Life of a Bird

Six scraping idiots dragging their terrible sandals along the concrete. Tank tops don't fit, shorts don't fit, their language doesn't fit. Five jet skis spin in asshole circles, crashing into their own waves. Their fists pump in the air, there's little concern for the boats around them waiting to enter the harbor. An old white man passes me on a contemplative bicycle. That certainly sounds like modern R&B swooning from his pocket radio. I'm wearing jeans and a T-shirt, I'm comfortable. It is a motley crew.

A seagull is on the concrete edge that separates us from the waves. He landed there sometime after I sat down. He looks back and forth, studying the water. Looking for something, someone, another full. Maybe I'm giving it too much credit.

Cigarette smoke is coming from another cyclist. He is determined to break even. How am I supposed to clear my head with his secondhand nonsense? The water looks surreal, if you stare at it long enough you can't comprehend it. Waves don't break, they're crystal blue, no white. I wish I had enough money for a boat. A big boat. I'd invite my friends out. We'd all be tan and beautiful.

What is this bird doing? It must be lost. It certainly looks lost, it looks the way I look when I'm lost. If he weren't lost wouldn't he have flown away by now? I don't think he's taken a single step since he landed. He just stands there, darting, left to right, left to right and back again.

There is another old man, however, and he smells of pipe smoke. Now this I can get behind. It's the history of it all, the time it takes to pack, the match involved. There is romance, and as long as there is romance you can elevate just about anything. There's a cute girl over there. I won't say a word and our paths will never cross again, scientific laws be damned.

The gull starts to walk away and another lands to take its place. There are twenty feet apart now, mirror images, looking out and looking back and forth. They stand and look out over the water. Is this what happens? What is it they've lost? Am I projecting too many complications, too much intelligence? I've seen these things eat garbage. Still, there must be more than that. This must be the life of a bird.

I get up. I walk away. Every twenty feet there is another gull, head darting back and forth, left to right, back and forth. The shadows are here now. There is so much lost in the water. The boats, they're waiting to be let in.

Washing Goblets

"What are we celebrating?"

I searched for whatever she wanted me to say. "Uh... Um..." She was at the cupboard, looking for glasses. "We could celebrate... us?"

"No," she said, "that's no good." She was washing goblets.

"If you need an excuse to drink just tell me."

"I don't need an excuse," she said. "I just thought it would be nice." I had plenty of clean glasses. Why was she washing goblets?

"Well, then, let's drink to that?" I tried to phrase it as a statement but failed, although I think I got away with it. Probably not.

She popped open the champagne and it drooled out onto the floor. She filled the goblets until they too were drooling. She handed me one and we clinked them together. We drank our chilled champagne, and we were both better for it.

She Disappears

We sit together on the sofa, opposite sides. We read what we read, taught stories and laughabouts. We are sipping our separate sips, we experience different highs and lows. There is tartness, blandness, a general weariness to the exposure. Trodden, I think.

Dusk settles, dust settles, it is the end of summer. Day-old air lingers and from the open window passing breezes freshen us here and there. Darkness grows. Looking at the pages makes it all the more dark, focusing fine-tunes shadow.

We have learned to sit in silence. We yearned for it once, back when things were energized and each day had its own definition. There was no imprint yet, and the code we lived by was the code we wrote ourselves. Hand in hand, hand in pocket, pockets on the bedroom floor, we kicked up that dust and every moment was pure sunlight.

She is fading from my view in this room of mine. Am I the same to her? I recall her tender hair, her fair lips. If only I could reach out and kiss her knee. If only she would ask.

The black is blacker, yet somehow I still see her face. I look at the words before me and can see in my periphery that she is sleeping. Her book is closed. She is breathing, dreaming, and who knows where.

It is in this darkness that I see her best. And when I turn to look at her, she disappears. And, again, I am left alone. It is not fair that I should see so clearly, but only from the corner of my eye.

Various Water

Wake up and have a glass of water. Make it a cold one, make it at least cool. I want you to continue drinking water throughout the day. It doesn't matter what kind at this point. Cold water, hot water, tepid water, like I said it doesn't matter. The important thing is to keep the body hydrated. When you feel yourself getting thirsty you're already dehydrated, you've failed. Call it whatever you want; agua, l'eau, wasser, voda, whatever you like. Just make sure it gets in there. We are mostly water. We must keep it so.

