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Grooms (Another Six)

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Grooms

Six Sentences, Volume Two

I am honored to have made the list of authors who will be featured in the upcoming literary anthology: Six Sentences, Volume Two. The 6S community has given a voice and a platform to many talented writers, both aspiring and accomplished. Thank you, 6S!

The official announcement (my name appears at 1:47)

6SV2 Author List

Five Percent

When my doctor said the word cancer, I was incredulous. I asked him to repeat himself. As he did, he gently pushed me onto my back and told me to lift my chin. "Keep your chin up," he joked, and in spite of myself, I heard my own laughter.

 

He kneaded my neck with his fingers and scowled when he hit home. "There she is," he said, and I knew exactly what he was feeling. I had felt it myself dozens of times in the shower, or alone in the car, or awake in bed at night before I finally gathered enough courage to call a specialist. A quick ultrasound revealed the lump, swimming on the small screen in grainy black-and-white. He said it looked good, as good as can be expected in this situation, but he wanted to be sure and so he sent me home with an appointment for a needle biopsy the following week.

 

"It really does look good," he assured me, "maybe a five percent chance of cancer, and five percent is very low."

I went home and thought about the concept of five percent for seven days. If there was a five percent chance of rain I wouldn't pack an umbrella, I told myself. But then again, if there was a five percent chance of my flight being hijacked I would probably reschedule my trip. A five percent chance of flash flooding would only interest me for the length of time it took for the announcement to scroll horizontally across the bottom of my screen. But a five percent chance of having my torso chewed to bits by a shark while scuba diving off the coast of Mexico would probably find me booking some other activity to enjoy during the course of my vacation. I did this all day, every day, in my head for a week.

 

Sometimes I did it out loud, and drove my coworkers at the library crazy, "if there was a five percent chance of your baby being born with a degenerative disease, would you be in the reference section right now?"

I returned to the doctor the following Monday with a cold breakfast in my belly, as nervous as I have ever been. I had done enough research on the procedure to know that the doctor would take several samples through fine, hollow needles by inserting them directly into the lump. There would be no anesthesia. I sat in the waiting room for an hour reading Physicians at Leisure Magazine. I should have been reading Patients at Wits End. I felt just like I do before I board an airplane, twitchy and scared. As it turned out, the procedure itself wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be (much like the airplanes I so tentatively board) but it left a bruise the size of a small plum and almost exactly the same color, like a five-carat garnet choker or a port-wine stain. It was done. The doctor said I was an excellent patient, not a single flinch or swallow. He told me to come back in four weeks and he would have the results. I told him I would do exactly that as soon as I could stand up without passing out.

I was at work when I got the call. It had only been four days since the biopsy but the doctor wanted to see me immediately. I explained to the receptionist that I already had an appointment in four weeks. I was confused. She said, "no, he wants to see you tomorrow." She could not tell me why. I spent the next nineteen hours in a fear-induced panic. I drank too much wine with my girlfriends and drove three blocks home without my headlights on. Everyone assured me that it would be fine. Perhaps there had been a mistake with the samples. Maybe they just needed to redo the biopsy. But I knew. A call like that never brings good news, and it didn't.

The next morning I was told that the results of the biopsy were abnormal. The doctor gave me a paper copy of the diagnosis and groups of unfamiliar words swam before my eyes. Macrophages. Epithelial. Metaplasia. I went home and Googled the entire thing and I still didn't understand it. That, or I didn't really want to. He explained to me that he believed he was seeing a type of follicular cancer because of the amount of cells that were discovered in the samples. A surgical biopsy was needed to be sure. Suddenly, my five percent became fifty.

 

"This type of cancer is the best cancer a person can get," he said, as if that can even be said about something so horrible. "It is the slowest moving and has the highest survival rate, something like 95%."

 

But I couldn't help remembering that he told me after the original biopsy that everything "looked fine" and now here we were. Fine had become fear and five had become fifty. I wasn't even going to allow a statistic like that to get into my head. Because yes, I would pack my umbrella and yes, I would get to higher ground and yes, I would take another route and yes, I would run for my life. On and on it would go into infinity and I was far too exhausted by everything else I had been forced to process over the past twelve days to take on that kind of chaos.

