Selling the Sky

Selling the Sky

By Alex L. Mauldin 

              It's these little things, they can pull you under.
                           Live your life filled with joy and wonder.
                             I always knew this altogether

                               Thunder was lost in our little lives.

                                          - Michael Stipe, “Sweetness Follows”

As each page turned, the story ran deeper.  Some of the words slipped past unread, but still the story held itself together through its own inertia.  It resisted my mind’s wanderings.

Your absence is cruelty.

The story of teenage love reminded me too much of what my own love lacks:  the innocence which is long gone.  So are the moments of excitement that cause the heart to tremble because of their newness, their seemed uniqueness.  The first time hands are held.  The first tentative kiss.

You laid back on my futon, smiling remember?  Your laughter came so easily, dispelling the nervousness we both felt.  I was telling you about my old high school friend who years later came out of the closet.  You thought that was so funny.  I knelt beside you on the floor, my head level with yours as you stared at the ceiling, soft hair spilling over the sides of the pillow, laughing at the story of my gay friend.

Too many words were slipping by now.  Whole paragraphs soon to follow.  So with some regret, I tossed the book onto the coffee table and moved over to the computer to check my mail.  The stereo and TV were silent.  The whole room was silent if you ignored the hum of the computer and the steady exhalation of the air-conditioner. 

There wasn’t any new email.  Some ads for lower mortgage rates, yes, but no real email.  Some offers to reduce my debt, but no real email.  Something that would make my manhood truly remarkable, but no email from anyone I knew or cared about. 

You just wouldn’t stop giggling.  You would burst out with “Your gay friend!” and twist on the futon in laughter.  I leaned over you and told you to stop laughing, though by now I was echoing your laughter.  Our faces were so close together.  The moment had arrived with incredible swiftness.  Staring at the sky while standing on the edge of a cliff.

Time for a shower.

It’s odd how time passes in the shower.  Minutes seem to take fewer seconds to slide by you with the warm water.  Steam seems to hide you from the rest of the world.  That is until someone knocks at the front door.

Yes, someone was definitely knocking.  The urgency of the knocking eliminated all hope of it being imagined.  Turn off water.  Few quick wipes from the towel piled on the toilet seat.  Shorts tugged on and t-shirt thrown over the head.

“Hey, how’s it going buddy?  I got another package for you.”

As if I couldn’t have guessed.

“I need you to sign here.”

Why is it that when you sign your name on an electronic screen, the signature never looks right?  Shouldn’t it come out the same?  But mine never looks right.  It looks like a poor forgery.

“All right man, see you later.”

The package is relatively light for its size.  But then again, half the things I order are packed with so much Styrofoam or plastic air-pockets that you’d think the package would float out of your hands before you got a chance to open it.  One of these days I’m going to open one of these and there will be nothing there.  Just carefully packed air.

This is where the big decision must be made:  get a knife or rip it with my bare hands?  Since using my hands feels more manly, I opt for it.

How did you open the packages I sent you while I was away?  I was so careful in how I packed the books, cds, cards, and other gestures of how I felt about you, I wonder if you took that same care in receiving them.  Did you notice the care put into each package?  Or did you rip into what I gave you with both hands?

The package contained two books I’d forgotten about ordering.  Back-orders have a way of doing that to you.  They wait just long enough to be shipped so that you’re honestly surprised when they arrive.  It’s almost as if someone else had picked them out for you.  Someone with tastes oddly similar to yours.

One book concerned the making of Citizen Kane.  Must have ordered that after catching an Orson Welles film fest on cable.  The other a look at the history of the world through the eyes of science.  Both essentially non-fiction. 

Lately I’ve turned myself away from stories that aren’t grounded in truth.  It’s as though I’m afraid to lose myself in a fantasy world.  A world that can’t possibly be true because it is too good to be true.

You claimed to love coming to my small apartment because while you were there, the rest of the world went away.  Your parents, your friends, your problems, and all the people who wouldn’t understand all waited outside my door.  They could be forgotten for awhile.

I liked that idea at first.  I liked the idea that I was the place you felt safest.  But then I realized after awhile that in your eyes I wasn’t a part of the real world.  You were afraid of the real world and ran to me to escape it.  In your eyes I was too good to be true.

The shower long forgotten and the two books placed on the pile of books begging to be read, I returned to the chair in front of my computer.  An hour passed by with a cursory check of the job application submitted to a website I hoped would eventually pan out.  Next a few moments spent looking at potential places to live in a city just far enough away to forget a few things.  Another crucial decision loomed:  apartment or house?  Apartments were temporary and you knew that going in.  Houses announced their seemed permanence with a thud.  Neither was truly permanent, though.  At best we rent our lives month by month.

