Нэнси Кресс - The End Is Now

Here is what I think about sometimes: The day I figured it out, that the entitled ass who showed up every day to exchange his rental car because the seat didn’t recline all the way or the gas cap jiggled or the clutch was sticky or the radio cut out at the high end of the FM band wasn’t such an entitled ass after all, that you didn’t give a shit about the shitty cars, you just wanted an excuse to smile at the girl behind the counter. The day I smiled back. The four days it took after that, waiting for you to make your move; the way you dimpled when I made it for you. What you said, when you dropped me off that night—the first time, before you made the U-turn in your tin can rental car because you realized taking things slow was crap—that it wasn’t because you thought I was pretty, that that’s not why you came back the next day. Not that you didn’t think I was pretty. Of course you thought I was pretty. It’s just it wasn’t because I was pretty.

I liked it when you stammered. I liked that I could make you nervous.

It was because you didn’t bother to say thank you when I handed you the keys, and I told you that wasn’t very polite.

Not just a pretty girl; a pretty girl having a crap day at a job that required her to smile and be nice. A pretty girl with butterflies on her dress and a glittering stud in her nose, with army camo nail polish and a chip on her shoulder, with one assy customer too many, and something about it woke you up, you said, and you came back that first time, the next day, just to see if I had quit. You had a feeling about me, you said. Like I was some tropical bug lighting on a flower, that all it would take was a breeze to spook me away.

I liked that you remembered what I was wearing; I liked that you didn’t call me a fucking butterfly.

You’re right that it was different with you, I’ll give you that. You’re right that it was better—but in the end, it was the same, because it still ended. It doesn’t matter how good something is if it doesn’t last; the being better only makes it hurt more when it’s over, so what’s the fucking point?

It’s over. That’s the only forever for us now. We both know you’re dead, and we both know how, and I don’t want to talk about it.

Love,

Dear Cheating Bastard,

You die in the woods, where your smug face gets eaten off by escaped zoo bears, you chipmunk-headed fuckwit.

Love,

Dear Teach,

That was my first ever A+, and I guess I proved myself a C student through and through by being dense enough to believe in it. That when you said I had promise, you meant in life, and not in a back office, bent over your desk, skirt hiked up, both of us listening for someone coming, only one of us actually knowing what that would sound like. You write like a writer. That’s what you scribbled on the last page. See me after class, and you underlined that one twice. A for effort.

I thought I was an old soul; I thought I was a portrait of the artist as a young woman. I thought you loved me for those things, and for the way I laughed like I had a secret and the way I perched on the fringe of life, expectant and ever watchful, seeing into things that most people can’t see at all—because that’s what you told me. Not that you loved me because I sucked you off like I’d done it a million times before or because you had some weird fetish for skinny wrists and slap bracelets, or because I was just stupid enough to believe you when you said I was smart.

I know, I know: When I whine, I sound like a child.

I’m thinking now you liked that best.

Age, you said, was just a number, which in retrospect explains why you liked fucking teenagers, because you assumed we would mistake cliché for wisdom.

A lot of things are clear in retrospect, not to mention cliché, like the things a girl will do when she grows up without a daddy and the sad vampirism of a guy in his thirties making one last lunge for his vanishing youth. I was sixteen, and you were sixteen years older—enough space for a whole other me to fit between us. Which I’m guessing you would have enjoyed.

Theresa Babbage is only nine years older than Isaac, which seems distasteful enough now, when he’s only thirteen, but won’t matter too much down the line, and either way, you’ve no room to judge. Isaac says that when he turns thirteen, he will be a man, that that’s how it worked in biblical times and—look out the window—here we are again. (We have no windows here, but we all know what he means.) He says God wants him to be with a woman, and he wants that woman to be Theresa, and since age is just a number and what Isaac says goes, so be it. That’s what we all tried to tell ourselves, and shrugged.

It makes sense he would pick her, not just because she’s closer to his age than anyone other than the little kids, not just because she’s hot, but because she was his babysitter, and that’s the closest thing we’ve got to a teacher. ( Hot for a teacher, there’s another cliché you know pretty well.) She broke the rules for him, let him stay up after his bedtime, let him watch horror movies even after the nightmares started, the ones from God about the end of the world, and there’s something intoxicating about that, breaking the rules together, sneaking around together in the dark, sharing a secret. Secrets breed.

Write dangerous, you said, when you gave us the journals, told us to write what we felt and what we feared, no sanitized shit about proms and puppies. You called them journals, not diaries, because diaries are for little girls, and you promised they would be for our eyes only. Make the page a repository for your soul, you told us, but when I showed you the page about how you tasted and what my heart did when you spelled words on my neck with your tongue, you told me don’t be a fucking idiot and never write any of this down, and never even bothered to say if it was good.

I did what I was told. I didn’t tell anyone. Even after you traded me in for that sophomore who wrote a love poem in her own menstrual blood, I didn’t write any of it down. I learned my lesson about that. Never write down what actually matters. Never tell.

Even so, I still thought I might be a writer someday. If I had the time. If anything worth writing about ever happened to me. And here I am, witness to the end of the world, nothing to do but can fruit and record the fall of civilization and the mourning song of my heart or whatever, and the only thing I’ve bothered to write are my little collection of shitpaper letters to all you pieces of shit. There’s nothing in here I want to record, and nothing out there that I can bring back by writing about it. What I want is to lie on a couch and watch TV.

You told us TV would turn us into passive consumers of other people’s words and we should take a sledgehammer to the screen, impose our creative will on the world, creation via destruction, raze our brain-washed, consumerist, capitalist, shallow, pimple-popping lives to the ground and build from scorched earth; you told us no one ever died wishing they had watched more TV, but I will. I wish I’d watched more Friends reruns and had made a dent in the list of Boring-Sounding Shows I’m Tired of Admitting I Don’t Watch. I can picture how you probably died (pierced in the jugular by exploding glass while you begged the mirror for help with your comb-over), but I’m already forgetting what the Real Housewives look like. I told you once that I thought soap operas were the most realistic form of storytelling, because they never stopped at happily ever after, they never stopped at all, and you laughed like I was making a joke, and I guess now the joke is on me because they stopped along with everything else.