Diaries
Sam was older than me and one of her nipples was pierced and I did whatever she said. I was barely a person, more of an ill-fit together explosion of hair, limbs and teeth spilling all over, my body a gangly nest of messiness. We had met through friends of friends, she found me clinging to edges of parties I didn’t belong at, and I followed her around religiously, I worshipped her and I think I made her laugh, she dragged me across the surface of suburbia everywhere.
We always ended up at the bookstore. This was 1999 in Hyannis, MA, so that meant the Borders off of Iyannough Rd, one strip mall over from the Blockbuster Video.
Edward Gorey was still alive then and you could catch a view of him most weekdays in the corner of the bookstore café, smooth bald head and shining white beard, drinking tea and doodling in sketchbooks.
Sam had long legs and walked at the brisk pace of a city walker, I was always two steps behind her, my eyes fixed on the space between her shoulder blades, the tight fabric of her black and white vintage three quarter sleeve baseball t-shirt, Sam never wore a bra, the muscles of her back a wedge that refused to let my lungs deflate. My sports bra scratched and squeezed but I could never go without one like Sam did, and I wondered if she thought about her own body as often as I thought about mine, wondered if she ever thought it might be wrong. It seemed impossible she would.
I followed her to the café counter, and she spent my money buying us coffee, the dark oily roast of coffee that was still popular then, and then I followed her to the tables where we dropped off the coffee first and then she strode into the stacks.
We had been together long enough, I mean we weren’t together together, but we had been friends and spent enough time together where we could allow silence between us, I mean I stopped asking questions and she expected me to go wherever she went at this point, there was an intimacy to silence, is what I told myself, and maybe there’s some truth to that.
Sam went to blank notebooks. Every Borders had a section like this, two full shelves of blank notebooks, they were all cream and sage colored, the covers designed with maps or a diagram of a golden ratio or Not All Who Wander Are Lost in silver letters, and she picked out one and I picked out one and we brought them back to the table.
We sat down across from one another at the table and drank coffee and wrote in the notebooks, and I tried to not look Samantha in the face.
She began writing in the blank notebook right away, she was fast to start, where I started slow and worked myself into a lather. I wrote nonsense, just picking one abstract word after another, letting them pop in my head on their own. I wrote things like,
collection of window weather grinding satellites water ripples germ torn marionette chassis knothole star tangled tongued heavenly body
How could Samantha know I wanted to be a poet? At least, I wanted to grow up to be a poet. I wanted to grow up to be a poet even though I didn’t really do any writing and I wasn’t considered particularly intelligent or creative by anyone who knew me. But maybe she did know, maybe Samantha knew things about me that I did not.
When she decided we were done I tried to hand her what I had been writing, the page and a half I had filled, and she pressed her lips together and shook her head. We weren’t doing this to read each other’s writing. It wasn’t for either of us, because then Sam got up, went to the shelf and put the notebook back.
Our writing remained there, on the shelf, somewhere in the middle pages of an otherwise blank notebook. It was a hidden message for another to find. A secret graffiti, a surprise to whoever, who we hoped would find our writing, and for this surprise to open the world, a hidden story that forced the world to be bigger than it was, a mystery that forced one to reconsider the size of existence, like everything Sam did, a guerilla act of wonder.
We left the notebooks on the shelves and cut out of the bookstore. Two days later we came back and did it again, picked two blank notebooks, wrote in them, put them back. We did it again the day after that. Sam had no concern in getting caught, there was no one awake enough in that Borders to stop us, and anyway it wasn’t like we were stealing. It was the opposite of stealing; we were leaving behind more than we had arrived with.
I got better at free writing. By the end of the first week, I could pretty much sit down and go at it.
Every city encyclopedia of texture last path follow beyond the end of hunger foreign without sadness gravity hates the replication of cells the constant of longing
On the ninth day, Sam showed me something she had been writing. It was always fine for her to break her own rules, after days of us keeping the writing from each other, she just shoved hers in front of me. She was suppressing a snicker that caused her nostrils to flare as the thick paged deckle edged lined notebook came across the coffee stained formica table.
