Chapter I: Eternity

When you lift up your hair before your eyes to check for split ends, you can see the world blur past your vision. Everything is there and alive, but you don’t notice… can’t notice it beyond your focus. I think this is the problem with everything. I think this is the source of every conflict that has ever existed in the history of humanity.

My bangs are too long and I need more conditioner.

 

I was sitting back waiting for my hair to dry nearly an hour ago, and that’s when he called. Marcus is one of those names I don’t run into often, so I never bothered entering a last name for him in my phonebook. He called wanting to know what was up. That was a lie. No one calls for that. People call to find out if you have time for them. That is the source of every call that has ever been made. Even telemarketers just want a moment of your time. Your brother just needs to talk to you for a minute. He got dumped again, so won’t you listen? Your best friend wants to see if you are busy first before asking if she can swing by. People never just want to know what’s up. This is a misnomer. Never let it trick you again.

Marcus called and didn’t ask me if I was free. I told him nothing was happening. This was his golden ticket, if you will. He completed the awkward purpose of his call by asking me to go to the movies. This is what people call cliché. So I told him I would go once my hair was dry and I’d meet him there. Finally, my hair is dry. I can see all the dead ends nodded and twisted together. I can see the way they turn sharp corners, becoming so much lighter, right at the thinnest spot. I close one eye, focus in on one and go for it. I miss it the first few times with my forefinger and thumb in the dreaded tweeze position. Once I grab hold, it plucks off of the main strand as if hardly attached to begin with. This is just bad hair.

My phone rumbas across the kitchen counter. That is what my phone does when it receives text messages. Apparently they excite her and she likes to dance. I pick up the phone to see a message from Marcus asking if I’m leaving soon and one missed text message as well. It’s from Mima.

I love u. I hate u. Good bi. You suck. *sad*

This is a cry for attention. It is blatant and without shame. This is the sort of behavior you see from children and people who have fallen so deeply into the empty chasm of ignored passive aggressive tendencies that they must crawl, belly to the thorny ground, out again and plead for your love and affection. Mima is one of these people and she makes me sad. Well, she used to, when we were close. When we were close, she was the world to me. But people are the largest, most titanic of disappointments you will ever come across in your beautiful life. Nothing else will ever matter. Even the rain over the Macy’s day parade cannot compare to the realization, that frigid moment, when you discover someone you held so highly in your graces has never deserved to be anywhere near that pedestal. I like to call it the Man Behind the Curtain Effect. This text is a glimpse at the man behind Mima’s curtain.

I call Marcus to let him know that I’m now too lazy to drive. I actually love driving. What I’m really saying to Marcus is ‘I am low on cash and I just realized that putting extra gas in my car to see you is not a priority.’ I’m that important, so he agrees to drive the extra ten minutes out of his way to see me. This is the place where I get in trouble. The extra attention. The wanting to see me. I’m going to go ahead and assume our little Marcus has a thing for me. I’m going to assume it, because these are the signs I was taught to look for. But I’m not going to let things get to me. Trust me. I’m neutral on this Marcus character. I play life cooler than a cucumber, whatever that means.

I run a comb through my hair. It’s been growing and over growing since I lost my job. Haircuts cost money and I don’t trust any of my friends, family, or self with a pair of scissors as far as I could throw a pair of scissors. (I have just received an award for successfully using that loose expression in such a way that it made sense to me in a sentence.) My hair is at that stage where it no longer looks like a haircut. My hair looks like I’m either growing it out or I have given up hope. I zero in on the whatnot drawer. Inside, there are scissors. A fresh pair of scissors suitable for cutting. Thankfully, my mind has already made up that it wants to wear a hat. It may rain today anyway… dry hair and all that. I’m not trying to impress anyone today.

Marcus is not really special. His hair is brown. His eyes are brown, his skin is tan. His build is average. His height is average. He is the sort of guy that can easily be the extra in every movie ever made, every photo ever shot, and every dream ever imagined. He is not amazingly gorgeous. He is not amazingly anything. Lela was amazingly gorgeous. Lela was breathtaking. She worked at a shoe store, when I first saw her. I walked in with a few friends. ‘Are you hiring, by any chance?’ came out of one of their mouths as I stared. She stood behind the counter, elevated atop its platform. Her clothes were bright neon splashes against black and silver lining. Her hair was long, black cherry Sunday sherbet. Her bangs were perfectly snipped parallel to her eyebrows, perfectly shaped to her face. Her eyes beamed through, under rockstar pink cotton candy eye shadow. Her lips looked so soft, slight shine under the florescent lights. When she spoke, her words were so gentle and kind. ‘I’m sorry. We aren’t hiring right now.’ One of my companions said something to her, most likely a thank you. I watched her as we turned to leave. She walked around the front counter to fix some shoe display. I felt a tap on my shoulder. ‘Let’s go.’ Apparently, I was making an ass of myself. So we left. But some girls like that. Some girls like a guy that is sheepish and makes an ass of themselves around them. It gave her all the power. It made her a goddess in our small world. And when I went back to see her, I bought shoes.

