glue myself shut

We watched every sunset
Until we got sick of each other

“Do you remember Gay Street?”

He’s always sounded older on the phone. I remember that now. Middle school prepubescence disguised by warped static in the same way his middle-aged voice now sounds ancient by the same mechanics. I would have told him this back then, the humiliation of age as the butt of the joke. I don’t know how he would react now, though. If he’d find it as hilarious and nostalgic as I do.

“I walk past Gay Street almost every day now,” I say. “I’m looking at it now, basically. It’s somewhere outside my apartment window.”

“Somewhere? You don’t know exactly where? Is it running away?”

He’s more casual than I am about this phone call, but that’s to be expected - it was he who hit my contact name on his phone and called, not the other way around. His name on my phone screen was a surprise that jolted me from my supine position on the couch, phone in one hand, petting the cat on the floor beside me with the other. Not a lot gets me to startle anymore. Nestor’s name did.

“Nes,” I start, the diminutive coming out before I can stop it. “I live in the city. We’ve got tall buildings here. I can’t see every street from my window.”

“You know, I always forget the Baltimore you live in is the same Baltimore we went to camp in.”

“Well we didn’t go to camp there, we just did that one sleepover at the science museum.”

“You still correcting me on everything, huh?” I can hear the laughter in his voice, but I can also feel my teeth clench. He’s already picking fights. A decade of not taking, and he’s taking swings within minutes.

It’s been small talk so far. How are you? How’s life been? Are you still in Baltimore (to me) and Denver (to him)? Are you still in marketing (to me) and dog training (to him)? But I’m ready for an end to the small talk. Maybe this is what men do - forget you exist when you stop talking to them, and then, one day, just call you out of the blue and pick up like nothing ever happened.

“Seriously, Nes, why are you calling? We haven’t talked in years,” I add, as if he doesn’t know. All these years, and I thought he got the picture. I ghosted every birthday message, stopped liking his Instagram dog updates. Even blocked him for a few years there, not that he knows that.

There’s silence for a beat, followed by a heavy sigh on his end. It’s not like Nes to be lost for words. He wouldn’t shut up in the early days, telling me on our late-night phone calls about everything from the Transformers movies to Grand Theft Auto to detailed descriptions of what his dogs were doing at the moment. Oh my god, Katie, Rosie’s got her chin on my knee. She’s been pawing at me for like hours now and I guess she gave up cuz now she’s just chilling. Rosie, I’ll play with you in a minute. I’m talking to Katie now.

Another beat of silence. Then: “You remember my dad?”

Nes’ father had died when we were in college, also on opposite sides of the country. He called me a few weeks before it happened. I circled my apartment complex at least twenty times in the December chill, having forgotten to grab a coat on my haste out the door to avoid yelling over the ultimate frisbee party noise. I was moving fast to keep the cold off my back, trying to absorb every word Nes was saying, but my half-drunken state was only picking up phrases: liver failure…alcoholism…any day now. In the end, Nes had managed the will and the funeral and the house-selling and the family fallout all by himself. His father had made too many enemies in life.

“Yeah, of course I do,” I say, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

It hits the ground with a thud. “Turns out, it runs in the family.”

We’re both quiet for a minute, the implications of this hanging. Below me, a car honks at a driver in front of it who hasn’t noticed the green light. The sun is setting, orange and pink and yellow dancing over the buildings blocking my view of the one memory Nes carries from our first time meeting.

“You mentioned Gay Street, but do you remember our bus driver that day?”

I can feel Nes’ smile over the phone. This is our old pattern arising again; I remember that first week together flawlessly, my middle-school brain collecting memories that felt infallible and important back then, while his took snapshots and kicked the superfluous extra to the curb. “No, I don’t. Enlighten me.”

“He was crazy,” I say, twenty years dissolving into mere moments as the images come to the front of my mind. “Kept cutting off drivers on East Pratt. And now that I’ve lived here so long I can tell you for certain that’s, like, a capital offense. I’m surprised now that he didn’t get shoved off the road and into the harbor.”

“Is it really as foul as they say?”

“What, the harbor?”

“Yeah. That’s practically all I see when I look at local Baltimore news.”

