I wish I could lose all inhibitions.  I want to dance in front of three-hundred people.  I want to be the only one dancing.  Not performing, just not caring.  I dream of wearing red socks with purple shoes.  Or purple socks in red sandals.  I want to rock Euro swimwear on American beaches.  Sport a Mohawk when I’m fifty, handlebar mustache below impeccably groomed uni-brow.  I long to talk loud in restaurants and not be concerned about the intrusive ears of other diners.  I will be fat, skinny, drunk, straight-edge, unbelievably gorgeous, irretrievably homely, boisterous, flamboyant, pointed at or ignored, and I won’t give a fleeting thought as to the opinion of others.

Dahlia says she doesn’t want a boyfriend.  It’s true.  She doesn’t.

I mumble.  I’m a low talker.  I sit in corners and post up against walls.  Observe from shadows, stay out of the way.  I’m embarrassed about my shyness, afraid to expose a private persona in public places. Acquaintances label me as serious, stern.  Usually they modify the terms with ‘too’ or ‘so.’   As in: ‘Why are you always so serious?’  I make my way to the sides of classrooms, the edges of bars, hang out in the back of theaters.  I do not initiate conversations.  If people talk to me I am polite to the point of curtness.  My face presents as dour without my permission.   My posture is erect, my shoulders somewhat broad.  It’s been said that I’m intimidating.  Usually, that’s the last thing I’m trying to be.

Dahlia has black hair and an incredible stomach.  I could spend all day with her between soft sheets, smooth skin on skin, cool breeze, autumn rain outside the open window.  Or so I’d like to imagine.  We would be terrible for each other.

I would love to be perceived as approachable, affable, open, but the older I get the meaner I look.  There are strings of days when I speak to no one.  I long to have jolly good times, make new friends, forget about the future and past and live smiling in the present.  Forget about being self-conscious forever.  I am never the center of attention, yet I always feel like it.  Arms swinging awkwardly as I cross the street in front of cars. Bar patrons eyeballing my every action while I order drinks, checking out my clothes upon entrance of any establishment.  I imagine harsh judgments in abundance.  I truly want to never care again.  Never have another thought about it.

Dahlia is the worst kind of bad news.  She crushes men and claims she can’t help it.  She’d rather be alone.  She needs a lot of space.  She doesn’t even believe in the word boyfriend.  She will never get married.

Dahlia knows that she’s the worst kind of bad news.  She tries not to be, sincerely, but she can’t help it.

Everything is energy.  There is an underlying unity to the universe beneath forms of separateness.  The tiny particles that are me pedal tiny particles that are bicycle.  We move through all sorts of jumbled cosmic dust.  The air is filled with flying particles of inane cellular conversations, invisible molecules of high-speed pornography broken into little bits, waves of radio negativity from right-wing baby killers condemning left-wing baby killers and vice-versa.  I question what this does to my psyche.  To the collective consciousness of the world.  I wonder how these things affect the soul.

She lets me rub her stomach, which I’m infatuated with, but there are set  boundaries. No hands on the breasts, nothing in the ‘bikini region’ (her words).  For now, I don’t mind making myself a little miserable.  I’m the worst kind of bad news too.  We might be evenly matched.

I run for longer than I have run in a while.  I want to keep moving.  Nighttime and stepping through shadows, off curbs, into puddles. There are dark dogs in the park that want to chase and bite.  Cars without headlights and drunken operators at the helm.  There is a big bright moon and myriad stars even under the blanket of city glare.  I see Orion as I go.  I focus on breathing.  The stars do not judge me.  I am part of them.  They were once me.  Light shines into my eyes millions of years after it has left the surface of each individual star.  In a million more years the light reflected off my eyes will be returned.  When I look at the star, when the light hits the back of my eyes and lets me see it, we are connected through time and eternity.  We, It, Us, Them – all the same.

Still, I wait for phone calls, for poverty, for judgment.  I wait for food to cook, water to boil, letters in the mail, for death.  I cannot die, but I cannot seem to realize that I cannot die.  I listen to music, I cross my legs, ‘I am not I,’ I sigh. ‘We, are everything.’

