bar, my girlfriend had told our bagel shop-opening friend that she loved her. This bar was close to my girlfriend’s dads’ house. The second bar was lightly Andy Warhol-themed (mostly in name alone, the inside had a few soup cans and maybe a Liz Taylor in the bathroom. There was a bust of Elvis behind the bar). When I think of Warhol and Pittsburgh I think of Lou Reed and John Cale’s song “Smalltown,” which invents an interior monologuing Andy who wants to leave, who thinks nothing of Pittsburgh. It has lines like “there’s no Michelangelo coming from Pittsburgh.” That’s a good line. I like it because I personally like Warhol a lot more than Michelangelo. The other line I remember is “there is only one good use for a small town / you hate it, and know you’ll have to leave.”
Earlier that week we had gone to the Warhol Museum. We walked over a bridge (big, ugly, steel— Pittsburgh sure loves its steel). The bridge was wrapped in quilted yarn people had knit for a public project no one remembers anymore. My girlfriends’ mom had knit one, and we spent an extra half hour crossing the bridge to see if we could find it. I can still remember the feel of the wool on my hands, made hard by the rain and the sun. I remember this probably because I hate heights and needed to hold on to something, real tight. Walking over the bridge felt like riding a Ferris Wheel, which I hate. The next year, my girlfriend would make me ride a Ferris Wheel because she didn’t believe my fear of heights was really that bad. She was the third girlfriend I’d had who did this exact thing.
The Warhol Museum had an exhibit of the life and work of Genesis P-Orridge and Lady Jaye Breyer. I sort of knew who they were, and I had pretended to enjoy Throbbing Gristle at least once in my life. But the totality of the work on display made my head spin. Their life project was to become one person. They did this through their art and through surgery, to look the same, feel the same, become the same. They talked about the “malleability of physical and behavioral identity.” I thought about what that meant, if I myself had the will towards that malleability. I looked at the exhibit and I looked at the detritus of a relationship and I learned than Lady Jaye had died and it made me sad. I couldn’t imagine a love so absurdly huge you had to become one with someone else. I looked at my girlfriend, who loved the exhibit too. Did she love it in the same way? Would we understand each other better through having seen this show? It was metal as hell, and extremely trans. The exhibit lit a bonfire on a forgotten dream. That forgotten dream was mine. I had spent almost three years at that point tamping down my own desire to transition. Every time I thought about what my body could be like I remembered holding my scream-crying, drunk girlfriend as she said she couldn’t imagine my body through that process. I remember her saying that she would “miss my cock.” I was more scared of being alone than I was scared of the closet, so I hopped on in and made a bed for myself out of straw and a wish. We left the Museum. I had tears in my eyes. Three years later my girlfriend would text me the message “why do you always think with your dick when you don’t even want one.”
I sat in the Warhol Bar and thought about Genesis P-Orridge and got a little tipsy and stood as the sisters of our friend from Chicago who had moved back to Pittsburgh and opened a bagel shop walked in. They brought a friend of theirs. Our friend’s sisters introduced themselves, and their friend I assume also introduced herself. I know I used to remember the sisters’ names, though I don’t now, but I know I never knew their friend’s name. My first instinct is to declare that there was a Z in her name. It is very possible there was not. I don’t remember what it was, which might be due to the night’s ongoing consumption or I might have never heard it in the first place, lost, maybe, over the din of the bar. I thought that our bagel shop-owning sisters’ friend was cute. I don’t remember anything about her life. I remember the look on her face at a certain point in the evening. It was a face I have enjoyed seeing and sharing many times over the course of my life. It’s a face that silently admits defeat against desire. It means at base “I like you,” and at its peak can mean literally anything. We would soon define this particular look’s exact meaning.
My immediate memory after the Look was glancing over at my girlfriend who had herself witnessed the Look I’d shared with the Nameless Girl (I know she had a name. Maybe it did have a “Z” in it. I’m going to call her the Nameless Girl from now on. I’m sorry. I wish I knew it. I know I never will). The look my girlfriend then gave me was different, but no less exciting. It was a look, along with a slight curve upward of her mouth, that said “okay.” It was a “that’s so nice for you” kind of look. Things like this were allowed, technically, in our relationship. The limitations of the arrangement would show themselves in less than 18 hours, and again three years later.
At this moment I wonder to myself, “who cares.” At the center of this story are two admissions of sex. They surround the ghost of a good memory. I don’t think of this as a boast (I don’t really think it makes me look good), outside of the fact I was surprised it happened at all.
The party wound up, the bar wound down. My girlfriend became too drunk to enjoy herself. The bar closed, and we shuffled out. We didn’t go to the third bar. Our bagel shop-opening friend and her sisters drove away, but their friend stayed behind. My girlfriend stammered out that there was “more to drink at home,” which tickled me as she meant “her Dad’s house” when she said “home,” and that this “more to drink” was a good-time threat to raid a parent’s liquor cabinet when the parents were away. We stopped at a convenience store to get snacks. The nameless girl insisted we get Honey BBQ Flavor Twist Fritos. I’d seen the bag, and admired the grey-blue hue of it, but I had never tried them. For whatever mental pull of a reason, this bag of chips became a brief anchor to the night’s courtship.
As we walked to my girlfriend’s dad’s house, my girlfriend stopped being able to walk straight. She was still talking about the liquor cabinet. I was still talking to the nameless girl. It is strange to imagine maintaining a pleasant level of flirt while half-fireman-carrying a human, though at that point in my life I was already something of a professional at having to carry on conversations while doing exactly that. I probably did it at least a dozen more times over the next five years. Later I’ll talk about the last time I ever did it, on the way to talking about something else.
My girlfriend’s dad and his husband owned a four-story building. In the early 2010s they had let a weirdo run a venue out of the bottom floor. Now the bottom floor was filled with expensive garbage. The remaining three floors were also filled with garbage, though it was immaculately curated garbage. The last way a white man shows his wealth is the way a gay man in his 50s will decorate his house. It is a hoarder’s dream. My girlfriend’s dad’s house was corpulent with things. He had money because he had held out for months when the city wanted to build a stadium over his old house. He waited until they had no choice but to pay him a ridiculous amount of money. He used that money to buy a building and fill it with trinkets and trash. The house had approximately six thousand vintage globes in it. It had countless mid-height torso-busts of men, Greek-like cocks proudly displayed at eye level. It was a nice house, if a little claustrophobic. It had a pleasant dust-musk mustiness to it. I always felt like tip toeing through his house, partly because I was afraid of knocking something over, and partly because of the fact that to this day I consider my girlfriend’s dad to be the second worst person I have ever met.
I put my girlfriend in bed, got her a glass of water, and said “hey, I’m going to hang out downstairs for a bit. You good? You need anything?” and she said “yes, have fun,” and something else I couldn’t make out. She was snoring by the time I shut the door.
I went back down, offered the nameless girl some water, and we sat on my girlfriend’s dad’s gold velour-upholstered love seat and shared the bag of Honey BBQ Flavor Twist Fritos. We talked about snacks we liked, and the bag of Fritos. I liked them! I was surprised to like them, and I said that out loud, and I talked about other chips that were weird I had enjoyed. I talked about the time Lays made Cappucino-Flavored Potato Chips and that a friend of mine had poured the latté art on the bag. I probably talked about how much I had liked Coke Blak. I knew there was something else I was supposed to do but I had been gripped with a sudden, sickening uneasiness. I had to keep talking about chips. I couldn’t stop. I probably talked about them for half an hour.
