Physiognomy: A Story About Shoulder and Chin

It must have been 90 degrees. I didn’t know for sure. There wasn’t a thermometer in his kitchen. My skin was still cold from the air conditioning of his bedroom. When I rubbed my chin against my shoulder as my face started to sweat, it immediately cooled from my still-cold skin. From my chin, along my jawline to my ear, I rubbed against my shoulder. I closed my eyes. It was a cooling effect. Had I long hair, I would have blown upward, my lower lip extended to create the movement. I do not have long hair. No. It’s dyke short. He said so.

His kitchen, the one he shares with two others, was consumed in a disgusting mayhem that I could not recognize. It was not him. The dishes were piled sloppily against the silver inner walls of his sink, and the floor, the floor… that was slippery with pieces of raw onions and the type of trash that should have been discarded days, if not weeks, ago. I remember thinking how when I fell apart time after time again, it was the floor that knocked me down with its grime. I had let the grime consume not only my insides, but the floor beneath my dirty feet; the floor beneath my step too weak for a proper stance.

The night before he had called. The night before I had come to his aid like a nurse who should have known better. But instead of a portable medicine cabinet, all I could offer was a Diet Coke. It was per his request, and I only had one in my refrigerator. I did not want to risk him falling back to sleep as I scoured the Lower East Side for another. I’m not sure why I needed him to be awake when I arrived. I had something to tell him. I had spelled it out. I had written out the details, word for word, the night before on a napkin. But the napkin, like my pride, got tossed in front of the first subway that came my way.

On his back, that’s how he was; drunk and spread eagle like a victim of a war who had been shot from a distance… that’s how his roommate had found him. She questioned his safety and health. Open doors will do that. When I got there, he was able to let me in, but his keys were still missing. I found them. They were on the table in the kitchen… the most obvious place in the world.

He took his place back on the floor like a wounded soldier who had been dragged through the horrors of atrocity and made it out alive. I wanted to tell him he didn’t know horrors. Neither did I, but that wasn’t the point.

He smelled sour. He never smells bad. He smells like him: an equal combination between his skin and whatever deodorant he might be using. But that night, he smelled like something I couldn’t place: halfway between sweat and something else… something toxic… something that has yet to be defined by scientists.

I handed him the Diet Coke. He pulled himself to a sitting position, drank it, and wondered aloud why I did not bring him another. I placed my hand at the base of my neck as I tend to do when I don’t have an answer and exhaled: that’s all I had.

And I remember thinking:

I’ve heard this in a song too many times. I’ve written about it too many times. I’ve just never confronted it head on: my arteries exposed, my intellect subtracted.

My therapist is the first one to point out the math of it all: intellectually you’re there, emotionally… emotionally…. emotionally… you probably never will be. She extends the word “emotionally” as if to make a point, as if I don’t know any better, as if I had not predicted this months ago.

Like a gorgeous plague, that’s how he looked as he squinted his eyes against the light and justified his state. His unwashed hair slightly bounced against his forehead like a bridge that was missing the other half, a bridge that was missing the necessary girders to keep it from falling. I had to bite my lip from crying. I had to look away.

On his new record player, Bob Dylan played. I pulled myself next to him. Although our heads were aligned, our feet were facing different directions. I did not think. I did not consider. I did not realize our feet until days later.

Against my hand, his hair was the softest hair I had ever touched. Softer than a newborn baby’s and perfectly broken… the way you’d hope your hair will be when you check into the afterlife, the grave or whatever in which one chooses to believe. I don’t believe in anything. That fact alone makes me realize that when I die, I will have had to relish in that moment. Because his hair, that softness against the insides of my fingers, I don’t get to take that with me.

And I cried. I fear this may be the greatest downfall of my existence. I can’t have a moment without already writing the words to it in my head. He says I’m a stalker. I try to explain I’m just observant. But the truth is that I’m always in my head looking for the next way to immortalize. That’s the difference between he and I. As much I want this physical body to die, I don’t want to die. I want to linger. I want to withstand. I want to define. I want to scream to him Napoleon quotes: “glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.” Like a sixteen year old, I want to scrawl it on my skin as a reminder over and over and over and over and over and over… until breath is lost; until I’m dizzy and crashing into walls, until the sense I’ve lost comes back to me.