Now, let's talk about aqua vitae. I'm bringing this up because agua and aqua are very similar in spelling, and I'm not going through this mistake again. This is distilled spirits. These are all right to have, but I'm asking you not to make it a regular thing. Not as regular as water. If you do imbibe (a special phrase reserved for spirits) with frequency, please do your best to hide it. We all appreciate it, and thank you in advance.

Aqua fortis is nitric acid. Don't drink that. Or be very careful if you do.

Aqua Velva is a fragrance you can put on if you want to smell like your father, or if you want to send your mother down memory lane. Maybe one will accomplish the other.

Aqua Velva is also a cocktail. Please see above.

Let's see, I've lost my train of thought.

Ah, yes! Over the Atlantic, Pacific shores, the mystery of the Indian Ocean, these all mean the same things to me. Raindrops and Antarctica, my tip of my own iceberg, tears rushing down. Sweating after you're in from the heat, after you're done running, with cool air coming but still more and more sweat. A watched pot never boils but a boiling pot can't happen in an instant, so it's all right to watch it for a while. An ocean liner! How romantic. I would like to travel across some great expanse on an ocean liner, around the bottom of South America, around the Horn of Africa, just like they did in the old movies I love so very much. I wonder if there's room. A barge through the Panama Canal, a makeshift raft down the Mississippi. That place between the land and the sky that goes on forever, and you can see it moving, breathing, living, stretching out into itself, becoming nothing and everything.

We are mostly water. We must keep it so.

Zen Antonym

The problem with following a stranger you see regularly is that she's seen you just as often as you've seen her. If you break a habit she's bound to notice. If you stay on the train when usually you get off it could draw her suspicion. But I didn't know this at the time.

She was always all in black, textures, glossy and matte. Bits of gold adorned her; a buckle here, some bangles there. Her golden hair revealed a biological black line down her center part. She had—and I hated to admit this, but it was true—a mouth that reminded me of an ex. It was an ex from more than ten years ago, and not one on which I looked back with particular fondness. I rarely referred to her by her own name, but instead a childish moniker of my own invention that I thought adequately described her during those finals weeks. So when my eyes locked onto this stranger's mouth—small, full, a hint of pout—and I made the connection, and found it attractive, I had to force my gaze back down to my book, I could not stop staring.

Four stations north of mine she exited, and I followed. I placed myself at the end of the car and let several people get off before me. I thanked her silently for her wardrobe, it's as if she wanted to be seen. I followed her down the dirty steps, past crinkled snack bags and discarded beer bottles, through the turnstile, and out the door. I knew the area. It was nice; brownstones, small white dogs, cars that matched the girl.

And then she did what I had been dreading: She walked only a block before stopping underneath a bus sign. This wasn't a station, a well-populated train car. This was an open street corner with nowhere to hide, not even a glass enclosure with a bench for her to sit on while I waited on the other side. There were a couple people already there which provided some relief. Still, it was something I wanted to avoid. I looked down the street from where the bus would be coming, looked at my watch, tried to show that I had someplace to be without being too obvious. The line between conspicuous and inconspicuous, on that line I needed to reside. I had my book at the ready, opened back up to whatever page I was on. It was the perfect disguise.

The bus arrived without too much half-reading, and I made sure I was at the front of the line, real independent. I chose a window-facing seat in the back. She chose a seat toward the middle, giving me a perfect vantage point, like she almost wanted me to have it. This idea gave me a strange anxiety, like I'd consumed too much caffeine, too much of some unknown herbal supplement. My heart raced, and I turned my pages with indifference.

Ten, fifteen, twenty minutes passed, until I started to wonder whether or not she lived on that very bus. But then, as we approached the half hour mark, I saw her pull the cord and stand. The stop was requested. Three others on the increasingly empty bus left the back with me, and as luck would have it the girl walked in the opposite direction. I tightened and slowed my gait so as not to catch up. I would be lying if I said that when I got dressed I hadn't thought about how much noise my shoes produced. I couldn't keep a decent breath, couldn't fill to the top of the lung and feel that release. My blinks weren't coordinated, my sweat glands opened, my tongue dried up.

