Monk The Teller

Tales of My Life: Watching The Line and Recording The Beyond

His behavior began to become more and more erratic. His writing became filled with characters overwrought with despair and the imagery became dark and borderline delusional.

He’d began to walk right up to the line of what was considered socially acceptable behavior, stop, look both ways and cross into the unknown.

At first, it would happen with out him realizing it until it was too late.

He’d snap out of a rage or slip out of deep and dark, semiconscious, dream-like state where he had generated some of the most disturbing images his mind ever created and realize it had happen again.

But later, he’d become conscious of it the exact moment before he crossed the line.

As time passed, he was able to watch himself from the moment he headed in the direction of the line, until the moment right before he crossed it, and right on through the moment he crossed on to the other side of sanity.

And with each time that he crossed the line, the process become more seamless and his desire to escape the darkness faded.

It scared him that he began to enjoy the whole process.

Before, where he was able to prevent letting his mind slip into the darkness, he now allowed it to happen on a regular basis.

And he would go darker and darker every time.

When he snapped out of it, he’d begin to write. He’d sometimes write for hours straight with out rest.

He would explore the entire spectrum of human emotions and try to convey it in his writing. 

It was the most productive he had been in a long time. Yet, it was also the most self-destructive he had been in a long time. And he went with it. He didn’t hold back, he just experienced it and recorded it.

Tales of My Life: Who Knows

He began to suspect that his coworkers knew, and it bothered him that the facade he had worked so hard to maintain was slowly falling apart.

He didn’t want to have to go through explaining to them the reasons why it had all ended so quickly. He hadn’t yet made sense of it all and trying to explain it to others wasn’t something he was prepared to do.

But they began to probe more and more, each time getting bolder and bolder with their inquiries.

“Where is she tonight?” they’d ask when he would show up to a function alone.

“With her friends,” he’d reply coldly.

As more months passed the questions became more direct.

“You haven’t brought her around in a while. Why haven’t you brought her around?”

With each time that they probed into his personal life, he began to hate them more for it.

They’d ask him about her and he’d do his best to keep from lashing out at them in a half embarrassed, half rage outburst.

He’d just cringe angrily and mutter some half-believable excuse and quickly change the subject.

After a while of these exchanges—them asking him about her and him brushing off their comments—he knew that they had begun to suspect something.

But he was stubborn and he refused to tell them what he knew they all suspected.

It arrived at the point where keeping his secret was more than not wanting to explain the situation. It became more about not giving them the satisfaction of confirming their suspicions.

‘Who the fuck are you,’ he’d think to himself whenever they asked about her. ‘I don’t have to explain shit to you.’

But he knew they knew. And it added to his rage and embarrassment. 

Tales of My Life: Merry Christmas

It was Christmas Eve and he had no desire to visit his family or to even leave his apartment, for that matter.

He had tried to get into the spirit of things. He drove from store-to-store earlier that afternoon, buying gifts for his parents and brother and sister-in-law, with every intention of spending the holiday with them.

It was something that he hated doing under normal circumstances, but was made much worse this year because of the divorce.

The shopping was as chaotic as he expected it would be.

People rushed in-and-out of stores, all looking for that last-minute gift. The lines at the checkout counters seemed to stretch on forever. And the sounds of panicked shoppers filled the air.

He wandered aimlessly through the department store aisles, looking at everything and nothing at the same time.

He watched as parents loaded toys into carts, colorful packages in every shape and size that would bring joy to the hearts of their children.

He watched as men shopped for that perfect last-minute gift for their girlfriends, and he could picture  their emotional responses as they unwrapped little jewelry boxes that contained a ring, or a pair of earrings, or a necklace—each representing the man’s undying love.

He remembered the ten years that he, too, scoured department store aisles looking for that perfect gift for her.

Because like the men, who on that day, were looking to show there unyielding commitment to their loved ones, to show that they would always love and be faithful, he aimed to do the same.

And it made him feel like such a fool. And he became flushed red. Anger and embarrassment swelled up inside him and choked at his throat.

It was all too painful to realize that in the end, she could walk away from it all and now he was alone, watching others do what he had once done when he was in love.

‘Fuck it,’ he thought. ‘I’m getting the hell out of here. I can’t do this.’

He made his way out of the department store and onto Clark Street and walked the two blocks to where he had parked his car.

It was cold and windy and he moved up the street quickly past couples and families who seemed filled with holiday joy.

The anger and embarrassment strengthened their grip on his throat. He kept moving. He had to get home and away from all of it.

