In Which By The Time You Hear Me I Will Be On My Way Back Home

Vermicompost

by DAN CARVILLE

Around late January, when Christmas was just the echo of an echo of crumpled wrapping paper, I ran out of ways to convince you to come back. 

Apologies in advance for the second-person. I know it is the dirt worst, even worse than consecutive semi-colons, but you can lay the blame on my total lack of composure. I was pricing a belt at T.J. Maxx on Wednesday and tears ruined the buckle, rusted it out. 

A lot of bad things have happened, if I'm being honest. I know in a relationship, a real relationship that is what you have to be, or it catches up to you. A phone call out of the blue announces the lie has evaporated. 

I don't lie anymore, not even to myself. 

One of these unfortunate occurrences put me inside of a hospital. (It was nothing you did, and it was not really happening to me, anyway. He only goes after those we love, especially when we love ourselves too much to risk it.)

Hospitals all look the same, halls too wide for human occupation. Signs point us in the wrong direction, away from the place we need to be. I remember one time I was in a hospital; I was just a little boy, I had seen The Rocketeer; it was supposed to keep me awake, only the thing was it put me to sleep instead. 

I should have known that basic irony would be the defining jest of February. The reason I give a gift is to show who I am, the kind of person I might be under better, more favorable circumstances. I guess what I started thinking is, what if I am that person now, and the gift just proves how much further I had to go. 

Why you left is nuncupatory. The fact is you are not down in the Metro when I go there, and believe me I questioned city personnel. I keep thinking to myself how I never did anything bad to you except not take the trip you wanted me to. You never suggested I go, but you should not have had to ask. It eats at me a lot that I did not do that for you, but it is not even the biggest bite. 

Day one of therapy was like a bunch of swarming minnows, taking plankton-size chunks. My metaphors run away from me. Writing is inadequate to this particular task. There is something missing from it that can only be conveyed by the actual passage of time, not the gasp between paragraphs. 

I did go back. I also returned to where we first met, hoping I would glimpse you through an aquarium. That first day we met I was not really looking forward to seeing you. I canceled the night before, wrapping myself in a thin black blanket and reading until all my bad thoughts went away, of how maybe I was not the person you thought I would be, and would I hate myself for the lack of authenticity?

My therapist gave me this idea. He asked me what kind of person I thought I was. The only way I could answer is this: I never do things for the sake of them. He told me that some people might view that as a character flaw. I wanted to scream. 

But I did not. There is no anger there, even that has faded with the time we are given to get over ourselves. The training for this in the life of a man is minimal. I am, like plenty of others, not unfamiliar with being dismissed, but the way you did it.

That has nothing to do with it. It is what I tell my class (I am teaching now, you never let me tell you, it is great fun and you always told me I should do it and I did, I'd talk to you about it in these warmer nights if you let me, my lips brushing against a pillow like a perpetual greeting). What I tell my class is, the way you say something doesn't matter at all. If you're saying the right thing, you could tell it backwards and we would still shake at the end. 

March comes on like a refrain. Everyone is telling me to be social. "Don't retreat into yourself," a friend says. "It takes too long to realize nothing's there." I have my books and movies. I finished Carrie: the ending was just awful. I tried another Theodore Dreiser, and I noticed a theme. A woman is humbled, and she takes a man with her into the gutter. She makes a choice to save herself or save him, and whatever decision she lands on, she regrets. 

 

You must have some regrets. I never met anybody that didn't second guess themselves, but I suppose that is why you are not here right now. I would have liked to watch that movie with you, and I wish we had never disagreed. It is another character flaw, to enjoy bouncing hard against something soft, and then doing the reverse. I'm working on pushing the soft parts together, says my therapist. 

It is the opposite of what you are supposed to do in writing, and maybe that is what I find difficult about relationships at times. It feels like pressing the cathodes of a battery against each other, nuzzling their charged tips. 

I pray a lot now, which is funny considering I told you how silly I thought it was. Well, now I know why people do it: it is for when you want something real bad and divine intervention is the only way they can think to get it. I pray for you to come back in my life, and sometimes for wonderful things to happen to you. I figure if you are happy maybe it doesn't improve my chances, but it couldn't hurt them. Plus, you'd be happy.

