trigger

Jan 27, 2025

Every night I lay in bed, stare up at the ceiling, and listen to my upstairs neighbors have sex. It starts with a bump and a creak. Hushed voices, like they’re underwater. A brief pause. And then banging. Bed frame against floorboards. Bang bang bang bang bang for fifteen minutes. Five to ten go by and then bang bang bang bang bang again. Silence. I’ve never met them. I don’t know what they look like, but I like to imagine them pretty. Him slender with an accidental mustache, her equally small and noticeably mousy. I like to picture them naked, standing face to face, imagining themselves together for a long time. I like to picture them in bed intertwined. I imagine their bed right above mine. And their bodies. I wonder sometimes if they know I can hear them. If they like to picture me, their downstairs neighbor, lying in my bed, staring up at the ceiling, and listening to them have sex.

When I was twelve my second favorite friend invited my first favorite friend and me to his grandpa’s farm in rural Georgia. The place was a few hours outside the city and his family took pride in that. Real country living. Something like that. It was less of a farm than a vanity project. They had all the gear, the tractors, tools, laborers. But they had no product. No crops. No cattle. Just fields for forever. John, my second favorite friend, brought us into his uncle’s cabin on the property to show us some cool stuff. We tried on night vision goggles and watched each other make faces in the dark. We mimed sword fights with machetes and hatchets. John handed me his uncle’s rifle. It felt important in my hands, like a gun. Or a baby. Without thinking, I pulled the thing up on my shoulder into firing position and aimed it right at his head, my finger teasing the trigger. I thought nothing. We thought nothing.

These moments that glow like a memory. This life. I’ve been doing the thing therapists and women call “narrativizing”. I’m making a life out of a life. I’m running and looking behind.

I’m running on the mountain and I can’t feel my legs. Days blend like a soaked wet canvas. Accidental watercolor face imprint on the couch cushion. Once nothing, now a Rorschach of my life, that thing I’m living. Right now’s fingerprint. I’ve been thinking: trap an impressionist in a room with all white walls and soon enough they’ll be gnawing at their wrists painting portraits with their blood.

Every band in this city is starting to sound the same.

Let me place you in the crossfire of my eyes. And the light from the old bulb of my Super 8 projector. Let me trace your shadow on my once-white wall. Let me find your leitmotif. Four hours over the piano keys. Real ivory ones. Grandma was a concert pianist before she met Grandpa. Now she’s Grandma. Imagining the bullet before the gun. Imagining the metal before the bullet. Imagining the sentence before the word. Your leitmotif is a one note ostinato. I’ll pay someone to play it for me for a few hours over the polyrhythm of my heartbeat and breathing. We’ll be like a symphony.

I’ve been thinking: I want years to go by and you to see me from across the old bar. I’ll be the oldest guy in the room. Take a seat right by me. By then I’ll be a real local. Knees locked up from running and looking behind. From running across the skyline. I’ll see those eyes and remember the times we’d share a bottle of half-priced wine. No idea where we were from and no clue where we were going. On some mutual path of Montréal. Some narrative of self destruction.

And here’s the tragedy. The dream is over. I'm in the bar alone. Your kid just took a bow. He was the Cowardly Lion in his third grade production of The Wizard of Oz. There are planes flying overhead. We both hear the same one. Like that old upright piano. Grandma’s ivory. I used to write to you and a million others. I’d look for your eyes in the crowd.

Laying on the couch belt undone, fly down listening to “Fade Into You” through my phone speakers. The sun makes its way down the mountain. Everything’s getting blue. I’m thinking about the dead friend who’s in everything I do. My old landlord sitting in her car outside my window with the heat on in a puffer jacket. She’s yelling at someone on the phone. Every couple months, a new anniversary and none of them good. Anniversary of the Aussie boy saying goodbye. Anniversary of how I lost my shit. Anniversary of the bomb I built out of my anguish. Anniversary of the roadside explosion. Of the nights spent rocking back and forth. Of the Irish guy. Of the guy who left me in the middle of the night. Six months, eight months, a year. Anniversary of a year. Anniversary of the sixth month anniversary of the last time we talked. Anniversary of the one year anniversary of the six year anniversary of when my mom said I looked just like her dead dad. There’s a stack of books on my coffee table waiting to be read. A dozen little worlds I’m supposed to want to live in. But I can’t get myself to open them up. I can’t get myself to want to live anywhere but here. It’s not perfect, but it’s all blue. Harry Potter but there’s no magic and he never left the room under the stairs. Star Trek but there is no starship and there are no stars. Romeo and Juliet but only Juliet kills herself and Romeo moves on.