He jumped in his car and drove off heading north on Clark. He drove through Wrigleyville passing Wrigley Field, its gates shuttered, but its bright red sign still illuminated.

It reminded him of all the Cubs games they had been to, all the times that they had sat along the third base line and watched the game. 

It made him sicker, still. He wanted out, out of the city, out of the country. He wanted to go to a place where memories of “them” didn’t exist. But above all, he wanted to get home to his apartment and feel safe and alone. 

When he got home, he parked his car and made his way upstairs. His apartment was empty and lacked any signs of the fact that it was Christmas. It was just his writing desk, his sofa and his bed. 

They represented what his life had become—write to survive, sleep when he could.

Tales of My Life: My City

Some nights, after work, he didn’t want to go home, so he’d drive downtown and park somewhere and write. 

There was something about the buildings and the lights and the stillness of the city center at midnight that soothed him and cleared his mind. 

Fucking Chicago, he loved and hated his city just as much as he loved and hated life. 

It contained everything good that he could remember, but everything bad, too. And he wished he could get rid of the bad, and just remember the good. 

But the city wouldn’t allow that. He had to love her unconditionally, take the good with the bad. Because she did the same for him. And he knew it. But he still hated her for it. But he loved her all-the-same. 

She was, after all, his home. The lady that raised him. The promise of tomorrow and the reality of today. 

A real bitch, she was. 

Tales of My Life: Feeling High

He woke up with that same gutted feeling. The mornings were almost as worse as the nights, because he’d suddenly snap out of a drunken sleep from which his mind had fallen silent. 

He did his usual mental check of what had happened the night before, but could only remember part of the night. 

He looked at the floor of his bedroom and saw the clothes he’d worn the night before scattered across the floor. 

He slowly sat up in bed, rubbed his eyes and threw the covers off his body. He swung his legs off the side of the bed and stood up. 

He walked slowly to the bathroom, flung the toilet seat up and took a long piss as he leaned unsteadily against the wall with his right arm.

After he was finished, he made his way back into the bedroom and sat down on the bed. 

He looked down at his jeans and decided to look through their pockets. He had been leaving his credit cards behind at bars lately; forgetting to close his tabs. He reached into his right, front pocket and pulled out what turned out to be a joint. 

‘How the hell did I end up with a joint in my pocket?’ he thought. He tried to remember the night before and how he ended up with the joint. 

After a few minutes it came back to him. The girl at the bar he had spent half the night with, she took him outside and handed him the joint and told him to light it up. 

“It’ll help with your troubles,” she said. 

“I don’t smoke. Thanks,” he replied.

“Don’t be a pussy,” she said

“I don’t smoke. You light up,” he said.

“Love, you need this more than you know,” she said as she stuffed the joint into his pocket and walked away disgusted. 

Then it went black. 

He looked at the joint and debated whether or not he should smoke it for a minute. 

‘Fuck it,’ he thought.

He walked to his kitchen, turned on the stove and lit the joint.

He watched as the lit end burned a bright orange and he lifted it to his mouth, inhaled deeply, and held it in. 

And instantly he was high. 

High as hell, actually. 

He walked into the living room and looked out his windows. Rays of sunlight were shining into his living room. He sat on the sofa and stared out of the windows down onto Thorndale Ave. 

Life seemed to slow down a bit, and his pain and his suffering and his emptiness went away. And he loved it. 

And he wrote free of any burdens. 

Tales of My Life: Revisiting Old Memories

For the first few months, he left the boxes he had moved over scattered on the floor of his apartment. He was too down and broken to open them up and go through their contents. He knew for sure that there was something in them that would remind him of his old life: old pictures of her, a bracelet, a train ticket stub from one of the adventures they shared together, a love letter—it was too much for him to handle, so he left the boxes untouched. 

But as some time passed, he knew that it was time for him to begin his new life, and, drunk off whisky one night, he moved on with the task of opening the boxes and sorting their contents. 

The first box he opened contained pictures of all their travels that took place during their ten years together. Their adventures had spanned over four continents and dozens of cities. 

As he flipped through the pictures, he was immediately stunned, like he had received a strong blow to his head, temporarily disconnecting him from reality. ‘This wasn’t his life, it had never happened. How could he go from being happy and in love with this woman, to being alone and miserable?’

He sat for a moment and thought of what he should do with the pictures. Then it came to him. He would go through each photo and throw out any that had her in them. He would recreate his history, and delete her from his life. His life stories would remain same, only except for one detail: she would not be included in them.

That one time in Paris at the cafe, the jazz club in Amsterdam where they had one of the best musical experiences of their lives, the time they walked up some steps in a small village in Morocco and encountered a herd of goats—it would all be the same minus her. It seemed to be the most reasonable thing for him to do: purge her from the record. 