 

Personality. I forgot to mention that. A quick look in the mirror to apply a little SPF lotion to my face reminded me that I’m not totally shallow. He’s dull. Marcus is a little dull. He’s fun sometimes, don’t get me wrong. I’m not pitty-friending him, because I’ve nothing better to do. I’m not going to the movies, just because he’s paying for it and I’m broke and haven’t felt the warmth of a large, red theater seat cushion against my ass in months. That’s just not true. A couple weeks ago, we met up at the park. I suggested the park, because it’s free and I can walk there from home. He said he just wanted to get out of the house, which ended up being crap. He really just needed an ear to listen to some of his problems. Things were getting bad between him and his father. Stress on finding a career, growing up, you know the sort. I didn’t mind, but I can only walk around the park for so long before I need something to do. We ended up walking down to the boulevard to some smoothie shop where I accosted a Strawberry Mango Tango for my trouble. ‘Taste this!’ I said. He drank from the straw with the drink still in my hand. Safe to say, that was awkward. ‘It’s awesome sauce!’ he replied. He actually said awesome sauce. ‘See. Remember the bright side of life.’ Sometimes I’m not the most witty person, but what else was I going to say? It made him smile and he thanked me. He thanked me in one of those deep and meaningful, stop the car, we need to talk, I love you, thank yous. I’ve never been good with those moments. I only have two possible reactions. My reaction? I punched him. Not too hard. More like a ‘go get ‘em tiger’ punch. Half the time, my brain puts me into the state of mind of a little league coach when someone is emotional. This has gotten me into trouble because little league can be a scary place if your coach is punching you and things have gotten intimate enough to be emotional.

 

I purchased a pair of hot pink, patent leather, knee-high, black zip up, Dr. Marten boots. I spend one hundred and twenty dollars plus tax on them. She smiled. She liked my style. My over the top sort of ridiculous and less you are in a band or a diva why the fuck would you wear that sense of style. She asked where I was planning on wearing the boots. I told her anywhere. I said that I might wear them to get some coffee later if she’d like to see them in action. She smiled again. It worked. It actually worked. She said yes. She gave me her number. That is what success looks like. We met up after her shift at four. I spent over an hour preparing an outfit around those god awful boots. I remember wearing black jeans, a yellow rocker tee with a vest, and a silver belt. I went through a third of my wardrobe to find something cool and fabulously tacky. You’d think me vain, but I seriously never spend that much time in front of the mirror. Once the clock struck four, I was already sitting there waiting. She walked in and it was slow motion like a bad teen comedy in my head where people our age play sixteen. (At that point, I had already graduated from college.) She walked in and sat down across from me. That was a moment where playing it cool was the only wise option.

My phone does another shimmy across the kitchen counter. It’s just Marcus letting me know that he’s on his way. An unnecessary text, since I just spoke to him five minutes ago. He texts a lot. I’ve noticed that he doesn’t call much, but texts so very much. It’s obnoxious at times. I don’t really like texts. Small sentence fragments whizzing to me at the speed of light, letting me know something unimportant. ‘What up?’ I get that one the most. In texting, ‘what up’ also does not mean ‘what up?’ It sometimes is that hidden ‘spend time on me.’ But at other times, it is pointless. It comes down to a small reaching out to make sure the other person isn’t dead. Of course, this isn’t a dire worry or need to hear from them. If it were, people would call. But no, people send the shortest fragmented couple of words they can casually think of to people they haven’t talked to in months. ‘I miss you,’ from a person you haven’t seen in months means about as much as ‘pass me the salt’ from anyone else. This is a major waste of time. Cell phone companies make billions off of this magical little invention. Not from the senders. No. They are already addicts, subjecting the world to their word pollution. The money comes from the innocent people that simply bought a phone for the simple purpose of calling people. Simply. When the addicts send texts to these innocents without plans, those texts cost money. Quite a bit of money once you add them up. Eventually this causes the innocents to purchase texting plans since their friends and loved ones are horrible people who cannot respect the phone wishes of the innocent simple phone users. They get the cheapest plan. But their ‘friends’ and ‘loved-ones’ aren’t satisfied. They text them more than ever until they run over the cheapest plan’s meager limit. Eventually this snowballs and our poor, innocent simple phone user is now trapped in a loveless affair with an unlimited texting plan they never intended on purchasing. This is the cycle. Marcus is an addict.

