PHANTOM LIMB IN LIMBO
Note: This collection of short essays, originally published in January 2016, included a fifth part, which was part four. I have since removed it because the story could have been misconstrued as a sort of passive-aggressive jab at an innocent person, which wasn’t my intention, but hey: it’s gone. The rest, for good or ill, is untouched. Were I to subtitle ‘PHANTOM LIMB IN LIMBO’, which is just about the best title I ever gave anything, I guess I would say something about it being a series of quiet tragedies and miseries.
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[01]
I had a sad friend in Los Angeles. She was sad and she made me sad too. She made me sad because I didn’t want her to be sad. She was smart and pretty. She was funny. I liked her a whole lot.
She didn’t like herself. She said was hopeless and futureless. She didn’t want to be alive anymore. She didn’t see the point.
We made a suicide pact. I don’t know if it was a joke. It was the tenth or eleventh suicide pact I’d entered into in my life. I didn’t know if those were jokes either.
She asked me how we’d do it and I told her I’d heard the garden hose in the tailpipe method is the way to go. My father had seen a lot of suicides like that at work. He said it looked like they had just gone to sleep.
Months later I was in Los Angeles for a writing assignment. My friend invited me over. She was housesitting in Echo Park. When I got there she was wearing a kimono. We drank two bottles of wine in the kitchen and smoked a lot of cigarettes out back.
At three in the morning we were smoking on the patio. She was sitting on a bench and I was standing in front of her. She looked at me in a certain way and I looked at her the same way. I asked her if I could kiss her and she said yes. She grabbed my shirt and pulled me towards her.
We went inside. It was a long night. She had a beautiful body. Her skin was very soft. I felt vaporous and ghostlike in comparison.
In the morning I had to go write about something for some people who were paying me to write it. I didn’t care what I was writing about. I was broke. They were paying me and that was good enough for me. They never ended up paying me.
I told my friend I was leaving Los Angeles that night. I didn’t want to leave. I had to leave. She was upset that I was leaving. She thought that maybe I was leaving because of her. I don’t know why she thought that. I told her I would rather stay with her than leave. I wasn’t lying. She didn’t believe me.
She stopped talking to me after that. I wrote her a few letters and told her I wanted to see her again. She didn’t write me back for six months.