Sometimes I am so bold as to kiss her on the neck.  I like to bite.  A diagnostic test to determine the extent of the damage.  Dahlia claims she is ‘dead downstairs these days.’  I look for a reaction.  It’s frustrating to touch someone without being touched in return.  Legs intertwined, at times, and never a significant response.  Maybe she’s right.

Dahlia does her own thing and I do mine.  She says we only want what we can’t have.  Right.  She has some quirks.  Everything in her house/truck/life must be just so.  The kitchen cabinets are empty and the salt and pepper shakers can only be arranged one way.  Maybe the pepper sits closer to the edge of the counter than the salt, holes aligned, two inches apart.  Maybe the dish towel must be folded in thirds, rather than in half.  The eccentricities aren’t exactly endearing.  I long to be thoroughly annoyed.

Never assume I know what I want.  The questions in my life are the same now as they have been for years.  Persistent little interrogatives these ones:  Where am I going?  What am I doing?  What do I want if it’s not to be secure, become sedentary and stifling and blend straight in to the suburban strip malls of middle class mediocrity where I reside?  These statements, these questions, are prosaic and unoriginal.  It’s all been said before, but I don’t think most people really believe in any sort of rebellion after the age of 25 or so.  Then it’s time to settle.  Time to get busy being busy all the time.

I’m late.  A late bloomer maybe or just a bad weed seed.  If the status quo had a gardener I’d have been plucked and burned long ago, or hosed down with poison pesticide so good and cleansing.  And still the problem is that I’m not passionate about anything.  Not money, not politics, not sex or saving the world, or living or dying.  I am only existing.  Breathing oxygen and expelling something else.  I am wandering without purpose because I can’t sit still with purpose and neither of the two is all that interesting.

This is what I think at least, when I wake up in the morning and before I go to bed at night.  The old why are we here is why am I here routine.  I do not believe in a higher purpose, nor do I condone lesser evil.  But if there is no figuring anything out, then why am I still so stumped?

Dahlia says relationships are drama.  She prefers to be alone.  I have spent long stretches of time by myself.  Sometimes I crave companionship.  Then I don’t.  Dahlia says I would get tired of her.  She’s right.  I get tired of everyone.  I say that she’d never be able to give me the attention I need.  She agrees.  At least we’re honest with each other.  Most of the time.

I hate to hurt people’s feelings, but I seem to have a penchant for it.  Relationships are misunderstandings, frustration, damaged egos, things said in anger, anger itself, too many other emotions, and worth it most of the time.  Living in this world is absurd.  Consuming, buying, believing.  Trying to stand out.  Trying to fit in.  The clothes worn, food devoured, plastic containers of liquid quaffed.  The insecurities, activities, the confusion of attempting to deal with oneself and all the rest of the species at the same time.

Dahlia is athletic, but never exercises.  And she never eats.  Her body is amazing to me.  Mostly because I’ve only seen it covered.  I get the occasional view of perfect legs extending out the bottom of tasteful dresses.  The rare glimpse of exposed midriff.  She tells me she has cellulite in her ‘hard-to-reach woman areas’ – under the buttocks, top of the thighs.  Her self-deprecation is usually exaggerated.  I want to find out for myself.  Her eyes are bright green.  They are alive behind the blackest of eyelashes.  Illuminated when she smiles.

It would be easy to fall in love with Dahlia, at least for a while.  When people begin to like me, I slowly grow bored with them.  Not always, but often.  Dahlia isn’t completely insensitive to the requirements of others, just not interested in sacrificing any part of her life to meet them.  She says she needs to have her heart broken, penance for the pain she’s caused.  But she says I can’t be the one to do it.

I wish she’d give me the chance.

