There’s A Grace When You’re Far Enough Away

Until yesterday I thought my life could be different, I was in love, etc. -Roberto Bolaño, Antwerp

The campus steeple Golgotha on the small town skyline. Latin sayings on stone walls as pronounced as letters beneath shopping cart handles.

There are women with words here too, words on asses in yoga pants and it’s a forgiving October to be warm and still kind to the skin but I do not look at these girls since I am only here for her.

She’s nineteen and I’m not. I’m twenty-four and pretending to be an adult and rent a car with money I think I have (it’s all about the thinking isn’t it?) and I graduated what seems like years ago (bitter and not promised certain things, whatever) and my girlfriend is so college, thinking that holding up a sign will conquer the world, that this vaguely passionate act could feed people, a fleeting belief that an Environmental Science degree would net her that eponymous career. She still relates classes to jobs. She’s in the phase where she says I’m a hippie yet showers everyday and shaves nearly everything inherited from womanhood.

It’s all so endearing, the last time I think I’m in love.

When I pull up I know this us will end, that I am encroaching on her other life. I promise not to do anything this pyrotechnic for anyone ever again. It’s so easy to make ultimatums when the heart is replaced with an urn but this isn’t a story about lost love because I know where she is. I press her name on my phone, she gets in the car and it’s —Hi, how are you, the college girl wandering eyes and twisting hair, it sounds like a parody but she does that and she will do similar mannerisms again. That’s what I meant about our end: it’s in her gait and in her voice that blends with the eventual end of the branch/leaf binary. We walk through this strange botanical garden or dog-walking park and who has the time to walk or own a dog in college? You can almost see those disposable dog shit baggies adhered to a trunk.

Again, she’s really excited to see me and not excited to see me.

Like you said, distance plays tricks, she said in an earlier message and we are walking up to her dorm and I feel too old — a creeper, to borrow her word.

I tend to take it out on us, she said in one of her messages a few weeks before.

I have not eaten all day and this is not something new and they call the cafeteria the Caf and the Caf is closed by this time because I’m late and did not know the car rental bill could be split between two credit cards. I’m that kind of adult.

Her roommate offers me some heated thing or crackers or a sandwich, something from the small fridge or the white wire composite rolling drawer. The roommate looks small town like she walked from that one frontier-themed video game but she has doll-through-the-plastic-display-window lip gloss, made up and straight hair, she’s thin but has round cheeks that look like they could hold a grocery store’s bulk aisle for a season, a sort of hunter/gatherer skill learned on a prairie sometime in the past. She is kind to me with the food and all. We will start drinking soon.

In the liquor store parking lot my girlfriend gives me cash.

I want something vodka, something flavored, something raspberry, she says.

Did I mention yet that I was in love?

I am the older responsible man buying liquor for minors. I would buy her all the flavored vodka if I could because what else do you do when you are blind and in the throes of what you believe to be intimacy? I can’t say you’d do the same because I am not you and I wouldn’t listen anyway and there will be a lot of that in the less than a month before we’re done. By the way, I find some of the flavored stuff near the bottom of the shelf, not quite in homeless-reach. I use the rest of her cash for my beer-dinner and tell her I’ll pay her back but I don’t remember it and neither does she and the last time she’ll see me we don’t kiss and she uses my wifi to register for a college class and I ask her, So are you going to leave, and we’re lying there; don’t know why we’re lying there when she should be gone, that’s what you do when you’re done with someone and she says, I guess I should go, because that’s what you do and now, back in the rental car, we kiss and I hold the paper bag full of our night and everything right now is as smooth as the start of a paper bag, and the funny thing is I don’t remember the sounds she made in bed or even the parts of her now only shadowed in vague ideas of women’s clothes, but I do know the shape of her lips because they are shaped like mine and maybe a detail like that means we are too similar to last.

Back in her dorm room now. A small crowd of sophomores is drinking in half-crescents standing up and I feel old, the idea that these distilled provisions are due to my age on plastic. There’s so much faux-wisdom to speak, kinda like a worried dad saying, “Internships teach you more than classes, you know,” or “Don’t drink too much, believe me,” but instead there’s small talk.

This guy walks in she had a thing with — that was last year, don’t worry, Alex — but it’s one of those prophetic moments where you see them together after you because there is an after-you after all and you don’t want to know but you love the clairvoyant voyeurism of it all.

In front of you this guy turns into the man she wants even though you are but you only have the now. His stake is in future moments, and he neutered by what hasn’t happened yet can only say “Hello,” and “It’s nice to meet you.” You hold the hand of the woman he can’t but probably will soon. You touch her fingers where they fold and isn’t it weird how this and the elbow are the only parts of us that look old and will always look old, a permanent snapshot of our future age. And speaking of photos, you can already envision their online photo albums together, her and the fling-guy, smiles and squishing faces on one end, your tepid and hooked clicking finger on the other. During moments like these, jealousy can be ascribed to body parts. Hold her hand now because the future isn’t easy or as predictable as you’d like to think you are, when you aren’t. You will never come close.

