I decided to study English in college because I wanted to be a writer. I took a creative writing course early (my 2nd semester) in poetry, got really fed up with the experience and put away writing for good. Now (in my 50th semester) I decided to take the plunge again before I graduate to see maybe if I wanted to pursue writing in my graduate studies and enrolled in a fiction writing course.
My course work for that class is a story every other week, with the end goal of the course being 25,000 words over seven stories. We don't do editing or revising, just creating new works so this is completely unrevised from the period of time that I wrote it, which started about 8 hours before the class after the class it was due started.
It's pretty cool, except that we don't do anything like workshopping or helping revising or any of that since we are really centered on the whole beginning of the creative process and getting things down. This cuts my readership down to two people, my professor and my bff, so I'm sort of hoping to get this out there for critique.
It's a pretty blatant plagiarism of Eliot, but that's sort of my things:::
Lamb
I don't want to die I don't want to die I don't want to die “I don't want to die,” the words escaping my lungs impossibly, being crushed by the weight of the half million tons of water drowning me- I don't want to die escaping, my hope, that last shred of light that I could cling onto in life, forming bubble that rush towards the surface to explode and join the rest of me, or what will be the rest of me after this ***** bites my head off and rends me limb from limb, replaced by that realization, that slowly dawning realization that starts to black out the edges of your eyes that you know, you know you are going to die.
So when the light comes back down, and I can see it and I can hold my hands out to reach for it-- when I can see figures on the surface with the light now piercing below distorted by the waves above, I am a little surprised. Surprised by the clearness of the water, by the air in my lungs, by the life still in my body. Curious.
***
In a winter a long time ago when it was cold and gray I ventured down into the basement of my grandparents house. It was a narrow house, on a narrow street, on a steep incline-- I mean the whole house just felt cramped. Even as a child I felt that there wasn't enough room, from the telephone booth sized foyer to the tightly wound staircase to the second floor, to the kitchen where I could barely move around the table. It felt like that only chance I got to breathe was the dining room, but even then the dim-lit space felt too small. The staircase going to the attic bedroom was claustrophobic, and every time I think about it I get the impression of balancing a stack of encyclopedias on my head, and a bowl of cereal, or being a hammer headed shark-- not so much a real idea or something that could be put into real words but just a feeling, something like how water must feel when a glass can't hold it and it spills over the sides. I felt as though I was a pitcher of water, and that this house was the top of a pyramid of glasses, and that I was being poured into this house and that I couldn't fit inside and now I was spilling over down into the rest of life, the other glasses but no matter what I was still in this glass and no matter what this glass was still filled.
So that winter, on a cold and gray day I poured myself into that house and I found myself in the basement. It was a Sunday-- I know it was a Sunday because I had been to church that morning and I could still hear the sermon in my head-- like a lamb returning to the fold. That winter, on a cold and gray day I poured myself into that house, and I found myself in the basement like a lamb, returning to the fold. Here I was, at the bottom of the world, the end of the glasses-- I could be poured no more and I was like a lamb, returning to the fold on that cold dark day not knowing how many cold dark days would come.
***
"Hey, Bee, what do you think of this," I asked, my hair parted in an unusual direction, "Do you think that this would look alright?"
She shot me an exasperated look. "Oh, I don't know."
I shifted my hair to a new direction. "How about this?"
She rolled her eyes.
"How about my pants then? Cuffed or not? I never know what to wear for these things."
No response.
"I don't like these people. I don't even know these people, why are we even going?" I asked, knowing already the question was in vain.
As she was finishing up her hair I asked, "Are you even listening?"
Still without a response, I moved in closer to kiss her neck. And then-- and then what happens next?
***
I remember when we first started seeing each other-- I remember our first date. I remember the first time we walked on the beach, with the sand between our toes and the waves washing gently across the shore. I remember the gulls and the pier, I remember the clouds that day, and the sun, and I remember those eyes that stared at me and I remember her asking me to kiss her, and I remember that figure, that dark shadow looming in the distance. Like the smoke of a fire. I remember how the sun set on that day and I still hadn't tasted her lips. I remember this love, this love that is shaped the same as my grandparents house-- narrow and too small and claustrophobic and I am being poured in, and I feel myself filling the glass and I am at the point at which I can no longer hold myself in, and that irreversible irrevocable process of spilling over was about to happen. These days that I could admire the angle at which the sun hit her face in the morning soon I would be falling from, and falling into that basement, like a lamb returning to the fold, like a lamb returning to the fold.
