"Good morning to you."
We were all tangled together in a position that just screamed discomfort, but was miraculously not so, at all. I had never felt so comfortable before in my life.
"Whatcha doing?" I said, catching her gaze with a smile.
"I was just noticing this." She said, gently tickling my morning wood. It was resting in the crook of her hip, red and angry and desperately out of place against her smooth skin. I blushed. No matter what, I always felt a little embarrassed when someone - be it my brothers, my friends, or Annissa lying naked in my arms - pointed out things like that. I casually diverted her attention by interlocking my fingers with her's.
"Yeah," I said, "It happens..."
"I've noticed." She said.
"You have?" My chest was tight with humiliation. For a moment I felt like I was going to cry.
"Yeah." She said, with a smile, but shifted her attention to my hair with her other hand. "But don't worry about it. It's not a big deal. I mean, it's beautiful."
"No it's not." I said, "It sucks. I hate it. It's so useless and out of place..."
"Aw, Taylor, stop... you're going to hurt its feelings."
"You're siding with it?" I asked, with mock offense.
She broke a smile, "Well, of course. I always root for the underdog."
"I highly doubt he's the underdog in this situation."
"Well, you're bigger than him, you could beat him up."
"I'd much rather you do that job." It was my turn to smile.
"I don't know if I could ever truly beat him. He kind of impresses me. It does this every morning?"
I laughed out loud. "I've never met a girl so openly intrigued with my penis before..."
"Well hey, man. I got gypped. You have a whole handful of surface area to work with, and what do I get? The swamp!"
"It doesn't feel like a swamp to me."
"That's not what you were saying last night..."
"Shut the fuck up." I said, laughing. We de-tangled a little and I stood up. "What time do you need to be at work today, anyway?"
"Not for a few hours. We're cool. Why are you getting up? Jerk! You don't want to stay in bed with me? I'll keep you warm and cozy."
"I need to take a shower... Where it's hot and steamy..."
"You take showers like that?!"
"What do you mean 'like that?' I shower every morning. You know that."
"I mean... with your dick all hard."
"Oh." I blushed again, "I normally beat off if it doesn't go away."
"Can I watch?"
"Ani, seriously... You're obsessed. If I knew you would be so infatuated I would've never have let you see."
"Oh shut up, you totally love it. And you're going to let me in the shower with you because you're a pathetic loser guy who can't say no to a naked girl in the shower with him, regardless of circumstances."
"I'm offended by that generalization!"
"So can I come and scrub your back?"
Sigh. "Yes."
"Thought so." She smirked.
I like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite a new thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
I like your body. I like what it does,
I like its hows. I like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which I will
again and again and again
kiss, I like kissing this and that of you,
I like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh . . . . And eyes big love-crumbs,
and possibly I like the thrill
of under me you so quite new
-e.e. cummings
After work, after school, she came home to me. She slept over near constantly, and in those first few weeks I was convinced that everything was going to be perfect forever. I adored her. I adored her more than I had ever adored anyone in my entire life. I was going to marry her. I was going to clean up with her. We were going to have babies, buy a big house, and live a perfect, happy life. In our dream world, life seemed okay again. I began eating. I stopped taking so much Valium. I shaved and bathed. And when we weren't in bed, and she wasn't in school, there wasn't a moment I wasn't at her side. I knew every freckle, every turn, every mood. I reveled in her idiosyncrasies. Even her most irritating and appalling habits turned me on. I knew that this was love.
I watched her pop zits in the mirror as I brushed my teeth.
"Do you have to do that? I have zit cream, you know..." I said, pulling the toothbrush out of my mouth, and making a disturbed face.
"Fuck zit cream. We can't all have perfect complexions like you."
"That's not true! I totally break out at the most inconvenient times... and it sucks..."
"Taylor, please... a boy like you doesn't even shit!"
I laughed.
"I love your hair in the morning." She said, patting my damp, flat locks, curled out in every wrong direction. "You should cut it again, though. It looks awkward that length."
