Coitus With The Eternal

It was the tail end of summer, the time when everything gets inexplicably sad for no reason. The trees wilt like old people preparing for death, the sun is blotted by an onslaught of gray clouds that seem to birth more before the others pass. The strays were looking for a semi-permanent living situation within the walls of my house (which was clearly the path of least resistance considering the depressive manner in which I was living at the time). I could routinely hear critters within my walls, scratching at the insulation and the years of lead paint hidden behind the less toxic layers that separated us. I occasionally wondered if they were squirrels or rats and if the paint was just as toxic to them as it was to me.

I had lost sight of myself in a loveless relationship with a woman that loved me a little too fervently for my understanding. Additionally, I found myself routinely mixing my antidepressant drugs with boatloads of booze and, occasionally, a few other party favors if they happened to be offered to me (and they were always offered at a rate that would be alarming if I hadn’t willingly ingested them every time they were). My brain was scrambled and that was my whole life at this juncture: woefully ill-prepared, unhappy, and living with a woman that I would never love as much as she loved me. Drunk often. Antidepressants not doing a damn bit of good (and in fact, as you soon will read, having the exact opposite effect as the one that was intended by a series of nonchalant, careless doctors).

The guilt of these things grew heavy on my heart and I began to think of ways that I could make my escape. Ways that I could leave my relationship. Ways that I could feasibly have an excuse to stop taking my Zoloft. Ways that I could get the fucking animals out of my walls. And most of the time, it was all for not. I couldn’t leave the clutches of that woman’s teeth. I kept swallowing those little pills every morning. The animals birthed new animals in those hallowed walls. It all seemed so…fruitless.

Ava and I had been friends for some time, but it never left the initial stages of that into the vast abyss of physical connection and emotion. And I’m pretty sure that we both preferred it that way. We would hang out and drink and we would complain about whatever romantic interest wasn’t fulfilling us at that specific place in time. We developed a very genuine and raw relationship in those months, like two opposing veterans after a long war that still exists long after they were themselves discharged.

Occasionally, things would get a little tense. Especially if whiskey was involved. She would touch the back of my neck or I would find my hands a little too invited on the crests of her pale, thin hips. Times when she’d kiss the side of my cheek or I’d lick her ear for a humorous photo on social media; all things that both of us deemed appropriate in light of our level of intoxication and/or the effect we were trying to reach to our respective audiences online. Sometimes, she would get hounded at the bar by creepy old men and I would become her temporary boyfriend. Other times, I would find myself followed around by a woman that I didn’t want to talk to and she would become my longform lover. The two of us had a sort-of symbiology that wasn’t ever truly addressed, but in retrospect, I suspect that that was the intention of it to begin with. The moment that it would have been talked about, perhaps, it could have imploded in on itself and disappeared with the collective realization.

The two of us likely truly needed one another at this point and so…we just never did. We kept it just within arm’s reach and just far enough away that our eyes couldn’t make out exactly what the fuck it even was.

Fair enough. It was what it needed to be. Thank god for that.

It was a particularly warm evening considering the previous circumstances and so I decided to have a small party at my house. It was going to be extremely low-key, just friends and friends of friends, and we would listen to music, talk about philosophy and sex and life, love, existence in the universe — all that hippy-dippy bullshit that extreme conservatives love to make the source of mockery. I personally lived for that kind of thing, so I began to make moves. I bought a bottle of medium-shelf whiskey, a bottle of coca-cola, a pack of Parliament cigarettes, and I sent several messages to people that I regularly enjoyed communicating with.

Ava was the first person to show up.

My girlfriend (the one mentioned in the opening of this piece) was blackout drunk by nine o’clock. This was pretty par for the course at the time and I couldn’t bring myself to disparage her for it because I would eventually always catch up to her. But she started saying things like this:

“I know you’re fucking that skinny chick.” The look on her face was equal parts disgusted and cocksure, something that would further my annoyance as the night carried on and my patience wore increasingly thin.

“Tell you what, asshole, I’m going to bed. I hope you two are real fucking happy together. I dare you sleep with her. Fuck her and see what happens! You’ll never see my face again!”

