Beautiful, Dream Not In Color

Here is Janine. Janine is 24 and is staying 7 miles away. She recently “got out” of a long and semi-abusive relationship with her boyfriend or rather ex-boyfriend. Mark. You don’t know Mark very well but from what you hear he’s not too much of a catch. You remember: he drives a Dodge Dart and his lower lip can often be observed for lack of a better word protruding out of his jaw, packed tightly with a comprehensive gob of Cope, which, when he spits, makes him look like he’s spitting very dark blood all the time. Janine is good looking and slim and auburn-haired, and from the few sweet memories you have of brief and tempestuously fickle teenage lust you remember that she was the object of your again for lack of a better word affections. It is profound what the mind’s eye can visualize, and what it can conjure in terms of both depth and texture. Janine has the ability to blow completely circular bubbles of air in a pool, a trick she uses to impress her young nephews at birthday parties and family events and summer getaways and whatnot. What she does is she holds her breath until air pushes against the bottom of her diaphragm, and then makes a shape with her mouth and lips and slowly blows: O. 

    This is Janine. Janine is the object of a few dark memories of plangent youthful self-abhorrence, of romantic existentialism. You know Janine from when you were both very young, basically children. You have not seen Janine for many years but still vaguely remember the distinctive qualia of the smell of her wet hair, of the bluish of stained eyes so vivid you could almost taste them. Like everything about youth, Janine was heat and color, something totally alive and vibrant. It has been a long time. You don’t understand the lines etched in imaginary pavement that you have crossed or have not crossed, some terrible psychological geometry into which you have backed yourself into, latticework and bars and crosspieces and all of mental alloy you have trapped yourself behind and effectively blinded yourself with. Some of these lines are self-drawn and others both of you have made known and observe. Janine is 7 miles away and is back home for the holidays, as are you. You drive around empty streets at night and make irregular stops at Waffle Houses and QFCs and the local mall and places adorned with gaudy holiday razzmatazz, stopping at these places where you’d expect to maybe see Janine again, places you’ve been together, places you’d frequent. Where you’d maybe glimpse a waning face and a half-smile or the back of a head or the lisp of a lock of auburn hair about to turn a corner almost out of sight. You avoid making eye contact with your reflection when you see yourself in dark windows, illuminated by covered overheads whose naked bulbs are somehow always visible. You heard from a friend that Janine smokes cigarettes now, and when you consider this it makes you not want to see her very much, or at least gives you this feeling of weight in your stomach about the idea of seeing her. You wonder: does she have any tattoos? And you wonder if the feelings you harbored towards Janine, Janine being more sort of an abstraction than an actual Janine at this point in your life, really cut into a deeper part of you, in your forgotten youth, and if that strange chemical feeling of sickly jaw-tightening orgasm and physical synthesis was not the only thing you know you loved, yes loved, her for, or if mayhaps these feelings you possess now are manifestations of some other endogenous ailment, and that the love you felt for her was simple and now feels complicated only in retrospect.

    And then there’s the whole thing about Mark, which you do not know what to think about when it comes to all that. When you found out about this strange bondage, your inclination was, you remember distinctly, to step outside and take a long walk. The feelings you experienced were, you think, if you could identify them with broad strokes: a deliberate urgency, coupled with hurtful resignation. The impetus of these feelings was probably what perpetuated this cycle of long and confusing metacognition and self-referentialism regarding your relationship with Janine, from so long ago.

    You don’t remember much about how it began. There were inside jokes. They were puerile; you were young, after all. There was brief touching and hugging which ignited those distant feelings of tangible sexuality inside your half-formed teenage mind: that oh my God I’m touching a girl sort of sense of euphoric insouciance that comes from those first adolescent experiences of active libido. But beyond that. To go back further would be to put weights on the mind. Events that occurred prior to prior. They are memories dripped in gauze like watercolor, hazy and bandaged and un-rememberable for a reason. You used to call her Jane, you remember. Before that. You drive you car at breakneck speeds trans-empty-freeways at night for no reason other than to feel as if you’re moving toward something but you don’t know what. The rainbow fluorescence of the holidays turns into a blinding all-color when you speed down highways in your two-seater. Before you went to college and when you were still excited about college. Before all of that. You remember Mark because he used to go to the same parties you went to, back when you used to go to parties. He was someone you never talked to but always sort of saw, hanging out on the decks of porches spitting into the black of backyards piled with empty cars. You were never much fun at parties but always enjoyed them anyway. You wonder how they met but don’t want to actually know. Wonder why all of a sudden Janine occupies such a predominant part of your mind although before you came back for the holidays you didn’t think of her often. Only when watching the plane break the cloud bank and witnessing for the first time in a long while the recognizable lineaments of a hometown more fiction than fact did these feelings truly resurface as something old and archaic and with almost sinister implications hidden in the blanket of nostalgia and melancholy. Like something down there wanted to come up and hurt you.

    Before that. A knoll or field or some sort of grassy surface on a day where the blue of the sky was so low and like candy. Pebbles rough on the ground like stubble, the ocean not far away. The occasional strewn garbage completing a sort of landscape. The air was full and the humidity was terse and the heat swelled and was good. A song from your youth playing in the distance, Janine right there in front of you like something real. You wonder why you’re remembering this now. You car’s CEL haunts the bottom left-hand side of your instrument cluster, your breath making foggy rotations as it FLOABW careens out of your mouth in the holiday cold. You and her just talking, nothing important or really meaningful but talking, your first conversation with her as the other kids were hitting each other with balls on the soccer field; memories of a real kind of distant hubbub. You’re back there again, with her, in the warmth of that almost-summer day sometime nearing the end of your freshman year. Her fingers curl a blade of grass until it becomes taut, but it does not snap, and you watch it expectantly. 