I haven’t loved anyone for years.  It’s not that I don’t want to, I just don’t feel like it.  There is a letter, a remnant of a relationship long past, that lives in my heart subjected to constant revisions:

‘Could you know that I dreamt of you the other night?  That for the first time in five years I saw you in my sleep and when I went to kiss you – you kissed me back?  Could you know that in all of the dreams before you only hugged me half-heartedly, and when I tried to kiss you, to resume where we parted so long ago, that you turned your cheek and gently pushed me away, destroying me in the process?

“It’s not like that anymore,’ you said. 

‘Recurrently.

‘Could you know how it felt to kiss and be kissed again after so many years – even in a dream?  Could you know that I have never looked at a photograph of you since you got in your car and drove up 9^th Street that day?  That I prefer, instead, to remember you as much as I can from memory?  But reluctant to re-open that part of my life in flimsy pictures – I still have pictures of old photographs in my head, along with visions ingrained in mental images.  I have glimpses of your face, of your innocent and sincere smile when I used to walk unannounced down the aisle of the natural foods store where you worked.  When you looked at me like that – time stopped for a second and the universe was reduced to ten square feet of a grocery and I knew I would love you forever.  And I do, though I dwell on it no longer.

‘That dream the other night brought it all rushing back.  Could I know that this letter is still being written?’

It’s hard being human and small and loving somebody too much.  It’s hard to resent one’s own frailty.

If we ever did have sex, the mystery of Dahlia might disappear.  Most days when I see her it’s in a new light of attractiveness.  She has a calming presence and a model’s smile.  I try to make her laugh, but we don’t always share a sense of humor.

After knowing someone for a while their imperfections, both physical and otherwise, grow more obvious and impossible to ignore. Maybe the tiny mole on her cheek will sprout hair.  Maybe I will obsess over imperfectly plucked eyebrows.  Maybe I’ll fixate on the ‘hard-to-reach woman areas.’  Dahlia doesn’t use soap in the shower.  If I make her dinner she devours it without thanks and she never makes me anything.

My own imperfections are easy to ignore from the inside.  If there is one word to describe my alter ego it’s petulant.  Dahlia politely refers to my quick changes of temper as moodiness and tells me she doubts that she would be capable of dealing with it if we were ever together.

Dahlia has studied martial arts from an early age.  She once kicked her sensei in the face when he lifted his head too soon.  His wounds were a broken nose and much embarrassment.  He admitted that it was his fault, not hers.  So will I, when the time comes.  I don’t look forward to the pain, I merely live in the present unfulfilled.

Dahlia carries a folding three-inch knife everywhere.  It is both disconcerting and ridiculous.  She used it once (or one like it) outside a train station in France at three in the morning, but refuses to outline the details.  She clips it to the waistline of jogging pants, gym shorts, blue jeans, the skirts she wears to work each day.  She knows how to hurt a person more ways than most.

I enter the Pacific Ocean by running down a beach and jumping into waves off the Mexican coast with the biggest splash I can muster.  I wonder if the displacement is sufficient to affect the morning tide in Japan.  That is to question: Am I significant?

I like Dahlia’s feet.  Sexy long toes and delicately curved arches.  Some days they stink when she takes her shoes off.  She doesn’t watch TV or listen to music or write or draw or paint or read.  I have no idea how she spends all that time alone.  She doesn’t drink, smoke, or do drugs.  She neither prays nor uses profanity.  She doesn’t work out or cook or clean or sing (to my knowledge).  She simply IS, I suppose.

I think I might have to stop spending time with her.  It’s too much for me.  I can’t control myself.  Can’t contain the longing.  I go over to her house and she is outside washing her motorcycle in the sunshine.  She is wearing a black skirt and a white top that showcases the exquisite abs I want to gnaw on gently.  She smiles at me and I can only sigh inwardly as I attempt to smile back.  I’m not very good at forced facial contortions.  I’ll never win a high-stakes poker game.  I only want to grab her and hold her tight and carry her inside and love her forever.  I can’t.  Definitely not allowed.

It gets worse every time.  I say the stupidest things.  Ask the most ridiculous questions.  Tell her how much I like her and try to say why.  I feel like an incorrigible idiot every time I attempt to explain my emotions.  I can’t help myself.  I’m tired of feeling like this, and I don’t know what to do about it.

