I Think About You, Only Louder by Jordan Kurella
~2600 words, 13 minutes reading time
Issue 1 (Winter, February 2023)
At 4:30, I go to the algae covered pool and wait for you to come home. A heron arrives. She goes fishing in the pool, but I am too tired to watch. The heron is pretty, like all birds are pretty: terrifying and loud. I eventually fall asleep, only to wake to a frog settled between my feet. It’s staring at me, the frog, its throat bellowing in and out.
In and out.
I stay this way for hours, on this pool chair, on your old rainbow towel, trying to rest. Hours. Maybe less, maybe more. My staying is not for the frog, not for the heron. Not for the pungent smoke that currently lingers on the periphery of the courtyard and will, eventually, come rushing in.
I stay here because of you. You are meant to come home and find me still waiting for you, here on this chair. It was once less mouldy, less saggy, less sad. I was less sad, once. Before the smoke, before the pool turned green and unswimmable.
Before I realised you weren’t coming to find me.
So, I gather up your towel, tell myself that you’ll come home later. Later. But my memory says that you won’t. Doesn’t memory lie, though? Doesn’t it change and shift? Like the smoke changes and shifts: moving in and out like sighing. The only certainty I have anymore is that I miss you.
Everything pivots around that. Everything.
The frog stares, the heron leaves, and the smoke closes in like fatigue. I can’t stay here. I can’t wait for you anymore; you aren’t coming to find me. I walk, dragging the towel, dragging my feet, back to our apartment.
When I shut the door, I think about you. Only louder.
•••••••••••••
You believed in reincarnation. Hard.
I believed in jack shit. There used to be comfort in nihilism.I once told you that the world went away when I died. Once upon a time, I believed I wasn’t responsible for anything. Not even you. This all hits too hard in my current reality, because now every day I wake up and grab your rainbow towel, go out to the pool, and that is the routine of this current state of me.
Starting to think I had the wrong idea.
•••••••••••••
I open the door with your towel over my shoulder. I am wearing my bathing suit and duct-taped flip flops. It’s 4:30, and I am going to sit on the pool chair and wait for you to come home.
There is a heron, she is stalking around the pool chairs. Looking under, over. Goddamn, she’s excitable: chattering, calling, swallowing. She sees me, flaps her wings excitedly, raises to her full height. She is tall, blue, gorgeous in the way that birds are gorgeous: like iridescent dinosaurs. Somehow not ashen grey from the smoke but shining. Pretty impressive, this bird.
There is a frog under my pool chair, the mouldy one, the sagging one. The one where I plan to wait for you. You like to catch frogs, to save them. If you were here, you would catch this frog and take it back home to save it from this freaky heron. But you are not here.
I am.
You are late. Something itches in my memory and says you will always be late. Later, even. So, the three of us are at a détente: the frog, the heron, and me. The towel over my shoulder, my sunglasses askew. I stand up to my full height, hands on hips, and the heron chatters at me. I have nothing to say; I have so little to say anymore.
The heron breaks the stalemate first.
The frog blinks at me, its throat bellowing in and out, in and out. I know what you would do, would want to do. The heron dives. Her beak darts through the pool chair and I, in the same motion, dive my hands underneath it. It’s not until I feel the frog in my hands and hear her wings beat the air that I know. I understand.
I won.
The frog trapped in both hands, the heron trapped in the chair. She flings the chair about, throwing it into the pool and I stand while she flies off into the smoke. She disappears. I open my hands to see the frog. No thank you is given, it simply leaps from my palm and onto the concrete, and away.
You never arrive to see the spectacle. Nor hear about it. I can’t linger to tell you about it either, as the smoke closes in early. So, I go home, wanting nothing more than to scream at you for leaving me alone. I tear the towel to shreds, and somehow, somewhere, I know, you are upset with me for being gone.
•••••••••••••
Once upon a time, you taught yoga out of a studio that we rented, and I ran your books. You had degrees in physical fitness and religion, and I had a degree in economics. We had delusions that this was our ticket to long life and true love, even after everything went to shit with plague and panic and more plague and more panic. We were right, for a while. The studio kept on keeping on.