I don't know how it was, but together we were more far apart than any two people could ever dream. We were trapped inside this house together, and there was no leaving it. There was no vacation from our life or our love-- and like a flower watered too much we were drowning. It was as if there was no world outside of our house, that there was no world outside of us. On one edge of the universe I sat, and at the opposing she, and in between us there was an entire universe but outside of us there was nothing-- nothing but waste and void.
***
"I can practically see the paint peeling off the walls. I mean, don't get me wrong I'm not trying to say that it's cheap or that it's rundown or that I don't like it but I can just feel the vibration of all these fake particles just buzzing around like some sort of crazy theoretical physicist meets mad marionette movie where the grand unifying theory of everything is that we are all just a bunch of puppets and all the universe is the god damn strings pulling as around vibrating or whatever."
I get a little talkative after a few drinks. My partner in crime, I don't even remember her name, sits across, her eyes in complete attention.
"I know what you mean," she says, but she doesn't. "These people here are all so fake, they are all hiding behind this facade, like it's not even their true faces. Most of these people probably spent hours preening in front of the mirror for this thing and I mean, what is it even for?"
In the corner of my eye through the doorway into the kitchen I can see Bee. Smiling, talking, laughing.
"Hey, do you want another drink," my companion asks, and without even waiting for an answer she takes my glass into the kitchen. The chatter in the room, people coming and going, entering the room, leaving a conversation, going to another room, joining another conversation, transforms from a crowd of distinct voices to a low buzz to nothing. I watch her fill the glass, and as I watch it rise in the glass slowly, steadily, it spills over.
***
We first met in high school. Both of us were in the theatre program. I joined because I thought it sounded better than an introductory typing and business spreadsheet writing course, and that maybe it would look good on a college resume to be involved in something, and her I guess because she liked acting. Bee didn't catch my eye at first-- she's not that kind of attractive in that someone would see her and pick her out from a crowd, she is not the perfect, most ripe fruit on the tree that nearly picks itself. That's not to say she isn't beautiful. A more appropriate comparison would be that she is the kind of beautiful that the Earth is-- something that you can appreciate and recognize, something you can celebrate and cherish and love, but something that until you see it rise from behind the Moon, until you can see the reflection of its beauty not from your perspective but from this new, otherworldly perspective, that you can't possibly fathom how deep her beauty and majesty is. That is to say, I didn't notice her until our schools production of Hamlet, where she played Ophelia.
A more appropriate love story would have me play across from her, as Hamlet. "To be or not to be," I would ask on stage, and in my heart asking "Is this love to be, or not to be" and being able to be close to her, to be able to hold her. Or perhaps as Laertes, and behind the scenes is a forbidden love boiling betwixt us. However, I was in charge of the lights. Of course, had I not been in charge of the lights then I would never have seen that reflection of her beauty-- I would never have been able to leave the Earth and fly among the stars and catch a glimpse that glimpse of her-- and I never would have been able to see her face illuminated by a certain angle of the morning sun.
It wasn't until years later, until after we had graduated, until both of us were nearly finished with university that I managed to get the courage to ask her out. And then that day, on the beach...
***
When I graduated from university I received, as a gift from Bee, an antique gun. It wasn't any old antique gun either-- it was an old Colt .45 pistol, like the ones cowboys used to have. I always had a thing for cowboys and Indians and that sort of thing, and the gun was just so beautiful. That night we went out, for a romantic dinner as a sort of celebration of everything coming to a close, and we started to talk about plans, plans for the future. Going to graduate school, taking a year off, getting a job, getting an internship, traveling, there was just so much that we wanted to do and as the evening began extend itself into the morning and as we walked the streets of our neighborhood and the park it becoming more and more clear that despite the fact that the distance between us, our physical selves, our hands could be represented by zero, that there was no way we could possibly be closer that we were so far apart and were hurtling away from each other and the speed of light.
"I don't know what were going to do," Bee said, "Our plans for the future take us in completely opposite directions."
"I know."
"And I'm not going to ask you to change what you want to do just to come with me, and I'm not going to change what I want to do or who I am just to be with you, but I don't want to give this up."
We were sitting in the cool grass of the park, my arms around her and us just watching the sky.
