Sawyer Paul's Blog, page 90

Windows Phone's Start Screen is a lot like Launch Center Pro

On a recent episode of The Talk Show, Merlin Mann mentioned that the one thing he didn't like about Launch Center Pro—a quick-action app for the iPhone—was that he had to launch it at all.

The idea behind the app is that it takes common actions you might do in separate apps—like make a call to a certain person, add a to-do in your preferred reminders app, play a certain album, etc—and place these actions in a grid, so you can get to them without having to drill down in individual apps. It's a very good implementation, but Merlin is right. It would be nice to just be able to launch actions without having to necessarily launch apps.

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Now, this isn't a Windows Phone-is-better-than-the-iPhone post. I get that there's major downsides to the Windows Phone, specifically in regards to 3rd party app support (and, with WP8 coming out in the fall, this will now officially never change). It doesn't have Tweetbot, Omnifocus, or the plethora of other iOS apps pro users love. But it does have something very similar to Launch Center, and it's the first thing you see when you turn the phone on.

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Now, I don't generally use my Windows Phone in this regard. As you can see above, my tiles are 8 of the more common. The first tile is my 'me' hub, which allows me to tweet, and see who's replied to me on Twitter and Facebook. The next is the people hub, which allows me to read Twitter/Facebook updates from everyone and individual people, and email/call/sms whoever. Messaging, music videos, IE, Rdio, and email are all pretty self explanatory. I have the official Twitter up there for direct messaging, which happens enough to justify its placement.

But, if I wanted to make this more Launch Center Pro-ey, I could add tiles below these for certain actions. Windows Phone apps allow you to pin actions, lists, and contacts to the start screen, and there are apps in the Marketplace like Connectivity Tiles and Network Dashboard that allow for even more. See below:

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What I've got here is one-touch access to an Rdio playlist I'm listening to right now, the dropbox folder my IFTTT links reside, the Granta Twitter stream, and the live stream of Monocle Radio. Below that, I've got four actions: Share status, send a new text message, send a new email, and toggle Wi-Fi on and off. These are the kinds of things people use Launch Center Pro for on the iPhone, and the kinds of things that reside on the start screen (without having to launch any apps) on Windows Phone.

2 hours with The Mountain Lion

I know it's "Mountain Lion" and not "The Mountain Lion," but it sounds better the longer way. It sounds more important, probably more important than it is.

The Mountain Lion has a built-in expiration date a year from now, since Apple announced yearly upgrades. Most Mac OS's have had the benefit of an unknown successor, but I think this extra bit of knowledge is good. It means no matter what might be wrong with this version, we only have to wait a year for improvement.

Not that there's much wrong. Like the title suggests, I haven't had much time to play with it, but what I have seen is incredibly solid. I'm used to reading reports of odd bugs, strange crashes, and other mysteries that come with an OS upgrade. Not this time. Smooth sailing so far. It's Lion, but nicer.

The new stuff starts out pretty empty if you haven't loaded your iPad or iPhone full of iCloud documents. I opened up a few iCloud apps to see if anything was there, and it wasn't. Same goes for notification centre. I assume I'm going to use both new features a ton, but that's later, when there are things pinging and quietly saving across all my devices.

I like the new dock. It's almost milky.

I like the new desktop wallpapers, always a nice treat.

It's a touch faster everywhere, except Safari, where it's night and day. I use Safari primarily for its smooth UI and acknowledging its slower pace, knowing that Chrome is sitting right over there, begging me to race along with it. Now, I don't feel like I'm using the second-best browser.

The little loading bars that you get when you move files around happen directly on the file, just like on iOS. Goodbye, seperate bars. Yay, less bars!

This is the first time in the history of my personal computing life that not one app broke. Everything just kept on humming along, preferences and confidence intact.

I need a few more hours with it. That's all I've got so far.

More Things: July 26, 2012

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8-Bit Butcher Diagrams by Jude Buffum

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More Lit Things:

Semi-Colons are still tricky.

Fifty Shades of Grey reviewed in animated .gifs.

Cornell libraries: 55% of all books purchased since 1990 have never circulated.

Random House spent more time licensing fonts for Martha Stewart digital books than producing the actual books.

Does Money Make Us Write Better?

More Tech Things:

How Many People Use Twitter’s Own Apps?: http://t.co/u67i4Edk

OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, the Little Details

Mountain Lion Miscellany

More Canada Things:

Mass Shooting In Canada: Compare and Contrast

So, what if the Toronto condo boom isn’t a bubble?

Adding a Feedburner RSS to a Squarespace 6 blog

This confused me at first, and Squarespace 6 is too new to have a ton of people writing about specific edge-case features. But yeah, if you have a new Squarespace blog and want to syndicate it through Feedburner, here's how you do it:

Go to your blog in navigation mode, and click on page settings.

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Then, click over to the farthest right option called "Syndication." It's kinda tough to see with certain angles or monitors:

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Place your feedburner URL in there. If you have a podcast, that's where all the nifty iTunes meta-tagging is, too.

Create a Linked List Generator from Twitter and Google Reader with IFTTT

If you're a blogger that likes to collate your favourite links of the week (either your own or others), I've got two IFTTT recipes that might help that process.

I hit the favourite button on twitter quite a bit, but I almost never go into my favourite list. This first recipe takes every tweet I've starred that has a link, and drops it into an appended text file in Dropbox:

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I'm still working out the kinks, since the 'text' area sometimes includes the link itself, but it still works very well.

The next link does the same thing, but with Google Reader. Star anything in Google Reader, and it appends to a note in Dropbox as a Markdown link:

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It's with these two IFTTT recipes that I plan to make my weekly More Things article, and it's useful for anyone who wants to keep links to the things they like online.

The Biggest Lie: A Short Story

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My flight leaves in two hours from gate six. Out in the wide open of the circular airport terminal, I’m looking up to the departures screen, all of the information just flying. The screen, it’s a hundred feet high but you can still see the tiniest dot up at the top. The detail is so intricate, and it might mean something if there was anything to it. I look at my watch. I look at the screen. People of all shapes, sizes, all with luggage and screaming children and tickets, they’re all around me. In an instant, they’re all gone, all in lines or the hallway to the bar or out catching taxis. In an airport terminal, it’s the busiest place one minute and the loneliest the next. Out in the wide open, I’m looking up at the departures screen. I look at my watch. I look at the screen.

Everyone who’s ever been to an airport will tell you to go early. The lines—they’ll tell you—take forever. They wind back and forth until there’s this mile long snake of baggage. And then there’s finding your gate, and getting through the metal detectors and assuring security that you are indeed not a terrorist. When the guy with the stun gun attached to his waist asks you if you need anything, you’ve got to have an answer ready. What they don’t tell you is that when you arrive two and a half hours early—when there is no line, and the gate is in plain view of just about everywhere—well, what they don’t tell you about is the waiting game.

I’m worrying about stun gun guy asking me just what I was doing standing out in the middle of this gigantic C shaped building, so I walk down the hallway to the bar. I pass all the novelty shops, all the paraphernalia and useless crap you get your distant cousins as a last minute oh-I-almost-forgot kind of gesture. I’ve got two hours before my flight takes off, and since I’m not planning any terrorist activity, a bar is exactly the place I should be. The bartender, he cleans a glass, takes one look at me, and grimaces. He sees it. I don’t know how anyone wouldn’t. The driver of the car didn’t see me, but ever since the accident, it seems like I’m just the most obvious thing around. “Do you want some ice?” He asks sincerely. I shake my head, and order a ginger ale. He doesn’t ask “what happened?” as he cleans a glass and pours.

This bar, it’s an insert off this long hallway going who knows where. There are two dozen tables, all dark maple with gold trim. You can see this exact same pattern on all the chairs, all the floors, all the walls. Outside the bar, it’s totally white, clean, and personality free. It’s so sanitary it stings the eyes. Another thing they don’t tell you about airports is that if your looking for anything to do with the real world, forget about it.

There are a few people in the bar with me. I can’t see the faces of the people over at the far tables, but I know they’re smoking and laughing together. I’m the only one not using a table, the only one without company.

In two hours, I go home. In one hour, 59 minutes, everything goes back to being normal, small, manageable.

In one hour, 58 minutes, I get my life again. Get it back on track.

Welcome to the waiting game.

I wasn’t looking, but with an hour and 57 minutes before I get my life back on track, this girl came and sat down right next to me.

I didn’t say “Hi”, but she still looked my way and, as best to be under her breath, said “Oh Jesus Christ!”

Ever since last night, I’ve been getting these kind of reactions. This girl, she has golden blonde hair, reaching halfway down her back in loose curls. There were no hair clips. It was long and thick. You could lose your hand in that hair. She wore a grey poor-boy hat on top. She wore thin black glasses. The bartender has his eye on her. Under her feet is a blue duffel bag with a tag on it. The look on her face when she looked at me is something I’ve been getting used to. You know, shock and awe.

I say, “Hi.”

“I’m sorry,” She says, suddenly flushed. She took off her glasses and wiped them on her t-shirt. “I didn’t mean to, you know, freak out.” She put them back on and I could still see her wince, “Are you okay?”