But I didn’t.
There were once things of yours in the apartment that I hated, honestly. The French Press with the gold filter that never got cleaned right. Your fancy opaque coffee containers with the coffee in them until the beans tasted off, cause you never drank them as fast as you claimed to. The Let It Be poster on the kitchen wall that you said had to be there ‘for luck.’ I always thought the poster too final, too macabre for the kitchen, but you always said it was a sign to keep going, to keep going.
To, like the song says, just let things be.
•••••••••••••
It’s just after 4:30pm and I swear I have been here before. With this frog in my hands, setting it on the mouldy pool chair, a pissed off heron flying into the smoke-black sky. But it wasn’t like this before. My memory has other versions: the frog sitting on a counter in the apartment, the frog leaping out of my hands, the heron drinking from a clean, blue pool.
You believed in reincarnation hard. I still believe you’re going to come for me. Neither of these things are true, because it’s just after 4:30pm and the sun has given up its fight with the smoke, and I’m too exhausted to get up and go back to the apartment. Everything is exhausting these days. So much takes too much energy. Just to come here, just to stay here, just to think about you, to dream about you.
Some things never change.
The frog is still settled between my legs, it hasn’t moved. It’s kind of cute, in that frog way: slimy and balloon-ish. Then it says something and I can’t move at all.
It says, “Kiss me.”
The frog crawls a little closer, then. Tentative, on all four legs like it’s not quite sure if it offended me. I’m not offended? Just a little shocked that frogs talk and want kisses. It gets closer, between my knees, and that’s when I reach down and pick it up. Holding it in my hands for the briefest of moments before I kiss its forehead. I kiss the frog like I used to kiss your cat that sat by the spider plant, who ate that poor thing into a perpetual state of near-death.
Quick peck: no lips, just get the damn thing over with.
The frog, to my horror, puckers its lips and crawls closer to the heel of my hand, raising its jaw and closing its eyes. Apparently, my facile gesture wasn’t enough. So? So. I kiss it on the lips the way your grandmother used to ask me to kiss her in greeting. I hated it then and I hate it now: both the frog and your grandmother smell like mildew.
•••••••••••••
You and I had friends that were the same, and friends that were different. Our friends that were the same liked to come over for dinner parties and offered to feed the cat when we had to travel for whatever or whenever.
My friends that were different liked to go for Karaoke and sing 90’s hair metal. My band of choice was Extreme, because I was indifferent to them as I was to everything, so like everything I didn’t have to try too hard. Your friends that were different liked to come over and watch bad movies about cool guys who don’t look at explosions. You loved anything where the science warped so bad it couldn’t even be science anymore.
Makes sense, nothing is science anymore.
Which is why I blame you for all of this. You don’t show up, leaving me here to haunt this old life. I’m furious at the fact that I’m dead, and more mad that you don’t answer anything that I do for attention. Nothing. You don’t show up to see me when I’m quiet. Didn’t show up when I knocked your fancy French Press off the counter; didn’t show up when I shattered the glass on the Let It Be poster.
There’s nothing left for me here anymore, not even you.
•••••••••••••
It’s weird, to kiss a frog in our kitchen with all the doors locked. Feels dirty somehow. Like it’s something to be done quietly, like when we used to make out in my old bedroom when we’d visit my folks.
It’s a little early for drinking (not quite 5:00) and the moment the kiss ends, I feel drunker than I’ve ever been. Higher than I’ve ever been. I set the frog down, except there’s no frog to set down, just my hands on the counter to catch my own vertigo, cause the apartment isn’t the apartment I left this morning.
The apartment is the apartment as it was before I died. Complete with The Beatles on the kitchen wall, before the band died. And you, too, smoking out of your black-cat hookah, smiling at me in a half-baked stupor.
“Siddown, I got something to show you.”
The TV is on, with our wedding video. You’re walking down the aisle to languid music so boring it could put Pachelbel to sleep. You gesture at the screen so grandly I’m astonished you don’t fall off the couch, but, as I recall, your control of everything was so great, you could hold reality in check.
