xoxo

poems and a story

elle jay roe

table of contents 1|listening to ambient music in an empty dorm room 2|why do you actively dwell on things that make you miserable 3|thank you for inviting me to spend thanksgiving with your family 4|poem for a girl 5|doctors who smoke 6|men of god 7|my bathroom mirror is covered with cardboard 8|i want to break my hand by punching a piano 9|every morning i feed my fish four pellets of fish food 10|i am probably way better at vacuuming than you are 12|what would happen if you were a non-sentient being and i was god? 13|conversation is a mcdonalds drive through window 14|the plight of the late cretaceous -brief intermission- 15|honest graduation story Copyright © 2014 Elle Jay Roe All rights reserved Cover Photo: https://flic.kr/p/4Q7BYk

listening to ambient music in an empty dorm room maybe if the drawers were filled or mattress covered in crisp clean sheets things would be less lonely or if the people were not filing out en masse like a great exodus or migration now sitting alone in the center of this empty room a steady hum of people packing makes me think about the tide

1

why do you actively dwell on things that make you miserable that night i saw a girl in lightened dress

in citys dark she stood under a light her face unseen the lamp downcast fluoresce

like golden halos flooding darkness smite

she held out roses several in her hand

and twisting stems like strings within her grasp

her face held low like guilt from gods demand

to vend her flowers products in her clasp

i walked to her and bought one red ornate

then questioned for her motives and her name

she smiled with her eyes i know its late

but he alone controls what i disclaim

since then i havent bothered to decide

to call it faith or name it suicide

2

thank you for inviting me to spend thanksgiving with your family i spent most of the bus ride

wishing the sky was dark around us and invisible

i talked about street lamps i talked about street lamps and loneliness you talked about your family and your friends i talked about shawarma and coffee

you talked about your dad and your old school i asked about your life

you asked about my life

i smiled and looked out the window and thought about dying have you tried these mints? these mints are really powerful i got these mints from my japanese friend

these are really powerful japanese mints look at me

look at me bringing heartbreak into everything

3

poem for a girl it was cold and you were beautiful i wore a silver white jacket and we were in the city

we walked along the river and you held on to my arm

you liked me a lot then or maybe even loved me

you put your head on my shoulder while we walked and looked at the ground

“everything is so interesting with you

with you nothing else seems like it matters”

i grinned and looked at the sky we took the subway three times that day

the first time we took it in to m.i.t. the second time we took it to the common the third time i took it home and i never saw you again

4

doctors who smoke

consider this! an alcoholic's drink- (acquired through his habits on the streets) a drunken man stops not to pause nor think, but drink alone, and in (t)his lonesome weep. but children! in their lives do contemplate: "if i don't study, i will fail this test." the factors in their lives do aggregate: "my actions in their outcomes manifest." then why? in direct moves we choose to take, are mistakes chosen- poor decisions made? we know the right, and left without eve's snake decisions poor in nature still pervade. it seems we in our chaos do forget, like doctors tending to their cigarettes.

5

men of god

the lord the devil sailed to the ocean

where my body lay floating

and held me under for the world to notice

my wanting of the river like the ocean was my body to be the plow that broke the plains

this alone man remains

6

my bathroom mirror is covered with cardboard the mirror of my bathroom is covered with cardboard

from various cases of energy drinks duct taped to the edges of the frame

when i brush my teeth i look at the cardboard

i look at the cardboard and say, “here comes another day,”

and there it goes i want to avoid mirrors for a long time

i want to avoid mirrors and never look at my reflection

then, after a long time, i want to find a mirror and look into it and say, “look at me

look at all of those days”

7

i want to break my hand by punching a piano i want to practice piano for six hours a day

and get frustrated at myself when i cant play a passage correctly

i want to shout at myself and feel angry

i want to pound on the keys and feel real rage and slam down the piano lid and scream

i want to punch the piano really hard

i want to punch the piano so hard that i break my hand

i want groups of girls to look at me and whisper—

“thats the guy who broke his hand by punching a piano”

i want the other girls to gasp and say things like

“why did he do that” and “jesus”

i want to make a slow recovery and practice with one hand

i want to give my senior recital with one hand

then bow and say “thank you for coming to my recital”

then walk away with one hand in a sling and one hand at my side

8

every morning i feed my fish four pellets of fish food every morning i feed my betta fish four pellets of betta fish food

i feed my fish and i look at him while he swims to the top of the tank and eats the fish food

