The Lonely Ghost (A Short Story)

This is a story I tweaked a lot since its original conception, more so than any other story I've written.  The original idea just started from a ghost holding a girl at night - in my more lonely moments I always imagined what I'd do if suddenly a ghostly hand appeared on my shoulder and held me tight.  I've also been thinking about ghosts lately.  A friend of mine wants to do a sort of Martian Chronicles with robots, I'd like to do the same with ghosts, maybe with a Sandman-like world surrounding them (though my idea so far is more akin to Beetlejuice).  


My final revisions aren't completely done with this story yet - actually, I haven't revised anything in months!  I feel a bit guilty about that, since this is another story from my Fiction class.  I would've liked to post some more recent work but none of that stuff is ready for public display yet, so this will have to suffice.  Please leave comments and criticisms!  I apologize for the weird paragraph breaks, it got messed up in the copy and paste but doesn't affect the story at all.  Anyways, thanks for reading, I hope you enjoy!


p.s. Feel free to let me know if it's boring or crappy or anything, PLEASE tell me, don't have me suffer the ignorance of my own mediocrity!  Thanks.

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The Lonely Ghost
by Matthew Stalbaum

    My boyfriend of six months had broken up with me.  He said he hadn’t felt like we were working out as a couple, and I wanted to tell him I loved him, but I just agreed instead – telling him the truth wouldn’t have changed anything. 
    Things got lonely.  I kept going to work, showing up at the bookstore with all the people bustling past me or asking me about whatever titles they were looking for, and I’d give them answers and smile weakly, wishing I could go out back to smoke a cigarette or something.  I don’t smoke, but it seems like a lonely thing to do, sitting outside, alone, with just your thoughts.  I guess it wouldn’t be lonely if there were other smokers there too, but I probably wouldn’t talk to them.
    I didn’t sleep much that first week back in my apartment.  The bed felt too big, I couldn’t seem to find my space in it.  I curled up in a little ball on the right side of the bed – that had been my side usually – and wrapped my arms and legs around the blanket, cradling the pillow under my head.  Then I closed my eyes real tight and tried not to think about anything, but that never worked.  Little images would flit through my head, echoes of things we’d done together, wishes for how things could have been.  In my head he was still walking over to the bed, kissing me on my shoulder, calling me his sunbeam.  I felt him still breathing softly against my neck, rubbing his fingertips against my stomach, like he was making sure I was real.  But he was gone, and eventually I fell asleep.  Sometimes I dreamed about him, and those were bad nights.  Other times I wouldn’t dream about him, but those were still bad nights – I’m still not sure what I preferred more, wishing he was there, or dreaming that he was.  It all amounted to waking up alone.  Before opening my eyes I’d reach out to try and grab him, but of course he wasn’t there.  I’d pull the sheets in closer, hugging them, never opening my eyes, holding on a bit longer to my dreams, as though they had soaked into the bedspread.
He was everywhere in my apartment.  The memories were on everything, like a film of dust I couldn’t brush off.  He had mostly come over to my place, and had a habit of kissing the things he thought were beautiful – my record collection, old scrapbooks and photo albums, even the dinner plates.  My entire antique collection must have touched his lips.  If I had known it would hurt so much when he was gone, would I have still let him come over so often, leaving fragments of memories on everything he touched?  I don’t know, probably.  It doesn’t matter I guess.  The apartment was so quiet and still, so dull and bland, even though, when I remembered him being there, it all seemed brighter.
    For a while I put myself into my antique collection.  It was something to do.  I bought a lot of cheap, old trinkets online, figurines with paint chipping off and small cracks, signs of their past lives that I’d never know.  I could get distracted for hours just dreaming about the pasts those trinkets had.  A couple things I got from local listings, places I could go to in person.  I don’t talk much.  I usually shy away from talking to people – in the bookstore I hide in the stacks a lot.  I thought it’d be a nice change from the silence of my moping around.  Honestly, I imagined I’d become one of those really sociable people who can talk to anyone about anything, but the few people I did talk to I just smiled and nodded.  Smiling’s easy, you can even do it while you’re sad.
I bought an old camera from this very nice older man close by.  He had a large, grey beard, with large wire-frame glasses.  He had lots of exciting stories about taking pictures in exotic places that he wanted to tell me.  When he talked he always looked off somewhere, like he was seeing the events he was describing right there. 
