No Poem Is the Only Poem. No Story Is the Only Story.
I threw a house-warming party. It was a mild evening and I opened the windows in the sitting room. A smell of pepperoni wafted up from the pizza place a few doors down. About a dozen people came. I invited Simon, but he was ghosting me.
We talked our way to a raggedy field, where we sat in the sparse grass and he condemned our past relationship, bid it good riddance, flipped it off. After half an hour of this I asked if we could find a place for me to pee, which led us to stand and to walk more, two hours more, to be precise.
“Who is this?” I asked, exasperated.
“I asked you first,” he said.
“No, you didn’t.”
“Okay, I didn’t. This is Elmer Doyp.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Oh no, I’m not,” he said.
Fatema visited. I stood at the window, while she stayed about two meters away. Eesha didn’t know. It would have been wrenching, if she came and I couldn’t hug her. Or would she understand? She was seven after all and wanted to learn everything.
What is quarantine? She had asked. She would still call every day, and ask the same question: when would I go home?
“If we’re going to do this, I kind of need you to do something first. Or during.”
“Like what?” I leered at him, trying to make my voice sexy.
“Throw me out the bedroom window.”
On the following evening, down in Hollywood, I slid my cell phone back into a front pocket of my trousers and stood outside a bar Reid and his friends frequented. I felt as if I were on a film set in a desert and overcome with the futility of it.