The Black Book & A Golden Star

Before I was a man, I carried a black book with me in the glovebox of my car. There was nothing special about the book. The cover, no larger than an average piece of paper, was coarse and rugged. Inside the front cover I wrote the words, ‘Write the pain, it goes away; you will be paid in full’.

My fingers tremble retracing the words I wrote before the world changed. I remember then, when I fell in love on a whim. When I would skip, gleefully, on my way out of work, only stopping to introduce my forehead to a grey door frame that jutted out from a terribly plain wall in a restaurant so dry it sapped the fluids from your skin.

That was before the restaurants closed, and the world, perpetually in motion, came to halt. What little money I prostituted my voice for that summer didn't cushion the blow, and I can only imagine the words, “Will not move for your head,” are now painted where my head had said, ‘Hello, wall. I'm Darius' head. Nice to meet you.’

A few days prior I had written, “I love you Gwynevere,” into that damned book, which waited, ever so patiently for me on that fateful day. It may have been a week - I no longer remember.

Gwyn and I had met in a past life, long before the book, when life was slow and the dullness of drugs and work and sex had replaced the innocence of our younger minds. I dare say her introduction was harsher than the doorframe’s.

“I can smell you,” I remember her saying, tapping my shoulder, turning my attention towards her poignant face. Sweat dripped down my prepubescent armpits, and, as I questioned whether or not I had put on deodorant that morning, it began to collect on my brow.

“I’m Gwyn,” she said, her small hand waving hello, still covered in paints from the silhouettes that were requisitioned by Mrs. Hanz. Her face scrunched and her eyelids flared, revealing sand colored eyes that glistened - as she was inspecting me - before she turned and skipped off back towards her desk.

Those memories are faded now, only remembered by the pages in this black book.

We grew older in time. I had left for New York City immediately after graduation, while she had found a new home in white powder and power capsules. Those days came and went as quickly as the smoke we blew from our cigarettes into the night sky at a house party we were reunited at my first winter break. She had opened that door for me, literally, and in the two weeks I was home, I only remember that night across the river - when the yards and roads were covered in a gentler imitation and my naivety was at its peak.

I often wonder what would have happened had I stayed that year. I question if I could have found the strength in my mind and fingers to fill the pages of the book at my feet, had I.

I dropped out after my one - and only - year of college, and her and I would reconcile shortly after. With each new meeting, it seemed our faces grew slimmer, and hair thinner. She was a woman now, and I, a man, but despite our faces age, and their accompanying creases and wrinkles, our childish nature permeated from the very pores of our skin, practically oozing the closer we were.

We spent that summer before my accident together. By day, working together at that restaurant perched on a hill, and our evenings under the stars of her parents driveway. When their dirt roundabout flooded, the cars we sat in with our feet out the window long into the morning would sink into the mud. She always made it a point to look down. My eyes were always fixed to the pages of my book. On clear nights, when she was sober and asked for my attention, we would spend the night staring at the sky, music and our laughter reverberating off of the trees that surrounded the roundabout.

When the summer was nearly over, and only a few weeks after my accident, I felt broken. It felt as if my mind had cracked on that door frame, and with it any chance of keeping my job. I had changed drastically, with frustrated tears and anger replacing my stoicism.

I moved into that doublewide abyss I affectionately called the ‘Traphouse’, at the start of September. "Wake Me Up When September Ends", blared in my car speakers, stretching what final months of 2019 were left into oblivion - cigarettes and booze now replacing the seconds and minutes.

I stayed in my car, mostly. When I ran out of gas, I would sit for for four cigarettes, the car's battery being my only lifeline to a sense of reality. When the battery died, I sat in silence, and a few weeks later those inside dragged me in with them.

Gwyn gave me a golden star to commemorate the occasion - “To decorate your book,” she said, before telling me that, “Batteries wont stay charged forever.” She had watched on as psychosis had overtaken me, and frankly, I think she was petrified I might try to end it all or burn down that god forsaken house. I took what she said literally, asked her for a ride to a local bank, and opened an account with her as the beneficiary. That account is still empty to this day.

There were five of us who lived in that house those months before Christmas, myself included. I saw myself as an invalid worth no more than the dust covered couch I slept on. Acid trips, a broken banjo, and a garbage heap that overflowed onto the kitchen and living room floor became my new norm. The trash was smothering. Combined with the smell from the back vestibule, the noxious fumes would make you gag when you realized they clung to your clothes and your nose hairs. The animals liked that backroom. It started as a dumping ground, and at some point became an outhouse. A slider door was the only barrier to their freedom, and I think if they had thumbs, or, if someone felt particularly gracious, they may have broken that seal and made their way back into nature.

The end of the world was still approaching, and no one cared. I thought we had already died, and when I told Gwyn, she stopped visiting.

The water pump broke in January. I boiled snow for a while, but when it became apparent that no one in that house would be able to shower or drink clean water until the freeze line receded, I walked seven miles to and from my mothers house to fill two liter pop bottles with water.

She was ambivalent, and her boyfriend would punch me in the back of my head a few days after the end of January for, in his defense, ‘attitude’. He went to jail that night, and afterwards my mother became defensive, aggressive and blamed me, principally. The scribble, “My mother wants to see me dead”, was written under a page of jargon in my black book I can’t decipher. A restraining order was issued to me a few nights after, and within a week I found myself in a psychiatric ward. The floors were cold. My ears rang. But my stomach was full.

I only made one phone call while I was there. Gwyn seemed so far from Tico Machete, a Dominican man who had cut a man's arm off for stealing his grandmother's chain. She didn’t answer. I was released six days later.

I spent the next ten months homeless, moving from house to house, and job to job. A pandemic devastated the world, and by that summer I had put down the black book and forgotten - or rather chose to forget - everything associated with Gwyn, and spent my time on my longboard and my feet, protesting in city after city, tired of watching people who looked like me die with a boot to their neck.

It wasn’t until winter's end that I finished filling the pages of the black book. A year and half later, through thick and thin I had carried it, and now, it was complete. With mumbled nothings and genius insights riddled through, I flipped through a final time to admire my work. Approximately half way through, I noticed, nearest the binding, a quick note - ‘You’re welcome Darius’. I stood, befuddled at the handwriting and to why it wasn’t my own. Before I had time to fully process the note, keys were in my car’s ignition and I was making my way down the highway - black book in tow - towards Gwyn’s parents home. She had written it, I was sure, and I wanted the answers that I thought - no, knew - I had deserved.

I drove into that oft-flooded driveway for the first time in over a year, walked through the mud up to the door inside the garage, and knocked. Then I knocked again. Before I had the chance to knock a third time, her dad answered.

We stared at each other for what felt like an eternity. I imagine he was startled I would return, but then, before I could say a word, he turned and went back into the house.

A few moments later the door re-opened, and in his hand a single sheet of paper. Handing it to me, he said, “She wanted you to have this.”

I stood there, on the same steps I stood on when I had first told Gwyn I was in love with her, confused. I scanned the paper, but before I reached the bottom he spoke.

“Its a trust. To you. She’s gone,” he said, wincing, his face scrunching the same way hers had. He turned and went inside, leaving me with more questions than answers.

‘Darius Williams,’ occupied the blank squares where the name was supposed to go, with $1947.58 sitting, ever so patiently, at the bottom. The ink seemed to shift across the page, and vivid memories of every moment I had spent with my nose buried in the black book I held in my hand crept up on me the same way she had so long ago. An image of her silhouetted hand waving one last goodbye appeared in my mind, and when I looked down, two drops had stained the ink where the address was. I realized then where my home was.