October toast

It was an evening in October. I was back in the country for another ten days for work. It was dark, cold outside. The dog was on the kitchen floor. He had already entered his last phase – sleeping, being petted, peeing and eating. Not that he ever was a playful frolicking dog, but now he was moving on, he knew the deal. Everyone else was gone.

Was Lex eating? I can’t remember. I think we were drinking tea. Or maybe I was cooking that vegetable thing, where you burn peppers to remove the skin and then fry them with tomatoes, courgettes and onions. I made it a couple of times, and she ate some of it. I don't think it stayed down.

Lex was drinking one of her treatments – a vile Chinese bitter brew. At one point she told me that she really didn’t want to drink it in the beginning, but the person responsible for that particular curative insisted. It was really hard to acquire, and therefore it had to be used. It was muddy brown, and bitter, harsh. Lex said that in the beginning it made her want to vomit. Then she got used to it. At some point she even said that it helped somewhat.

Like I said, it was October, our unwritten schedule had another seven months until graduation, and Lex was full of energy that evening. The energetic days came randomly and we had just gotten lucky – lucky that everyone was gone, and that she was up to sitting in the kitchen.

We were talking about shared memories. Not our usual conceptual stuff, this was all concrete – times together. “Remember the party in San Francisco? Your uncle got so drunk and you were really embarrassed.” “Yes, I guess I was”, “And then Jeff had brought Salvia, but you refused to do any”. “Yes, yes, I know”.

She told me stories about her courtship with the Professor, the early days in Russia, the less early days in Sweden. We were covering her life, luxuriating in the moment. Then she said: “Let’s have some vodka”. We poured a shot each, toasted and drank. It was a beautiful wake. I can never be sure of what she really thought, but I felt that I knew that she knew that I knew that we both knew that she was dying. Some times we actually manage to grasp the opportunities we are given. Isn't that amazing?

Peanut Dream

She is sitting at the kitchen table perched on a chair, feet tucked in. The cup of coffee is standing in front of her, ringlets of steam curling upwards in a slow, gyrating stream. The smoke takes me back to a memory of her hand holding a cigarette, smouldering and trailing smoke - it is winter, and we are both shivering as she is speaking excitedly, while we stand outside of the shabby looking doorway leading down into the club. We are surrounded by beautiful people, everybody not giving a fuck together. She talks about her passion for travel, how she walked the Inca trails in Peru last year. She's drunk, maybe high, but it doesn't bother me. We have just met.

Now she is sitting at my kitchen table, wearing one of my t-shirts. The wind outside is chasing yellow leaves and the apartment is cold. She smells faintly of sweat, so do I. We haven't showered and the night was spent fucking, fuelled by Red Bull, coffee, alcohol and sugar. Now she looks pensive and as she stares off into the distance, I notice that yesterday's make-up has formed small clotted clumps on her eyelashes. She is eating peanut butter straight out of the can, slowly but methodically sticking spoonfuls into her mouth. The peanut butter is the chunky kind, making crunching noises as she chews.

"I've loved peanut butter my whole life", she says dreamily, "our mother used to make us peanut butter and jam sandwiches on weekends, in the mornings. You know, she made us eat oatmeal every day of the week, but on weekends we had hot cocoa and peanut butter and jam sandwiches." I nod and take a sip of my coffee, its sharp smell fills my mind with the colour black. She scoops up another spoonful, sticks it in her mouth, chews. "We would sit there, me and my sister, and we would eat them as slowly as possible, to drag it out for as long as we could. I used to start with the corners of the bread, because no topping every reaches all the way out to the edges, you know? And then I would nibble my way inwards, like eating a pizza from the outside." She drifts off, lost in thought, and my thoughts drift off to my own mother, as a different me enters a different kitchen, early morning, hung over from some party the night before, several years ago.

As I walk in, everything is totally quiet, and I see her in her yellow morning robe, sitting at the table. A plate of cinnamon apples is in front of her, a cup of coffee, and her pill box, with one compartment for each day of the week. One of the slots is open, revealing a colourful mix of vitamins, placebos, supplements - her daily portion, awaiting ingestion. The dog is lying in the middle of the kitchen, a big, unwashed sack of quiet reproach for not getting treats. When I come in he gathers himself lazily and approaches to check if anything is coming his way. I extend my hand to pet him, he sighs audibly, and drops back to the floor in disappointment. My mother is reading the morning paper, but as I come in she closes it and pushes it away. I make myself tea and sit down opposite her. We speak, but what I remember is the moment itself rather than what we talk about. The world around us is still.

The girl puts another spoon of peanut butter in her mouth, the crunching audible as she chews. I study her face, sharp, symmetric, certainly pretty. Her blonde hair is tousled and she has tied it into a ponytail. As I examine her she begins to fidget, and my eyes are drawn to her breasts, nipples outlined by the white fabric. I feel the beginnings of excitement, but she interrupts me, exclaiming: "I just remembered that I forgot to call her, I was supposed to meet with her for lunch today!" I'm not sure who she means, and it takes me several seconds to come up with the appropriate social response. "Call who, your mother or your sister?"