Jan 21st 1995
I ran into Judith in the grocery line yesterday. Her husband had died a year or two before, but she was still keeping fit, we caught up a little bit, and needless to say, the top of my cock began throbbing in my dungarees…
It was porn. While I was trying to get something out of me while not revealing too much of myself, Sam was releasing these short bursts of the erotic. It was so silly and perfect and exciting and made my chest burn. Plus, she had written this random date on it, which I thought was a stroke of genius.
After that, the tone of what I wrote in the notebooks changed, I followed Sam’s lead, it was transgression within transgression, the boundary of using the blank books themselves, and then conjuring softcore under the florescent light of the corporate bookstore retail chain café.
September 14th 1993
I totally couldn’t believe what Tiffany showed up wearing to field hockey practice. I was so embarrassed that I just had to slip away. As I was changing in the locker room, I realized it had been a long time since I really looked at myself in the mirror. I had developed a lot in the last year, and as I moved my hands over my skin, an electric sort of feeling happened in my body…
Our writings had become about something else. I wasn’t sure what was happening, or I could guess what was happening, but I didn’t want to, I thought if I was oblivious to the thing there would be a greater likelihood of the thing occurring, good things sometimes did happen to me as long as I never wanted them to. Sam’s stories became increasingly complicated.
April 9th 1989
…that’s when I realized my wife was also staring at Renee, our scuba guide, as she slipped into her wet suit. Her eyes followed where Renee’s tan skin pressed into the suit’s tightness, and my wife’s lips were moist…
Our time going to the bookstore to write in the notebooks stopped abruptly. Our project, the things we were writing, couldn’t really go any further. This thing between us, this charge, this pent up whatever, which I was trying and failing to tell myself didn’t exist, it had no release. Neither of us would take the step. So instead, we avoided the bookstore, just spending our nights together driving aimless in my car, terrified of what would happen if we stopped moving.
One night two weeks after the whole thing had started, we were in my car. It was a cold spring night and it was after midnight, maybe it was already almost 2 am, and we were parked in the parking lot of this dark elementary school, me in the driver and her in the passenger, the car off and it was not quite raining out, a sprinkle of water from the sky, and Sam had her hands folded together between her thighs, fingers laced, worrying the knuckle of one thumb with the other.
Our seatbelts were off and there was nothing between us on my beige fabric bench seat station wagon.
There was a security light on the back of the brick building that was the elementary school, and we were facing the playground, a sad metal jungle gym and some swings, the security light bright but the roof of my low wide car blocked most of it, Sam’s face looked nervous in the soft gloom of the harsh light’s reflection.
“I’d very much like to kiss you on the neck,” she told me.
I breathed out, hard, through my nose, and I opened my mouth to say yes but I didn’t actually say anything, but some sort of okay was communicated because Samantha began sliding her body across the bench seat towards me.
She placed one hand close to my butt, her arm behind mine, and scooted to the middle seat, and leaned her body sideways, her chest with the piecing brushing the elbow of my arm and with her other hand brushed my long wavey hair away, and tilted her face at an angle and leaned in closer, and leaned in closer still, and then her thick lips were pressing the side of my neck, and I could feel it in every inch along the surface of me, the kiss was soft at first, and then she pressed her lips deeper and pressed her lips deeper, she wanted to feel everything, she was indulging each layer of sensation, drinking me in.
Then she pulled away.
She slid back to her side of the car fast, slipped away from me and made a loud sigh.
It was the only time she ever touched me. After, we stopped driving around. She stopped talking to me, and I only saw her one more time, at a party, and she refused to look in my direction. My frustration remained lodged, something at the edge of swallowing. The memory became an unreal thing that turned over in my mind at night. It only existed in my imagination, an incomplete story, hidden in a book, left behind.
* This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are producs of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