he doesnt mind that i feed him the same thing every day

he doesnt mind that i only feed him the cheaper brand fish food

he eats the fish food

and then swims around the tank in circles sometimes i imagine this is his morning exercise

he seems like a good fish

well-mannered and disciplined

heart-healthy and hardworking

he never misbehaves he has never tried to leap out of his tank

if a fish can do it then so can i if a fish can do it then so can i

9

i am probably way better at vacuuming than you are stop me when you can relate/empathize to one of these statements: i make cups of tea even though i dont really like tea

and know that ill take one sip then wash the rest down the sink

i realize if i sit down in front of a computer im going to look at things on amazon and youtube and not get any work done but i still try to do homework in front of the computer anyways

i put on music to fall asleep to because it seems like a cool and romantic idea but the music makes it really hard to fall asleep and i dont turn it off because that would ruin the sentimentality of falling asleep to music, even if its really annoying in reality

i resolve to be really productive and sit down and do three minutes of solid work then stand up and take a nap then spend the rest of the day feeling terrible for failing myself

when its autumn i buy starbucks pumpkin spice latte and drink it while walking around listening to acoustic guitar music

10

i vacuum the entire house (basement kitchen living room bedroom) in record time and feel amazing while doing it

if the only thing separating each of us is how good

one of us is at vacuuming maybe there really isnt that much separating us

11

what would happen if you were a non-sentient being and i was god? today at walmart i bought a cactus i brought the cactus home and put it on my bookshelf then i moved it to my windowsill then i moved it to my desk i took a sticky note and drew a speech bubble in the speech bubble i wrote “what purpose do i have in your life?” i stuck it on the wall beside the cactus then i smiled and left the room

12

conversation is a mcdonalds drive through window when i talk to someone it feels like going through a mcdonalds drive-through in reverse

first i go home and make a burger then i drive to whole foods and buy a soda

then i drive to the mcdonalds drive-through pickup window then i hand someone my food

they will probably give me a strange look and ask what i am doing

then i put the car in reverse and pull up to the ordering window

then i place an order for a burger and a soda

then i reverse the car all the way out of the parking lot and back onto the highway

and drive home thinking about all the sandwiches i hadnt eaten

13

the plight of the late cretaceous the velociraptor is a very misunderstood dinosaur it was small if it stretched its neck up it could only nibble at your thigh it had feathers but it probably couldnt fly its hooked claw was probably used to pierce the neck and not slash through the stomach i am listening to guitar music while writing this poem imagine if you will a velociraptor playing the guitar a velociraptor singing and playing the guitar now the velociraptor has no feathers and is no longer small now the velociraptor uses its claw to slash through stomachs because in your head thats what a velociraptor looks like

14

honest graduation story

Graduation day itself started off without fireworks in the most New England graduation day you can think of, the kind you see in Home and Garden magazines or something. We had these burgundy robes and hats with golden tassels that made us look real official, and nobody looks good with graduation hats so I didn’t put any effort into decorating mine or anything the way some kids liked to. Being an arts school some kids really went all out on them. One kid had a cow on top of their hat. It was ridiculous, it really was. We had to stand together as a class and parents could take lots of photographs. Mine weren’t there, thankfully. I really wished that they weren’t. They said they’d be at the church, where the ceremony took place, but they wouldn’t be at the beginning. I’ve never felt comfortable in photographs, is all.

There was one girl that I wanted to talk to, Alysha. She was a dancer who had this body that made other girls jealous and boys hold textbooks in front of themselves when they walked and a personality that teetered between keenly self-aware and vapid but she was someone that made eye contact

15

with me a lot and we flirted back-and-forth all year though nothing ever happened between us. I just found her interesting. If you grow up with a certain kind of body you look at things differently, like your personal image projects itself across all interactions, and it seemed like she was someone who understood this rather than took it for granted. I like doing little things like giving someone a note with some life lesson or limerick on it before leaving them for good or writing down some optimistic message on post-it notes and sticking them someplace hidden or leaving lyrics and quotations on chalk boards so I pull her aside from her group of friends who give her a look like “It’s now or never” which made me grin, and we walk around campus for a few moments and I tell her, “We both know there were things between us, and I wish I had the time to have gotten to know you better through the year, but the way you’re headed, you’re going to great places. Keep up what you’re doing and make sure to get some for me next year.” And she gives me this smile like she was waiting to hear something like that all year no matter how cheesy it would sound and then we walk back and I go to find Nobuo. I really like doing small things like that; I’m not good at saying goodbye, so I always try to do things like that before leaving anything.

