Pictures of You Pt. 2

I woke up the next morning and pretending not to be hung over, I told my mom about it.

"So, we still love each other."

"You do?"

"Yeah."

"So what's going to happen? Are you back together?"

"I don't know. Maybe. Maybe we will be. I think so."

She smiled and then we ate breakfast together. She always thought Peter and I were meant to be and that we'd end up together.

I sent him a Facebook message later that day:

“I'm just writing because I want to tell you that you should be honest. I think we both have to be honest. I know it's hard, but we both have to do it because what do we have, if not the truth? I will love you until my heart stops.”

In retrospect, it's a ironic and hypocritical that I would encourage someone else to be honest, when my modus operandi was to lie about my feelings to everyone, especially myself. But maybe, my subconscious was wiser than I gave it credit for. Even though I addressed that letter to him, I was writing to me.

I spent the next few days going back and forth between feeling elated because we were still in love and on the verge of tears because we were still in love.

Pictures of You

You'll think this is crazy, but I did then, and for a long time after, believe that somewhere, in some alternate universe, that Kate, and the Peter that loved her, the ones that didn't live on earth anymore, not in the flesh anyway, just in their slowly fading memories, were together and would love each other, with a force and profundity for the rest of their days.

But I was young then, so much younger than I am now.

I didn't know that something could be untrue even if you really believed it.

Black Coffee Night

I have lost myself to love twice.

Three times, depending on the shaking nature of my memory that day. Lately, it moves like trees in the wind with light falling at random. Things get lost in the darkness.

...

Don't the hours go shorter as the days go by?

We were going to save the world that night, both his hands pressed around my neck, softly, careful not to hurt me. He poured everything he had inside into me.

I like it that way, almost but never quite in pain.

I wake up the next morning sure I was in the house of someone else, a man I knew once but no longer. I remember the trees where he lived. They met above the road, like a bridge.

What he will remember of me when he's old?

 It scared me right out of myself.

Sympathy For The Devil - Personal Essay Excerpt

He started crying. 

“What do you mean you don’t trust me?”

 Then I started crying.

“I don’t know what I mean.” 

Neither of us spoke for still minutes.

“So what are...what are the terms for this, if we work it out? How do you want it to be?” I asked, voice aching.

“I want you to accept me for who I am. I want you to love me enough that what I believe doesn’t matter.”

 Maybe that was our problem; I didn’t love him enough for what he believed to not matter. I could never love someone that much. But his strength was on Sunday, no place else. 

“Glenn, you don’t accept me. You want me to not ask questions. I’m always going to ask questions. I love asking questions, that’s all I ever do. Why did you think I would ever be okay with us never discussing the most fundamental thing in your life?” 

“Things are fine until you disagree with them.”

 “It’s the other way around, Glenn. I’m fine with you until I disagree with things. Do you just want me never to disagree with things?”

  He looked away, angry. 

“Why were you ever with me if you wanted someone without an opinion? Why me? Why’d we go though all this?” I asked.

 “Because I love you.” 

Silence.

“So I have two options; stay married to you and have parts of the world we can’t discuss, or break up?”

He didn’t say anything. 

People say of love that you never know what you had until you’ve lost it. I think that proved true for us both. We didn’t know the other until it was too late. I find it emblematic that our break up took place via machines and letters and people other than us. It pisses me off that I had to write him emails like a politician, that I couldn’t tell him to fuck off, that we couldn’t work things out how two people that are in love do.

But then, everything that went wrong exists permanently in black and white type. Maybe this way I’ll have to be more rigorous in how I remember things.

 In front of other people, I spend most of my time laughing about it. “I think it’s cosmopolitan divorcee at twenty-two!”

But I feel cheated. He and I were better than what happened. I alternate between believing that he lost his mind and that’s why he behaved how he did, and that I’m stupid and never knew him at all. The more time I spend with it, the more I think that sometimes things are Heaven sent.

I was never meant to see this coming.

Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt.

“It's one of the great tragedies of contemporary life, that families fall apart. Almost everybody has that in common.” Andrew told me that once.

We were lying around, watching t.v., stuck in one of those days that never begins and then never really ends. He wouldn’t look at me when he said it, he just kept staring at the television. I have moments with him where he’ll say one thing that changes my life forever.

I’m dumbstruck, silent, and he’s none the wiser.

Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt

“Did you sing that song a lot when you were a kid?” I asked him.

I’m always asking him about his childhood. I’m a stupid, old detective trying to understand the man I love.

“All the time. My mother would always say, ‘Sweet Lord, the never ending song!’

“How did you sing?”

“Very earnestly.”

“Were you good?”


“No, I was awful.”

He is a beautiful singer now. He is beautiful at everything he touches and I am jealous of him. Maybe that is why I love him.

“I was. In Grade Two, my teacher told me I wasn’t allowed to sing at my desk anymore. Then on the last day of school, everyone got to pick one special thing they were allowed to do and I asked to sing again.”

I pictured him as that little boy, with too much energy singing his heart out for hours at his desk. Maybe he was performing, or maybe, he just liked the company of his own voice. Either way, I thought it was mean that a teacher would take that away from him.

Especially when he had a dead brother.

“Did you ever really feel like you were married?” he asked me as we fell asleep that night. My marriage was another thing we talked around but hardly ever about.

“No, not really.”

And when I was married, I never did. Things only feel real once they’re over and even when they’re over, stories never really end.

In the hazy dark of the night, I looked at Andrew.

“I hope you’re my never ending story,” I told him.

I meant it.

Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt

I picture my father in his prime as Dustin Hoffman in All The President’s Men; smoking in elevators, busting into politicians offices in corduroy bell-bottoms, coercing pretty young women into giving him leads.

Only, he was tall and handsome like Robert Redford.

Only, he believed Watergate was the end of journalism he wanted to be apart of, the end of turning a blind-eye.

He stopped working undercover with criminals, exposing sex scandals, interviewing off the record. He became editor of the sports page and travelled with the Toronto Blue Jays, almost year round. He refused to wear anything but jeans, sweatshirts and ball caps.

He told me that he just had to get out. He didn’t have the taste for the jugular he used to.

I know the truth. That was the year he quit drinking.

That was the year he lost his nerve.