"It's not just a matter of years, either. Our plans for the present future are going in different directions, and our plans after that go even further, and then our final goals are completely separate-- I just don't see those lines ever really coming back together again."
I wasn't really sure what to say. I didn't even know what I could say to that. You're right and everything is doomed? We can make it work as long as we try? Were we supposed to compromise ourselves for each other, just so we could be together? Is that what love is?
Is love even worth it?
"Honeybee, how about this: we both take some time off, get jobs here and stay together for a while longer and just see how things go? We don't need to rush off just yet, we are still young and we still have time to do whatever we want to do in the future. There will be a time when we might have to move on, but for right now let's just enjoy ourselves."
She just looked into the horizon. The sun was rising.
"**** it. I don't care about anything else I just want to love you and be with you forever and hold you and I don't ever want to let go. I want to have little Bee children running around and I don't care what it means I have to sacrifice to make it work because more than anything else in the world all I want is you and all that matters to me is you and will you marry me?"
The way that the morning sun illuminates her face in the morning, it finds the perfect angle and suddenly just lights up and is the most beautiful thing on the planet-- I saw her face then and I could feel the glass filling and I knew that this was the last moment that I would have, as if when the sun set next that it would set forever and it would leave the world a cold, dark, lifeless place.
***
We didn't get married, but she did decide to stay. We started to live together, and with our new jobs we could afford a place that was nice. Well, not nice but not ****ty. I would send articles off to magazines in hopes that they would publish something, while she worked for some corporation "in the private sector," doing I don't even know what she did. We made an alright living, and we got to go out and do things when we had time off. We would play games together, and spend time together, but it always felt like there was something there. Something between us that just persisted and never left us alone. Across the table we would sit from each other, and no matter what size the table was it would seem miles across, and she would become so distant that I could hardly even see the speck of her in the horizon.
It wasn't all bad. I still loved her, and I still thought she was beautiful, and I'm pretty sure she still loved me, it was just that life had taken hold of us and we weren't carefree kids anymore. The memories we had together in our early years we would cherish forever, but now we were going at life in a different way, one that gave us responsibilities and obligations outside of one another. We had worries and problems and we felt vulnerable and alone and afraid and we were past the point where just each other's love could solve that. I understood that that's how things had to go, that that's how things go for everyone. It's just that I couldn't help but feel robbed, or lost.
I would envision life as this pyramid of glasses, and slowly, through mediation, I would will myself upward, starting from the bottom glasses and jumping upward to the previous level, going and going and going until I was able to hop into the last glass, the very top glass where everything would be contained and I wouldn't have to worry about the whole pyramid and falling down and overfilling or spilling, that it would just be that one glass, and the ecstasy that I felt through this gave me so much focus and resolve that I just went through it. Every day was a battle with life and every day I jumped back up into that first glass, and slowly back into the pitcher, like a lamb returning to the fold, I would tell myself, like a lamb returning to the fold. Like a lamb returning to the fold.
Not much later, when Bee was bringing in the mail one evening, she gave me an envelope that contained a letter that told me that my grandparents had died.
***
After everything was said and done, I had inherited the house and a large sum of money. Back in our old apartment, me and Bee sat across from each other at the table at dinner, where we started to talk plans.
"We should sell the house. We could use the money for something else. It's not like you have any need for that house anyway, we have jobs here and an apartment and all this stuff."
"I don't want to sell the house."
"What do you mean you don't want to sell the house?"
"I don't want to sell the house. That's it."
"That's it? So you just want to have it sit there and rot into the ground? If we sell the house then we can put some money into savings, or invest it, or get a house here, or a million other things than just let it sit there."
All of these real-life responsibilities. These obligations. I could feel myself dripping onto the table, onto the floor but there were still glasses there to catch me, no matter how far down I got there was always something. I tried to breathe, I tried to get myself back into the pitcher, like a lamb returning to the fold, but I couldn't anymore. I couldn't and I knew why.
"I want to live there."
"What?"
"I want to live in my grandparents old house. I want to move and get rid of all of this and I want to live a new life. You can transfer, can't you? Or you can get a new job, we could figure something out. Even if not right away we'll still have enough money anyway."
Bee just stared at me.
"It's just I've given up so much for this to work. I've tried so hard and now I've lost some of the last family I have left and I feel like I can't catch a break and I feel like we've been drifting apart and I'm afraid. I'm afraid I can see this all just breaking down and destroying itself in slow motion and I don't want that to happen I just want things to be how they were I just want things to be how they used to be I don't want this life anymore I want us to have a new life I want you I want you back to how we were."
