Munkey Brains & Other Delicacies

More than 5 years ago now I wrote a story. It has no title. It has never been typed. But it is a singular work I have been saving until I can wrap my mind around a concept I have no conception of quite yet. But when I find it, I'll know. This I believe. (She said to no one in particular, but most especially not NPR.)

The story is about one's notions about other people. How they take on a shape and a life of their own inside one's mind as you think about them. The story is about a monkey who lives in a jungle that has invisible boundaries. He is mourning, he cannot remember where he came from or how he came to be in the jungle. He is alone there. The jungle is stormy sometimes and tempestuous and sometimes a princess comes to visit him. Eventually, though, she always leaves and does not come back for a long while. The monkey is sad and has a deep desire to understand his origins.

One day he asks his princess about his mother. She laughs and replies that he has no mother. The monkey does not understand this.

So he asks, "Where did I come from then?"

"From me." She replies, without elaborating.

Eventually, having had enough of the princess's mysterious replies the monkey decides to go exploring. He finds a cave. Which turns out to be a long passageway or tunnel, with roots sticking out everywhere. The monkey climbs, upward, until he arrives at a door. On the other side of the door is an office. It's dusty. And messy. There are file boxes and cabinets everywhere. Some of the cabinet drawers are open. Files are everywhere. Pieces of paper litter the floor. But, somewhere in a musty corner he finds a pile of boxes. They are wrapped with beautiful paper and tied up with ribbons and bows. Some are old, very old - some look quite new. Not knowing what to make of them, he chooses one. It is small-ish, the wrapping paper is a faded purple and the ribbons are white. Slowly, carefully he undoes the ribbon and then even more slowly and more carefully he peels back the fragile yellowed tape. The paper unfolds like a flower opening. Inside is a pale pink box. He opens the flaps of cardboard and inside are pictures. Snapshots. Candid and still. They are all of the same person. A man with dark hair and a wide, easy smile. Silvery pieces of metal seem to drip from his nostrils. On his arm are dark blue depictions of something or another. In one he wears a vest and is walking, expressionless. In another he sits at a red table, holding a cup, laughing. Another his mouth is wide, his arms outstretched with lights set upon him. There are little slips of paper too. With things written on them. Some are typed. But the monkey cannot read.

The monkey is now utterly confused.

He gathers together the contents, finds a broken old chair and sits down to look at them. He isn't sure why, but somehow the pictures feel... significant. As he studies the snapshots, despite her absence, he feels the unmistakable presence of the princess. Somehow, he thinks, she involved. That is certain. He looks at the man, who really is little more than a boy and feels a sort of... affinity. Yes, an affinity with him. Though he isn't sure why. He feels somehow familiar. Something about the way his eyes crinkle up when he laughs. Something about the way he looks at the photo-taker. Something, about the eyes. Yes, the eyes. The monkey stares and stares but gets no further. Finally, he feels his brain is running in circles and takes one of the snapshots, tucks it away and carefully puts back together the box.

This is a clue, he thinks. It must be.

He climbs back down the passageway and back into the forest. There has been another storm in his absence. And when he arrives at his tree, he finds the princess. She is sitting on the tree he once called home. It has been uprooted. Felled. She isn't smiling. She looks rather unhappy, in fact.

"Where have you been?" She asks, petulantly.

"Exploring." Says the monkey.

"Well, don't do that. When I come here to see you, I want to see you - all right?" This does not sound very much like a question to the monkey. No, it sounds a great deal more like an order. Or a threat.

"I'll remember." He assures her.

"Do that. I have to go now, I have other things to do but please be here next time. Though, I may be a while." With that she rises, turns on her heel, and begins to walk away from the monkey.

"Wait! I found something that I want to ask you about!" He cries.

She stops in her tracks. "You found something? What do you mean, you found something? Just where did you go?!"

"I don't know where I was. I found a cave and went in and when I came out I was in a new place I'd never been before. And I found this."

The princess snatches the picture away from him. She looks hard at it and he watches, frightened, as the color drains from her face and her expression hardens. Anger makes her eyes alight.

"Found this? You found this. Was it simply lying about or did you go digging through my things?"

The monkey looked at her. His mind raced. He'd never lied to the princess before. He'd never had occasion. But now, suddenly, there seemed no other option. He knew instinctively that telling her he'd opened one the of the boxes was the worst possible thing he could say.

"Yes. I found this. It was on the floor. There were lots of papers and things on the floor. It's kind of messy in there."

The princess stares hard at him. She cocks her head. She considers. Finally, she softens.

"Okay. You found it. Don't ever go exploring again. You live here. No place else. This is yours and no where else. Do you understand?"