16

There isn’t much to say about the ceremony itself and it would be pretty banal of me to go through all the intricacies and details of it, and really no point either. What follows is just the bullet points of the whole thing, because what’s really important happened afterwards. We had to walk down to this church in town that was pretty huge; all the parents sat in the balcony and the students filled up the lower level. We sat in pews and had this whole choreographed motion of standing together and turning and walking to receive our diplomas. We even practiced it a few times, too. The weather seemed heavily tilted in our favor, what with the extreme amounts of sunlight; it did make the church pretty warm, but that could’ve been our excitement. I felt pretty good about my speech, it seemed to go over well; what I wrote about was the importance of pursuing the liberal arts, even if you aren’t going to do it for money and all. I felt pretty passionate about that sort of thing, and I really tried to write it for kids that hated types of things like graduation speeches. The way I see it, those are the only kids that really need the thing. Otherwise you’re just speaking to a group of people who already know and agree with what you’re saying, and then it’s no longer anything didactic, it’s just a rally.

17

The whole ordeal took too long but everyone was pretty enthusiastic, I guess on account of graduating, which I suppose is a pretty big deal. When the ceremony ended the students all rushed outside, you should’ve seen us. I’ve never seen a louder and happier group of kids. It made me grin, it really did, to be in the middle of that clump. I threw my hat up and everything, if I saw myself now I’d probably want to punch something, but I did it. My family met me outside and I took a few photos with them but they left pretty quickly and I told them that I’d probably be sticking around for a while. I caught up with Nobuo and I walked with him to this gas station nearby where we bought cheap cigars. I’m not one for smoking, but I was riding a pretty big high and I wanted to do every cheesy thing that I had always hated; I guess I felt old and therefore worthy to partake. If you told me at sixteen that I’d be throwing my hat up and smoking cigars at graduation I wouldn’t have believed you for the world, I really wouldn’t have. I was pretty rotten back then, honest. Nobuo and I got a kick out of being able to smoke, too- our school has pretty strict policies around smoking, which makes sense, but we were graduates, so we could do whatever we wanted. It sounds juvenile, but after two years of following the same

18

rules every day it felt good to be able to break them without any trepidations of consequence.

So we’re walking back to campus together with our cigars and we put our arms around each other and I’m still not feeling very emotional about this whole thing; I mean, I had this creeping thought in the back of my head that pretty soon I was liable to start feeling very down and sad about leaving. I really can’t deal with leaving, if there’s one thing that I can’t deal with. When I left my summer music festival last year I spent the last night alone in the practice rooms and I guess I sort of lost it. I went room to room and I played on every last piano and then I ran through the halls screaming my head off. Then, what I did was, I went to one of the practice rooms with a nice grand in it and I played the aria to Bach’s Goldberg Variations. That’s a piece you should listen to. I always like to do that, play that aria before leaving anywhere. The way the Variations are formatted, you play the aria first, and then 30 variations all on that aria, and then after those 30 variations, which takes damn near an hour to play through, you return and play the aria again, note-for-note. It makes me cry, to be honest.

Anyways, when we get back to campus we stub out our cigars and there’s this big tent set up

19

with food and everything, so we go and grab some cans of soda, and since we’re cool and all we obviously can’t eat under the tent with everyone. I do see Alysha again and I give her this look and she gives me a look and then I smile, meanwhile Nobuo runs to his dorm nearby to grab a soccer ball and we find Noah and Noel and we go to the field to just kick the ball around a bit. All the while around us kids are with their parents going to their dorms and moving stuff into cars or just walking around the campus in packs laughing and grinning wildly and hugging each other. A few of them were crying, and we just stay there right in the middle of it kicking around that damn soccer ball. I don’t know what to make of that, I really don’t.