The worst part about being a writer is when someone quotes you back to you… and he did. I hate that. On the floor, my head against his, I slowly rubbed my warm chin against my cold shoulder, because sometimes that’s all you can do.

It must have been 90 degrees. There wasn’t a thermometer in his kitchen. My skin was still cold from the air conditioning of his bedroom. When I rubbed my chin against my shoulder as my face started to sweat, it immediately cooled from my still-cold skin. From my chin, along my jawline to my ear, I rubbed against my shoulder.

And it was the dirty dishes that I could erase. It was the kitchen floor I could scrub clean. It was with regular, unscented dish detergent, that I could try to make a dent in his room, in the boxes of bills, on his stinking body, in a life of which I used to be a part. He was once a person I could have drawn in the dark with my eyes closed, but I’ve realized that sometimes the people who know you most, are the ones you need to lose in the shuffle…. for your own sanity. It’s not personal or because you’ve misplaced them or love them any less. In my exhale, I want to tell him: “It’s easier to be fake with them, than be real with you.” And it’s true.

So I stood there and scrubbed dish after dish like a maid who had been sent in to fix a problem that wasn’t mine. Plates, pans, glasses, silverware, cutting boards… one after another I cleaned them, the whole time thinking that was all I had to offer. I did not want a “thank you” in the traditional sense, I didn’t want a pat on the head like a good puppy would get after obeying, nor did I want to secure myself as a fixture as some sort of homemaker I’d never be. I just wanted to clean.

“What do you mean you wanted to clean?” asked my mother when I told her a day later.

“I felt it was my duty, because that’s all I could give; that’s all I had,” I tried to explain. Even I didn’t understand what I meant.

I don’t use a brush to clean my own dishes; I use a sponge. But he had a brush and had he not, my hands would be beyond raw right now. All I kept thinking about was how every time I fell out of love and realized it, I’d take a shower and literally scrub myself to pieces. I’d walk out of the shower bright red, with skin peeling off my inner legs and stomach. I needed proof. Sometimes you need to bleed to prove resolution.

But his shower is sticky. While my downfall is crying unnecessarily, his is disgusting bathrooms. You cannot clean yourself of your past within your past… it’s like cloyingly sweet frosting on top of the same: good idea on birthday cake, but bad idea in life.

I don’t know how many chunks of food I threw out that day. I don’t know how many pieces of vegetables, I picked up of which I disposed. I just know when I was done, I exhaled and I had no words.

I went back into his bedroom. He was slumped over the side like a broken record that I would have once put on repeat; like a record I would have once found inspiring… like a rare EP that no one else gets to hear but me… but that was gone. Despite the record player in his room, the sound was gone. Or maybe, just maybe, I was deaf to it… but I refuse to believe that.

We had walked to the river’s side amongst hundreds of people and I saw him from faraway. It wasn’t his attire, or the way he sat, it was his profile. To me, someone who had memorized it by mistake, it stuck out in a way that words, to my knowledge, can’t define. I guess, it in its simplest terms one could equate it to familiarity. When I reached the water’s edge, I told him so. Like me, he rubbed his his chin against his shoulder and didn’t say a word.

The silence that comes without words is everything.

I pulled at my hem, as I tend to do. I tried to re-align my hair so it was intact with mediocrity. I covered my new tattoo with my hand and inhaled. I had cleaned his dishes, now all I could do was exhale.

And after we walked back from the East River, his dishes were clean. When we huddled down in his apartment free from the sun, I had already seen the movie. And when I stood on my toes to say goodbye to him, as I had always done, my calf muscles ached… they were over it. His nose between the pieces of his loft bed, his clothes scattered everywhere like an explosion without a purpose, and his phone vibrating alone on the chair’s arm… it was emptiness exemplified. And I tried to breathe; I did. I tried to exhale and back in I again, but I could not. Sometimes removing an important artery will do that. Sometimes there is no resolution. Sometimes the raw part, the one exposed in the palm of your hands from trying to fix something that is not yours, bleeds endlessly.

I rubbed my warm chin against my cold shoulder on my way home. I pulled at my hem, as I tend to do. And although I could give nothing else, I exhaled… and it almost killed me.