"Yes. I understand. This is mine. No place else. I understand."

The story goes on. The monkey goes exploring again despite the princess's warning. He finds two more rooms. But none are so fruitful as the office.

I wrote this story about someone I had been thinking about for years. Many, many years ago I thought I loved him. Hell, I even thought I knew him and understood him. That, it turned out, was pure fantasy. But still, he had been an albatross that arrived and flew alongside sinking ships. Whenever a relationship was about to end, my thoughts would turn to him. As things grew worse in the relationship, my state of panic would increase. I would feel a burning need to see him, to talk to him. What exactly that would've accomplished at that time I wasn't sure. I wasn't even sure what I would have said if I had seen him. Maybe I would have come to this realization sooner but I suppose it came when I could understand it.

One night, years ago now - maybe 6 or so - I went to a friend's house and he was there. I believe he had just gotten out of a relationship - sort of. I was still engaged. My affianced had decided to go home. I had decided to stay. He and I talked and talked. I was enjoying it very much when our hosts decided it was time for them to go to bed. We still had more to say, I guess, so we decided to take a drive. Our conversation ranged over a variety of subjects. He said things that confused me. Things that didn't make sense in terms of what I thought of him, what I thought he was all about. And then suddenly it dawned on me. This person that I had been thinking about for all these years, this person I still fancied myself in love with had NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with the real, living, breathing him. They could not have been more different. I remember feeling the love seeping out of me, into my seat, down to the floorboards, and dripping - like water from an old car's exhaust pipe - onto the pavement below. I was leaking love and ideas built on falsehoods. At an alarming rate.

Now there is a new monkey in town. This one's a howler. It's nothing so dramatic as the first, I learn my lessons sometimes. And at least now the monkey is as aware as I am that he's a figment of my imagination. One day "poof," he'll get sick of performing for me and be gone in much the same fashion as the first. Though, I wonder why it is my brain chooses monkeys. I suppose because the individuals they represent made a big noise in my head without ever saying anything. Like the din of primates. I suppose I could think of them as inanimate objects - like giant rocks heaved into the freeway run-off pool of my mind - but that doesn't hardly seem appropriate. They are organic and mutable. They change to suit whatever tack my thoughts are taking. Rudderless sailboats lost at my sea.

I finally finished Murakami's Wind-Up Bird Chronicle early this morning. Things happen in an alternate reality that effect the physical world and that set me to thinking of this story. I hadn't thought of it in a while. Murakami's Mr. Wind-Up Bird set me thinking of myself. Kumiko, of the monkeys that live in my head. Perhaps there really are alternate realities for each of us. Perhaps we are all quietly living other lives we know nothing about. Perhaps the true alternate universes exist in the ideas and memories of us that live in the minds of other people. Maybe somewhere there is a meaner me or a sweeter me. A me that has absolutely nothing to do with the consciousness that peeks out at the world from behind this particular pair of eyes. That moves these particular limbs and thinks these particular thoughts, that creates these particular ghosts to rattle the window frames in the night.

I'll have a Nottie-Hottie, please waiter...

I don't know if I want to tell this story, truth be told. I feel like I told it a lot - I really haven't, just to a few close friends in the hopes of mashing it out and reconstructing it into something I can understand but at the core of the matter is the glaring fact that it's really only facts that matter. I can conjecture until I turn blue in the face but all that makes me is a girl. And a silly one at that. That it's the things that were not said as much as the things that were said. And what my experiences say about those things.

It's weeks later. After I should have stopped thinking about it at all. But, after all, I am me and this is what I do.

See, there was this boy I liked. I really liked him a lot and thought that I connected with him in a way that I hadn't connected with someone for a long while. I guess it's in those moments that expectations are born with or without one's knowledge. Even despite one's best efforts not to have them at all in the first place. But more often than not my brain has its own triumphs over me so I really shouldn't be surprised I guess.

But I digress.

I liked a boy. And it was wonderful. For about a week. And then it turned to shit. And then it turned to fertilizer for the weed-bed of my aforementioned willful brain. For about a week he sent me silly text messages and weird pictures and called me every night. I wasn't sure about the whole calling me every night thing. I hate sitting on the phone but he made me laugh so it was okay. And then it all stopped. This isn't unusual. I don't mean for me specifically, I just mean in general. I don't know why when faced with these situations I feel somehow unique. And resentful. He never promised me anything so I knew I didn't have any right to be upset. Besides, we both had a lot going on in our lives. The semester was concluding, there were projects afoot. Work was insanely busy - I put in waaaaay more hours than I am supposed to be working. But there was still a bit of contact. He hadn't disappeared totally. Yes, his communications were less frequent and more terse but I thought it situational and decided not to be offended.

