Tag Archives: love

243. Emoji Problems

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It started with a few back and forth texts of emojis late one night. The next evening, a Friday,  typically my poker night with the guys, my girlfriend came to the door.

“You brought over pizza, how nice,” I said. “And, oh, gosh, look at that, a Netflix.”

“Jerry Maguire,” she said, and gave me a kissing face with heart-shaped eyes. “‘You had me at hello.’” It was her favorite line from the movie, or so I learned the first, second and third times we’d watched it.

“That’s so sweet, but you know, it’s poker night. The guys are here.” I gave her a frowning face with open mouth. 

“But you said you wanted me to come over.”

“I did? When?”

“In your texts.”

“No, I didn’t. They were just emojis.”

“But you can communicate a message in emojis. They’re pictures, symbols or whatever. They’re meant to say something.”

“That might be true,” I said, but again I had to remind her that it was poker night. I gave her an expressionless face.

She gave me a pouting face.

“Come on,” I said. I gave her a face in cold sweat, but she wasn’t buying it.  ”Okay,” I said, and gave her a little smiling shit pile. “See?” I feel this bad. She still wasn’t buying it. Finally, I said, “Do you want to come in?”

She gave me a face with look of triumph and stepped through the door.

Nothing that disturbing happened for the next few days, although we continued to send emojis back and forth. It was easier than having to compose actual words, which could be tiring.

She gave me a volcano, and I gave her a snowflake.

She gave me a ring, with a question mark.

I gave her a bomb, exclamation point.

She gave me an open lock, a growing heart, a bride with veil.

I gave her a runner, a bell with cancellation stroke, an imp.

Basic stuff.

And then one day she called me at work. She had been crying.

“I can’t talk right now, honey,” I said. “I really really really want to, but I’m in the middle of a meeting.”

“This is too difficult to say out loud, anyway,” she said. “I’ll just text you.”

But she didn’t mean to text me. She wanted to emoji. I considered asking her to write in real words, but I was in the middle of the meeting.

When I drove up to her place that night, she ran out to greet me. ”Thank you for understanding! I was so scared about telling you.”

“No problem at all,” I said.

“You’re not mad?” She gave me a worried face.

“Of course not, no.” I gave her a flexing bicep. “Why would I be mad?”

“Well, I guess from our last communication,” she said. “Most men wouldn’t put up with that.” She gave me a man in turban next to a tropical fish that was going ZZZZ.

“Um,” I said.

Over the next few weeks, our emojis progressed.

She gave me a taxi, a crystal ball, a red balloon, a ghost, a shrimp, a needle, a cactus, a dog’s head with its tongue hanging out.

I gave her a full moon with face looking to the side.

She gave me a snail, a sunset over buildings, a bikini.

I gave her a dress, a glass of wine, a love hotel.

She gave me kids. Here they were, two loudly crying faces. She gave me that.

I gave her a trophy, a lemon.

She gave me the caution sign.

I gave her a face without mouth next to a thought bubble.

Where was the lightning bolt?

She gave me a cyclone, a collision, a perennial thumbs down.

I gave her a frog.

She gave me a bust in silhouette.

“I don’t even know what that means,” I tried to text, but by then, we were clearly done with words. And I felt bad about this, for sure, but I gave her, finally, a closed mailbox with lowered flag.

Eventually, in response, she gave me the hammer, and I gave her—am still in fact giving her—a money bag.

237. Old Man and His Walker

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Slow-going, this afternoon, for the old man and his walker
through the mall,
his wife beside him coaxing
as his left foot does half a stutter-
step against the floor, half a br-
oken animal claw.

The quiet fights in the bedroom, hissing
under their breath long after
the sleeping children
have grown up
and moved on, the fierce
love-making, diets, drill
bits, March flowers, hearing—all of that gone.

They’ll do anything now to make it into the sticky booth
where in the middle of his meal, with red sauce
on his chin, after he launches into what
is obviously a long and tired rant,
she reaches across with a napkin
in her trembling hand in the pretense
of wiping his chin and—not necessarily
unkindly and perhaps only to get
his attention—slaps him, as if to say, “Shut up, just
please be quiet. Shut up now, or you’ll choke to death.”