Eventually the nameless girl interrupted me to say “I’m sorry, can we stop talking? I really want to kiss you,” and we stopped talking about chips and I murmured “oops” and we started kissing. They were huge, sloppy kisses that mostly missed whatever targets we had mutually imagined. I think I remember her grabbing what little hair I had at the time (it was growing back after I had shaved it off all the way to play in an R.E.M. cover band). Many things looked down at me as we kissed. Globes, of course, and a thousand tiny other knick knacks stared down at us, too. There was a portrait of my girlfriend and her dad from her childhood hung over a mantelpiece to nowhere. It was a good painting. I thought of when my girlfriend’s dad said “our friend painted that” after I complimented it and his husband wanly said the word “AIDS” as if that explained something, as if that gave it more meaning, more reason to be on the wall. The word felt like a joke coming from his thick fey drawl. It wasn’t a joke. I blinked and said “ah, sorry.” There were a dozen paintings my girlfriend had made in high school. She hated all of them. My girlfriend’s dad never missed an opportunity to toss an “I wish you still painted” into a conversation about what my girlfriend was doing in her life and practice. He had yelled at her and called her selfish for switching her major to sculpture, and consistently threatened to stop paying her tuition, which he never did. Mostly I thought of of the first night I had ever spent in the house in 2014, when I met my girlfriend’s dad for the first time, and he showed us a porcelain owl he had bought for one hundred dollars at a flea market. “I don’t even like owls,” he said. “I hate them. I just liked the weight of this.” He hefted the owl in his massive hand, and I respected the notion of an object’s importance being determined by its weight, even if the opulence made me uncomfortable.
The nameless girl pushed me down, and pulled my shirt up to my chest. She pulled her clean plaid flannel shirt off. She pulled her brown sports bra off. She had small breasts. I thought to myself, “I’d never been with someone with such small breasts.” My mind wandered to a memory of my dad seeing a woman with small breasts like these wearing a light blue shirt that was one size too small and he said “ew” out loud. My mind snapped back when I registered the huge tattoo of bat wings that was immediately under her small breasts. It reached down to just above her bellybutton. I blinked and took in the texture of wings before shoving my mouth over one of her small breasts. I pushed her down and took her dark beige cargo pants off. I took her panties off. I started to go down on her, and she seemed to enjoy that. I looked up at the bat wings as I did that. I wondered what her name was. I registered that I kind of had to pee. She grabbed my hair and said “stop. Let’s fuck. I need you to fuck me.” She looked like she meant it. I took my pants off. When I was about to be inside her she said “oh. When was the last time you got tested.” I said “oh, uh, yeah. I’m clean.” What I meant by that was “I haven’t had sex with anyone in over a year.” I know that these do not mean the same thing. The sex was okay. I felt out of breath. I was out of shape. I had seen a photo of myself as I sang R.E.M. songs in a college student’s basement and I thought I looked fat. I told a coworker this and she got mad that I had used the word “fat.”
I realized eventually that I had to pee too bad to keep having sex. I got off of her and got off of the golden velour love seat and ran to my girlfriend’s dad’s bathroom and took an extremely painful piss. I came back, and we tried to keep going but he mood had passed. The room felt cold. We sat on the love seat for a minute, wrapped in a throw blanket that had fallen on the floor. I told her I should probably go upstairs, but that she could sleep here, I’d be down in the morning, we could get breakfast. She said okay. I went upstairs. My girlfriend was still snoring. Two years later in Albuquerque, New Mexico she would hit me in the back of the head at night if I was snoring in our bed. She would hit me in the back of the head and in the square of my back whenever I shifted my body in bed. She said it woke her up. She'd call me an asshole and say I was ruining her day by shifting in bed. I stopped moving in bed, I'd keep perfectly still and listen to her fall asleep as she called me names. I tried to stop breathing too much in bed, too. Eventually I stopped sleeping just to make sure. Getting woken up by someone hitting you in the back of the head doesn’t feel good. It makes your next dreams weird.
In the morning in 2016, my head hurt a lot more than I had assumed it would. I hadn’t had enough water, and I’d physically exerted myself. I went downstairs. The nameless girl had already left. She had left a note, thanking us for a fun night. She didn’t sign it. I still don’t know her name.
This is what I thought of through my bulbous headache as my girlfriend yelled at me seven minutes later for sleeping with the nameless girl on my girlfriend’s birthday: one, that since I had sex after midnight, it technically wasn’t her birthday anymore. Two, I thought of the idea that an open relationship was all about weird moments you just had to go for (a notion I’m not sure is true, but I had intuited it from my girlfriends’ behavior). Three, I thought of all the times my girlfriend had broken the two supposedly sacrosanct rules of our open relationship: one, no sex with exes, and two: we had to respect the other when they felt the vibe was off. I had never broken either rule. She broke both of them half a dozen times within the first year of our relationship. I thought of the first time she had called me, crying and begging for me to break up with her because she fucked up so bad. I was too afraid of being alone so I forgave her. I did not let myself think of all the other times she called me the same way.
I was in trouble for having sex, though it became unclear if she was mad that I had sex on her “birthday” or because I had sex on her dad’s love seat, while her dad’s things looked at me. That didn’t really make me feel bad; I hated her dad a lot. It felt good to do something bad on his possessions. I wondered if he’d be able to smell the sex on his gold velour love seat. I thought that this was a gross thought. I told my girlfriend I was sorry and went outside to buy her a coffee. The shop was two doors down from her dad’s house. The guy who opened the shop was someone my girlfriend used to go out with. She told me he had a full back tattoo of a zombie eating a guy’s guts. They had slept together again six months previous. When I got back my girlfriend was still mad at me. She made it definitively clear that it was more because I had sex around her dad’s belongings. I thought of the owl that had a good weight and thought about how this family places value on their things. Later I would think that it was more about me doing something she couldn’t control in a place she thought she always controlled.
Three years later she would bring up the sex I had on her dad’s gold velour love seat while she was yelling at me for sleeping with a girl in our own bed. “You always do this,” she said, it not mattering that I did not “always” do this and in fact it was she who had “done” “this” far more than I ever had. An hour after she said that, I would think of when she cried when I talked about wanting to transition because she said she’d “miss my cock.” I thought of that because she had texted me this: “why do you always think with your dick when you don’t even want one.” When I got that text message I stared at the word “always.” It was chosen for me a lot like the portrait of her as a child that was painted by a man who later would die of AIDS had been chosen for a wall in her dad’s house; in the same way a man who had spent one hundred dollars on a porcelain owl was chosen: for its weight.
I felt my own weight as I looked at the word “always.” I felt as my own weight pushed the bone of my left side hip into a rock on the ground beneath me. When I got the text from my girlfriend about my dick I was curled up in a patch of dirt next to our apartment. Technically by that point, in 2019, she was no longer actually my girlfriend. We had broken up in March and it was October; it’s just that her dictation of every aspect of my life was so total I still referred to her as my girlfriend. It was easier that way. I hadn’t even told my parents we had broken up. I told them the next day, after I went to their house with a poorly packed bag with the brief intention of never going back to my apartment.
I talk about the time I was curled up in the dirt next to my apartment a lot. I guess that makes sense; it’s a pretty wild thing to have done. It’s a too-good shorthand for explaining what the end of this relationship looked like. “How bad did it get?” someone asks, and I say “well, one time I tried to sleep in the dirt next to our apartment,” and they say “oh.” You could say I talk about it for sympathy, and that’s a little true. But I also talk about it because I myself can’t quite believe it happened. Sometimes someone leaves you without any other options. I don’t want to talk about it right now.
