Category Archives: You

2016/06/11

The Lamella

By dsholloway

To exorcise your anxieties, you invent a woman, draw her portrait, and then dream about her. You’re supposed to ask her questions, in your dream, and, after you wake, write her responses in your “dream journal.”

 

But when I present her portrait to K, he becomes enraged. “This is your woman? This is your animus?” He balls her up in his left hand and drops her to the floor. “Try again.”

 

I again draw the woman, the locus of my anxieties and erotic fantasies. She is my life’s work, the climax of my existence. I don’t ask K for his approval before I begin dreaming about her.

 

K is jealous of my animus, I feel. He wants to dream about her, ask her questions, and write about her in his own “dream journal.”

 

I dream of K instead of my animus. I ask him where she is. He says that she has left me because I’m “too unstable.” I tell him that’s why I drew an animus, to stabilize. He says that it’s too late and that she’d rather be with a rich guy besides. I can’t disagree.

 

I wake up but don’t bother to write any of that down.

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2014/12/29

The Heart of Everyday Normality

By dsholloway

“Merry Christmas,” said the white haired lady, thrusting a jar of honey in your hands. “It comes straight from her hive,” she continued, gesturing to another white haired  lady near the tree who, evidently, was an apiarist.

The lady’s words sounded oddly perverse, to you, and you laughed. Your girlfriend, along for the ride since it’s the holidays, gave you a proper slap on the shoulder. The white haired lady looked crookedly at the two of you before going elsewhere to, probably, deliver more honey “straight from [the] hive.”

You had no interest in this particular jar of honey, having plenty of honey at home and very little room in your suitcase. Nevertheless, the next day you gently wrapped the jar of honey in an old necktie and buried it in your carry-on. Maybe she’ll let me do something sexual with it: you pictured your girlfriend covered in bees.

You hear a few days later that the white haired apiarist is dying of cancer. You don’t really know her, but you’re still sad a little.

You decide to watch a documentary about bees. They’re dying in large numbers throughout the word, you learn. But they probably aren’t dying of cancer.

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2013/03/26

A Love Letter or a Suicide Note

By dsholloway

Where to begin? I love you.

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2013/03/24

Traumatic and Possibly Monstrous

By dsholloway

You said you were going out to make a snow angel.

You asked if I wanted to join you. I wanted to, of course, because you look so cute in winter wear and because I love you. I refused, however, because I was mad at you.

I lost track of time.

When I looked out the window, I saw your snow angel under the willow tree where you had refused to marry me. I didn’t see you, however, in your snow angel.

I went downstairs and out the back door. My love? There were no footprints in the snow. Only your snow angel under our tree.

I walked out to your snow angel and prostrated myself inside it. It was warm and smelled of your perfume. I closed my eyes and let the cold eat at my body.

I walked out to your snow angel the following day and took up residence inside it. It was still warm and still smelled of your perfume.

Again the next day.

…

Your angel has begun to decay. It is dirty, unshapely. But still it is warm and possesses your scent.

When it is gone, will I have lost you?

Spring is coming.

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2012/07/30

Essentially Expendable

By dsholloway

It’s hard to evacuate your bowels in a busy public restroom.You try to do it in those precious moments after men have left and before new men arrive–you are a thief waiting for the security guards to change shifts. You wait in silence, peeping out of the crack in the stall door. Now’s your chance!

But somebody comes in and, the horror, takes up residence next to you. Shit! You’re now in a stand off, listening while simultaneously trying not to make those noises. He is doing the same. His LV belt buckle is resting in a thin pool of liquid, you can see. Sometimes you bend all the way down to investigate the kind of pants the guy next to you is wearing because you have nothing better to do with your time because you didn’t buy an iPhone.

You cough. You figure that will mask the sounds of evacuation, like that scene in The Shawshank Redemption when the guy waits until the thunder claps to hit the sewage pipe with his big rock. You also roll the toilet paper thing around and around and around.

Now more men have come in. Shift change over. You missed your chance.

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2012/07/16

Fantasies of Autonomy

By dsholloway

Dearest:

A girl was wearing your perfume today. I wanted to punch her in the face and kiss her on the mouth, though in what order I don’t know. Then I wanted SuperMan to spin the world in the wrong direction (he can do that) so that we would have one more chance to do things right, because when he spins the world in the wrong direction we can do things like that.

When I turned to look at the girl, she was gone. How appropriate.

(Generic Valediction),

K.

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2012/07/08

Revisionism

By dsholloway

He’s tall and slender and sounds like Barack Obama. So when you’re sitting in his tiny office, you sometimes giggle when he’s talking because it feels like the President is your therapist.

He’s not very good at his job. He takes copious notes while you’re talking, like an overeager college freshman, giving the impression that he isn’t really listening at all. He mispronounces people’s names. He gives you an odd assortment of handouts with graphs and crap on them. You throw them away because, I mean, come on… He’s not even a therapist by trade; he’s an engineer or something, but he was recommended to you because you’re poor and troubled and because real therapists are expensive. See, mental health is a rich person luxury–like golf or litigation.

He cannot not help you, this imposter. Most cannot. Sometimes you wonder what Freud would have said about you, or Adler, or Klein. But then again, you think psychoanalysis is a bunch of fluff, anyways. Somebody told you once that the entire field of mental health is a trite Americanism. She was wrong, of course, but she was also right.

So you make an appointment for the same time next week.

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2012/06/18

Dark Matter

By dsholloway

Have you ever woken up inside your temporal lobe? I have. It’s a scary and lonely place–like the desert during a thunder storm. There are memories that grab at you, hooded and masked figures from your past that whisper frightening things to you, rivers teeming with regret that try to drown you, caverns inhabited by sorrow that scream for you, bottomless valleys of mistakes that want to swallow you. It [your temporal lobe] rumbles and quakes because you are inside it and it does not want you there. So it hides the pleasant things from you because if it gave you access to those things you would never leave. And if you never left what would become of you?

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2012/06/15

Disavowals

By dsholloway

He approaches you humbly and you chase him away mockingly.  He says he needs money and you reply that everybody needs money. You finish washing your car while other people washing theirs cast him aside as you did. He does not know what to do with his squeegee and hand towel.

But then you encounter him again. And this time you feel bad. You offer him three quarters, saying, It’s all I have. He dries your entire car for those quarters. You feel like you’re at a strip club, making some girl ride your sagging body for half a song before rewarding her with one dollar. So you give him a ten-dollar bill. The Hispanics over there look at you disapprovingly, as though you’re encouraging destitution and freeriderism–Our people don’t beg for money. You pretend not to notice as you wait for the vagrant to finish.

Then you realize that a girl is waiting to offer the vagrant some money so that he will dry her ride, too. And you smile. But you frown when you realize that the money you gave him was money for your yoga class, and because it looks like rain.

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