Thu, 19 May 2005

Aminal
Nobody remembers that summer. If you ask, they will shrug, or laugh, or get a pinched look between the eyes and start talking about their favorite politician, or musician, or operating system. Nobody was married, or divorced, or was born or died, of if they did nobody seems to remember. It is possible that people who seem to disappear in and out of our lives were always there, only the time is lost to us, a blur of nondescript days with no crushes on the subway or brilliant books or really horrible oysters that lead to a weekend in bed with the smell of vomit and cooled air conditioner breezes up near the ceiling. Perhaps we spent that summer afraid, unwilling to go outside, running out of real food and sucking on plastic tubes of condiments. Perhaps we were always afraid, staring at our hands and all knotted in the stomach and afraid for things we didn’t understand. More likely there was just a period without novelty, without character, the days all pointless and small. It’s no one’s fault. These things happen, sometimes, and that we cannot remember them is of no great loss as the reason we can’t remember them is there was absolutely nothing memorable about them.

Jenny and David met during such a lull, a hazy apathy around their aniverseries, a vague discomfort their friends get when Jenny and David talk about when they first met. They never discussed it, but Jenny and David both wondered if maybe there was something wrong, something cold and empty in the center of their near-perfect relationship. Each assumed it was them and not the other. They have a preoccupation towards this topic when they have sex, cook dinner, lay on the far sides fo the bed, staring at the ceiling while pretending to sleep.

They know something is wrong, but they don’t know what it is. They try to think back to their first dates, the beginning of their coupling, but it’s so hard to remember, it’s like they never really grew into each other at all. They woke up one day like they’d been that way for years.

When they split up, all their friends were sorry to see them drift apart, wondering what went wrong, and maybe just a little happy not to have to think about it anymore.
(12:05.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #