Apex

“I can’t imagine being in love right now.”

He said it as we were standing on the train platform, both of us facing the sign that warns you not to step on the third rail—looking through it. My stomach did a calculated jump. I didn’t know I wasn’t ready to hear those words.

“What do you mean?”

I looked to the left to see if I could see the train coming towards the tracks and feign indifference.

“It’s just so stressful. To care about someone,” he took his hands out of his pockets and rubbed them together. He looked down the length of his body and zipped his coat up tighter. “It takes so much effort.”

I creeped my chin back into my scarf to hide the way my mouth was dropping open. He couldn’t have known back then how much I wanted to be anywhere near those hands. They looked the way I imagined Paul Newman’s hands would, with a few casual calluses. Even the way he would maneuver them, they seemed honest and hardworking without trying. I turned my head to watch him fiddle with his zipper only to be overcome with hand-lust. I instantly wanted his hands all over me. He self-consciously shoved them back into his jacket pockets. I shuffled the soles of my shoes against the splinters of the platform.

“That’s too bad. That you would think that love isn’t worth the work. I mean, it’s work… but I don’t know about cutting it out.”

“I’m not saying I don’t want it—I just can’t imagine having to do all those… things, you know? The things you have to do when you’re in love. All the time spent together, all the worrying, all the emotions.” He took time to squint across the apartment skyline.

“It’s a labor of love,” I winced at the cliché as I felt it cut crisply across the air between us, making our separation increase tenfold.

“It’s too much.” He looked right at me.

There was no pretense to this conversation, no way to know how or why such a topic emerged from the depths of his mind, but there it was. A revelation from an otherwise stoic figure.

And even with such a definitive statement sitting in front of me, I couldn’t help but to think back to our years of friendship. When he would hold me just because he knew I needed to be held. Or when I would call him at three, four in the morning when he was dumped in the middle of the night and needed to wake up the next morning and pretend like it hadn’t happened. We knew not to talk or give perspective in those situations.

That was what made it was so painful to look at him then, with the train about to wind tunnel from behind him. Every part of him was lying to me but there we stood, together, in that wonderful moment before the train came rushing past us. Like the apex of a breath, after the inhale and right before the exhale, our bodies stood floating through this new space that we had created. Until the first car came by as it always intended to, making a fist of frigid air and punching us both in the face. We turned away and covered our faces from it and one another out of instinct.

“I don’t want to talk about this.” He said a little louder than the train brakes, taking my hand. I let him lead me onto the car, like we had always intended to do, and put his arm around me without the need for anything more.

An Introduction to Grief

In her twenty-three years of living, no one had told Annabel the protocol for grieving, which is why she showed no concern to be standing in the middle of her kitchen with only the urge to physically escape her own body. Because she didn’t know any better she let the pain go through her—pulse through her head and throughout her person.

Annabel could feel blobs of red and blue come together behind her eyes and jab at the back of her mind. She rolled her head around to let the colors come together and fall apart, making violent disgusting love. She stood up completely straight to feel the colors drip loudly down and puddle somewhere under her nose. She brought her fingers under her nose and lifted them in front of her eyes. She was bleeding. Automatically she sucked the blood off of her fingers and used her palm to take a definitive swipe. Just once. She let her bloody palm drop back down and bump gently against her thigh. The warm blood still dropped from her nose and pooled in the space just above her lips. Annabel’s eyes were stopped two feet in front of her. They hurt and her elbows felt funny, like they weren’t supposed to be there. Elbow. El. Bow. Ellllll boowwwwww.

The left side of her head started to feel heavy and began to fall. She let her body go with it until she was almost doubled sideways at the hip. From there she could hear everything come together, rushing towards her ears to recreate the upside-down feeling that had taken over her world.

She had to get out of herself. Annabel started to take her shirt off. She raised it above her head, revealing a full stomach of olive skin and ribs hugging around her lungs. The t-shirt barely touched the ground before she started unbuttoning her jeans and pulling them down so that they pooled around her ankles. She had to get the world off of her, away from her. She had to get the blood that had been dripping down her nose away from her mouth because it was falling down her chin and now down her chest.

Annabel looked up to the sink. Two steps hoisted her body up to the counter, both feet slapping into the metal basin. She turned the water on, cold, and watched it hit against her toes. Annabel cupped the water in her hands for a moment and then let go. It dumped it down her shins like a thousand knives clattering against her skin. She hunched her body over itself to mix the blood and water and tears together and drip down the front of her legs. The three liquids came together organically and followed their own path down the small hairs of her calf— each droplet taking an individual and frantic route. Annabel let her eyes fall closed and her head loll somewhere between her knees, her body cradling its own weight in an act of strange self-sufficiency. She could feel her skin completely lose sensation and submiss as the red bled out of her and the blue started to crawl up her toes.

