A handy-dandy college dictionary sits beside the bed – a relic of the latest cycle of insomnia: frustration, masturbation, and endless, impossible crossword puzzles. And there on page 481 is the fourth definition of the word settle: to sink.
That night was nothing special. There was a party, and two drinks into the evening there was the first gnawing complaint. One more vodka and there were excuses made, tabs paid, and rushed goodbyes. No one was supposed to notice that this smiling couple was seething at the coat check. No one was supposed to see the explosion outside the revolving door. No one was supposed to hear the obnoxious, illogical argument. But then came the crying. Crying that people will do anything in their power to avoid and ignore. The hysterical, pain in the ass, PMS-driven, woman-cry that seems so desperate and vulnerable and is so hated by both sexes – she for the show of unstoppable weakness and he for the impossibility of dealing with it. There is no right answer.
“You know you’re fucking crazy. Just leave me alone and fucking go home.”
Go home. Where is home, anyway? ‘Where the heart is’ they say. What the hell is that – some piece of shit cliché that says home is in the center of your body, slightly on the left? So we really have nowhere to go. Just pull yourself in and implode.
Next is the walking portion of the evening. Stalking down Second Avenue listening to the clicking of uncomfortable but stylish heels on the sidewalk. Past the deli guy selling flowers, past the annoying couple holding hands, past the woman talking on her goddamn cell phone. Click, click, click. Life as reaction, rather than action – as it is rather than as it should be – reaction to fear, to loneliness, to all the useless baggage that’s carried along each over-burdened day. Reaction to the broken, idiotic relationship. To the shoes. To that mother-fucking cell phone.
“Stop. Come on, I’m sorry. I love you.”
Softer now, calm, cigarette lit on the corner of 74th Street. Big words, I LOVE YOU. Big enough to hide a lot of things. Valuable property, those words, not to be abandoned without considerable thought. But there must be a Cinderella-at-midnight moment when I LOVE YOU loses its magic and dissolves into two pronouns and a verb – not a complex, mysterious concept that the world conditions us to seek out, but subject and predicate, simple to diagram. There must be.
It wasn’t that night. That night was nothing special. No great revelations on the corner of 74th and 2nd. There were thoughts – of violence, of running, of hope, of loss. There was a deluge of anger. Had it been a novel, someone would have seen the foreshadowing. (Maybe that deli guy with the flowers.) There would be an end one day, but that night there was just a cold, quiet taxi ride over the bridge. Perhaps a flicker of recognition of the truth on page 481.
SETTLE: to sink.
Jump ship before you drown.