I choose a beanie with a small bill. It’s turquoise and matches somewhat with my blue sneakers. I put on jeans and a thermal with a light jacket for today, as I said earlier. It may rain. But this is California. More than that, it’s Southern California. When I say it might rain, I mean there is a chance that it could sprinkle. And when it does sprinkle, you will see umbrellas outside. There will be girls in rain boots. People will run into buildings in fear of getting misty. On the streets and freeways, drivers will decrease their speed a good 10 miles per hour. You must decrease your speed in the rain. In the actual rain. This is not rain. Southern Californian’s cannot drive. Water only is allowed to exist on the beach and in water bottles. We do not understand cold weather. We thrive in a coastal desert that attracts fire like the whores and wannabe movie starlets Hollywood. These cities fear the one thing they need to stay fire free. Thank god if it actually rains today. I toss my light jacket on my bed and grab a thicker one instead. I’m preparing for the best.   

 

I’ve never enjoyed waiting. That’s a bit of an odd statement. What I mean is I’ve always hated waiting. I get anxious and antsy all over. The anticipation burrows through my skull and I start to go mad. A sort of cabin fever-like sickness comes over me and every passing car is my ride. Every metal clinking is the jingle of keys at my door. I’d bite my nails if that were my bad habit. That suits my feeling better than yelling into an empty apartment. Yelling into an empty apartment just sounds crazy. But maybe the jury’s still out on that one.

I shut all the windows in my apartment. Standing next to door, I flip open my phone. Nothing. Not a peep, nor a saucy tango. As I said, I hate waiting. The anticipation feels like duck tape tearing slowly away at my skin. Once he gets here, it’ll be a quick and painless rip as I jump into the car and say something bitchy at him for revenge. I live a small life. I scroll through old photos on my phone to pass the time and Lela’s there. It’s a picture of her, wrapped in a rainbow scarf. The angle is close up and poorly taken. She took it herself for me. She did that a lot. She’d take my phone when I was asleep and leave albums of her beauty on the hard drive. Personality. Lela has personality.

Once we got to talking regularly, I found out she was the girl everyone wanted to know. She’d been to the most amazing places and done beautiful things. None of the cliché bullshit about riding a gondola in Venice or walking across the Great Wall, no. She’d met Alice Cooper at a guitar shop in Chicago, while passing through to visit her granny. She bought him a beer and listened to him play a song on a thousand dollar guitar. Lela found a hundred dollars in a gutter and bought a plan ticket to San Francisco for that weekend. Sure she’d been to Paris, but she went to the top of the Eiffel Tower in nothing but a trench coat and streaked her way down. They nearly deported her. Her trip back would have been free. Lela had a Polaroid camera. Her bedroom walls were filled with those white framed squares. Notes and dates were scribbled in marker on most of them. She never forgot a moment. She had a million stories.

Lela took me to her favorite place one summer evening. It was this think slab of concrete lined up at an angle at the edge of the bay. It was so out of place. It looked as though they were planning on building a pier, but never quite got there. Just below it was a hollowed out area, barely a foot above the tide. ‘This is my view of the horizon,’ she said to me. It was so dark, but I could imagine the sun setting, lighting the red in her hair. She smiled, she could tell I was thinking too much. That was the first time. I still don’t know how we fit in that small dent in the concrete, but we did.

Marcus is nice, but he’s boring. He’s been to Denver. He had an omelet.
 

The vibration of the phone tickles my hand as I receive yet another text. It’s Marcus again. He’s running late, filling his tank.

Running late. Filling tank. Can u check movie time? –m.c.

I close my phone and walk to my laptop. My email is sitting open. No new mail. No new nothing. It’s sort of amazing how many new ways technology has provided us just in the last ten years to be ignored and feel lonely. I type the name of the theater into the search bar and look up the website. The movies out today are listed in the middle of the screen. Most of them are crap: cartoons, family movies, romantic comedies, and action movies lacking plot. Two o’clock. We have about an hour to go before we are successfully late. The next showing after two is 3:15. Personally, I’m not that excited to see the movie to justify waiting around for an extra hour and fifteen minutes. The movie we are going to see is the newest blockbuster. Blockbusters are big budget compilations of all the popular movie genres. They are action, drama, and comedy all wrapped into one. They are entertainment. I wouldn’t give them anymore or any less credit than that. They are always better in the theater. If you have money to waste or know someone who likes to waste money, see them for fun. If not, find a hobby.

