In Which Things Are A Lot Worse In The Morning

Theater of the Absurd

by DAN CARVILLE

This rough-looking, pinned back challenge. You only laughed among your friends, those you knew for longer than you knew me. That is how I knew there was something dark inside you, and the laugh was a kind of easing.

There is a castle in a place we both know. Inside the tower, spaces oscillate between cramped and open. Part of me wanders from room to room there. I just wanted you to pose for one photograph. That was all. Candids aren't my style.

Rub a particular spot in concentric circles. Tell lies the whole time you are doing it. Tell truths afterwards.

Once I complained that you never asked me for anything. Then you demanded much that I never intended to give. You used my phone for a calculator, metaphorically. It was only good for that, I was only worthwhile to fill in some aspect of a desire. Sections of you, pieces of yourself never resemble the larger whole. I am so much more complete than you.

80, 50, 42, 10. Fold the rope so it burns at both ends. Near the castle, but not inside it, a little girl screams, "Take me with you."

There were much worse heartbreaks than this, much more awful people. Over time you start to admire the honest ones. Now I tell what exactly it was that made me feel nothing, so that the abscess never has to wonder about its removal. This is only kind: a ghost is a vicious kind of creature, the sort that never leaves well enough alone.

Meeting someone new feels impossible. So much of me is stuck behind somewhere. The only thing that takes my mind off the pain is reading. In one novel, a man visits the realm of Faerie. When he goes to leave, he sees the spectre of himself still resting on the beach. He says that he wishes he could spend the rest of his life there, in the dangerous and wild part of the universe. "Doesn't part of you remain there?" his friend asks.

One thing that bothers me in all the love stories I read is that they have such definite boundaries and strictures. Moving up and down on a wet point. Bending back the focus, rough at the base. Delight.

Fading out, the softness of your hands and shoulders. Light from the kitchen, the vastness of the pillows. The city stretched out behind us, everyone else planning for a future that was bound to come. I shook nervously, too far from home, and the refractions preyed upon me. We all become too much like one another, merely through proximity.

Let's be fully open. Even when you screamed at me in Bloomingdale's, I blamed myself. I always loved you, but I didn't bother saying it. You said that you loved espresso and popcorn, bedsheets and black boots. Those were all the things that can't really love you back.

In the mornings it is so much worse.

In my sorrow I go back to these old places. It is better than being taken by surprise, casually walking onto the grounds. I need to prepare myself for the fact that you will always inhabit this New York for me. I know you will never think about me within the walls at all. You have to be warm inside to notice the cold.

Putting my fingers in someone's mouth is never as intimate as I expect. Placing them elsewhere with the lightest touch. I try to be kind until I have a reason otherwise, but that reason usually arrives, coming up through the bedsprings.

Winter is the worst time to be alone. I received a letter from a woman I loved. Of course I never told her. It was an apology, an unneeded one really, since she at least had the courtesy to never promise me what she could not give. At the time I called her cruel, but now I think she was just being merciful to never give me a chance. She knew her heart better than I did: how small it was.

Dan Carville is the senior contributor to This Recording.

In Which We Slow Down Now For Your Benefit Alone

Everyone Says They Know You

by DAN CARVILLE

There is a hike I do every so often, when I am feeling up to it. It is good to take in the air and see something of the world I live in. Maybe this sounds incredibly stupid to you, but sometimes I forget that people are not the only thing in the universe. This self-aggrandizing attitude perpetuates and feeds upon itself until days like one a month ago, when I found myself examining every part of my body with the flashlight on my phone.

On the hike you can still see humanity. Families dot the trail, sometimes carrying a cooler which means they won't be going very far. Divorced parents abound; their children looking overfed and undernourished. There is a man-made part of the path that suggests a sandbar, and you can see things submerged on either side of you. You can't go down and touch them, but you know they're there. That, someone with brown hair once said to me, is what being in love feels like.

I only tell women I love them when they meet the following requirements: they have no idea that I will say it, they are unsure of how to respond, they are unclear on whether I even believe in love in general, and they have made no serious commitment to me or anyone in a long time. Once those givens are established, we move past a sandbar to a small inlet where a little boy found a body when I was in middle school.

Coming back home makes my moods inelastic. This is a good thing, because otherwise I will miss the one I used to be with. You know that echoing part of mourning, when you just feel a twinge and nothing more? I wish for that, but it never comes. In the first gust of September, I had to close the curtains because the trees have lost their leaves.

On a regular basis everyone I know and trust feels insatiable for a certain element of their personality, which if they embraced fully would manifest itself as insanity. What I want to avoid is the panic I feel at waking in a strange place, with a person I love but worry it is not entirely or not enough. Panic fills my lungs then, and each individual action feels irrevocable. The biggest difference between people now and a decade ago is how forgiving they are in the light of day. Secrets that we keep from ourselves or others subsist in a stasis that belies the seasons.

