He was a jazz pianist. He was an asshole, if you want to know the truth, but I liked him. I was kind of crazy that summer. He would hunch over the New York Times crossword puzzle, sitting at my cramped table, carving a space out for himself in between the piles of unopened mail. I liked him because he was messy and self-absorbed, and didn’t shame me for the crazy shit I was doing that summer, a lot of which involved riding the subways at 4 a.m., eating takeout Chinese for breakfast, sleeping with him, and never opening my mail so that it would pile up in stacks on bookshelves, my coffee table, my dresser, my windowsills – collection agencies shrieking at me like a bad dream. I made coffee for him, my mascara from the night before still caked on my lashes, and sometimes I wondered who the hell this person was in my house. He used a tiny pen to fill in the blanks of the puzzle, and I found this ostentatious, but also impressive. Especially when it was the Saturday one. The pen was small, like a tiny peppermint stick you would buy in an old-time candy store. He would crack it open, casually, it was just his pen, no big deal, his slender blue-white hands looking enormous against that teeny thing. Scratching in the answers, up, down, across. The pen itself was a deep dark blue, like midnight, with gold flecks in it, or maybe they were swirls. At the time, which was, like I said, a crazy season for me, the pen reminded me of one of those far-out galaxies, a nebula, but a nebula trapped on a tiny pen? It made no sense. There was a scope, a grandiosity to that midnight-blue, it made me think of the empty space between stars. This was not a good thing to think about on a mascara-caked Tuesday morning, when you haven’t slept in 2 days. I didn’t need trapped nebulae. I haven’t seen him in 5 years, I was too unstable that summer to be seeing anybody, and honestly he was kind of a dick. Although he did have his charms. He left the pen behind by accident, or maybe he didn’t find it as captivating as I did. I wondered if he missed it. It’s beautiful. Well, except for the size.
I’ve never really cared for jazz.
wow..that’s fabulous Sheil!!!
That’s a gorgeous piece of writing. Excellent. Thank you.
Beautiful …
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I just got here I’m doing background reading.
Love this, Sheila!
Its funny how our crazy seasons get defined by little random things (Mine is by an Eeyore hoodie)
fantastic bit of writing, red. :)
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Sheila, I love it.
Ken: fire at will.