He spent the rest of the night dumping her into the trash and carrying it out to his building’s dumpsters. 

She would no longer exist, and he would forget her once and for all. 

She Wants Me Not: Part Two

He had been having troubles sleeping at night again. He lay awake, staring at the ceiling fan as it spun, his mind racing.

The sleeping pills he had been taking weren’t working very well; all they did was allow him to slip into a semi-unconscious state, but he’d never really fall completely asleep.

He could hear the cars passing by on the street, and the sound of the birds as they chirped in the nearby trees as he lay in a half-daze.

He was going on day three without sleeping, and his mind began to play tricks on him. He’d see a shadowy figure walk across his room. Then he’d have visions of childhood memories, so vivid, that he felt like he was back reliving them.

The heat didn’t help. It had been three consecutive days in Chicago of mid-nineties and forecasters said the temperature was set to keep rising.

He lay on his bed, fatigued and sweating through the sheets. His sweat-soaked body glistened in the glow of the street lights.

His mind raced. He thought about the current state of his life, and all the heart ache he had endured and the fresh batch of heart ache he was enduring.

He had done what he swore he wouldn’t, and now he was suffering as a result. But for some reason this new suffering seemed worse than the first round. He couldn’t explain it. In terms of severity, the first should have definitely been the worse. But this suffering, it stung more, dug deeper than the first.

He lay there, in his bed, alone, trying to cope with what he ultimately had got himself into. Regret filled the air of his tiny bedroom. It mixed in with the humidity and heat of the evening and formed a thick cloud that enveloped him.

He sat up in the bed and swung his legs over the edge and put his head in his hands. Sweat dripped off his face and landed on the floor beneath.

The fan did little to cool him down. It just blew the warm, regret/ humid air down onto his head and shoulders, and seemed to make things worse.

He looked at his phone, it was 2 a.m. In the distance he could hear a baby crying, or maybe it was a cat. He couldn’t tell. His senses had been dulled by the lack of sleep.

He got up from his bed and walked into the kitchen. He opened his fridge and pulled out a jug of juice and drank straight from it. The coldness of the drink temporarily sent a chill through his body and provided some relief. But the chill was almost immediately overtaken by the heat.

He brought the jug into the living room and plopped himself down onto the sofa. The heat, humidity and regret followed him.

He still couldn’t understand why he let himself fall into that trap, why, even though his better judgement had told him not to, he did.

He seemed so sure that she felt the same, and although she told him she did, he felt that she didn’t. Her actions told him that she didn’t.

He would tell her how he felt, tell how he thought she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever known and that all he wanted was to hug and kiss her. And she would tell him nothing.

She would say that she had been hurt, and she couldn’t trust another man, not, I want to kiss you and hug you, too, but I’ve been hurt, and I can’t trust another man.

Those words would have made all the difference in easing his suffering. He understood her being hurt. After all, he, too, had been wounded deeply by the hand of another. And had suffered for many months because of it.

But he couldn’t help but think that if she did feel the same way as he did, she would be able to over come her lack of trust in the opposite sex.

After all, he had been completely honest with her, something that he hadn’t done with anyone. He hid nothing from her. And while she had shared some of her deepest, darkest secrets with him, he still felt like she was holding back. He wanted more of her than she was willing to offer.

And it frustrated him. At the thought of it, he began to feel a deep, burning sting in his chest. It was from the shame of rejection, and the knowledge that he had gone out on a limb to open himself up to her. And all he got in return were her coded, and vaguely-worded responses.

It was also from the fact that he had warned himself that this would happen. He knew that the whole thing was a bad idea, but her beauty and personality drew him in so strongly that he lost any sense of restraint.

He lay on the sofa, thinking about the predicament he was in, until the first rays of the morning sun crept into his living room. He finished off the jug of juice, placed it on the ground next to the sofa and sat at his desk and began writing.

She Wants Me Not: Part Three

It was as tragic a situation as any he had ever known. It made him sick to his stomach when he thought about it all. But now that he was in it, there was very little he could do.

He was torn at the thought of his options. He could continue on as he was, chasing after a woman, who in all likelihood would never open up her heart to him, and continue on tormented as he was. Or he could completely cut off all communication with her and go on tormented for a while, but eventually grow numb to the feelings generated by her absence and the loss of a potential love.

He hated both of those options because they both left him hurting in the end. He just knew that going on as he was would tear his soul to pieces.

His heart ached daily. He longed for her and wanted so badly to do as simple an act as holding her hand. But she would not grant him his wishes.

