A Modern Romance (Fiction)

{This is a short story I’d originally worked on in July of 2008, in my first real attempt at emulating DFW’s Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. I got about 7 sentences in before abandoning it. I picked it up approximately a month ago, and finished the story (which was essentially rewriting I, while keeping only the Smiths part from the original), then forgot about it. Tonight, after seeing 500 Days of Summer, I was reminded of this story, as both referenced The Smiths. After touching it up here and there with new nuances inspired slightly by the day that had just transpired, I decided I liked it enough to have the two of you who clicked on this read it. (You‘ll note the lack of similarities to Brief Interviews…,  partially because I decided to go a different direction, and half because I suck.}

    As he strolled down the sidewalk, rather than count the blocks he’d walked (which would have been a total of 37 or 38, dependant on if he’d chosen to count the initial block he’d walked across to get to the road on which his path was currently parallel.), he hummed a song to himself, at times letting the chorus or some poignant piece of verse slip out from cracks in his sighing lips. It wasn’t a particularly downbeat song, nor one he was especially fond of. He’d simply heard it on the radio once or twice around the 7th grade, and it had always struck him as the type of song that would play in a film as the protagonist was taking those long, contemplative, night time walks where the camera would be lifted on a crane (like at the end of Chinatown). So tonight, since he couldn’t have the song in the ambience, he provided his own internal (and as previously mentioned, occasionally external) soundtrack for this evening’s walk.

    When he arrived home, he nodded in recognition to the pants-less overweight man, whose sleepy eyes recognized the moving, fleshy Rorschach before him as good, and rolled back over. He, (not the pants-less man) ascended the stairs, nudged open his door, and threw his jacket onto his bed with an arched path of ease that his body soon imitated. After taking a moment to drum his fingers on top of a copy of Gravity’s Rainbow he’d kept on his bedside table with the intent of starting (It had, a week ago, been removed from the presence of it’s neighbors, Infinite Jest and The Pillars Of The Earth, all of whom made residence in the neighborhood in his bookshelf deemed “Too Fucking Long To Ever Read, But I Feel Smart For Owning Them.”), he pulled a VHS copy of Annie Hall off of his shelf, and pushed it into the VCR that lay above his head on a wooden canopy that protruded from his headboard. The scenes played before his eyes like rain on a windowpane, striking for a poignant moment, and then slipping away, barely remembered. He lay there, digits writhing, letting the night slip away into the oblivion of twilight. Clipping at excess fingernails. Playing situations that would never occur in his mind, correcting his actions whenever he erred. And then, in what seemed like an instant, but which had been brewing in the recesses of his mind for hours, and had only just now boiled over, he leapt up from his bed, grappled the phone with the force of a bandit for a gun, and dialed the number.

    “Penny?” he said. Penny replied with yes. “Listen, we need to talk.” he said. Penny hesitantly encouraged this talk, worried about whatever had worked him up into a frenzy this late. “What has it been, 3 years now, we’ve known each other? Well, since we’ve been really close?” Penny agreed, but with confusion in her voice, which he picked up on. “I guess I’m kinda starting count from that time we were humming the same song in the train station. Anyway, this is all for a purpose. I’m not just asking questions. I’m clarifying things before I start, ok?” Penny found this whole thing amusing, as she always did whenever he nervously rambled. However, she was afraid to giggle, in case that might hurt his feelings, as she was still not sure what he was about to say.

    “Ok,” he said “I just gotta get this off my chest. I’m a stubborn bastard. I believe certain things, and I can’t help the fact that I feel like everyone who believes something different than me is dumber because of that. I don’t believe in god. I don’t believe in people being “meant for each other” or “meant to be.” I don’t believe in souls, or fate, or heaven, or any of it. But that changed recently. I have to be wrong about that, because how else could you have ended up exactly as you did? How could every joy, every heart-ache, every skinned knee and Polaroid moment have added up to shape you as an exact fit for my life? Because it’s impossible to conceive the idea that one millisecond of my life could’ve gone different, and that I could have lived a Penny-less existence.” At this statement, she (Penny) couldn’t help but gasp out a giggle, as he had always had a propensity for wordplay she’d always found so original. After pausing to let the giggle resonant in his head as encouragement, he continued. “And I’m not saying this to be “romantic”. It’s not about romance, or charm. It’s just that we work. And that you are, without a doubt, one of the most perfect people for me. It tears me up inside that every time I watch a movie, or listen to a song, I can hear in my head how you’d react to it. The other day, I was listening to The Queen Is Dead by The Smiths, and on the line ‘…I said that’s nothing, you should hear me play pian-er.’ I could hear your voice say ‘Oh that was terrible.’ Stuff like that, that kills me. Or the fact that whenever I’m out with a girl, I know, rare, but it happens. But the kicker is, that whenever I’m out with a girl, sitting over a Styrofoam coffee cup flanked table, or sitting at a movie, or walking in the park, holding her hand, whatever I’m doing, the killer part is while I’m doing it, all I keep wishing is that this girl, the one I’m out with, that this girl was the one you were jealous of, instead of whatever girl happened to have caught ‘his’ eye that day. And all this stuff that goes on, it kills me, because it gives me an answer to the question of why you’re always the first thing that seemingly randomly pops into my mind whenever I see old couples at diners. Because I’d rather sit on the opposite end of a room, with you sitting there wrapped in somebody else’s arms, then curled up on the couch with anyone else. This all sounds like some love-lorn dribble, but that’s only because people don’t really talk like this to “just friends”. And we aren’t “just friends”. The word “just” is an insult to what we were. We’re closer then I’ve let myself be with anyone else, and it’s possibly the same for you. I don’t know. But what I know, what I’ve come to accept, is that you’re a perfect fit for me, in whatever way is possible. The fact is that I’m in love with you, Penny. You make the days I see you worth how much every day sucks when you’re not there. I am, and have always been, in love with you.”

    “I had no idea you felt that way.” Penny said. Then she didn’t say anything else. And neither did he. Then he tried to talk a bit about Annie Hall, which had just about reached the credits, and she listened and interjected (having never seen the movie, she had very little to contribute, and even less she wanted to, especially at an hour she hadn’t even fully realized the lateness of until now) a little here and there. Then she said goodbye and hung up, after waiting for him to offer a goodbye as well. She never called him back. She, in fact, never called again. She also never happened to be in, whenever he called her, and had picked up the apparent habit of never checking her phone messages.