Dog people-Part 1

When they were first married, my mother said that she would grill chopped onions and peppers on the stove whenever she wasn’t sure my father would come home. She thought that the smell would remind him that he wasn’t alone, he was being taken care of. He could forget about the stresses of being young once he walked through the door and the heavy vegetable smell wrapped around him. Every woman has her own way of keeping her partner close to her. The onions and peppers only came out if Daddy was having a particularly hard week or it was especially cold out, if they had a big fight and Mom saw him glance too many times at the front door while they were “trying to work things out”. It wasn’t a particularly powerful skill, but it got her out of a few pickles early on in their marriage.

That’s the part of the story that would be hotly debated whenever anyone would talk about the day Jesse came into my parents’ lives. My mother would be insistent that there had been no work-stress that week, no cold fronts and no fights. But my father distinctly remembered the onions and peppers. He would tell the story of Jesse’s first day almost poetically—how the pup trailed him home from the papermill that day and padded through the living room like he knew he already owned it. Mom would chime in here, noting that she had been laid out on the loveseat in front of the television with her stocking feet aired out over one armrest and a beer within arms length from her, warming on the carpet.

Daddy would tell us how the sound of the door opening had woken Mom up from her exhaustion to see the pair of them walk through the house and to the kitchen. He remembered her watching him take the onions and peppers off the stove and pour half of the contents onto a plate and the other half into a metal bowl. He brought the bowl down to Jesse’s mouth and watched as the dog ate every scrap. My father would say that Jesse knew even then where his place was in the house, which was not in the house at all. According to my father, the dog took a deep burp after eating his first meal in who knew how long, and immediately trotted to the backyard—no questions, no confusion.

That was when Daddy went back into the living room to join my mother in her confusion. He walked to the love seat with his plate of onions and peppers and lifted her legs up from the seat cushion so that he could sit under them. This is the part of the story that I could always see, the two of them fitting perfectly into that love seat like they would always do when we were growing up and they were too tired to move.

“We have a dog now,” he had said to her. “Thank you for dinner.”

And then Mom remembered that they watched the rest of a Three’s Company rerun like it was the easiest thing in the world.

Exerpt from The O'Connell's 2

It wasn’t hard to adjust to life back at home. Even with my father gone and my mother living like a hermit, going home had the same comfort as it always did. You can’t deny the feeling of your feet slapping against the same planks of wood that you walked on years ago, back when your knees were just wobbly little things and you still weren’t sure how to balance your head on top of your neck. My parents had bought a new TV after Ryan had moved out—a sort of mixed celebration and slap in Ryan’s face for surviving so many years without a remote control. But the couch in the TV room sagged in the same places and still had the stains on it from when I volunteered to paint the walls a dark green. The refrigerator still hummed and clicked in the middle of the night loud enough to wake me.

My mother spent most of her days in my father’s study. She would sit in the darkness of the small room, her little body curled up in the immenseness of his leather La-Z-Boy, flipping aimlessly through his files and scratch paper. She didn’t want to come to the table for dinner so I would bring her soup and watch as she lifted every spoonful to her mouth.

‘I’m just glad that we were young,’ she would say to me in between sips of broth. I would watch her hand drop the spoon back into the bowl with the majority of its contents still sitting in it, putting the soup back into the bowl just so she could pick it back up again to be rejected.

‘Mom, don’t be silly,’ I retorted. ‘You don’t really want Dad to have… been young.’ The word death or gone were still taboo in the house. Especially in the study.

‘No, no, no Elizabeth. You don’t understand.’ Her eyes squinted and her hand flailed around her head. How was it that I always felt like the insane one in moments like these? ‘When I met your father…’ she extended her hands out as if to grab his essence into her, ‘your father… mmm… we were so young. He was such a beautiful man back then. Still is.’

I flinched in embarrassment. I adjusted my vest to sit straight against my chest. But she wasn’t fazed by the mistake.

‘We had so many beautiful moments together, so much love together, with you… you kids… and watching life happen together. Just, watching it all happen, you know? You know what I mean by watching life happen, Elizabeth?’

I had no idea what she was talking about but I nodded yes.

‘It’s so wonderful to grow up next to him. Everything is so much easier when you can share it with someone else.’

Her body froze, her eyes staring straight ahead at the empty wall in front of her. I could see her neck muscles tense. And relax. And then her head dropped onto her neck.

‘Mom?’

‘…. Mmmmm?’

‘Want anymore soup?’

‘mmmmmm’

I could see her head lolling back and forth ever so slightly against her neck.

