next writing project 2

            II.

            It took me the better part of a day to get up and do anything. I was asleep a lot, going back and forth between the separate levels of consciousness. My dreams seemed to be just echoes of my personal history these past several years, but from new perspectives and angles and not necessarily good ones.

            I have this déjà vu a lot and it unsettles me that I can never seem to pinpoint where it’s reflecting from. I started having it in my later teenage years and it’s continued on since. In these recent years, though, or maybe just the past six months, it has augmented beyond my control. These last six months, more importantly, have been lost in an unfamiliar haze of half-memories. I’m often left questioning where I came from or how this all happened. I remember places and people and smells and sensations but not the moment in my personal history they originate from.

            My mother once asked me, when she was perched over the kitchen sink quietly washing the dishes, letting the soap bubbles roll off them one by one, if I ever felt like I was stuck in a series of bad dreams.

            “And you just can’t wake up from them?” I said “yes, I had.” I had just dropped out of college at the time and was stuck at home for a period that I wasn’t proud of. She then dismissed me by mumbling something about me being “too young.”

            I called Eduardo, first of all, to know if he wanted to stay with me because I was lonely. Audrey’s adopted homestead was vast and kind of too white, like a hospital waiting room. I walked through it several times and it just got to be too much. It wasn’t like it reminded me of Audrey; it didn’t at all. Audrey’s touch, if there was any, was barely noticeable.

            The back story on the house was it belonged to a kindly old woman who had sort-of-adopted Audrey after she ran away from home. Then the old woman, being old, died. Leaving Audrey to guard the house in limbo while her spoiled and estranged children, a rich pair of eccentric fraternal twins, split out the rest of the belongings and hashed out who in fact really had the house. The old woman hadn’t written a will.

            I wrote a will once. It’s under my bed at my parents’ house. It’s written in crayon and clearly states everything I own be returned to the K-Mart we bought it from. Even the stuff we didn’t. And let’s face it:  no one goes there anymore.

            What Audrey does in this fucking house, I have no clue. I’ve come to associate it with Grey Gardens in my mind. I think she just varies between pacing and writing and maybe reading, or obsessively cleaning one object for several hours.

            Maybe she stares at her reflection for hours on end, asks her questions and expects a response.

            I have, for better or for worse, started sticking around. I come in on weekends and holidays and whenever else I have nothing better to do. At first Audrey seemed to hate it, but I think she’s gotten used to it. I think the fact the house is so overwhelmingly big, dwarfing anything around or in it, having someone else’s presence available is just one small comfort.

            Eduardo would have been mine, having been my friend so long I can’t remember the right time or place where we first met.

            For a brief time, Eduardo and I lived together in New York City. He was trying to gather work as a commercial actor and I was doing what I do best, being absolutely nothing. Peoplewatching. Riding mass transit. Combing my hair. These are all talents.

            We had been fortunate enough to find a loft to rent together. It was tiny but it was doable, one big room and a bathroom and what appeared to be an attempt at a kitchenette. We lived there for three months, the span of one summer, until I returned home and Eduardo emigrated to the East Village, where he remains.

            “What are you doing?” I asked him after I came home from a day of my best and saw him staring out the window, pensively, phone in hand.

            “The people with the condos across the street,” he gestured towards them. “The lights are on in their exercise room.”

            Sure enough, in the sterile white room, the lights were on, illuminating the outlines of Nordic traks and treadmills. With no one using them.

            “But how does that affect you?” I said as he dialed the numbers.

            “It doesn’t.” Beat. “Yes, hello, is this Lighorm Condominiums?  Yes, I’m from across the street. The light is on in your unoccupied gym. Can you turn it off? I’m an environmentally conscious individual and it disturbs me.” He shook his head at me, like I had caused the problem.

            So now when I called him again, in the present state at Audrey’s new home, he was eager to come up, just not sure when.

            “I have work.”

            “Work?”

            “Yes, work!”

            “Okay. The weekend, maybe.”

            And then the weekend came and he didn’t.