It was as though you had woken up in an old nightmare and you didn’t want to hear a single person tell you that they believe in God. Because it wouldn’t mean what you would have liked it to. He asked who you thought you were with the million pictures of some beautiful boy in your wallet. You had been warned about the chance of having a coffee table thrown at you — the kind with a glass top. But he didn’t need to throw a thing. You cut the gash into your own hand eventually. Nobody was going to come bandage the back of your hand (where the wound was) to make it better. Nobody was going to come kiss the center of your palm (where you would have liked it to be) to make it better.

Oh, it was a beautiful evening. Or it felt that way after the sun had grafted the skin from someone else’s back below your neck. The boy in the pictures was looking at you sideways and you had to blink twice to make sure he was there. Surely, he was sitting beside you on cable car with half a smile and tired arms. You said you were dreaming a very bad dream. He said he was sorry and that he knew the worst part was that you were not asleep at all.

“What good are you for if you can’t write songs or poetry?” said the streetwalker.

He called after you late into the night, “What good are you for if you can’t write songs?”

He finally threw the coffee table at you and yelled, “What good are you for if you can’t write?”

And you thought about it too: What good are you for? What good are you?

Someone on the bus was wearing cologne that smelled like home.

My eyes were suddenly full with everything that had ever gone wrong.

And that’s all it takes to cry in public.

It was hot outside and it was hot inside. I was watching people walk down the street from the window and thinking about how I had nowhere to go. I could have gone somewhere if I wanted to. I could have walked to the tap in the kitchen and turned it on to watch an eager gush of cool water chase itself down the drain. Perhaps that’s why I wasn’t going anywhere. It was hard to leave behind the comfort of a cool drink of water whenever I wanted one. Oh, and the glasses too! The tall glasses stored in the cabinets were clear and cool to the touch. They weren’t warm and hazy like the outside, so it was hard to leave them.

I tried to count on my fingers all of the people that would have been glad to see me if I did go outside. I told myself that if I could think of seven, I would leave my apartment. The first six were easy — there was Lance who was in love with me, Nosheen and Miranda (colleagues from the salon) who had tea every Saturday afternoon and loved having company, Jiro and his wife Lena who were old friends from school, and Clarice, the lovely old woman who was my neighbour and let me come by any time to watch afternoon soaps and DVDs.

The seventh person was harder to come up with. Richard, who sold flowers in a shop between the convenience store and the pharmacy, came to mind. He was actually ‘ray-shar’ because he insisted that his mother had given him a French name. I thought that he would like to see me because he remembered that water lilies were my favourite and always asked me about my courses at the beauty school. But I changed my mind about adding him to the list because he chatted up all the young girls even though he was greying behind the ears. He would have been glad to see me, but glad in the way that he would have been to see any woman in his doorway.

I thought of Jessup next and smiled at the thought of him because he was kind and a bit old-fashioned just like his name. He helped his father at the church on weekends and had said that he liked talking with me because I was the only one in the neighbourhood who could talk religion with him. It was a pretty big compliment because I’m not even Catholic. As nice as it was to think of Jessup, I wasn’t able to add him to the list either. He would have liked to talk a little with me at the church window that day, but only because I had read a few philosophy books I bought at a garage sale once.

Thinking about the church made me think of Tamara next. Ann, her mother, had me watch her sometimes when she went to church to volunteer. Tamara was the most delightful baby girl anybody could be asked to look after. I couldn’t help but feel a little proud whenever she smiled at me while I was taking care of her because it meant that she knew me, if only for a moment. Tamara would have been all giggles if she saw me, but I figured it wouldn’t really count until she was at least three years old.

The following three people I thought of didn’t work either. I found myself imagining expressions of pleasure onto people’s faces when there really wouldn’t have been any at the sight of me, so I stopped. I made myself a really good pitcher of iced tea and drank that for the rest of the day — indoors. I wondered why anybody ever goes outside if there aren’t even seven people that would be happy to see them, until Lance came to see me. I told him that I was glad to see him, but we didn’t go anywhere.

It does not make sense that he listens to the Bay City Rollers. He has a head that’s kept on straight by a level. He keeps his eye on the prize, front and center. Yet in the midst of all this practicality, his weakness is the Bay City Rollers to whom he just hasn’t been able to say ‘bye bye, baby’.

This fall he’s going to Harvard, and although he won’t tell you, his father’s been planning this his whole life. He carries himself as though it’s been his own decision all along. He likes to carry himself as though he’s got his hands on a very large steering wheel. Sometimes a slip of the tongue will give him away, but you’d have to talk to him long enough to catch that. He isn’t one to keep conversations going longer than necessary and reads only the parts of books that are relevant.

There is not much time for leisure in his life, but he likes to keep up a healthy image, so he goes swimming twice a week at the public pool and makes at least one social appearance a month. A schedule keeps all of his activities in order, and he has strayed from it only on one occasion. It happened on an afternoon when he was walking home with Priscilla. She was pretty and mostly well-liked, but while they were together he often wondered if he’d made the right choice for his senior year girlfriend.

