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- 09/20/2017
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Note: While authors are asked to place warnings on their stories for some moderated content, everyone has different thresholds, and it is your responsibility as a reader to avoid stories or stop reading if something bothers you.
So Weeps the Willow - 4. Sobriety - Day 3
Sobriety - Day 3
I don’t think anyone is reading my blog. The counter is showing five viewers, same as yesterday. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. All I know is this experiment is starting to get a little scary. I’m still having trouble sleeping, and when I do I have wild, erratic and disjointed nightmares. Yes, I know most dreams are a mishmash of things, but they seem even more odd and disquieting.
I’m beginning to fear the worst; I really am an alcoholic. I drank myself into addiction and in the next couple of days, according to all the medical websites, I will get very, very sick. Already, I can feel weakness in my legs and arms. My stomach is tied into knots. My thoughts are foggy and thick, soupy and slow moving. There is an ache in my temples that throbs and pulses. I’m working out, running, and trying to keep busy because then I know this may pass quicker, or at least less painfully.
This isn’t good, yet I had a hint of a reprieve.
Nats was wonderful last night. I confessed my ‘going on the wagon’ and she was very supportive. Usually after work we go out and tip a few back, I think I mentioned that, but last night we didn’t. Nats suggested we go to her apartment and play cards and listen to music. It was nice of her to be so accommodating.
Her apartment is much like her -- unique, radical, and totally without rules. Her kitchen cupboards are stacked with her long, peasant skirts, short midriff tops, hats, striped stockings with large holes in them, and wigs of every color. Her bathroom is stuffed full of magazines, arty ones, fashion spreads, even a huge stack of US Weekly featuring beautiful, vapid Hollywood stars posed artistically on the front cover. Her bedroom has large tubs, sealed with latched tops and stained with clay lined up against one wall.
It's a crazy place. Her tiny dining room and living room are filled with little tables with her pots on them. I hadn’t been here in a while. Nats isn’t the socializing type, any more than I am, but things were even crazier than I’d remembered.
I was wandering around the main room looking at her work and saw an especially large pitcher, the spout long and graceful, the handle large and shaped resembling a stylized flower. The opening at the top of this pitcher was tiny, a finger could barely fit. The outside was white and she’d carefully painted delicate flowers and small birds all over the surface. Some were yellow, some pink, lavender, even baby blue, but all pastels. What was strange was the color inside the pot. It was a eerie, dark gray, greenish color, sickly and almost deadly, at least that was how it felt compared to the bright airy outside and the elegant shape.
“Do you like it?” she’d asked me.
“It’s…well interesting.”
My answer made her smile.
Glancing around, I saw a large bowl on a shelf across the room. It was strangely familiar, yet not, until I realized the ugly color from inside the pitcher was the hue painted on the outside of the bowl. The inside was like the outside of the pitcher only painted with little furry animals, squirrels with fluffy tails, raccoons, rabbits, frogs, and even a deer placed dead center in the bottom of the bowl. Nats’ pieces were pretty unique, but these two were exquisite.
“Do you like them? I see you found the matched set almost immediately.” Nats was looking over my shoulder holding firmly on to my arm. Her left hand massaged my neck affectionately.
“What does it mean? They are lovely, yet sad as well.” I don’t really know art except what moves me. An impression came over me and I added, “These two belong together, though they don’t really fit well, do they?”
Nats sighed and pulled away. “I threw those two pieces in honor of two different lovers.”
I was shocked at how casual she was about the admission. I knew from her side references; her work was inspired by her hookups. I turned and gestured for her to continue.
“Do you remember the blond, the one you teased me for weeks after?”
“Yeah,” I responded. “Is that in one of these pieces?”
“Maybe,” Nats answered, picking up another pot, this one a vase painted with black interlocking squares on the background of deep, glossy blue. “I do like expressing how people make me feel.”
Dreamily, or so it seemed. Nats placed the vase back down and swirled in a circle, her hair and scarf streaming around her. It seemed exaggerated and unnecessary, but then it wasn’t a huge surprise; she did that. Nats was that way. Then she stopped, put a finger to her lips, and smiled.
“Can you figure out what that piece means?”
“What do you mean?” I answered immediately. “It’s not me, is it?”
“Nooo,” she said, drawing the word out. “But that doesn’t mean we don’t have a relationship.”
For a minute, I couldn’t understand what she meant, then I realized she was referring to our friendship. I looked about the room, there were at least fifty pieces sitting around the place. It was so clean, so sterile a space. I knew Nats to be a little messy at times, but for some reason she’d cleaned. I wondered for whom.
I closed my eyes and thought about her and me. We partied. We went out. We cruised together. We hunted. For prey. For lovers and for her, stories.
Opening my eyes, I scanned the room again and my eyes fell upon a square pot in the corner of the room. It was slightly larger than most of them. I walked over and picked it up. The inside was painted with a bright white paint and in the bottom was a little lamb, not painted, formed from clay and glazed a gleaming cream color. The outside of the pot was a matte finish, dark charcoal gray, with highly cartoonish outlines of a tiger’s head on each of the four sides.
“This is for me, isn’t it?” I asked her.
Nats didn’t say anything. She smiled and walked away.
After I left her apartment, on the way home, I walked by a bar, an American Legion, and I heard a bell clanging. The bartender was bellowing out last call. My heart pulled me closer. I stepped up to the door. I stopped. I held back. With enormous effort, I stepped back off the stoop away from the door. I came home and wrote this. I’m still shaking. A little.
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Note: While authors are asked to place warnings on their stories for some moderated content, everyone has different thresholds, and it is your responsibility as a reader to avoid stories or stop reading if something bothers you.
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