I’ll talk about it later.
It was cold in the dirt in 2019 and it was cold in Pittsburgh in 2016. The night before we left town we went to another bar, the third bar we had meant to go to on my girlfriend’s birthday. It was one of the many bars that you can still smoke inside there, because no one gives a shit about almost anything in Pittsburgh. I always came home from Pittsburgh smelling awful, like cigarette smoke and vomit, like alcohol and sex. I felt like I smelled like violence. I tried to convince myself I liked it, that it made me cool. My girlfriend smelled worse than me. One time during a car ride in 2013 my girlfriend’s dad yelled at her for smelling so bad. He yelled so loud the window of the car shook. Five years later in December 2018 he would yell exactly that loud again, and the window’s shaking slapped against my head, which was pressed against it as I tried to will my body into dust. The first time he yelled that loud I spoke softly and reasonably and it diffused the situation. The second time he told me to shut the fuck up and stay out of it. I shut up. I stayed out of it. I felt the glass slap my forehead as he kept yelling. The glass was cold.
The glass was cold in December 2018 and it was somehow even colder the month earlier when I left the apartment at 3AM because my girlfriend had called me and told me I had to “come find her.” Maybe she didn’t really tell me that— I could barely understand her. She had drank too much and she was talking about demons and she said someone stole her coat and I asked where she was and she said “the middle of the street” and I said “what street” and she said “fuck you” and I said “where were you” and she told me the bar she had been at and said “I’m cold. It’s cold. Someone stole my coat” and I told her I was on my way. I hesitated before leaving. What if I didn’t go, I thought, then felt bad. Earlier that month she had gone out too late three times in a week. She realized that women didn’t have to pay cover at the strip club and people would buy her drinks there. I said “I’d like to go there with you some time,” and she reminded me that I didn’t have a job yet. She kept going out. She kept calling off work because she was too hungover to go in. She was on probation at work. I still didn’t have a job.
After my girlfriend was on probation at work she said that she was going to call me the next time she went out drinking and I was supposed to tell her she had to come home. I thought it was funny that it was my responsibility to make her not stay out all night drinking. She said “you could come with me, then,” and I said “I can’t afford to do that right now” and she got mad at me for reminding her. She went out. She called me at 1AM and I said “you should come home.” She said she was having a really good time, and she met some people who were nice and that she really wanted to stay. I was afraid of getting in trouble more than I was afraid of being alone, so I said okay. Two hours later I hesitated by the door before deciding I needed to get her home after she called me talking about demons and telling me someone had stolen her coat.
When I got to the bar she was on the pavement yelling at two female cops. I walked up, they looked at me, and looked at my horrified face and walked away, saying with their entire bodies that it was my problem now. I couldn’t believe she wasn’t in jail. I realized I wouldn’t know what to do if they had put her in jail. It was cold outside. I put my coat over my girlfriend’s shoulders. I stood her up. “Fuck you, someone took my FUCKING COAT” she yelled at the bar she had been kicked out of. She tried to lunge for the door, I held her back, and she spun around. What I saw on her face made me the third most terrified I have ever been in my life. She looked at me with disbelief and purest rage, and I looked in her eyes and saw nothing. She didn’t know who I was. I had known her for nearly six years. We had gone through love and death together. She didn’t recognize me. Then she looked away and started screaming at the air. I started to walk her home. She couldn’t walk. I half-fireman carried her. She kept screaming. Men saw me. They said “hey.” I kept walking. They said “what’s going on here.” I kept walking. “What the fuck” they said. “It’s okay,” I said. “I’m just getting her home.” I saw a man in cowboy boots starting to walk towards me. He looked angry. He looked like he’d be the kind of man to carry a gun. I walked faster. It’s hard to carry someone when they go limp. My girlfriend had gone all the way limp, though she was still screaming. I had given her my jacket. It was so cold. I told the man “it’s okay.” I told my girlfriend “it’s okay.” I said it probably fifty times. My breath fogged my glasses. I don’t know how I got her home, but I did. I put her on the bed. She kept screaming. I thought someone was going to knock on the door. I kept checking the window. I walked back to the bedroom and held her as she screamed herself to sleep. In the morning I watched her from the bedroom door for an hour, trying to make sure she was still breathing.
My girlfriend woke up with no memory of this night, and when I tried to tell her about it, she yelled at me and accused me of trying to make her feel guilty. She made me walk over to the bar and ask if they had her coat. She didn’t remember getting kicked out. She didn't remember getting carried home. She got mad at me when they said they didn’t have it. She thought I was lying. She told me her it was her dad’s coat. She said that twice. I said I was sorry, they really didn't have her coat. I don't think it was a lie.
She said "fuck you," and started crying. It wasn’t the first time she had said “fuck you” to me. She would say it a lot when she’d get home from drinking, picking fights at nothing and then passing out. She’d fall asleep behind me whispering things like "fuck you, you're useless." One time, in a voice soft and slurring, sounding like it was pitched to hurt a child's feelings, "fuck you, you'd never hurt me. I can do anything to you. You're so fucking weak, you're too much of a pussy to ever hurt me back." More than one night I would fall asleep while she whispered “I’ll slit your throat” into my ear.
She sat in bed crying and screaming because of her hangover, and because of the way it was making her brain say mean things to herself. It filled me with care and terror. I walked out of the bedroom a few times to try to think of something to do for her, to try to get her to drink water. I forgot that the sound of running water made her sick, and she screamed at me from the bedroom. I turned the water off. I walked to the kitchen window. I pressed my nose against the window. It was freezing.
The windows of my apartment were cold in 2018 and a month later the shaking windows of a rental car would be cold and it was cold in Pittsburgh in 2016 and the cigarette smoke from the bar’s insides had made me feel sick. I went out for some air. The air hurt. I was glad to be alone. I was tired of talking to strangers, to people I had heard of in stories about teenage violence, to people I knew my girlfriend had slept with even though I begged her not to. I felt petty, but I felt good to be alone.
The city was too quiet. I looked at my phone. My battery was low; this embarrassed me. I looked up George Michael on Spotify. He had just died. It was 2016, everyone had died that year. I looked at his records. I had mourned him loudly and in public the last two days, but I’d never listened to one of his records. One of the records was called Songs from the Last Century. I looked at the tracklist. One of the songs was “Miss Sarajevo.” I loved that song. My grandmother loved it too; she would cry at the Pavarotti. Later I heard that my grandmother had told my aunt to buy a gun in case an “N” broke in (she had used the whole word). I didn’t know George Michael had covered “Miss Sarajevo.” I didn’t have my headphones. I let the song play out of my phone. It was soft and there was no one around to hear it. The song was nice. I tried to find myself in the lyrics. I couldn’t: it was about people trying to have a beauty pageant in Sarajevo. That was a level of experience I couldn’t reach. I played it again. I hadn’t heard it before. It was weird I hadn’t heard George Michael’s cover of “Miss Sarajevo” before, I thought. I had never had sex with someone whose name I didn’t know before that week either. It felt nice to do things I’d never done before.
Two weeks later I turned thirty years old. One week before that I had the thought “this is the last week of my 20s.” I sat with that for a moment and then said out loud “thank fucking God.” I was tired of my 20s. I thought I had something to look forward to. Now I’m 35 and the last two years were 2021 and 2020 and the year before that I was curled up in the dirt and the year before that I felt a car window shake against my forehead because a man thought so highly of himself he would loudly call his own daughter a cunt and make fun of her for being sad. In 2016 I had sex with someone who was not his daughter whose name I do not remember on his gold velour love seat while the items of his weighted choices looked at me and I didn’t feel bad for it. Two days earlier I stood outside a cold, brand new mansion and saw that George Michael had died. Three years after that I would write “you know you have to do it” on the cover of a sketchbook under a drawing of Garfield. Beneath the drawing of Garfield were a few smears of blood on it, from a moment of half measure when I pulled an xacto blade over my forearm. I didn’t go very deep, I could still feel too much, even though I had emptied out what was left of the liquor cabinet to try to prevent that. I thought it was wild to feel anything at all. It was 2019.