My phone rings. It plays “Music” by Madonna. It’s Mima. That’s her song. Phones just can’t ring nowadays. Not only do we need to know who people are before we answer the phone, but now we have to personalize their identities, immortalize them in thirty second snippets. I made the mistake of personalizing a ringtone for Lela and Mima heard it. For about a month, from time to time, she pestered me constantly for her own ringtone. ‘I want Madonna,’ she’d say. ‘Give me Madonna.’ I ignored her at first. This proved useless in her unrelenting struggle for love and attention. She started calling me when we were together. When the standard ringtone sounded, she’d say in this grading voice ‘I wonder who that could be?’ It was easy to see that I only had two options. I could continue to deal with her shit and eventually yell at her until she cried or I could appease her. My first inclination was toward yelling at Mima. I told her to stop calling me when she was sitting a foot away and that I’d block her number before blessing her with her own ringtone. A proper punishment for behaving like a five year old, I thought. This didn’t work out, however. Thankfully I left the room before she got emotional. Neither of my two reactions to deep emotionality would have been appropriate. Neither.

I answer the phone reluctantly. “Hey, Mima. What’d you need?”

“You’re horrible! How can you answer the phone like that?”

“Because you usually need something. I’m going out in a bit, so I can’t talk.”

She ignores me. “Did you get my text?”

“Yeah.”

“Well?”

“Well what? Was I supposed to respond to kinder garden rhetoric? I’m not going to give you the satisfaction.” I didn’t give her the satisfaction.

“Fine! All I was going to say was I’m having this dinner and it’s important to me and there will be people from work and school and it’s like a big deal and shit and I wanted you to be there.”

“Will it cost me money?”

“Morgie! Come on! It’s a free dinner at my professor’s house. You just need a sport coat and be on your best behavior.”

“Okay,” I say. I hear her squeal and mumble something to someone. “I’ll go. I have to go now though. I’ll talk to you later.”

“Thank you so much. I love you again!”

“Sure.” I hang up and spin the phone around in circles on the kitchen counter. I remember the expression ‘the friends you keep…,’ but I can’t finish the sentence. I mull over it silently in my head until the frustration starts to leave a sour taste in my mouth. I start to repeat it over and over out loud. The things we do when we are alone. You know everyone is crazy when they are alone. Have you ever happened upon a child in the middle of playing with toys by themselves? They talk. To no one. Out loud. Have you ever caught yourself thinking through a sticky situation, getting lost from bad directions, talking to yourself alone in the car? You even turn down the radio so that you can hear yourself be crazy. This is a natural human phenomenon. All people are mad.

That expression means that the friends you surround yourself with ultimately say something about you. Was it ‘the company you keep…,’ I think to myself. The words are lost and they are going to stay lost, because the effort it would take to type and Google search it is beyond me now. I leave my phone on the counter and walk over to the couch. I take a seat and stare at the wall. It’s a wall. It’s been a wall since they built this place. This is boredom at its finest. I never got to decorating the walls of my apartment. I had planned on it, but losing your job, therefore your steady source of income, puts a cramp on interior design. The wall is just blank and boring. It says nothing about me. White wash. A year ago, I wouldn’t be allowed to live in such an empty shell. It would be an abomination. Lela would force me to live in my home. Really live. She believed in surrounding yourself with all the things you loved, wanted, and aspired to be. She’d always say, ‘remember where you are and where you are going.’ Lela was the one who would find twenty dollars on the street. Her eyes were open to opportunity. She saw possibility. ‘Today, I sell shoes. Tomorrow, I’ll be designing them.’ She kept sketchbooks filled with designs and binders filled with swatches. She had a dressform standing in the corner of her bedroom draped in red flapper dress and a short, brown bob wig named Maria. Maria was her muse and her model for women’s fashion, she’d joke. Somehow, Lela had even convinced some people that Maria was a real person.

After her birthday party last year, we came back up to her room. She was drunk, not sloppy drunk, just loose drunk. She started stripping. I thought it was just for me, but then my lap dance was being performed for Maria instead. She even called out her dressform’s name later on. I can’t say I didn’t mind, but to this day she doesn’t believe me.

That was our little joke. ‘Oh, Maria!’

My phone does a little foxtrot, so I check the latest message. It’s Marcus. He’s here. I take a deep breath. Time to go. Time to finally go to the movie. I almost thought it would never come. At times like these, I wish I didn’t answer my phone.