Artist Insane .com

Josh absently flipped though the channels on the remote, passing from one morning TV program to another, each featuring the expected cookie cutter match-ups of perky, perfectly suited and coiffed pairs of warm and fuzzy male and female co-anchors.  In his own sleep-deprived, grief-muddled and far from perky state, it passed though his mind just how appropriate the term anchor seemed for all of them…considering how fervently he wished he could push every one over a cliff into pounding surf and watch them sink into oblivion.  Switching off the TV, he stood up and began looking around for his keys so abruptly he made Sultan jump from his cozy position on a nearby pillow and look at Josh expectantly.

“What?” Josh demanded of his feline roommate, whose only answer was a yawn, a bit of stretching and a few steps toward the kitchen, before glancing back at Josh to make sure he’d got the hint.

“Yeah, yeah, I hear you.  You want breakfast.”

Noting Sultan wasn’t budging any further until he did so, Josh continued, “You don’t trust me?  Go on.  I’m coming.”

Josh opened a cabinet door and took out a bag of cat food, filling one of the two bowls by the refrigerator as Sultan looked on, purring with approval.  He then removed the water bottle from the fridge and poured some of its contents into the other, taking a long drink for himself before putting both the bottle and bag away, and heading toward the front door.  Picking up his keys and wristwatch, he glanced at the time on the latter before reconsidering his departure, and heading back into the living room instead.

Picking up an acoustic guitar leaning against a far wall, he sat down on the couch and started playing a few chords, strumming away with no real tune in mind for a few minutes, before gradually starting to fingerpick the beginnings of a melody, eventually trying out a few variations on the initial sound.

He reached suddenly for a pen on an end table, and grabbed a napkin from last night’s dinner lying under the coffee table on the floor.  Starting to scribble down notes on this potential new composition, he found the pen to be out of ink, muttered a curse under his breath, and hurled the offending object across the room, causing a momentary cease in the contented crunching sounds that had been steadily coming from the kitchen.

The phone just above Sultan’s head started ringing as Josh walked to the bedroom and opened the top drawer of a desk.  He heard the elongated beep of the answering machine, wondering dully if all home appliances weren’t in fact designed to serve as subtle forms of torture, before Tommy’s voice came from the other end of the line asking, “Hey Josh, you there?  Pick up if you are.  We’ve gotta talk.”

Ignoring the moment of silence that followed, before a mildly confused sounding, “Okay, I’ll call back,” Josh continued his impatient rummaging for another pen, removing a spiral notebook Julie’d used for one of her community college courses in the process.  At last finding what he sought, and trying it out on the cover to make sure this one had ink, he then flipped through the notebook and tore out a blank page.  About to close the book again, he was stopped by the words he’d left naked on the next one – which appeared to be a poem written in Julie’s hand…

“You say you see me as your own,

Expect a card on Mother’s Day;

But I know in your heart I’m just

Your picture of Dorian Gray…”

Intrigued, Josh stopped reading briefly to flip back to the beginning of the notebook in search of some indication as to what course it had accompanied.  Finding the words, “Western Civilization I” on the inside flap, he couldn’t help letting out a quick laugh of derision, given the verse he’d just discovered seemed to cover the subject of the far from civilized aunt’s home in which Julie’d grown up.  Was there no end to the hints he’d long been missing regarding the ironies of life?   Worse than that, were there an equal number of solutions to Julie’s problems he’d missed as well?  Hell, he hadn’t even known she wrote poetry.  Maybe he was just beginning to realize how little he’d known her.

Forcing himself back to the writing before him, he continued reading, stopping at the lines…

“If you could only see
how your hate defaces me.

If you saw you through my eyes,
saw Dorian Gray in disguise,

You’d see how it should be…
you’d hate you instead of me.”

Suddenly ripping the page out of the notebook, Josh started back to the living room, turning back quickly to grab the pen he’d been seeking in the first place, before he crossed once more to the couch and his guitar.  Laying the piece of paper containing Julie’s words before him on the coffee table, he started picking at the melody he’d been playing around with earlier, and singing the last lines he’d just read to form a chorus.  Letting out an excited, “Yes, that’s it!” he reached over the guitar to mark a few notes on the page, then put the pen down again, and set to work on the first verse.

Still engrossed in this endeavor when the phone started ringing again, Josh had no idea if mere minutes or hours had passed, but once more allowed the answering machine to deal with Tommy’s follow-up to his earlier call.  “Okay, I guess you’re still not there.  Call me.”

Having been shaken from the trancelike state of his creative efforts, he now took the time to pay a visit to the kitchen and see if there might not be just one last beer hiding somewhere in the depths of the refrigerator.  Scavenging through browning lettuce, fruit-flavored yogurt containers and various forms of now unidentifiable leftovers, Josh’s search came up empty.  Recalling in dismay that the mission for which he’d intended to leave earlier was to go buy just this item, he now wanted to stay in and keep working, so enlarged his hunting ground to include every square inch of the kitchen, tearing open drawers, cabinets, and everywhere else he could think to look until he finally hit the jackpot of a myriad collection of beer, Jack Daniels and scotch on the bottom shelf of the narrow antique cupboard Julie’d once used as a pantry.  Hmm, it seemed she’d turned it into another kind of storehouse in recent months.  Why was it coming as a surprise how little he really knew about life?  Clearly he had a lot to learn about even his own home – and his own girlfriend.  But then again, why bother.  Whoever said, “Education is never a waste” apparently wasn’t educated enough to be aware of another key phrase, “Time is of the essence.”  Julie’s time had run out, and nothing he learned now would bring her back.  Whether that particular bit of education would be considered a “waste” by those in the “know” he had no idea.  All he knew was he could have lived a lot longer without it – not to mention that, without it, he might’ve just lived a lot longer.