Months have gone by. Maybe it's been longer. Alex still doesn't have a phone. Sometimes I think of leaving a message for him with the record company, but I never do.
Sometimes I think of writing him a note, but I don't know what to say. His band will be playing again soon and I know I can go to the gig if I want. It's a free country. I can picture him, surrounded by girls, girls who don't write for a living, girls who probably don't do anything for a living.
I walk by the building where he lives, day after day, night after night. I wonder why he's never there. I wonder if he's ever coming back. I wonder if I will ever see him again. I wonder how things would have been if I had gone there that morning, and sometimes I wonder if he wasn't sending me some kind of cry for help, if maybe he wanted me to come over because he too was suffering from the intense loneliness that I feel as I wait for something to happen to change to make my crazy life seem settled and then throw it to pieces again and make my settled life seem crazy. I wait for another Alex. Or maybe I just wait for Alex.
I look for him all over my neighborhood. Every time I see a man on a motorcycle, I think it might be him, and then I see that the hair isn't long and black, the stomach isn't smooth and strong. A friend of mine said she saw him doing his laundry one day, so now I think every man with a bag of clothes might be Alex.
I break up with my boyfriend. I look for a new apartment. I move around a lot. My phone number changes so many times and one day I realize I am in one place, my stuff is in storage in a warehouse on Avenue D, my cat is in my old apartment until I find a new one, there is an answering machine taking messages for me in still another place, and it feels like my life is disappearing. And I can't find Alex anywhere. It is no comfort for me that if he wanted to, he couldn't find me either.
I feel everybody disappearing.
I sit around the house doing nothing a lot. I lie in bed and listen to records, kidding myself that I am actually doing my job and then realizing that, in fact, I am doing my job. I hear Tom Petty singing: "But not me baby / I've got you to save me / Yer so bad / The best thing I ever had / In a world gone mad / Yer so bad." And I know what he means. Maybe sometimes everything is so crazy that what's worst for you is what's best because if nothing really matters anyway then the one thing that might make you remember that you're alive at all is something that's black when you're blue, something that's wild when you're so tamed you can't even see to the other side of the cage much less consider escaping.
And then I hear Don Henley: "I was either standing in your shadow / or blocking your light / Though I kept on trying I could not make it right / For you girl / There's just not enough love in the world." I feel certain he's singing to me, that's the sort of person I am. I watch my boyfriends, and there have been so many, so many more than I ever thought it would take to make me feel okay, and I see that after a while they all get that same baffled look at their faces, that shoulder-shrugging look that says I have no more ideas about how to make you happy so maybe I should just give up. In the beginning, every one of them thinks he will be The One, the savior, the person who will be different from the last failure who would dig ditches to China, who would stop traffic, who would fly across the country, who would wake up for phone calls at 4:38 a.m. just to hear me say, I feel such pain I don't know why please help me.
It never works for me with anybody because of the gaps gaps between my legs and in my mouth and in my heart that are maybe deeper and wider than the Mississippi, that love needs to fill up but there just isn't enough of it. Never has been. Never will be.
Late at night I feel desperate and think of calling old boyfriends who were never good enough when they were around but who I could maybe talk to right now to make it okay, but instead I roam the streets until the morning light peeks through, thinking about all the work I could get done in the time I spend feeling bad about all the things I don't do, and I know that one of these days I'm just going to throw my body across Alex's doormat and I'm not going to move until he comes back from the Far East or Avenue A or wherever he is because it would take something as empty as him to fill up a void like me.
for a living, girls who probably don't do anything for a living.
is something that's black when you're blue, something that's wild when you're so tamed you can't even see to the other side of the cage much less consider escaping.