The snow falls through the streetlight glow like glitter. For a moment, it stops falling and is just there. In stasis. In perpetuity. And this moment is now. I’m narrativizing. I’m making a life out of a life.

The gun, I pulled it down slowly from my friend’s face. His look was one of primal fear. Like the wildebeest looking behind at the lion. Like the man watching the ground grow, plummeting six stories down. Like the dead friend when he died. Like Grandpa in Vietnam. Like the tree before the axe. We never talked about the time I almost killed my friend. There was nothing to say. Added it to the catalogue of horrors, little images discontinuous with the falling out of time. Little snowflakes stopping as they fall. Like glitter. Like the dead friend looking at the other dead friend in the eyes, realizing I’m the common denominator. I’m the killer. I’m the one with the gun. And that’s the life. That’s the narrative. It’s about having the gun. Finger on the trigger.

I took myself out to a nice dinner last night. I used to do this all the time. I couldn’t think of a single nice restaurant in town I hadn’t been to on a date, so I chose this Italian spot a few blocks away. The hostess sat me at the table where I sat with the electrician. I didn’t protest. Ghosts aren’t real and if they were, they’d haunt someone else. I figured I’d try something new, so I ordered the same thing I did when I was on the date. It tasted a lot like blood. Not in a bad way. Just in the kind of way that makes you think about that wildebeest and the lion. So I did and that’s okay. The wine took me out. I fell asleep for a brief moment. Discontinuous. The waiter complimented my book and I decided he loved me. Because I am vain and I am vile. He walked like a gay guy, but he had a deep voice. He complimented my wine choice like he wasn’t the one who chose it. He said I looked “cozy”. I downed a Fernet Pianta and left my number on the back of a coaster. Never heard from him. Somewhere in my mind, I found a way to imagine the coaster lost in the garbage. The busser must have tossed all the garbage too quickly to see I’d written a note. That’s it. I stumbled home in the snow and lay on the shower floor with the hot water beating down on my face. And I cried. I plugged the drain, let the tub fill up. I held my head under the water until everything blurred together. Until my thoughts became unidentifiable. I cried without tears.

I’m not lonely. Not in the way I used to be. I don’t walk by men and feel that urge how I used to. I don’t look straight into their eyes and expect them to fix my world. I don’t really go on dates. I’m an old horse. I’ve lived enough of a life. I’ve kissed some pretty faces. I’ve made love to some pretty people. I’ve run out of wishes and I've squandered the life I’ve been given with bad tattoos and poor financial decisions. It’s not permanent. I will end up. In many ways, I’ve made it further than so many people I looked up to as a boy. My old coaches, first crushes, English teachers. My mom prays I’ll meet “someone nice and handsome”. My dad prays I’ll meet someone at all. My sister prays I find a job after graduation. My brother, I’m not really sure.

There’s a safety in memory, in believing the story is over this early. It allows you to ignore impulse and avoid passions. To look and see, but not do. You can tell yourself it’s Stoicism or preservation, but it’s not. I want to be fertilizer. I can’t see myself as anything but a dead body. Not that I think I’ll die soon. I think I will live for a while longer. Several decades. But dead bodies are things you mourn over. They’re totems of regret. They’re the thing you try to love. You try to convince yourself they’re what they used to be, but it's incongruous. There’s no light in those eyes. It’s just your own dim reflection.

Under that bathwater, I saw myself swimming. I saw the pool scene from the teen movie of my adolescence. I saw my body as corners pressed against the walls of the tub. This thing I wear, it juts out and takes up space. It moves in ways I can’t control. This thing I wear, it will give up on me when I need it most. When all I want to do is dance one more time. When all I want to do is make love with that beautiful woman and her beautiful body, to kiss and be kissed, to measure my heartbeat against hers and make heat with the friction between goosebumps. Under that bathwater, I pictured the old pond where my friends and I would swim on the farm. Where we’d cast line after line and catch the same dozen fish all day. Until the sun set and the boat was moored. His grandma would call us in for supper. We’d throw cans in the air and shotgun them into a million pieces. We’d kill doves and cover our faces in their blood. We’d pull down trees with cables attached to old trucks. We’d wrestle on the bed until the frame broke. And I picture you there, in that field. Dusk light in all its blue and pale yellow. Face to face. Cold from the wind. Silence for a hundred miles. For a hundred more.

My finger’s on that trigger. The gun is steady and my aim is true. And I do it all, yes all, only for you. Picture yourself there. In that open field. The sun is barely past the horizon. The moon is somewhere out of sight. It’s all sky. And clouds. And me. And you. And I don’t know you. What you look like or who you are. It’s like that dream. The one where I’m chased through the woods at night. My knees lock up. My breath stills and my heart stops. I turn around, in resolve. And it’s me looking back.