Looking back, maybe it’s just we had some sort of camaraderie in that none of our parents were there. All of us seemed to have some sort of issue with our parents, fathers especially. The dynamics of a father-son relationship are something I still don’t understand, and it’s the most fragile connection I can come up with, both in fantasy and reality. None of us are real close with our parents, but I’m sure our parents all cared about us; why else would we all be here. Still, there was this unspoken rule between us that parents stayed out of our pictures, that we’d

20

handle parental issues alone, that fathers were generally assholes, and that whatever abuse came out of that was necessary, because we all probably deserved it to a degree. This one time we were sitting in the field, and Noah gets this call, so he gets up and starts pacing around, and the rest of us are all joking and we can’t hear what he’s saying, and after a bit he just throws his phone down and starts screaming these expletives and rattles off a list of words that shouldn’t be recorded. He’s not done either, he picks up his phone and he throws it down again, and we look at each other like, “Yeah, this has to be his dad,” and we ignore it for a bit, and after a while Noah’s phone is shattered into pieces scattered across the ground and he walks back to us sniffing a little and sits down, and we just continue messing around like nothing happened. To be honest, what I did was, after they all left, I went and picked up all the pieces of his phone. I get pretty sentimental over things like that. I still have all the pieces, too. They’re on top of my bookcase.

We kick around the soccer ball for a long time and we’re all laughing, and then we all go back into the dorm together, and Noah goes to his room to finish packing on account of he was leaving the earliest, and Nobuo and I go up to Noel’s room just

21

to hang out more. I don’t think any of us wanted to be alone that day; Noel had things everywhere, the room was a real mess, but he wasn’t leaving for another day, so he had an excuse. On his desk were a few pill bottles on account of the school having to get rid of all the student medication that they brought; understandably, students couldn’t keep it in their own rooms. I’m still on this adrenaline rush so I ask Noel if I can take any of his Adderall, and he goes over and hands me three of them and tells me not to take them all at once, and hits my back a little. I put two in my pocket and I swallow one of them and then I tell them that I’d be at the porch eating food.

When I walk out of the dorm I pass Noah’s room, and I knock on the door and open it, and the entire thing is empty. I sort of stood there for a moment just looking at the place, and I don’t really feel anything. Then I close the door and I sit down at his desk and I’m just opening and closing drawers, trying to find something, anything that was indicative that he ever lived there at all, and I open his desk drawer, and someone had written in it, “I fell in love with the best person this year and I’m the happiest I’ve ever been and I don’t think anyone has loved like we love.” I knew it wasn’t him, the handwriting was too girlish, probably from another year before this

22

dorm was converted to a boys’ dorm, and his handwriting looked nothing similar, but I still got a kick out of it. Then I just stood and opened his door and closed it and walked out of the dorm.

The porch is a part of the Eliot dormitory, a girls dorm. The way the building is set up, there’s a big porch that stretches around an entire side of it, and at one end of the porch is an entrance to the dorms and a door which leads directly into the recital hall, and on the other end is the entrance to the dining hall, so I grab some sandwiches from the tent and sit on the porch, and I start seeing other friends that are leaving, not close friends or anything, but friends, and I get this urge to do something for them before they go, so now I’m just helping people move their luggage into backs of cars and hugging them and watching them drive away. Still, even now, I’m not feeling much of anything, I’m just feeling happy. I guess I knew that things were ending, but I couldn’t really internalize it yet or believe it myself, so I just sit on the porch eating my sandwiches and drinking my Coke. After a bit I see Elise at the other end of the porch, and she walks over and asks if I want to meet her parents, so I go and say hello, and then she asks if I have any cigars left, and I check and tell her I have two, and she asks her parents if it’d be okay if she

23

went downtown with me to smoke a cigar. They were pretty casual people, and I think they knew it was a one-time thing, so they let her go. Throughout the year I must’ve talked to damn near everyone on campus at least once. I’m pretty outgoing like that. For every male friend I had I must’ve had two female, but that’s more indicative of the ratio of girls-to-guys at an arts school than much else. Elise was part of this friend circle that included Teal and Kelli, and by association I was also pretty close with Teal, and not so much with Kelli, but we still got along, we just didn’t talk much. Sam was the only other guy that I felt very close to; he was the most eccentric person I knew. I mean that genuinely. A lot of the time strange people aren’t strange when compared to other strange people, they share habits and mannerisms, but not Sam. Sam lived in the biggest dorm room on campus with a fireplace that wasn’t in use, which he gracefully turned into the dirtiest dorm room on campus, the dirtiest room I’ve ever set foot in, I swear. I think he once said that he found a mouse that had been living off of his banana peels in the corner of the room, or something, but there was a certain charm in that.