 

Three weeks later a surgeon removed a cancerous tumor and half of my thyroid gland. I spent forty-eight hours in the hospital eating chocolate pudding mixed with powdered meds and when I left the nurses gave me a prescription and a recipe: crush coedine tablets, mix with chocolate pudding, sleep. I slept for days. The bits of me that were removed during the surgery were sent halfway across the country for a second opinion. Today, those tests came back conclusive for signs of spreading. What this means is that in six weeks I will be back in the hospital having a surgeon slice out the other half of my thyroid gland. Six weeks after that I will be chasing the pudding down with shots of radioactive iodine in order to kill the remaining cancer cells. And while I have certainly enjoyed my share of dangerous cocktails, drinking radiation isn't exactly my cup of, well, iodine. A period of isolation will follow; entire days spent in horrible exile, far from my friends and family. So, in the meantime, before I have to go through all of this, I am planning a much needed getaway. A weekend of hiking in Death Valley - which is, ironically, a place that is almost completely uninhabited and bordered by a nuclear test-site.

Six Sentences

Six Sentences published my submission!

Cutter

Are You Their God?

When I was growing up I wasn't allowed to read Judy Blume. My parents belonged to a church that believed certain books were dangerous, that the ideas they contained within their pages could lead me astray, and so they were forbidden. Blume's books were the biggest offenders. She wrote about breasts and menstrual cycles through the eyes of a prepubescent girl who talked to God. A curious young woman who dared to question her religion. A heathen-child brazen enough to ask God to help her begin to develop. It was an abomination. Coming of age. Finally figuring out what your friends were pretending to know already. Puberty. Judy Bloom, indeed. I knew that something sticky would happen between my legs someday, but I wasn't sure what. I had a feeling these books could tell me.

By the middle of the second semester of seventh grade a paperback copy of Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret made its way off of the library shelf and into my hands. The cover was a deep shade of purple, which made it feel very mature. I stared at it. A girl in a high-collared orange dress stared back, her blonde hair flowing wildly, almost defiantly, around her shoulders. I had heard the title of the book whispered so many times with an incorrect inflection that I was surprised to discover that it was actually a girl asking God if he was in fact present instead of questioning whether or not he was indeed someone's higher being. Are you there, God? Not, Are you their God? It was the first of many fascinating discoveries. I was too afraid to check the book out so I shoved it deep into my bag and walked as fast as I could past the librarian. I was sinning already.

I was reading the book in the bathtub when I realized I hadn't locked the door. My mother was putting towels away. You'll prune, she said, as she placed a stack of clean towels in the cupboard next to the sink. What are you looking at that's kept you in here so long? If I'd been in my bedroom I could have rolled over and asked her to turn out the light. I could have plunged the book deep under the bedspread. But there we were, Margaret and me, glaring like blemishes in the fluorescent light. My mother squinted. Her brow furrowed as she stuck her neck out like a turkey to read the title. I would have tossed the book into the toilet bowl if I hadn't been frozen stiff. The bathwater had suddenly gone from tepid to cold. No bubbles, nowhere to hide. Just my hairless, pale pink body, caught like a tuna in a net. The humiliation continued in school the next day when, while I was waiting in the cafeteria line, the boy who was waiting next to me silently poked the side of my left breast with a pencil.

In the end, it couldn't be stopped. No matter how hard they tried to prevent it, I grew up. Birthdays came and went. My breasts swelled until they filled rounded cups. My ovaries kicked in and started dropping eggs like a free-range chicken. I lost my virginity. I exercised my right to choose. I read Ayn Rand. And when I was ready, my womb became the warm, wet miracle it was meant to be. I now have a daughter of my own. She is older now than I was when I took that book off of the shelf. Times have changed, however, and banned books do not exist in her world. She sleeps late into the afternoon on Sundays, and sent me a text message when she started her period.