In 2019 we were in Albuquerque, New Mexico. My girlfriend and I moved there in 2018. I like to tell myself that we moved there for a change of scenery, to refresh a pair of lives that were going stale. I don't know if that's true anymore. All moving really did was remove myself from anyone I had ever called a friend. All the people I met in Albuquerque I met through the job my girlfriend got at an art store. I only kind of thought they were my friends. A couple of times they really felt like it. One day in 2019 I went to a cowboy's gay bar to see a drag show with my girlfriend, one of her coworkers, and her coworker's boyfriend. I was excited to go, to be seen in a place I hoped I would feel comfortable. My girlfriend got drunk. She got a text from her boss. Her boss wanted to have sex with her. We said “don’t have sex with your boss.” She asked if her coworker would drive her to Corrales so she could have sex with her boss. Corrales is pretty far outside of town. Her coworker said no. She took a Lyft to Corrales to have sex with her boss. It probably cost a hundred dollars. When her coworker and his boyfriend drove me home I was angry. “She always does this,” I said, trying not to say too much in case they were going to tell my girlfriend about it later. They said “sorry.”
It was a hot summer when we moved there. It took me nine months to find a job. I walked around in the cruel sun waiting for my girlfriend to get off work and frequently got at least a little bit of heat stroke and often stood under the shade of a street sign that pointed the way to the Atomic Museum. New Mexico is where they made the nuclear bomb. Twice a year you could drive down to the place where they first tested it. I never went to the testing site, but once I went to the Atomic Museum. It felt empty. They had recreations of the bombs. I saw a placard that talked about the little makeshift homes where they sent the wives of the scientists who made the bombs. I read about the scientific model they used to compare radiation burns, an "average human" that they called a "reference man." There was a guestbook full of people who were happy the bombs had been dropped. It was next to a ruined tricycle. I remembered an idiotic line I had written in a notebook ten years before: "life is just waiting for the next bomb to drop." I felt embarrassed to remember it. I walked out of the museum, and let the pushed-out wind from the cars speeding past cool me down in the scalding, dry-desert air. I thought about the wives, standing alone in barren houses while their husbands were dreaming up the nuclear age.
The first Christmas after we moved my girlfriend's dad and his husband came to visit, and we went to the same cowboy's gay bar almost every night. She went out drinking a lot when her dads were in town. One night my girlfriend drank too much at a holiday party my parents’ friends had thrown. She had tried to get her dad to drive her to the cowboy bar. She was drunk and her dad started to yell at her that he didn't want to drive her to another bar. His husband took my girlfriend's side, he wanted to go to a bar too. Then my girlfriend's dad really yelled at her. He yelled at them both. He said they were being selfish cunts. I tried to quietly say "it's okay if you just take me home" and he yelled at me. He told me to shut the fuck up and stay the fuck out of it. He yelled so loud it made the windows shake. There was snow on the windows. The next day they came over for dinner at my parents house and my girlfriend's dad was humbled by how good a cook my mom was. He mumbled a “sorry” to me as they left and that was all we ever spoke of it. I never saw him again, though I did talk to him on the phone one more time.
(It occurs to me now, over a year after writing this, and having it exist as a new form of weight upon me, the weight of this all having existed instead of the weight of keeping it within myself, that I realize that I never said the one thing that might actually be the key to this. The actual reason why I wrote it, why I felt I had to, and why I was as exhaustive in its depictions as I was. The reason I decided that it was "easier" to write something like this, instead of just retelling snapshots of my life over and over again. I never said this about the person I am talking about throughout this story:
I loved you. I loved you so much. There were days when I honestly thought we would always be together, and many of those days that was the happiest thought I could imagine. Meeting you felt like finally getting the boulder to the top of the hill. We were so similar in so many ways, and our tiny eccentricities made sense in each other's company, in a way I didn't think possible. I still don't know if it's possible, because so much of us was such a wonder to me. I loved you, and I was happy to fight for us, and to fight for you, and to fight in your behalf. I wish it never got to the point where I discovered what the limits were of that desire to fight for you.
I understand why this seems unfair. I can't quite apologize, because this piece came from an honest place, and to apologize for honesty feels like a different form of death. I understand why this looks like an extended attack. Unbelievably, it isn't. I know you have read it, and that you at best hate me for it and at worst do not think of me at all. This exists because I could not figure out what to do with the space you left in my life. I could not figure out what to do with that feeling I once had, and what I was supposed to do with the years-thick piece of my self that was called "my love for you." I was no longer allowed to use it. It had been two years since I could have. And still it was there, and every day I arched an eyebrow wondering why I felt incomplete. It was because at some point I did feel complete, or as near as one could get, with you, and I will never feel that feeling again.
I wrote this because I missed you. Even today, after another year, there are times when I'm confused that you aren't in my life anymore. There are still things about me that only you know. I'm still not sure if anyone else on this entire planet knows me as well as you did. That still hurts, even if I'm mostly a functioning person without you. Even if sometimes I actually do manage to forget all the things I wrote about in this piece (and the other things I did not). I will hopefully never speak to you again, and it's the fact that I have to write "hopefully" there that still hurts. Because when a story contains "I loved you" in it, what more cruel fate is there than "I will hopefully never speak to you again."
I was not ready, even a year ago, to actually explain this most important part of the story: I loved you. I loved you so much. It was always about you.
I loved you until the moment you forced me to say that I did not.
Remember that I loved you, as I continue to live (and even if I do not); remember that I loved you as a past version of me continued to write this.)
Okay, I’ll talk about the dirt now.
Ten months after the Christmas I felt a car's cold window slap against my face I invited a girl to a Halloween Party our friends were having. I had met this girl the year before. She was one of the first people I’d met in town. She was definitely the first person I had met on my own, without any connection to my girlfriend. A friend of mine from early college texted me to say “hey, I have a good friend who lives in Albuquerque. You just moved there. You two should hang out. Maybe you’ll like her. I think she wants to play drums with people.” I thought that was cool, though it made me nervous to meet someone just to play music with them. What if it goes bad, I thought. I was scared to meet new people. I was scared to meet people without my girlfriend there. I didn’t know what she would think. It didn’t occur to me that was a weird thought to have.
Ten minutes later I got a phone call from a number I didn’t know. Most times I would not answer this. Every now and then my entire body tells me to break this soft rule. It was the girl (let’s call her S—) my friend had told me about. I didn’t think she’d call that exact day. We talked on the phone. She sounded nice. We made plans to hang out. It was 2018, I didn’t yet have a job (it would take me a long time to get one). We met up. The first thing I noticed was her hair; she seemed to have an infinite amount of it. She kept it in a ponytail. I noticed a little bit of blue on her eyelids. Her eyes looked kind. I thought “I don’t know if I’ve ever thought that about someone before.” We had a good time together. We walked on a nature trail next to an arroyo (that’s a giant concrete ditch that houses rainwater that flows off of the mountains. A lot of kids like to skate in there. A lot of kids die in there when rainwater comes rushing through without warning). We ate tacos (which she bought, which I was secretly appreciative of because I didn’t have a job and the week before I had literally $4.73 in my bank account). We walked on another trail. She walked off the side of the trail to pee on someone’s fence. I thought it was cool that she didn’t seem to bothered by doing that. She seemed really nice. We talked about life in Albuquerque in the early 2000s. We remembered a lot of the same people, even though we'd never met before that day. We played some music together in her storage unit, which was a converted boxcar. I thought that was really cool. I told her that. She said “thanks.”