Anyways, I’m walking with Elise downtown now and we light our cigars and I’m starting to feel

24

the Adderall kicking in, so now I’m talking even faster than usual, and pretty soon I’m talking non-stop, and I feel this surge of emotion. For the entire year at school I was pretty damn focused on my work, I mean, I still had fun flirting around and hanging out, but most of my time was just spent in those damn practice rooms trying to get repertoire into my fingers, and when you couple that with my mindset of “Only you can solve your problems,” it meant that I really didn’t tell anyone anything personal. But now I’m walking with Elise and we decide to sit by the train station that students take into the city and I just keep talking like a hermit who’s just seen someone for the first time in a decade, I mean it. I’m telling her everything, I’m telling her about losing sleep over anxiety of the future, I’m telling her about how I felt like shit a lot of the time but kept up with my positivity spiel, I told her about meeting Ariane, I told her about taking Noel’s Adderall because I wanted to maintain this high, I told her my inability to seem anything other than happy, and we sit at that subway station for what must’ve been an hour or so and we’re both just spilling our feelings like starved melodramatic teenagers. It felt good, being able to do that, it really did; I can see why people talk about their feelings.

25

When we finally head back we go up to the dorms and we go into Kelli and Teal’s double room and we help Teal pack. I don’t know why I did it, I guess I just wanted to keep myself busy so I wouldn’t have to think about other things. I do have to say a few things about Teal, just that we got close over the year because we both felt comfortable talking about anything, myself moreso than she, but it was close. I know she had some emotional things but she never brought that up with me, probably because she knew I wasn’t the person you went to, to talk about your problems. I appreciated that. So we help Teal finish packing, which was just a mess. If you think guys are messy, you should see girls dorms, that’s the real nightmare. I mean, it couldn’t compare to Sam, but I’m not even sure you could even consider Sam human. We finish packing Teal’s things and load it into her car and we promise to see each other all again and pretty soon after that she’s gone on her way to her house up in Maine.

Now the three of us, Kelli, Elise, and I, are standing outside, and I ask them if they’ve got anything pressing, and they all shake their head, and I ask if they want to mess around on the piano some, which they agree to, and we turn to go into the hall when I see Sam walking down the walk to his dorm,

26

and I call out his name. Before concerts I always liked to go into Sam’s room; he had this soap that he had me use that smelled like lavender. We would sit in his room and listen to music sometimes; he had this habit of asking if I was bored, it really affected me that he’d care about something like that. I call out his name and he looks up at me with this crazed look in his eyes like he was just startled and I laugh because I’ve just pulled him out of his world and I shout, “Give me one of your shirts.” Sam looks at me a moment and says, “George, I would, but my parents are here and all of my clothes are already in boxes.” “Then give me the one you’re wearing now.” Sam takes a second to look around and now all of us are laughing and he unbuttons his shirt, this brown plaid one, and he hands it to me, and he says, “This better be worth it.” and then he’s gone, too. I have a thing for keeping things from people; it feels good just to remember them by. I’m wearing that shirt right now, to be honest.

The three of us are in the recital hall now; Kelli sits next to Elise and I go and prop open the door of the hall and lift all the windows up so there’s sunlight streaming into the place reflecting across all the surfaces and it looks like inside everything is a warm glowing orb of light. I sit at the piano and start

27

playing songs, and pretty soon other kids pass by to listen for a few moments and I play some pop songs for them and we sing along together. Eventually Elise’s parents come in and they talk to Elise for a few moments and Elise comes back and asks if I’m busy for the rest of the day, that Elise’s family was planning on taking Kelli and her mother out to dinner in Boston, and if I wanted to tag along. I really did, at this point I just didn’t want the day to end, and any action that would prolong it I was on board for, so I tell them yes, and then Kelli and Elise tell me they need to go up to their rooms to finish cleaning some stuff, and they leave the hall, and now it’s just me on the piano.

It was probably some combination of the Adderall high and the steady rush of adrenaline throughout the day but I spent the next couple of hours in that hall just playing. I didn’t have any piece in mind, I just went through my repertoire, starting with Liszt and moving to Schubert and then Bach. I guess in my head I hoped that someone was listening, but it really didn’t matter, what mattered was that I needed to play. There are only a handful of times where it genuinely happens but sometimes when you’re playing you get so entranced in the sounds and emotions fluctuating out into the air that you forget

28

about everything else and you lose sight of yourself as a human; you’re no longer there, it’s just sounds, and it’s the feeling behind the sound that you become lost in. I think it only happens when you’re physically alone, but you’re close enough to civilization where there’s a chance that you’re being watched, like some benevolent voyeur or eavesdropper paying attention to what you’re playing, only you’re not sure whether or not they’re actually there; it’s this whisper of a thought that drives your playing, the knowledge that you’re playing to some unknown entity who’s there to genuinely listen to what you’re doing, and for no other reason besides that.