I grew up in a trembling household of Christian hippies and weeping crucifixes, broken crackers and grape juice, Harvest Night instead of Halloween. We weren't allowed to celebrate a holiday with Pagan origins, but we were allowed to dress up in costumes and come to the church to collect candy as long as those costumes reflected characters in the bible. And if this message wasn't confusing enough, we all pushed the proverbial envelope by arriving dressed as animals from Noah's Ark and fish from the Red Sea. We looked no different from the kids on the street but it was an illusion the church vehemently clung to. One kid even came dressed as a mummy and told everyone he was Lazarus risen from the tomb.

I don't want my children to be afraid of faith or to be terrified into being better people. I want it to be something that comes naturally, an acute sense of right and wrong instilled in them by years of good example. But I was also raised to fear the wrath of God. I was assured repeatedly that God would be deaf to the sound of my voice unless I repented every time I prayed. So what will happen to my children if I raise them to question and explore instead, to research any religion they choose, and to find what fits for them? Will they benefit from such a freedom, or will it fail them? The guilt is killing me. It sticks to the inside of my heart like a bramble and I pray in my bed, late at night, ticking off a list of my sins before I begin just to make sure God hears me. I pray for answers. What will happen to them? Am I doing the right thing? Are you even listening? If I choose not to believe in you, are you still their God?

Salvation Mountain

Niland is a small town in Southern California nestled alongside the Salton Sea; a town so desolate that I thought I might have made a mistake in my plans to visit it as I drove past the green highway sign announcing that I had arrived. In the distance I could see the encampment known as Slab City. Flat, arid, and nearly deserted, Slab City is home to a handful of hippies, snowbirds, and fringe-dwellers who live among the concrete slabs of an old World War II military base in beat-up campers and trailers. Most of them live without running water or electricity, far away from the clutches of society, subsisting only on what they can provide for themselves. They pay no bills and no rent. The residents are left alone to live as they please. The Last Free Place on Earth, they call it, and it is, in every sense of the word.

Salvation Mountain rises from the dust in the middle of Niland like a Technicolor spring. Leonard Knight, now in his seventies, has been working on his creation in the middle of the desert for over twenty years. The wind was picking up as I arrived at the mountain and I pulled my cap low over my face as I slowly walked toward the huge, colorful mass. Paint cans were gathered in groups along the walkways, some of them open and nearly emptied, their contents already spread in streaks across the adobe clay. The silence was eerie, nothing but the howl of wind and the flapping of old rags. There was no sign of Mr. Knight and I would have felt like I was trespassing if the signs hadn't been so welcoming. I thought he might have gone into town and I was disappointed that I had missed him.

I was kneeling in the dust to get a picture of a reclining chair inside what Mr. Knight refers to as The Museum, a structure made entirely of bales of hay, discarded car doors, giant tree limbs, old tires, and adobe clay when I heard someone call a loud greeting from above my head. I was so startled that I nearly dropped my camera but I was delighted to find that the artist was home after all. He climbed slowly down the ladder and extended a friendly hand. His skin was like a leather glove. He had a shock of white hair and the dark brown face of a serious desert dweller. His clothes were covered with paint and as casually as if we had already been in the middle of a conversation, he launched into the story of how he makes the adobe flowers that line the trunks of the trees. He told me how he starts with a big dollop of clay (he showed me the size with his hands) and then he just punches them, like this! He put his fist into the already dry indentation and I could imagine how much fun that is when it's wet. In this way, he tells me with childlike exaggeration, he can make a thousand flowers in a day.

He offered to give me a proper tour of the cool, shady corridors and it was a little like what I imagine being on Tatooine on acid would be like. He encouraged me to climb to the top of the mountain. Especially with that camera, he said. So I half climbed and half crawled up the sunshine-yellow stairs and foot path that wind across the face of the mountain. My backpack shifted alarmingly and I put my hand down for support. I noticed in places that the paint had chipped off in great thick chunks and I wondered how many years of dedication and how many layers of acrylic it takes to produce something like that. As I climbed I thought about safety measures and building codes and I was quite relieved upon finally reaching the top of the mountain. Slab City lay quietly to the east, a field of tiny white boxes. To the west, the sparkling Salton Sea. A giant cross made of what appeared to be telephone poles cast a shadow hundreds of feet long across the dirt. The creator of the crumbling beast squinted up at me through the sunlight. Looking down at him, I couldn't decide if the man was crazy or brilliant. Then I realized that I was the one who spent the afternoon climbing to the top of a giant art installation in the middle of the desert. He waved and I walked back down.