"No, Ann. We we're supposed to meet for lunch at X today. She's just broken up with David again, you know, he's such an asshole. I just don't understand why she continues to go back to him. I mean, I've told her again and again that she should just get on with her life and leave him behind, but she always goes on about how great he is, and that he's had a hard time and I've told her a million times that he's walking all over her but she is so so very sad for him, where is my bag, I need my mobile, have you seen it, I need to call her, I wonder if she went home with him again yesterday."

I watch her come up for air, like a singer who has just finished a whole refrain without breathing, a sharp intake of breath punctuating the outburst. "I think it's in the bedroom" I answer, "can you bring mine as well?" She slips down from her chair and walks out of the kitchen. Her bare feet make tiny slapping noises on the tiles. I watch her ass as she walks out of sight.

The can of peanut butter stands empty on the table, she has left the spoon inside it. Coupled with the now very thin trail of steam coming from my coffee cup and the sounds of the city drifting in through the window, this reminds me of some movie scene, a long still shot setting up the mood for... Something. I pick up my coffee, and the rich, bitter, black aroma fills the air around me with a promise of movement as the burnt blackness envelops me.

Cold Foot

The recollection came as a shock, a snapshot suddenly projected into the insides of my retinas. Cold, as a central theme in one of my earliest short stories. It was, for me, vividly autobiographical without having to do anything with reality; a view into a dream landscape through the eyes of a boy. I may not have been a teen particularly full of angst, but there was enough to dream up a story of teen attraction, a girlfriend, walk back from school, making out on the bed, ending on the stylistically functional “oh how cold her fingers are, he thought”.

I would have liked to have re-discovered these melancholic memories during a silent moment, maybe alone in a busy café, surrounded by students and tourists, baristas who barely speak any English shouting to each other. Alas. However, the memory comes back to me vividly as the girl reaches down my pants and cups her hand around my balls. She is straddling me, we are in her living room, sitting on the floor. We have been kissing, intensely, for the better part of an hour. The TV is on, the bright glare of advertising envelops us like a blanket. Her breathing is fast, and I have modified mine to follow suit, as a signal. My hands are already on her skin, under her top, my fingertips pressing against her flesh. Exciting times.

She bites my lip, just hard enough, in that cliché way, the one we all have seen in scores of movies, TV series, erotica pictures, porn clips. I'm hit by the thought that we're saturated with the image of a hot girl biting on the lip of a hot boy. And then she does it. Her hand slides down inside my pants, her long fingers cup my balls. The cold, when it hits, is sharp and sizzling, like the inverted effect of butter hitting a hot frying pan. Only it's my balls and cock and the cold, from her fingertips, like tiny lightning bolts, running all the way up to my brain, exhuming the memory of that first short story, about the feeling of cold. In an instant I vividly see the room in which the fictional boy was making out with the fictional girl. The bed, the slanted ceiling. Based on a real room, but not a real room, the fiction just as visual and real now as it was then, when it was written and submitted to a well meaning but slightly mousy literature teacher. "Oh how cold her fingers are".

I jerk away, and without being able to control myself blurt: "damn, your hands are like ice". She looks shocked. And then I start laughing. It ends quickly, a defensive laughter saying "sorry I broke the moment, please let us continue". She gets it, I think. At least the immediate result is that she stands up, takes my hand and leads me into her bedroom.

The sex happens. I will spare you the details, not out of any sense of dignity, but because it is boring to describe. All the usual stages happen. Mouth, face, tongue, breasts, body parts entering into other body parts, the sounds that go with it. My teeth are leaving marks on her body, which she will have to cover tomorrow; her toes are in my mouth. She is all over my face, I am all over hers, et cetera, et cetera...

I walk out of her apartment the next morning. It is barely seven, she is still asleep. I haven't made any excuses or tried to come up with an explanation. This is not the first time, and the exit is part of an unspoken disagreement we have. The city is quiet, the Sunday air is cool but not cold, not entirely unpleasant. The cloud cover is like a goose down duvet, soft and light, protective, but stifling. I close the door behind me quietly, even though she is not a light sleeper. Images of her naked body are still engraved into my retinas. The smooth cream colour of her skin and the the outline of my hand on her ass. The occasional blemish of a birth mark. A scratch on her lower left arm, her red painted toes, her nipple, chin, earlobe, vulva - all come against me like a torrent of soundless images, stills taken out of some erotic exhibition. I can still smell her on my face and on my hands.

I stand on the porch of her house, one front door leading in to three flats. I take a deep breath, close my eyes. More images come, but strangely, none of her face. We don't have faces when we have sex, she and I, we disappear inwards, become disconnected. The harder we interlock, the more we disconnect.

I'd like to say that the moment seems poetic, that emotions wash over me, that they cover me in warmth, or despair, or angst, or that I feel empty because of a lack of emotion, but as I stand there, listening to the faint humming of an airplane above me, I am devoid of being filled. There is no sense of cleanliness or dirt, no laughter or sorrow, no music in me. It is as if I am reaching out, in this moment, to everything. I reach out, but touch nothing, and everything flows through me, a wide stream. Of things, ideas, pictures. Empty of desire, I take a step, then another.

Rinse... Repeat...