I didn’t see her for a little bit. I saw her again the day before my 32nd birthday in 2019. I told her what had happened the night before. The night before my girlfriend had gone out drinking again. She hadn’t really taken a break from it since the night I carried her home.
She was drunk the night before my 32nd birthday. She came home late. I heard her fall over in the hallway. I fell back asleep. She crawled into bed, naked. She was cold. In the morning the sun was bright and it was beautiful and I got out of bed early. I walked out of the bedroom and into the hallway and I saw, directly in front of the bathroom door, a smear of human feces with a bootscrape skid through it. My mind immediately put together the entire image of what happened, of her stumbling home, of her taking all of her clothes off in the living room, of her walking to the bathroom door, of bending over, of shitting, of slipping in it. I wondered if she had thought she had made it to the bathroom. I wondered if she was thinking at all. In that exact moment, I surprised myself at how calm I was. I surprised myself at the way I barely reacted to my next thought: “okay, I’m going to have to clean my girlfriend’s shit off the floor.” I put on yellow kitchen gloves and I remembered hearing that vinegar was good for smells. Maybe it was. It was certainly better for the hallway to smell like vinegar instead of my girlfriend’s shit.
So when I saw S— the next day, and she asked me how I was doing, I told her exactly how I was doing. I told her that I had to clean my girlfriend’s shit off the ground. She was really nice about hearing it. She told me she had friends who had substance abuse problems and how hard it can be to live with them. I had never considered the words “substance abuse” to relate to my life. We played some music and it felt okay.
I didn’t see her for another little bit. It was autumn before I did again. We went on an “adventure.” We picked a direction and drove out to it. We chose west. We drove down Route 66, and talked about life. She told me about her grandmother who had dementia. She told me about having to get ready for her sister's wedding, which was going to be in another country. She had to learn a particular style of dance for it. She told me about the job she had on and off, in a bookstore on the other side of town (after this, every time I'd pass the bookstore in a car on the way to somewhere else I would crane my head to look, just in case I would catch a glimpse of her, which I never did). I told her about the job I had working in a cafeteria under a school behind a hospital. I told her about how embarrassing it was to wear a black polo shirt with the wrong name sewn into the back. I told her about having to push a giant dumpster-wagon in the hot desert sun wearing all black, with the wrong name sewn into my work shirt.
(I didn't tell her about the daydreams I had as I pushed the dumpster-wagon, as I listened to the wheels tangle in the pavement; I didn't tell her about my daydreams of climbing up to a rooftop with a bottle of wine and staying forever, or going out to the edge of the river with a knife and waiting for dogs to poke at my body. I didn’t talk about my girlfriend either, who by that time was my ex-girlfriend. I’ll tell you about the night we broke up: we watched the movie What We Do In The Shadows and I said “I can’t believe they gave Taika Waititi a Thor movie.” My girlfriend said “why do you always say shit like that,” and she yelled at me and I started yelling back and she said “well maybe this just isn’t working anymore” and I agreed and she blinked and then we were broken up. I don’t think she thought I would agree with her. I think I surprised her by not backing down. I told her the next day that I wanted to move out of the house. She convinced me we were too good of friends still to do that. We could still share the bed, "it wouldn’t even be weird." She told me I didn’t want to live alone. I stayed in the house. We shared the bed. It was weird.)
S— pulled off the highway. We walked down a dirt road for a while. The sun started to set. We found a lot of trash. We found a couch in the middle of nowhere. We stared at the couch for a long time. I thought about the couch, I wondered how it had got there, who had dragged it out. I wished for a long second that we lived on the couch, that we never had to get up and leave it. Just S— and I, and our couch. I took a picture of it. It's the only picture I have from the time we spent together, and S— isn't even in the picture. I don't have a picture of S—. We saw a truck barreling toward us down a dirt road in the distance, so we turned around and got back in her car. My stomach hurt. I think I was nervous. I tried not to acknowledge why. We stopped at a Love’s. S— and I climbed around some abandoned concrete tubes. We looked at the lights of the entire Albuquerque Metropolitan Area. She drove me home. She put on Who Will Cut Our Hair When We’re Gone by The Unicorns. “I haven’t heard this in years,” I said. It was dark. When we got to my house she came in for a second. I think she had to use the bathroom. She stood in the living room. She looked down the hallway. She said “this is a one bedroom?” I said yes. “You still share it?” she asked. I said yes. A look of something passed over her kind eyes and then she thanked me for a really nice night and then she quickly walked out of my apartment.
A week later was the Halloween Party. It was a group of people I had just met through playing a show, and some people I knew through my girlfriend’s job. My ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend (let's call him F—), were there. S— came a little later in the night. I fumbled introducing S— to the group, but everyone was nice about it and made her feel welcome. I think she had a good time. We carved pumpkins. The party was in an alleyway behind the garage a friend lived in. The only light was a streetlight at the end of the alley. It wasn’t orange. Someone took a picture of all the pumpkins. I watched my ex-girlfriend leave with her new boyfriend. She looked at me as she was walking away and gave me a look a lot like the one she gave me when she saw the way I had looked at the nameless girl in 2016. This time it made me kind of mad— I didn’t need her permission to have a good time with someone, but it felt like she was saying it was okay if I hung out with S—. S— asked me what I wanted to do. I said I didn’t know, but Roosevelt Park was close by. We had been to Roosevelt Park before together. It had a lot of big hills and huge trees. We had rolled down the hills.
It was getting dark. We drove over to Roosevelt Park. We sat in the park for a while. Someone a hundred feet away started fire dancing. We watched it for a while. We walked back to her car. She said “oh. I think I left my keys in the park.” We walked back to the park. We laughed. She didn’t seem stressed about it. We found her keys. By the time we got back to her car, it was pitch black outside. As she started to put her keys into the door, fireworks started going off in the distance. We didn’t know why. "A sports game," we both said, then laughed at how no one would ever call it “a sports game.” We stepped away from the car. We walked towards a chain link fence. We watched the fireworks. We both got real quiet. Our hands found each other. We started holding hands. Her hand felt huge. It was all I could think about, “wow. S—’s hands are huge.” I decided I loved that about her. The thought “I like her a lot” kicked me in the stomach. That’s why it had hurt the last time we hung out. I put my head on her shoulder. Her huge hair got in my face. It smelled good. She turned her head to me, and we kissed.
We kissed real hard. It surprised me. It surprised me that it was happening at all, but it surprised me with how much we clearly both wanted it. It felt nice. She was a nice kisser. She was pretty aggressive. I liked that. The way she went for it felt masculine. I felt safe in her kissing me. I felt feminine in how I received her kisses. It felt good. It felt affirming. It was a good moment. The fireworks gave it color. I just felt like me, as if that suddenly had a definition. I realized that I was smiling. It’s hard to smile when you’re kissing someone. I realized that I hadn’t been happy on exactly my own terms for a long time. Even now, as the colors of it all run grey, it remains a good memory.
We drove back to my apartment. I knew my ex-girlfriend was staying at her new boyfriend’s house. We drove back to my apartment because S— really wanted to show me a Steve Irwin snake video. That was a half truth. We watched the snake video, and I liked it. I had never seen a Steve Irwin video before. S— couldn’t believe that. She kissed me.