230. More Like Dogs

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I would like to see this old man on the bench next to me here
at home
filling the dish with round crunchies
and calling his dog
in that coarse whispery voice
over from the couch
to have a little bite. I would like to see
their private life—the sharing
of meat scraps and late night
moonlit craps—even as I’m disgusted
at their public display
of affection: how the man says,
“Come here, come here,”
and then without hesitation,
and with his bare fingers, wipes clear
those white strings of snotty stuff
from under his dog’s eyes, something
I probably couldn’t even do for my lover.

But then as I say this, you are gone again
and I am alone again
and lonely
and is it any surprise
when I take the tin
out of the cupboard
along with that little yellow lighter
I found? Is it any surprise
that I want to be dumb tonight
and not hear the voices
crawling inside the walls of this house?

Aren’t we all a little
like dogs? More like dogs
than, say, cats
or cantaloupes?
Isn’t it always
just a bit more friendly
when alone together
at home
as I curl up on the floor
where I pretend to sleep
but watch you dancing?

I won’t believe when they say that love
is only something
that gets played too hard
like a chewed-up Frisbee
lying in the grass
in the park. Love is me
dreaming of you
reading your books
by Carl the Dreamer, laughing
at some in-flight
entertainment, or asking
for a second bag of pretzels or nuts,
while I—suddenly—am an animal mess,
surprising myself that I still can find
the number for the taco shop on Hawthorne
and my jacket again
and my wallet
and the keys
and the door
through all these strings in my eyes.

192. Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Penis

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Two women took the table directly behind my own in the coffee shop this afternoon. I couldn’t see them, but I heard one of these women say, basically, and I’m summarizing, that she returned home last Saturday morning for her water bottle when her husband had been expecting her to have already been at the gym, and walked in on him in the living room, in front of the fire, giving himself fellatio.

“No!” the other woman said.

“Yes!”

“And what did you do?”

“What could I do? I first didn’t understand, of course, what I was seeing. He didn’t even bother to disengage.”

“Oh, Janet!”

“Well, he didn’t. And I honestly had no clue that he was that flexible.”

The other woman giggled.

“It would explain a lot, though,” Janet said.

“Like what?” the other woman said.

“Like, for starters, why he has sores in his mouth all the time.”

“Oh, gross, Janet. Please.”

“And why, for seconds, he always seems to have a kink in his neck.”

“Please,” the other woman said again.

“And here I’d been thinking that he was having an affair with his masseuse. Now I’m thinking that an actual affair, to walk in on him fucking another woman, or even sucking off another guy, might have been better.”

“Really?”

“Well, not really? But it was really weird. Really really fucking weird. I’d never seen anything like it, nor could I ever actually imagine it. It’s like a bad picture that I don’t want to have in my head.”

The other woman cackled and then, presumably, by the hard sucking sounds, was hitting the bottom of her cold coffee beverage with her straw.

“And you know what he tells me the next morning,” Janet said, “right before leaving for church of all things?”

Her friend waited. I waited. Janet was a fine storyteller. She had a good sense of timing.

“Only one in 400 men are flexible enough to do that.”

“No!” Janet’s friend said, and again cackled.

“But you know what he tells me next, the most disturbing part of all?”

“Oh, God!” the other woman said. “Don’t tell me.”

“Yep, you got it. He swallows.”

The other woman let out a wild shriek of a laugh that caused me, literally, to jump.

“That was exactly my response,” Janet said. “I laughed, which was part scream and part what the fuck are you telling me right now over eggs and toast before church sort of unbelievability. I’d rather him say that he was gay. I mean who does that? It’s just weird. Why can’t he yank it with his hand? What kind of guy gives himself oral pleasure in the living room on Saturday morning in front of the fire?”

I had come to this coffee shop to read, ironically, the now pop classic, if not somewhat outdated, Men are From Mars, Women from Venus. It was part of the research for my doctoral dissertation in psychology. I was studying to become a marriage counselor. Unbeknownst to myself, while listening to the two women talk, I had been drawing an erect phallus and balls over the word “Venus” on the book jacket. Men Are from Mars, and Women, apparently, at least according to my subconscious, from Penis.

When I refocused, either I had lost the thread, or Janet for some inexplicable reason was deliberately throwing a non sequitur into the mix. She said, “I feel like I’m Joan Baez sometimes, you know?”

“No, what do you mean?” the other woman said.

“I feel like I’m some folk singer from some other era when folk music was something cool that people did.”

“Like Joni Mitchell.”

“Yes, like her. I feel like I’m Joni Mitchell sometimes.”

“I know what you mean,” the other woman said.