Bride and Gloom

Even after seven unsuccessful years of marriage and nine subsequent years of singlehood I still love to look at bridal magazines, especially the ones with cakes on their covers. I love the towers of soft, fruit-filled sponge, the impossibly smooth fondant, and the flowers made of frosting. I even love the miniature bride and groom that stand proudly on top, smiling like idiots. In a closet somewhere, deep in a box, I have my own set of little plastic people with their arms entwined, ready to face the world. The only problem with that is, I snapped the bride's blonde head off about six years ago. I remember rolling it back and forth between my thumb and forefinger after feeling the satisfying crack that freed it from its tiny neck. It was about the size of an Ibuprofen tablet and I chucked it across the room. I didn't see it again until months later when I pried it from my cat's sharp and hungry mouth.

I keep my bridal magazines stashed in secret places around the house. In the drawers of the coffee table, in the pantry under the cookbooks, and in the bathroom, where I can look at them in private. I read them in the car while I'm waiting for someone and then I shove them back under the seat. I read them in long lines at the grocery store, flipping defiantly through the glossy pages, giving any curious onlookers the ringless finger.

I know what this does to me. My judgment upon the smiling women between the pages is brutal, as if looking in from the outside gives me a superior sense of clarity. And perhaps somehow it does. I am convinced that the brides who choose lavender will always be mean and controlling. The ones who choose red will regret it. The ones who choose a masculine color to compliment a feminine one will at least have a fighting chance of finding themselves on the upside of an otherwise unlucky statistic. The ones who use the ocean as a backdrop are just show offs. Nothing else could explain the audacity of using the ocean as a prop. However, I did see Kevin Costner and his bride in a canoe once and a reception held in a natural history museum that made my heart skip a beat.

Don't get me wrong, I love weddings. I love that we dress up as virgins, it's like Halloween for whores. It's just that I hardly know anyone who hasn't been divorced, and I don't know anyone who shouldn't be. That's the problem. It doesn't matter how much I adore the deep creases of satin, the thick, creamy fabrics or the pointy-toed shoes. When faced with the prospect of getting married again I become almost unbearably uncomfortable. Like, hyperventilation uncomfortable. The subject itches, like tulle against my bare thighs. It doesn't fit. It is a tight corset of a conversation that crushes my chest, squeezing the organs inside until I can barely breathe. It's too much for me to imagine. Impossible, really. But then I see the brunette in the black-and-white photo spread smiling up at the grey buildings on the streets of Manhattan, her handsome dark-haired groom admiring her at arm's length and I think yeah, I could do that. Except I live in the middle of the desert and would rather smile up at the burnt-red walls of a canyon. Alone. It's the idea of it that I love. The day. I get caught up in the images, the frozen frames of moments caught on camera, and I forget that there's a commitment that comes with that. The lifetime. Til death do you part, or at least until you get so sick of each other that you would claw your own face off just to get out of the damn thing. I don't ever want anyone to feel that way about me. I've often thought about being a wedding planner. That way I could get my frilly fix without actually having to wear the dress. But then again, I'd probably just wind up telling the brides to go fuck themselves.

The Rules Did Not Know Me, Guaranteed

I arrived at the address to discover that it was nothing more than a vacant lot between two trailers. It was over two blocks from where I'd originally thought it was located. Evidence suggested that there had once been a trailer on the empty lot, as the house numbers were out of sequence by one. On the left the address ended in the number nine, on the right, thirteen. The empty lot would be eleven. There was a concrete block where back steps would have been and a large, black mailbox balancing precariously on a wooden post. The rusty nails holding the box onto the post looked as if they'd had about as much weathered abandonment as they could take. I tried to open the flap door but the metal had rusted almost completely shut. I gave it a tug. I heard the wooden post crack from the strain. The heavy box lurched to one side and I quickly pulled my hand away.