I smile a crooked smile because that’s really the only thing I can muster and say, “I’m fine. Really. Thanks for the, you know, concern. I’m okay.”

The bartender, he comes over and asks if she would like a drink. She orders a ginger ale. She looks over at my drink, and says “We’ve got something in common. I’m Sarah.”

I shake her hand. “I’m Rick.”

“Pleased to meet you, Rick,” she says, still not really looking me in the eye.

“If you don’t mind me asking…” she begins. I cut her off before she had a chance to embarrass me.

“Don’t. I don’t really want to talk about it. It’s fine. I’m not in any pain. Except for when I try to look really excited about something.”

She looks like she understands. She sips her ginger ale and asks me, “So, where you headed?”

“Home,” I say. “I was here, for…I guess you could call it a vacation. I mean, it was a business trip, really, but I didn’t get much work done. There was only one meeting, actually. I spent most of the time in my hotel room.”

“That doesn’t sound like much fun,” she replies. “What kind of business was it?”

This becomes a conversation, just like that. One minute, there is desolate loneliness, the next there’s this pretty girl asking me about my life. I thought about the workings of an airport, and how because they make you wait forever, you just start making things up to amuse yourself. You begin to make yourself up. You lie to complete strangers because here you can get away with it.

In an hour and a half, it’s back to the same old, same old.

I tell her, through the good side of my lip, “I’m a writer. Novelist, actually. My editor lives here.”

“A writer?” She says it with such surprise. I used to get that a lot too. I’d tell people in passing conversations that I’d written a few books, and all of a sudden I’m a celebrity. I used to make jokes about someday making it all the way to the bottom-right slot in celebrity squares.

“It’s nothing, really,” I say, “It’s nothing like in the movies.”

She looks at me queerly, “What’s it like in the movies?”

“I suppose it’s a lot of things.” I didn’t want to talk about me, or my life, or what happened last night. I ask, “Where are you going?”

She sips her ginger ale, “I’m going on an adventure.”

“Oh really?” I ask, pretending to be intrigued. This girl, she couldn’t be a day over twenty. Her eyes did this sparkly thing where you just knew she’s been dreaming huge.

“To Hawaii,” she says. “The plane I’m waiting for now takes me to Anaheim, and then I’m off.”

“To your adventure,” I reply coyly. I try to raise an eyebrow. She could probably sense my struggle.

“To my adventure,” she holds her glass up, toasts herself, and smiles. She’s clearly excited. She laughs a little when I try to smile back. She takes one look at my face again and she drops back into her seat. She gives a nervous smirk. She doesn’t want to offend me, or to make me feel left out. It’s hardly the case.

She asks me, “What do you write?”

“I don’t really know,” I say, “I’m not really a genre writer. I suppose, it’s too early to tell. I’ve only written three books. It’s not much of anything, really. At least according to descriptions from critics’ reviews, and I usually just use those. Some people, they call my stuff poignant, depressing, but others call it heartfelt and uplifting. It gets so much more confusing when other people begin describing your work for you. There aren’t really plots, you know, not much happens. But there’s people. I try and depict real people, doing real things and getting through them, going through those little struggles that we all go through. I try and make that mean something.”

I glance over at the bartender and he’s pretending not to eavesdrop. “The hard part is,” I say, “it’s not really popular, the whole idea. People always ask me what it’s about, but it’s only about what people take away from it. My stuff isn’t really ‘advertisement ready’ you could say. I couldn’t get Mr. Movie phone or somebody to give a three-sentence description of it. Some people, they just call it boring and slow and Canadian.”

“Screw the critics,” she says, as if she hasn’t met a critic in her life. She asks me, “What do you think? Do you like it?”

I really don’t want to talk about me, or about my work. But because she asks and is being pretty good company, I explain; “I get out what I want to say, I guess. It’s a good stress reliever. I don’t really think I’m cut out to do much else, anyway. But enough about me, what’s this big adventure you have planned?”

“Well, you won’t like it,” she says, “because it’s big and a lot of stuff happens and there’s almost no conversation and a lot of people senselessly die.”

“You’re serious?” I know she isn’t, but that’s how it goes. When you get all this time to wait, you amuse yourself by being whoever you want to be. The great thing about airports is there’s no second date. You could be an international spy and nobody would know the wiser.

“Oh, yeah. Can I tell you a secret?” She says quietly, dipping her head a little.

“Sure?” I don’t know if it was writer’s instinct or cynicism, experience or bitterness, but I couldn’t smile at this girl. She’s having fun playing by the rules.

“I’m a secret agent in my fathers bureau. I’m on my way to Hawaii because we’ve received a tip about a potential activity going on, something that’s pretty huge and will have ramifications that’ll involve the whole world.”

“Let me guess,” I joke, “There’s someone fixing the shuffle-board matches.”

“No,” she says, “but I’ll keep an eye out for that while I’m there.” She taps her nose with her finger twice and continues. “See, at the top of a volcanic mountain, there’s a cave blocked off by fifteen tons of hardened lava from a bunch of previous eruption. Inside, there’s an unbelievable amount of treasure, and, at the deepest end of the cave, there’s this sought after Tiki idol worth over a billion dollars. See, our operative has pinpointed a drug cartel who has shown interest in retrieving the idol, selling it to the highest bidder, and using the money for…”

“…horrendous, unspeakable evil?” I ask.

“How did you guess?”

“Because it’s always unspeakable, and most of the time you can bet on it being horrendous.”

“Anyways, my job is to infiltrate the cave, stop them in their tracks, and get the idol back to the proper authorities.”

“You’re fathers’ agency you say?”

“Yeah, Dad’s finally trusting me to do something dangerous. I just hope that I won’t let him down. All I’ve thought about for the last eight weeks is this mission. I don’t know if I’m ready or not, but I can’t disappoint him, you know? My father, wow, you wouldn’t believe the amazing things he’s done. I’ll be lucky if I’m a footnote at this stage, but, I’m just beginning. Someday, I’ll be just as good. Maybe better.” She takes a deep breath and lets it all sink in. She says, “Can you imagine how important this is?”

I look at her with my good eye. “You’re making this up.”

She puts her hands on her hips, “Am not. In fact, I shouldn’t even be telling you. You could be one of them for all I know.” She squints her eyes, “Are you one of them?”

“One of who?”

“Them! You know, the guys who are so shrouded in mystery and evil intrigue. Those guys. All we know about them is that they’re probably completely evil and hell-bent on taking over the world.”

I’m tempted to play along, to be one of them. The entire idea though, of being one of them, some indiscernible ‘people’ who do nothing individual, pretty well completely turned me off. I’m just not that good of an actor, however, so I’m left saying, “No, I’m not one of them. I’m sorry.”

“A ha!” she exclaims, “denial is the first clue!”

“You’re trying to mess with me.”

“Am I doing a good job?”

“You had me up until the part where you said ‘can I tell you a secret?’”

“You’re no fun.”

She’s right. I’m not any fun. The whole point is to play along with anything you’re thrown. The point is to let people be whoever they want, because there is no second date, and there is no place you can get away with it like at an airport. It’s the epitome of anonymity. And here I am ruining everything because I had a bad night.

“Hey,” I reply. “I’m plenty fun. I’m just a little injured right now. Injured people aren’t much fun.”

She looks at my face with a hint of study for the first time. “So, now that we know each other, what happened?”

“Now that we know each other?” I repeat back. She’s right. I’d broken the rules and revealed that we were in fact real people, and now we’re stuck knowing that. Still, I don’t want to talk about it. Still, even when you’ve admitted that you’re a real person, there’s still no second date.

“Well,” I begin, “the story goes back a little, back to when I first started this book I’m writing. It’s almost finished, so there’s a lot to it. Like I said, I write about regular, normal people with nothing special to them. Well, there’s a small problem that comes with writing real people. Sometimes, real people don’t like that you’re writing about them.”

There’s a very concentrated look on Sarah’s face as I explain this, so I keep going. “In the very first chapter, a couple of the themes and one of the characters was a little too close to a girl I used to date. Any writer you will ever meet will have this problem at some point in time. Although she was completely out of my head, a few ideas still lingered and when I sat down to write, those ideas came to me and I thought they were just great. Well, I sent out the first chapter to a few of my friends to read, you know, to see if I had something or if it was just pure drivel. Somehow, the chapter made it into the hands of my old girlfriend, and she noticed a few of these similarities, and she wasn’t too happy about it.”

“Ooh, did she have someone beat you up? Is that why you look like that?”

“Worse,” I say, “She went to my editor and pointed this out. However, she didn’t seem to realize that it wasn’t as if I was plagiarizing anything, I was just using elements of her personality. We fought about it in his office, and I was pretty adamant that it was some stupid coincidence and I probably wouldn’t even include it in the book anyway, and she went home pissed off but really unable to do anything. So, for the next four months that it took me to finish the book, I figured she would be secretly planning her revenge the whole time, and would wait for the day I’d come back into town to finalize the editing process.

