Jennifer Murphy

The End of August

Next to me last night sat the boy I loved last
summer. The blonde, the actor, the one
who went crazy is the way we remember
him now. Not the hero in the Invention of Love.
Not the child molester on Law and Order. Not
six-foot-one body like sculpture, Michelangelo's
David in Tompkins Square Park. It all came down
to one night at the end of August when he drove
out of New York into a forest in Connecticut
where he got naked, beat his chest, and begged
the Virgin Mary, Mary I love you Mary, name
me the son of God, Jesus, I am your son.
I'm not sure what Mary did, but his parents
put him in the hospital. He stayed in paper
slippers and watched September 11 on TV.
I saw him one week after and he said he knew
it was going to happen. In hindsight,
he predicted the whole thing. He said Mary
drove him out of the City and he was saved.
A month later I saw him sitting in Life Café
smoking a cigarette. He kept saying Go
toward the light. Find the truth. A year
after September 11 we ran into each other
again. He said there's a strange energy
in the City and he wants to acknowledge
it because his phobias are coming back:
spiders crawling up his arms. Patches of dark.
Living in a tunnel only unlike last year
he is able, he thinks, to see the light.

 

Nerve.com

He said the pink cloud you feel
when you first come off alcohol
is not a pink cloud, it is humility.
The girl remembered this one three-thirty
in the afternoon in a cubicle on Monday,
three weeks after breaking up with her boy-
friend when she saw him online, his profile
posted on Nerve.com. She remembered
the pink cloud she felt when she met him
which she called love and her friend Sarah-
John called "Not yet, but maybe someday."
How the cloud scattered the Sunday
she left for Laguna Beach to work for six
months in a cubicle where she would
eventually click on a link that led to his face.
His height his weight what he wanted.
Wordhead, what a handle. She thought this:
humility is seeing your ex-boyfriend
searching for a woman who is not you
online. For play, for dating. She thought
about how she thought about him last
Saturday night at the Crystal Palace on
Buck Owens Boulevard in Bakersfield,
how he of all people would appreciate
hearing Buck sing. She felt proud to be
from a place of which she had always been
ashamed. Night darkening on the streets,
the black sky trimmed in a veil of hot pink
clouds dragged across the horizon.