A Few Years' Distance

I'm sitting in his apartment. The song he hates is playing. I look out the window I've opened to freshen the stifling room - I see the black bars of the tiny fire escape balcony. Despite their thinness and seeming flimsiness, they remain unforgivingly strong. They occlude my view of the outside world, only affording me glimpses of little pieces and making the room a small prison.

He's at work, feeling sorry for himself. He's unhappy a lot; I don't question the sincerity of his despair when it appears, only the notion that he's the only one who feels it. There is no doubt of the fact that everyone feels and thinks with the same depth and profundity that he does - the difference between him and "the rest," as I imagine he would view it, is that he is able to articulate - only when he chooses, of course - what tugs at his soul. He emotes through wods, filling little lined books with pages and pages of uncertainties, misgivings, deaths inside.

He still has no idea who he is; he thinks he's struggling to find a definition for love, the meaning of which will elude him until he has at least begins to grope at what holds him together.

He can't see the futility of it all, and in his eternal focus on it, he has put me in a box.

He looks at me - all he knows about me is what he can see and what he hears me say.

I'm small to him - I've been reduced to a player in his drama - a character hindering him (the hero?) from himself.

He surveys my face - noticing the makeup.

He watches my body, seeing my clothes, and beyond that, my flesh. Nothing more.

I resent it.

I can feel the anger rising from my indignant intellect - who the fuck is he? Why have I been trivialized this way?

More importantly, why am I still here? I continue to invest in what has become a cheap, trite, poor plotline.

When I'm not here, he sits in the dark, listening to music, pondering the same old questions that forever bubble to the surface of his mind, smoking a joint.

As soon as he is satisfactorily distracted, eyes glazed over, he leans forward on the sofa I'm sitting on now, holding the stub upright between his thumb and forefinger, watching it glow for a moment. His eyes lose focus, not unlike a newborn.

In one sudden movement, he brings his hand down and extiguishes it. The ashtray may as well be my open hand.

Smoke snakes up into the darknesss, dissolving into the stifling, heavy air.