Alone with Other People Read online

  ALONE WITH OTHER PEOPLE

  a collection of prose and poetry

  GABBY BESS

  Copyright (c) 2013 Gabby Bess

  All rights reserved.

  CCM & Design by Michael J Seidlinger Cover by Samantha Conlon

  & Gabby Bess

  ISBN - 978-1-937865-17-7

  For more information, find CCM at: http://copingmechanisms.net

  For LK.

  ALONE WITH OTHER PEOPLE

  A WOMAN WANTS WHAT A WOMAN WANTS

  THEORETICAL VIOLENCE

  PEEK-A-BOO IS A GAME THAT INFANTS ENJOY BECAUSE THEY HAVE NOT DEVELOPED OBJECT PERMANENCE

  HOLLY GO LIGHTLY

  THE WOMAN AT THE END OF THE CUL-DE-SAC

  FRENCH LESSONS

  JUST BE FAMOUS

  WHAT I CAN OBSERVE WHEN VISITING A CITY NEAR WHERE I ATTENDED HIGH SCHOOL

  TIPPING

  THE THEMATIC CONTENT OF 1AM TEXTS

  I CAN KEEP YOU

  I CAN MARRY YOU

  THINGS THAT I PUT INTO SARAH’S MOUTH

  HOW TO LIVE

  EVERYONE WAS HAPPY

  BAD BITCH

  WE CAN PLAY THAT GAME WHERE WE PRETEND THAT WE ARE IN A DOCUMENTARY ABOUT THE INTRICACIES OF HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS

  I FEEL OF GREAT IMPORTANCE, HISTORICALLY

  DINING ALONE AT PLAZA AZTECA

  STEVE BUSCEMI EYES

  MINIATURE BEARS

  20MG/DAY

  THE UNIVERSE HAS TAUGHT US A GREAT TRICK

  SELL ME SOMETHING

  JEANNE DIELMAN

  A THING TO DO IS SIT AROUND AND THINK ABOUT THINGS

  I WILL WRITE A NATURE POEM ABOUT FEELING GRATEFUL FOR MY MOUTH

  IF INSTEAD OF ASKING ME TO INSTALL UPDATES AND RESTART MY COMPUTER I WAS ASKED IF I WANTED TO DIE INSTANTANEOUSLY I WOULD PROBABLY CLICK YES INSTEAD OF NOT NOW

  GOOGLE SEARCH HISTORY: WEBMD FIBROMYALGIA, WEBMD LUMPS IN THROAT, WEBMD THROAT CANCER, HOW DO YOU KNOW IF YOU HAVE THROAT CANCER, LIKE, FOR REAL?

  TRAVEL SOUTH

  PUSH NOT PULL

  RED GRANITE, WI

  11:47 AM

  EXPERIENCE THE FUN

  OVERSIZED T-SHIRTS

  INSIDE OF THIS POEM THERE IS A ROCK AND THEN THERE IS ME

  AN EXTREMELY LONG NECK

  NERVOUS CREATURES

  CONGRATULATIONS, YOU OWN A LARGE ROUNDED STONE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA

  ideas to get rich (#1)

  A WOMAN WANTS WHAT A WOMAN WANTS

  The alarm goes off and I wake up

  to perform my critically acclaimed

  sentience in my morning posture

  I seek to achieve the impossible angles of a bird laying dead in the road—with its head and its wings folded down into the asphalt from the vantage point of a crane shot.

  To make direct eye contact

  with the camera is to move the perspective from

  the watched to the watcher or to present an emotion as a publicly observable signifier,

  a voyeuristic experience—

  The Feel Good Movie of the Year

  was my nickname in high school

  and as is cinematically compelling,

  I brush my teeth for the duration of sand

  moving from the top of the blue plastic hourglass

  to the bottom. “Look at this existence.

  This pathetic, fallible, wonderful body,”

  you can say rhetorically, sarcastically, or earnestly and still achieve death.