It was cold in Pittsburgh in 2016 and the car window was cold in 2018 and it was cold on my couch in 2019, so S— asked if we could go to the bedroom. I said “sure.” We kept kissing. Our hands moved over our bodies. It felt great. We took some of our clothes off. She was wearing a shirt with a deep neck. I reached below that deep neck. I pulled her right breast out of her shirt. It felt soft and huge. She wore clothes that gave no indication of what her body looked like beneath them. I loved the way her body looked beneath them. We touched each other all over. “Jesus Christ,” she said. “I’m so fucking wet.” I hadn’t heard her use a curse word before. I moved my hand down her body and agreed with her. She asked if I wanted to have sex. I said “yeah.” We took the rest of our clothes off. When I was about to be inside her she said “oh. When was the last time you got tested.” I said “oh, uh, yeah. I’m clean.” What I meant by that was “I haven’t had sex with anyone since I slept with a girl whose name I do not remember on my ex-girlfriend’s dad’s gold velour love seat in 2016.” I know that these do not mean the same thing.
The sex was incredible. I felt, if not loved, then cared for. I tried to make sure S— felt the same way. I hope I did. "I really like this girl," I thought. I stopped thinking. That’s how good the sex was. She told me she was going to come. She told me she had come. I said “wow.” We slowed down. We kissed. We looked in each other’s faces for a moment. There was something new in her kind eyes. We didn’t lay in bed for more than a minute before she went to put her clothes back on. I said “you can stay,” and she froze a second before saying “no, I have to get home.” I said okay. She was living with her parents. I thought she just didn’t want to get home that late. She practically ran out the door. She stopped for one second. She kissed me and said “I’ll call you.” I said okay. I said bye. She got in her car. I watched her drive away.
I never saw her again.
Here’s why. The next day I was on the couch, playing a video game, when I got a text from my ex-girlfriend. It said this: “Joker. Fuck.” She had just seen the movie Joker with her new boyfriend. I wrote back “hell yeah.” She came back, she seemed a little drunk. She went to the fridge. “Uh. Can I have one of your beers?” I said yeah. She came back to the couch. I turned the TV down a little bit. She said I didn’t have to. I said “how was Joker?” and we talked about Joker for a little bit. Then she said “how did your night go?” And I smiled an ugly smile because I have never even bothered to have a poker face about anything.
There are a few tributaries in my life that I will forever consider; I will always wish I had taken another branch. I will always wonder how much nicer my life could have been if I had. Here’s one of those branches: me not having a poker face in that moment. My ex-girlfriend knew exactly what my dumb smile meant. “No way,” she said. “Hell yeah,” I said, still smiling an idiot’s smile. She congratulated me. She said “Wow” a few times. She said she was happy for me. Then she paused for a second. She said “wait, where did you guys fuck?”
This is another branch: that I did not, in that moment, say “oh, uh. In her car,” or “oh, uh. At her house.” I did not know I would need to. So instead I said, “oh, uh. In the bed.” And my ex-girlfriend said “in our bed?” And I said “uh, yeah.” And she said “in my bed?” And I heard the change in her voice but I pretended I didn’t and said “uh, yeah.” And she said, laughing with an unnerving cruelty I knew she had chosen for its weight, “I’m really mad at you.” And I stopped playing the video game and said “whoa, wait, really?” And she said yes, and we started fighting.
My memory goes bad here. After this moment, I lose my once-prided ability to remember my life. I remember exactly what was on the TV screen the moment before I said “whoa, wait, really?” I do not remember a lot of the rest of my life.
Here are some things I do remember about that night. I remember the tone of her voice. It was thick with disgust, like contempt was dripping off of every shouted word. I remember backing up from her, acting without thinking, like a scared animal. I felt like a dog. She called me a dog. I remember why she was angry: because I had sex in her room, even though we shared the room. I had sex while her possessions watched. She yelled “my clothes are in there.” She was mad because she had spent a year making that room into hers, filled with her things, her artwork, paintings that she chose to be on the wall, things that she had measured and considered by their weight, and I had desecrated it. She used that word— I remember that. Desecrated. She brought up the time I had sex with the nameless girl. She told me to leave. I said “what, no.” She said she didn’t want me there. I said “why should I leave,” thinking of how my clothes were in there too, and how I had also spent a year making that room into mine, filled with my things, my artwork, paintings that I chose to be on the wall. She screamed so loud I jumped. She told me to go live with my “fuck girl” if I was going to “act like this.” I said I couldn’t— she lived with her parents. She said “I don’t care. You should have thought of that before sleeping with your little fuck girl.” That made me angry. I said “don’t call her a fuck girl.” She yelled that I don’t get to tell her what to call her. She yelled so loud I heard a dog bark outside. I wondered what our neighbors were thinking. She told me to get out. She said get the FUCK out, FUCK you.
She said "fuck you" to me, and I got mad, because it all felt ridiculous, and I still felt like I didn’t deserve it. I went to grab a coat, she said “what the fuck are you doing” and I said “I’m going to get a coat.” Then I yelled “because it’s fucking cold out there!” And she said “good, fuck you— FUCK YOU.” And I said “fuck you” back, for the first time. Not as loud, because I couldn’t make myself mean enough. She yelled “you do NOT get to say fuck you to ME,” and I thought about when, in college, a student said “fuck you” to a teacher and he replied “don’t say fuck you to me.” Then I put a jacket on and left the house.
It was cold in Pittsburgh in 2016 and the car window was cold in 2018 and it was cold on my couch the night before. It was never so cold as it was when I got outside. I walked south down our street. I turned west. I walked two blocks. I didn’t know where to go. I got scared. It was cold. It was too late to call my parents, I thought. I didn’t have any friends— all of my friends I got through my ex-girlfriend, I thought. It was too late to call S— and what the hell was I going to say to her, anyways? I got a text. It said “go and stay with your fuck girl I don’t want u here.” That made me mad. I didn’t know what to do. I started to walk back to the apartment. I got to our street. I crouched down, I snuck around to the side of the house, I tried to see if she was outside. I couldn’t see her. I heard a crashing sound. I panicked. I didn’t know what to do. I took tiny, terrified steps to the wall of our house. I went to the side gate. It had never been opened. I sat down in the dirt. I heard a scream come from inside. I put my head down on the ground. I felt dirt on my cheek. It was cold. I heard the back door open. I froze. I thought that I had never been that terrified in my entire life. I thought “this is the rest of my life; this is how I will feel for the rest of my life.” I heard my ex-girlfriend scream “fucking ASShole” into the night sky. I heard my ex-girlfriend scream “fucking piece of SHIT” into the night sky. I curled up tighter. I wondered if I could sleep there. I felt a rock pushing into my hip bone. I got a text, I looked at it. It said “why do you always think of your dick when you don’t even want one?” I stared at the word “always.” Then I heard the front door open.
I realized that I had been wrong, that it was actually very possible to be more terrified. My phone buzzed. People like to use the phrase “my heart stopped” to describe a lot of things but I promise to you that I truly, honestly felt my heart neglect to beat. It was my ex-girlfriend calling. I answered. I listened to her yell at me. I quietly said sorry to everything she said. She told me she thought about breaking the disc of the video game I was playing in half. I didn’t say anything. She called me a lot of names. I felt my head collect all those names. I felt my head get thick with the names she called me. My head hurt. I blinked. I felt dirt scrape against my face. She asked me how I could have done this to her, how I could be such a piece of shit to her after everything she’d been through. She said “you really never cared about me, did you?” I didn’t tell her about cleaning up her shit, or carrying her home, or looking in her eyes and seeing that she didn’t recognize me anymore. I didn’t say anything. She told me she never wanted to see me again. I said I understood. She told me I didn’t understand anything. I said sorry. She said fuck you and hung up. I stayed curled up in the dirt. I couldn’t move if I wanted to, and I didn’t want to. I smelled her cigarette smoke from the front porch. It smelled like violence. It reminded me of Pittsburgh.
