Everyone is special except you

I write things like that in my journal. I write all sorts of things in my journal that I would never show anyone. This is sort of hard to say, but I've even taken to hiding it from my cat. It is unlikely that my cat can read. However, according to an article I skimmed it is also unlikely that human beings exist at all. It's just a safety precaution.

Most afternoons my neighbor stops by to talk about her husband. She blows smoke in my face and then faces the window. "I miss him," she says. I nod. "I mean sexually." My neighbor's husband is living on in her house as a ghost. My neighbor might be crazy, but I'm probably not the right person to judge. I stayed up three nights in a row reading the DSM IV trying to figure out what's wrong with me. It's foggy outside if you're the type of person who cares. I had a low watt bulb in, so maybe I missed some parts, but I couldn't find anything to describe the way I've been feeling, like my whole life is over, and I haven't even started living it yet.

Maybe everyone feels the exactly same way at twenty-five, or at least enough of us that we could form a group and meet, and affirm to one another that our lives are not over. Although, it seems likely that a group of people anything like me would probably just drink too much wine and affirm the very thing we were there to deny.

If you listen real closely you can hear a train whistle every fifteen minutes or so. My cat never seems to care. Tonight, when Venita, that's my neighbor, comes over, I ask her if she's ever been to the train tracks. And she gives me this look, like, are you effing crazy? And this is not the sort of look you want to get from a woman like Venita. "Have you heard the whistle?". Venita shakes her head and goes back to looking out the window and talking about her dead husband's voracious desire to steal her undergarments.

I ask her how long he's been gone, and she says she can't be sure. I wonder if you go crazy all at once, like a wave washing up on dry land, or whether, same metaphor, different meaning, it's like the crashing of the waves on a cliff slowly eroding you away. It's not the sort of question I'm comfortable asking Venita, who is currently rubbing my cat's ears even though my cat usually hates people.

I pop open a bottle of wine just because it's a Wednesday, and we start drinking. Venita is from somewhere in Eastern Europe that we never talk about. I assume the place is war torn, because it seemed to be that way for a lot of time during my childhood. I imagine that she carries around stones in her pockets to remind her of the dead. She is lying on the floor and lamenting the condition of her silk garters.

I am not good at telling people that I don't like them. Instead, I ask Venita if she'd like to go with me to find the train tracks. Venita says, "What the hell," and gets up off the ground, spilling a good portion of cheap red wine on my carpet. Luckily the cat goes over to start cleaning it up. She'll be drunk by morning.

The streetlights are sparse, and the night air is definitively crisp. Our shadows melt into one another. Venita is sort of lurching along. She's either got a bad hip that I hadn't noticed or is as drunk as I am. Cars are rare this time of night. We swim through the evening like fish. Mid-way down the block Venita turns around, and says she has to go back to check on her husband. She stars lurching away, and I want to tell her to stop. That she never even had a husband, or doesn't anymore. Who the hell knows? And that's just what I did, which is sort of rare for me. Trash was blowing at our heels as we made our way back into the dark.

I started telling her all about my first love just to shut her up about her husband. And she asked me questions about his sexual prowess, and I lied to keep her interested. My first love was in the third grade. He won the spelling bee, but that's not the sort of thing that you say. I beckoned her to the ground after four blocks, and motioned for her to be quiet. In the distance a train whistle blew, and she caught my arm and smiled.

We ran for half a block, past darkened shells of apartment buildings and cars parked head to toe before she started wheezing. "The smoke," she wheezed out, bent over, hand resting on my hip for support. We walked around for another five minutes or so, trying to find the sound in the dark.

As if by magic we came to a field of dried corn, or at least I think it was corn. I didn't even know we still had farms in town and don't know a damn thing about them. Venita and I walked through the corn, dried husks raising bumps on our arms. We held hands. And in the middle of the field, if it was a field, we hear a dog barking, and a man's voice calling out, asking if anyone was there. Venita dropped my hand, turned and ran, the troubled gait of before now gone. But I stood in the field for minutes or hours, watching the flashlight cut through the night. Someone was finally looking for me, and I was ready to be found.