“So, I got here a few days ago, and she just somehow knew. Last night, I was at a bar, kind of like this one but with real lights on the ceiling so there wasn’t any artificial mood, and she was there too. When I saw her, I began to sweat. Literally, a chill ran down my back. The entire room just slowed down as she came toward me. She sat down at the bar, just like you are right now. She looked me in the eye, and can you believe what she asked me?”

I wait a second to see if Sarah would come up with something extravagant with that imagination of hers.

After a few seconds, she quips, “Let me guess, she asked ‘how are you Rick’ really sarcastically, and then threw you up against the wall, gave you an ultimatum to take the bit out of your story, or else she’d paint the entire bar with your blood?”There’s no doubt Sarah thinks I’m lying. For all intensive purposes, I may be. But she plays the game by the book. She exaggerates and calls a bluff without coming out and saying that I may have been crying wolf.

I say, “You got the first part right.”

“She didn’t threaten you?”

“No. It was the strangest thing. She began by apologizing for the freak out a few months before at my editors. She said that she had been immature about it, and it was a privilege to be characterized in a book. And then, guess what she did next.”

Sarah, her eyes wander as she searched for something. At this point, after the last few comments, I wouldn’t be surprised if she could think up some incredibly extravagant piece about what could have happened in the universe of surprises and big plot twists and…and…

“So, what happened?” She says with a serious, interested tone. There’s no elaborate prediction that would have nothing to do with the point. Her eyes don’t waver, her lips don’t shake. She is interested. It is mature and real. It is something I had not at all been used to as of late. It is something that shouldn’t happen at airports. The rules, which she clearly plays by better than I do, is that you remain passively interested, and you add to the big hoax best you could, but you never actually care.

“Well,” I say, coughing a little, “What happened was that we ended up having this really great conversation. We talked about all the stuff we had put each other through, all the crap, and we totally forgave each other. It was the best conversation I’d ever had with her, and I was really happy about it. By the end of it, the bar was closing and she offered to give me a ride. I politely waved it off and said that I’d walk home. We left at the same time went in opposite directions as soon as we left the bar. Exactly four minutes later, I was crossing a street, and the streetlight had been knocked out and it was really dark, and all of a sudden, I saw headlights coming at me. I don’t know what it was - the lateness, or the fear of, shit, I don’t know, but I couldn’t move. And it took absolutely no time to hit me. I tried my best to roll over it, but as soon as I hit the hood I lost control. That’s what I always thought, you know? Just roll into it and you’ll be okay. But it doesn’t really work like that. Nothing ever works the way it does in the movies. I whip-lashed against the antenna, which gave me this little number here, and then I hit the windshield, and was propelled over the top and then behind. The car must have had a fin or something because I felt a really hard scrape just before falling off the car. When I fell, I didn’t really have much of a choice, but I fell face-first on the pavement which pretty well did the rest of it.”

“Wow,” She exclaims. She looks over my face again, trying to picture it all happening.

“The thing I have a problem with,” I begin, “Was that it really had nothing to do with me. My ex-girlfriend, the bar, the conversation, the book—all that I was directly involved in—and up until I got hit with the car, everything about the story was very small and manageable and believable. It wasn’t boring, I don’t think. There were twists and turns; there were the elements of revenge, of trepidation. There was paranoia on my part definitely. At points I honestly thought something terrible was going to happen. But that’s the thing. In real life, in our everyday existence, nothing really happens. Our imaginations could run completely wild, but the result is just, you know, your everyday life. Wake up, eat breakfast, and read the news about all these terrible events that never happen anywhere near what we’d call reality. We’re a hundred thousand miles away from any war zone. We’d have to have plane tickets three times the price of these to go anywhere where there is something actually happening. You know, like a religious upbringing or a war or a real, true adventure with pirates or secret agents. Big stuff. This car accident, it was real enough, but it had nothing to do with me whatsoever. I didn’t see who was in the car – I think I saw long hair – but it could have been anyone. And it could have hit anyone that walked on that street that night. It had to do with the driver, definitely, but it’s not like there was a connection between him or her and me anyway.”

I look at Sarah with her long hair and her smile, a smile that really works. I say, “Nothing in my life had prepared me for this accident. And I don’t think it was karma or anything spiritual, because I think I’m a pretty good guy. I don’t think I deserved it. But who knows, right?”

I think of old romances, and how sometimes it’s just better not to say everything.

In one hour, 14 minutes, I’ll be getting my life back. There won’t be a second date. I won’t have to properly explain myself.

Sarah, she says, “You don’t think it was your ex-girlfriend?”

I think of old romances, where the question of ‘who did it’ wasn’t nearly as important as it is today. All those questions. Who dies? Who kills him? How far do they go? How many bullets or arrows rattle his frame before he finally falls, with all the bravery of a lion?

I think of the Guinness book of world records, all those crazy things that people achieve. You know, the guy with the longest motorcycle jump. The guy with all the swords going down his throat. The couple that kiss longer than anyone else in the entire world.

Is there a record for biggest lie?

“I don’t care, really,” I say. “I felt like I lost a bit of me, last night. I lost the individuality in my life. Something big happened, and because of that I feel like I’ve lost all the little things. I feel like I’ve lost control.”

I think of how I never really considered myself a control freak until I lost it.

Sarah, in whenever time it takes her flight to get ready, will be off on a huge adventure.

I ask, “When is your flight leaving?”

She looks at her watch, and then she bends down, unzips a pocket on the side of the duffel bag and looks at a ticket. She says, “It leaves in about a half hour.”

Sarah, in about a half hour, will be off on a huge adventure.

I ask, “about a half hour?”

“27 minutes,” she says with calculation and confidence and grace.

In 27 minutes she’s off and running.

I ask, “Do I look really that bad?”

And she laughs a little, maybe at the thought of me never looking in the mirror since the accident, or maybe something else. She studies my face, it’s many contours, the several that weren’t there the night before, and the few I’ve always been stuck with. She dips her head back and forth, as if analyzing a painting in a museum.

Sarah sits upright again, and says, “Have you ever seen the video for Thriller?”

I say, “Child of the 80’s. You poor thing.”

“Oh come on,” She said with a giggle, “Ninja turtles. Cindi Lauper! You know you love it.” I nod and she smile and it is all right. She is all right.

I finish my ginger ale. The bartender, he’s right there asking if I want a refill.

In one hour, 8 minutes, I get my life back, my little life where I’m in control. My little life where it matters why things happen and not what happens. I get back to writing about all the little things that mean so much more than some random fucking car accident.

I say to the bartender, “Make it two,” and he fills her glass, too.

Sarah says, “thanks.” She looks down when she said it.

Her eyes are blue behind those glasses and they sparkle. She doesn’t wear any jewelry.

I ask her, “So, why are you really going to Hawaii?”

She say, “I told you. It’s an adventure.”

“Yes, I know,” I say, “but you didn’t say what kind. Let me guess, it’s about a boy?”

Sarah raises one of those blonde eyebrows. That’s how you know the hair is real golden blonde. She looks like she might be offended if someone were to question it’s integrity. She raises one of those eyebrows and looks away.

I accuse her. “It’s about love, isn’t it?” The thing is, this is how so many romances end, with a tragedy and a journey. It’s also how so many of them begin.

She replies, “Not everything is about love, you know.” And she pauses for a few seconds. She looks as if she was angry or bitter. I can’t tell, but I believe I hit a nerve.

“No,” she says. “It’s about love. I’m sick of it. It’s not about any particular boy or anything. I’ve never had a boyfriend, and I’ve never fallen in love, but I don’t like it. I’m frustrated, I guess.”

She leans on the bar with her elbows and drops her head into her hands. She looks up to the rope lights and follows the trail with her eyes. “I remember when I was a kid, I didn’t think about it much, but I knew love was it. It was absolute. It was all I would ever need. I felt like I was only half a person, and that everyone started out that way, and would walk the earth half a person until they found their real true love. I know, fairy tale stuff, but I believed in that. And, in the last little while, I don’t know, it just hasn’t felt like that. I don’t feel like I’m missing anything. I feel like I can take on the world completely on my own. I don’t need anyone. Hence the reason for the adventure. I really don’t have a plan for what’s going to happen, but it’s going to be good. I had to work my ass off for a year to be able to afford it.”

“I’m guessing you were up at 5 in the morning packing for this.”

“God no,” she said, “Who the hell wakes up at 5, anyways?”

I think about hitting the snooze on my alarm 4 times this morning. The first time was at 430 and the last was at 550.

“But,” she says, “You’re right about the workaholic thing. I never have a moment to myself. When I’m not studying, or helping my friends study, I’m at work or in class or sleeping in because my mother comes into my room and shuts my alarm off.”

There’s one hour until my flight leaves. Hers leaves in 14 minutes.

Before I can tell her that her flight leaves in 14 minutes, she asks me “So, why are you really going home?”

No second dates. No real reason to ever tell the truth because you will always get away like that old villain with a twisty mustache that we all secretly cheered for.

I’ve been in this town for four days. I’ve reconciled with an ex-girlfriend. I’ve had my fourth book OK’d content wise, and all that was left was a few weeks of petty editing. I’d met this girl at the airport, this wide-eyed girl waiting for life to take her for a ride. I think about the Guinness book of world records. I think about telling this story. I think about telling the truth.