He showed me some of the pictures he’d taken with the camera.  I noticed in some of the pictures of wildlife and nature that there was a figure standing off to the side.  He was always faint, almost like a wisp of smoke, but it looked like a man staring at the camera.  The old man said, “Well, I don’t know if you believe in this sort of thing, but it’s haunted, a ghost in the machine?  I’ve heard that somewhere, don’t know where.  You see, when I take a picture and develop the film, there’s this guy just standing there in it, not looking at the camera or anything, just standing there.  Doesn’t do for good photography if your pictures have ghosts!”  He laughed a little at that and started coughing.  “He’s real faint, you wouldn’t even notice him except that he only shows up when no one else is in the picture.  Maybe he just doesn’t like people, ain’t nothing wrong with that.”
I took the camera home but didn’t take any pictures.  I would’ve had to develop them at some point, and if the man was wrong about the ghost then I’d just have a bunch of pictures of a lonely house.  I put it in my room, on top of my dresser.  It looked nice sitting there anyways, like it was from another era.
A few days later I began hearing the ghost walk around my apartment.  I could hear him shuffle down the hallway, like he couldn’t lift his feet, or he was trying to keep from floating away.  He walked very slowly.  Sometimes I’d hear him walking somewhere, and I’d hear a door creak open very carefully, then creak shut the same way.  He was a very polite ghost though.  He always tried to stay out of my way, and he was never loud.  I wasn’t even scared the first time I heard him shuffling through the apartment.  His walk sounded like he had nothing to do but be sad.  I thought how horrible it had to be, being dead but not angry or adventurous or even mischievous, just sad.  What a poor life.
I didn’t see him do any of this for a couple of days.  I only heard his feet dragging along the carpet.  After a while I got curious about what he looked like.  I heard him walking around the corner of a hallway, by the bathroom.  I peaked around to where he was but couldn’t actually see him.  The bathroom door opened by itself and closed by itself, and the toilet flushed a couple of times, one after the other, like he just wanted the sound of it, or maybe wanted to see the water swirl down.  The bathroom door opened again, closed again, and that was it.  I didn’t hear him for the rest of the day.
After that he got more comfortable.  He walked around me more, and sometimes he’d pick up my antiques around the house, spin them in his hands, and then put them back down exactly where they were.  Do ghosts have hands?  It seemed like he had hands, legs, a body, like he was a real, living person.  I guess ghosts don’t really count as people – they were people – but he seemed like a person to me.  He acted like one anyways.  He touched everything my ex had touched, almost with the same wonder and care.  It was hard to see my things being held and not be able to hold the hand that was touching them.  Sometimes when I saw something floating in mid-air, I imagined my ex was holding it still, about to kiss it.  Once I saw the ghost holding a porcelain tea cup and I got close to him and felt where his arms would be.  The cup fell to the ground and split in two.  I left the pieces there and went for a walk.  I needed to get away from it all, the apartment, the memories, everything.
That night I slept hugging my blanket with one arm while the other cradled my pillow underneath my head.  My arm was bare to the world, and usually I find that uncomfortable, but I didn’t care that much right then.  My pre-sleep thoughts were more like sighs.  Just thinking about it all made me tired, but they wouldn’t stop and I couldn’t fall asleep.  All of a sudden, I felt the ghost’s hand on my shoulder.  I had always heard of ghosts being very cold, but his skin was warm and smooth.  I could feel each finger pressed calmly against me.  It didn’t scare me – it felt nice.  My troubled thoughts stopped then.  I imagined him lying right behind me, with just that one hand on my shoulder.  It made me smile, and the next thing I knew I was asleep.
The ghost did the same thing again the next night, and without even thinking I put my own hand over it.  The instant I touched him, I got scared that my gesture would make him disappear like before, and I could even feel it quiver for a moment, as though he weren’t sure whether to vanish or stay.  Then his hand just pressed a little harder, a little deeper, and I fell asleep feeling warm all over. 
The next night I wondered if he’d do it again, and I felt his arms wrap around my stomach, and his body press against mine.  It wasn’t creepy or disturbing or anything, just – something I needed.  I never tried to see his arms around me, never needed to prove that he was real.  I just pulled him closer and laid in the ghost’s arms as I fell asleep.  He never woke me in the middle of the night, never repositioned himself or left me, so far as I could tell.  He was fine just holding me, I think, and I was fine with holding him back.