So, I guess this is reality right now, and so I sit down, cause you finally showed up. All I’ve wanted in so long was for you to show up, and here you are, passing me the hookah like nothing ever happened. I pull, and pass it back. We both sit like this for a while, staring at the TV, watching the crowd cry and sob as the two of us mumble our vows back and forth to each other.
“Weren’t we beautiful,” you say, running your hand down your hair. It’s shorter than I remember it being. Shorter and straighter, and greyer. Mine is the same. Always curlier and darker than yours. Always impossible to tame, even though you were the one who was impossible to tame.
You turn to me, put your hand on my cheek.
“Aren’t you beautiful?”
The whole room is hazy, with a white vignette like in a video game or an old photo, or something you’d try to pass off as ‘artistic’ cause you edited it on your phone. Hazy around the edges and with incense and skunk weed and smog and gosh, your perfume.
I kiss the palm of your hand; it tastes like sweat.
And you smile, you smile so wide I can see all your teeth. I do, too. I can feel the air on them for the first time in, in. Time has been strange since I died. But my last few memories of you don’t have you smiling this wide, or this real. You grab my face and kiss me. I kiss you back, we fall onto the couch: kissing, tearing off clothes, wrapping our legs round each other just as our first dance comes on the video.
George Michael’s Freedom ’90.
We fuck. We fuck right there on the couch, and you are aggressive: like you haven’t fucked anyone in so long. And I am aggressive, because I have wanted to yell at you, scream at you. I have wanted to slam all the doors in the apartment at once just to make you notice me. But you’re noticing me now.
And how.
Right now all I know is that I love you and I have always loved you, I miss you and I have always missed you; there is no aspect of patience and eternity there is only right now and this moment and this aspect is climbing and climbing and you are in it and on it and we are together with legs on legs and hips on hips and your breath is against my neck and our breasts are tandem and our skin is sweating and I gasp and I gasp and I gasp and you are. And you are.
And we are.
Here.
When you’re done, after I’m done, you raise off me and smile. “I missed you so much,” you say. “Gods I missed you too much, too too much, everyone says.” That’s when I realize I’m crying. “Hey. Hey, remember me. Remember this. I love you, I love you and I miss you.”
You shower me in kisses. My cheek, my neck, my forehead. Each dotted with, “I love you.” Each one with your breath on my skin, smelling like spearmint. “Remember that, remember. Know that. Know that I love you, I love you.”
That’s when I turn to say something, to kiss you back, but the world shimmers.
Then gone.
•••••••••••••
The pool is blue and smells like chlorine. Iridescent like my feathers are iridescent. In my memory I know I come here a lot, sometimes I see you: see you on a pool chair, on a stitched-together rainbow towel, arm over your face, blocking out the sun. You’re in a bathing suit that seems familiar. Too familiar. It doesn’t quite fit you.
I recognize it, it was mine.
Once upon a time, you tied the straps at my back as I held my hair up; you kissed the bone where the neck meets the spine. I got goosebumps where your finger traced circles where your lips left me behind. The bikini was an impulse buy, fancy black with gold trim; it never fit me. It doesn’t fit you now. You’ve lost weight, you’re older, you’re asleep.
Time has passed.
My neck extends, feathers ruffling as I watch you in the bright sun, reflecting from the pool behind me, the blacktop of the basketball court across the street, the parking lot of the school beyond that, heat rising from the highway beyond even that. It is so bright. So bright. I chatter as your chest rises and falls. So slow, so even. Your mouth is open but even the mosquitoes avoid you.
We were this way once before: you on a pool chair, me standing far away, wondering at you. Your arm rising from across your face to stare back. You were younger then, your hair less silver, your legs less slim, less dimpled with age. I smiled at you then as you sat up. Walked over then as I walk over now, on legs too unsteady to carry me.
These heron legs are too unsteady to carry me.
Just as then, you are smiling, towel bunched up under your feet, pool chair sagging beneath your weight. I stand over you, as I did then, but this time I say nothing, beak tucked in my feathers I am watching you. Watching you smile as you dream, and breathe.
Breathe in and out, in and out.