The small haze of the room is so college. A girl the girls don’t like peeks in.

“Hey girls,” she says. You can tell she says it with a u.

The girls exchange their obligatory Barbie hugs. They talk about u-girl when she leaves, maybe how she’s fat, how she shops at Forever 21. They hold bottles by the neck and alternate swigs with cans of soda. I never drank in my dorm room at my religious school. I was so good.

People leave and you know what that means:

There’s a smudged reel of our skin at the top of the lofted bed, every leg first-time-bad-father-built-clumsy, my head up and down like the bags of recycling that will be taken out tomorrow and maybe our bodies worked but now she’s at the foot of the bed, at a different altitude.

“Where are my clothes?” she says.

She looks for her clothes.

“Wait, why am I naked?” she says.

During her drunk search I try not to laugh knowing I will remember this stupid detail forever. I rub the top of my head where the speckled icicles of the ceiling found my scalp.

I need to smoke so I smoke with this former student. He takes out his Marlboros, tells me that he’s in construction.

“Don’t try to hang yourself with a guitar string. It doesn’t work,” he says and maybe pinches the burning paper to save it for later.

He says he fell in love at a psych ward with a girl he never saw again.

“She wrote me a lot of letters. She had problems dude,” he says.

I think about two people hugging in straightjackets.

We go back inside and they love Guitar String Hanging. They call him by his last name he’s that interesting. My girlfriend has been sending me texts, the kind of where are you texts reserved for drunkenness. She has called me before saying she’s lost, but she knew where she was going, where the lostness comes out through self-loathing, no matter the direction you are headed. We had a lot of that. Our sadness was in stock.

I stop at the guy’s floor bathroom. Some wear towels and sandals and wait, these are the kids who studied late, congrats guys and I think of beach diseases and slugs gnawing through heels or other places you can’t see all the time.

She is linking arms with someone or is walking alone—one of those happened before and one is happening now—and she is knocking on her own locked door.

I hear Kind Midwest Face laughing on the other side.

“Are you getting your nut?” my girlfriend says, her cheek pressed against the wood.

Guitar String Hanging and Kind Midwest Face stumble through the door, fully clothed and beaming but guilty and the reunited roommates whisper and nod. Tomorrow we’ll look for Kind Midwest Face’s purse outside in the leaves and she’ll admit her penchant-fetish for manual laborers in uniform.

The door closes and we’re back in the bed, trying again. For brevity’s sake she’s on top, hunched like we’re fucking in a U-boat or the cheapest storage facility available, our bodies dodging invisible hoarded items.

When the roommate and Guitar String Hanging walk through the door it’s not embarrassing seeing us up there. It’s more Oh there are people sharing our sexy-space and it’s not exhibitionistic kinky or anything more toddler-twisting-master-bedroom-knob saying What are you doing, Why are you hugging without clothes on etc., the laughing and the leaving.

She gets dressed again and runs out after them and it’s really funny I guess, so funny, oh my god, all of it. She gives Kind Midwest Face a hard time about being such a tease with Guitar String Hanging. No condoms or something.

So, I wake up without her there.

Get used to it and she’s at the lower altitude again while I’m in this fucking high tree fort that I will have to zip line down. She is sleeping on a futon without cushions, like she is caught in the laziest fishing net available.

But this is the interesting part.

Through my headache I remember talking to the roommate right before bed in hushed sleepover tones.

Maybe, she said, You’re really good for her.

Maybe, she said, I’m glad you’re with her.

Maybe, she said, This is going to last.

And it’s all maybe since it’s that time during bedtime and drinking where you nodded to the wall because you needed affirmation that you were still there and that this woman who you just met had something important to say. For now my girlfriend slept next to me, before she left to go down on the couch, before she left me. There’s a beautiful face next to you, perhaps one found in an accidental arrangement of flowers somewhere outside and it’s all stupid metaphors now but please keep listening to the roommate.

Maybe, she said, Please be good to her.

And that’s the weird word, Please. Because you say to yourself, Please remember, thinking you have the brain power to moderate what you want to drink and what you want to think (that these two can be mixed. You say again, Please remember) and it’s instances like this that could be a beautiful cushioning to an end, the softness coming in the half-remembered, the what could have been said but didn’t matter. Kind words won’t change any outcomes for you, no, don’t think of that, what about whispering to the wall, yeah, don’t think of any end but think of the small walk in closet in your room growing up, full of stars and the fact they were stick on is null because they glowed. In the kid whisper mode of this memory and the roommate passed out now and no longer talking: Yes of course there were stars, there had to be, since how would you get from crib to bed and back again? How will you recover from her leaving? She is still here, in the dorm room; I’m still in love; there is no questioning any light’s power source in either the childhood or current scenario.

There will be no direction for a while without her, sure, but people who love and leave can teach us how to be alone since fire consumes for some reason or none at all, it’s watch and burn, not so fast, it’s learning to love yourself when you’re far enough away to hold the ash.