    Here is Janine. Your car sometimes penetrates, infiltrates, like some toxic agent, the walls of her suburb, where you know she is staying. You do not have the temerity to drive past her house, although, craning your neck, you can see it from farther than afar, past row after row of similarly shaped for lack of a better word homely homes, all arches and windows and gray-brown, carefully manicured lawns and mostly sedans, a tree here or maybe there. The suburbs where she is staying for a terribly brief period of time, inciting a special sense of desperation deep inside your core, making you sweat until your face and hair become uncomfortable with sweat. You are not a great man, you realize, not at all the way you wanted to be. This profound sort of epiphanic understanding came to you in some terrible afflatus or like catharsis as you drove at sub-15mph speeds through a deserted dead-end in hopes of maybe catching Janine taking some sort of walk, like walking her dog, if she owns a dog now, but you have no idea. You drove home promptly and went to bed without changing out of your dirty clothes; you went to bed but did not sleep.

    Way before that. Captured in the sun’s gaze, resting propped up on your hands which feel at strains of grass too all-encompassing to describe lexically. Someone else is playing different music on an opposing loudspeaker and the resulting hullabaloo is dissonant and overwhelming and creates unsettling sonic landscapes out of distorted time signatures and clashing ululations. You decide to get out of there. Smiles are exchanged, kept. Vectors are made toward shaded places. That feeling you get when you feel so empty after something so beautiful. You think happiness is the sunlight and her face and the way her mouth moves around yours. Time stops and starts and stops and starts. You felt on the plane that something on the ground was watching you, watching you past the stratiform of so many dark clouds like monsters sort of just parting like a sea of faces, giving way to her, way down below. When the wheels of the plane met the pitch-black stain of runway, in that interregnum between flight and not, you felt a tug on your for lack of a better word heartstrings that can only be described as something palpable, and there was a lump in your throat and your hand inadvertently strayed toward your seatbelt and your other gripped the window and you craned your neck and your eyes searched assiduously. And back there in the shaded place underneath branches and rafters and wilting sunlight you felt like a man but weren’t and then in the plane seemed to recognize this heartstring-tugging feeling as being akin to something similar, this feeling of just not knowing, of not being sure but knowing something was missing or wrong or both. Invariably always will be, is what it seems like, as your foot goes down and down and in the mirror a picture of yourself like the one you try to avoid but can never seem to for lack of a better word avoid. 

    It hurts. Your teeth hurt, your brain hurts. It’s an evident and immediate hurt that this place gives you. You notice shadows moving and slipping and faces of passersby blur like something monstrous, something sinister. Like something is hiding behind every corner, waiting to get you. You sometimes go through these nights where you’re not sure if you’ve actually slept but have no memory of being awake. Sometimes you feel as if you can’t see. Obviously you can see but none of what you see you feel matches things as how they actually are, noumenonical. Some days you go through whole days with the unformed Janine on your lips like a blister. Pain as a physical thing, pain as an idea, pain as theory, sunlight shooting through inside the intestines of your vehicle as you with bloodshot eyes make your way back to the airport, ready to leave and never come back. Through security checkpoints with stressed fingers grasping idly at overpacked suitcases, knees weak from waiting packed like a sardine amongst the throngs bustle and fervent sweat’d glow, faces moist under floor-to-ceiling windows effulgent and phosphorescent lighting galore. Broken styrofoam cups bleeding their contents from swollen trash receptacles, children crying as they ride their parents’ laps, lips trading information, bathrooms with grout and dross littering stained tile, mirrors ignored. You are ready to leave. The air is too much here, its weight burdening your lungs with the painful gear-and-pinion type stuff of existence, forcing you always in and out, awake and asleep, continually, each day and night passing in this fresh hell like the rasp of another completed breath. No longer does the sun remind you of the things that happened so prior. Is that Mark you think but no it is not, just a man getting out of a Dodge Dart in the distance in the airport parking lot, hand on a backpack and wearing glasses shades too dark for today’s light. Here is where it happens. Is flight a beautiful thing or a gauntlet thrown at God's feet? There were planes that day so long ago which you could name, which your eyes could pick from the naked blue of heaven’s empyrean grasp; you knew airliner information, shipping loads, maximum occupancy, wingspans. This would always impress her, make her smile. Her eyes were gods and you would importune. You see the face of your plane and the crooked silhouettes its staff working up and down its innards as you come closer to the gate, feeling the cold day. And on the way up the stairs at the DEPARTURES gate, a face and name you thought you’d never again see staring at you all-knowing with the sunlight coming through the floor-to-ceiling and auburn hair and a tilt of a wisp of something you can maybe going circumflex on old-young friendly lips. But which way? A light flashes like a gun from pillars of stainless-steel partitions around a solitary payphone, redirecting into your eyes; you feel yourself tripping, falling, falling backwards; And then you look up, the sky coming through and bending groundwards and you with outstretched hand toward the direction of the form, as if introducing yourself.