Spring

Dear Lonely Animal [Sometimes I could just]

57 Dear Lonely Animal, Sometimes I could just burst into tears. I found some friends, but they don’t understand I just don’t care about baseball and cupcake bakes and beer pong. And I don’t “hang out.” I don’t like hanging out. And I don’t like bowling. Sometimes I get in these moods, Animal, and I become intolerable even to myself. But I become very anxious about my brain cells. I feel that I need all the brain cells I have. Because I need to remember all the things I saw and heard, and I need to remember all the things I memorized. And mostly all the people, especially the people whom I miss the most. I need to remember their voices and faces, their real faces talking and laughing and not some face from a photograph of them. It’s like all the real faces, when they’re gone for a while, they always 58 tend toward those photo faces and then they become the photo faces and then I know I’ve forgotten. And I could just bury myself in the ground! I could just burst into a million tears, sharp tears like daggers that turn back on my body and stab, stab, stab—tiny piercings like tiny mouths biting all at once. Like that Canadian goose somebody found sitting by the side of the road, just sitting there. Somebody lifted up that huge bird and brought it in to us at the Bird Rescue. The goose didn’t so much as honk or give even the slightest whisper of a honk. It didn’t flap its wings or snap at anybody with its beak. It looked tired, Lonely Animal. Very tired. My aunt extended one of the goose’s wings to see if the wing was broken and there, under the wing, in the dense body of the bird, was an injury where some car or other had hit it and driven away. And in the injury there were scores of maggots, teeming there, boring into its soft body, devouring it alive, mouthful by mouthful with their tiny, smacking maggot lips. You know that sound 59 maggots make when they’re eating, and mealworms too. A tiny wet smacking like that gross sound when you stir up macaroni and cheese. I have one friend who does a great maggot impression. But mostly my friends go on big road trips and have dinner parties. They talk about NPR. They ask me if I read Billy Collins. NO I DO NOT READ BILLY COLLINS. And anyway, how can they forget their work like that? Walking down the street with me, one friend yelled “Fuck you” at a stranger because he drove by in a Hummer. Well, I hate all this political bullshit and I could just cry a million billion tears but what good would it do? If one person does not know how to treat one other person, what good are my million tears then? ...