Life went on as usual.  I went to work, kept to myself, didn’t talk much, came home and listened to the ghost walk around the house, watched him pick things up and put them down.  He’d walk right behind me sometimes, and we’d play a game where I’d walk and he’d walk, then I’d stop and he’d stop, and I’d try to trick him.  I laughed everytime I was able to hear his footsteps bounding after mine had stopped.  He never made a sound aside from his footsteps, but I’d feel him take my hand and squeeze it lightly.  I imagined him smiling, and that made me smile.  I didn’t even know who the ghost had been in real life, but the more it went on, the more I felt like I did anyways, like I knew what books he liked and what foods he enjoyed, even those little things you don’t notice about someone until you wake up next to them in the morning.  I’d wake up in the mornings and his arms would still be around me, and I’d pat his hands to let him know I had to get up and he’d just hold me tighter, like he didn’t want me to go.  I think he had been lonely too, locked in that camera for however long, in those frozen, empty photographs.  I don’t think we felt a bit lonely right then, with each other.
This guy started showing up at the bookstore around then.  He was cute, brown hair and eyes, little taller than average and slightly muscular, very faint beard but not creepy looking somehow, polo shirts.  I kept seeing him around in the literature section, though sometimes he’d wander into the poetry section too.  He’d pick up a book, sit on the floor, read for a while.  My eyes always managed to wander over to him.  I would always catch him looking at me, and his eyes would dart back to his book.  He was always smiling.  I just thought he was really enjoying whatever book he was reading.
    Another week went by trading glances with him by day and enjoying the ghost’s company by night.  I was putting up some books on one of the shelves when he wandered over into my aisle.  “Hey,” he said.  I didn’t realize he was talking to me.  “Um, hey,” he said a little louder, and I turned to him.
    “Oh, hi, can I help you?”
    “Yeah, uh, this is a little embarrassing,” he said, “but I’ve been coming here reading Love in the Time of Cholera trying to work up the nerve to talk to you.”
    “Did you like it?” I asked.  I guess I didn’t speak loud enough because he said, “what?”  I asked again a little louder, “did you like it?” 
    “Oh, yeah!” he said.  “It was really good!”  He said “um” for a moment, and I just kind of stood there while he thought of what to say.  I really did think he was cute.  He had this look in his eyes, or what I saw of them, they were pointed down a lot – what I could see of his eyes, there was this endearing fear, like he had ignored it for a moment, just long enough to talk to me, and then remembered it again.
    Before he could go on, I said, “I just broke up with my boyfriend recently.  I’m still kind of getting over it.” 
    For a split second his smile went away as he said “oh,” and I felt my heart break for him a little.  But then it returned and he said, “that’s alright, really, it was kind of crazy anyways to come here and…”  His words were getting quieter, the kind of quiet where you force yourself to speak because it distracts you from your rattling thoughts.
I felt so bad for him, I told him I was sorry, then kissed him on the cheek.  His face was a little hairy and rough, and it reminded me of the ghost suddenly, his smooth hands on my stomach.  I missed him right then.  The boy smiled though, and I smiled back and said, “you’re cute, you’ll find someone else.” 
He said “thanks” before leaving the store.  I saw him put his hand to his cheek as he walked out, and it was strange to know that I had left a memory on him like that.  I was in a daze for the rest of work.
That night, as I was drifting to sleep, I felt the ghost’s arm around me as usual.  Without even thinking about it, I opened my eyes to take a look at it, to see if I could see it there.  It was like a normal human arm, although it was gray and airy, like fog.  Then he went up in a cloud of smoke or dust that hung in the air.  I reached my hand out to it but it just blew away and I didn’t feel it anymore, I didn’t feel him anymore.  I felt like Orpheus coming out of hell and taking that one glance at his lover, seeing that she’s really there as she vanishes.  The bed felt empty again – the bed was empty again.  I stared into the darkness for a little bit and started to cry, both for myself and the thought of the ghost wandering around the apartment again, lonely again, lonely as ever.  I couldn’t stop crying.  I had cried when my ex broke off our six month relationship, but this was different, more painful in a way.  It was like waking up from a dream that you felt was so real, and you’re left with that confusion of worlds as the alarm clock buzzes. 
I always wonder about that guy from the bookstore – maybe I should have gone out to coffee with him at least.  He could have shaved his beard so it wouldn’t have felt so rough to kiss – but would it have felt as nice as the ghost’s hand playfully reaching out to mine, his skin so perfectly smooth, so soothingly warm?  I wonder sometimes if he wanders around the apartment still, tracing my steps, never able to make a sound, forever trying to simply brush against my shoulder and always passing through.  No one has to be lonely, not even a ghost.  I hope he’s not lonely.