  Look at me falling in love with fallible bodies. Look at me performing emotional labor,

  my arms are strong enough

  to work a tract of land:

  The impatient man calls me

  a bitch at my place of work

  and the upward movement

  of my facial muscles causes

  my eyes to wrinkle, a smile.

  This is a method of intention setting.

  I seek a husband

  with broad shoulders and a symmetrical face, a hard worker, whose value is in the width

  of his chest. I do not want

  men that can teach me. There is nothing more that I want to know; free of want,

  I can’t use men in the same way

  that they can use me. “Give up

  on art and love,” you can say rhetorically, sarcastically, or earnestly and still achieve death. I wouldn’t be a good wife,

  but I would be a wife

  in a way that was cinematically compelling.

  In my dream last night

  there was a factory farm

  that performed full body castration;

  I went there

  to lay with the women who wanted

  to find a calm somewhere.

  I became a body

  and my sentience became someone else’s problem as I awoke thinking,

  “Where is my value?” as if I had misplaced my lipstick again.

  THEORETICAL VIOLENCE

  The sex can be rough

  to bring pleasure with

  choking & punching & the sloshing

  of liquids in the back of your throat

  to spit near my eye area. To reduce

  my suffering, you can take my own

  hands within yours

  to rub the spit into my eyes &

  into my mouth & you can kill me

  inside of your head as many times as you need, just to feel calm. Is anyone moved

  by the plainness of raw skin anymore?

  Where did this tenderness come from?

  To reduce your suffering,

  I will fill the inner lining of my stomach

  with bullets by ingesting them like pills

  until I sag heavy

  & full in your hands.

  The shifting of skin on skin

  sounds something like an underhanded truce. Like kissing in a trench with your fingers crossed behind your back. I listen

  as the radio plays a song about guns

  Just the sound of it—the gunshot

  But not an actual gunshot—a human voice mimicking the sound of a gunshot

  over a heavy beat.

  this image is a series of signals to your brain that allow you to access my guilt

  PEEK-A-BOO IS A GAME THAT INFANTS ENJOY BECAUSE THEY HAVE NOT DEVELOPED OBJECT PERMANENCE

  Waking alone in a room that doesn’t belong to me under a comforter that covers my entire body, even my head, I turn into myself. The heavy folds of sheets are disorienting.

  I can feel my bangs brushing against my face

  like an open palm,

  covering my eyes like that game

  that babies like to play to make the world disappear and then reappear

  and then fill with laughter. Where is the second body? Hahaha am I alone here?

  HOLLY GO LIGHTLY

  At the end of her shift, Juliana walked into the bathroom to check her bangs in the mirror. Her hands were damp and marked red from various casualties throughout the day: the spill of an entire flat of fruit cups on aisle 17, the errant paper cuts from unpacking card- board boxes, the sticky soap from a cracked bottle. In her exhaustion, she absentmindedly touched her bangs with her hands in a spastic sweeping motion across her brow, which now felt a little sticky. She imagined visible remnants from her day clinging to her hair. Juliana felt self-conscious. She felt self-conscious about her bangs. She felt self-conscious about her knees. She felt self-conscious about the fact that her name was Juliana. In 20 years she still hadn’t grown into it. Her name was a foreign language that she couldn’t quite say with the right accent.

  Juliana stood in front of the mirror and looked at her face. Her bangs were greasier than she would have liked but she thought that they looked OK.
They sat just above her eyebrows like a pair of flood pants. She felt her oversized and shapeless work-uniform crippled her, in terms of her looks, and reduced her potential for attractive- ness to a mere childlike cuteness. She looked down at her nametag that read, “JULIE” in bold red letters, as she was sure to emphasize to her supervisor that she went by Julie and not Juliana. For the first week of work she wore a nametag that said “Quanique” while she waited for a nametag of her own to arrive. Juliana was Quanique for a week. Being Quanique was very similar to being Juliana except that as Quanique, Juliana felt like she could be more absurd and sarcastic inside of her head. While doing tasks at work she would think, “Qua- nique for a week. Quanique FOREVER” while grinning.