‘I’ll come back with your medicine.’

‘That’s fine Elizabeth.’ At least she could still make sentences. ‘That sounds… absolutely perfect.’ With effort, she brought her head up high enough to go back to flipping through the different papers and pictures that Dad had left lying around his study. Her fingers flipped through the pages with measured dexterity—using no more than the minimum amount of effort. Watching her move like that reminded me of the way she used braid my hair while I ate breakfast before school. I hated the way that she pulled at my scalp a little at a time, I would have rather that she take my whole head and pulled one, big, painful pull and just get it over with. But I knew if I sat still for the ten minutes it took her to get through my curls, she would feel better and wouldn’t come down to school that day in order to make sure that I wasn’t getting peanut butter or gum in my ‘precious curls.’

‘Mom?’

‘Yes Elizabeth.’

‘I was going to watch Meet Me in St. Louis later if you want to join me. Remember we used to watch that when I was younger? And we used to sing the trolley song? Wouldn’t that be fun?’

She picked her head up to me. In the clouded, mid-afternoon light I could see how her eyes had retreated back into their sockets and how getting older had made little lines form around her lips. My parents were actually getting older, I was becoming them and they were becoming entirely different people. They were elderly. And then I remembered that my mother was the only one getting old at this point so I stopped thinking about it.

That’s when my mother looked at me with the same face of concern that I was wearing for her, like I was the one that needed to be watched and spoon-fed dinner and entertained with mildly entertaining, nostalgic, musicals. How she managed to turn these moments on me, I’ll never know. She nodded her head at me softly with consent.

‘Sure, honey. If that’s what you want to do, we’ll do it.’

As I walked out of my father’s study, leaving my mother to flip through his personal belongings and pity me, I felt the world turning over and over.

Introduction

Don had been thinking about what Brenda looked like naked when the strange woman walked into the café that morning, that’s why he almost missed her altogether. He was sitting across from the front counter of the café, where the owner could still hear him talk while she moved gracefully between pours and steamed milk. He really couldn’t stand the taste of coffee, to be honest, and the persistent clatter of laptops all around him made his knee start to jiggle, but there was something about being there. The chairs and tables seemed so impermanent and floors never looked to be entirely clean, not even the clientele remained consistent for an hour—a minute. It was a world that could build and collapse upon itself at moment’s notice, never evolving or devolving in earnest.

Don liked to sit in the middle of the café and watch it ebb and flow. He found a weird pleasure in being the constant of this microcosm—a soft mass of a body encircled by quiet chaos while his whole person sat entangled around a mug of coffee. His blue eyes were fixated on the center of the table, two orbs weighing heavily on two cheekbones. Every part of him sitting completely and unchangeably locked in thought. And then he blinked. Once. Which made his head lift away from his body for the first time that morning which made him say something for the second time that hour. His head pivoted towards the counter.

“Hey Brenda, have you seen that movie that’s out? You know the one I mean…”

Brenda kept her head bent over the espresso machine, furiously polishing the stainless steel beast.

Don tilted his head upwards to see if she had heard him. His eyes melted even further downward as his nose pointed towards Brenda. After a beat, he tucked his head back to where his body had been waiting for it. She heard me, he thought. She must have heard me. Don took a breath and went for round two, popping his head back towards the counter with a nervous smile.

“That movie, where the two guys are on a train… and the train is about to crash… and one of them has to jump in the opposite direction to slow the momentum and save everyone else’s lives….”

Don trailed off and shook his head at himself, his hands gripping tighter against his mug and his legs slowly clenching closer together. He could hear the symphony of keyboards crescendo-ing just softer than the sound of his embarrassment. Don stared, defeated, at Brenda’s backside—willing it to turn around. She was wearing a dark pair of jeans that morning and he could trace the lines that her underwear was making against her ass. The seams were exactly where the seams of Don’s briefs laid against his own ass which made him wonder if Brenda was wearing men’s underwear, or a man’s underwear. He stared closer as the microcosm of his world changed again—another gear turning to shift everything to the side.

Brenda turned around just in time to see Don’s eyes move one second too late from where her ass had been.

“Is that the movie that Val Kilmer is staging as his comeback?”

She took a step towards the front counter and gracefully leaned her forearms against the tabletop so that her hair swooped down across her face and the tattoo below her collarbone was just visible above the neckline of her t-shirt. Don’s eye met hers with the effort of a mature man. He managed a few more words.

“That’s the one. Have you seen it yet?”

Don tried to control the contortions of his body but a giant smile crept across his face despite his best efforts, his cheeks exploding to twice their normal size. The sight of pure joy. Brenda lifted her body and arched her back so that her chest stuck out and her hipbone kissed the back of the counter, chest-tat now on full display.

