Three Cheers for Eve

The day I got the phone call, I felt the wholeness of my little world, my security, bodily health, relationship, and peace of mind break apart, red hot, and scatter in every direction around the dressing room.  That phone call was an atom bomb.  My life blew to pieces and then rained down all about me.  Everything burned.
"You tested positive" the nurse said.  The blood ran from my face into my feet.  Although my eyes were open, like synthesia I saw nothing but the sound of the blood beating at my temples.  I was delivered the test results in a department store, without my shoes, and in jeans that weren't even my own.  My skin grew cold and foreign.
Cut scene.  I don't remember peeling the denim from my legs, pulling my coat around my body, or stumbling into the October air of the parking lot.  Minutes tick by and I have no recollection of their existence.  In the following weeks, I find that whole chucks of my life go missing.  Action.
I sit in the car as the sobs rip through me and leave no part of my body untouched.  They pulse through my fingertips, cling to my ribs, draw my thighs toward my chest.  They puff into little clouds of steam in the cold, disperse, and are replaced by more tiny clouds.  I cry all the way home, bent double, call my lover, beg forgiveness.  He talks me down.  Says I have nothing to be sorry for.

I waver between periods of eerie silence that sounds almost like peace and inconsolable mourning.

I live through the nightmare of half a dozen doctors visits, a battery of tests, and waiting for more phone calls that once hung up leave me sobbing into my shaking hands.  The insides of my elbows turn the color of plums with bruises that bloom in the wake of one blood draw after another.  I drop ten pounds in a few weeks.  The nurses look at me with chiding eyes and say "You really need to eat, you know. You can't lose any more weight."   But food turns to sand in my mouth.  I have been hollowed out and I can't seem to fill myself again.

 I don't remember exactly when I stopped wanting her, but it happened with as much intensity as when I started loving her.  She still resembled herself, but she was no longer hot to the touch.  She began to physically manifest all of her inner turmoil.  Her face grew thinner.  She covered her once beautiful body in blurry tattoos, her skin had stretched with an extra fifty pounds, but never bounced back once she lost it all within months.  It  hung off her hips like pants a size too large.  The drugs and her refusal to eat had sallowed her olive complexion, dulled her hair (half Iroquois, she had once had the most lustrous black hair...). 

The night that we had sex in the back seat of her Sunfire for the last time, I waited patiently for it to be over.  That was the night I could no longer ignore the fact that things would never be what they were.  She didn't touch me the same way.  Or shine in the dark the way I remembered.   I knew I would never feel the way I once had again.

It took two years to climb that mountain of shared time (four very long years...).  And I don't look back now.  My memories of her began to smudge, blur together, then apart, bleed into the rest of my life, my imaginings, the things I read; I became confused as to what had actually transpired.  Shaving our heads together and watching the hair fall onto the bathroom's tiled floor became some strange dream I once had.  The feeling of her fingertip dipped in tempera paint using my naked skin as canvas...  The way her features gathered up into that look of sorrow deeper than that of anyone I had ever met... Every day it got harder to remember as she was passed from hand to hand in prison, rehab, and mental health facilities.  I stopped listening to her messages.  I cried less.

I was thankful for this unremembering.  I rid myself of all the things, both beautiful and grotesque, that might remind me.  Eventually, it seemed to me, I had made the whole thing up.  And although my past is written all over her body (the ink, her ragged fingernails, a scar on her left hip), when I look down, after everything, I realize that she left not a mark on mine.

Girl of the World, I tell her, you were only a figment of my imagination.