We spend the day together and go on a long walk through fields of sunflowers near her place.  It’s a beautiful day, but inside I am only being crushed by the immense weight of understanding that beauty is always transient, and that I am meant to appreciate it only from afar.

Before I leave I ask her to tell me why we can’t be together.  Until now there have always been allusions to the idea that it might be possible.  One day.  She tells me that I’m just not happy enough, and that she would feel as if it were her job to make me happy.  Then she says that it’s not that I’m not happy, it’s that I’m not ‘Hap-pY!’  As she says it she pokes her index finger into an imagined dimple and exaggerates a smile.  As she says it I’m thinking about how much I’m starting to hate the word ‘Happy,’ the condescending Ps slapping together, the long E at the end an additional insult to intelligence, a kick to the balls of the brain.  I’m thinking about what a subjective term it is, how utterly devoid of meaning.

I’m pretty sure she’s on to something.

There are days when I only want to melt into the afternoon light.  Days of contentment and inner stillness.  Days that don’t want to end with a night, with another day following.  Days that stand alone and unencumbered by ideas of infinitum.  There are days that call for something more: a silent explosion of particles, an infiltration of matter, a merging with the universe.  Myself and itself melded into more of a one than we already are.  I attempt to absorb the moment – the moment is indifferent to my longing.

Through eyes damp with beauty I crave to be part of fuzzy evening skies as the sun dissolves behind desert mountains.  Halcyon instants of such splendor that only evaporation could be a fitting end to individual existence.  I watch the air blend into dusk.  I breathe and let it all go away.

I go home and take a nap.  As I’m waking up, I have an epiphany and decide to call Dahlia on the phone and share it with her.  I tell her that I’m not looking for someone to make me happy.  That I have known for a long time the happiness of one individual cannot rely on another.  I tell her it would make me happy just to do nice things for her, to treat her well, to make her smile.  I tell her it’s been difficult for me to not be depressed when I’m around her lately because I can’t handle our relationship as it stands.  I know it sounds absurd, but it’s true.  Reluctant to hang up, still wanting to talk, I read her the first few paragraphs of this story.

She says she’s never heard me talk about myself before.

The last time I see Dahlia she comes over to my house with a vase of white, fist-sized lilies.  She’s leaving town for a week.  It is late at night and we lie next to each other for a while, on the bed, on top of the sheets.  Her flannel pajama bottoms are pulled up past her navel and she doesn’t have a bra on underneath a bulky brown sweatshirt.  I slide a hand onto her waist, but I’m still not supposed to let tentacles wander unimpeded.  The margin for error is slim.  I pull her close to me and squeeze tight.  Try to unify disparate masses.  I want us to be one.  This has nothing to do with sex.  This is about being lonely forever.

I rub her back and admire the tautness of her skin.  I stroke her belly, run my tongue along the length of her slender neck, follow it with soft bites down to the collarbone.  She allows me this privilege, allows herself the small pleasure.  But she is careful not to touch me in return.  She grants me these concessions and tells me they’ll never be enough to satisfy my desires.  She’s right.

Dahlia is going back to the East Coast for a wedding.  She’s fresh out of the tub and has just painted her fingernails maroon for the occasion.  Maroon is my least favorite color in the world, though a majority of women elect it as their nail color preference.  The smell of acetate is strong and nauseating.  It doesn’t fade for the two hours she stays.

Around midnight I walk her out to the car.  I hug a body reluctant to love and say goodbye.  I walk back inside and don’t turn my head as she’s leaving.  The odor of fingernail polish is gone.  In its wake there is only the sickly sweet smell of the flowers.  The air in the room is thicker than I remembered it.  I make myself and drink and turn off the stereo.  It is only this quiet late at night and early on Sunday mornings.  There is the sound of my breathing, of ice in the glass when I bring it to my lips, the occasional car passing outside.  Now is the time for silence.

(2009)