A moment of panic when I realized I had no final steps to cap off my plan. Was I going to say hello? Ask her a question? Ask her for help? Merely watch her go into her building and leave it at that? I'd come this far and it seemed a shame to end it so ambiguously. I couldn't very well weasel my way into her home, not if it was a large apartment building. I could maybe try the old Can I use your telephone routine, but I thought that too hackneyed and see-through. I couldn't touch her in any way. Could I? Maybe all I had to do was yell her name. But I didn't know her name! What was I supposed to yell? There are too many harrowing stories that begin with a woman being yelled at as she walks home. She would never stop.

My mind was in a million places and I didn't realize how much I'd sped up after she turned the corner, until I turned it myself and walked right into her.

The two of us shared a silence. Our first moment.

"What?" She wasn't mad. Was she mad? I couldn't tell.

"What? Hi. I'm just walking..."

She waited for me to finish but that was all I had. "Walking where? A friend's? Home?" I waited too long to say anything. A real answer, the truth, it should come more naturally.  "I saw you on the train," she said. "I've seen you before. You're not as sly as you think you are."

"Wow," I chuckled, "then I'm really not sly in the slightest." My lips squeezed and eyes widened at this thing which might be considered a joke, and whether or not she would recognize it as such. It was an accident! Would I tell her this? But her eyes were not on me. They were on my right hand, on my book.

"What are you reading?" she asked.

"It's..." I took a quick glance to remind myself. A book of zen stories my father had given me.

"Is it good?"

"I guess. They're short."

That familiar mouth of hers, it looked as though it was smiling, and it occurred to me that I had not seen her blink once. These are the things that can undo a man. "Are they working?" she asked me.

"What do you mean?"

"Do you feel more... zen?" I was too embarrassed to admit I hadn't read a single story. I'd had the book for years, and not a single one. I found a way to answer her that didn't make me feel like a liar.

"I'm feeling a lot right now."

Her smile vanished. It was the wrong thing to say! It was too loving, too creepy, too something! I don't know what it was but it rubbed her the wrong way and I was sure that that was that. I replayed the instant over and over in my head as I stood there, as an apparent eternity drifted by, cursing and loathing myself as I thought of so many other things that were better. What was I doing? What kind of plan was this? And then, shocking as ice water, her hand was on mine. She lifted the book from my clammy grasp and fingered its pages.

"Read it. Find me. Tell me your favorite story." She handed it back. "And why. I want to know why." She turned and walked away, and I watched her black figure, wondering what her name was, and what she truly meant by why. But I would not yell at her. I would read.

We're Helpless, Aren't We?

Me: "So you're a professional hairdresser?"

Girl: "Well, yes, professional in Dayton. I don't work everywhere. I mean, I'm not doing Beyonce's hair."

Me: "Oh, I know."

Girl: "What do you mean you know? You don't think I could do Beyonce's hair?"

And in this, gentlemen, lies the difference between men and women. Everything you will ever know and not know about that wonderful sex can be summed up right there, in this brief conversation I had not three days ago. I could spend years, decades in therapy, and not learn as much as I do from these four sentences. "Why didn't you tell me about that conversation before?" the therapist would ask. "I wouldn't have had to spend half my career with you. You could have taken the money and bought a boat."

Buy your boats, gentlemen. Buy your boats.

Wedding

This is when we start to chill it down. You know? This is when the night is done. Our friend is taking pictures, he's there, documenting this joy, this sadness! We take the pins out of our shirts and hope that we can use them for good.

We can feel the beat. We can! I do! Even if you don't, I'm sitting and I'm standing and dancing and I don't think I'll ever feel so good again.

It's the soundtrack, it's seeing her every two weeks until you die. The sound of our hearts. The beat, beat, beat, the high you get from the plan. It's late night Mexican cigarette dirty water strolling bass thump barefoot brand new bare feelings. I wish they could come back.

I grab them. I grab them knowing I hold a love you can only have for true friends, true. And when I'm ready to let go, and I do, they do not. And that's how I know. That's how I know this love will love forever.

Words cannot describe, my friends.