“Haven’t seen it. Whenever I see Val Kilmer act, all I think about is fighter jet. My cousin was killed by a stewardess.”

She let her head drop a little to the right with a half-grin, feigning thought. Don stared at her, eyes in complete awe. And then the trance broke. Natural defense mechanisms took over as Don's head tilted back with nervous laughter, all while his eyes snuck longing glances below Brenda's neckline—a man could be strong for only so long. Brenda broke her stance for a moment, looking directly into Don until he turned, deadpan, back to the table.

It was then that the strange woman walked in-- when Don was hunched over his cold mug of coffee, mentally taking his eye further down Brenda’s blouse. Between breasts and Val Kilmer and the smell of coffee moving into everything, Elizabeth walked into Don and Brenda’s microcosm.

Second take on spinning class piece

I thought it would be fun to take a spinning class—I’d seen the skinny bitches at my gym walking in and out of the group exercise room, gently sweating and giving off an odor that I can only identify as the cinnamon and sugar Febreze scent. So I showed up at the ass crack of dawn thinking I would get a piece of the action. Turns out, the following hour served as my impromptu induction into modern womanhood disguised as the single most terrifying workout that I’ve ever been a part of. If you, like me, enjoy getting your self-esteem trampled on by women half your size and twice your flexibility level, take some cues from my horrible, horrible mistakes.
First rule of spinning class—never show up on time.
Nothing paints a big fat “nerd” on your face like showing up to a party (or in this case, a group exercise class) on time. Apparently everyone knows this except for me, who has made it my life mission to learn things the hard way. Just like a party, if you show up on time for your spinning class, you WILL end up sitting in the middle of a dark, empty exercise room, sniffing your pits while the host’s cat quietly pisses in the corner.
Second rule of spinning class—never make eye contact.
Once the spinning class participants (or as I like to call them “the yoga pants army”) start showing up, repeat after me: I will not try to make eye contact with other human beings. It’s like looking directly at a solar eclipse, or looking into the eyes of medusa if medusa was also jacked up on pilates and a quad venti soy latte. Looking into the eyes of any other spinning class participant will not only make you blind, but that bitch can take you down (she will also have raging PMS, sorry). Eye-contact shows equality, and those who know their way around an immobile bicycle are equal to no mortals.
Third rule of spinning class—don’t be a dork and laze-out.
Having heard that a spinning class is the equivalent of a suicide pact between your ass, thighs, and calves, I was under the impression that the best way to prepare would be to play dead. You know, sit on my tongue depressor of a bike seat and trick my body into thinking it was still asleep before I render it useless for the next two weeks. If you’re as good as I am at pretending things aren’t happening when they really are (I’m looking at you both junior and senior proms), this tactic is logical. True spinners don’t use this method. True spinners warm up for the spinning class by spinning. And it isn’t a normal, pretend like you’re going on a summer bike-ride with your foreign exchange student lover Sergio who is also sensitive and can cook type of bicycling. We’re talking a slow, creepy, you’re biking home from a weird outdoorsy one-night stand in your heels and you can’t go that fast incase your skirt flies up and flashes your “come get it” thong. And for Fuck’s sake don’t look at anyone!
Fourth rule of spinning class-- every exercise mob needs a leader.
Once the yoga pants army has their bony asses in fake-motion, you know that it’s time for the instructor to show up out of no where and recreate every presidential fitness test you have ever endured at once. And if you think that you can’t look at the bitches wearing matching lululemon headbands, don’t even think of looking at the instructor (see Rachel Ray meets Lance Armstrong meets Satan). The next 45 minutes of your life will be a blur of incoherent screaming. Expect to hear things like “No one loves you” and “I just met your sister and she is hotter, smarter AND funnier than you” sprinkled in with “yourlifeisworthless yourlifeisworthless yourlifeisworthless RAAAHHHHH” I would tell you more, but I’m pretty sure I browned out for the whole thing. That’s right, taking a spinning class is a lot like doing 5 tequila body shots off of your gay best friend.
Fifth rule of spinning class-- if you can't beat them, keep trying you asshole.
All I know is by the time the class was over, the yoga pants army had left as quickly as they had come and in the same fashion—generally better than me. Most of me agrees with them. I wouldn’t talk to me either if I could crack a walnut with a single thigh muscle. But something inside me changed while I sweat every ounce of water from my body in that cold, dark room: the gauntlet was laid down. Without knowing it, I took a pledge. A pledge to be the bitch to take all their firm, toned, and tanned asses down next week, when I spin the fuck outta them. And if not next week, whenever the thigh chaffing goes down.