Still just staring in the dead of the night, the moon outside shining down, the stars and the waste and void the night a twisted, perverse night that we'd had before, two points on opposite each other this invisible boundary and those eyes, still staring, frozen in time, and in space.
And me, like a lamb returning to the fold.
***
"So what is it that you do for a living," asks my companion as she returns with my drink. I am still eyeing Bee in the kitchen, and when I shift my attention back to this woman I take my glass quickly and take a drink.
"I write things," I tell her, "like reviews for movies and music and restaurants and just living around in the city in general."
"Oh, that sounds interesting. Have you written something recently that I might have read?"
"I did a piece for one of the local papers recently about the new exhibit at the art museum downtown, did you see that?"
"Oh, yes, I think I did. It's such a lovely museum," She hadn't, and it's not, "They have some of my favorite paintings there."
"Yes, it is a very nice museum," I respond, not willing to press the issue.
Meanwhile my companion sees someone that she recognizes, excuses herself, and leaves.
Outside of the host's window, I can see the city lights. A yellow haze is in the air. The paint is peeling. In one corner of my eye through the door into the kitchen I can see Bee, smiling, talking, laughing, and in the other I can see my companions legs going up and up and up like how I wish I could be.
***
I am sitting in the basement when Bee opens the door and calls down, "I'm going to take a nap before the party, can you wake me up in an hour or so?" I tell her, yes, I can, and I tell her, yes, I will, and the door shuts behind her and I can hear her on the staircase. I'm in the basement, again, like a lamb returning to the fold. My antique Colt .45, the one that Bee gave to me after graduating, the gun I hung on the mantelpiece, is in my hands and I don't know if it can still fire but I think that it is contemplating it. I think back to how beautiful Ophelia looked from the stars, with the light twinkling down on stage. "To be or not to be," goes through my head and I laugh silently to myself-- I am not Prince Hamlet.
Slowly, gun in hand, I go up to our room, the attic bedroom on the third floor, staircase after staircase after staircase in that narrow god forsaken house, and I sit in a chair next to the bed, where Bee is sleeping. The sun is all wrong on her face, and for a moment I try to imagine what she would be like spread out against the sky.
My course work for that class is a story every other week, with the end goal of the course being 25,000 words over seven stories. We don't do editing or revising, just creating new works so this is completely unrevised from the period of time that I wrote it, which started about 8 hours before the class after the class it was due started.
It's pretty cool, except that we don't do anything like workshopping or helping revising or any of that since we are really centered on the whole beginning of the creative process and getting things down. This cuts my readership down to two people, my professor and my bff, so I'm sort of hoping to get this out there for critique.
It's a pretty blatant plagiarism of Eliot, but that's sort of my things:::
Lamb
I don't want to die I don't want to die I don't want to die “I don't want to die,” the words escaping my lungs impossibly, being crushed by the weight of the half million tons of water drowning me- I don't want to die escaping, my hope, that last shred of light that I could cling onto in life, forming bubble that rush towards the surface to explode and join the rest of me, or what will be the rest of me after this ***** bites my head off and rends me limb from limb, replaced by that realization, that slowly dawning realization that starts to black out the edges of your eyes that you know, you know you are going to die.
So when the light comes back down, and I can see it and I can hold my hands out to reach for it-- when I can see figures on the surface with the light now piercing below distorted by the waves above, I am a little surprised. Surprised by the clearness of the water, by the air in my lungs, by the life still in my body. Curious.
***
In a winter a long time ago when it was cold and gray I ventured down into the basement of my grandparents house. It was a narrow house, on a narrow street, on a steep incline-- I mean the whole house just felt cramped. Even as a child I felt that there wasn't enough room, from the telephone booth sized foyer to the tightly wound staircase to the second floor, to the kitchen where I could barely move around the table. It felt like that only chance I got to breathe was the dining room, but even then the dim-lit space felt too small. The staircase going to the attic bedroom was claustrophobic, and every time I think about it I get the impression of balancing a stack of encyclopedias on my head, and a bowl of cereal, or being a hammer headed shark-- not so much a real idea or something that could be put into real words but just a feeling, something like how water must feel when a glass can't hold it and it spills over the sides. I felt as though I was a pitcher of water, and that this house was the top of a pyramid of glasses, and that I was being poured into this house and that I couldn't fit inside and now I was spilling over down into the rest of life, the other glasses but no matter what I was still in this glass and no matter what this glass was still filled.
