What Guts

R finishes out the apocalypse like this: five bamboo plants that I gave her as gifts outside the doorstep of my new apartment. When asked why she left these plants outside my doorstep, she says “because fuck you that’s why.”

A pool party on the top deck of our old apartment building that will burn down soon, but we don’t know this yet because it has not burned down yet. When the pool party begins, the water is too cold so no one is swimming, everyone is loafing around the pool longingly gazing at the water. “Someone will drown tonight,” I tell R. We are ending the apocalypse with a pool party. The worst thing that happens: two people get locked out of the building, have to sleep on the adirondack chairs on the roof for the night.

There is a note on my new door to my new apartment in R’s handwriting: “Who was your New Year’s kiss?”

The note was not meant for me but for my new roommate. The handwriting is not R’s but someone else’s. Who was your New Year’s kiss? It certainly wasn’t me, I say aloud to the note, lineated like poetry, taped with Christmas tape—pine trees & golden garlands.

R is a pine tree, she says. We are driving towards the fire. The mountains are on fire. At a certain point, under an overpass one-way dwindling road, we are stopped by the authorities—large men in huge gasmasks—and are told to turn right around, the fire is spreading quickly, get away from these roads.

Here is where the scene doubles. Here is R in the moment before our apartment is on fire. Here is R taking over the wheel when I pass out behind it on the mountain road before we are asked to turn around.

R says she is a power bottom, and I only know what that means by the way she says yes, yes, when I am on top of her—yes, yes. When I say “yes, sir”—I mean it. “Don’t call me sir, it drives me nuts, especially when you say it in public,” she says. When we are on the train, we see a mistress & a submissive acting out a power dynamic—and I nod to R and say see—see—do you see what I see—you see—.

The world is ending and R says, I am taking you to the mountains to break up with you. We are using her new girlfriend’s car, but I do not know it is her new girlfriend’s car. I do not know she has a new girlfriend. “You don’t have to drive me to the mountains to tell me anything,” I say. How, when we drive back from the mountains, the apartment will be on fire.

I am in my new apartment by myself. R wants to come over and I let her and within an hour my fist is in her mouth, I am calling her a dirty little slut. An hour after that, she is gone. I only shoved my fist in your mouth because you told me it was over between you & the other person—you said you called things off completely—and three weeks later you are confessing your love her—you are telling me on our old couch that you are in love and just like that, R, you are out of my life.

Talk to me, you little slut, tell me how you like it—and she pauses—who said you could call me a slut—and it echoes and the echoes become echoes until echoes are not enough, never enough—I call her a slut and she stops moaning, moving, breathing—all her air is choked as if caught inside of her—what happened—I’m sorry—are you OK—I am sorry—is everything OK—hello—hello—talk to me—

R says that she had a pervy uncle that used to knock her on her head with a tight fist and the end of a gold eagle ring on his middle finger when she was young and say “Earth to R, come in R” like out of the movie Back to the Future.

It is the end of the world and we have nothing to lose, I tell her, we have nothing to lose.

When I first meet R, she almost never speaks to me again because of the kind of films I like to watch. She is very picky—have you seen this film—that film—and I say no & somehow I am ashamed that I haven’t been choosier up until now about my film choices.

“It was almost a deal breaker,” she says.

R is leaving me to a soundtrack—a soundtrack that differs greatly from the soundtrack of our lives. How music I never thought I would hear is playing itself throughout our apartment that is about to burn to the ground. R is listening to the Tommy soundtrack—“I love Tina Turner in this film,” she says and then, looking sideways at me, “oh, you’ve never seen that film, I forgot,” and begins packing her things again.

One by one the bamboo plants show up outside the door, I don’t know where R is and I can no longer ask where she is or who she is with or what she is doing because it is no longer any of my business.

R is not in love with me. R is in love with someone else. What is confusing is that R tells me she can’t be in an intimate space with anyone right now. She is crying, she tells me she is in love with someone else and she says this is hard, I don’t want this to be so hard.

She wants me to drink her blood. We are sitting on the corner of the street and our apartment building is on fire—everything she owns is gone. There was an explosion. Her body is bloody and she offers her arm and says “lick it,” and she smashes her open wound into mine—my knees are scraped and bleeding—and she says “together forever.”

But we will not be together forever, we are on top of the mountain and she says no—no—its all wrong—this is too much—its all wrong—too intense—we have to end.

“I haven’t even given you much intensity,” I say to the trees, to the mountains, R is no longer listening.

“There is a possessiveness here that I cannot wrap my head around, and I can no longer go there with you,” she says. She is the largest tree in the forest. She is a tree that has grown two ways, veins twisted and so large that you can drive a car through the middle. We are driving her new girlfriend’s car through the gigantic hole in the tree. We are driving through R and I want to get out of the new girlfriend’s car and take a picture—look up inside the innards—what guts. I want to take a picture of us inside of herself, through the gigantic opening in this tree in the middle of my heartbreak. “The largest and tallest tree in America—no scratch that—the world—its location is only known by a few scientists—did you know that?,” she asks.