Fingerprints and Impressions (A Poem)

I've got mixed feelings about this poem.  I was pretty proud of myself when I wrote it - it's closer to the kind of style that I want, but it also reeks of e.e. cummings, and though it's practically impossible to hide his influence on my poetry these days, this one gets close to feeling like I plagiarized him somehow.  I want to write in a style that's clearly my own, but e.e. cummings is my model for now.  Let me know what you all think, good direction, wrong way?


As for content, it's a bit abstract but I think the ideas are there to find.  All I'll say more on that is that it began as a description of sensation while drunk ("Let the edges fray"), but, obviously, grew a little more complex than all that.  So please leave me comments and criticisms, let me know if you have no idea what it's about or if the style sucks or something doesn't work for you or you just plain don't like me - constructive criticism is best, but if my existence offends you, let me know and I'll work on that!  Anyways, thanks for reading, hope it's not a pain!

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Fingerprints and Impressions 
by Matthew Stalbaum


Let the edges fray, let them
As straight turns to curve bends to
Angular mechanisms and rounded lips

Let the flowers quiver, the fields blur
Overexposed in sunly exuberance like
Starshine, or faint, ghostly starlight,

Let the ear sing and whisper, the
Tongue flick off a color let it all
Swirl and swish and twirl and wish
All things sing and shinespeak all

Fingers that brushed, skin
Tumbled against and matted with
Sweat and flesh, sweet, and breath

Weighed with a heart a heart a touch
With a single beat from a single one
A you a me a we a us a them a that a those

Let the edges fray, let them
Quiver and blur with touch and kiss
To sing and swish and brush and tumble
And beat with love (a moment
a life)

We Will Never Meet Again (A Poem)

I am currently undergoing creative differences with myself in terms of poetry - yes, that does make sense.  Actually, I have written any new poetry in a while now.  This is one I wrote during the semester, and I haven't changed it much since writing it.  It has ideas that I'd still like to think over and explore, but I need to toy with style more.  This isn't far from a style that I'd like to have, and I might look at it closer sometime soon to see what I did that I like, but it's not exactly what I'm looking for - maybe I'll never find that.  I've been thinking that poetry should work like thoughts or emotions, that they shouldn't be clear but airy and abstract, that they should utilize all the advantages and limitations of language that we don't normally question or concern ourselves with.  But it's hard, and I haven't much felt in the mood to write poetry really.


I've got some ideas, though, and I'm in an Advanced Poetry workshop this semester so I expect more poetry will come!  I've been focusing on Fiction mostly, so you might expect to see some more of that in the future.  I'm just trying to figure myself out as a budding writer.


Anyways, as always, comments are hugely appreciated, especially criticisms, cause I gotta know what needs fixing before I can fix anything.  Also as always, I hope this wasn't a waste of time to read!  So here's the poem, enjoy, and hopefully there'll be something here for next week too. 

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We Will Never Meet Again
by Matthew Stalbaum


You have went away, and
No leaves have fallen, no birds have flown off,
But it seems as though Winter has
Fallen heavy,
And snow has blanketed the path, white
Washing your footsteps
Into pure, smooth emptiness,
Like the silence before men could talk, 
The air before there was breathe.

