If at first you don't succeed...you know the saying right?
People say stuff like that with preconceived notions like, "it's fool proof, because any respectable person couldn't possibly fail a theoretical third time" Well, meet me. I'm not what you would call a first class human. I was exceptionally mediocre in high school. I prided myself on it. I took a semester of college, but was too distracted by the clear, warm California nights. I stared at the moon from my apartment porch the night before a big final and thought, "This view has got to be all the things I need to know." I work at a corner store.
But that's not what's important. Or rather who is important. Her name is Valencia. She has a last name, but god, I could say her first name all day. I Could trace it in shining gold, I could smear it in blood. I could spell it out with my lips on a piece of aged parchment. Am I in love with her? Yes....Yes? How do you measure love? As if it was quantifiable. As If it was measured in how many times her hands go down my jeans in public places. If so, hopelessly. As If it was measured in the amount of poems she reads to me while we lay on my bedroom floor, if so, I'd say maddeningly. Have we said I love you to each other? That’s a good question. She might have whispered it to me one wild night in a taxi before crawling up my shirt and digging her turquoise nails into my shoulder blades, but I was too drunk to remember. Maybe with our eyes, Maybe with the tips of our fingers, Maybe with that Gibson she bought me for Christmas, but never with finality, like this is all a dream and saying those three words would snap us back to the real world.
One night, Valencia Braque (it just pales in comparison doesn't it?) Gazed at me with her head perched on My chest, her sky blue hair forming ringlets in the dip between My collar bones, and asked...
And that's when everything went to shit.
Did I say I love you? Of course I did. What else was I supposed to say? She cups my chin with her hands, and the brush of her fingers against my beard sends an electric shock through every hair. “Do you love me?” she asks again, this time with force, with burning desire.
her eyes are narrowing, her pupils spread like a blot of ink over her sea green irises.
I suppose I haven’t really thought past our little world. I haven’t gazed into the future like so many do. They have told me over the years that I have no future, and I guess I’ve come to believe them. In that moment I try to see children running in between legs, white dresses over thresholds, a mortgage, living rooms, quiet nights, but there is nothing. A void where wonders and dreams used to be. that void becomes the pupils of Valencia’s eyes.
“Do you...love me?” I ask.
I am at long last able to imagine something. I see a image of us, lips locked in the middle of a crowded street. People are walking by, but we are frozen. Deathly blue replaces the warmth of blood. Frost coats the buttons of my jacket. We are an icy memory, motionless in the false eternity of young love.
Her pupils shrink. She brushes her hair back, and begins to trace circles around a freckle on my chest, looking down.
“Haven’t I told you before?”
“I don’t...know if I remember.”
what I really want is to know, not if, but why. Do you remember when I ambiguously mentioned the quality of my humanity, which may or may not be pretty damn low? Well, Valencia knows this. Her parents know this. Her dog knows this, because on my first visit to her childhood home in Modesto, her father’s pressing questions about my family life triggered a breakdown that culminated in regurgitating my spaghetti and meatballs all over the family’s beloved bichon, terrance. Several broken dishes, a gash in daddy’s forehead, one stained throw rug, and one traumatized dog later, Valencia is here. Kissing me when she knows strangers are watching, screening her parent’s fervent calls, pushing me down on my shabby twin mattress, running her fingers through my coarse hair and asking questions like, “do you love me?”
she stands like a body from a coffin, and walks through the threshold of my bedroom door, closing it behind her. There’s the finality that’s been missing. Blood rushes through our veins. The frost on our clothes dissipates into a cloud of steam around our flushed bodies. Our lips part and we stare into the heat of the inevitable continuation of everything.
Things were never the same after that.