all the red rings.

The new car's bluetooth digitally grabs my phone, pulling a random track out of the playlist a thousand deep:

And the mercy seat is waiting
And I think my head is burning
And in a way I'm yearning ...

Like a spell, the surprise blindsides me, and I'm in a kitchen I remembered from long ago. The redhead is uncorking her two-buck chuck like it's the finest. She climbs up an uncertain stepstool to get her fancy plated goblets with the relief of grapes on them for us, her well-proportioned Italian posterior centering the balance of her fae Irish form, barely keeping her from falling down like a beautiful disaster. The reels on the tape player turn slowly, the white teeth in the spools grinding forward toward a foregone end as we smile at each other. Nick Cave continues rasping out his ballads of murder & seduction, the listener uncomfortably attracted to the ouroboros of the idea that both those things swim in the same dark, warm water.

[she looked something like model Laura Schuller {photo by Marc Laroche}.]

All the red rings of hair my eyes cannot help but follow around and down, and I am lost, so lost in their warp & weft woven to crown this actress, a sketch group comedienne, this woman of talent who decided to come to a holiday party with me. And then there we were, at her place.

The stained livingroom couch has a gypsy fringe throw, and she drops into my lap like a gift. Our mouths are sour with her cheap wine. We walk the goblets into the bedroom. The fancy party clothes drop away in slow rounds of lingering movements.

Three hours later she tells me, "You fuck like the Devil." I whisper, "And you love like a pale, beautiful angel." The hours continue.

Somewhere during a breather, this important life changing moment happens, where she says, "'Bill'?!? Guillermo is soooo much better. You should take it back. Be Guillermo."

After, we lay there and talk of magick, and talk of curses, and talk of dreams, and talk of secrets, until the birds of dawn join our conversation, their song finally letting us drop into sleep.

I would call her later, asking if she wanted to watch Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, thinking our shared love of literature and her stagecraft could coo together over the spectacle. Many voicemails, but she would never answer. I saw it with someone else, who didn't appreciate it at all.

She would later go join her boyfriend in California, her future husband. I would get an email a few years after, with a subtle admission that perhaps her marriage was an ill fit. I never answered.

Between that unrequited pair of communications but before her intended move, I starred in a friend's poetry reading performance trio onstage at Club Congress, The Drunken Poet's Highball Hour, where 60 people I knew showed up just to hear my two poems. I'd mailed her a flyer. A heart milagro pinned to my jacket's lapel buttonhole, the emotional boutonniere that I would've unpinned to gift her in the audience during my reading. She doesn't show up to hear me speak the words to everyone:

"I would have gone.
I would have gone." 

Years later, at an unexpected nightclub encounter, she tells me between tears of regret that she scripted a character based on me in a play she wrote.

Somewhere outside of time, there's a version of me on a stage, my hand pressed to the small of her back, my fingers wedded in the red rings in the curls of another her, and we are together, still kissing.

[For Kimberly, who gave me the gift of my name.]

#   #   #

While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him.

it breaks my heart.

I would send that photo of you on a clear blue day in SF, holding the flask. It's that bright and shining moment of perfection where everything you feel is unquestionable and more than real and so solid it flays you free of the unimportant past and cracks opens the future like a pomegranate, each bead a sweet red bit of life to come, and you know in your soul it'll all taste good from here on out.

You're holding the flask in your hands, the one thing you wanted more than anything for your 30th birthday, and it reads "fire in a bottle", and it doesn't matter that nobody else knew what it meant, only us, only us, only us, only we knew.

Later, there were moments and pauses where our love flagged. The difference was that I had to try and pay attention to the ones where it didn't: the nights of sweat, breakfasts of unneeded donuts and fritters, you in marabou slippers, us driving out to see that total tourist trap in Dragoon that was so stupid it didn't matter because we were there together snickering among the scorpions frozen in paperweights; leaving the apartment like a dream in the stewardess outfit at 4 in the mornings, sleeplessly sexy, touching down like the setting sun when you got back in the evening, rising, falling, rising again, out into the world and ovaling back to me where I waited with presents washed up on the shore of my nights at the store. In them, I saw you, and the desire I had for you.