At the end of that time I was sweating pretty profusely onto the keys and after I stopped playing I became aware of the sounds of children playing in the field beyond one of the windows. That gave me comfort; I like kids, I really do, and it sort of eased me back into consciousness and the world from my state of momentary ecstasy. When I walked out to the porch there were a few teachers standing some meters away talking in a group while idly looking at their kids jumping around and talking about dinosaurs, and I go over to them and kneel down and ask their favorite species. “Which is it? Velociraptor, pteranodon, hypsilophodon, parasaurolophus? I know them all!”

29

and they jumped around me grinning and yelling. “Velociraptor had a claw almost four inches long,” I told them, standing, then grinning at the teachers and lifting my hands above my head and yelling, “I love kids!”

While walking to Nobuo’s dorm I open my phone and send a message to Kelli and Elise telling them that I’d be up in around half an hour, and that I needed to say goodbye to some people first. I go upstairs and Nobuo’s up there fitting final things into his suitcases and I sit on his bed and fiddle with my glasses. Then he does something, he goes over to his bureau and he takes this bullet shell casing, and he walks over to me very dramatically and hands it over with both hands and says, “This is for you.” And I take it grinning. “That’s from when I went to a shooting range over spring break,” he tells me. I pocket it and then help him bring his bags downstairs to the curb and we wait for a family friend to pick him up. I really needed that from him, honest. We stand there together waiting, and I ask him what he’s going to do over the summer. “I’m not sure,” he says. “I’m traveling to France for some time. I’ll see family.” “And then you’re back in Boston for school.” “For now. I might transfer next year.”

30

We stand there for a second taking in small talk and then he asks, “How is Ariane?” “She’s not at all like any other girl,” I tell him. “I’m honest, I really want this to work.” “What, have you slept with her already?” I grin. “No, no, I’m not even thinking about that right now.” “So you really like this girl." I nod. “You know Maddy, from this year?” he asks. “Shit yeah, she’s got a nice ass.” “We went out to dinner earlier this week, just downtown.” I look at him sort of sideways and start grinning now uncontrollably. “I knew you had a thing for her all goddamn year.” “Yeah, well we finally went to dinner, and I think she likes me back.” “Where is she going to college?” “Not here, another state.” “But you do like her.” “I don’t know, man. I really think I do, like, she really seems like a nice girl. You don’t meet a lot of nice girls.” “No, no you don’t,” and then I look at Nobuo and I

31

hug him and I start crying. He pats my back sarcastically and makes the sound girls make when they see a cute kitten or something and he goes, “Don’t worry, I’ll have to get my ass up to Montreal and we can go to a strip club or something together,” and that only makes the crying worse. I’m not an outwardly emotional person, I’m really not. I don’t think I’ve ever cried in front of another person before, but this was different. I really did care about Nobuo. There was something between us, like an understanding that we went through a lot of the same problems growing up, and shared a lot of the same ambitions. Even if we didn’t talk as often as Calvin or Sam I felt closer to him. This one time I was walking with Sam back from the practice rooms and he goes, “Who do you like better, Calvin or Nobuo?” and then he stops for a few moments and says, “Wait, no, I know the answer to that,” and smiles his fox-like smile and I know we both knew the answer. It’s not really that I liked Nobuo better. I just felt closer to him. Nobuo gets in the car and he leaves and I shout after him that he’d better not have too much fun in Paris without me and that was it.

I knew I needed to say goodbye to some teachers, too, so I walk to Ms. Koppels apartment and I knock on her door, and she tells me to come in,

32

shouting from the kitchen or something. She has two sons and there was this little kiddie fence that I had to step over and she walks into view and says, “Hello.” Just hello, nothing unnecessary. I appreciated that. I say hello back, and then we just stare at each other for some time and then we both move in for a hug simultaneously and the tears are back now. I really don’t know what was going through my head, if anything, and even worse, after a second, I hear her sniff a little and when we pull away she’s wiping something out of her eyes too. I smile a little and I gesture towards a pullup bar installed in one of the doorways, and I say, “For you?” “More for the husband. It’s hard keeping up with athleticism after just having a baby.” We both share a small laugh. “You know, I always thought,” and I gesture, moving my hand back and forth gesticulating between us, “I always knew there was something between us, like, you never got into my business even if you knew there was something wrong.” “Yeah, but you seemed to have things pretty in control,” she says. “You know I’ll be back, right?” “Montreal isn’t too far.” “And you need someone to harass you in class again,