  Although now, looking in the employee bathroom mirror, she was simply Juliana. She was Juliana Forever. She was Juliana for the en- tire rest of her life. The new girl that was recently hired was now Quanique on register 9. Oh, the lightness of being Quanique! When Juliana was Quanique, she was new; everything was absurd and sar- castic. Now that Juliana was just Juliana she had to come to terms with the reality of working for minimum wage. And the reality of working for minimum wage was that it was better than working for no wage but worse than other things.

  Juliana wanted to pee. She didn’t have to pee but she wanted to. (Don’t be vain. Don’t be so concerned with your looks, she thought.)

  She reasoned that it would be good if she at least tried, if she at least sat down. In vanity there is a certain confidence and self-assurance that is unattractive in a young girl and is met with every attempt to be suppressed immediately. Even when she was alone, Juliana behaved as if she was performing for an unknown, ever-present viewer who knew what she really went in the bathroom to do. (Look at her hair. Touch her face. Consider her attributes and watch a grin form across the face reflected back to her.) She inspected her grin in the mir- ror: crooked, but straight from a distance. She often received com- pliments on her teeth. People, strangers, would say, “Oh your teeth are so straight. Did you have braces?” Juliana would reply, “Yes, but I accidentally threw away my retainer on my 10th birthday so now they are crooked” and she would try to smile real wide to show the strangers her teeth. This made her mouth appear misplaced on her face, like it was her elbow or an ill-fitting cowboy hat.

  Sometimes she would look in the mirror and think, “Can I sell my- self? Would anyone buy me? Am I something worth having just to look at; like a coffee table book? Just to stand inside of a living room or on top of a fireplace like an arbitrary art thing from IKEA to point at and say, ‘Look at our good taste in arbitrary art things.’”

  Juliana’s favorite stall, if she was forced to choose something like a favorite stall, was located in the corner behind the main door to the bathroom. The door always appeared closed which made it diffi- cult to discern if someone was already inside or not and most people moved on to the next stall without bothering to check, leaving the thick roll of toilet paper untouched and minimal amounts of pee on the floor and toilet seat. It was a safe haven for those that wanted a place to sit. Juliana closed the stall door, pulled down her pants and put her ass to the toilet seat. Her ass settled onto the toilet seat, mak- ing a suctioning sound. Juliana sat on the toilet and watched the thin rivers of piss flow through the grout lines in the tiles. Juliana counted to 10 and then flushed the toilet. Juliana un-suctioned herself from the seat and pulled up her pants.

  When Juliana arrived home from work she took her MacBook into the bathroom, started the shower water and then started to undress. To Juliana, the bathroom was hers. She could sit on the toilet, doing nothing really, for hours and no one would bother her. In a family household the distinction between public and private space isn’t al- ways so clear. What was hers wasn’t really hers exclusively. But the bathroom seemed to be a safe territory, a neutral zone that would protect anyone that sought asylum there.

  Juliana took off her coat, her shirt and her bra. She was able to slide her pants over her thighs and back up again without unbuttoning them or unzipping them. “This is good,” she thought. Juliana opened up Photo Booth and started to take pictures of her shirtless body in front of the medicine cabinet mirror. She saw the tightness of her skin over her ribs. She saw scars across her stomach with unknown origins. Juliana saw her breasts. “Not big enough for... something,” she thought. She deleted all of the pictures immediately after view- ing them. She viewed her life as a TV show that no one watched, or that people watched but they were bored and she knew that the show certainly wouldn’t make it past the first season. Juliana imagined her funeral: a formless crowd of people in a trivial location, chatting amongst themselves, saying things like, “Oh thank God. Finally.”

  She stepped away from the mirror and thought, “Oh thank God. Fi- nally.”

  Juliana sat down on the toilet and started to idly look at blogs and websites. She noted the shallow dent underneath the Apple logo on her MacBook, fingering the depression like an open wound and laughing while her face contorted into an ugly, sad smile like it does when she remembers ugly, sad things. Juliana thought about the day that she dented her MacBook and her face became increasingly ugly as she smiled wider and crazier while sitting on the toilet. She had trouble thinking about the past. In the past she always seemed hap- pier. She didn’t understand how time could work like that. She didn’t understand how time could twist her face into an ugly, wild thing.