You kept coming back to me.  I stared at rental units and imagined you leaning over my shoulder offering opinions, that same soft hair brushing against my cheek.  I browsed through houses hearing your voice calling from the futon asking if they had a fence so you could have a dog.  No, a puppy.  Part of me wanted to swivel around in my chair to check if you really were lying on the futon like you were four years ago. 

Four years?  My god. 

I needed a drink.  Badly.  But the drinks do nothing but add a thin layer of ice over the emptiness underneath.  That ice will crack and you will have to deal with falling in.  Sink or swim.  Sink or swim.

That black book.  I still have it, you know?  We were supposed to write notes to each other in its empty pages.  So many blank pages meant so many opportunities to explain to the other how love was changing us.  First you wrote a poem called “Why Do I Love You?” in which you wrote how I was helping you become the woman you always wanted to be.  Looking back, I now know you weren’t trying to explain anything to me, but instead were trying to convince yourself.

Tequila.  Tequila mixed with anything is still at its heart an antidote to memories.  Good or bad, they all seem to quietly walk out the door and close it behind them.  The memories will return, of course.  So will the UPS man with more packages I’ve forgotten about ordering. 

More knocking.  A glance at the bedside clock confirmed that it was morning.  Which morning?  Sunday.  Then it can’t be the UPS man. 

Turned out to be my mother asking if I wanted to meet for lunch later.  Sounded good to me, though more sleep after a handful of aspirins sounded better.  She asked if I’d been feeling ok.  Never better, I replied.

That’s how I found out you had someone else.  There I was at Pizza Hut with my mother, listening but not listening to how things were going at work, when you appeared beside our table.  I hadn’t heard from you in a couple of weeks.  Work, you explained.  Busy at work.  In your hand twirled keys to a truck that wasn’t mine, or yours, yet.  You explained to my mother that you’d borrowed the keys from a friend, your boss at work, but from the way you glanced over at me, I knew he was becoming more than a friend just as I was becoming more of a memory.  As soon as you left, I disappeared inside myself right in front of my mother, though she never knew I’d left.  Or why. 

The black book was lying on the floor by the bed.  From a short distance it looked almost like a photo album, except once you opened it, it didn’t contain pictures.  At least not ones you saw with your eyes.

The messages alternated.  Different handwritings.  Different inks.  Different days.  Different voices.  But each spoke about the same shared love, regardless of the differences.  We spoke about those differences often.  How could we combine our seemingly mismatched lives into one worth living together?  How could we take the years, and friends, and families, and futures and mold them into something answerable to the questions that were sure to come?  Here my confidence ruled the day and overwhelmed your fears.  I had no doubt that it would work.  I knew our faith in each other would overcome.  Overcome what?  Your faith didn’t last long enough to find out.  Now my words seem as though they were written by someone else.  Signed by someone else.  A poor forgery.

“And when I think of you, your memory makes love to me and I can see no other.”  You wrote that line for me twice.  Once in the book.  Once while holding me, the whispered words written on my heart.  Now I wonder what my memory does for you now, especially when you’re with another. 

Back to the other book.  The one partly about teenage love.  Partly about death.  The two are intermingled, as though if you took out one, the other wouldn’t last long alone.  That is what’s so sad about young love: it has to die.  And death would not be so sad if it weren’t for love. 

I loved you so much I bought your favorite movie.  Twice.  A new copy for you and another for me.  You could watch Bram Stoker’s Dracula over and over and never tire of it.  I never tired of watching you watch it.  It seemed as though every time you came to my apartment we ended up watching a few scenes from that movie.  You’d curl up in my arms, eyes fixed on those characters that were more real to you than any actor could hope to make them.  The ultimate story of two people so perfect for each other, but separated by love and death.  Separated but inseparable.  Just like we were and still are.

One of these days I’ll also write a story about death and young love.  The story will be about two people so right for each other in a world so incredibly wrong about love.  They will buy the sky, and when the rain comes, one of them will sell it.  I’ll write about promises not meant to be kept, lies meant to be forgotten, and times when that terrible world waits outside the door a few moments longer.  Just a few more moments. 

I’d do anything for just a few more moments.

One day I’ll write that story.  And then it’ll go away.

Alex L. Mauldin

Copyright © 2003

Last update: 4/26/2005; 10:14:53 PM.