I tell her, “If it was my ex-girlfriend who hit me last night, then there’s an order to things. If you hit me, or if the bartender hit me, or my little brother or God, then there’s a reason and an explanation and everything is falling into place, the puzzle is working itself out, and there is nothing wrong with any of that. And I know that there’s just as much chance of something completely random and painful happening to me back home, but I suppose I just never thought of it before. I just figured that everything kind of worked, and I can’t figure this out. It’s not about love and it’s not about my book or the fact that my face looks like Michael Jackson from Thriller or that I’ve met you and you’re great, and really, just great. It’s not about love. It’s about finding something that fits, I guess. You could say we’re going in different directions. You’re looking for whatever could be out there. You’re looking for something big and exciting worth living for. I’m not saying that the little things aren’t worth it, because they totally are, but you’re not there right now. You need something big. You’re probably sick to death of the same old, same old. You’re looking for a smile and happiness and magic, wonder, amazement. And I don’t blame you one bit.”

I look at her blushing and curious as to where I was going with this. “…And you’ll find it. I have absolutely no doubt that you will find all the wonder you could ever dream of. Or, if I’m wrong, and you’re like me who enjoys the small things, who needs the small things, then you’ll find that too. The world’s a big enough place, I think. There’s more than enough to go around. I don’t think you have too much to worry about.”

“I’m not that great,” she says, “but I hope you’re right.”

I don’t know how to respond to that; it’s some sort of insecurity in her. I can’t say anything. I barely know her. Maybe she isn’t that great. I look at her with reassurance however, and sometimes it’s about what you don’t say.

I tell her, “You’re plane should be ready. There’s only 10 minutes.”

She looks at her watch and raises one of those pretty blonde eyebrows. She takes out her wallet and drops a ten on the table, something completely unnecessary for a single ginger ale. I thought about how she must have worked in a bar or club at some point, and how people who didn’t tip would have pissed her off so much.

Still, the ginger ale was two dollars.

I thought one more time about the Guinness book of world records.

“Well,” she said, getting off the stool and extending her hand, “It’s been nice talking to you.” She would get on that plane, get going on some huge adventure, and this little moment would be gone. No second dates.

I shake her hand and say, “It’s been a slice.”

She says, “When you get home, put some ice on that. Or, you know, see a doctor or something.” When I get home and put some ice on my forehead to quell the swelling, she’ll be off having the time of so many people’s lives.

So many people want the life she has.

As she walks away, out into the bright blinding light of the airport, the bartender asks if I want some ice. There’s 43 minutes left until my plane leaves, and I say “Please.”

All the people that scramble out through the airport, they’re all them to me, some kind of entity that was mysterious, complicated, and fake. If I never spoke to Sarah, she’d be one of them too, just like I would be with her. There would be nothing real about her if I hadn’t gotten to know her. There wouldn’t be any feeling if I’d seen her before. She’d be background. Wallpaper.

And then I think about how those people are all real people, who all have real lives who need and desire that life, and how at an airport, or anywhere where there is the perfect chance to be anyone else, how few of them take it. I took it. I’ll never know if Sarah did.

Even if I’m not completely sure, I think I’ve got something here. It’s nothing to write about, and it’s nothing to talk about, because it’s so completely abstract and subjective and judgmental. But it’s something to think about. It can always be about what you don’t say, too.

It’s different for all those people out there, but in not too much time at all, I’m getting back to what I think matters. There’s no wrong here, I don’t think, and I don’t see it making much sense if I’ve missed the point in all this. All it takes to throw it all off is one thing. I never hated big events until one happened to me. Sarah was nobody to me until we talked. A change can happen like that, and it’s okay if it’s not good, because it’s something. When there’s no second date, you can be anybody, but it’s nice when you’re somebody, too. Because there’s no second date, I’ll never know if Sarah was telling the truth, and she’ll never know the same about me. But she was somebody, and that’s what matters At an airport, with all the space and time and lukewarm reality, it’s much, much too fun to be the biggest lie.

Everything We Haven't lost: A Short Story

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I am sprawled. It’s way, way too early for me to be conscious. Through the drapes, the sun is invading my room. The world is screaming, screaming at me to join them. Join us! I can hear them. Become a part of this, this! You’re missing everything!

My hair is over my face and greasy from being up all night. It’s dyed blonde and usually shines. The sweat of a heated argument will do that. It’s over, for the most part, and we can get back to being civilized creatures who hate one another. We’ve both fought for hours and now all there just isn’t a whole lot left. I’m sitting against my headboard, supported by a small stack of pillows. My legs are just out there. I’m still wearing the dress I was out last night in, out dancing with that other guy, Mark. I’ve been seeing for a few months now. I think we discussed him around midnight, though I wasn’t exactly timing things.

On the other side of the bed—supporting himself with his left shoulder—was Alan. His hair was the typical dark and short, that well-worn cut that works for just about any confidence level. It was, since hours ago, a terrible mess. All he wore now were tight dark jeans, the kind in those fall collection commercials. We’re both half naked because as the night passed, it only became hotter and hotter in my place.

What we had here was a little crisis. It’s over now, I think. It lasted hours, this fight we had. All the years Alan and I knew each other, we never fought like this. There was fire in our eyes, feeling to our defenses, things inside of us that I had thought were long gone. About an hour ago, we both stopped yelling, after hours of it—not from defeat, but from being drained. It was all gone, every ounce of fight we had in us. The neighbors banged on the walls, pleading for us to quiet down. “I’m glad we did that,” I said, quietly. I was sure, too. I was glad. I hadn’t felt “glad” in months. Alan looked at me with those eyes. Now, after all that, there was little else in them but understanding.

“Me too,” he said.

“Do you mean that?” I was sure, but I couldn’t be like that about him. Even if this fight had brought us closer than we had been in years, I still couldn’t just trust his word. I thought of all the lies we talked about tonight, both his and mine.

“Yeah,” he said, with little energy. But what could be expected? “It’s not often you get a chance.”

“A chance?” I asked, only later realizing that I interrupted him.

“Imean,achancetodothis.Tojustgetitallout. Some of that, what we talked about, you know? It’s been in there for years.” Alan’s voice was tender and honest now, much the same as mine. “Do you think we can move on now?”

I tongued each of the words against the top of my mouth. That was something we did not discuss. But that’s not how he phrased it. Move on, I thought. From each other? With each other? Away from our past, I’m sure he meant that. Away from seven years of off and on, of affairs and lies. Away from what we were. But were we any different now? Can one night of brutal honesty change a person?

“I don’t know, Alan. I don’t know what it is to move on. I can’t say goodbye, if that’s what you mean. I’m awful at it. But I don’t know about us.”

He nodded, and looked like he was thinking of a comeback.

Alan and I met in college, first day, first class. He sat beside me in my morning Psychology lecture. There must have been a thousand seats in that auditorium. We thought it was fate. I had my apprehensions at first, coming from a small town into the big city, and having this boy follow me around everywhere. He was relentless. We talked all night—kind of like tonight, but completely different—every time we had a chance. We would watch the sunrise and kiss the afterglow. Today, we were much too tired to enjoy that blinding sun just outside my bedroom window. It was covering the middle of the bed now, that light. It was June and hot.

I saw that Alan was about to say something, but I cut in front, “Do you, I mean, can you say definitely that you’d like to know me? Not that you don’t, but I mean, to continue to know me?” I barely got it out, but I needed to cross out the chances of a definite yes or no from him. I couldn’t handle that either way.

Alan closed his mouth and drank in the question. I could see him silently constructing something. His eyes narrowed and tilted towards the ceiling. He said, “Because it would be a lie, wouldn’t it? Either way. For you or me, to say something like ‘no, I don’t want you in my life’ would be a lie.”

“I never said that,” I said, not expecting that kind of response. “I never said it would be a lie, I meant, how can we be sure?”

“And I meant that how can we be sure we’re not lying? And not me lying to you, I mean to ourselves. You know that inward lie you make when you really want to convince yourself that what you’re doing is right? If I were to stand up on this bed right now, raised my arms and declared ‘Julia Rose, I need you in my life!’ I might want to believe it. And when I say it, you may believe it, but inside, deep down in those dark caverns we’ve dug, it may not be true.

“We could embrace right now, and let the world know it, and get married again and go to Spain for a honeymoon and have children—when you’re ready—two or three of them, a girl and two boys or the opposite, all of them beautiful little kids, and grow old together and end up in some retirement home, we could still end up hating each other again. Somewhere along that line, I might just get tired of you, or pissed off or fall in love with someone else, someone neither of us have met yet, and then I’ll ruin everything, and what I’ve said today, this very morning, would be just another lie I told you.”

“Alan,” I said, a little surprised that all that could come out of a man so exhausted, “You couldn’t get up right now if you wanted to. I know I can’t. Face it, there’s nothing left in us. There is no more chance to lie. There’s no room in us for anything but what we got left, and that isn’t much. We just spent an entire night throwing every possible chance for more out, at each other, at speeds I didn’t know we could achieve.” Hell, I was surprised to find some more fight in myself. I didn’t know which cavern deep down in me this was coming from.

