Any Man

by Amber Tamblyn

We sink to the bottom of each other’s oceans, drowning in shared silence.

Her touch is a broken mirror in every room of my mind.

The rest of me will exit our picture’s future.

“What would you like for dinner, Don,” Camilla asks. Light talk is as good as any other way to begin my death sentence. “Steak? Lasagna?” All food is a last meal. “Fish?” Everything leads to the execution. I’ll have the fish, please, and Camilla my dear, can we swing by the bar on the way home I think I left my body there

Perhaps Donald once dreamed of becoming a famous novelist or poet. Donald now dreams of nothing. For he is a no one.

The hospital did not include Donald’s personal clothing in the hospital bag, perhaps because it is evidence now. Donald is evidence now.

Donald enters a closet filled with the belongings of a man and begins pulling out all of his belts. There are many of them. Donald places the belts on the floor with the other items; a bed of snakes. They move. Donald quickly retrieves a lighter and lights the den of them on fire. Donald has no recollection of burning. Donald has no recollection of objects. Donald has no recollection of pain.

Sometimes I’ll arrive at an appointment three hours early just so I have time to stare out my car window. I watch and try not to think. Everything is a film: a fly on the windshield trying to get in, a delivery truck parked in front of whatever to deliver something I will never savor, a plane carrying flesh messages across the sky. The movie is wonderful to watch when I’m not in

The human smile no longer makes sense to me. Why is it a sign of happiness? Who decided that? Why not the crinkling of the nose, or blinking, or a hard swallow? Who invented the word smile and gave it its meaning?

Each day grows toward its death.

I’d grow extra mouths to swallow all his confusion and sorrow.

MAUDE: Hi Jamar. MAUDE: Looking for a strong mind to haunt. MAUDE: I like your walls. MAUDE: Can I walk through them?

I believe a man’s gotta have an understanding with the tree he’s going to hang himself from.

want to say to the new guys here, look, it’s okay to process your shit however you want to. It’s your shit. It’s no one else’s shit. As long as you’re not hurting someone else. Your hell is yours and you get to decide, okay?

It’s not your fault. But healing your own pain does belong to you now.

The sound of her crawling toward me. Not on all fours but all four hundreds, like a stampede of millipedes. Like a multi-animal.

I’m fucking nowhere right behind you

You can’t live like this, Pear. Jumping in and out of your own grave.

I commended him on everything he’s been doing publicly. I could never do those things. I could make jokes about doing those things but I could never actually do them.

It’s a pain . . . it’s a cellular pain now, okay? It’s not a memory, it lives in me like a heart.

I am floating in an abyss of absence.

Yes, I’m priviledged. Priviledged to say whatever the fuck I want to whenever the hell I want to. Free speech, honey. Free. Beautiful. Speech. You must never allow yourself to be censored or silenced by those who get upset easily, by those who are what I call Emotional Polenta—poor people’s food for thought, which was the title of my second book, a New York Times bestseller.

she couldn’t have picked, I don’t know, like, a better name to go by? JENNIFER: Reminds me of my great-aunt or something . . . MELISSA: [Laughter] Yes! Maude. More like Maude to penetrate!

A year goes by. Two. Five. Every unanswered season spins an ocean of apparitions inside you. Ghosts crash like phantom waves, breaking your mind, a limp swimmer who floats landless.

Your mouth remembers to brush its teeth, not the murky memory of its battery. Pain grows distant but never separate.

I felt like a sun in a perpetual state of setting.

We’re not soft inside. I think people confuse the interior body’s sliminess for softness.

The parallel me had a future that couldn’t be darkened by his past.

That it’s okay to not accept what happened, to find no resolve but still live a parallel happy life. A life adjacent to the things you cannot forgive. I really liked that.

This world discourages authenticity from infancy.

Every memory is an ocean, every remembrance a tide. I have the right to recede. I have the right to swell.

And while I’m not a murderess, I do love a good ending to a man’s mind, especially if I’ve written it.