“I mean, if you call empty Doritos bags and fish carcasses ‘foul’, then…yeah. But we’ve got Mr. Trash Wheel on the case.”

“Ah…right. What a guy.”

“What a compactor, you mean,” I correct. “Don’t act like you know who my neighbor Mr. Trash Wheel is.”

“But I do,” he says - quite quickly, I might add. “He and his whole compactor family are famous. In fact, I’d argue you’re the one disgracing his name by reducing him to his occupation.”

I let out a laugh, the breath I was holding finally releasing. “How closely are you paying attention to local Baltimore news, anyway?”

“Sun subscription and everything.”

“Blegh. The Sun? Sinclair’s got their dirty paws all over that shit. Next time you want actual Baltimore news, talk to me. I can give you the scoop.”

“Such as…?”

“Such as how phenomenal Dickolas Cage’s last set was at Fells Point Corner Theatre.”

“Drag queen?”

“King, and how dare you.”

He cackles, the static old-man voice making it sound like Santa Claus. “You’re right, how dare I.”

My cat rubs against my leg - I’m late with dinner because of this phone call. She meows. Where’s my pate, mom? Her gigantic green full-moon eyes look up at me expectantly. “Sun subscription, huh? Who do you know in Baltimore who’s got you keeping on top of Mr. Trash Wheel’s shenanigans?”

“I have an old friend there,” is all he says for a minute. The sky is getting darker with each passing comment. Cars start turning on their lights. Windows in the apartment complex across the street now have faces in them, prepping dinner, watching television.

The question hangs in the air, finally. Somewhere in my bones I know, now, that the silence was felt on a two-way street. I wasn’t traveling alone, all those years I wondered if Nes felt my absence as strongly as I felt his. The weekly calls turned to monthly calls turned to nothing at all. My fault, of course.

How do you take back years? Push them back and erase the forehead wrinkles and wash away the memories you made alone. Ask yourself what life would look like if you had picked up the phone, if you had forgiven the transgressions that seem so minor now. Be the bigger person. Be the smaller person who finally lets themselves grow - stretch past the self-inflicted sorrow.

The cat is howling now. Slow, guttural pain for the lack of wet food on her plate. “Is someone being murdered in your apartment?” Nes asks.

“Basically. My cat is demanding food. I probably have to go,” I say. Instead of: Let me put you down for a minute, I’ll be right back. Instead of: Do you want to stay on the line?

Instead of: I’m sorry.

“Right. Sorry to your cat for taking up your time.”

The cat howls again. I hold the phone out and hear his laughter. “I think that’s her way of forgiving you,” I say. “Hey, Nes?”

“Yeah?”

“Same time tomorrow?”

“Same time tomorrow.”

I really don’t think any music will ever inspire me more than Noah Kahan’s. Since I’m a white bitch on Zoloft with an anxious attachment style, that really shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who knows me.

I’ve been struggling to write fiction lately, and I am currently on a bender of publishing (and therefore writing) every day for 50 days in a row. As I puked in my mouth over peeling frozen-turned-hot bananas for the banana chocolate chip muffins I was making today, I listened to Noah Kahan songs while trying to keep all the throw up off my kitchen floor. “Glue Myself Shut” is by far my favorite song of his, and it got me thinking: What if I wrote some of my pieces based on lyrics from his songs?

To be clear, this piece wasn’t based on the whole song, or what I think Kahan is trying to say in his own work. It’s just a little silly story based on a couple lines from it. Nes and Katie aren’t real and don’t live in (respectively) Baltimore and Denver and blah blah blah I’m attempting to write fiction and we’re all gonna be cool about it, right?

Hopefully this isn’t my last Kahan-inspired piece. Although I could do with an alleviation on the myriad of mental illnesses that make me connect with his work.

- kirby

for more bullshit, check out:

muppet of a girl

the only dogwalker at the new york rooftop party

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Aug 3

There’s a moment in every person in their mid-twenties’ life where they’re forced to question everything, wonder what decisions they could have changed to lead them to an alternate reality where they are happy, and face the potential of a future reality where they have to relive the same moment over and over again and ask themselves, “Can I live with my…