A clean, sweaty smell akin to sidewalk after a rain. Oblong erasers sharpened to a small, thin point. Magnets oriented away from the most of them, praising whoever is in the vicinity. I have been to many natural formations, but none so fine as this, in the place where you said the only sense in turning back is to make sure your head is still on a swivel.

Now I can articulate what I could not before – more than acceptance I desire an understanding completely sexual in nature, simply of bodies intersecting. Once that is achieved, beyond the railroad tracks where boys more zany than me found the juiciest cigarette butts, there is a sort of serendipidity that should flagellate itself on self-worship. It is loving yourself, but it is also loving through someone else's eyes. They are not yours, the lenses merely borrowed, the irises ground into a ceramic paste that is fed to dogs. I loathe falling in love again.

You can go off the path. These two girls in Panama wandered away from their maps. One hurt her leg, and the other took a fall when she went for help. All they discovered of the women was a pelvis. My only thought upon reading that was that at least they found something. Alone here you can come across nothing valuable, since everything in the forest has been abandoned, multiple times. I think you know the metaphor I am drawing, but I miss her too much to explicate it if you don't. I drew a parallel reminiscent of Herodotus at the gates; let that be enough for you.

What bothers me most in isolation is how much I tried to reach out and explain my mistakes. On a long enough timeline, we can experience regret for any one of our actions. I cringe thinking about this. Once when I was a boy I ran into my grandmother's arms accidentally. Another time I laughed when I meant to cry. Vice versa.

You might think me cruel or vain, but you're wrong. It's the opposite. You only believe that because it's what you come to expect, in this year of our lord.

What if I could take back some of it, all of it? Then I would retract without analysis, all of it. Experience of love is pointless without a happy ending. There is no learning experience. Read a memoir of an alcoholic – by the end they want it even more than before, every time. If they say they don't, they lie. If they say they don't want love, what they want is to call love by another name: yours.

Slowing down now. It's all coming to me without any pressure, close enough to matter but not enough to hurt. Our own power, personified on a license plate or a bough. The birds of this area have a distinct call that pushes on the inner ear, asks for a recognition beyond the species. I yearn to find those little ones.

What have I been listening to? The new Head and the Heart is pretty good. I like positive songs, ones that make me feel the evil in the world is just tremors, a muted reflection of the good. Put it back, the tremors tell us, replace the milk in the refrigerator. You know it only gives you gas and makes you bloated. Forget how good it tastes.

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

In Which Someone Very Close To Me Had A Cast On Her Leg

Torture

by DAN CARVILLE

Here are the things we wanted to take with us:

- old drawings of cars if they were people

- photocopies of our hands on top of our hands

- the pluperfect, the pluperfect

- the same rock, close up, magnified, and then from the farthest distance

- triumvirate alliterations, like daddy daughter day or ravishing rick rude

- contact lenses that are no longer our prescription

- the tonality of light, daytime leaves like a bow...

- baseball cards, all the players had our same birthday. June babies, March misfits. I knew their poses.

- when he became Venom, how did it feel?

Here is what was better left in the old house, stacked next to the stairs like a rose bush too close to another.

- casseroles of double meaning

- unused stationary, the wrong address. Mailings and return to sender in those familiar printed letters.

- the less interested of the two porcelain jugs, filled with all manner of detritus

- helmets of the Spanish conquistadors

- assembling at dawn

- retrofitting porcelain tiles that did not resemble the brochure

- remember that time in Monterrey? She thought they were smoking menthol cigarettes.

A sodden man, flipped on his side. Stands and puts his palm against the light. What would we do without these little bits of fire between the eyes, rotating our insolence? Left for carrion, a man is only so many things at once.

- There is no point, no point at all in candles where we are headed.

- Before the exit there's a turn-off where you can see the whole town, Don't stop there.

- I signed over the rights to this story, but I am not sure what we get in return, except a bib.

- The functions of things.

- Carnival signs, the watchword is caution.

I sanded down two thin sticks of wood and placed them in my pencil case. It is a lot easier to get inside of a building if you have your lockpicks all squared away before then. They resemble cheap, finite creatures who barter for status. There is none of that here, in the world beyond the world.

From one vantage, the past radiates through each of us, humming like an air conditioner and bringing a more favorable complexion to view. I hate to mix metaphors, but someone very close to me had a cast on her leg, and she likened it to that. I sure don't want to forget what happened - bad first dates, God in an oxygen tank. Writing her all those frantic letters that didn't show enough of what they meant to display, which was this: my affection.

I glanced through what she had sent me. Corny bullshit mostly: playlists and cheap polaroids, postcards from Manila and Bangladesh. Her opinion of all the painters who had ever lived. Everyone else is sentimental. I used to wish I was like that, and my wish came true.

Dan Carville is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in Los Angeles.

Images by Los Carpinteros.