The Persistence of Her Things

The morning light came through the blinds in thin, institutional strips. Arlo had been talking for seven minutes about Charlotte’s hair. I knew it was seven minutes because I had been watching the clock above his refrigerator with the focused detachment I usually reserved for wage slavery or sitting in a waiting room listening to muzak.

“It gets into everything…” Arlo said. The beer in his bottle had been cooling for some time, approaching what engineers call ambient temperature and what the rest of us call the temperature of piss water. “…the drain, my clothes, my food.”

He took a slug off his Red Stripe.

I understood this. I understood this in a way I didn’t tell him I understood it.

There is something worth dwelling on here, which is the persistence of a woman’s hair. It is a persistence that bears no relationship whatsoever to the persistence of her presence, or the persistence of wanting her, or the persistence of the conversations you had in the early months when you were still performing a version of yourself you found credible. The hair simply continues. It turns up in drains and coat pockets and, yes, wrapped around the lint trap of a dryer you share with two other people who do not have long black hair. It is not tracking your emotional situation, it is a filament of protein doing what filaments of protein do, which is go everywhere and remain.

“I found one of her’s wrapped around my dick,” I said. I said it the same dry way you would mention a minor irregularity on a bank statement.

Arlo was quiet for a moment. Outside, the city continued its tedious, mechanical functioning. A delivery truck. The air brakes on a city bus hissing to a stop.

“Yeah,” he said finally. “Same. That’s happened to me too.” He traced the logo on the beer bottle with his forefinger. “Weird, isn’t it.”

This was obviously rhetorical and I was far beyond bored anyway. We didn’t say anything else about it. It went easily, which is what subjects do when they have already said the only thing they had to say.