Breadcrumb #192

ALLEN GUY WILCOX

Every one is free on Saturday, or busy with friends—family staying with them over the long weekend. Wedding in Vermont. Wedding in San Francisco. Wedding in Brooklyn. Wedding at your parents’ farm.
 
Coffee with your best friend—coffee with an old friend you haven’t seen in forever. Coffee with someone from college. Drinks with someone from high school, someone you haven’t seen in a million years.
 
Friends visiting from France—sister’s boyfriend’s family in town. Work drinks. Work dinner. Work coffee. Tinder date. Bumble fuck. Date with someone I met on OKCupid and stayed with three years. Date with a woman I met online and moved in with.
 
She’s moved out. She drove cross country. I took over the lease. I was upstate, she was in St. Louis, visiting her brother, his wife, their kids. Brunch with my folks. Brunch with my Tinder date from last night. Brunch with my gays. Day drinking with my gays.
 
Day drinking with my best friend. Day drinking with my brother. Day drinking with my sister and her husband. Day drinking with somebody I met at a bar. You know she grew up in the next town over? Small world.
 
Everybody’s on the phone, looking something up. Everyone is pledging allegiance to regular digital detox. Everyone’s at work, Yelping their favorite restaurants. Everyone’s at work, hoping to get cut. Really need the money. Everybody really needs the money.
 
Everybody really needs the money but if I have to be here one more hour I’m going to lose my nerve. I’m going to rip my fucking hair out. I’m going to set this place on fire. Seriously, I don’t blame myself. Name me one person in New York who can save money.
 
I blink my eyes and I’m nineteen again, on my vision quest. I’m listening to tapes in the car, I’m waiting for somebody to call me back. I’m waiting for someone to cold call me, the girl from the cafeteria. It was unmistakable the way she looked at me and then away.
 
I am waiting for my parents to bail me out. I’m waiting for whomever it is who controls who gets what money when to remember me in a kind of eureka moment. Everyone is waiting outside the restaurant. The man in the gray suit drank a lot and hailed an Uber. 
 
I blink my eyes and I’m at the bar again, having a glass of beer waiting for my girlfriend to get out of yoga and my brother to walk down from his place so we can go to Riis Beach. So we can go to the Whitney. So we can get classed up and go to Monkey Bar.
 
I’m waiting for my girlfriend to get out of work and for Andrew to get out of his tennis lesson so we can go to the 92nd Street Y for a conversation with the head of the Joint Cheifs of Staff. With Obama’s second in command, with a former deputy press secretary.
 
I’m waiting for my ex-girlfriend so we can go to Grand Central, so we can go to Cape Cod, so we can stay at our rich friends’ place on the Vineyard, so we can go to couples therapy. So we can stay together despite the fact we’re both deeply uncertain about it.
 
Everyone is reeling from a breakup, unsure about someone new. Looking for someone. Looking for a little something. Back to checking my horoscope, apparently the sun is in conjunction with Venus in Leo and the bather in the sacred pond went too deep.  
 
I-Ching says I should have expected as much. Who knew—when I was a boy and first started to fall in love—that one day I could erase a morning, saturated in pics of lonely women, 5-10 miles from my current location? Erase an evening. Erase a weekend.
 
Everyone’s a sarcastic whisky drinker in search of a goofball partner in crime. The balsamic moon encourages reflection. Everyone’s a wine-loving all-around nerd. Heaven has withdrawn its mandate. Bonus points for beards. To this we must reconcile.
 
Lana left the sofa and enough glassware for a dinner party. Lana left the mattress and several towels. Lana left for another life in California. You know who else lives there?
You won’t believe it when I tell you. Seriously though, I know, right? Small world.

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Breadcrumbs #189

MONICA LEWIS

she wakes with a metal tongue & all day it sticks, rust-smacking she struggles to stop the rot that's all chemically composed, hard-wired in science & skin. at this point there's no point for a hug or mouth that mouths i understand, she understands each day she must swallow desert, let it cake through her veins, cut out starfish flesh & worship the sun.

still, in dark, blankets are waves & each night she'll sink or swim, 
no matter she's a fish & come morning, in sand, flapping fins as the wind triggers fits to bust both brain & lungs. a sea-thing born with feet, the girl can't grow like they grow, listen to her words: she gurgles, then gasps. & each prayer, a prayer for water,

not to choke, not to choke

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Breadcrumb #188

KASIA MERRILL

When I was in my early twenties, I had one great aspiration in my life: to be a widow. 