"I thought you loved it!"
"Only because it looks stupid."
"You want to see stupid?" I said, challenging her.
"I don't need to. I have you!"
I stared at her incredulously, toothbrush in hand and toothpaste drooling down my chin. "Who you calling stupid?"
"Oh no you don't." She said, nearly tripping herself as she stepped back from my toothpaste covered kisses. "Yuck!"
I felt like I was on some kind of delirious and wonderful drug every hour of the day. Just knowing that every morning I would watch her change into her school uniform, and every evening I would listen to her breathing to lull me to sleep, was enough to keep me high for days. In spite of everything, I couldn't see how our relationship could ever go bad. I had nearly forgotten why she slept at my house in the first place, too blinded by the perfect girl I saw that whispered E.E. Cummings in my ear, and knew just the right places to touch me. I never wanted to believe that there existed a world outside of us that wanted anything else.
But there was. There was a whole world of demons and horrors that didn't want us to ever be. It came to me like a slap in the face when once again she returned to my house with bruises and welts, this time covering her back and legs. She wouldn't tell me what happened, and she wouldn't let me touch her for two days. She started taking my pills. Seeing her so hurt and depressed made me cry. I kept my tears from her, because I didn't want her to know how much it pained me. I sang for her, I cooked for her, I even played the piano for her. We had spent several hours, one afternoon, just down in the basement as I sang and played. When I hugged her she pushed me away, but yet she refused to leave my side. It confused and frustrated me. I was running out of ideas. I didn't know how else to love her.
After a few days locked up in my room, filling our lungs with cigarettes and grass, she proposed one of her cure-all's.
"Let's go to the park and play on the swings." She said. We got in my car, but it was hours before we made it to the park. Barely on the road, she picked up my phone and called our dealer. He was having a party, so we went.
It had been years since I had been to a party, and the experience nearly intimidated me into leaving. The last time I had been in a room so filled with people was at Zac's wake, and the noise, even longer. Loud techno flooded through the house while mashed out kids sat on the floor and couples copulated. I didn't want her to be there. This was not a place where she belonged, but when I suggested we leave, she looked at me like I was stupid and walked away. I felt like such a square in an environment I used to know so well. I sighed a little to myself as I grabbed a drink and sat down, alone on the couch, waiting for her.
I don't really recall how the events took place. She had disappeared, and I was drunk. I suddenly came face to face with an old friend of mine.
"Taylor..." He implored. "Taylor Hanson... is that you?"
I nodded, not really bothering to give the voice my attention.
"Wow! I haven't seen you in so long! How are you?"
I shrugged, and looked up at him momentarily, but behind him I saw Annissa squeezing between people and stumbling around empty bottles.
"Taylor!"
"There you are!" I said, exasperated. "I was worried. Where on earth did you disappear to?"
She was fucked up, I could tell. I was pissed, but I didn't know what I was expecting. She started to kiss me and I pushed her away. "Don't you start." I warned. Don't you dare be that girl. She looked hurt, but soon forgot. "Sit down."
My friend was still standing there. "Sorry, this is Annissa, my girlfriend." I pointed to the girl on my arm, "Ani, this is Jay. He's an old friend of mine."
He winked at me, and she clung to my shoulder, shyly. I was so nauseated by the whole exchange. "Don't listen to him. We go way back, don't we Taylor?"
"Oh yeah." I said, dryly. I was drunk, and now that I had found Annissa, all I wanted to do was go home and go to sleep.
"Hey listen," He said, inviting himself to sit down beside me. "I just got the most amazing shit. It'll blow your fucking mind."
"You know I don't do that shit anymore."
He pretended not to hear me, and he pulled out a tiny vile, filled with the contents of what was once my life. "Me and Taylor, we used to do a lot of crazy shit..." He continued prattling on, talking a mile a minute about our coke binges. "Taylor, you boned that one chick right in the kitchen, remember? Man, you proved so many people wrong that night." He was cutting lines right in front of me. I wanted to leave. Annissa was staring up at me with eyes as big as saucers. "Then you went to LA and, like, never came back. What happened, anyway?"
