Justin Blaney's Blog, page 48

Last Night’s Goodbye, Chapter 1

Raindrops collected on the open window, sliding in fits and starts, seeming so content in their random and brief lives. Yellow street lamp mingled with blinking green 3:45 on the clock beside our marriage bed, the only light across his face. My husband, Lysander, the love of my life, breathing long and slow. The man who had convinced me to move across the country, to leave behind all my friends, to take our children away from their grandparents, and me away from my mom. The man who I would have followed to the moon if he told me we could live there happily ever after. He said the summers in Seattle are beautiful. And it’s a lot easier to make a living than Dallas. He said it really doesn’t rain as much as people say. I guess that was the first time he lied to me.

The room was musty and cold. This place smelled wet even on an August afternoon. His clothes were piled on top of the dresser. Pillows lay on the floor at my feet cast in the same grayish yellow as the sheets and the shirts and the peeling floral wall paper. A delivery truck rumbled past, it’s unmuffled old engine cuttingly loud. Loud enough to muffle a gunshot perhaps. Lysan turned over, pulling the sheets about him, unaware of the silver barrel pointed at his peaceful face, the .40 caliber Sig Sauer that his dad gave him preening in the blinking green LED lights and the yellow streaks cast through rainy window panes.

I didn’t cry when he told me. The mashed potatoes I’d whipped and whipped until not a single lump remained slowly turned to acid in my throat as I realized he wasn’t joking. I listened in silence to the whole story. How he felt disconnected from me. How we’d both been growing apart. How I’d changed. How he didn’t even recognize me anymore. How he didn’t mean to fall in love with someone else.

He touched my hand. “Adela, what are you thinking? Talk to me.”

I flinched. The first time I’d flinched at the touch of this man. I would never feel his hands on me again without thinking of where else they had been. I wanted to do something dramatic. To throw the bowl of mashed potatoes at the wall. To slap him. Throw water in his face. Something. But all I did was push my chair in and put my dishes in the sink. I went to the front door. He sat at the table, calling after me. He didn’t even get up. Something about how sorry he was. Something about please come back.

I killed his pleas with the slam of our apartment door. In the courtyard of our Capital Hill turn of the century building, I passed two women who seemed pleased to have something new to gossip about. I was soaked by the time I walked the three blocks to Madison Pub, the gay dive bar where we used to order whiskey and ginger or manhattan’s with some kind of slushy coke on top or some local IPA with a hipster name, where we would drink until we both seemed to realize at the same time that our bodies were lonely for each other’s skin. I’d make him wait until he got desperate enough to slip his hand up my dress while we sat at the bar, his fingers exploring the edge of my panties. Then I’d kiss him hard, and pull him out the door. Take him to this bed. This same bed he fucked her on. This same bed where he now sleeps with a gun pointed at his slow breathing face.

The clock turned to 3:52, reflecting through a wine glass left over from a few nights earlier. A framed picture hogged the rest of the bedside stand. I’d given him the frame for christmas, a kit I bought on Etsy and painted myself. I learned calligraphy so I could write a poem around the edge, the one he wrote when our twin daughters were born five years ago. The picture was of Lysan helping the girls lift a huge pumpkin into a wheel barrow. Their squealing and laughing rang in my ears again as if it were happening for the first time.

I looked down the gun at the man who betrayed me, his twitching closed eyes clear at the end of the blurred barrel. The gun grew heavy in my hand. I tensed, my finger on the trigger, willing the weapon to keep focused on the task at hand. He murdered our marriage. He deserved this.

Or maybe I was indulging the four whiskey shots and two pints of stout still hot in my belly. I was a good wife. I followed him to this city where I had no friends. Where people are colder than an endless rainy winter. I let him buy an Audi while I drove a Dodge minivan. I let him chase his career no matter how many hours it took away from us, while I stayed home with the kids. I let him stay out late with his friends and never complained once. I let him buy that signed Seahawks jersey and hang it in our room. I let him do whatever he wanted to me in bed. I even learned to like it. I started drinking whiskey for him. And I hate whiskey.

If I did this, I would go to jail. Obviously. Probably turn myself in. Call 911 and confess it all to the operator while sirens blared outside our building. But I’m not a victim. I’m not going to let him get away with this.

I sighted down the gun at his shoulder. Then his hand. Then his leg. I could tell the police it was an accident. “The gun went off on its own, officer,” paired with my best impression of a dumb blonde. It might work. And the buzz was telling me it didn’t matter. Make him pay.

But what to shoot? What would hurt the most? I began to squeeze the trigger. I felt the hammer move. How far do I have to pull before the bullet fires? Would it kick back. Would it hurt my ears? Cringing, I squeezed harder.

The gun fired. But just before, I’d swung my arm up. An explosion, a burst of flame and my ears rang. Glass shattered. And a brand new black gash marred Russell Wilson’s sharpie signature in the middle of a big white number three.

I am so fucking pathetic.

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Complete list of chapters here: Last Night’s Farewell

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Announcing a novel experience, Last Night’s Farewell, chapters posted daily as I write them

This is the home page for my new novel, Last Night’s Goodbye. I’m posting chapters daily as I write them.