I drove home thinking about a conversation I'd recently had with a friend of mine, an artist by the name of Hillman. He was telling me how each of our lives are made up of blocks of time or, markers, as he called them. How physical relics are sometimes left behind to prove that we existed within these markers and how important it is that these things be preserved. Time marches forward without a glance over its shoulder but there are ways that we can capture time whether it be through photographs, keepsakes, or our own memories. I thought the conversation was a little strange at the time as he was having it almost all by himself, as if he were merely thinking out loud and I just happened to be in the room, but I did understand and absolutely agree with everything he was saying. As I drove, I marveled at how timely it had been and if I were to believe in signs, this would be a billboard.

I started talking about all of this to my best friend, someone who has tolerated, humored, and encouraged every thought that has ever drifted through my head. For the first few days he would squint at me through his glasses as I explained what I wanted to do. He silently sipped his drink as I described burning piles of scrap metal, empty spaces, property ownership and permits. Sometimes I made it up as I went along and other times I made perfect sense. It was all I could think about. My brain became a kaleidoscope; if I tilted my head even the slightest degree to one side, or to the other, everything I was thinking would change, depending on which way it all shifted. More than once I saw it in my sleep. It was never a matter of why, but when. I wanted the mailbox.

We slowly drove past the lot. I was afraid of hanging around too much, my focus was making me nervous, so I would crane my head as we went by, as innocent as if we were on a Sunday drive. But in reality I was carefully examining the base of the post, the twisted wire, and the height of the neighbor's fence, behind which I knew lived an angry pit bull pup. We didn't want to do anything we weren't supposed to and this fact alone generated most of the discussions that took place. The issue remains cloudy to this day but we no longer discuss it. I said it was abandoned. I argued that even if someone rebuilds on the lot someday they certainly weren't going to use it and it would only end up in the city dump.

On and on it went until we both agreed we should at least speak to the neighbors. Actually, I agreed that he should speak to the neighbors and I should wait in the car. The conversation took place across the chain link fence. Amazingly, they had lived there long enough to remember when the old trailer had been pulled down. My heart ached at this but I said nothing. After some debate amongst themselves they agreed that it had been about ten years or so. They said they had no problem with us removing anything. I was surprised by this as it wasn't theirs to allow. I felt like I needed to leave at that point, even empty-handed, and so we did.

I left work the next night thinking about my upcoming weekend, blissfully free from thoughts of the previous day's events. I opened the driver's side door and there in the passenger's seat, illuminated by the dull overhead light, was a huge, black bulk. Paint peeling, no flag, the rusty nails that once clung to a wooden post threateningly close to the interior fabric. It was the mailbox. Tucked into the flap was a note scrawled in a familiar hand and obviously meant to make me laugh: With Love, Alexander Supertramp, which is, of course, the name Chris McCandless adopted during his travels including the short time he spent in what was now a very vacant lot.

The mailbox now has a permanent place in the garden in my backyard next to a deceptively fuzzy patch of Cholla Cactus. Rusted and slick with rain today, absorbing the heat of the sun tomorrow. A marker preserved, with desert grass growing tall through the cracks in the metal. When I ask him to tell me the story of how he got it he just laughs and says he's glad I didn't want the concrete block.

Into The Wild

I never knew Chris McCandless, but he lived in my neighborhood. In the fall of 1991, McCandless spent two months in an empty trailer in Bullhead City, Arizona, a filthy strip of a city that clings to the banks of the mighty Colorado like a parasite. Bullhead City is nothing more than squat, vacant strip malls and fast-food chains. Biker motels and gas stations. Run-down river rentals and bars. Lots of bars. Grown men get struck crossing the highway here all the time. On the other side of the river, to the west, Nevada spreads out like a rough blanket, broken only by the jagged peaks of Spirit Mountain and the low rolling hills of Searchlight. Las Vegas glows to the north. On clear nights the bright lights of the city can be seen in the sky all the way into Bullhead but that doesn't make it any more beautiful. It's still Bullhead. I live on the Nevada side.