33

too.” She laughed and let out one of her characteristic “Oh jeez” sighs. “Hopefully not too soon, then,” she says. And I smile a slight smile and say goodbye, and step back over the kiddie fence, and then I start walking to Mr. Stumpf’s apartment, silently looking forward to seeing him again, and silently hoping that I wouldn’t start crying. It wouldn’t feel right for him to see me crying. He would understand and all, I just didn’t want to seem like I was some emotional guy. He’d probably seen that from my writing, and I enjoyed the dichotomy of writing emotionally but appearing pretty nonchalant. His wife was in the living room when I stepped in, and the first thing she says is, “I really enjoyed your speech. We were talking about it amongst the faculty and they seemed to enjoy it too. Are you looking for Mr. Stumpf?” and I’m so dumbfounded by this that I sort of stammer when I say yes, and she calls out for him, and it was the cutest thing because he was in the bedroom and he yells out “Just a minute,” so I stand there staring at one of his kids until he steps out. “George!” “Hello.” I made emphasis on a rising inflection at the end of the word. It was something I always did with him, like some personal regular greeting we always

34

gave each other, always in the same tone of voice. “So you’ll be going to—” “McGill” “McGill, next year. Montreal. Big city.” I smile at him. “Hopefully we can keep in touch?” “Yeah definitely.” He flowed these two words together as if there was no space between them. “And keep sending me your writing.” He wished me luck, and that was the end of it. While walking out of the hall I found one of his kid’s sketching notebook, and I crouch down and I draw a picture of a hamster, and I sign my name. It made me feel alright, knowing that he’d soon find the drawing and smile to himself, or maybe he’d just look at it and remember me in his head for a moment and move on to whatever else he was doing. It didn’t matter so long as he didn’t forget about me.

By now it had gotten treacherously close to my half-an-hour window I allotted myself, so I walk back to Eliot Hall and I take the steps up two at a time and I step into Kelli’s room and ask her about dinner plans. The sun was beginning to shift into its darker pumpkin shade of setting, slowly falling down from its apex like a slow-moving spotlight eager to touch everything it could see and let them acknowledge its departure. Kelli said that Elise would

35

leave first with her family and drive into the city and that we’d follow behind them, her brother also accompanying, probably driving our party. The whole thing felt very surreal; I really wasn’t social outside of talking to people in the dining hall or the practice rooms, and I had only gone out with friends a handful of times in the two years I’ve been at the school. In a way this dinner really was a way to hold more sour emotions at bay, and I recognized this a sort of futility in knowing that the emotions would hit me in one way or the other. The Adderall was still in full-force, and coupled with the few instances of crying, my head felt all out of whack, and I was pretty emotionally spent. Still, to be honest, I knew I still had the capacity to feel pretty depressed about this whole thing, so I was very thankful when we got into Kelli’s car, her brother indeed driving, her mother in the passenger seat, the two of us in the back. Her brother drove pretty recklessly, which I loved; he wasn’t very familiar with the city either, so it was understandable, but I got a real kick out of his questionable turning and the even more questionable directions, remedied with finally switching on the GPS of his phone.

The real kicker was finding a place to park, which took practically as long as driving there, I swear to god. We had a helluva time just driving around in

36

circles looking for a parking garage, which seemed to apparate up out of the ground. We were in the Italian district, where the streets are too thin to accommodate American cars, and the restaurants too densely packed together to abide an empty stomach. We ate on the balcony, overlooking the street, with a view of the city, and, close by, this clocktower. I kept looking at the clocktower, not because I wasn’t interested in the conversation, I really was! Elise’s dad was an oil man and the entire table was real friendly and all, especially after a few bottles of red wine, but all the while I kept craning my neck to the side and staring at this clocktower. Its stones were pale yellow and it was a magnificent structure, really, standing higher than any of its adjacent buildings. It made no sound when the hours shifted from eight to nine to ten, and with the sun it illuminated soft orange then shimmering gold. When I finished my plate I stood and paced over to the window and stood hanging half over the balcony, just to look at the view, not to screw around or anything. Below I could see people in packs and swaths of color walking and running through sidewalks and streets holding hands or trailing in lines; it felt really naked, if you know what I mean by that, it seemed very real, like, everyone I saw

37

wanted to be where they were, and they were all there for a reason.

