The Cacographer

What I forgot

Fuck you you've obliterated them in your ignorance and I’m not sorry anymore despite all my sorries and you should never have driven anyway. You destroyed it eachtime because I pushed shift page up and did it with each piece because I couldn't believe you. Your cruelty makes me incredulous and I didn't trust my experience that you could and would do it again and I shouldn’t have asked again and again.

I can’t write anymore today not with the phantoms of dirty windows and vermouth at my sides. Not anymore since you ruined it. Since you ruined Christine and the car. I can’t recreate them, I can’t resurrect them despite it being the day before easter and the boulder will remain immobile tomorrow.

“Half an hour into a panic attack, I began calling” feels as familiar as the pianist at my Mervyn’s who always starts with Danny Boy despite being spanish or mormon I can’t tell. “I called Christine” is the beginning to the next but I don’t know it’s like trying to draw my 7th grade english teacher’s face or the backside of a nickel. Here the mutations begin between the dead and the living and theories of the wrong enter where the third remembers the second remembers the first like children born to replace siblings. “You’re wrong tonight I said I’m okay I’m tired said Christine” no this is wrong “You’re wrong or not something is wrong” I didn’t write this “clutching” I wrote later but I meant to say “clamoring” but that didn’t mean panic, not even “these clamoring hands at my vocal cords” which I never wrote, not ever.

I knew She was theory before anything. I know She was the panic attack despite Christine saying “vermouth and hockey and gin and vodka and brother” except I didn’t write vermouth first. Despite Christine saying “Hallmark and scotch” and her laughing at something far away from me and further from my touch she wasn’t wrong even without being right. It wasn’t Christine’s fault she was wrong or not knowing that she was wrong because she said “I’m okay” this time instead of “I’m tired.” Christine was tired but She was more tired because I asked if I’d woken Her up but She always said the same thing because I never heard it. The first time I don’t remember and the second time I said nothing and the third time I said the same thing as both other times. “” She said, dribbling over the “wet pillow.” I know the “overstuffed comforter” was “over stuffed comforter”, and that it was a pun one time and hesitantly witty the other.

I can’t tell you about the windows and the dirt and the over stuffed down comforter or distant lights that didn’t survive the first, much less the second despite it’s insistence. She always had this, and they were always red, always looked warm despite her cold. I don’t even know if the corpse of the forgotten phrases while I poured too much pasta into the salt will forgive me. I can’t reconstruct deciding that okra was okay to eat and “Eat and Heat” tells me nothing about the expiration of sausage. Or that the petulant and reluctant marinara ignored my urgings and exploitations and remained a film on glass and I learned that bocculism lives in tomato sauce and She didn’t have to worry anymore if it was snowing. If it was raining, She was fine, and the camera would fade to black and resolve in a hospital. But I couldn’t tell if the hysterical static within my eyes was precipitation outside my windows and under yellow or not. “Not now” She said in the first, but She “always” said it in the second. She said it again now, but not yet.

I thought of Her second, and She stood in laughter or a hat or something vertical before I called. Did I wake you I asked Her and She sniffed. I’m tired is what Christine said the first time but I didn’t ask her, and She said I was in a car accident none of the times, not even this time because She never said that. Not in words, but She did tell me that.

“If it’s raining, she’d be fine, if it’s snowing, she’ll die” I said each time, remembering the psuedochiasmus, the lack of a semicolon and not thinking I would capitalize Her despite the tense shift. I remember “the worm with claws” at “my vocal cords”, but I don’t know how he got there, I don’t remember how he was the anxiety in my chest.

She was it, She was that coiled centipede in my larynx and bronchials. Her murmurs and crumbling soft sobs at the “insistently blinking” phone, “toggling green and red” but I don’t know the order. Her, indistinguishable from other apartments turned off could see my apartment and one lamp blazing across dark distances. But She never did, not once twice or this third. I know She’s reeling, feeling across Her breasts and Her stomach wherein lies the belly button piercing forgot it was never Her. I never did know those crests mounted on her body, not anytime before the first began and this wind changes everything, the clutching twigs only wanted to brush against my window. I never said this before. “I’ve never said this before” I have.

I tried to show you the “gin and the bandaids” and the “potatoes” with thin twisted arms, clutching themselves in pale, but I only had “potatoes” before and “thinking of” them. I thought of them all the time with “my pinky finger in my mouth” or “my pinky in my teeth” which survived the third only as allusions.

She wasn’t okay Her hands were circumspect in their knobbiness their knuckles skeletal. I know She was “thinly constructed” and “roughly maintained” the second time because the first She wasn’t frightened yet of dying. This time Her ankles twisted beneath the car without accident, and this time She ran her hands down to Her hips to determine swiveling and felt Her heart to “determine mortality” which She immediately forgot and put Her hands to Her face. She stopped there this time and won’t go further if there’s a fourth.

“Are you okay I asked” but Christine said she was okay, she was tired and She didn’t answer at all in words except ones that were wet underneath her tongue. It didn’t matter this time anyway, because I only asked them both before and this time in the third and the final I didn’t ask anyway, just the empty room of nothings that responding with itself or a gesture that is the bookcase’s equivalent of a shrug. Now I’m looking gin cloudy this time with lemon or lime and tonic, thinking I can make 7-up or Fresca. “This wind changes everything” is now capitalized because the winter dead tree needs something from me and She can’t remember me calling She says. Christine said I called but only the third time and the first and She refutes them all and my phone’s been whittled away to blue and grey underneath yesterday. I can’t tell if I said to Her. She said you already told me. “I’m sorry” I said again and again and I can’t tell you about the apologies like wet leaves sticking to boots and arms. They were soggy and choked only in the second time when I said “I said I’m sorry behind tissues transparent” but I don’t think I said that everytime or ever.

If it’s windy I don’t know how She is. “If it’s windy” She should be outside in it, it doesn’t make sense for Her to be in the hospital or Her room with red coating the bed if it’s windy. Now if it’s windy then She’s outside, coating the pavement with strawberry blonde hair or walking down the street confused wondering where Her purse and hamstring went. It now says “if it’s windy,” so She could be okay. “Do you want me to come over I asked” I asked the first and third time into the phone, not knowing what else to say to a crumpled mouth. “Not now” She now said, after waiting hours. I tried to pick Her out of the barricaded windows shut against the outside streetlights and dark but She didn’t say anything I could hear from across the street. Are you okay? But I never woke Her up.

And now today after my sorries and She said things that weren’t words, She can’t remember. You woke me up I wasn’t asleep She once said only today only once and I said I’m sorry “I’m sorry” I said again so She knew I meant it and Christine said 30 year olds and Daiquiris and Birthday and Justin once said Butterfield again and again in the frozen mud and granulated snow.

I asked you today about it. You said, “I’m okay. And I can’t remember, but you’re wrong.”

posted by OrangeDrink @ 2:54:00 AM