We will never meet again, and though
We come again in this same wood, along
This same lone path, it will not be;
Nor you and I, neither the sky, nor the eternal stars, neither
The freckles in our eyes (once like 
constellations, now like dust) and even should we
Touch, our fingers intertwining
Like they once did, the grooves
Will have shifted like sand-dunes or mountains,
Like your chest rising and falling with every breath,

(that moment is a moment was a moment
never again
to be a moment that can be a moment but only was and possibly
a to be but never to come oh god never to come to never
what could have but now only never only silence only
an empty moan, one of infinite pitches streaking behind,
comet-tails, whisps of smoke)

Say to me, and I will know
You have disappeared among the bare stumps,
Bare trunks and lonely branches (each unique to
face its own way

your ghost comes down the path,
brushing the leaves,
ruffling the wind,
passing through me like sunlight, and your smell lingers
forever as you go on and on into a never again, lingers)(

Perhaps, maybe, in a way
I love this you that has come through the wood,
I see in you you, a you, once you
Always you and never you and somewhat me always
Echoing pale colors newly vibrant steeped in
Hues of infinite you’s (spectrum without
ends) and then

Jack (A Short Story)

Woah, it's been a while since posting anything on here! In a bleak attempt at making up for lost time, here's my first short story post! It's a tad long, coming in at 9 pages double-spaced. This was the last piece I wrote for my Intermediate Fiction class, and the professor encouraged us to make our last stories experimental in terms of what we were used to doing with style, since a writer rarely gets the security of a group of impartial critics to judge their work and give feedback, at least before publication. So this is what I wrote, and I had been toying with the idea of it for a while - the content, not the actual style of it, that came on the spot. I even wrote my first story for the class partially on this content, on secret writing that is, but it didn't come off the way I wanted it to. I'm posting this here un-altered from when I submitted it to my class, mostly because I got very mixed reviews on it - most people loved it and were caught up in it, but others found the style annoying. All I'll say more about it is that I used very long sentences - very, very, very long sentences - so it might get irritating if it disagrees with your reading style. Also, with the font changes at the end, I had more creative fonts originally but they don't carry over well to Blogger, so I changed them, which is why they're a bit bland...sorry!

Please leave comments! I'm open to all forms of harsh and tough criticism, let me know if anything doesn't work or if some aspect is lacking. The more you tell me, the better the second draft will be! This was really fun to write, so I hope you enjoy reading it.
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Jack
by Matthew Stalbaum