Chris worked for a while at the McDonalds on the main highway, a place I avoid but can't help glancing at whenever I pass by. In a letter he wrote, he talked about settling in Bullhead. He thought he might abandon his tramping life, but then he added, "I'll see what happens when spring comes around, because that's when I tend to get really itchy feet." This doesn't surprise me at all. Bullhead would give anybody itchy feet. Every time I have a reason to go there, I make it as quick as possible. Even Chris lied to his coworkers and said he lived on the other side of the river in Laughlin. Every time I pass that McDonalds I look to left, towards California, and I see what Chris would have seen on the day he left that restaurant for good, a view that soars across the campus of Mohave High and down into the valley where the Colorado pushes forward, and always west.

Where I live I see drifters almost everyday. I see them head south into the desert, with packs on their backs and hats pulled low over their brown leather faces. I imagine if I had seen Chris I would have given him no more thought than the curious amusement I give these men. And somewhere here in this desert, before he made his fateful trip north, someone saw Chris.

The things Chris McCandless did were not great. In fact, the things he did were pretty ignorant. Camping in a wash near Lake Mead on the cusp of monsoon season, for example, or taking an aluminum canoe down the Colorado to the Gulf Of California. I have an aluminum canoe. The thought of taking it, alone, any further down the Colorado than our little lagoon seems like sheer idiocy to me. But he did it. He floated right past our little lagoon, a freer spirit than I will ever be, and one thing becomes quite clear: I may be outside, but I still have walls. This is what I admire most about Chris McCandless; there were no walls. He had a complete lack of fear, a quality that killed him as well as set him free.

He was an idiot, that's for sure. But in my opinion, Chris McCandless dying a slow death in the wilderness is no more senseless to me than all the people in the world dying slow deaths at their desks right now. Living one life while dreaming of another. One of the last things Chris McCandless wrote was, "I have had a happy life." I wonder how many of us will be able to say the same.

Chemical Vs. Comfort

We've all felt it. The waves of adrenaline. The breathlessness. The dangerously heightened levels of every single one of our senses. The rush of passion that comes when we've met someone whose internal makeup is so similar to our own that our entire physical network goes haywire. The sweaty palms, the racing heart, the inability to concentrate. I know I've been there. I've spent nights without sleeping and still felt refreshed. I've stopped eating for days and never felt hungry. I've been completely convinced that the world I knew before I met the love of my life was a waste of time and that I wasn't even an entire person until he swept me off of my feet and took me ever-so-lovingly (of course!) into his arms.

I read an article recently that explained how all of the rapturous feelings that occur with brand-new love are brought on by the release of a chemical called Serotonin into our bodies. I'm confused, and my idea of cupid has suddenly taken a nosedive. Apparently, the little cherub's cherished arrows are nothing more than neurotransmissions and nonsense. Some scientists are even starting to compare the state of mind that we experience when we fall in love to mental illness, and even though that makes perfect sense, I hate the idea of it. I hate looking back and imagining that everything I've ever felt when I've been in love was nothing more than my body producing a substance with enough power to fool a full grown man. Comparisons of my mouth salivating at the sight of a steak are filling me with shock - is that all it was? A physical reaction that I couldn't have controlled even if I had wanted to? It brings a whole new perspective to the term "madly" in love.

But don't look at me. I failed science. It was the romance of the arts that I've always excelled in. And according to this article, my ability to endure the comfortable, slightly bored feeling that never fails to worm its way into any long-term relationship means I'm sane. It also suggests that my tolerance for the familiar (and mind-numbingly dull) predictability of knowing exactly what he's going to say next, exactly where he's going to touch me, and exactly how long this is gonna take makes me more stable than if I were walking around with my head in a cloud and a moronic smile plastered across my face.

Of course, all around me, everyday, hundreds of people seem quite content to spend their short lives in relationships that are less than fulfilling, existing together in states of complete and ignorant bliss. They say passion is bound to burn out anyway, so why bother? But at what point do we choose to give up the magic for the mundane? And what price do we pay when we do? I've seen women become bitter and broken. I've seen frustrated men reduced to tears as years of complacency steal entire lives. Call me crazy, but I don't want to live that way. Comfort at any cost. Do we have a choice?

