Pee On Water

MY BOYFRIEND, BUT TRAGIC

I called him Peek-a-boo Street, love bug, baby, Tom Tom Club, Tomato, boy toy, butt man, robo-butt. Our favorite way was to have sex. He was a good cook but serious. His deodorant made me woozy.

This love was my favorite. My other boyfriends had been before. This love was now and it leaked all over. Like since I was in love, so was my apartment. The toilet brush bristled with inspiration! I threw it out because it smelled bad.

This love was big and swallowed reality. I’m not saying the love was merely symbolic. Just the emotions were so massive and bulky, everything else became off-hand. The love wasn’t a big deal. It was love. Like a kiss, it’s distracting. I worked at a store. Tom worked in a place. We lived smack in the middle of everything. Then we moved a little out of the way. These are just details. Tom was my favorite person I had ever met. My girlfriends, they were characters stuck in a phone. They were electronic people I could chat with, but they were not as real as Tom. My life with him was on a charmed track, a toy set kept going round and round and so we smiled.

But then Tom 9-11ed.

I don’t know how to explain this. It’s crazy. What are the odds. I’m still weird about it.

If a love is really good, it gets tragic. God is romantic to a fault. Like a bird is beautiful and then it’s killed. I’m not saying it’s romantic, it makes you shudder. Staring into the bird, mini-revelations glaze over you, this life with all its visual beauty. You are an innocent. You are bad news. Nothing really matters, you kick the dead bird with your sneaker, no one gets mad, god doesn’t care, he was there when the bird died, or he missed it, it doesn’t matter. The winter is strained and uncomfortable. The sun burns my skin. It’s challenging. Tough love, like your boyfriend holding you down a bit pretending and you both get so turned on you can’t stand it, you need to mash his thing all the way into yours. Like if there was a bubble and a butter knife, we’d pierce the bubble with the knife. Its Freudish. If there were a pizza and scissors, we might cut the pizza in long strips. We could cut the pizza into shapes and eat them. But Tom is all done.

He 9-11ed. It hit his upper body and he tumbled. He was in a plane and felt queasy. He stood tall next to his twin and they both caught on fire.

I was inconsolable. My country hurt. It was irritated, but not too bad. I checked my underwear and was unsure. I paid someone to look at it and apparently it was ok. Tom was dead. He was demolished. There were little bits of him, but they were sharp. They were asbestos. My country bonded together. It got racist. It itched and was tested. It wrinkled. It protested.

After Tom, Tom looked like Body Worlds. His arm was an omelet. He looked like an alien. Like throw-up. Like sculpture. He was innovative, avant garde. He was pixeled and low quality.

I do the eating thing, the sleeping thing, but what am I but a crying machine, humming along. Breathing, sighing, waiting. I am an admirer of things, a secret brain of events. Before, I was a responder, a pretty shape, contagious laughing. Now, I am just an animal that can move. An example of a person.

I just want to say it once. Tom was born. He was nice. His parents were nice. He made friends laugh. He sneezed. He wasn’t a dancer, but he did dance. Then, Tom joined the big club of done lives. He does not linger around. All of Tom was in a brain. The heart is just a power plant. The spirit, a tissue you crumple.

Tom was trying to newscast, but it got too smoky. He was commemorated on a plate, but the kind you can’t eat off of. Tom got mushed in a sandwich. He was bankrupt of parts. He was on clearance, then closed. An airplane missed its mother. Someone ordered clam chowder optimistically. Birds had anxiety attacks. A building got embarrassed.

Tom made my calendar cry. He prayed but it felt funny. It was his body, it wasn’t his fault.