Okay, you know how when a woman dumps you, and she says, "You're pathetic in bed," and "Don't ever call me again," and she does it in front of all (well, both) of your friends, and then she laughs and walks out and slams the door so hard your Run Lola Run poster falls off the wall, and the glass breaks and goes all over the place, and while you scurry about picking up the glass and wondering how you're going to get all the glass grains out of the carpet, one of your friends mentions that if he were writing a story in which one of the characters got dumped in a really horrible and publicy embarrassing fashion, he would avoid the device of making a glass object fall and break -- "It's such an lame and obvious metaphor for the shattered state of the character's brittle psyche," he says, helping himself to another Guinness, "like something someone would write in a small-town writer's workshop," -- and then your other buddy, the one with the curly blond hair and the trust fund, his cell phone rings, and it's your girlfriend (well, ex-girlfriend) asking if he'd like to get together for coffee sometime, and when you ask how your ex-girlfriend got his cell number, he coughs and changes the subject to hockey, and you don't sleep at all that night, and you call in sick the next day, and you just sit around your apartment with the lights off, not even watching TV or anything, and you think about calling her, because maybe she was just having a bad day or was on the rag or something, and a couple of times you even pick up the phone and dial the first four or five digits, but then you hang up because she did tell you not to ever call [her] again, so if you called her she would think you were stalking her, and you're not the stalking type, but you kind of (at first glance) look like the stalking type, and you're afraid that if you call her she might freak out and call the cops, and then they would come around and ask a lot of embarrassing questions, and maybe even haul you downtown, or she might just mention to a few people that you're stalking her, and then if, just by coincidence, her apartment building caught on fire or if she died in a terrible car wreck, people might think you had set the building on fire or cut her brake lines, so you just put the phone down and wonder if you should turn the lights on, because keeping them off is such a lame and obvious metaphor for the darkness that lives inside the black vortex of your soul, and you sleep a little bit that night but not much, and the next day you call your boss and tell her that you won a trip for two to Maui on a radio contest, and the catch is that you and your girlfriend have to leave today, in fact, you need to be out the door in like twenty minutes, so you'll need the next two weeks off, and your boss is obviously not happy but says okay, and of course you don't go to Maui -- you just sit around in the dark until about noon or so, and then you eat a meatballs & mozzarella Hot Pocket and put some pants on and go to Hobby Lobby, where you get some pipe cleaners and some glue and some little googly eyes and stuff like that, and when you get home you make a 1/8 scale model of your girlfriend, and then you make for a doll a little pair of jeans and a little blouse out of some bits of fabric, and, well, it's okay, and kind of cute, but you get to thinking how much better it could be if you could make a 1/8 scale model of a particular green dress that your girlfriend used to wear (and probably still wears, just not for you), because she looked lovely in that dress, a cunning garment that revealed only what needed to be seen, and concealed just enough to plant the seeds of fantasy, and it fitted itself to the curves and hollows of her body so well that it seemed organic to her flesh, and she would wear the green dress and smile with her head tilted to the side in that certain way, walnut hair spilling along her face to her shoulders, and to think of these makes your heart hop with pain and strange pleasure, and so you go to a fabric store and search for the fabric from which the dress was constructed, but you can't find quite that certain fabric, so you go to a different fabric store, but they don't have it either, and neither do any other the half-dozen fabric stores you visit that day, and finally some tired fabric store lady asks you to please leave, sir, because the store has closed and she would like to pick her daughter up from day care before they charge extra, and the next day you get out the Yellow Pages and turn to FABRIC STORES and start calling, trying to describe to unsympathetic fabric store clerks the exact combination of color plus weight plus texture, but none of your leads pan out, so you get online and search eBay and dressmaking sites and textile retailers, and finally you find a wholesaler in Albuquerque that just might have it, so you drive six hours to get there, and they do have the right fabric, the exact same stuff, and you just stand there rubbing it between your fingers trying not to cry while the fabric wholesaler guy frowns, and they make you buy an entire bolt, enough to make about a hundred full-size dresses, because they're a wholesaler and not a retailer, and so you swallow hard and drop it on your Visa card, where it has lots of company, and on the drive home you stop occasionally to caress the cloth and once you commit an act of self-abuse at a rest stop just south of Colorado Springs, and when you get home the real work starts, because now you're trying to sew a tiny dress with no pattern, and you barely know anything about sewing except that you're no good at it, so you keep screwing it up, and starting over, and your skin blisters and bleeds from pinching the needle between your fingers, and your eyes get red and sore from staring at the tiny stitches, and you can't finish before your two-week vacation is up, so you call your boss and try to convince her that you need more time because your flight back from Maui was canceled, but she tells you not to bother coming back, and you can expect your final check in the mail in a few days, and you say, "Oh," and put the phone back on its cradle and pick up the little half-completed dress and start sewing again, even though you feel numb and scared inside, and finally you finish the dress, or at least as well as you're going to be able to make it, and you put it on the doll and try to feel the way you felt when she would emerge from the bedroom with the green dress on, smiling and laughing, and always it seemed to you like the first time you saw this woman and that dress, and these memories arouse and excite you on the surface, but mostly you feel empty and alone?

Anyway, what kind of pipe cleaners do you use? Mine keep breaking.

+posted by Lawrence @ 3/11/2004 03:44:00 PM