There he waits,
the Nice Guy,
looking academic
and out of reach
in his tweed.

There's something
feminine in the way
he crosses his legs,
draping right over left in the fainting chair.

There you are, across from
him, at this party your
roommate dragged you to.
And you ask how he is.

He ushers you to his chair.
Sit down, sit down. I insist.
You know, he says. Most people
would tell you they're good or just fine.

The Nice Guy reassures you he is
not most people. He's a Nice Guy;
he's down with feminism, waves
One through Three.

He has a dog named Atticus.
They frequent open-air bars
in the summer.

He's a Nice Guy, an old soul,
someone who should have been
a young man in the 60s.

God, he has so many female friends
he tells you, leaning on the banister,
sipping on Glenfiddich.

You wonder how he is. This was your question.

He has so many female friends. Notice
how I'm stressing the word friends, he says.

I do, you say.

He's a Nice Guy and all these female friends
they're all the same. They love the bad boys,
the rich snobs, the ******* jocks.

I don't, you say.

Oh, sure you do, he Nice Guy-splains to you.
And there's a golden light coming from the chandelier
behind him, and he looks so holy and pure as he tells
you how one day Tara, Sam, Whitney, and Amber
will wake the **** up and realize just what they're missing.

But by then, this Nice Guy will have rambled on. He'll become
someone's second husband. A Good Woman will see how precious, how rare this Nice Guy truly is.

Okay, you say.

Prove me wrong, the Nice Guy says. He leans in closer.
You can smell the scotch. Prove me wrong.

Yeah, I guess you could say that. I seem to be past the hex. I have a job again, one I like. I'm teaching. But I can't help but hear that song from Wizard of Oz play over and over in my head. No. Ha ha. I wish it were that one. No, it's the one that kicks up as they leave the poppy field. "You're outta the woods, you're outta the woods." That song is so hopeful yet undercut by something looming, inevitable, a bigger fall to come.

Sure, I still think of her.

But what I was getting at earlier is that I feel like I'm at this point in my life, this middleplace, where the abstraction of love, the mysticism of the body, all of that ****** fog seems to be clearing. The people around me are plucked white, devoid of any raw, genuine sentiment. They view the body in a way so clinical. I only hear of its limitations or its capacity to bear children.

Peter Pan Syndrome? Maybe. But if the body is reduced to its most rudimentary boundaries and functions and not treated as an instrument of erasure or alchemy, then what's the point?

Yes, she and I talked about kids, but that was always so far away. At this point, I don't know that I want them. Her? That's hard to say. I'll concede that the happiest moments of my life involve her. But, and I see the irony here, on some fundamental, unsexy level, we enabled poor behaviors, addictions. We both suffered from depression and didn't know how to dig each other out.

I never see her in a negative light though. You look surprised. I don't. There she is and there are all other women. She's fifty feet tall in my mind. A femme titan. Whipsmart, funny, kind.

There'll be a crowd encircling you, I'm sure.
They'll nod at your every word, imperfectly mimicking
what people look like when they actually listen.
I'm sure the crowd will be people we know.
Old high school friends with real estate ventures
and gyms and multi-level marketing schemes.
Most of them will be doughier, their cheeks permanently
stained red from a decade of drinking.
Most of them will have photos of their kids on their phones,
and they'll tell you they're "sure you don't want to see them"
as they pull out their phones and show you photos of their kids.

I imagine I'll approach, stop just short of the circle, pretend to bid on an Alaskan cruise.

As you talk about redoing your floor in a faux tile that looks just like the real thing for like half the price, you'll see me.

I hope you'll think of that kiss five years ago, outside of a bar in Norman, when the world entire bent for us, when all traffic silenced for us, when all people vanished for us.

Maybe you'll think of the time we ****** in a twin-sized bed, beside a wall decorated with newspaper clippings, which I thought made me look worldly and learned. I admit now the look was less academic, more serial killer.

And maybe you'll think of the manchild fit I threw when I found out you had moved on after I moved away.

And maybe you'll be totally present. Good to see you, you'll say. You will ask about my family. We will discuss the cooler weather. We will talk about your business, your kids. We will side hug and say goodbye. We will take the same route to the same exit. There will be children coloring the sidewalk with chalk. We'll each borrow a piece. I'll outline you; you'll outline me.

Still hexed, unemployed, another daylong bout
between too much silence and too much noise,
a sweetness opens the hymnal: sing, rejoice.

And I'm an American male child, born in 1990.
Summon me a moment, Effexor one-fifty,
instant nostalgia, a natural reaction.

Polly Anna, hailing from Tulsa, has a key.
She's in my robe, dancing on the balcony.
And we're not drinking
as much as we used to be, yet talking
baby names by three.

And I can feel it, a future good memory
unfolding in real time. Her dark shape,
growing darker, shadows from bedroom
to bathroom and back again.

Oh, the profane things we whisper
to get ourselves out of character,
unguarded, empty-headed, free.

The notes of trained movement,
of calibrated ****** phrase, harmonize.
The walls, the lamp, the bedside table,
the mattress, the blankets—the room entire
converges.

My name takes on two more syllables.
Her name becomes soundless.
Hold time. Bend, baby. Boundless.