Ruined Music

Ruined Music has published me:

You Can Use My Skin To Bury Secrets In

He was a rock and roll Raggedy Andy, all cable knit and frayed denim. He had spiky red hair, like bolts of yarn, and a secret sewn over his heart. He loved music almost as much as he loved the intake of breath that kept him alive. In fact, to him, I think they were one and the same. He didn’t just ruin one particular song for me, he ruined an entire artist. I was a fan of Fiona Apple before he came along, but it didn’t hurt to listen to her the way it does now until her songs became the words I was too scared to say, until her phrases rocked a boat that I was too afraid to shift my weight in. Her entire discography would eventually become the soundtrack to our very intense and very memorable relationship.

We would meet in Las Vegas. Sin City. It was perfect for us; a city whose entire tourism campaign is based on secrecy. What happens there, stays there. And so I clamped it. I kept my mouth shut and let Fiona do the talking. We would barricade ourselves in a hotel room for a day or two, emerging only to drink, maybe to see what time of day it was. We’d spend hours making out. Good, old fashioned making out, like in high school, where his hands were like snakes and my lips were swollen. Music would fill the room, like steam from hot water, records he’d brought with him that he wanted me to hear. He would gently lift the long rope of wet hair from my back and begin to brush it as he pointed out a melody here, a drum fill there. He taught me how to listen to the music, how to truly hear it. Fiona was one of his favorites, too. He admired her passion and compared it to my own.

When we were apart, we’d spend long afternoons on the phone. “What are you listening to?” he would ask.

“Fiona, again.”

“Ah, yes. Of course. You and your Fiona. Which song?”

“Right now, it’s ‘Limp.’ She’s so brilliant. These lyrics are the best.”

“Indeed. Ah, can I call you back?” He would know exactly what kind of mood I was in and he would run. I ached for him. I was restless and wanted more than he could give.

During one of his last visits the phone rang and I answered when I wasn’t supposed to. A female voice on the other end asked for him. I held the receiver next to my thigh. He was sitting there in a dress shirt and slacks that made it hard for me to recognize him. I knew him in casual clothes, jeans and vintage tee shirts of rock bands that he loved. A knitted cap that made his face look very pink, fleshy with the cold. Shoes with soft soles and beautiful stitching. The room swayed as reality hit me in the face. In a voice I had never heard before he told me to hang up the phone. It was in that instant that everything changed. It was time to go home.

Fiona often sings about being angry. She sings about regret, about sorrow, and about a love that cut a wound so deep it changed the very core of who she is. Almost any one of her songs could sum up our entire relationship, and most of them are now off limits in both my iPod and my car’s CD player. Especially my car’s CD player. The last thing I need is to be blinded by tears while I’m driving. There’s just something about the quiet space and personal privacy of hearing a great song in the car that gets me every time.

It’s been three years. He’s moved on and I’ve become a memory. A song he hears but can’t quite place. Still, the music keeps coming, “you and your Fiona,” and I begin to hate the sound of her voice, the perfection of her piano, and the lyrics that make me burn with the resentment of not being able to let go of something that does not want to be lost. Words that threaten to drown me in anger as I choke on my own frustration. Sometimes I wish I could tape her mouth shut.

Because, interestingly enough, the relationship between myself, Fiona, and this man has somehow transcended any standard boundaries. He no longer comes to visit; we no longer speak on the phone. All the proper limits have been set and yet, years later, he still pops unexpectedly into my inbox with delightful treats such as Fiona’s recent duet with Elvis Costello, mp3s of the Cold War Kids covering “Fast As You Can,” links to posts he’s made about her on his popular music blog. I devour each one of them like a brokenhearted girl in a bakery. I know they are bad for me, but I cannot stop. He also sends music through the mail. Shiny silver discs in paper envelopes containing every emotion that has been bottled and corked and sent out to sea. Delicious waves of melody that wash them all right back. Little gifts of song that mean more to me than any bauble or trinket ever could.

His name appears in a subject line and I freeze. My head screams delete, but instead I download the pain. It hurts like hell, but I make myself listen. I don’t know, maybe I listen because I’m looking for a place where I can not only forgive him, but myself as well. Maybe he sends them because he knows that place might be somewhere in these songs. Maybe he just wants me to have my songs back - the musical equivalent of returning a favorite shirt left at a lover’s house. Either way, I’m beginning to understand that sometimes that which fills an empty space can be even bigger than what was there before.