The baby was a boy, and they wrote “Jack” down on as his name, and his parents smiled and held him and couldn’t wait to write to their friends about him, “Baby’s born, he’s a boy, his name is Jack,” and they wouldn’t get any response, they’d just call, but it was nice to have an occasion to send a letter for anyhow.
Jack cried and Jack grew and Jack fell and Jack grew, and after doing that for four years they put a pencil in his hand, and he wrote “Jack” down on a piece of paper and he smiled and held the piece of paper and said, “that’s me!” He wrote his name on that paper over and over and over, Jack, Jack, Jack, Jack, until his pencil ran out of lead, and then he asked for another one, just to see himself on that piece of paper like that, “Jack.”
After a small bit more crying and falling and growing he wrote a whole sentence, “Jack is a boy,” and now he was something. There was a pretty girl in his class, so he got another piece of paper and wrote, “Sally is a girl” (it took him forever to figure it out), and he gave the paper to her but she said it was ugly and that she couldn’t read his handwriting, so he ripped it up and wrote, “Sally is ugly,” and he gave that to her and he got in trouble but he didn’t care because she had been mean to him. Later on he wrote, “I’m sorry” (that took even longer), but she moved away and he never gave it to her, so he put it in a drawer and let it echo there, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorrrrry,” and even after that piece of paper was lost it was written in his memory and in his heart, though it stopped echoing after a while, and then it was just there, like a scar.
Jack read and Jack played and Jack got in trouble like all boys do but got out of it just as quick, and he worked himself up to writing an essay on Benjamin Franklin, because he was the most smartest person in history, and it was a page and a half long and looked like a whole book to him, and the teacher gave him an A and he smiled and held it and put it on the refrigerator and bragged about it until his friends yelled at him (obviously because they wished they had gotten A’s). Jack wrote a poem too, but that got a B, so he didn’t talk about it much, and when Scott bragged about his poem getting an A Jack yelled at him because it was annoying and rhyming was for sissy’s anyways.
Jack kept growing and Jack kept writing, and he got it in him to write something just for himself, a short story, and it was about bullies being dumb and a regular kid named Jack (no relation) rising up and beating them up, and then they didn’t bully anyone anymore. A year later Jack wrote the story again, but this time Jack (still no relation) was saving a pretty girl named Penny (all relations to real people is entirely coincidental) from the bullies, and at the end she kissed Jack and he smiled and held her, and Jack liked this story much better and felt light and heavy every time he wrote “Penny,” and sometimes he wrote it over and over and over just to feel her name, “Penny, Penny, Penny.” He gave her the story and he wrote her a question on the back of it, and she wrote back a “no, sorry” on a scrap of paper, and Jack didn’t feel light and heavy anymore, only heavy, and he didn’t want to write again, but then he wanted to write so good that she would write back a “yes, yes!” Jack started to write another story but he never finished it – it would’ve been about a boy named Jack (pure coincidence) who beat up all the bullies in the school, but then he still felt lonely, and Jack didn’t know why the character was lonely at the end but he knew he had to be.
After that Jack only wrote for school, and he wrote research papers and essays on how everyone was equal or something like that and how he wanted to help people when he grew up, and he didn’t know if that was true or not but it didn’t really matter cause it got him an A and he wasn’t ever gonna look at those papers after high school anyways, he barely looked at them while he was writing them to begin, they just blew out of his fingers like steam. He did write start writing a poem for one English class though, and it was supposed to be about himself, so he started with “My name is Jack,” and he wrote some characteristics like “I am smart,” and “I am white,” but then he wrote, “sometimes I’m sad,” and he wrote, “I hate things sometimes,” and part of him told him to erase these lines, they were bad, they sucked, they were pathetic, but he couldn’t, wouldn’t, he needed them somehow, and he wrote more, and each line was only five words at the most but he wrote more in them that only he knew about, wrote things under them, he wrote about divorce and about having to meet new potential Dads every couple of weeks and about running away to his real Dad’s house and about how quiet it was there, how the boredom was nice somehow, and about how his best friend Billy was gay and had a crush on Jack, and about Jack punching him in the arm and calling him a fag and then crying when he was alone because he knew he had acted like a bastard but it was all he could think of to do, and none of these words were in the poem but they were all there, like a heavy fog surrounding it, and he titled it “Jack” but had to rewrite it on another piece of paper because some teardrops stained it, only he never turned it in, couldn’t turn it in, there was too much of him there, more than people could see, so he made a revised version with only the simplest and lightest lines and turned that in and got a B, but he kept the original version for himself, under his bed, and he didn’t smile at it or hold it, it was just there. In senior year he had a teacher great enough that he wanted to show him the poem, but he added three more pages to it, and added some images, and each one was colored with sadness and confusion and an occasional moment of happiness in love, and the teacher said he was a good writer and he should write more, but Jack didn’t write, he refused to write, he couldn’t write cause all he could see in his poem were his own hidden sorrows and he didn’t think he could handle another soul hearing them.