It was you who doubted, who saw those same moments not as answers but as questions to be raised but for your own reasons, because in the end security was more important than love for you. Is it? Have you now found it a few just too convenient doors down? I can't say. I've always been secure with myself, safe in my own arms, self-contained. I still am, but you've cracked that container, and while it's all still together in my boundless soul, there's a space where you're missing, where the cold enters, depressurizing my insides when I don't expect it, and I see you through the hairline gap, and I miss you: the bangs, the full smile, eyes of dusk, charms you never even saw, but that never failed to surprise, seen as though it were always the first time. Through the heartfissure I accidently watch re-runs of the Christina channel, and what was once my favourite show now breaks my heart, and the fucked up thing of it is you don't even have to be there to do it again.

Yet I can't tell you, or send you the photo. Pride forbids it, my righteous anger tells me such offerings are undeserved, that they weren't adequate to save us in the first place, that maybe, after it all, they'll signify only to me, and are ultimately unasked for.

I wonder if one night you'll realize that more than that immediate family you love, the shoe leather father of impossibly high regard, self-declared asshole brother, sweater-vested aloofly uncaring younger brother, and especially your unwinnable mommy dearest, that for that time, I cared for you more than all of their small mouths could ever hold, and cared most of all.

And in the end, now a year later, in the wake of your unsober tear eyed unannounced visit to my parents, I'm right: love isn't enough. In the end I was the one left holding the bag, the bag filled with gifts left ungiven, gifts poured back into the oceans of unwanted things, these artfully wrapped presents that weren't just gifts -- they were years of I love yous to come, the red seeds of pomegranate that once shined and burned inside that bottle like a fire, impossible but true, if only for a moment of our lives, flowing away from you,
almost,
but not,
tasted,
given up ...
gone.

#    #    # 

While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

an open letter.

One night you will search for yourself, Miss Kris Nicholson, and you will find this, thereby finding me.

Come September it will be 11 years since I walked away from you on the curb of the New Orleans airport, trying my hardest to never look back -- but a part of me has been looking back ever since, unable to forget the splendour in the shadows of that old whorehouse turned hotel on Rue Dauphine. We only stopped long enough to eat oysters in the Vieux Carre, returning for more on bended knees & arched backs, over the ottoman, & upon the silks. 

Talks of literature applied to living. Drama from the page, characters & plots twisted from lips that echoed the leaves even more than mine, so worth the listening as hours became minutes. Your skin, a pallid pleasure wrought in alabaster, hair a red river silted in gold. I never tired of looking at you.

I never got the chance to. You poisoned us. 

You went back to your once-spurned fiance willingly. Know that you were the last person I could love more than myself & you put paid on that innocent mistake. Maybe on some level you felt undeserving, returning to a man who'd hit you, an unimaginative parasite who had already cost you years. I had no choice but to leave. 

Then some odd Thanksgiving I spotted you, a ghost. You looked worn & tired. I was nearly relieved at the sight. Katrina had destroyed 90% of Hattiesburg and even after so many years my first thought worried if you were still in Mississippi, crushed beneath the wreckage of the South. But Tom was near, towing the lesser and later vision of you, and that looked to be a far slower demise than nature could devise. 

You were the love of my life, but you don't deserve such high regard. What is eight months of passion compared to many dedications of three years? Yet I think on you more, for good or ill. Equal measures of pride & self-respect have kept me from actively seeking you out. They still do. They still will. 

In letter & person I was the night to your day. And it seemed to be half you. Was it actually you? Or was it the heaven you made me feel? It was both. Only far later I realized it never really needed you as an external catalyst, because it doesn't come from another -- that bliss comes from oneself. It just wanted you to share with, and that was the miracle we had together. 

But on rare nights it still hurts, the poison, burning that lesson inside me. In turn, remember me on this sainted day of love when we'd first touched one another in earnest. Remember that I bought a star in Scorpio to name after you, lit smaller than a pinhole & greater than all the world.

#    #    # 

While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.