So that winter, on a cold and gray day I poured myself into that house and I found myself in the basement. It was a Sunday-- I know it was a Sunday because I had been to church that morning and I could still hear the sermon in my head-- like a lamb returning to the fold. That winter, on a cold and gray day I poured myself into that house, and I found myself in the basement like a lamb, returning to the fold. Here I was, at the bottom of the world, the end of the glasses-- I could be poured no more and I was like a lamb, returning to the fold on that cold dark day not knowing how many cold dark days would come.
***
"Hey, Bee, what do you think of this," I asked, my hair parted in an unusual direction, "Do you think that this would look alright?"
She shot me an exasperated look. "Oh, I don't know."
I shifted my hair to a new direction. "How about this?"
She rolled her eyes.
"How about my pants then? Cuffed or not? I never know what to wear for these things."
No response.
"I don't like these people. I don't even know these people, why are we even going?" I asked, knowing already the question was in vain.
As she was finishing up her hair I asked, "Are you even listening?"
Still without a response, I moved in closer to kiss her neck. And then-- and then what happens next?
***
I remember when we first started seeing each other-- I remember our first date. I remember the first time we walked on the beach, with the sand between our toes and the waves washing gently across the shore. I remember the gulls and the pier, I remember the clouds that day, and the sun, and I remember those eyes that stared at me and I remember her asking me to kiss her, and I remember that figure, that dark shadow looming in the distance. Like the smoke of a fire. I remember how the sun set on that day and I still hadn't tasted her lips. I remember this love, this love that is shaped the same as my grandparents house-- narrow and too small and claustrophobic and I am being poured in, and I feel myself filling the glass and I am at the point at which I can no longer hold myself in, and that irreversible irrevocable process of spilling over was about to happen. These days that I could admire the angle at which the sun hit her face in the morning soon I would be falling from, and falling into that basement, like a lamb returning to the fold, like a lamb returning to the fold.
I don't know how it was, but together we were more far apart than any two people could ever dream. We were trapped inside this house together, and there was no leaving it. There was no vacation from our life or our love-- and like a flower watered too much we were drowning. It was as if there was no world outside of our house, that there was no world outside of us. On one edge of the universe I sat, and at the opposing she, and in between us there was an entire universe but outside of us there was nothing-- nothing but waste and void.
***
"I can practically see the paint peeling off the walls. I mean, don't get me wrong I'm not trying to say that it's cheap or that it's rundown or that I don't like it but I can just feel the vibration of all these fake particles just buzzing around like some sort of crazy theoretical physicist meets mad marionette movie where the grand unifying theory of everything is that we are all just a bunch of puppets and all the universe is the god damn strings pulling as around vibrating or whatever."
I get a little talkative after a few drinks. My partner in crime, I don't even remember her name, sits across, her eyes in complete attention.
"I know what you mean," she says, but she doesn't. "These people here are all so fake, they are all hiding behind this facade, like it's not even their true faces. Most of these people probably spent hours preening in front of the mirror for this thing and I mean, what is it even for?"
In the corner of my eye through the doorway into the kitchen I can see Bee. Smiling, talking, laughing.
"Hey, do you want another drink," my companion asks, and without even waiting for an answer she takes my glass into the kitchen. The chatter in the room, people coming and going, entering the room, leaving a conversation, going to another room, joining another conversation, transforms from a crowd of distinct voices to a low buzz to nothing. I watch her fill the glass, and as I watch it rise in the glass slowly, steadily, it spills over.
***
We first met in high school. Both of us were in the theatre program. I joined because I thought it sounded better than an introductory typing and business spreadsheet writing course, and that maybe it would look good on a college resume to be involved in something, and her I guess because she liked acting. Bee didn't catch my eye at first-- she's not that kind of attractive in that someone would see her and pick her out from a crowd, she is not the perfect, most ripe fruit on the tree that nearly picks itself. That's not to say she isn't beautiful. A more appropriate comparison would be that she is the kind of beautiful that the Earth is-- something that you can appreciate and recognize, something you can celebrate and cherish and love, but something that until you see it rise from behind the Moon, until you can see the reflection of its beauty not from your perspective but from this new, otherworldly perspective, that you can't possibly fathom how deep her beauty and majesty is. That is to say, I didn't notice her until our schools production of Hamlet, where she played Ophelia.