“I’m twenty seven, Alan,” I said, with more of a whimper than anything, “I’m too tired to play these games with you. We’ve been married for five years now, and we’ve both had two affairs. Over the last six months, I’ve seen more of Mark and you’ve seen more of Jessica than we’ve seen of each other. I want to stop, Alan. I want to stop being such an unhappy woman. I don’t care what I have to do to stop it. I don’t care if I lose Mark. I’ll lose you if I have to. We’ll divorce if that’s what it takes. I won’t fight for an entire night again with you. I’m not doing that ever again. I don’t have it in me.” Outside, I could hear the vendors screaming. They were yelling, “I have a good deal right here!”

At seven in the morning, your play-book is used up. All the jukes and runs, all the passing plays, all the special teams, they’re gone. When you’ve thrown the book out because it’s useless to you, when there is no more inside you that you know can work, the moves you make after that, well, that determines what kind of person you are. It’s what you can do after you’ve done it all. With Alan, I’d used every defense I could. I brought up every incident, big and small, that had happened between us in seven years. And I won’t take anything away from him, he fought me just as hard. He gave everything I’d ever seen him give. But I knew who I was much better than who he was.

He had met me on my doorstep last night, after my night out with Mark, and said that we needed to sort some things out. I let him in because it was raining hard, that kind of pour you can’t escape. I was in a great mood before I saw him. I was walking on air. Mark had been great last night. It was one of the best dates we’d had. My smile soured as soon as I put the key into the lock. We rode the elevator up silently, me wondering what just all this was about, him presumably plotting out his moves. He complimented the apartment, and noticed all the little changes I’d made. The pleasantries didn’t take long. I didn’t offer him a drink. We didn’t drink all night. What came out between us had been boiling, waiting for so long. It wasn’t perfect timing at all, but it was everything it could be. I thought—hoped—that maybe he had come to apologize for everything. All I ever wanted out of it all, after any of the dust settled anyway, was an apology. I bet he wanted one too. Instead, he said he wanted to sort everything out. So, with me tired but in a light mood from the evening, we began from the beginning. Psychology class. Then to his dorm room. Then to my dorm room. Then our first apartment. Meeting one another’s parents. Going on trips together. To the mountains, and skiing above the heavens. What mattered now wasn’t that he cheated first, or that I didn’t want a child when we had the chance, or that we still wore our fucking wedding rings.

“Do you still love me?” I asked. I don’t know why I did. He smirked, “That’s not the point here.” “I know it’s not the point. But I just want to know. Can you tell me, now, after all this? After we’ve briefed each other on our entire lives? Can you say it?”

“Julia, love isn’t the issue here. It’s living. It’s surviving. You just said it. You need to move on. I need to move on. You’ve never had trouble finding love.”

“I don’t want to find love, Alan. I want to know if you have it.”

“I don’t fucking believe this,” he said, and sat up, stood, and walked over to the window. He creaked it open a little. “Down there,” he pointed, “Down there, a million people are in and out of love. Nobody dies over it. You want to survive? You don’t need it. We’ve been dodging this forever.”

“So why still do it? All night, we never said anything about it. Why can’t we now?”

“Because it’s pointless!” He closed the window, shut it down with might I figured was gone before the morning came. The plays you make after you’ve made them all can be terrifying.

“Alan, don’t get angry. We don’t need this.” With the window closed, the outside world was denied this space, and us without it. It was deathly quiet. The air conditioner, sticking out a window in the living room, it hadn’t kicked on yet.

“What do we need?” In my head, the song all you need is love began playing, the soft piano strokes echoing between my ears. I hadn’t heard it recently, and hadn’t thought of it as that much of a catchy song before, the kind that sticks in your head for painfully long amounts of time. Still, there it was.

“Just say it, Alan, please.”

He came toward me, until he was only a few feet away, “I love you! So There!” Alan’s breathing got heavy, and it looked as if he was about to fall over at any moment, “When you cheated on me I loved you. When you lied. When your…when our child died inside you, when you made it happen,Jesus,Ilovedyou. IknowI’vedoneallthistoo,the lying, everything, and I hated you sometimes. I hated you. But that wasn’t enough. Hating you couldn’t get rid of it. Love. That fucking word. It means you, Julia. Jesus!” Alan was walking around the room during this. Alan, caged animal, was frequently throwing his hair back and letting his hands fly with his mannerisms. “Fuck.” He uttered as he fell, collapsed really, down to his knees on the hardwood. The movements you make can be breathtaking.

All you need is love was halfway through in my head when I got off the bed, came down to him, and put his head to my heart. We hadn’t touched all night, and the force of it went through me. We touch! It’s possible, after all this time! I wrapped my arms around him. We embrace! It can happen after all! I thought, everything was going to be okay. Beneath me, Alan was crying again. I held him with all I had.

We moved back to the bed. I grabbed the half-finished box of tissues from the night-table. “Thank you,” he said. I smiled.

“You see how that meant something?” he nodded. I said, “I didn’t think it would mean that much.”

“Really,” he looked at me with a suspicious leer, “What did you think it would mean?”

“I just wanted you to say it. I thought you could do it without breaking into an emotional outburst.”

“It was not an emotional outburst,” he said, half laughing, handing me back the tissue box, “it was an emotional outcry. And it was what I felt, what I needed to say, at that moment anyway. But we’re not anywhere new here. You knew I loved you.”

“Yes,” “And I know you love me.” “Do you?” “Don’t I?” “How can you be sure?” “Don’t do this to me, Jules.” He called me that whenever

he thought it would be cute. I hadn’t heard this particular nickname in years. Since we stopped getting along so well, a year or two after the marriage, he had come up with other names to call me.

“Alan, I’m not doing anything. Just, don’t assume that because you love me that I love you.”

“But you do.” “Are you asking me?” “I am now.” I decided to make him wait for it, because I could see that

I had him on a string. I could have crushed him. I could have really done damage, and even though I didn’t really want to, I couldn’t help but revel in the few seconds of possibility.

“Of course I love you, Alan, but that’s not the point.”

“We’re going in a circle.” He said, frustrated at my comment. I gave him a little shove, letting him know that the atmosphere in here was no longer one of hostility and one of warmth. There should be understanding, peace, maybe happiness if we were lucky here. Though, one can only wish for so much. All you need is love had wrapped up four times in my head, and began again after a few seconds.

“I need to get this song out of my head,” I said, “It’s what’s going in a circle.”

“You are good at changing the subject.”

“I’m not changing the subject. We’ll get back to it in a second. Just help me out here.”

“Can’t it wait? We’re in kind of an important part of our conversation.”

“What? The love thing? It can wait a few minutes, anyway.”

“Yeah, you’re right. It’s just the love thing,” Alan repeated, sarcastically. The song was becoming stinging since I mentioned it. “Fine then. What’s the song?”

I said, sheepishly, “All you need is love.”

Alan laughed, “That would be it, wouldn’t it? It couldn’t be something by Meatloaf or The Pixies. It couldn’t be that horrible jingle McDonald’s has for all it’s ads.”

“That wouldn’t be very fitting, would it? Imagine, us arguing about love and our horrible relationship, while inside, I’m really thinking that maybe I should just go out and get some Chicken McNuggets.”

“Now that you mention it…” “No, Alan.” “I was joking.” “I know.”

“Can we do that?”

“What, joke?”

“Yeah.”

“Alan…”

“I know. We’re in a serious situation here, we shouldn’t take it lightly. I know. It’s just, it’s so heavy in here. The air.”

“Open the window then. You’re the one who closed it.”

“That’s not what I meant. I mean the air between you and me. This tension. You know it, you know what I’m talking about. You can’t have what we have without this air.” I nodded, not really agreeing but feeling too weak to engage in disagreements that didn’t really mean anything. I had to pick and choose wisely, now. Sleep had formed around my eyes.

“So, getting back to the lies.”

“The lies?” he asked. I was ready to get on with it, even if the song was still repeating. I’d get rid of it later. I’d listen to the radio or something else awful.

“Yes,” I said, “The lies. You said, even if we did promise to love each other and make everything work and, hell, have babies and soccer practices and old folks homes, as you delicately put it, we’d be lying.”

“I said we could be lying. How would we know?”

“Well of course how would we know? There’s always that possibility of changing everything.”

“That whole every-moment-of-your-life thing, right?”

“Right.” I remembered the half a dozen movies where that little tag line was used in the preview. Watch as our hero makes the choice, the choice of a lifetime… The overuse tended to water down the meaning, but I still usually paid for the ticket. And this was no movie. For years, Alan liked to say that. “This is real life,” he’d say, “There’s no script here.” I don’t know what he ever meant by it. The randomness of our actions maybe. But maybe it was the striking absence of any hero.

“Well, I’ve got a point.”