Then, one night we were on the phone. Where he had been funny and interesting before, lately his conversation had been disjointed and didn't give me a lot of room to find my own thread to follow and respond. Which should have been a bad sign. It was late, I was tired, I had just gotten home from a business trip and to be honest I wasn't really giving him my full attention. But all of a sudden I found myself in the middle of a yarn. One which turned out to be a very tangled ball of incredibly stupid yarn. I don't remember the specifics but there was something about hurt feelings and possibly about different goals. It was, in fact, a break-up speech. And I had no idea if he was talking to me, not talking to me but talking to me, or really not talking to me at all. In my exhaustion, my solution was to get the hell off the phone and deal with it tomorrow. Which, I attempted to do via that lovely, crazy, undependable interweb playground we all know and love - myspace. I wrote him a message asking him what the conversation had been all about, told him my thoughts on how our "association" should go. I said that I enjoyed his company, would enjoy continuing to enjoy his company - no pressure, no expectations, talk to me when you want to talk to me, don't when you don't - and don't feel guilty when you don't. I hate that. I never want anyone to do anything for me because they feel guilty. Do only what you want to do, that's the only thing that has ever meant anything to me. Guilt-tinged gifts of time or words or whathaveyou feel dirty to me. They stink. That was the gist of it anyway. It's all I remember.

So I sent this message. And then I waited. Three days went by and I was going crazy. I couldn't look at the message I sent and analyze it's content for potential offenses or craziness. It was suspiciously absent from my sent folder. Now, historically I don't use myspace's messaging system. Most everybody I want to talk to I can just email. For some reason that's changed lately but when it didn't appear in my sent folder I thought, "maybe there's a checkbox you have to click." "save message to sent folder" is not entirely unusual. And I was unwilling to just mail someone to find out. It made me feel obsessive. Anyway, on the third day after I sent the message I couldn't stand it anymore. So I sent him a text, something to the effect of "My curiosity is getting the better of me - am I a) a whackjob or b) are you simply too busy to respond?" He sent back the message, "End of the semester crunch". Now, that wouldn't have been so bad if it hadn't been something I distinctly remember writing in the message. So it felt like my words were being thrown back in my face. I don't remember if I responded or not. I think I tried not to, but I may have. The next day I felt totally ridiculous. I thought to myself, why o why did you have to go and expose yourself as caring enough to send the message in the first place? You're a headcase. It lasted a week. LET IT THE FUCK GO, you dumbass. Jesus, how I browbeat myself. Feeling stupid I sent yet another fucking text message. Confusing him even further and further cementing my status as a headcase.

The following Monday I sent a friend a message. I checked my sent folder and there it was. Glaring evidence that he never got the message. So I sent him a message relating that. I also said that I wasn't going to text him, or myspace message him, or call. That if he wanted to contact me, he knew where to find me. There was no response to that one either.

I think I quit there. I decided I was done feeling stupid. That this was enough evidence of disinterest to sweep all this mess back under the rug and get on with my life. I had plenty of life to attend to anyway. It didn't stop me fantasizing about him a great deal and wishing things had gone differently because I had liked him so much. Silly girls dwell. I was to charge on and forget about it.

And I nearly had. And then he messaged me over myspace again. Essentially apologizing for his silence. I messaged back and said it was all right, that it was probably for the best, that it had allowed me to focus on the things that really needed focusing on and that again, if he wanted to, he was welcome to call me. He has not.

And yet, there are the fantasies. Cropping up at the oddest moments. I was walking down the hall at work the other day. One of the last times I saw him he had just shown me his new tattoo. I had this flash, this twenty-second quickie involuntary daydream. I licked his tattoo. I literally had to stop in the hall, shake my head to get it out - like there was a bug in my hair, reprimand my brain. And then I started walking again.

Now, aside from the obvious craziness over the lost message I think I maintained myself as a fairly reasonable girl. There's really nothing for me to feel all that badly about. I behaved like a grown up, I attempted to communicate like a grown up, and he decided he didn't want to communicate with me. So what, right? Big deal. It happens all the time. I am not special. Most especially I am not special to him. Also not a big deal. Who cares? Certainly not me... am I right? Brain, am I right? Can I please fucking be right for once? No? You're not willing to let this go? You're gonna subject me to all these little fantasically sexy vignettes of increasingly frustrating bodice-ripper fodder over someone I can't have? Really? Do you have to? Can we just not and you can say you did? Please? No? Well dammit. Fuck you then.

So this is where I am. Caught in a mental k-hole of imaginary two-person sexy parties to which I am not actually invited. Goddamn it.