I don’t know how long I was curled up in the dirt next to our apartment. I heard her go inside, I counted to ten, then I moved my cold bones and crept out of the dirt. I crossed the street. I could hear my heartbeat. I couldn’t hear anything else. I circled around the building across the street. I got another text. It said “i’m going to f—’s. fuck u. youd better not be there tomorrow.” I found a gap in a fence I could look through. The fence was cold. I watched the house. I heard a car pull up. I watched our front door open. I looked away, I didn’t want her to see me (as if I would disappear if I wasn't looking at her). I heard the car door shut. I looked back up. I watched the car pull away. I counted to one hundred. I went back inside.
It was cold in Pittsburgh in 2016 and the car window was cold in 2018 and it was cold on my couch in 2019 and it was cold in the dirt the next night and it was cold in my house when I walked back inside. The back door was left open. I saw that there were no sheets on the bed. They had been angrily half-stuffed into the washing machine. I walked to my desk. I half checked to see if she had broken anything, or spilled something on a drawing, or enacted some kind of violence. I felt disappointed when I saw that she didn’t. I needed violence. I needed something that felt more real than anything I had just experienced. I already felt myself losing trust in my own experience, in my own memory. I felt it slipping away. I had all the names she had just called me filling my head. I went to the liquor cabinet. I still had bourbon. I drank a couple of the names out of my head. I drank more. I laughed, but it felt wrong. I drank it all. I walked back to my desk. I grabbed an xacto blade off of the desk and took one swipe at my forearm. Blood came out, more than I had imagined, but it was a laughably small amount, so I laughed at it. I stopped laughing. I went to the bed. I sat on the bed. I felt like I didn’t deserve the bed. I grabbed some clothes out of my closet and stuffed them in a suitcase. I told myself I was going to leave the next day. I genuinely thought I would never come back. I went to the couch. I curled up on it. There was still dirt in my hair. It was cold.
I stayed at my parents for five days. My ex-girlfriend’s mom was visiting Albuquerque that week. I hadn’t seen her since Christmas of 2016. She brought her mom into the shop I worked at. I couldn’t understand why she thought she could do that, that it wouldn’t be weird if she did that. I had told my coworkers I had been curled up in the dirt. They felt bad for me. They looked at my ex-girlfriend with open mouths. They asked if I was okay. I told them I was fine. She left the shop. It was the last time I ever saw my ex-girlfriend’s mom. My dad picked me up from work. I didn’t tell him anything. Two days later my ex-girlfriend would say “I bet your coworkers are stupid enough to believe whatever you tell them.”
Two days later my ex-girlfriend texted me to remind me that friends of ours from Chicago were coming through on tour. I met them at the show. I said hello to my ex-girlfriend. She didn’t say anything to me. I said hello to our friends. They asked how I was doing. I said “man, I’ve just been really tired.” My friend said “yeah man, I bet we’ve been a lot more fuckin’ tired than you have.” I felt as bad as I felt angry. I didn’t say anything else. When we got back from the show we talked about it. I hadn’t been home in almost a week. My parents had said “she doesn’t get to tell you you have to leave the house,” and I agreed. I told my ex-girlfriend I thought she should leave. She said “fuck you,” and she told me how bad of a person I was. I watched her drink three beers as she told me all the ways I had been a terrible person. At a certain point in the conversation, I realized I believed her. I realized I couldn’t win the fight. She reminded me of the time I fucked a girl on her dad’s sofa. She told me I was always like this. She told me we were staying in this apartment and I was sleeping on the couch. Then she told me she was going to her boyfriend’s and left. I wrote “you know you have to do it” on the cover of the sketchbook I had smeared blood on five days earlier. I didn’t do it. I slept on the couch instead.
It was cold in Pittsburgh in 2016 and the car window was cold in 2018 and it was cold on my couch in 2019 and it was cold in the dirt the next night and it was cold in my house when I walked back inside and it was cold every night I slept on the couch. My ex-girlfriend would get home drunk, slam the metal door so hard it would open again. If I was awake on the couch when I heard her fumbling for her keys I would shut the book I was reading or slam my laptop shut and throw it under the couch. I would pretend to sleep. If I was awake I knew she would find a way to be angry at me. Three out of four times she got angry at me she would squint her eyes and say “and you fucked that girl." I remember the weight she gave to the word “fucked,” like she had taken it off the wall and made me look at it; like she hefted it in her hand and then threw it at me. If she came home, she came home drunk. She would leave the door open while I slept. I asked her to at least close the door, since the living room was effectively my bedroom now. She never did. A mouse got in to the house. I heard it walk around the house. I got jealous of the mouse. One night my ex-girlfriend got home a little more drunk than usual and left the door open and put her body over my body as I tried to sleep on the couch. I said “no” and she said “please” and I got off the couch and went into the bed. She followed me and tried to sleep on top of me in the bed. I said “come on” and went back to the couch. The door was still open. It was December of 2019.
I slept on the couch until March 2020.
March 2020, much like the year 2016, does not need an introduction. The air was thick with no one knowing anything. Then we all knew a lot. I got laid off from my job. It was a real job, it was the job I’d wanted in Albuquerque, not the job in a cafeteria under a school behind a hospital. I got that job in September 2019. I was curled up in the dirt three weeks later. I was proud of getting that job. I was happy to work there. I got laid off anyway. The day before I got laid off, a customer said when I handed him a to-go cup “this will be your generation’s greatest hoax after 9/11.”
My ex-girlfriend was in Pittsburgh when the virus really started to hit. She was supposed to go to Rome with her dad and his husband. They didn’t go to Rome. I thought she’d stay in Pittsburgh until June. Our lease was up in June, and we were both going to move out, to move away. She said she wanted to make sure her stuff was okay. I told her it would be fine. The week before she left for Pittsburgh I had told her that my mom had come by the apartment to put tape on the things she wanted of ours. My mom had given us most of our furniture. My mom wanted some of it back. She said we could sell the rest. My ex-girlfriend said “why the fuck would you do that?” I said “I thought we had discussed this.” We had definitely discussed this. She said “you always do this.” I didn’t know what she meant by that in this context. She started yelling at me, but I couldn’t figure out why this time. It felt like she didn’t know what else to do than yell at me. She used the phrase “you never cared about me, ever.” I didn’t know what she wanted me to say to that. She yelled “just tell me you never loved me” and I said “why would I do that” and she yelled “because you never fucking did” and I tried to say “that’s not true” because it wasn’t but she cut me off by screaming “just fucking tell me you never fucking cared about me” and I finally matched her yelling and said “fine. Fuck it— fine. I never cared about you. I never fucking cared about you. Are you happy?” and she said “fuck you. I’m going to F—’s.” And she walked out of the house. Two minutes later she walked back in and yelled “and you fucked that girl!” I blinked at her. It was a bad argument. Me having sex with S— didn’t have anything to do with “me letting my mom in the house to put tape on furniture.” It didn’t have to do with anything. I realized she was trying to make me feel bad for something that had made me feel good. It was the first time she had yelled at me and it did not work. She left the house. She didn’t come back. I felt tired. I felt excited to move out.