“Of course you’ve got a point, Alan. You can make that fucking vague philosophy work for any couple. You can make it work for anyone who says they’ll never do any particular thing ever again. You could take someone who quit smoking, who promised the world they would never light up again, and make a great psychological argument that this particular person could be lying to us all. Because until that person dies, is cold in their casket or burning in some incinerator, they have the chance, Alan, the chance to lie, to light up again. She can get a pack from any corner store, and ruin everything. And that’s just like us, Alan. At every opportunity, we could lie to each other. We could find other lovers, hell, you could find them at any street corner, and that would ruin everything.” I paused for a second, put with my eyes I let him know I wasn’t finished. I just had to catch my breath. “Alan, I love you. But I loved you when I was with Mark, too. When I was dancing with him last night, out on the town, I still loved you. And like you said, during everything, you still loved me. And I’d like to think that we’re both being pretty honest about that. Yeah, there’s a chance, a certain and very clear possibility that we’ll go back on everything we’ve said tonight, and make all the same mistakes again. But I don’t want to think about it. I can’t, Alan. I can’t think of myself in the future as the tired, cheating wife I am. And I don’t want to think of you as a lying bastard of a husband. And you bringing up, talking about that chance that everything can go wrong, that’s good. That shows me that you can think of this without being selfish and angry. That you can feel guilt about it. I like that you can reflect on the wrong things we’ve done and know that they’re wrong. Shit, Alan, we’re old enough to know what we’ve done wrong.”

Alan smiled at this. I was looking inside now, at what I’d done. His points were just as valid for me. Could I do as he did? Could I actually contemplate the wrong things that I have yet to do? Could I trust myself to do the right thing? Out loud, I uttered, “That’s the problem, isn’t it?”

“What is?” He asked. “We don’t really trust ourselves, do we?” “What do you mean?” “Like, what you were saying about the chance. That chance depends on what we do about it, doesn’t it?” “Yeah, I guess. If say, I were to cheat on you in the future, I’d certainly have to have a conscious part in it, wouldn’t I?”

“You would. And I would, too. So, it comes down to trust. Alan, do you trust yourself enough to stay true to me?”

“I don’t know.” “Neither do I.” “That’s a good point.” “I know.” I found it amazing to have never thought of this.

“We’re not much good to each other if we can’t trust ourselves, are we?” He said with a sarcastic laugh, that kind you make when the doctor tells you that there’s something terribly wrong with you and there’s nothing you can do about it.

“So what about moving on?” I asked, with the same ferocity he used an hour ago.

“I think,” he said slowly, deliberately, “That I don’t very much like who we are.”

“So what do you suggest?” It seemed obvious, but I thought I better let him have it.

“There’s always becoming new people.” What a silly person, that Alan. “There’s always that, yes.” “We could do it.”

“You think?”

“Sure, why not?”

Crazy little Alan. Alan with his get rich quick schemes, only they were for rekindling love. I’d been here before.

“I thought you subscribed to the ‘people never change’ school of thought?”

“Well, people change, sometimes.” They don’t, but it’s nice of him to mention the possibility every now and then.

“You’re cute.” I had to let him know sometimes, even if all it did was re-assure that he was clever. He grinned that Cheshire cat grin, like a first grader who got the tough math question nobody else could quite figure out. Yes, Alan, You’re right, eight minus six equals two. Here’s a sticker. I put the wheels in motion, if only to let him have a brainstorm or two. I wanted to figure this out, I did, but I just didn’t have it in me to lead this charade of a game.

“So we should throw away everything about ourselves that we don’t like and start over?”

“Something like that,” he started, “I don’t suppose we should throw away everything we like about ourselves.”

“Not much point to that, is there?”

“Well, wait. Do we mean, throw away everything we don’t like about ourselves, or throw away what I don’t like about you, and vice versa.”

“That could become ugly.” “How do you mean?” “If I pointed out everything that I hated about you, and you did the same, we’d probably end up fighting again.”

“Maybe not.”

“Alan, we wouldn’t get through six items without having to throw things at one another.”

“So what do you suggest?”

“We could become completely new people. I mean, we stay away from each other for a while, say, six months, no, a year. Yeah, a year is enough time. And in that year, we completely change who we are. Philosophies, fashion, friends, how we look at the world, how we view art, how we eat. Can one change how they eat? I guess with enough determination, why not? How we live, I’ll have to move. Since I haven’t seen your place yet, you can stay where you are, or move if you like, whatever. We’ll have to start reading different newspapers, hell, get different jobs. I can quit at the office and get a freelance writing job, maybe for the local scene weekly or something. I’ll write the advice column, you know, about all sorts of gossip. Hell, that way, our problems won’t seem so bad!”

I threw back my head and laughed at the thought, of me sitting at my computer, attempting to solve other people’s severely complicated issues. Dear Julia, I know you must get this question all the time, but… it was too much to hold in. Alan wasn’t laughing, but enjoying what I was saying. Maybe he was considering it, who knows. He’s got those eyes to him. You never quite know what’s behind them. “And then,” I continued, “after a year or so of intense changes to every part of us, we’ll agree to meet somewhere. Lets say, some bar where we’ve never gone before but always wanted to. You know, neutral territory, like a first date. Everybody’s got a bar like that. It’ll be some hole in the wall pub with British or Irish artwork and design, and the bartender, he’ll try to pick me up, but I’ll say ‘sorry, I’m waiting for someone.’ and he’ll say ‘yeah, that’s what they all say,’ and then you’ll come in and sit down at the far end of the bar, because you won’t recognize me at first. I’ll have dyed my hair red, or gone back to the natural Auburn, you know, very advice column-ish, and I’ll have lost twenty pounds and wear an evening dress you’ve never seen before, something new I’d imagine, something daring.

“You, you’ll be in some winter sweater, something your mother will have bought you. You know, the ones you hate now? Well, you’ll love them. You’ll have grown a deep appreciation for your mothers careful knitting. I don’t know, maybe you’ll be knitting yourself by that point. After a few minutes, you begin introducing yourself to all the ladies’ at the bar, having them turn around and look you in the eye, and then you’ll wave them off, apologizing. ‘Sorry, I’m looking for someone else,’ you’ll say. It’ll break their hearts, really, because you’ll have been at the gym every other day for a straight year, and eaten impeccably well, and will look like you’re out of a Hollywood romance. After you ask them all, you find me, and I say something like “Have I met you somewhere before?” And I’ll say it with that little wasp that all the girls on MTV use, and you’ll fall desperately in love with me on the spot.”

Around here, I sat up and crossed my legs. I was hit with a good amount of inspiration, though who knows from what. Maybe I had been thinking about something like this. There was no way I was thinking all this myself. It had to be from a novel maybe, long ago, from those cheesy paperbacks I used to read. It sounded like something from those. Alan was extremely attentive at all of this. I could see it all over his face. He was as surprised as I was that so much could come out of me at once.

“We’ll chat over drinks, the new kinds we’ve grown to appreciate, and you’ll tell me about your new job, teaching art to high school kids, or maybe you’ll have written the great Canadian novel, and it’ll be full of every wonderful idea you’ve ever had. Everything will be character driven, of course, because you’ll have found a deep love for how a simple premise like two people talking on a bed—in the early morning after a night of deep, emotional arguments—can be as compelling a story as any of the incredible epics out there. You’ll have a scarf, a blue one, because right now you hate the colour blue and will, a few months from now, decide you need to do something about that. And you’ll have been single all year, just like me, a state neither of us have been in since early grade school. You had your first girlfriend at 13, didn’t you? Well, I was 15, his name was Randy, but you get the point. The time will have been very good and productive for both of us, and we’ll have become close with people we had no idea existed before, and we would talk about them and tell each other of just about every moment we’ve had since separating. The bartender will have to kick us out at two, and we’ll be shocked that the time has gone so quickly.”

Alan had sat up to, and in the same cross-legged way so we were matching and our knees almost touched. This was the first time in the last twelve hours that we were this close for more than a few seconds. I felt comfortable, here, on my bed with him. He was watching all of me, his eyes wandered everywhere but mostly they were on mine. This conversation reminded me so much of those first few weeks I knew him, when we planned our future, late at night in his dorm room, laying together in his bed, our hands reaching to the ceiling whenever we had a particularly huge idea.

“It sounds like a good time, doesn’t it?” I asked, feeling as though this were the point in the conversation where it became do or die. There would be no middle-ground between Alan and I. We had both, inside us, decided that either we were to be in love for the rest of our lives, or to never see each other after this very morning. The moves you make can be magical.

“I’ve got a song in my head, too,” Alan said, looking toward the window.

“Alan, it can wait.”

“Well, no, because now we both have the same problem. All we need is love is still swimming around up there, isn’t it?”

“Actually, I pretty much had it gone, but now that you mention it again, it’s back. Thanks a fucking lot, Alan.”

“So we’ve got the same thing to deal with.” “We have more than the songs in our head to deal with, Alan.”

“You cut us off right in the middle of our I love you’s to complain about yours, I can cut us off about our perfect imaginary future.”

“It doesn’t have to be imaginary…” “But it is, Julia. We couldn’t spend a year without each other.”

“I’ve been right close to never seeing you again thirty times tonight, Alan. A year won’t kill me.”

“We’ll get back to that in a second. Lets get these songs out. It’s driving me nuts.”