A more appropriate love story would have me play across from her, as Hamlet. "To be or not to be," I would ask on stage, and in my heart asking "Is this love to be, or not to be" and being able to be close to her, to be able to hold her. Or perhaps as Laertes, and behind the scenes is a forbidden love boiling betwixt us. However, I was in charge of the lights. Of course, had I not been in charge of the lights then I would never have seen that reflection of her beauty-- I would never have been able to leave the Earth and fly among the stars and catch a glimpse that glimpse of her-- and I never would have been able to see her face illuminated by a certain angle of the morning sun.
It wasn't until years later, until after we had graduated, until both of us were nearly finished with university that I managed to get the courage to ask her out. And then that day, on the beach...
***
When I graduated from university I received, as a gift from Bee, an antique gun. It wasn't any old antique gun either-- it was an old Colt .45 pistol, like the ones cowboys used to have. I always had a thing for cowboys and Indians and that sort of thing, and the gun was just so beautiful. That night we went out, for a romantic dinner as a sort of celebration of everything coming to a close, and we started to talk about plans, plans for the future. Going to graduate school, taking a year off, getting a job, getting an internship, traveling, there was just so much that we wanted to do and as the evening began extend itself into the morning and as we walked the streets of our neighborhood and the park it becoming more and more clear that despite the fact that the distance between us, our physical selves, our hands could be represented by zero, that there was no way we could possibly be closer that we were so far apart and were hurtling away from each other and the speed of light.
"I don't know what were going to do," Bee said, "Our plans for the future take us in completely opposite directions."
"I know."
"And I'm not going to ask you to change what you want to do just to come with me, and I'm not going to change what I want to do or who I am just to be with you, but I don't want to give this up."
We were sitting in the cool grass of the park, my arms around her and us just watching the sky.
"It's not just a matter of years, either. Our plans for the present future are going in different directions, and our plans after that go even further, and then our final goals are completely separate-- I just don't see those lines ever really coming back together again."
I wasn't really sure what to say. I didn't even know what I could say to that. You're right and everything is doomed? We can make it work as long as we try? Were we supposed to compromise ourselves for each other, just so we could be together? Is that what love is?
Is love even worth it?
"Honeybee, how about this: we both take some time off, get jobs here and stay together for a while longer and just see how things go? We don't need to rush off just yet, we are still young and we still have time to do whatever we want to do in the future. There will be a time when we might have to move on, but for right now let's just enjoy ourselves."
She just looked into the horizon. The sun was rising.
"**** it. I don't care about anything else I just want to love you and be with you forever and hold you and I don't ever want to let go. I want to have little Bee children running around and I don't care what it means I have to sacrifice to make it work because more than anything else in the world all I want is you and all that matters to me is you and will you marry me?"
The way that the morning sun illuminates her face in the morning, it finds the perfect angle and suddenly just lights up and is the most beautiful thing on the planet-- I saw her face then and I could feel the glass filling and I knew that this was the last moment that I would have, as if when the sun set next that it would set forever and it would leave the world a cold, dark, lifeless place.
***
We didn't get married, but she did decide to stay. We started to live together, and with our new jobs we could afford a place that was nice. Well, not nice but not ****ty. I would send articles off to magazines in hopes that they would publish something, while she worked for some corporation "in the private sector," doing I don't even know what she did. We made an alright living, and we got to go out and do things when we had time off. We would play games together, and spend time together, but it always felt like there was something there. Something between us that just persisted and never left us alone. Across the table we would sit from each other, and no matter what size the table was it would seem miles across, and she would become so distant that I could hardly even see the speck of her in the horizon.
It wasn't all bad. I still loved her, and I still thought she was beautiful, and I'm pretty sure she still loved me, it was just that life had taken hold of us and we weren't carefree kids anymore. The memories we had together in our early years we would cherish forever, but now we were going at life in a different way, one that gave us responsibilities and obligations outside of one another. We had worries and problems and we felt vulnerable and alone and afraid and we were past the point where just each other's love could solve that. I understood that that's how things had to go, that that's how things go for everyone. It's just that I couldn't help but feel robbed, or lost.
