EVERYTHING IS AWFUL (BREATH)

Mac Keller

Read [each] in one breath.

[1] EVERYTHING IS AWFUL.

Everything is just so awful isn’t it—says a Chelsea man in Dalston Superstore, nudging me and my American passport. I tell him yeah but New York is getting sexier with the socialists incoming and he sucks his teeth and says no one will allow him to keep his promises. I ask him how many promises he has broken, he starts counting on his fingers until he runs out and laughs. I want to ask if he is still counting on his toes, counting on the birds on the telephone wires and chimneys in a row or maybe on the bumps of his almost worrying razor burn that he specifically says is razor burn not an STD and shows me his most recent work up to prove it. 

He asks me the same and I say most of them—isn’t that awful he says and I tell him no because half the time people forget the promises were even made and maybe they made bigger and better promises with other people and that sometimes a promise is a debt. He calls me a nihilist and I tell him he is using the wrong word. He asks what’s a better word for it and I say I don’t know but it’s not nihilism because I know what nihilism is and I don’t think things are meaningless I just think people's priorities change and that’s okay because I still mean something to the late night talk show host in my head. He says that’s schizophrenia and I roll my eyes at his need for face value. I tell him that this was me trying to be funny and he laughs. I think he is laughing at the fact that he doesn’t find me funny but I let it slide because I pity him and I don’t think a woman has ever laughed at his jokes without the need for him to buy her a drink.  

He tells me his favourite writer is bell hooks and says the title of the Raymond Carver book that’s also about love but isn’t hers and I laugh at the obvious irony. Everything is so awful yet we’re dancing to experimental jazz from a vinyl only DJ in a room you can barely see in from the overpriced cigarette smoke and maybe I could do London and he’s thinking maybe he could do me if he shields my face long enough to come and I know I’m not coming tonight. 

[2] LONG CON

We’re driving Highway 1 towards the road closure and as we pass Post Ranch my dad reminds me about the fact that he met Rihanna by the pool when he first signed his divorce papers. He likes to say that she was flirting with him. And we’re on this straight stretch of road that almost never occurs on a cliff like this; but the eucalyptus canopy parts and the sun comes into the sunroof a hot red. I’m holding my palms up as if I was praying and my dad swerves to look at me. 

He apologizes and says he was stunned because at that moment I looked so much like my mother, so much so he thought he’d seen a ghost. I wonder if my mom is intentional about the people she haunts and if she wants to haunt him to have something interesting to share with god as they smoke straights up in heaven. 

He’s been saying these things more, little acts I do that resemble her. When I rub my elbows or squeeze his neck or when I concentrate as I clean the counter. But now it feels like every other action is hers yet when I look in the mirror I can’t see it and I want to because she was prettier than me. Though, I do notice I am mirroring her habits and I get the feeling that maybe she has puppet strings, or maybe the idea of free will is a farce or maybe the whole bit about inherited traits and the punnett square is what's actually driving it and that freaks me out even more. I get scared when I want wine with dinner, I’m scared that I'll always be drunk, I'm scared that maybe she’s haunting me instead. 

I want to ask my dad if he would have rather had another son to save him the grief of living through another Heather, or if he thinks I can pull my own weight—but when I bring up weight he tells me that this is something I need to work on. When he makes comments about my body I think of the time my mom told me that after doing coke with Deana she had to call her dad to help her get her out of the bath. That day he counted the notches of her spine and said you really need help, you really shouldn’t look like that. She said to him: but daddy Mark says I’m pretty—and I think my dad would be proud if I shrunk small enough to sneak under doors. Mark was her second husband and my father was her last and at her funeral they met and I met him for the first time that day even though I thought I met him before but it was only in pictures. All he could do was grip my shoulders and tell me how much I look like my mother and he wept as if I were Lazarus and wouldn’t let me out of his hands. They're laughing at me and memory and the fact that she was theirs and I don’t find anything funny at all.

[3] FRESHCO DEVILS FOOD 

I’m eating cake off your belly and your laugh is spreading the icing onto your shirt that I hiked up and my face hurts with knowing that I love you. I am trying to get rid of the evidence but my tongue can’t get rid of the store-bought icing film that it leaves on your peach fuzz. This isn’t foreplay and this isn’t sex (later), this is something else. This is an offering, this is: no part of you is evil, not your brain, not even your snaggletooth that your orthodontist shuns you for.

 I am constantly waiting for you to find the other fallen shoe or decide that maybe you prefer brunettes.  But every morning I wake to your speckled back or your chest heaving and wonder have I conned you into something not worth keeping—and this is all conjecture and I would never say this out loud and you will never read this, but I’m thinking it so it's making it to the page. I have always measured my friendships and relationships in whether we can be in comfortable silence but sometimes I get nervous that I let it ring out too long. What if I have nothing to say? What if what I think is entirely unoriginal and I’m just circulating bits like reruns of Golden girls you wake up to after falling asleep on the couch. How do I hold your attention when I can’t even remember what it is that I’m saying? 

 I don’t know if I’m easily readable or if you just have had practice from sisters and that's why you're better at kindness than me. It's not that I am mean but sometimes there is delay in reaction as my body sets fire before I speak. And it's crazy that you can translate what I am saying when I say things I don’t mean and I wonder if you were trained by the CIA to read my mind. 

I want to feel your low-moods as if they were mine so I can know how to take care of you better.  I want to draw you, I want to be able to draw so I can figure out how to shadow your sunken eyes and I want to celebrate every birthday with you so I can bake a cake (much better than the store-bought one we’re having) and add a tier to it every year until it’s taller than the Sales Force tower. I want to take you to San Francisco, I want to take you to Big Sur. I want to show you my hometown and show you where the authors and missionaries had orgies and went to die and the veins of jade that I know better than I know myself. I want to show you my childhood in its best light and I want to shield you from life's worst and I want to live in the gaps of your shoulderblades like a tick and I have never wanted anyone more.

Mac Keller is a Dublin-based writer and a master of tangential questions.