Still hexed, unemployed, another daylong bout between too much silence and too much noise, I turn on the TV and watch our show. Season 4, Episode 13, "Whitecaps."

And it's the scene after the Russian mistress has called, and Carmella—played to long suffering perfection by Edie Falco—kicks Tony out of the house. The scene sticks with me, the way Carmella's body shakes, the deep grooves of her wrinkled face when she says she can't stand to be embarrassed anymore. And I'm caught off guard by two things, one simple, the other not so much. I think about how you must of related to Edie Falco out of the gate, on a surface level. You both share a prominent nose, one you were always self conscious about, but a nose you found beautiful on her face. I always wanted to ask you about it, but I never found a gentle enough phrasing. And the other thing, the complex thing, is how the whole scene runs parallel to our second break up, the bad one, the early morning fight. I remember you striking my chest over and over. I remember grabbing your wrists, trying to restrain you, and you wriggled out of my grasp only to strike your head on a cabinet. I tried to comfort you, and you wouldn't let me drive you home.

You walked. I couldn't find you. By the time I got dressed, you'd found some path unknown to me.

Gentle enough phrasing. That's why it ended one, two, three times, isn't it? My inability to be straight with you, to say how I truly felt without massaging the words to safeguard against any conflict.

I wish I could watch the show with you again. I wish it was 9:00 p.m. I wish we both had work in the morning. I wish we'd watch one episode too many with the dogs snuggling in our laps. I wish we could listen to them paw at the bedroom door as we undressed.

But we've jettisoned ourselves, haven't we? It's irreparable. I think of something you said about depression. You told me that when it was bad, really bad, you could never feel clean. I don't feel clean, no matter how much I wash. I don't feel clean, no matter the quality of deed, the grace of the statement, the preciousness of a future good memory unfolding in real time.

The rains came. The road called.
And the cities we coursed through on the way to Ulysses,
to Broken Bow, didn't they always seem to be waiting on a change, longing for us, as if time moved only at the sway of our arms?

The rains came. The road called.
And there was a sanctuary of our own, a quiet place to lay our heads and listen, always listen, to nature's nightsong. How many mornings did we awake to find a new sweet creature in need of a home?  

The rains came. The road called.
And we stopped counting the number of wheat fields we had walked, the caves we had explored, the antique stores we had perused, the cups of coffee we had poured.

The rains came. The road called.
And there were hospital visits, both of joy and joy's opposite.
Time did what time does best, shaping and reshaping the people
we love—and that's what we know best, isn't it? Love.

The rains can come and the roads can call,
and we delight in what we know of love.
Look, love is not a flower with a single season.
Love conjures prehistoric time.
We love not as two,
but as all the men and women who have gone before.
Fathers rest in our bones like mountain ruins.
Mothers carry our blood like river beds.
And the moments that brought us here,
could we even discern the major from the minor?
Why would we diffuse love of its wild alchemy?
Love rivers through us, guided by every path and climate a fate improbable, beautiful, holy, endless, intrepid, guarding, forgiving.

It was an—I don't know—unfleshing of sorts. There I am. I'm in my old room. My parent's place. And Mom's telling me what all we need to pack up and organize. This place, my room, it's frozen in time. It looks exactly the way it did when I graduated high school. The lime green walls, the Brett Favre poster, a few pieces of artwork my brother did. There are all these medals and trophies for soccer; football; academic *******; and most of it, to be frank, was undeserving. I phoned it in, my education and extra curriculars. Things came easy, et cetera. And the lesser accolades, the participation trophies, for these, Mom hands me a pocket knife and tells me to pry off the nameplates and she'll donate them to Goodwill. It was tangible, right? This erasure. I've talked to you about that before, erasure. I wanted to disappear completely, but there I am in my old room, prying away pieces of my past with a knife, a couple of nameplates popping off and hitting the floor before I can grab them. That sound, dull, empty, metallic.

I'm alone a lot now, you know? After losing the job, entering this funk, gaining weight. I'm in a depressive state. In that room, I felt like I was just further removing myself from the world, like my deletion had gained dimension, it was truly, ****, what word am I looking for here? Help me. Comprehensive. That's good. Sterile and safe for work. My erasure became comprehensive. Ha.

And it's hard to talk about this, depression, erasure. I always feel like a selfish child. I'm perpetually throwing a fit. I won't clean my room. I don't want to brush my teeth. I don't want to help grandma with lunch. Ha ha.

You say that. And I appreciate it. But if I always talked to you about this stuff, you'd stop answering the phone. Or I'd feel so guilty about bothering you that I'd stop calling. This feeling gets you from both sides. It's like that old adage. Never chew on something that's eating you. But that's precisely what I'm doing. In this moment. Outside of this moment. I want to ask you how do I stop. But what could you possibly say. Stop thinking about it. Find a hobby. Exercise. Read. Journal. Go to therapy. You could smile while you told me these things, you could pat my hand, you could finish your coffee, and you could walk out the door to face your own little tragedies, feeling like you'd done something kind today, check the box, score some karma. You see all those recommendations are tired, generic; they're surface level, phony. What would I prefer? I think if you threw that coffee in my face that'd be a start.