He thinks of her, still.
The box-dye hair that reeked of crushed aspirin, filled him with equal parts longing and dread. He'd met her when she was unwell, and should have waited 48 hours before falling in love, but couldn't. She had that quality, that knell that went with the swaying of her fat come-here hips, that filled you with a sense of faith in humanity. That turned the insides of his kidneys to charcoal dust. That insistence of permanence that didn't - wouldn't - suffer him to wait. On good days, he decided to want her all at once, except it was no decision at all. This woman was his desert. His perdition. Fate.
This woman who made him crawl about on his elbows and left his knees skinned like when he was a boy. If he could've chosen at all, he might've wished for an easier woman. It was a lukewarm, nice enough fantasy that ended up disappointing him each time. He could no more be satisfied with a woman like that, a wishy-washy woman, a paper-clip woman in the deluge that was his life, than he could hope to be happy with her.
It wasn't happiness his witch from the desert had promised him. It was dry-lip kisses and flickering streetlamps that kept him up at night.
He thinks of her often.
The green-blue shrapnel when she opened her mouth wide and let him peek all the way down to her belly button. The panoply of things she refused to tell him, and that ended up driving him out of his mind.
He thinks of her as he's loading up his gun. The yellowing of the plants she forgot to water. Or left out in the too-cold, forgetting it was winter outside, forgetting the bulging of her own red-rim eyes. Forgetting. That, she did well. So admirably, in fact, that one day he came home to find every trace of their life together vanished. His clothes and his turntable, burned to a crisp in a neat, mortuary pile on the sidewalk. The smell of him scrubbed and bleached off every wood tile, off the fridge door handle. Like he was never here.
The only vestige of abandonment, echoes of self lodged deep between the couch cushions where she always meant to vacuum but never remembered. He makes a mental note to vacuum when he gets home. Will find a way to retrieve the men he's lost from himself, to finish at least the gallery of babies they never had. Currently, he's on his fifth. The one where she orgasmed quickly, violently, against the steering wheel, off the side of road.
On top of everything, she was always a light-of-day lover. A shameless lover who tricked him into trading in his own mortification at being caught flushed and wet-handed. Losing himself into the ocean of imaginations she dressed him up in. To his daylight lover, he was Napoleon at Lodi. He was James Brown belting out the rhythms of Sex Machine at the top of his lungs. To her, he just was, except in the end, this prolonged state of being turned much too agonizing and unfamiliar for him to handle.
He thinks of her when he rides the metro late at night. When he leans against the ledge, smoking with the lights out in his white-wash bedroom. His borrow-intimacy bedroom that never quite gets warm enough. Thinks of her as he plasters Wanted posters across the murky downtown streets. He's the only one who looks for them, still. Their families and loved ones gave up years ago. There comes a point in life where you abandon the search, for fright of what you might find if you keep on looking. But he remembers.
He uses high-quality photos. Black and white, because they always come out a little bit blue when he tries color. But black and white works fine. It's the traditional route. She would appreciate this route. Imagines her layering the glue on the post beside him. Throws her a smile, but she washes away.
Every now and again, not all that often, someone will stop and chat with him. Inevitably, expecting a tragedy. How he tries, and fails to explain he doesn't want in truth to find any of these people. The very act of looking would be absurd, since he knows already where they all are. What he wants is for them to be remembered. For someone to pass by and think hey, I knew this person. For the world to keep on spinning on its axis. For the warmth of her armpits. For the taste of her sweat, and the look in her eyes when she still wants to sleep.
He's a man of simple whims. A quiet man, but they ask, and he hates to disappoint. They're always searching for tragedy, people who ain't had enough of their own, so he likes to serve it to them. Makes up stories. Ever so often, they'll catch him putting up a poster of her. In the stories he tells, they're still living together in her brownstone apartment. There's always the suggestion on his breath that at the end of the play, they find each other. In the stories, she's still warm under his palms, and they are both happy.
