@battlehood / nathaniel: you mind if we look around?
By all means, look. Dig, and dig. Truffle pig to truffle pig.
I don’t care what they find, because there’s nothing to be found — Carthage is a ghosttown. A real Midwest character that coaxes out the tumbleweeds and the clink of spurs on each boot from the very cowboys that say they don’t rule this neighbourhood.
Let me explain. I insisted that we didn’t buy. I don’t want anything tethering me to the Huck Finn slapstick hillbilly asshole-of-America that is North Carthage. The only rentals are puckered amongst the run-down estate of foreclosures and boarded up windows that is our neighbourhood. Our. I say it like it’s just a totally blasé way of meaning mine. But Nick’s dragged me here, kicking, screaming, humming and... well. I’d like to say I didn’t kick up a fuss. Nick’s mom had cancer. She’s gone now, and he seems to have dug his heels deeper and deeper into the woodloused, rotting foundations of the McMansion we’d found ourselves in.
It’s been two years. I miss the city. I miss New York, with its New York traits and its New York lights. I miss the rats that scuttle along the subway, and the piss that streams itself up the side of each wall under the cityscape. That’s how much I hate it here. I’d rather be pissed on by the homeless drunk that camps out outside each bodega and his clinking bucket of change.
“By all means.” Look around. See what you find. Because I’m telling you, one New Yorker to... whatever the fuck breed that finds himself at my door, you won’t find anything. This house is empty of Amy. It’s all Nick. Here, I’m nothing but the wisp on the wind. Here, I’m The Dunnes. I’m an empty bottle of perfume and two quarts of half-and-half away from being a total fucking stranger to this place. Nick has The Bar. I have Bleecker and a total, irrefutable claim to something better. I don’t want this life. God, will someone just fucking pull me from its grasp before I start saying shit like y’all, and darling.
I open the door — it doesn’t take much convincing. Figure out what it is you want and go on your merry way. Nick thinks I’m making too big a deal of this. I have my journals — what I squirrel away in light of a better day, and a carton of New York memories that look as obsolete as I feel here.
“Anything you’re looking for in particular?” I don’t mention the garage. Or Go’s woodshed. That stays between friends, remember? Don’t fuck this up for me.