writing: the narcissism of small footnotes

The images and sonic blur that the book gave her lined up with her ideal place to live: blue-green, pine trees, little pockets of mud and permanent nostalgia so heavy in the air that people were always forming bands to understand the place or they understood it too much and were trying to get the hell out of there. She was fascinated by the idea of moving to a place that some teenager was desperately trying to escape from; it was completing the cycle that she had begun when she left home and then realized retrospectively that even though the way of life strung through her upbringing had no correlation to her personality, she was mired in it nonetheless because she grew up there. Not exactly an original epiphany but she felt the newness of it like a blow to the head. Her teenage-hood in rows of cows staring, bug-eyed and silent, from behind electrocuted fences as she walked on the gravel roads to the farm behind the hills, like she was walking through a calendar picture, and listening to angry and desperate music.

“I’m sorry, what about the book?” He was bored, she could tell. She realized also that she had no conception of him; she could not think of his hair color or eye color. He was sitting right in front of her. She focused — he was drinking coffee, his hands wrapped around the cup.

“It’s the book I’m reading right now,” she said. “It has a nice ambiance, it reminds me of a place I would like to live.”

“Hmm,” he said. “Like a future memory.”

“Exactly!” she said. She felt a sudden thrum as she imagined him unbuttoning her shirt and working his fingers around her nipples. “My other problem, though, is what if I focus on this place so much it becomes almost real to me, and then life is life and I end up somewhere else? What do I do with all that energy that I spent directing, so intensely, you know, towards that one place?”

He had brown eyes. She noticed this because she was making a scene in her head and needed the details.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe your recognition of that is its own cautionary tale. It’s dangerous to try and plan out life too much.”

“But you can’t not! You have to have some idea.”

“Well, of course,” he said. “But there’s an idea and then there’s what you are describing. The idea is more real than anything else because you know of it but you also know nothing about it.”

She was working right now in a dead-end job, something she had swore (when all she did was study and this seemed like a profession unto itself) that she would never do; she wondered if he could sense this dead-endness hanging around her and if he was secretly repelled by it. She could not sense anything from him.

“Where did you grow up?” she asked. She had finished her tea too fast and now it was a green pit inside her stomach. Slow steady pine green knots. She imagined the cows in a long oscillating line; the burs that got stuck inside her tennis shoes, their faces worming towards her feet. The itching pain if they ever made it.

“Lots of places,” he said. “But mostly the west coast.”

Now she imagined a deep welling blue feeling, pine trees in thick corpses to the sea. Or the slovenly heat of SoCal, the friction of growing up always in the summer. He was saying something else. He was telling her about the house or the leaving from the house or the acquiring of a new house. He was talking slowly and his eyes went to the upper left or the upper right in pursuit of memory. She thought about how marrying him would feel, what kind of taste it would leave in her mouth.

“Well, I had a lovely time,” he said.

She gulped. He was going to crucify her — she was awful. What was his name?

“I would love to see you again,” he said.

Her teenage self was was going up green hills and under fences and into the far expanse of private land. The wind moved fast through the overgrown grasses like the breath of God.

“I would like that,” she said.