ARRvol34 master reduced - Flipbook - Page 98
Collected Fictions
After everything, I will reflect that missing the point is not an
adequate way to a solution. I will do this while standing in a wide,
empty plaza, as people with their own problems pass me by, faceless
by virtue of the evening and twitchy orange light. I will use love to
pretend I understand.
It was probably in 2008 or 2009 when Brian Sullivan let me
borrow his copy of The Collected Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges. I’m
fairly confident that it was about the same time I decided to have
sex with my roommate’s girlfriend and a few days after I was asked
to depart from my parents’ house. Don’t have sex with your roommate’s girlfriend. Don’t have sex with your roommate’s girlfriend on
your roommate’s bed.
Brian, one roommate, Bobby, the roommate with the girlfriend,
and Ashley, the girlfriend, all lived in a one bedroom apartment in
Rocklin, near Sierra College, where Ashley took classes. It was near
where Bobby worked, too. Ashley had a deviated septum, short
blonde hair, and a crooked smile that reminded me of a triangle. I
was sleeping on the floor next to the coffee table, by the couch Brian slept on. Brian, remarkably lazy, and resoundingly homeless, was
an old friend of Bobby and Ashley, and I was convincingly sincere,
coping with a loss, and a poet.
I had insisted on the floor as a demonstration of my native austerity, in dire need of demonstration back then. One night, after drinking half of a green bottle of candied foulness because someone had
mentioned my sister, I told Ashley I’d written a poem about her eyes,
their color like the afternoon the day it came wandering through
the plane tree’s leaves, and I told her that was God. The ambiguity
militated against seriousness.
90
The story you tell yourself to justify or condemn yourself is as
subject to criticism as what you do. The fact that a gesture coincided, one day, with a splitting cloud’s spilling sunlight on a sheet of a