These chapters are raw and unedited, posted as soon as possible after I finish each one. My hope is you can experience the story unfolding just as I do, falling slowly from the muses that float around me onto the page. My plan is to record and post one chapter every day until I’m done. I believe it will be in the vein of Gone Girl or Girl on the Train, but more romantic, at least that’s the vision. It’s not done yet, so who knows how it will end 

Announcing a novel experience, Last Night’s Goodbye, chapters posted daily as I write them

This is the home page for my new novel, Last Night’s Goodbye. I’m posting chapters daily as I write them.

These chapters are raw and unedited, posted as soon as possible after I finish each one. My hope is you can experience the story unfolding just as I do, falling slowly from the muses that float around me onto the page. My plan is to record and post one chapter every day until I’m done. I believe it will be in the vein of Gone Girl or Girl on the Train, but more romantic, at least that’s the vision. It’s not done yet, so who knows how it will end 

187 my soul digs roots down into your heart

187
my soul digs roots down into your heart, through your veins, seeking heat and life in the midst of muscles and bone, so i may grow
the deeper i burrow into you, the more abundant and full and quenched i become, praying softly of my thanks for your eternally emanating fire

All my books are free forever including, Where Whispers Willow, a collection of 100 reverie, musings and lingering dreams.

 

1 the silence of this cherry blossom cathedral

1

the silence of this cherry blossom cathedral
where gnarled branches and iron lampposts form buttressed walls and coffered ceilings
broken by the hushed kisses of college lovers lost in firsts and seconds
and drifting petals on the brisk spring night air
this is where crying fathers send daughters who used to make welcome home stickers with stacks of construction paper and finger paint
the same color pink as lips on a third date with a boy who she has already tried on to see if his last name rolls nicely with mrs
never again will cafeteria noodles taste as good as the ones walked to hand in hand on pebbled paths beneath lantern lit white petaled glass

All my books are free forever including, Where Whispers Willow, a collection of 100 reverie, musings and lingering dreams.

 

91 to a bird, hovering in the wind is art

91

to a bird, hovering in the wind is art
she flies because she can
marlin jump from the sea 
turning in flight 
splashing on sides
art
beauty 
because they can
because they are compelled to
proclaiming who they are
they are true to themselves
they are real
this is art 
we leap into the air, we sprint, we dive, we write, we sing, we create
because we are human
because we can
not to make the world better or because it is our job or for applause
it is simply our nature 
the more we embrace our humanity
the more meaningful our art becomes
and the more beauty we will see when we look at each other
our fellow artists 
and the more beauty we will see in the mirror
creating for joyless profit is work
creating for ourselves is art

All my books are free forever including, Where Whispers Willow, a collection of 100 reverie, musings and lingering dreams.

 

99 let me kiss your drooping eyes and whisper

let me kiss your drooping eyes and whisper i love you forever in your ear so soft you can barely hear me above the crashing waves and wind outside

your door

goodnight sweet love

dream of happiness and complete joy

go to sleep with a thankful heart for all the beautiful things in this world and all the wonderful people who love you

farewell sweet love

i see you now

perfect and sleepy and quiet and fair

wrapped tight and warm against the icy air

i shut my eyes and dream of you

and breath soft and heavy

goodnight

All my books are free forever including, Where Whispers Willow, a collection of 100 reverie, musings and lingering dreams.

subways are where humans of all kinds clog together with a common purpose

subways are where humans of all kinds clog together with a common purpose

to go into the city

then we separate our ways

some to work, to fun, to visit a husband in prison, or a grandmother’s grave, to errands nefarious

8:45am

the passengers of this train will soon become part of an organism called new york city

on the fringes, we glide above the ashen streets on iron tracks and stone walls

brick and glass reach with greater ambition at each stop

baychester, gun hill, pelham, morris park

more and more of us enter, on and up and in

around 125th, the city chokes out sky and we are forced to descend under the streets and basement apartments

the buildings far above grow richer still, but all that can be seen of them is flashes of orange and blue light, the tips of their senses and nerve endings and copper roots sparking with electricity and warning of danger

power systems on the other side of the turnstiles, up stairs and escalators, in the light of floor to ceiling penthouse house windows, don’t exist down here

those with the least to loose are kings and queens of this fluorescent world

the owners of titles and mortgages ride at the pleasure of the unemployed

and as long as everyone minds themselves

the train fulfills it’s purpose

moving blood through the veins

turning people into city

Purchase a paperback copy of my first 100 reverie, The Whispers Willow.

Find out more about reverie here: justinblaney.com/reverie

waves a ways off crash into rocks at half the speed of sound

waves a ways off crash into rocks at half the speed of sound with a lower octave of rushing and the dusting of foam that falls slowly on those who climb too close along the snaking coastal peaks plunging into sands that stretch below the waves much further than we consider when distracted by castles made from the stuff, dried by unfiltered sun

is this why time passes so slowly on beach days?

Purchase a paperback copy of my first 100 reverie, The Whispers Willow.

Find out more about reverie here: justinblaney.com/reverie

hold me as i lay over you, tucked in twisting meadows

hold me as I lay over you, tucked in twisting meadows, centuries wilting away on the afternoon sun and centuries more springing up in dandelions, still and hushed and twirling in the currents that wind around us

Purchase a paperback copy of my first 100 reverie, The Whispers Willow.

Find out more about reverie here: justinblaney.com/reverie