5 April 2019

Today, a homeless man traded half a pack of matches for a single cigarette.

His hands were shaking. Caked, brown blood lined the chipped edges of his fingernails. His shirt, greasy from a fast food dumpster, draped over his sunken clavicles like the faded robes of kings. And he looked me directly in the eye, though I imagine his mind was elsewhere. Somewhere long ago, before the cataracts set in, when the streetlights were northern stars. A temporary solution to some lost family member. Some overdue mortgage. Some dead dog. And he pats his pockets, searching for the matches he’s traded. He doesn’t ask for one back. A deal’s a deal and, down the road, he may find someone willing to trade a light for half a cigarette. Someone half as desperate and twice as kind. Someone who isn’t me, who studies his shrinking frame as he limps down the sidewalk. I lose him to the blur of headlights and sirens and roaring tires. I thumb the matches in my right hand.

And some things are just too close. Everything that I’ve managed to write to reach these deadlines feels like I’m taking pictures from the inside. Not losing a forest through the trees, but losing the man in the tomb of the large intestine as it wriggles inside my stomach; losing the story to anxiety. Here I stand, so afraid of the story that I may write that I make no effort to pick up the pen. To sit behind the keyboard. To make that cup of coffee. And when my friends ask how my writing is going, I can only tell them of the things I plan to do. I rattle off a river of ideas that has frozen in my procrastination. I blame the changing volume of music for my inaction. The buzzing phone. A barking dog.

 

The body twisted at the end of its rope, bathed in the near-blinding light and eternal dust of the library’s domed ceiling. A single red stiletto, dented from the fall, rests on the white-and- gray, checkered tile. It casts a shadow over scuff marks. The lobby is cold. Quiet. Pages shift in the distance. The rope moans and creaks against the too-skinny girl in the tight, red dinner dress. Her lipstick mouth, a contorted smile interrupted by a swollen tongue. Her eyes bulge from their sockets, straining to see further into the darkness. Looking to see if anyone is watching. Hoping they call her beautiful.

But the truth is that I’m afraid. Here I am, finally doing everything that I’ve ever wanted to do with the only woman in my life who has ever been willing to do it with me, and the very voice I’ve spent a lifetime developing seems to have faded to a faint whisper. I hold my ear to the door, trying to make out the words. Trying to hear those screams that, now, seem to have come out of an entirely different person. I’m too young in an aging body.

So I guess this is a promise disguised as an apology. I never was good with emotion.

There are a lot of great things on the horizon here at The Nightmare Box, and they’re coming together faster than I would have imagined. If you had asked me five years ago where I would be today, I would only be able to pray for shifting paper. Moving keys. Microphones crashing three times a week and the pleasure of putting a branch through my hand on a shoot day. I would have begged for a life so perfect as to be limited only by my own creativity.

I’ve left myself no exit strategy. I need to remember why.