I waited for them to go on, but when it was clear that they were not going to, I turned to them and said to Janet, “And who is he, your husband?”

“Excuse me?” Janet said.

“Sorry, I was listening to your conversation. And now I’m wondering: who is he? You compared yourself to Joan Baez, so is your husband like Bob Dylan or like Neil Young or what?”

“Nobody,” Janet said. “He’s just himself.”

“But that doesn’t make sense. I don’t understand you.”

“What don’t you understand? And why were you even listening?”

“Why compare yourself to somebody and then not finish through with the comparison? It’s like a metaphor or something, you know what I mean?”

“No, I frankly do not know what you mean, and I’d wish you’d leave us alone. You’re a creep.”

“But if it’s a story you’re telling me here,” I said, “you’ve got to bring it to climax.”

178. Kites on the Coast

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Some time not long after the war had started, after the demonstrators had demonstrated and then gone home (their cardboard protest signs in the recycling bins), and after the manufacturing boom in Taiwanese-made American flags and Chinese-made American flag t-shirts and Mexican-made American car flags and car flagpoles and Malaysian-made Made in America pendants, you found yourself on the coast lacquered with 30 SPF and patting your hair down, over that bald spot, and pulling your shorts up to your belly button, over that embarrassing albino bulge.

Kite-flying looked like fun, rather relaxing even. You turned to the person next to you—a lover, perhaps, or a spouse that you remembered once loving—and said: “I think it’s the sound I like best.”

You meant that one kite there, wanting to dive, to dive, to dive for the sand—rippling, wind-torn, angry almost.

174. June on the Oregon Coast

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They sat side by side on a driftwood log high up on the beach. From his backpack, he took out his pipe, his plastic sack, his yellow lighter. Out of the sack, he pulled a bud. He put the bud in the pipe and handed it to her and she said you first.

He brought the pipe to his mouth and lit the bud with the lighter. The bud sizzled beneath the flame. He drew the smoke in and coughed and she said what’s wrong with you? He took another hit and then he was coughing and laughing and coughing and she said this is why I don’t like to do this.

He said relax. It’s working. You’re supposed to cough. When you cough, you know it’s working.

He held the pipe out to her and she put the lip of it into her mouth. He lit the bud and told her to inhale. She inhaled. He said take a bigger inhale and she said don’t pressure me, I hate it when you pressure me.

She was mad.

Don’t be mad, he said.

I’m not mad, she said. I just don’t want to do it. You do it.

He put the pipe in his mouth again and brought the flame from the yellow lighter to the bud and took another hit. He held his breath and exhaled.

Wherever you are, she said, there you are not.

He waited for more. But when she didn’t go on, he said what?

She said it’s nothing, something I just was thinking about.

But that’s profound, he said.

She looked over at him and he said really. You should remember that. It’s really profound.

Her hair was blowing lightly in her face and she used a hand to keep it back, squinting at him behind her sunglasses in the sun. But what did I say? she said.

He thought about it for a moment and said I can’t remember. But it was deep, whatever it was.

He took a seat at the base of the log. A honeybee came to check him out, bouncing around his knee, and then a fly flew near his ear. He wrote HI in the sand between his legs, crossed it out and looked up to see her becoming littler as she walked away from him toward the water.

He leaned his head back against the log and when he opened his eyes again, she was working on a heart in the hard-packed sand next to where he sat. She was smoothing the damper sand around its outer edges. She was digging and digging deeper with her fingers into the outline of the thing so that the heart began to take shape by that which all around it had been cleared away.

Wherever you are, he said, there you are not. That’s what you said.

Yes, she said. Wherever you are. Now I remember.

There you are not.

You didn’t let me finish.

What is it then?

Stop testing me, she said. She stopped working on her heart to look over at him. I know what it is.

Well then what is it?

There you are not. I remember that part. She smiled at him.

Wherever you are—

Wherever you are, she said. Yes! Now I remember. There you are not.

Again she turned back to her heart. He knew that he hadn’t loved her so totally as he did at that moment then. He knew, too, that he might not love her so totally ever again. He felt sad about this for some reason, or somehow, but he also felt overwhelmed with happiness by the largeness of his potential for love. He knew too that this largeness was only the drugs. Sitting here by the sea, he could recognize how truly small everything was. Even so, he thought he might one day be lucky enough to end up as fine as this sand. Wherever you are, there you are not. As fierce as this water, the ocean, and as smooth and as fine as this sand.