I went to rehab, you asshole, was all I could think. But I couldn't say it. My eyes were fixed on the mirror table and the fat line Jay had cut just for me.
I didn't even know what I was doing until after I had done it. I was knocked off of my feet with the familiar sensation that overcame me. I was no longer drunk, but I was no longer pissed off, either. The world felt a little brighter, lighter, and just better. Like it always had. I wanted to hate myself for what I had done, but I couldn't. I felt bolder, more powerful, more like the old asshole I used to be when I would go to parties and tell, not ask, the girls to suck my dick. I wanted more. I reached for the perfectly rolled twenty in Jay's hand.
"Good shit, huh?" He said, "But watch it. This shit's intense, you don't want to overwhelm yourself."
I ignored him, and did another, smaller line.
I lit up a cigarette, and the sensation was immediately sexual. Annissa was laughing, it felt good. I was euphoric, but clear headed. For the first time in months, I felt like I could talk to anyone about anything. My natural shyness had completely faded, and I began to wonder why I had given up cocaine in the first place. The entire idea of it, at that moment, just seemed ridiculous.
We did go to the park that night. Three in the morning, the two of us drove there, and I had so much energy that I could've run around her in circles for hours. She informed me, finally, that she was just on uppers and quite drunk. She tripped and fell in the grass when we were playing tag and I joined her. Are you hurt? No. Look at the sky.
I lit up a bowl and we began talking.
"How do you feel?" She asked.
"Contented." I said. "Happy, perfect, contented." I leaned closer to her and wrapped my arm around her. She let me. "How do you feel?"
"Better."
"I'm glad." I said. I felt as if whatever had thrown us so off balance for the past few days had finally been corrected. We were back to normal again. I kissed her over and over. She giggled. For a moment, though, I had to be serious. The question was nagging me, and I now had the guts to ask. "What happened?"
"Nothing more than the usual." She said, soberly. She pointedly looked away from me at something in a nearby tree.
"I don't really know what 'the usual' entails..." I said.
"Taylor," She said, irritated, "Why do you even care? It doesn't matter. Why'd you have to bring it up?"
"Maybe it wouldn't matter if you weren't so inconsolable. What did he do to you?"
"Why do you press me to tell you things that will only hurt you?"
"Because they're hurting you."
"Listen, okay? I graduate in a few weeks. It's just the summer, and then I'm out. I got scholarships. I can go to school. He said he'd pay for it. I've been saving the money I get from the store. If I can get my feet on the ground I'll never have to live with him again."
"Why are you so bent on doing this by yourself?" I asked. "I will help."
"No."
"Ani..."
"Just drop it."
There was a long silence.
"What happened to your mother?" I asked. I had known she died in an accident, but Annissa never really elaborated on it. I was curious, especially since, in the past four months all that I talked and thought about was Zac. While I was mourning, she had quietly abstained from saying a single thing about her mother, except for the time she held me on the playground before his funeral.
"Died in a wreck." She said, softly. "She was driving home from work late, one night, and some stupid fuck kid hit her head on because they were drag racing. They didn't even kill her instantly. She had to suffer for three weeks. My Dad's been fucked up ever since. He wasn't always a drunk bastard, you know." Her anger was apparent in her words, but her sadness, too.
"Was the casket opened or closed?"
"Closed." She said. "The accident was too bad. It was better that way."
"I hated staring at Zac all day." I said. "They claim that opening the casket is better for people to cope when a younger person dies. I guess, it gives people closure - allows them to look at the dead person dead, rather than remembering them as they last were alive, as if you might see them again... It was strange, though, because it almost made it more surreal. He looked like a doll. Not a person." I sighed to myself. "I just don't get it. How can life just stop before your eyes?"