  The dent in Juliana’s MacBook appeared on the day when Adam and Juliana were laying down next to each other on Juliana’s bunk bed. Adam was on the inside, closest to the wall, and Juliana was on the outside. That night Juliana was on her period and Adam kept trying to finger her while they were watching “I Love You, Man” on Juli- ana’s MacBook. With her mouth full of Trix cereal Juliana said, “No. Not tonight,” while smiling. Adam leaned in to kiss Juliana. When the movie finished, Adam and Juliana sat in silence until Adam said, “Okay, I should go.” Juliana said, “No” and reached for the box of Trix. Juliana poured what was left of the Trix cereal on top of Adam’s head. Juliana and Adam spent the next thirty minutes eating Trix cereal off of Juliana’s sheets while laughing. After thirty minutes had passed Juliana said, “Okay, you can leave but since you’re on the inside let’s just barrel-roll over each other. Kind of like spies.” David grinned and said, “Okay. On the count of three. You’re obviously go- ing over.”

  One (1)

  Two (2)

  Three (3)

  Juliana went over, Adam went under, and Juliana’s MacBook fell ap- proximately seven feet to the ground. It hit the ground like a dead thing and bounced. Juliana felt like she didn’t care about her Mac- Book and she laughed. She kissed Adam and wanted to have sex with him but Juliana was on her period and her roommate was on the bottom bunk the entire time.

  Later on that night Adam called Juliana and said, “Come over, I have a surprise for you.” Juliana biked over to Adam’s apartment and found David standing in the doorway with a travel sized bottle lube much like an outdoor cat with a dead squirrel in its mouth, proud and tentative as it presented its gift. The laugh track plays.

  “Since you’re on your period do you want to have anal sex?” Adam grinned and Juliana stared at her feet trying to compose her face into an appropriate reaction. Juliana considered her feet. “Sure. What- ever. Whatever you want,” Juliana said as she picked up her face to smile in a way that looked adventurous. Girls always have to look adventurous when propositioned with things like this.

  Juliana used her MacBook approximately 16 hours a day so she thought about that story a lot. She memorized it. Edited. Highlighted details. Treating the story, along with every other sensory experi- ence, like a third grade science experiment; naïve, at first, followed by a hopeful diligence for the desired reaction. Which object floats and which sinks in water? What separates from the oil? Juliana tried to make sense of the past year. Trying to bring it closer to the truth, or possibly further, so that when she sat in the overstuffed chair in her therapist�
�s office and these words fell out of her mouth, her therapist would laugh instead of something worse. So that her therapist could see the lightheartedness and comfortable sweetness that possibly outweighed the manipulation and Juliana’s desire to be wanted. Her therapist didn’t see this. She prescribed Juliana Klonopin, Lexapro, and Lamotrigine. Juliana put the story back in the water.

  On the toilet, Juliana opened up Omegle in a tab in Safari. “You are now chatting with a stranger. Say hello. You both like [sex].” On some level Juliana didn’t even like sex. On some level—one of the infinite levels that her consciousness seemed to obscure or elucidate, rather vindictively, she thought, ‘at random,’ causing her face to twist in discomfort at the memory of her skin being touched by another person, while she enjoyed feeling a great sadness for herself when her consciousness did choose to partially reveal how she felt about her skin being touched by another person—the act was simply a 10- 45 minute relief where she didn’t have to talk so much, especially if she was being choked.

  She constructed herself as the modern tragic figure who would sacri- fice herself for whatever.

  Only once had she allowed a guy to go down on her. (Go down on her. Perform oral sex. She didn’t know which term to use; one seemed to be too crude while the other seemed to be giving too much credit.) He attempted to go down on her for almost an hour and when that didn’t prove profitable he drove Juliana home in silence. As they were driv- ing, Juliana’s body curled, wet, and uncomfortable, he looked down at her and said, in a matter of fact tone: