Gazelle's Drawer

The Rolling Stone cover of John Lennon and Yoko Ono was the last picture taken of him because the day of the shoot he was shot. Yoko said, “Why wasn’t I told that John will be taken away from me soon after, without even a chance for me to say goodbye?” I love the naked vulnerability of the male prototype curled into the strength of his woman. I love how strong she has been throughout all the years and the pain.

He commented on my picture of my sister—he must have just known it was her because I don’t remember introducing him to her in photos. He said he used to keep a picture of Angel who died in a drawer, but threw it out because every time he looked at it he got depressed.

I was shocked that he threw out the picture. I was holding onto every little thing when my sister died and couldn’t imagine throwing out a picture of her.

I started thinking about him and his drawer. A guy in high school used to say that his ex-girlfriend would always have a closet in his heart because she was there when his dad shot himself.

We have all our defenses heightened after we fuck. He says I’m his booty call and I tell him I’m just using him to get over my last dating disaster. It’s like our drawers are down and we’re naked and then we realize we’re walking down the street without any clothes on, so we shut the drawer really fast, smashing the others fingers to feel just enough pain so we don’t get too comfortable.

But sometimes I want to crawl into his drawer. Kind of like I wanted to crawl into the satin casket with my sister. It’s dangerous and sad and comforting and temporary and eternal and not mine but sometimes it feels like mine too and I just want to curl up next to them and go to sleep.

I was thinking about his story about when he told the kid on the PE field not to kick the basketball. It made me think of Castaway and Wilson. Maybe he saw his heart in the ball because he cared and didn’t want it kicked around. He said something about the ball getting welts. Maybe our hearts have been kicked around and they have these warped welts.

And I think about how I don’t want the game to end with him. How I really like the drawer slamming and the kicking of the ball. How I can hear the buzzer telling me the time is running, but how I want to find that moment in the game where slow motion occurs as you throw the ball to the basket, and it circles around the hoop, and for that split second, you don’t know if it is going to make it or not.

We have never taken a picture together. He says, “Out of sight, out of mind.” I wonder if I opened his drawer wide enough, if I could put my picture in there so that even if he threw it out, it would still have made that eternal print in his drawer.