"Death is such a strange thing." She said, "I can't wrap my hands around it. Maybe that's why we fear it, you know? Maybe if we considered death as just another part of life, instead of trying so hard to figure it out, then maybe we wouldn't be so scared and upset by it. Maybe moving on wouldn't be so hard."
I thought hard about something I could say, some way to respond, but all I could come up with was a sob. "My brother is gone forever. That's a long time. I'll never ever get him back."
"He's not gone, Taylor. He's here now. He's in your thoughts. You'll see him, someday. Have faith."
"Do you really believe that?"
"Hmm?"
"That you see your loved ones again? When you die, maybe? That there is a heaven? Do you think everyone looks the same?"
"I think they just feel the same.."
"Feel the same?"
"What does the bible say? That when you die, your soul escapes the burden of the flesh? We can't imagine it - I just think that everyone has a very distinctive feeling. Your spiritual self has no face. Just that feeling." She said, "God does it so it doesn't matter when someone dies completely mangled or broken. When you die you're free of feeling mangled or broken. You're free of everything. Death is a good thing. It is. It's just hard for us to see it when we're stuck here on earth. We feel left behind."
"I want to touch him. Is that weird? The desire to touch him would never have occurred to me if he were alive. You never really think about it. Just to hug or be near someone that you love. I've lived my entire life with him always nearby. Within reach. You never realize how much it will affect you when they're gone. I want to touch his face and hug him. I want us all to put our hands together and get hyped for the show, one last time." I touched her cheek and followed the shape of her face with my finger, over her lips and to her chin. "I want to play a show, and I want to feel that energy we have again. Used to have. The way it flows through our fingertips with that last bow. I want it again. I want it so bad. I don't want it to be over..."
"Who said it has to be?"
"It is. I know in my heart. It just simply is." I had never admitted this aloud. I never told anyone before about how much I missed the band. But I did. I hadn't been able to write since he died, and anytime I played I grew frustrated and gave up within an hour. There were days, when I was younger, that playing music was the only thing that willed me to take the gun out of my mouth. Now its absence was weighing in on me. Now I was remembering, and it hurt so much. Without my words, and the constant string of melodies that used to float around my mind, I felt as if someone had put plugs in all of my orifices, letting the waste build painfully and endlessly until my organs exploded.
"Oh, Taylor." She said, and she wiped my running nose with her bare hands.
I held her as tight as I could. "I love you. I love you. God, please, don't you ever leave me. I've never loved a girl like I love you in my whole life. Marry me. Marry me. Please, just come to LA with me and marry me."
"You make it sound so easy..." Her words were far off.
We both undressed completely. Our bodies naked and open under a thousand stars. We were safe with each other - right there, far away, where nobody could touch us. She cried at the moon, and I held her tight when my hips started to jerk too hard. Neither of us made a single sound, aside from a few bitter sobs and our heaving breaths. There was an inexplicable emotional weight between us. Something that neither of us could express. In my head, I wished over and over for her to smile. Let me take your pain. I begged. There was an instant, a flash out of the corner of my eye. I swore I heard it: feet shuffling across the grass, and a low voice humming. I went to speak, but I was stifled by a sudden and immense pleasure which spilled my orgasm prematurely within her. When I looked up, nobody was there, and my body felt weak as if I had just ran a marathon. I was shaking completely, and I looked all around us again.
"What's wrong?" She asked.
"I..." I started to tell her, but I began crying. She wouldn't believe me if she hadn't heard it herself. If it was real, or if I was just losing my mind, I didn't care. I knew that voice. "Nevermind. I love you."
Had God heard me, after all? I thought, as side by side we lay, staring up at the moon until the moon was gone. I knew it was him. I never doubted it. I thought he had come to take the weight, to remind me that things get better. It's alright, Taylor. It's alright. I believed I had found reconciliation.
I hadn't realized that maybe he had appeared to alert me of just the opposite. It was on that night that everything changed.