Meat Hook pt. 4

It'd been two weeks since I'd last seen Chelsea, quite a bit of time since we'd see each other at class normally, but she'd been sick, or avoiding me.
One time when we were drunk we'd hooked up. I suppose that was the night when we entered our relationship, and departed (?) from our friendship. She had passed out in my bed, not an entirely uncommon event and I discarded a modest amount of clothes and put the covers over both of us. In the middle of the night she reached out for me. We hadn't been drinking that much and while I'd always been attracted to Chelsea I hadn't made any moves that I didn't consider relatively platonic. When she put her arm around me I laid there for a moment or two and then internally shrugged. Wanting her, and worrying about future consequences I decided on an optimistic future. Its funny how little moments like that one can set a whole series of events in order, or maybe it wasn't that moment but one of the ones that followed, when I kissed her, when we fucked, when I hugged her in the morning.
We had a tumultuous relationship, not that the relationship itself was ever very bothersome, actually it was quite good in many ways, but rather our youth and inexperience hampered us. We were in the constant process of breaking up and getting back together. This process was tremendously emotionally tiring. The hopes, the dreams, and the constant disappointment all added up. I began to drink more during these stints, when she was gone, something I've always tended to do during periods of emotional turmoil. I sincerely hoped that she didn't smell the reeking stench of alcohol that oozed out of my pores during lunch.
During the periods of disappointment and heartbreak I would usually sit in my room and write, or read Kurt Vonnegut novels. A few times I'd ventured out to find another young lass who might make me happier, even if only temporarily but my body and mind acted more like those of the porter's in Macbeth.
ACT IV Scene III
Porter

'Faith sir, we were carousing till the
second cock: and drink, sir, is a great
provoker of three things.

MACDUFF

What three things does drink especially provoke?

Porter

Marry, sir, nose-painting, sleep, and
urine. Lechery, sir, it provokes, and unprovokes;
it provokes the desire, but it takes
away the performance: therefore, much drink
may be said to be an equivocator with lechery:
it makes him, and it mars him; it sets
him on, and it takes him off; it persuades him,
and disheartens him; makes him stand to, and
not stand to; in conclusion, equivocates him
in a sleep, and, giving him the lie, leaves him.

Maybe it was the left over alcohol that induced me to show those juvenile pictures to her. Maybe it was because I felt to incapable of showing her what I'd been working on, a crappy love poem. The poem was about a young man who would spend days upon days in a row boat in a lake practicing singing with his guitar. The young mad went out to the middle of the lake as he was so embarrassed by the very idea of ever being heard or seen attempting to practice a song that would make his “true love's” heart swoon. The woman he loved lived next door to him, and he'd see her hang up the laundry every few days (this was the days before laundry dryers but after clotheslines). She wasn't terribly attractive, but she wasn't quite plain either. The same could be said for him, the young guitarist. What drove the guitarist on was the idea that she might just be a woman with whom he could spend his life with, what he feared though was the rejection of being tossed aside like a mechanic's oily rag. One day, however, when he knew she would be out hanging the laundry he ported his boat on the grass near the clothesline, which was no small effort as the small lake he practiced in was half a mile away. His hope was that by having the boat there he would imagine the rhythm of the waves, and would play beautifully. When she came out with a wicker basket full of sheets he began to play. He didn't look at her but rather looked into the sky and played the songs he'd always played while in the boat. His hands shook, his body trembled...

I hadn't gotten much beyond that point in the poem. Having the bad habit of always wanting to rhyme my poems made things terribly difficult. It took me a good week to think of an adequate ryhme for oily mechanic's rag, that didn't imply the woman was a hag. Maybe it was my inability to come up with clever rhymes that prevented me from showing her the poem.

What exactly would happen at lunch was beyond me. It was hard enough seeing her.