I would envision life as this pyramid of glasses, and slowly, through mediation, I would will myself upward, starting from the bottom glasses and jumping upward to the previous level, going and going and going until I was able to hop into the last glass, the very top glass where everything would be contained and I wouldn't have to worry about the whole pyramid and falling down and overfilling or spilling, that it would just be that one glass, and the ecstasy that I felt through this gave me so much focus and resolve that I just went through it. Every day was a battle with life and every day I jumped back up into that first glass, and slowly back into the pitcher, like a lamb returning to the fold, I would tell myself, like a lamb returning to the fold. Like a lamb returning to the fold.
Not much later, when Bee was bringing in the mail one evening, she gave me an envelope that contained a letter that told me that my grandparents had died.
***
After everything was said and done, I had inherited the house and a large sum of money. Back in our old apartment, me and Bee sat across from each other at the table at dinner, where we started to talk plans.
"We should sell the house. We could use the money for something else. It's not like you have any need for that house anyway, we have jobs here and an apartment and all this stuff."
"I don't want to sell the house."
"What do you mean you don't want to sell the house?"
"I don't want to sell the house. That's it."
"That's it? So you just want to have it sit there and rot into the ground? If we sell the house then we can put some money into savings, or invest it, or get a house here, or a million other things than just let it sit there."
All of these real-life responsibilities. These obligations. I could feel myself dripping onto the table, onto the floor but there were still glasses there to catch me, no matter how far down I got there was always something. I tried to breathe, I tried to get myself back into the pitcher, like a lamb returning to the fold, but I couldn't anymore. I couldn't and I knew why.
"I want to live there."
"What?"
"I want to live in my grandparents old house. I want to move and get rid of all of this and I want to live a new life. You can transfer, can't you? Or you can get a new job, we could figure something out. Even if not right away we'll still have enough money anyway."
Bee just stared at me.
"It's just I've given up so much for this to work. I've tried so hard and now I've lost some of the last family I have left and I feel like I can't catch a break and I feel like we've been drifting apart and I'm afraid. I'm afraid I can see this all just breaking down and destroying itself in slow motion and I don't want that to happen I just want things to be how they were I just want things to be how they used to be I don't want this life anymore I want us to have a new life I want you I want you back to how we were."
Still just staring in the dead of the night, the moon outside shining down, the stars and the waste and void the night a twisted, perverse night that we'd had before, two points on opposite each other this invisible boundary and those eyes, still staring, frozen in time, and in space.
And me, like a lamb returning to the fold.
***
"So what is it that you do for a living," asks my companion as she returns with my drink. I am still eyeing Bee in the kitchen, and when I shift my attention back to this woman I take my glass quickly and take a drink.
"I write things," I tell her, "like reviews for movies and music and restaurants and just living around in the city in general."
"Oh, that sounds interesting. Have you written something recently that I might have read?"
"I did a piece for one of the local papers recently about the new exhibit at the art museum downtown, did you see that?"
"Oh, yes, I think I did. It's such a lovely museum," She hadn't, and it's not, "They have some of my favorite paintings there."
"Yes, it is a very nice museum," I respond, not willing to press the issue.
Meanwhile my companion sees someone that she recognizes, excuses herself, and leaves.
Outside of the host's window, I can see the city lights. A yellow haze is in the air. The paint is peeling. In one corner of my eye through the door into the kitchen I can see Bee, smiling, talking, laughing, and in the other I can see my companions legs going up and up and up like how I wish I could be.
***
I am sitting in the basement when Bee opens the door and calls down, "I'm going to take a nap before the party, can you wake me up in an hour or so?" I tell her, yes, I can, and I tell her, yes, I will, and the door shuts behind her and I can hear her on the staircase. I'm in the basement, again, like a lamb returning to the fold. My antique Colt .45, the one that Bee gave to me after graduating, the gun I hung on the mantelpiece, is in my hands and I don't know if it can still fire but I think that it is contemplating it. I think back to how beautiful Ophelia looked from the stars, with the light twinkling down on stage. "To be or not to be," goes through my head and I laugh silently to myself-- I am not Prince Hamlet.
Slowly, gun in hand, I go up to our room, the attic bedroom on the third floor, staircase after staircase after staircase in that narrow god forsaken house, and I sit in a chair next to the bed, where Bee is sleeping. The sun is all wrong on her face, and for a moment I try to imagine what she would be like spread out against the sky.
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