It wasn’t a lightbulb moment, not necessarily anyway, but it was absolutely a watershed moment that played in my subconscious like some kind of beautiful symphony that I couldn’t quite hear from so far away. I told her to fuck off, told her to go to bed, and told her that it really pissed me off to get accused of something I hadn’t done.

“Well, then…” She continued.
“Fucking DO IT then. I dare you.”

Fair enough.

Ava was especially beautiful that night. Her hair seemed to mimic that manic laugh she carried, as if it bounced in accordance to the cadence of it, and her bright pink lips shined against the tungsten lighting from above my dirty ceiling fan.

“What’re we drinking?” She asked.
“Whiskey.” I responded, with authority, as she grabbed the bottle from my hand and took two healthy pulls from the thing. One swig turned into two, then four, then six, and I don’t even remember where the two of us stopped. But there was a point that I very specifically remember now, where the crowd had emptied at the same rate as that mid-shelf whiskey did. We were suddenly alone. And her hand was my on my leg. My own was way too comfortable on those pale hips. We had been in this exact place before, of course, but we’d never been there alone. And we sure as hell hadn’t ever been there at the tail end of two relationships that we knew weren’t ever going to work.

“I think I’m going to go home.” Ava said to me.
“Okay, I get that.” I replied.

Fair enough.

I watched Ava walk out the front door and marveled at her slender figure. I watched the bass drums of her small legs stray to the door, the way her piano fingers reached for the doorknob, sitting in drunken silence as her flesh turned silhouette and into the ether.

I kept on drinking because that was true to me. Sometimes, you just have to listen to your impulses.

A few hours went by when my phone buzzed from the corner of my living room. It was Ava.

“You still awake?” She asked me.
“Yeah. What’s up?”
“I’m sobering up and I wish I could have stayed with you.”
“You’re sober?” I asked.
“Yeah. Are you?” She replied.
“Sure. Want to go on a ride?” I lied.
“Sure.”

She picked me up in a completely different outfit than the one that she’d left in, but she was all the same beautiful. Ava’s curly locks were smothered by the humidity of her car, and they seemed to tug at her shoulders as if they waged war with them. I found myself relating to the feeling and was simultaneously a little jealous at their proximity.

We rolled through the cemetery and came to a complete stop in the old Jewish section. Neither one of us said so, but I couldn’t help but notice that we’d come to rest at the oldest, darkest point in the place.

“So are you going to kiss me or what?” One of us said to the other. As I write this now, I don’t know who asked the question. But one of us did. And that’s all it took.

Ava’s car was large but my figure was bigger. It was uncomfortable. We were suddenly crammed into the back of this thing like sardines in a tin can and only with the dead to keep the two of us company. I’m sure they watched and laughed with the gods as I tried to bend my legs into any position that would make sense.

None of them did.

We awkwardly exchanged tongues, exchanged embraces, touches, feels, and none of it was working as intended. Maybe I was just too drunk. Maybe she wasn’t drunk enough to match me. Maybe the gods were spiting me for cheating on my girlfriend. Maybe it was all of these things at once and maybe it was none of them, too.

We went down on one another, both awkwardly exchanging glances at one another’s eyes as our legs cramped somewhere in the distance. We both thought of other things, both wondered why the fuck we were finally doing this in a car in a cemetery as opposed to its proper place (almost as if we were delivering a eulogy for something that never got a chance to be, some kind of miscarriage of wasted opportunity). The amount of sighs to occur between us greatly outweighed anything else.

That old guilt of mine set in and there I was, my member in my palm, deader than any corpse in that fucking cemetery.

“I think I need to go home.” I said.
“Fair enough.” She replied.

The two of us never talked about that experience again. At least, never with any veracity or conviction, and that fact alone probably strengthened our relationship after the fact.

Eventually, some time after this experience (but not too long after), that loveless relationship ended. Whatever boy that Ava was trying to spite has been relegated to the depths of irrelevance, too, and the two of us have remained very close friends.

I think there’s a metaphor to that, somewhere, but I’m not sure what it is exactly. Maybe it’s best to not fuck your friends. Maybe it’s better to sleep with them in a way that is at least borderline comical and secret. Maybe it’s best to have experience even if it is at the cost of your own dignity. Maybe it’s okay to make mistakes. Maybe it’s all of these things at once and maybe it’s none of them. Maybe it’s just a combination of a very specific few.

Fair enough.