Jack wrote a page to get into college and Jack wrote papers there too for his requirement classes, and it wasn’t any much different from high school except he had to write more and his teachers accepted a little less bullshit but he got by anyhow, and he majored in Math because it was something he knew how to do, and he wrote the answers to the problems and got A’s and made Math major friends who introduced him to other-Major friends, and Jack partied and Jack drank and Jack smoked, and before Jack knew it he was out of college and he had a Bachelor’s degree and nothing to do with it, and he wasn’t sure what to do but he couldn’t write, he was sure of that.
Jack found a job at a cubicle punching in numbers to a computer, and that was his writing, and occasionally he wrote emails to his co-workers and to his boss, and he came in everyday at 9 and left everyday at 4:58, and he put on a smile and held it there, and when he got home he had a beer and watched TV, but mostly his eyes glazed past and he fell into thoughts about dreams and wishes and the way things always should be but never are, and eventually he would snap out of it and eat some dinner and then daydream some more until he went to bed where he never dreamed, and he grew quiet and his smiles grew pale and his sighs grew longer and longer.
He had carried that one poem with him since he had moved out for college and then into a real apartment, tucked deep in his luggage beneath old socks and used books, and sometimes he’d found it and held it and thought that the lines could use some touching up like a painting, and he’d change a word here and add an image or a scene there, and he bought a binder for it because it quickly grew to 30 pages long, and he’d spend hours some nights long past his bedtime haunted over the right word to describe a subway station, but not just the subway station, its depth and darkness too, the abyss where those trains really emerge from, and not just that either but Jack himself, and his depth and darkness too, and he wrote feverishly and tirelessly of countless scenes, and they were all under the heading of “Jack,” and when he was done for a night he would hold the poem but he wouldn’t look it over and he wouldn’t read all that it said, he was too afraid there was a wrong word, or even worse, that there was a right word, and that the word would speak of empty jobs and a meaningless life, it was better not to read it at all, just not at all.
Despite his quietness and his lack of writing by daylight, save for checks and bills and taxes and census forms and work forms and catalogue forms and emails to his Mom about whoever her boyfriend was because it was useless to remember names, and emails to his Dad that were only responded to with a word or two, and emails to the few friends who kept in touch and were all in the same place as him only he couldn’t read if there was any despair in their words like there were in his because despair in language was always so faint like carbon monoxide or radon – despite his lack of writing, Jack received an email from one of his co-workers that was distinctly not about work, and Jack responded back with a hint of a blush, and they emailed back and forth during the days and talked and kissed and pressed back and forth during the nights, and eventually they wrote each other lovely little somethings and gave each other rings for them, and people applauded even though their somethings were not very original or poetic and Jack’s was more somber than it should have been, because it didn’t really matter what was written, it was lovely that there was an occasion for their little somethings to be written at all. Jack said little to his Sara, but he kissed her whenever he could, on the lips and on her forehead and on the neck and on her chest, and he wrote his love along her body in hickies as she wrote her love in little notes around the house on tiny scraps of paper in elegant handwriting and in the depths of his heart in red ink that bled throughout Jack’s body so that his smiles seemed to glow with a flush, and they wrote themselves into each other’s lives indelibly and irrevocably, like engravings in stone.
Jack still wrote on the poem, and over the previous lines of desire and despair there was now something brighter, something lighter, not anything like some bright light at the end of a tunnel but at least a spark, and it glowed on the words he added, washing over the sadness they hinted at before like the ocean tide over seashells, and within the scenes there emerged those glimpses of love he had written earlier in high school, and he hadn’t understood them those years ago, they just seemed like some nice thing to hold onto, but now they were real, and he smiled and held the poem, and afterwards he smiled and held his Sara. But he didn’t tell Sara about the poem, he didn’t know why, it never occurred to him, she had a Jack, she didn’t need his “Jack” poem, and he only wrote on it after she’d gone to sleep or while she was in another room, and maybe he’d only add a quick word in a margin while she was going to the bathroom, and she’d return to see him lying quietly on the bed with a smile.