The most perfect thing happened after that and if I told you you really wouldn’t believe me, I just know it, but you have to try and stay with me. Kelli had gone to use the bathroom and when she came back up she had this distraught look on her face, and she goes, “I lost one of my rings down the sink.” And we all look at her, and she says, “No, don’t worry, it’s still here, the pipe is bent at the bottom so it has to still be down there, I just can’t get it open.” So I stand, and I go downstairs with her mother and together we ask the manager to help us get the damn sink drain pipe open, and at first they tell us that we’d have to wait until closing, only we were pretty belligerent and all, so they finally agree to have someone go down there and open the thing up. It really wasn’t difficult, I kept saying that I’d be able to myself, but nobody would hear it. So now three of us, Kelli, her mother, myself, are crowded in the little area outside of the women’s bathroom waiting for this guy to unscrew the bottom of the sink, and he finally does it, and the ring falls out and he hands it to Kelli who rinses it off, and then we head back upstairs.

I mean, retelling the damn story now I have to

38

admit it doesn’t sound especially miraculous or anything, but it felt like an embrace or a wink from the world or something, just a small act from a higher force to help prolong the night in whatever way possible, and I mean it. It really did feel that way, honest. We finish dinner and we step outside, and it seems like the world is still giving me a pat on the back or whispering something in my ear because Kelli and Elise both attain this sudden urge for coffee, and they’re telling the parents now, each of them grabbing one of my arms, that we must get coffee, that we had to find a coffee shop, and now we’re running down the road the three of us shouting at people in our way until we stumble into a very indie-seeming cafe and I very dramatically let the people inside exit first, with a huge bow and a “Please, after you,” and we enter the place laughing and order various espresso-based beverages and sit at a table and wait for the rest of their families to stream in and slowly order pastries and sit around us.

The shop had this glow, you see. Everything in the shop was cream colored save the metallic espresso machine itself and various utensils, and with the amber lighting the aura spilled out onto the street a haven or womb. A little after eleven we collectively agree to make our way back to the parking garage,

39

and now that we’re all more than thoroughly caffeinated and more than half of us more than a little drunk, we half-stumble, half-sprint our way back to the cars, designating drivers who hadn’t imbibed, and we separate, Elise again departing first, then us, back to campus. With the sun now dearly departed and the night setting in the city held a different feeling, like a sigh after excitement, or the sudden reality of silence after the steady hum of some machine ceases; Kelli and I sat the entire ride in silence each of us staring out at the moving scenery, her mother occasionally making small talk, and I call my own to let her know I’d be back on campus soon and would need her to come and pick me up. There was some song playing on the radio that I knew, some acoustic song I couldn’t place from a moment in my past.

When we got back to campus Kelli and I stepped out of the car and I thanked her mother and brother for the ride, and Kelli walks to the dorm while I make my way to the parking lot where my mother was waiting; in that insignificant distance from myself and the dorm I turn my head and see Kelli and Elise standing in the doorway under the singular porch light, the sole light illuminated outside that dorm, Elise calling out to me, “Aren’t you going to say goodbye?” and I have to freeze, because a part

40

of me wanted to run over and give each of them a hug and tell them how significant this day was, how its climaxes and ecstasy coupled simultaneously with its desperate nostalgia and beckoning morosity like two trains running on top of each other on the same set of tracks, and the inexplicable claustrophobic sensation of feeling both the happiest I’ve ever been while experiencing a significant loss of finally moving on from one chapter of my life and flipping the pages into the next, but I make no motion towards them, I just stand there alone a lone outline in the shadows of night looking at these two archangels under their halo, and the blackness around me no longer feels heavy or cloaking, it feels inverted, like all around me is a light that burned so brightly I could feel it scalding the inches of my exposed skin, and I shout, “No, because this isn’t goodbye,” and I turn and walk to my car.

41

elle jay roe has been alive since he was born and will continue to respirate until he dies. elle enjoys eating boxed sushi and thinking about love. in his free time he complains about chopin. elle would like to remind you that you may contact him at: high.fashion.mood.music[at]gmail[dot]com for purposes of: (1) sharing a subway ride (2) discussion of topics not pertaining to politics, religion, or anything "remotely controversial" (3) being his one friend elle currently attends mcgill university he studies piano performance and neuroscience and his apartment is almost certainly better than yours. tru blu Originally published in 2014 on http://www.georgeteng.com