That's not where these pleas to God end, however. I don't imagine just having you around. That's peanuts. I imagine marrying you in front of everyone I know. It gets worse. Even though we're already wed, I propose again. We could renew our vows. I was looking for a ring, but it wasn't good enough. The only thing that would say what was in my heart right now is seaweed and grass. I go back to the earth — I'm even composting now. I miss you. When you walk through the door, you won't recognize me. I ran to lose weight, and I kept doing it because I know you would have wanted me to. I'm volunteering for Hillary. I've seen so many places on these travels — the end of the park, choruses of concrete, metal detectors exchanging compliments, lightning bugs kneeling and circling my big stupid head. That's not all. You're here and praying too. My clothes are better, my spirit is larger. I am king of all the animals, and I sprinted a block to return a dollar that had dropped out of a girl's pocket. You won't recognize me at all. 

Dan Carville is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in Washington D.C. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

"Radio Protector" - 65daysofstatic (mp3)

"The Big Afraid" - 65daysofstatic (mp3)

In Which We Prefer Our Gifts Small And Delicate

paintings by gigi scaria

Must

by LINDA EDDINGS

David had a reputation on a dating website. He also had webbed toes on one foot, which I previously believed impossible. He pronounced sinecure incorrectly, and he used it incorrectly in conversation over half the time, which constituted a double whammy.

Charlie had wild hair and was a very fast runner. After we had sex three times he revealed he was a product of incest and things spiralled out of control from there. He wrote and shopped around a book about his life story and how he was saved by semi-pro lacrosse.

Marcus loved M. Night Shyamalan and insisted The Village was a work of genius. He totalled my car.

paintings by gigi scaria

A myna bird will repeat whatever interests it. In the absence of sound, it will cry.

Theo drank Bailey's Irish cream in everything, even Diet Coke. I asked how he could do that and drive. He told me, "Bailey's doesn't have alcohol in it, right? What do you mean?" He died in 2007 during a stampede.

Jason used to blow bubbles on my stomach. At first it was semi-pleasurable and routinely led to oral sex. Eventually he only did it when he was apologizing: e.g., "Please forgive me. Blooooooo" on my navel. He is now married with two children.

I started to wonder if guys only talked down to you because you did it to them in subtle ways. I tried women, found them very similar in almost every way.

Diane remains a musician with a very irritating voice. If you got mad at her she cried, probably because her father was an English alcoholic who wanted nothing to do with her.

Mary-Ann's favorite musical act was Salt-N-Pepa. Each time she brought me to the point of orgasm she whispered, "Shoop." This was fantastic but she ended up clicking more with her Korean dermatologist.

Artis was an engineering lead who spent a lot of time in front of his computer. Sometimes I would feel I was observing a fish in a tank. On occasion he would take a break and meet my eyes, but only for a second.

You know when a plane suddenly loses altitude and then levels out? Nina was like that.

Daniel took me to Disney World. We had a very nice time until he remarked, "The only problem with this place is the none of the pools are deep enough to drown."

Susan Minot acts like such a dick sometimes.

You know when you are really close, yes you are so close. The one thing holding you back from where you're supposed to go hovers at the periphery, it is saying the same words you heard as a child in a classroom: Behave.

Clifford was the most transparently pathetic adulterer in the entire city of San Francisco. He never lied or apologized, which was his only saving grace. Actually he had several other virtues: punctilio, joie de vivre, and a passion for Pinot Giorgio that defied all common sense and fiscal responsibility. He kissed with his eyes open.

Pascal was always coming from new cities, where he would bring small and delicate gifts and go into the bathroom while I opened them. It took me much longer than it should have to realize he was a drug mule.

They pick up on something that is so petty, and so reductive because they can't think of the real reason why it is over, and instead of being disappointed by the lack of perceptiveness at work, I am just as happy not to have my nose rubbed in it.

My fault.

A man (a boy?) who only sips from juiceboxes, who only listens to Buck 65 and J Dilla.

Henry wrote all the pauses into written dialogue. Sometimes when he stopped talking I could see him mouthing the word to himself.

They want you near, in more intimate proximity than they have ever been to themselves. They want to go to the one place you have never been, in order for you to witness the event through their set of inhibitions, hang-ups and callbacks.

The most free I have ever been was one morning in Joseph's studio. He was breathing as he always did, through a sleep machine, and the rhythmic sound of the snore echoed through his only chamber. I knew that no matter what I did or said, he could not wake to answer. This is what I told his sleeping form: "Don't. Just don't."

Linda Eddings is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

Paintings by Gigi Scaria.