“You think it’s stupid, don’t you? That’s why you’re changing the subject.”

“That’s why you changed the subject with the I love you’s. You realized it was pointless.”

“Yes,” I caught myself, “No. I didn’t realize anything. And you’re admitting it. You think my idea of our little future together is silly.”

“Jules,” he took my left hand with his right, “I just think it would take more than just an idea. Something like that, a life changing thing, that’s a commitment.”

“You were the one who brought it up!” I pulled my hand away, and waved it in the air. We were, as he put it earlier, going in circles. “I was just going with it. You suggested we start new lives.”

“I know, I just didn’t think you would think up a probable scenario for it right away.”

“What’s the song then?” “What’s that?” “The song, the fucking song! You stopped my big idea of our future because you had a song in your head. What is it?” He said, rather sheepishly, “Jumping Jack Flash.” “Jumping Jack Flash?!? What in the hell does Jumping Jack Flash have to do with what we’re talking about?” “Why does it have to do with what we’re talking about?” “Mine did!” It did too. It popped into my head for specific reasons completely relating to what we were talking about. Future’s and all. We didn’t need new lives, or old ones, or old broken promises promised again. All we needed was as much God damn love we had. Didn’t he see that?

“Well, I’m not you, am I? Just because your song has something to do with this problem of ours doesn’t mean that mine has to.”

“The only reason I mentioned the song in the first place was because it had something to do with our problem. A hundred songs have been stuck in my head, Alan, but I mentioned that one because it meant something. Jumping Jack Flash doesn’t mean anything, not to us anyway.”

I stopped, and realized that we were arguing again. I had vigor to me, a little fight, something I thought was gone from me. It was a new day! We had left the space of being too tired to say anything, and caught that second wind that happens when you realize that yes, there will be no sleep until we collapse in defeat to nature’s will. This is what we needed. This was what we would use to get through. We would win! We would be triumphant! If only I didn’t completely hate him!

If Alan were to say something like “I don’t get you” or “Well, why is that a problem?” or “I’m allowed to bring up meaningless songs up whenever I damn well want!” I would have taken my newly realized strength and shot him through the window, and watched him fall twenty floors into the noisy, crowded outside world that would continue to move without me.

Instead, Alan said something that forced me to look at him as the man I fell in love with years before. He said, “I’m sorry. I love you. I don’t know what I was talking about. Julia, I can’t take this. I need to know if we’re going to be okay. I don’t want to talk about our future or how we’re going to change and be honest with each other and lead brand new exciting lives unless I know if it’s possible. You know my answer already. You know that I’ll do everything I can to make it work. I’m really determined to. But I don’t know about you. I don’t know what to think. I can’t read you. I need to know what you think.”

His confession was more than he hoped. Before his apology, before the words came out of his mouth, I still didn’t know what I was going to do. There was an equal shot of me leaving him and moving to Italy or Paraguay, never to see this man I’d spent the longest relationship of my life in as there was letting him move back in with me, with his big black suitcases and dresser, sitting out on the balcony, watching the stars, thinking up baby names. I could have gone either way. I was out, before his confession, out for my happiness whatever the cost. I could marry Mark or never see him again. I could begin a new life. I could write an advice column. I could get all new drapes. Whatever. Nothing mattered but the safety of my happiness.

But here it was. Sitting not a foot away from me was the chance at my happiness. I couldn’t quite do it without him. I loved this man more than the possibility of a new exotic life. I would take him, be with him and be happy. I decided, right this moment, that was what I would do. I had fought all night with this man. We argued over every moment we ever shared, the good, the bad, and the inconceivable. There would be a happy ending here. There must. It could end no other way. We would not fight this hard and this long for anything less. There would be victory at last! It would be great! It would be true!

I grabbed him by the shoulders, looked at him with the most determined look I could gather, and kissed him with thunder. A strong wind threw the window open and the world entered. The noise, the voices, the music, all invaded this exhausted battlefield in which we had waged war. But we did not stop. The elephants could not stop us. The mountains and the storms and the oceans could not stop us. The chances, the possibilities, the insecurity could not stop us. It could only get in our way, slow us down, make us fight harder, stronger, faster. There would be happiness in this house, in our home. It would be real. Our wedding bands and our friends and our lives meant less than this, this! Look what we are a part of!

Sleep: A short story

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The book slips through her fingers. She lets it. She does not care. She is asleep. Her fingers, they hold the book so easily. But they let it go just as well.

She looks at me, through slits, the smallest amount she can open her eyes and still be a little asleep. Her other hand, not the one that dropped the book, came towards my arm and gave it a little squeeze. She was done. This is all I would see of the full life tonight. She was signing off in the dark.

I reached over and turned off the light on her side of the bed. I let the book lay next to her. I knew in three or four hours time she would wake, and she would either put it away herself or read another paragraph before finding sleep again. She would read this paragraph in the dark, and in the morning or whenever it was she would continue, would not remember having read it, but find it familiar. But if I moved the book and she awoke, she would look for it, and by looking for it wake up even more, maybe to the point of looking at the alarm, of seeing the dull blue LED lights display two or three AM. And she would look at these numbers and blink, once or twice, and be angry at herself for finding herself here, in bed, with me. So I don’t touch the book.

Her hands come together, clasping. Her breathing is steady, unwanting. I can see just a little leftover mascara on her rested eyelid. It’s proof enough of life, that we live. In the morning, I’ll tell her about it. But tonight it’s a reflection. And some nights, you just want to hold on to whatever you can.

An Indication: A short story

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My boyfriend, Private Jeremy Bellam, was nineteen years old. There wasn’t much to him. We graduated from high school in Red Deer the spring of our nineteenth birthdays. We were rams. He was the only one between us who bought into that. I was meek. He was stubborn. I couldn’t have joined anyone’s army.

Jeremy flew to Afghanistan sure-shot. He came back incapable. Among other things.

We liked each other. I liked his hair and thick neck, how I could sit on his shoulders. He liked that I’d sit with him while he played video games with his friends and not be a pain. I played sometimes, and he let me win. That’s how we were. He liked that I wasn’t a prissy girl, and I liked his patronizing bullshit.

He joined the army in the summer following two months of dissatisfaction and frustrating working at his father’s garage. He never told me he was a shit mechanic. At first, he made it sound like his old man was just being too hard on him. But after a while it became obvious Jeremy barely knew what a car was, let alone how to affix parts. I knew more about engines than he did. His heart wasn’t in it, and Jeremy was never very good at things he didn’t love.

I worked at a hair salon in a corner plaza. I thought I would get more reading done as a receptionist than I did. I just became addicted to gossip. I learned more sordid details about people only marginally more famous than myself, and I learned the right facial expressions for shallow applied horror. I began to have some seriously contrived opinions about seriously contrived love affairs.

Unlike Jeremy, I was good at things I didn’t care about. That was one of the big differences between us. Among other things.

Of course I tried to talk Jeremy out of the army. My argument crumbled early. He wasn’t qualified for any jobs that weren’t equally dangerous. He could just as easily get killed in the oil fields or the hydro repair, putting up turbines or fixing power lines. The army would pay for college, and they only needed him for three years. He wouldn’t even be out of the country half the time, and there was only a 30% chance he’d even see active duty. I read the pamphlets. The good money was on in reconstruction, building bridges, roads, schools. Jeremy was in great shape, and would have no trouble getting through basic training.

He knew how to shoot a rifle. He knew how to follow orders. Any argument I had against it withered away in a half handful of afternoon arguments.

The more time passed, the more Jeremy talked himself into signing up. He convinced himself there was better in this life for a guy like him. He hadn’t particularly aced high school, and he was sure the army would help us get to where we wanted to be. It would get him ample work. In a couple of years, we could afford a house. We could afford to raise a child. It was a crazy, son of a bitch gamble, and one I still don’t think he should have done. But you talk a young man out of serving his country. Once the thought is secure, there’s no turning him.

The girls I worked with didn’t help. Their men were all quarter life crisis man-boys. They had mostly gone to college or university and come out having no clue who they really were. None of them had the balls to try something like the army. The girls swooned when I told them.

The night Jeremy left, he did his goddamn best to get me pregnant. The condom broke and he knew it but didn’t stop. I caught him and kicked him from underneath. He stopped pretty quick. I don’t think he was all there in trying. I think it was some unconscious part of his brain that tried to tie me down while he was away. After he got off, I told him I believed hard in abortions and he wasn’t getting a baby out of me until I said one could come. We fought half the night about it. Somehow, we didn’t break up.

Jeremy and I got high pretty much all week leading up to the day he had to leave. There wasn’t a day we weren’t high or drunk or too hungover to do either. The sobering reality of letting him go for a considerable amount of time ate at me, so I turned to the good ol’ illegals. I didn’t tell Jeremy this, but I was fucked up the whole week after he left, too. I couldn’t fucking take it. I went through extreme bouts of nausea, as if the fucker actually had impregnated me. I blew through four pregnancy sticks just to make sure.

