Big Nothing

When I came home Amy was on my couch sleeping. She was drooling a little bit, and it looked like she had drank about half of a bottle of wine because there was half a bottle of wine sitting next to the couch where Amy was sleeping. When I woke her up she apologized and said that wine always puts her to sleep. Wine puts everyone to sleep. I don't know why people always have to say that wine puts them to sleep like it's something out of the ordinary.

Oh, really? Wine puts you to sleep? I've never in my life heard anything so ridiculous, and it is because of this that I can agree to forgive any and all wrongdoing on your part. You may have crashed drunkenly through half of my apartment, ruining carpets and breaking valuable china, but I mean, if the shit puts you to sleep, well, what can be done?

Amy hadn't done any of that though. She had come over to clean my apartment because today was my birthday, and she thought that a completely clean apartment would be a nice gift.

Amy didn't have any money, and she didn't have a job, so it was, one could say, the only gift she could possibly give me. I could give Amy lots of gifts. I have lots of money. I invented a special piece of plastic that adheres to the tip of a whipped cream can. It makes the cream more whipped and prevents curious pre-teenagers from sucking all of the gas out.

Amy likes thunderstorms. Amy likes to lie in my bed and watch the thunderstorms through the skylight. Amy makes me want to tear the roof off of my building and replace everything with skylights. She makes me want to build some kind of bomb that will fuck with the atmosphere and make it rain for a year. I want everything to be beds and rain and Amy and skylights.

I have a pet hamster that I named Sylvia, after Sylvia Plath. I discovered several weeks after naming her that the animal was actually a male, but I couldn't bring myself to change the name. Amy can't sleep in the same room as Sylvia because he crashes around in his wheel all night, so when Amy sleeps here, with me, I either have to put Sylvia's cage in the kitchen or Amy has to jam a foreign object somewhere in the wheel. I find this to be a little cruel, but am extremely attracted to the way Amy laughs when she does it.

Amy says it's kind of weird that a twenty three year old guy who lives alone has a pet hamster. I say that rodents are the barometers of the human. Amy doesn't say anything.

Amy says "I want to go to Iceland with you. I want to see that city, and those crazy ass rocks. And I want to get drunk and make out with Bjork." I don't say anything. I'm reading a magazine article entitled "Highly Verbal Psychic Real Estate Writing."

A year ago, I kissed Amy, dramatically, for the first time. The next morning I got on a train to go to work, and for the entire train ride, I replayed a daydream in my head. In the daydream, Amy was standing on the platform of whatever station the train was arriving at. She was with a man, and as the train stopped, she would kiss him, and they would smile, and she would board the train, sit across from me, and look shocked as she realized what I had seen.

In the daydream my eyes met hers and my eyes said "I have seen you in his bed and I have known for so long now that you would drive this so deep into my chest. I can hear you laughing moaning crying in his arms holding him wondering if your grip is tighter or if you are closer than when you are with me. You can be closer to no one but me because I am everything and I am all around you and I am always whispering much louder than I am speaking."

Each time I went through this, there were minor changes that didn't really matter. What mattered was the pain I felt. It hurt so terribly I could barely walk. I didn't want to walk. I loved her and I wanted to die.

Amy's father was born in the Caribbean. He is the son of two french citizens who went on vacation and never returned to France. I think that "Amy" is the most un-French name I have ever heard, and I once wondered if they had thought the same thing when they named her. I wondered if they thought about their home and cursed it quietly with that name, the three letters they adhere to what would be their only progeny- an A for the sand, M for the waves and the wind in the trees at night, a Y for the blue color that seemed to leak from the water and the sky into her eyes.

Today Amy will not finish cleaning my apartment, and I will not finish cleaning it tomorrow. We will lay on my sofa and watch re-runs of The Real World until two o'clock in the morning. Amy will talk some more about Iceland, and I will not think of her with anyone else. We will fall asleep until quarter to five, when the patter of rain will wake us and we will watch the thunderstorm in a dream, half awake, silent.