"Holding On" - Bootleg Rascal (mp3)

"Asleep in the Machine" - Bootleg Rascal (mp3)

In Which We Hold Very Closely To A Notion

painting by Kate Shaw

The Right/Wrong Time

by HAFSA ARAIN

1

I certainly did not know two years ago that leaving school would be just as harrowing an experience as entering it in the first place. When I started graduate school as a rather insecure 25-year-old, I found the first semester to be one of the most challenging experiences of my life. I remember a conversation with my mother a few weeks in, in which she lamented the loss of my presence at home, and in which I lamented the loss in my confidence and ability to speak my mind. Through her tears and my discomfort, I communicated what I could not say to her in person: that I wanted more than anything to come home and be comforted.

My parents, who have learned how to be supportive of me and my choice to study the humanities, sent me to California with the sense that I would relearn who I was and return to them a reformed and renewed person. This is true, although I never went back to Chicago. I relearned who I was in graduate school — rebuilt what I had deconstructed in undergrad — and now I need to relearn how to be a whole new person. One who does things instead of thinks things, one whose identity is connected intimately to whom one works for.

This is because we pretend it is a choice who we work for and why — have we not been directed through life’s strange twists and turns to end up in a place if only because chance made it so? That you met so-and-so doing something connected to what you do, or that your friend introduced you to someone who happens to have some money set aside for an intern — these are the ways we get jobs, not because we actively search for something that fulfills our identity. This is the way I have gotten jobs — only because I have proven myself to the right/wrong people at the right/wrong time.

Painting by Kate Shaw

It is a strange thing, then, that we place so much value in where someone chooses to make their living. We ask about it at parties, or assume that it must be announced like a calling card on social media. It must go after my name in every email I send out — I am inextricably connected to what I do. Even after I am much older, should I ever decide to leave what I do even though it is fulfilling, it will live on my resume as a stamp of my life as a 27-year-old. You did “x” for “x number of years” and that’s how we will define you.

The only act in connection to work that has ever proven my identity is leaving a job — ceremoniously and at a young, impressionable age. The leaving was the act of being myself. The leaving is what led to everything that came afterwards. The leaving was the key to my success. When I tell some relative much later in life how to feel alive, I will tell them to quit their job in the way I did: without any regard to the consequences. Quit when you know you can’t take it anymore, and then revel in your poverty, for it was your own choosing.

Of course, I could never imagine giving such advice now — not when I know too deeply and too recently what it feels like to see bright red numbers and an unfortunately placed “-” on my bank statement.

2

Unlike my sister, who works as an accountant, I have found that the kinds of jobs I've had expect me to envelope myself in them. In most cases, I have not minded this expectation. I am accustomed to enveloping myself in things — it is how I exist best. In college, it was maybe listening to certain kinds of music or reading certain books. In graduate school, it was my research and exploration of young Muslim women living in Pakistan.

Such a life is only worth living if you believe in what you envelope yourself in. And such was my perception of crisis in my transition from student to worker that I met with my thesis advisor at first notice to go over the potential PhD programs to which I should apply. In recent conversations with him, I have confessed my own doubt and apprehension in my work. To this he replied: what is your project?

And to that, I thought, I have too many.

painting by Kate Shaw

3

Having been raised to be creatively-focused, I find the most challenging aspect of my job is not the expectation of bringing ideas forward or challenging my bosses, but rather the expectation of hyper-productivity. I had never judged myself before on how much work I could accomplish in a day, only the quality of said work. To be judged on both now is a challenge I have never encountered before. As much as I try to welcome such a challenge with open arms, I find that I am often seeing my own flaws in a way that makes me resent what I used to do and who I used to be. That I could have spent all that time learning how to be better at what I do now and didn’t — that I had wasted so much of my life not being a good enough or fast enough worker.

I resent those who are able to work in the creative field even more than I resent myself. I recall especially a talk I attended a year ago with Zadie Smith, a much beloved author, who said that she could spend at maximum about four hours per day writing. What I actually resent is not that she requires only four hours per day to write amazing works of literature, but rather her financial ability to live her life comfortably while working however many hours she chooses to.

4

When my mother turned 50 — a few years ago now — she told me over the phone that everything she thought she knew about herself was so little compared to what she knew now in her middle age. Her role as a mother, as an immigrant, as a woman – all of these things made such little sense to her when she was my age. Even in my struggle for instant satisfaction as a millennial, I hold very closely onto this notion. That one day, I too will be a slightly wrinkled 50-year-old woman who will look back on my life with the solid understanding of where I have been and where I will be then.

Hafsa Arain is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Los Angeles. You can find her twitter here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about her childhood.

Paintings by Kate Shaw.

"Actually" - Rozi Plain (mp3)

"Best Team" - Rozi Plain (mp3)