Soon enough Jack’s Sara got pregnant, and the baby was a boy, and Jack wrote “Billy” down as his name, and his parents smiled and held him and couldn’t wait to write their friends about him. But Sara got sick, and she wrote some words for Billy and she wrote one more note for Jack, and then she stopped writing, her hand went limp just as she finished “Love, Sara,” and Jack wrote a list of people to contact for the funeral and he wrote other things for that too but he didn’t notice all of them very much, the words fell out of his fingers and into the right places but only by accident. Jack would rock Billy to sleep, and he’d hold Billy and he’d try to smile, but once Billy was asleep he would go to his poem, and Jack added another 20 pages to the poem from coloring every scene that he could read without crying with the overarching shadow of Death and Loss, and written into every word was a fatigue that went deeper even than Billy’s crying at 4 in the morning, and everywhere Jack wrote “loss, loss, loss,” though he rarely used the actual word, it washed over the poem like oil on water, it was even written on his forehead in wrinkles and creases and in his hair in wiry gray strands.
Billy cried and Billy grew and Billy fell and Billy grew, and Jack was there with him for it all, and Billy smiled and Billy laughed and Jack smiled and Jack laughed, and the creases of sorrow written into his face were written over with new joy, and they didn’t rewrite his face, there was still evidence of that sadness, it would always be there, but there was hope and it colored even the darkest shadows of his years with something lighter, not a promise, not anything clear or absolute, just something lighter. Jack even told Billy fairy tales, ones that Jack made up on the spot, and some were about boys named Billy (no relation) fighting dragons and saving princesses, and at first Billy said “yuck!” to saving girls, but after a few years he asked to save them again, and the endings were usually happy but not always so, but even the sad endings were happy in a way, and Billy would stare with wide-eyes at his Dad while he told them, and though the stories were never written down they wrote themselves in Billy’s memory and in Billy’s heart. Jack thought about writing them down but it was nice enough to only tell them out loud and let them fade into echoes and then nothingness, but he continued writing on his poem, and he wrote into it the wrinkles of hope that had formed on his face, and over the “loss, loss, loss” of before there was now “Billy, Billy, Billy,” and the poem grew to over a hundred pages long, but Jack never read over it as a whole, maybe a part here or there for a few changes but never as a whole, not just yet, he wanted to wait just a bit longer, he would know when the time was right.
Time rolled on and Billy grew and Jack grew too, though there wasn’t much growing left for him to do it seemed, and yet it seemed he couldn’t grow tall enough, and Billy wrote more and more each day and Jack wrote less and less each day, and Billy grew tall and big as Jack grew short and small, but they both grew in a way, and Billy graduated high school and college and Jack retired, and his co-workers wrote him a goodbye card, and it wasn’t anything original or poetic, but it was nice that there was an occasion for one anyways, and Billy emailed his Dad and Jack emailed him back and that was most of his writing, and the rest of his writing was just for himself. Sometimes he wrote a response to his Sara’s last little note to him, and sometimes he wrote a lot of responses, but he usually burned them and imagined she was getting them somewhere, somewhere so far and so close, and sometimes he wrote on his poem, and he never wrote much, only a few words, but they were just the right words, written with all the undertones of his life, like the deep creases in his knuckles, and if you read them carefully you’d see that each one really spelled out “Jack.” One day, after making some changes to his poem, Jack decided to read the whole thing, and he read over handwriting that was his but not anymore, words he hadn’t written in 50 years, and reading over himself, he remembered days of confusion and days of emptiness and days of happiness and days of loss and days of hope, and as the poem went on he felt their accumulation, like dust, and when he finished he smiled and held his poem, and he crossed out the “Jack” written at the top, and he wrote “Jack,” and he did not ask himself what he’d do with it, it didn’t much matter to him, it was done and that was enough, and soon after he finished reading it he went to bed and he went to sleep and wrote himself an end.
At the funeral, Billy saw death written all over his Dad’s face, written over the heat of life like white-out, but it was not a perfect cover, and Billy still saw wrinkles of contentment there, and his mouth upturned in the slightest hint of a smile, and Billy smiled and wanted to hold him but couldn’t because he was gone now and he’d only be holding emptiness, but for a moment he held the binder that Billy had found in his Dad’s house, it was a binder filled with countless pages of images and scenes and stories and they were all formed into one poem and words were scratched out and written over and the handwriting changed from front to back like a different person had written it by the end but not a completely different person, so Billy could tell it was old, and Billy had seen it headed as “Jack” and thought it deserved to be with Jack, even though Billy liked it very much and wanted to keep it. But it was written in Billy’s memory and Billy’s heart like the fairy tales that his Dad told him as a child were, because Billy felt that some of what he read in “Jack” was himself, in some way he couldn’t really explain, even the parts that weren’t about him, they were about him, and they were about everybody who could read it, so Billy took the parts of “Jack” that were “Billy” and let them write themselves in his memory. The funeral ended, and the funeral home needed Billy to write his name, and with a sad smile Billy wrote “Billy,” and his eyes stared at it for a second, at that “Billy” there on the paper, because it wasn’t just “B.i.l.l.y,” it said so much more, of happiness and loss and sadness and hope, all in those five letters: “Billy.”