We had different reasons for wanting to move out. I never told her mine (because I didn’t want to sleep on the couch anymore, and because I was tired of being yelled at). She told me that she wanted to “come home” instead of staying in Pittsburgh. I told her that she was home. New Mexico had just put a quarantine on travelers. No one really knew what lockdowns were. No one really knew anything. I told my mom my ex-girlfriend was coming back to the apartment. She reminded me about the quarantine. I called my ex-girlfriend. I told her about the quarantine. She said “did your fucking mom just tell you that.” I said “no, I just read about it.” I didn’t want to be stuck in a house with her for ten days without being able to leave. I had been alone in the apartment for a week while she had been gone. I had gotten used to waking up in kind, warm sunlight, watching dust fall on the pillow next to me where no one's head was resting anymore. I liked walking to the bathroom and not fumbling to grab the right toothbrush. I liked standing in a barren house and not feeling afraid. I told myself “this has been the best week of my life” and I meant it but I did not stop to think about why that might have been. I told her I was going to stay with my parents while she quarantined in our apartment. My ex-girlfriend didn’t like this idea. I said it was safe and that the only people I really talked to (because most of my friends I got through my ex-girlfriend, and after I had sex with S— she told our friends that I was a piece of shit, and I didn’t know if they believed her or not, and she had told me my coworkers were idiots for believing what I told her, and I didn’t know if they believed me or not) were my parents, and they were in their 60s, it was safer. She told me she was scared to be alone. I told her she’d be fine. I said I’d be back after two weeks.
I never went back to that apartment.
The night before I went to my parents' house I stayed up until 4AM. I had a triple cheeseburger delivered from Burger King and I drank a third of a handle of cheap whiskey out of a plastic bottle. It tasted like vanilla. I sat silently in bed, watching a video called “The Weeknd — Blinding Lights — One Hour.” I watched that video five times in a row without really realizing it. My head was still filled with all the words my ex-girlfriend had ever called me. I thought about the sketchbook in the living room that said “you know you have to do it.” I didn’t do it. The next morning my dad came to pick me up and said “is that everything?” and I didn’t know what he meant. They knew I wasn’t going back. That was their plan the whole time; to get me out of that apartment. I didn’t believe that I had the choice.
My ex-girlfriend did not take well to quarantine. She called me at least once every single day. I wondered why she didn't call her new boyfriend. She sounded increasingly drunk every time she did. That's probably why she didn't call her new boyfriend. I always took her calls. I was too afraid not to. One day she called me at 10:30AM sounding drunker than I’d heard her in a while. “You know what?” she said. I said “uh, what?” She said “you’re always going to be my best friend. You’re going to be in my life forever.” It sounded like a threat. Eventually she started calling me later at night. I stopped answering those. It was April 2020. I had been staying at my parents’ house for almost a month.
Here’s the last time I talked on the phone with my ex-girlfriend’s dad. One night my ex-girlfriend called me six times at 5AM. I turned my phone off. The next day I turned it back on and listened to the voicemail she had left at 6AM. It was her wailing, drunk, telling me she couldn’t do it. I called her. She told me she “couldn’t make it.” She hung up. I went out to the kitchen. My parents were watching Tennis. I didn’t know what to do. I told them I didn’t know what to do. They told me she needed to get out of there. They asked if there was anyone else I could call. I thought about her new boyfriend. I didn't have his number. I didn't have her dad's husband's number. I didn't have her mom's number. I knew I had to call her dad. I didn’t want to call her dad. I didn’t know what else to do. I remembered the time she had drank so much she gave herself a panic attack and then took a klonopin to calm her nerves and then felt her heart slowing. She looked at me from the couch and asked if she should go to the hospital. I said “yeah, probably.” She asked me if I hated her. I said “the only way I would hate you is if you died.” She started crying. She was crying when she told me she "couldn't make it" through quarantine. I believed her. I went to the backyard. I called her dad. I didn’t want her to die. I was shaking as I dialed his number. I told him what she had told me. I said she needed to get home. He said he’d talk to her. He hung up. He called back ten minutes later. He told me she’d be coming home in a week. I thanked him.
Ten minutes after that, my ex-girlfriend called me. She said “you called my dad.” She thanked me. Four hours later she called me back. She said “fuck you.” I said “what? Why.” She said “why won’t you come down here?” And I said “you know why. There’s a plague. I’m with my parents.” She said “fuck you. I don’t know why you won’t come down here. Are you coming down here?” And I said “no.” And she said “if you don’t come down here, I’m going to kill myself.” I hung up. I screamed. I had never felt so much pressure in my skull as right then. I ran into the kitchen. I yelled “I can’t do this anymore.” I punched the wall. I bruised my knuckles. I told them what she had just said to me. I cried. They looked fed up with having to deal with someone who would hurt their child this much, this often. My dad texted her dad. My dad told her dad what my ex-girlfriend had told me. Her dad texted one reply: “she’s just upset that they broke up.”
That was the last time I talked to her dad, the 2nd worst person I’ve ever met in my life. The last time I talked to the worst person I’ve ever met in my life came a little later. After that last day, I had turned my phone off for a week; even looking at it terrified me. Eventually I turned it back on just long enough to block my ex-girlfriends number and any other way she had to contact me. Two months later I needed to figure out if she had moved out of the apartment because I needed move the rest of my things out, so I unblocked her number. I saw there was a voicemail from that morning. I listened to it, shaking— I could barely hear the message over the sound of my pounding heart. She said she had just gotten out of a detox center. She couldn’t find a ride home. I called her back. I was too late to offer her a ride (I wouldn’t have anyways, nor would my dad have agreed to give her one), but I still wanted to congratulate her. I meant it; it sounded like she'd done a genuine good thing. She said she’d call me back later that night.
It was 9PM when she called me back. I went on a walk to hide the fact I was talking to her. I didn’t want my parents to know. It was May 2020. There were cicadas singing outside. They were loud. There was still a little bit of blue in the sky. We ran out of things to say really quick. There were a lot of long silences. I could only hear the static of the phone and the buzz of the flies and the hum of the streetlights. I said “do you have someone taking care of you?” Another long, static-filled pause. She said, quietly, “well, F— right now… and then… you know… you.” I didn’t say anything for a while. I didn’t know what to say. Then I knew exactly what to say. I said “you know… I’m not coming back. I’m staying here.” She didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything. All I could hear was flies buzzing. I looked at the phone to see if she’d hung up. She hadn’t hung up. A streetlight hummed. It was orange. When I walked under it, she said to me, “you must feel really vindicated, don’t you?” I stopped walking.
I said “no. I’m just glad you’re getting help.”
She said “no you’re not.”
I said “yes, I am. And that’s it.”
She hung up.
It was cold in Pittsburgh in 2016 and the car window was cold in 2018 and it was cold on my couch in 2019 and it was cold in the dirt the next day and it was cold when I walked back in the house and it was cold on the couch that I slept on until March 2020. Now it was May 2020, and it was warm outside.
I walked home.
This story serves as a companion piece to an album called The Nuclear Age. The album is another way of pulling at the thread of memory that entails “when I lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico.” This story adds to that, it builds around it, it adds more threads to the particular knot of memory. It’s not meant to “help,” nor is it really meant to change the experience of listening to the album. It’s more of a marker for myself; to remember, to chalk the outline of the years I spent threading the details of a life into my little head. It is my life and it is what it is, I hope no one can ever change that.
“I’m just thinking about it.”