    Death was foreign to me. Love even more so. I once had a pet goldfish that died, and this was the nearest I had come to loving and losing. Of course, I didn’t really love it. I tried to. I tried watching it swim and adapting some sort of feeling to its journey through its tank. I even gave it a name, Clarence, but upon second thought renamed it “Phish” because it seemed more appropriate. In the end, it was just a fish on my dresser, a piece of art that matched my orange rug. When it died, I flushed it down the toilet and felt nothing. I kept its empty aquarium in my room as a memorial, a testimony to coming close to love.

    Of course, I had studied love. I had read books on intimacy and lack of intimacy, watched movies and documentaries, even researched the scientific evidence of love and romance. I knew all the different kinds: heterosexual, homosexual, asexual, pansexual, etc. Still, it eluded me. 

    I decided that I wanted to feel it, but not for a long period of time. Length was risky. Someone could get to really know you if they were around for long and eventually come across your flaws. I didn’t want this. Then again, I didn’t want a one-night stand either. I wanted a short-term, highly committed partnership. I wanted to share a life with someone, but a short life. 

    On a Friday evening, I joined a dating site called NeverLate4Luv and made my username aspiringwidow94. My profile was brief and direct: female, early thirties, aspiring widow. Practical, direct, unsentimental. Enjoys red wine and researching humanity’s latest diseases. Seeking: committed partner soon to be finishing up life. Message me if you are serious, committed, and on your way out.

    By Sunday, I had received over 66 messages. Some of them were quite angry with me, especially those who were already widowers themselves. They called me a sociopath and said I had no idea what I was talking about. I replied that this was perhaps true, but this also clearly pointed out that we were not a great match.

“Some of them were quite angry with me, especially those who were already widowers themselves. They called me a sociopath and said I had no idea what I was talking about.”

    Others asked if I wanted to meet up for casual sex, and three more asked if I was goth. No, no, and no, I replied.

     In the end, there were only two that were of any interest to me. The first was a man in his late sixties who had found out the year before that he had lung cancer. I’m not looking for sex, he wrote. Just someone to be by my side during my last few months. 

     The second message was from a man who said he was addicted to dangerous sports. Any day might be my last, he wrote. Tomorrow I’m flying to South Africa to swim with hammerhead sharks. Fancy a drink tonight before I go?

     I met with the second man first. He was ruggedly handsome with a hooked nose that had clearly been broken more than once and a mess of blonde hair. 

     “Why do what you do?” I asked him. “Why risk your life?”

     “Call me crazy,” he said. “But I just don’t feel alive unless I’m facing death.” He winked.

     The two of us slept together, and the next morning I kissed him passionately before he boarded the plane.

     “It was nice knowing you, love. Maybe we can do this again if I make it through.”

    I watched his plane depart through the window, trying to feel remorse or sadness, but I felt nothing, just as I had with the fish. I suppose it was too much to ask to love someone after only one night. 

    That evening, I met with the first man who messaged me. He had a thick head of gray hair and bony shoulders. We drank red wine and ate medium-rare steaks at a restaurant with burgundy velvet chairs. He lifted his glass in cheers, and there was an expression in his eye that was alarmingly calm for someone who knew he was on his way out. I clinked my glass against his and jokingly asked him to marry me, to which he replied with a laugh.

     “I could never marry you,” he told me, his knife slicing through the meat on his plate. “You’re much too docile.”

     “Docile?” I repeated.

     “You know what you need?” He looked me in the eye. “You need to get your heart broken.”

     “I know that,” I said. “That’s why I’m looking for someone like you.”

     “That won’t break your heart,” he said. He shook his head. “No, I most certainly won’t. Besides,” he said. He placed a forkful of steak into his mouth and began chewing it, talking to me as he looked down at his plate, his hands busy with cutting the meat. “When you are on the brink of death, it begins to come clear the things you want and the things you have no patience for.”

     He looked at me. “I would have no patience for you.”

     I went home alone that night. The following week, the man who had gone swimming with the hammerhead sharks messaged me again to let me know he had lived. He asked if I wanted to meet him before he went bungee jumping into a crocodile den. I realized I didn’t even know his name.

     I sat at the computer, staring at the screen. The words blended together. I blinked, then exited from the dating site. I pulled up the website for the local pet store and ordered two goldfish.
 
    Aspiringwidow94 still gets messages sometimes. Neither of the goldfish have deceased.

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