One time, I remember, you put your hand on my forehead. You probably don’t remember this. We were very drunk, or I was anyway, and dawn was going to break at any minute, and I was talking — I’d been talking for hours and it was like labour or something, like giving birth, I was working myself up and now I could feel it coming, I could feel it coming, I was going to tell it, and I broke out in a sweat and started talking faster, willing it to come but terrified and the next thing I knew I was telling it, telling you, and the fluorescent light from the kitchen was glinting off your glasses in a way that drove me crazy, so that I actually got up and moved at one point, closer to you, mid-sentence, just to change the angle so I could see what was happening behind your eyes.
But that was when you held out your hand, as if to stop me from seeing, or as if I had moved toward you precisely to receive a kind of benediction. You leaned forward and held up your palm like a traffic cop or Diana Ross mid-routine and you placed it against my forehead and your hand felt fantastically cool, which made me realize how heated I’d become with all this talking and confessing.
And everything stopped. I don’t know how else to describe it. I wasn’t talking anymore because words seemed not to exist. And that was wonderful — it was a wonderful feeling, the sudden nonexistence of words — like a cool shower after a long gruelling hockey practice.
And morning light started fingering its way through the gaps in Kyle’s shit-green velvet curtains. Curtains he’d hung precisely to keep the morning light from doing this very thing and auguring its way into our hungover dreams, but curtains that consistently failed to hold up against the tenacious morning rays.
And long fingers of light, I remember, gradually stretched themselves across the room, illuminating the beer bottles. I’m sure you don’t remember. Probably it only lasted for a second, your hand against my head. It would be years before I hooked up with my church but I think I had a moment of precognition then. Faith-healers, charismatics, weeping, shrieking supplicants, the laying on of hands and then — all that pain followed by all that peace.
But you know what Adam? Fuck this. That’s what I have decided, just now. Fuck you, traitorous fat man, and you, skinny cryptic four-eyes, and most of all You — lying disappointment you have been, it turns out, all along.
4
06/01/09, 1:12 a.m.
SURPRISE! RANK HERE.
Adam, this has begun — there’s no way around it. That’s what I’ve been realizing this past week. I gave up writing to you and I felt this incredible relief — no doubt you did too. In fact that was the only thing that tainted my relief — knowing you were probably relieved as well. But fuck it, it was over! It had been started, but now it was stopped, and so was over. Cooler heads prevailed and all that. I’d just go back to doing what I’ve been doing all along — working and coaching and going to the gym — and you would go back to whatever it is you do — vampiring the good and the real out of people’s lives — and we’d forget about each other as we’d already done and should’ve kept right on doing.
So let’s take another run at this, shall we? I’ve been reading over what I sent you so far trying to figure out why in God’s name I can’t just settle into a nice, neat, chronological version of the story of my life. I keep going off on these pointless tangents. It seemed like such a simple idea at first — all I had to do was sit down and write it out. But it’s actually a lot harder than you would think.
Now that I’ve read everything over, however, the problem has become clear. It appears I’d rather talk about pretty much anything other than working for Gord at the Icy Dream. But if I don’t the rest of the story can’t happen. Which is precisely the hurdle, come to think of it.
The interesting thing about this whole process is that I find myself realizing what I think about everything at the exact moment I’m typing it out. Then I sit back and read it