I bought a new cell phone so we could chat all the time. There wasn’t an hour went by without some update. Most texts or voicemail messages were short and to the point. He loved me and missed me and this is what he was doing. He told me about the workout regimen and how when he visited I would be shocked at how much better looking he’d be. He took a picture of his abs. When I received that text, I was making change for a woman. I showed it to her and we both laughed. She told me to facebook it to everyone, and I did. Jeremy was mad for a few minutes, then “LOL’d” me. I took a little pride in knowing that everyone knew I was with someone like that.

There was a two day period where I didn’t hear form Jeremy, and I worried like crazy. Eventually, Jeremy did call me. He said his phone had been taken away as a punishment. He told me that he so far hadn’t impressed his superiors. It took me a while to get this out of him. At first, they didn’t understand him. It was all them, them, them. But eventually he admitted his faults. He was having trouble with basic training, and was nearly last in his regiment. They were going to step up his training so he could catch up. I didn’t know what that meant, and he didn’t tell me. I didn’t share any of this with my facebook.

I was putting the pieces of poor Jeremy together. He was never a great student. He was useless in his father’s garage. And now he wasn’t even that great a soldier. To a sane girl, to one not in love, all this evidence might suggest that there wasn’t much to Jeremy. Objective advice given from someone distant might point out that maybe I should leave the loser while I still had the chance, before he got a baby in me for real. But I loved him, and he was good at loving me. I could see all his faults, but he was good at me. I might have been the only thing he was good at. I couldn’t very much leave him for what he failed to do outside our relationship.

I was doing well at the salon and they wished the best for me, so much so that even when I began interviewing for better jobs they’d fix me up first. It didn’t take me long to get a new job. I was still a receptionist, but the office was downtown and my employers were lawyers. I still found time to visit the salon, and I kept all the girls as close friends. I did my best not to forget people I didn’t see every day. I found my circle of friends growing. It wasn’t long before I was having lunch with the other employees at the law firm. I was able to save money, too. I hadn’t moved out of my parents’ yet, so by the time Christmas came around I had enough money to buy everyone I knew beautiful presents.

It was during Christmas I finally saw Jeremy again. Our phone chats became further and further apart, so there was lots I didn’t know. Jeremy’s personality had changed a little. He was quieter. The other men in his regiment made fun of him for being so attached to me, for expressing so many feelings. But he had improved, supposedly, and he would finish his basic training in a few weeks. That didn’t mean he was coming home. It just meant he could do a lot of pushups, and he’d soon be doing them in sand. He had two and a half years to go, and then he’d be able to hit college, get a solid job, and take care of me.

He didn’t get shot in that time. He held guns and shot them, but nobody ever shot back. My husband killed three Afghani civilians. None of them were armed. He tells me that he still hears them.

After Christmas, I sent him away with kisses and cuddles. We had sex twice a day while he was here, and though he was in better shape, he was marginally worse at it. I chalked it up to lack of practice.

I’d heard stories from my girlfriends about how some of their boys cheat. I figured Jeremy was pretty safe in the army, but I honestly couldn’t blame him if he were to succumb to another woman while away. I would have been jealous, but I can’t say I couldn’t understand. Oddly, Jeremy never cheated. At least, he never admitted to anything. I can’t say the same.

I first cheated on Jeremy on Valentine’s Day, the night I met Ben.

Jeremy was about to ship off to Afghanistan, and I’d gone out with my single girlfriends to some anti-valentine’s theme party at a pub. I loved valentine’s day. I loved the schmaltz. I escaped my friends to get a new drink from the bar, and ran into Sam, an older, richer, married man. These were details I learned later. When I ran into him at the bar, he gave me his card and smiled. We only talked for a minute. I didn’t want anyone to think I was flirting. They still think I was about to throw a drink in his face, but didn’t want to wait for another one. It was only after my friends disbanded at the end of the night that I called him. He picked me up at the bar and took me back to his place. He owned a house. His wife was out of the country on business. It was an illuminating evening. Among other things.

Of course I felt guilty for a little while. It was the first time I’d ever cheated. That sort of thing doesn’t just happen without serious emotional response. I felt guilty for a sum three hours the morning after, which I took as a sign that I was either a psychopath or had done something arguably reasonable.

If the guilt had stayed, I wouldn’t have the arrangement with Ben I still enjoy. His wife goes off for business trips, and we find the time. It’s very nice. He loves his wife, and I love my husband, and neither of us can handle the loneliness.

Jeremy’s first trip to Afghanistan took four months. He came home happy, surprised he never had to even pull his gun, and proud of his accomplishments. It was the most productive four months of his life, and the first time in mine I saw what Jeremy could be. His back was straighter. He spoke with more confidence. His parents were so proud. When he saw my smile at the airport, he burst into a run and grabbed me and held me high.

With him back and brighter, I felt our relationship complications for the first time. Jeremy was in the army so he could take care of me, but more and more I found I didn’t need to be taken care of. I moved out of my parents house in the late spring, and moved into an apartment with a girlfriend from the salon. I’d saved thousands of dollars, and wondered if maybe I should look at Calgary for better work. It wasn’t that far away, and there was far more opportunity. I was becoming really good on a computer, something I’d barely touched before the law office. I could type like a demon, and focused better than some of the young lawyers. I could make more money in the city. I began looking at classes I could take. Colleges. I could pay for an entire year out of pocket.

I’d also been working on my own health. I ran every morning as the sun rose. Jeremy noticed. The first time we were naked together, he remarked on how much better I looked. He smothered me with dirty affection. We were out of practice sexually, and suffered for it. Sex is not like riding a bike, but we practiced our tight asses off. I told him we needed to get back into sex shape. Jeremy still had to report to base every day, but it was mostly for briefings and information on future missions. We used the evenings to their fullest. We made them wet and sticky and hot, and in between the love making Jeremy showed me how well he’d learned to cook and clean. It was like the army was teaching him how to be the perfect boyfriend. If he was home and I wasn’t, he’d tidy the apartment. My girlfriends were impressed. There are few things more attractive than a house cleaned by a man. I loved him an insane amount. I didn’t care if I was smarter or made more money, Jeremy was the man in my house.

I saw our plan slowly changing, shifting from his expectation a year before to my plan two years from now. He didn’t need to take care of me. I’d take care of him. I didn’t want to be with a rich guy, or some successful playboy. I wanted to work, and I wanted Jeremy at home, ready for me when I got home, ready to love me. I was happy with my poor soldier.

My plan worked out, sort of. I do make all the money. Jeremy is at home, ready to love me. Though I do sometimes wish I had the real Jeremy, the one I remember from his first year in the army, before he went back to Afghanistan and they tore him apart.

On his second mission back, Jeremy killed three civilians in a friendly fire travesty. They hadn’t done anything. They hadn’t even raised their hands. Jeremy shot them out of instinct, fear, and probably a little racism. He was written up but nothing serious happened to him. Friendly fire accidents were apparently very common. More civilians have died in the war than the people we were there to actually kill. Jeremy came back with war face. It’s like how women get a certain sourness in their face after working at a bar too long. Bar face. Jeremy’s was like that, but it only took him a year to earn it. The next time I saw him, he had a year left in his contract and absolutely no will to go. The murders, as he referred to them, tore him apart. He couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t make love. He told me several times how he secretly hoped to die on the third run.

I was having none of it. I supported his decision to join the army, and I continued to support it right through. It was the right call for him. He wasn’t talented, and he wasn’t a prodigy. But he was a good man, and good men serve their country. I believed it entirely.

Nothing happened to him on the third run. He didn’t shoot any more civilians. He didn’t shoot any bad guys. Nobody shot at him. Jeremy helped build a bridge. He kept watch nights. He slept better during the day, like a house cat. He became pretty good at poker.

And when he came home, finally, forever, he came with money and papers. He would get to go to college the following semester, paid for by the Canadian government for his service to the cause. His parents were extremely proud of him. I praised him endlessly. Eventually he stopped talking about the people he killed, and in the years since he’s hardly even talked about being a soldier. It’s like the whole thing didn’t happen.

But before the army, Jeremy would have never been my husband. I would have moved to Calgary, like I did the following summer, and he wouldn’t have come with me. We wouldn’t have moved into a one-bedroom apartment five miles from my downtown office, where I worked during the day as a law secretary. I studied at night, learning more and more about law. In a few years, I became a paralegal. I made enough money to support both of us.

Jeremy hooked up our new stereo. I was proud of him. He buys the groceries. He cooks. He looks after our new cat.

I’ve never seen a relationship like ours. Maybe it’s new. I don’t mind any of it. I don’t mind at all being in charge. I don’t mind getting what I want. I don’t mind a man who will give it to me. I love Jeremy with all my heart, and I know he’ll never leave me.

We were married in Red Deer with our entire family present. We honeymooned in Las Vegas. Jeremy lost a thousand dollars playing blackjack, and I bought us tickets to a couple of glitzy shows.

And at night in our apartment, we watch television shows he’s downloaded off the internet, so we can watch them whenever I get home. Sometimes I work late. Sometimes I don’t come home at night. Jeremy is always there, waiting. I’m all he has, and it’s the best thing a girl could hope for.

More Things: July 23, 2012

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