Fomich Speaks of Love

By Fomich.
And the sunlight rose and rose through my window until I woke and stood and wrapped myself in a towel and then walked out of my door into the kitchen where the air was much colder and I made for the bathroom and sleep dropped from me like feathers. I stood naked in the shower and warm water seeped into my bones and stayed there for many minutes after I dried off and I dressed and left my house to where the air was colder still and walked down Pulaski St towards downtown and the breeze hid in shadows of light poles and trees and houses and I stole a newspaper along the way. I read the newspaper in a coffee shop while slowly, very slowly, sipping on some vanilla tea and I wrote after.

One day I found a pen in the library. It was a nice pen, a pilot V5 extra fine, you know? I used it to write a love letter because the ink flowed so nicely that it kind of wrote itself. The first draft of the letter wasn’t too great so I stopped and started over.

I hung the letter from a paper clip that I had found in an old book bag my younger brother lent me. The paper clip in turn was suspended from a length of twine that I tied around a doorknob. The doorknob was on the door of my friend Molly’s house and I wrote the love letter for her because she had these really expressive eyebrows and sometimes we kissed when we were listening to music or watching a movie in her bedroom but only if her friend Thomas who lived in another room didn’t sit in her room with us because we were both kind of shy.

I wrote about the sky and how the light and wind were pouring down and screaming across my face that morning and how I liked her the same way I liked trees and Muses and maybe I could like her like something more tangible if she liked me too. So I left it on her door and rode my bike away real quickly so that she wouldn’t see me and shout out hello because I wanted her to be alone when she read it in case she didn’t feel the same way so that then she could just not bring it up and I would understand and things could keep being the way they were already. At the end of the letter I asked her to hang something red from the paperclip if she felt the same way so that I could know for sure.

Then I went home and sat in my room for awhile on my bare mattress and read a book for awhile before I had to go to work. I put on my apron and my jacket and rode out past Molly’s house to the restaurant and craned my neck up Molly’s driveway and the letter was gone and the paper clip was still there swinging slightly in the wind and spinning at the end of the twine but it was empty. There was nothing red clamped between its coils.

At work I made it through the busy times by thinking of her face and how sometimes right after Thomas would leave she would lean in slowly like music and look away, always to her right, and our lips would touch and if she was in the right mood she would place her arms on my shoulders and slide them down around my back and find the gap where my pants and shirt left a patch of skin and she would scratch that patch and as she slid her arms down she would draw in so close to me that her chest touched mine and she would close her eyes. She became a kind of mantra.

I rode home with my pocket filled with one dollar bills and a sandwich in my free hand and it was dark so I had to ride up her driveway a bit to see if she had left something red in the clip. It glinted orange, still oscillating slowly in the air, catching the dirty yellow sodium glow of a streetlight and there was nothing red. I rode home and finished my sandwich and drank some soymilk and brushed my teeth and that was all for that day.

The next day I woke the same way but instead of my mind starting clean and taking in the world one step at a time I was already thinking about the paperclip and if it had something red in its teeth. I skipped taking a shower and didn’t steal a newspaper and instead walked past Molly’s house and there was the paperclip and it was still there by itself. The sun hadn’t reached a height allowing it to catch the steel of the curves yet but I could tell that it was just waiting to shimmer in the light and swing free from its twine and not have anything to hold for another day.

Everything was wrong at work and I could see her and Thomas laughing about my letter and I cursed myself for not checking the spelling of the word sentance because even though I’m not an idiot I’m not that good at spelling some words. I was sent home early because I dropped too many plates and as I was riding home I saw the paperclip leering at me from its twine on the door knob and I threw down my bike and ran up to the door and tried to rip it off but it was strong twine and I cut my palm badly and yelped and then threaded it off the string and ran back to my bike and rode home. I put toilet paper on my bad hand and threw the paper clip into the sink. It was covered in blood now and shone red in the flickering, purply-white light of the bathroom’s neon bulb.

That night I sat on my bed and I was wearing all of my clothes and my shoes and my cell phone was resting on the naked mattress next to me and I wanted her to call to invite me over and I wanted her to call so that I could not answer the phone so that she would know I didn’t need her and that I wasn’t just waiting for her but it felt really hollow doing that because I knew first of all that if she did call I would pick it up right away and answer with an audible smile and that furthermore she wasn’t going to call because she had a lot of homework because she was a student and I wanted to be a student really badly but my parents weren’t rich like hers were and I began to hate her. I held the paperclip tightly in my good hand and my bad hand wept blood slowly into the mattress, seeping along the seams and turning brown like wilted leaves and I fell asleep like that.

I woke at 4:28 in the morning because it always gets extra cold before the sun rises and I don’t have any heat in my house and my face was still scowling. I shifted slowly back and forth, trying to warm up but it was too cold so I got out of bed and walked out into the street where the world felt like it had a ceiling and that I was in a big wet warehouse because the clouds were low and thick and I couldn’t see the moon or the stars or any hint that the sun would rise at all and I walked to molly’s house. I put the bent paperclip that was in my brother’s bag back on the door and waited in the thick, dead kudzu enshrouding her driveway until after a long time when I was shivering and sneezing, the clouds turned grey and the streetlights died and she opened her door and I jumped out of the bushes and walked over to where she was adjusting her hat and getting ready to mount her bike and all of the hatred and insufficiency and loneliness that I’d ever felt welled up in me like a black tide or a seething tree line over an earthquake and I wanted her to love only me forever and then, before she saw me, I could see her take a red handkerchief from her pocket and turn back to her door. She looked quizzically at the door and the bent clip for a moment before attaching the cloth to the end of the twine and smiled and then she saw me standing behind her because I had kept walking and was really close to her and she started and then a smile crept across her eyebrows and she walked slowly into me and we embraced. And then it was okay. And then I smiled and the tide and the trees settled down and she said that she would like to have lunch with me after class if I wasn’t working and I was working but I said I wasn’t because I could quit that job because I hated it anyway and it was really nice of her to want to have lunch with me and then she rode away like music and I stood there for a moment and went back to my room and sat on my bed and laughed so softly to myself that if you had seen me there you might think that I was crying and then I put my phone on the mattress next to me and waited for her to call because I wanted to show her how much I loved her and that I would always love her and that no matter what, she could count on me to be there for her forever because she was my best friend and I loved her.