On that afternoon, she had stopped at a record shop — or that’s what she liked to call it. They hadn’t stopped at a record shop as much as they had taken a detour to a record shop that was in the opposite direction from where she lived. He was a little agitated by her behaviour, but had learned that this kind of thing was just her personality, and told himself that a little impulsiveness may be a good trait for him to pick up.

Priscilla had made friends with the cashier and asked about new arrivals while he’d pretended to browse the shelves. Eventually she had asked him if he’d like to listen to anything, and he had passed over the first record before him on the shelf saying “What about this?” in an attempt to mask the fact that he was caught off guard. She had laughed in the way that people do when they are sure someone is joking, and put the record on a turntable. Mixed with Priscilla’s laughter, the Bay City Rollers had streamed through the record store speakers, and settled comfortably against his eardrums.

He ended things with Priscilla before December of his final year of high school, deciding that she was too different from himself. This was the reason he gave upon being asked, but he truly knew that she would have broken up with him if he wasn’t first to act. She listened to music he did not understand, watched films he did not understand, and spoke of things he did not care to understand. Simply put, she was not like any of the other girls he’d dated, one of whom was even student body president. He needed a goal-oriented girl and Priscilla just did not fit the bill — at least this is what he told himself while shrugging away the thought that perhaps he did not fit whatever bill Priscilla had drawn up.

He took the debate team captain around for the rest of the year, and Priscilla became a face in the background of his class portrait. She left the front and center focus of the ‘big picture’ he had for his life, but somehow caused the Bay City Rollers to be left behind. It does not make sense for him to have an affinity for the pop sentimentality of the Rollers, but he hasn’t been able to do anything about it.

You rose out of the water.

I thought of blooming flowers and how they catch you by surprise.

You bloomed over the lake surface and spread outwards like a net.
I spent three days cutting through synapse squares.

I was free on a sparse morning. There was a single wisp of blue in the sky, bleeding through the overcast.

Your skin is paler than ever. I can almost see underneath it everywhere except the crater that is now your eye. Blues, purples and blacks surround your eyelid like a bed of dark jade. Every other inch of skin is like gossamer. It is terrible to be able to see through you, Jack. You and I both know this. So you take a step back and ask me to throw the next punch and then another and another until you are all black again.

The eyes meet where you draw the Xs. Mine are looking at the place where the lines cross over each other and everyone else is busy digging for treasure. You made me promise not to disappear again, but here I am disappearing into the center of your Xs. I can’t stop thinking about the place where the lines cross over each other. I know you’ve drawn them only to make placeholders for me, but isn’t it funny that they’re the reason you’re going to lose me again? I’m going to lose myself.

You asked me at the water fountain, “How old are you?”, and I think all I said was that I was seventeen when I had met you. I liked watching your eyes move to recall when it was that you would have seen me for the first time. They made Xs gliding to the opposite corners of your eyes. I’ll never know if you remembered, but isn’t it funny that your forgetfulness is what made you remember my name the next time we saw each other?

You’re all Xs and I am the O with the hole at the center for my mind to slip through. You’ve tried to pin me down with Xs so that I don’t go anywhere. It’s what you were doing when you put those pins into my dress in an X to hold the corsage in place. (What are you going to do once it is no longer the season for flowers?) Everyone’s legs crossed over each other’s on the dance floor later that evening. Isn’t it funny that everyone was moving only to stay exactly where they were? We were watching from very far away. I was the only one thinking about being some place else.

Then you looked at me and shot two arrows into my head. I like to imagine that they would have overlapped each other about halfway down each one’s length if I could have seen them. And of course you saw them that way because they had hit your mark exactly the way you had planned. I don’t think you knew that even if you held my eyes in place, there was nothing to be said for the eyes I had left on a million different vantage points.

So here you are drawing Xs anywhere you can and everybody wants to know where the treasure is because you’ve always been the man to follow. Isn’t it funny that nobody knows that you’re just chasing a girl who is always falling backward through the letter O in all of the openings?

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you trapped laughter inside a jar? I imagine it would flutter around in there like a butterfly. I just can’t figure out if you’d hear that rippling sound of delight when you opened up that jar again five days later, five years later, ten years later… or if you’d see two wings folded upon each other flat against the bottom.

In March they said that he was going through therapy and that it was “your fault” without ever really saying it at all. I wasn’t really sure what had happened. The last thing I remembered was something that happened while I was twelve years old and still wearing an oversized middle school uniform.

I was one of few girls who still looked as though they belonged in the elementary school on the other side of the bridge. Most of the other girls had already figured out how they liked to wear their hair and the exact way to ask a boy a question. I was not one of them. I wrote 11 page short stories and was afraid to make detours on my walks home from school. I woke up early for band practice and had not yet read any Shakespeare. I could have summed myself up on the tips of my five fingers.

That was the year that I shook hands with a very important politican and had my picture in the newspaper. Some time before or after that he had grabbed my arm too eagerly and my wrist watch had come off and fell to the ground. The strap had come apart from the watch face and I was very angry: “My father gave me that watch.” and “Can’t you be careful with anything?” He said to trust him to fix it. By the end of the day he brought it back looking like nothing had ever been wrong. And so I began to trust a boy who could put things back together to look like he had done no harm. Maybe that’s why he’s in therapy and I’m not.