Bury

When we first met, I noticed him so little I can’t even say I dismissed him. Thus, I had no reason to use my usual lipsticked, short-skirt trickery. Disinterested in his opinion of me, I made no attempts to be anything but myself, no effort to show him I liked the same obscure movies he did, the same music. Unbeknownst to me, during each of our interactions, I gave off a radiation of attraction that branched into his lung tissue and transformed his cells – no chance for a cure. At the beginning of our love, I wished I had seen him before, wished I hadn’t wasted so much time not liking him. But starting things back then would have been like biting into an unripe apple – bitter, hard, tossed away.

He talked about children from the beginning, like a child, so as not to give away the desire for longevity that arose in us only after a few weeks. “Their hair won’t be as curly because of me, huh?” He is beautiful, but his hair is boring

“Could go either way,” I said. My tone: calm. My heartbeat: not. “And each kid might be different.”

I don’t want my hair to fall out. More, I don’t want him to watch my hair fall out. He loves my hair. He finds tumbleweeds of my curls around the house and puts them in his pocket. In bed, his hands pull apart the curls and coil them up again. I imagined him doing that in a few weeks and ending up with a chunk in his hand. His pockets will soon be overflowing.

“I’m shaving it off,” I tell him.

He nods. “Let me.”

He worked as one of the only competent managers at the bar and grill where I hosted. Most of the servers: sweet, but stupid, irresponsible and apathetic college kids who didn’t know any other way to behave. Matthew made himself apparent to me for the first time when a cute-but-average-in-all-things 19-year-old approached him during our Friday night shift. “Can you cash me out?” she said, handing over her receipts.

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Gilles said he’d let me cash out as soon as my last customers cleared out,” she giggled, referring to the owner who had a propensity for hiring (doing) cute-but-average-in-all-things college girls. “They did.”

“What about the rest of the fucking restaurant?” he barked. “You don’t think the rest of us need some help? You don’t think we wanna go home?”

“But Gilles said,” she repeated, invoking the owner’s name again.

“Never mind,” He snatched the receipts from her hands. “Get the fuck out of here.”

“I’m sorry, Matthew,” she said and stood in front of him for a few moments while he ignored her.

At the end of the night, with all the customers gone, those of us who had closed drank Gilles’s liquor and smoked in his non-smoking restaurant. Matthew began to make me a margarita when I said to him, “Little harsh with Kelly, don’t you think?”

“She left us in the lurch.”

“Like she knows any better, “ I said, and kept going when he rolled his eyes and began to speak. “And she won’t learn from some guy twice her age who can’t stop yelling ‘fuck.’ She’s out with her friends now talking about what a dick you are.”

Matthew dipped a finger into his bourbon and ran it around the rim of his glass as I talked, making a high-pitched tone that seemed to come from far away, wind whistling through leaves. He looked up, directly into my eyes, forehead unsteady. “You think I’m a dick?” His voice: earnest and pleading, contrasting the output of shock value jokes and sarcasm usually spewing from his lips. I had never thought of him as mean, simply someone on the way to becoming a bitter, dirty, old man. But he had not yet arrived at that destination.

“No,” I said. “But you are to Kelly and she’s not complex enough to understand people have more than one color.”

He snorted at my dig at Kelly. He rubbed his eyes with the same whiskey-dipped fingers. “Ow. Dammit.”

He teared up. “Are you okay?”

He said yes, but absent-mindedly wiped the tears away with the same hand. “Fuck.”

“Close your eyes.” I took a bar napkin and soaked up his tears, as close to him as I had ever been. The pores in his dark skin: holes in the ground. His lips flitted into a smile he tried to hide. “All better.”

He went behind the bar to wash his hands and thanked me. “I’m sick of this fucking business.”

“Get out.”

He shook and nodded his head at the same time and mumbled, “Yeah, soon.”

We decide to perform the task at hand in the morning since his shift will start at four. “I can call in sick, “ he says, “ so I can be with you all day.” I tell him not to worry. At first, I set up my chair facing the mirror. But as soon as I see myself and Matthew standing over me, scissors in one hand, clippers in the other, I turn around.

“OK?”

“OK.”

The first clump of hair falls at my feet, like a baby animal scurrying for cover. Again, I wish I had noticed him sooner. As he continues to cut and cut, I try to remember him before he kissed me.

I didn’t make enough at Gilles’s, so I found a better job. Matthew said, “We’ll all celebrate your last night,” and walked away. He didn’t say a word to me the rest of my shift. For the first time in a long time, he bitched out one of the waiters.

After my last shift, waiters whom I barely knew toasted me and “bought” me drinks, passed a joint to me over and over again. Matthew sat next to me in a booth; he had been quiet and never accepted the weed. “Makes me paranoid.”

Pretty soon, everyone had forgotten the guest of honor and simply partied, leaving Matthew and I in a booth alone. I turned to him; he was already looking at me. He turned away and looked at his hands. That sequence of events had been occurring often. “Are you staring at me?” I laughed.

“Yes.”

“Lucky you.”

“I am lucky.”

The time had come for me to go and I told him so. He wished me luck and hugged me good-bye – our first close contact since I had wiped tears from his eyes. “I’ll come visit,” I offered. “Yeah, right, “ he said, without bitterness.

I stumbled from the bar without saying my farewells to the rest of the bunch. My stumbling steadied out in the cool, spring air and I decided to forego the subway and walk home. A block away from the restaurant, I heard Matthew calling my name. His jacket half-fell off of him and books fell from his unzipped bag. Once he had my attention, he turned to pick them up and ran toward me. I met him halfway. I said, “Did you come to declare your undying love for me like they do in the movies?” He tried to laugh through his panting. Standing still, the effects of the 8-hour shift, booze and weed hit me. “Not yet. I don’t feel good.” He handed me his water bottle from his still unzipped bag and kissed me on the lips. “I’ll walk you home.”

He came up. I fell asleep on the couch. When I awoke, I found the trunk of his sleeping body contorted to fit in my rocking chair. I smiled, turned over and slept; happy and confused.

The clumps of my hair surround my feet, great, knotted tree roots bursting from the Earth, their only task to bury me underneath that same Earth. When I am bald, I walk to the bathroom for a shower and Matthew follows. He wipes my tears away, a symbolic gesture. My tears merge with the water streaming over my head the same way Matthew and I are merging together, like all water knows its home is the sea. He leaves the shower before I do. The door to our bedroom is open when I step out to dry off. I see him. He places my hair in a shoebox and cries. I ought not to be looking into the future like this. I close the door and vow to forget this moment. I will remember every other single seed of time we had together. I bury this moment before I bury myself like Matthew will bury me before himself. This memory will wait for me, as I will wait for Matthew, the meat of our memories and my bones feeding the Earth.