a very normal boutique

There’s a boutique about three blocks from my house and every time I go there I almost start crying. I don’t understand this because it’s a very normal boutique, with pretty little things like local bracelets and teal colored scarves and tongue-in-cheek cards that make me laugh out loud. I like to walk around and pretend that I could buy anything I wanted for anybody, I could buy those earrings for my neighbor and those table coasters for my mother and the beautiful clock with the red and gray birds and the sleek metallic numbers for my friend who isn’t my friend anymore. I think about how I would give it to her, maybe I would say, here’s a clock that I bought at a boutique that always makes me almost cry, and I know we aren’t friends anymore but I thought you really might love it. Maybe I would leave it on her doorstep and ring the doorbell and then run, but then I remember that I don’t know where she lives and that I can’t afford that clock and that actually we aren’t even friends anymore.

I think the woman who owns the boutique knows everything, because when I start to blink a lot or wipe my eye she says with the kindest smile I’ve ever seen, is there anything I can help you with? 

corners

It's like love has all of these corners that you are afraid you will get stuck in again. But you're not entirely sure you'll get stuck because you think they're right where they should be, because a square is a square just like water is water.

Of course, that would mean that love has boxed you in.

the day by the lake

It was late in the afternoon, and I could see that she was tired. The lack of sun and the overwhelming blue of the water and the dark gray blue of the sky was making her eyes shine in a lingering, haunting way. I thought she might stop talking, I hoped we would go home. We didn't.

What's the ugliest part about you? she asked. She looked too eager when she said it, and suddenly her eyes danced like this had been the only thing she had ever wanted to ask anybody since she was old enough to know what the word ugly meant, what it really meant. I was silent, and she smirked in a frightening way and then she said, I'm just naturally curious, that's all. 

I didn't know what to say so I rambled a bit. She didn't seem interested and so I sighed, exasperated. I really don't know how to answer that, I said. What's the ugliest part about you? 

She looked up quickly and tried to be soft about it but it was a harsh look, too harsh a look for someone as pretty as she was. Her eyes glowed and she said, I thought you'd never ask. 

andy

I knew she loved him when I heard her call him Andy. Not Drew, like everybody else called him, or Andrew, which is the name his parents gave him, but Andy. I wondered if she was in love with his off-beat walk or his insistence on the glory of oil-based pastels, or maybe she was enamored with his blatant wholesomeness, his stark naiveté which glistened off of every wispy hair on his body. "He's so good," she said to me once. "You love him," I whispered back. She thought about what I had said quietly, and then answered, "That's why I call him Andy."

The only problem was that Andy loved me.

mone y

Her voice is full of money, he said. I didn't think so. When I met her I thought her voice was like the way the lamp in our small living room flickers on and off again, or how I feel when I put my hands through my long dark hair and immediately wish I could cut it. Her voice was an in-between place, it was a yes and a no, it was sharp and velvety and irresponsible and saturated with something raw like bloody meat or a bar of glycerin soap all at once. Her voice isn't full of money, I finally told him on a day when it was raining intermittently and so I felt courageous. He stared at me for a while like he was flirting with the idea that I could be right, and then he said easily, flatly, perhaps not. But yours is.

word play

I just want to talk to everyone. I just want to talk and ask why, when, and how, who made you that way and what does it feel like and do you like shortbread cookies or cinnamon ones, spring or fall, Pluto or Jupiter, men or women. Do you think Lolita is a sick, twisted account of a deranged old man or is it the greatest love story of all time? Do you want to travel to Peru and stay there for awhile and will you eat the lomo saltado or will you look at the waiter's weathered face and stammer out in squeaky English that you just don't understand. Do you understand?

I just want to talk to everyone. I want to know when their parents were married, and what her dress looked like, and why there were only seven people there. I want to know why my grandfather has clocks hidden all over his house, and I want to suggest on an afternoon that I should have bathed but didn't that perhaps he is afraid of time. I want to ask the bus driver how long she has been silent like that, and find out why my landlord won't look me in the eye. I want to tell the woman in front of me who shrugs away the two handles of vodka on the conveyor belt by saying, times are hard if you know what I mean, that I know what she means. Do you know what I mean?

I just want to talk to everyone, and tell them that I think spilled milk is funny, that I think everything is either funny or hopelessly tragic and that there is no in-between, that I believe in change and catastrophe but that chipped paint bothers me in a way that it shouldn't. I want to tell them that Hemingway is the worst and Tolstoy is the best, that nobody likes philosophy or bourbon or a run-on sentence even though I write that way.

I just want to talk to everyone because I write that way.

the big shining golden sea

The ocean is so mesmerizing, always. But as early evening leads a warm summer day to bed, something extraordinary happens. The now yawning sunlight dances across slick, calm waters, illuminating the many folds and layers of the sea and making each ripple, each velvety movement, appear as though it has a heartbeat and is very alive and at any moment could reach out and ever so delicately take you away from everything you ever knew to be true. Footprints in the sand look like they have just been formed in melted copper, like they will stay that way forever, just like the movie stars handprints somewhere on Sunset Boulevard, somewhere off in Hollywood. I hold onto these solitary moments by the water because they are radiant with life, but also because just then it's only me and the big shining golden sea.