He knew almost nothing about how she truly felt about him. She absolutely refused to open up to him, no matter how much he pleaded with her. She also refused to see him, a fact that upset him so. He knew she enjoyed going out. She would go out with her friends, to bars and other places, but she avoided him as much as she could.

It was rude, really, to avoid him as if he were some stranger. What’s worse, it seemed to him that she would have treated a stranger better than she was treating him.

The situation was so frustrating for him. If he tore himself from the idea of maybe one day being with her, he would suffer. If he tried to stay and pursue her, he would suffer. He wished so badly to be with her, but if he couldn’t, he wish so badly for a quick and painless solution to the problem.

But as much as he tried, he could not come up with one. He spent late nights thinking about how he would remedy the situation. In the mornings, his eyes were always red and looked tired.

He had reached a point were there was nothing left for him to do but to act. He knew what his options were. Like them or not he had to do something because she would do nothing. She was content with inaction. “Sorting some stuff out,” she’d call it. It was more like holding out until he gave up.

He couldn’t understand what happened to her in her past that made her this way. Why was she so opposed to the idea of having a man that could treat her so well in her life?

It was perplexing, maddening, really.

The whole situation was fucked. It was fucked and he was fucked. And he was sick of being fucked.

He wanted to for once come out of a situation with out being screwed over. Up to this point being a good and honest man hadn’t paid off. It just left him with an abundance of disappointment, heart ache and sorrow.

All he had to do now was act. If all he could do was act.

She Wants Me Not: Part One

She smiled at him. He looked back, confused, not sure how to respond. He knew that she was as beautiful of a woman as he’d ever seen.

He wanted to tell her so, but couldn’t. For some reason, be it her beauty or her overwhelming sense of confidence, he couldn’t bring himself to tell her the truth.

She lay on her sofa, looking as stunning as one could. He sat on the other end, looking at her, searching for the words.

He wrestled with his thoughts. ‘Tell her, you coward’ he told himself. But doubt kept him from speaking his mind. But her beauty compelled him to. It stunned him, disorientated him, and caused him to be silent. But his mind raced, still.

He questioned whether or not she felt the same. His male ego told him that she did. Then it told him that she didn’t. And he suffered.

At one point she got closer to him on the sofa. She allowed him to touch her forehead that was wounded, and he thought, ‘I want you. I want to know you, learn all about your dislikes and your likes. I want to know what upsets you and what makes you happy so I can always make you smile.’

On more than one occasion he tried to leave. It was late, and she had been yawning. But he couldn’t. He wanted to be in her presence.

But by 3 a.m., he knew it was time to go. So he left with nothing more than a good bye.

He walked down her hallway, got on the elevator and hit the button for the first floor.

The door opened up and he made his way through the lobby of the building and out into the street. The night was cool for a Chicago summer night. But he didn’t mind. He walked away from her building and turned onto Diversy, walking with a steady pace, looking down at the sidewalk, thinking.

As he made his way to his car, he walked past a couple that was arguing. Apparently the man had bought shots for everyone at the bar except his girlfriend, and she wasn’t happy about it. They didn’t even notice him as he walked past. The sound of their voices faded as he strolled down the block until all he could hear were faint traces of their drunken argument.

He continued on, thinking about what had just happened. The night felt surreal. The city was quiet. It felt like he was in a dream. When he finally got to his car, he got in and drove off.

He cruised through the city streets with his windows down, in no particular rush. His was the only car on the streets and it felt as if he were all alone. His mind raced as he thought, ‘What if I was right? What if she feels the same way I do?’

He parked his car in front of his building and walked the two flights up to his apartment. Once in, the silence continued.

He got ready for bed, laid down and continued to think. As the sun rose, he decided it would be best to leave her alone, to let it be. He was wrong. There was no way she could possibly feel the same way. And he didn’t want to embarrass himself or her any further with his silly behavior.

He showered and went to work, knowing that the dream had ended.

Tales of My Life: Forgetting

Later on that day, he sat in his apartment alone, suffering.  He couldn’t seem to get used to the feeling of loneliness that had taken over his life. It was his constant companion. And in his loneliness, he was left to entertain the millions of wild and painfully imaginative thoughts that tormented his mind, his body. He refused to think about her, though. He thought about everything but her. He had convinced himself that the thing to do was to take everything he had shared with her, every memory, and package it up into a small mental box and toss it into the flowing river that was his conscious to be swept away for ever. He could never completely get rid of it all, but he would let it sink deep into his subconscious so that it always existed, but far from his everyday thoughts.