It's been said

Sep 08, 2008

It's been said. The cigarette helps me swallow the pride or whatever this feeling is tucked in a weird crevasse in my throat. The words "VIDEO 1" stagnant on the tv screen seem foreign to me. V-I-D-E-O-1. Video. Too many vowels I think. I trace her movement about the house with my eyes. She talks to me in a monotone staleness. It's not anger or disappointment, but a sort of broadcast of her general actions. I think about the house that is less then a 1/4 painted for 2 years now; The small but sharp comments we whipped back at one another in regards to stupid tasks that rested on my shoulders. I haven't cried for five or six years, and I don't think I'm going to. But if there was ever a time, now is it. I suspect she isn't going to either, so is that reassurance? I scorn the new love a friend has found recently, I scorn the loud music resonating up the back hallway from the basement, her studio. 'Vagina Rock' I call it, I'm sure she hates the label I gave it (although she knows on occasion I listen to it). I go down there after a bit and we talk about how absent we both have felt. I am all but absent now, engulfed by the pressure of the moment. Once you get one thing taken care of in life, another problem rears its ugly head. If there was a time and a place for everything, life would be a lot simpler. The beer I opened a half hour ago and had one sip of looks back at me, label half cocked. Fuck that label. I go back upstairs.
I sit in what we affectionately called "Acadia's Room" in the past. It's a full guest room that people stay in from time to time when too much has been drunk. The most use the room gets is our dog's many naps on the bed we picked out, hence the name. The dog's name is greek for lazy and slothful, which rings more true then the intended meaning (a park we both loved in Maine, first place the sun touches in the east-Cadillac Mountain). The dog comes in after a short trip in the basement. She hops up onto the blanket next to me in the only grace she knows. She looks as though I am in the wrong place, even though there are a multitude of alternate K-9 bedding apparati scattered strategically in every room in the house: some with technical fortitude greater then the Sealy we currently stare at each other on. I feel in the wrong place since I remember I made the bed after its use last night, and she claimed to be sleeping there tonight. The dog helps and hurts my thoughts. I don't let her know that, but she thinks of the two humans as her pack. I pet her with one hand and sift through some pages of a book of poems I picked up as a distraction. I just leer at the pages, looking past them with a sort of x-ray vision at my present conundrum.
I can't do this without her. In the past four years I have failed to make any real friends of my own. All my friends are second-hand her friends. Not a fair conduit to travel though. She and I are first and foremost best friends, we were before we got together, and i suspect will continue to be whatever the outcome. That was all I needed. Now our intertwined life is a messy group of wires which I have no manual for. I know that it is unethical and just plain annoying to spout to them my side, I know first-hand from their end. But now this veneer I have to apply is a shallow , obligatory stop and chat that we all fear and hate; smile plastered on. The transparency is clear, I'm sure, as they pose with a puppy dog face at me. Its crap, because as of now its just a break(not even a separation) and we are and have always been civil...perhaps to a fault. I flip the page, and drag my hand over a floppy fur covered ear.