Joan's Key Didn't Work

Joan’s key didn’t work in the lock on my back door.

It shouldn’t surprise me, since she didn’t even have the apartment anymore. Even if she did, my back door was attached to my apartment that happened to be 2500 miles away from the apartment she didn’t have anymore. More than that, in a wrenching visit a month ago to her new place, I even told her about the new someone else in my life. The someone else I was trying to shoehorn into my idea of Someone Special, effectively putting the exclamation point to our story that had run through fits and starts and lengthy discussions on the nature of non-possession for the last year and a half.

That key just didn’t want me to take it off my keychain, though, I reasoned.

I even had other keys from other Formers, but they sat in my sock drawer, or were randomly tossed into that bedeviling pile of To-Be-Sorted papers, to be searched for frantically when needed.

Like those two keys on some sort of Disney keychain that went to Arianna’s place, where I walked her Australian sheepdog for her when she worked the late shift. Two keys that I let myself in with sometimes, when after her shift she was hungry to share a joint, and her bed. I’d find her there naked and wiggling with giggly desire, shotgunning me a hit she’d held in her mouth when she heard the key, waiting for me as I found her landing strip, slipping frictionless into our little sacred secret space together.

Or there was that single skeleton key that Daria gave me, hung on a big silver ring off what looked like a single handcuff. That one I kept in the garage, on a fat rusty nail just inside the door. I wanted it there to grab quickly, because when Daria called, my decision to go enable her latest trick-- or to tell her to fuck off-- had to be blink-of-the-eye. I never did coke with her, but always thought it would have suited us: The rush of her was harsh like lines in your nose and always put me in full flare. Assumptions made this moment contradicted the next, with the both of us arriving at the perfect clarity of the paradox at the same time, cosmic and cool and calculated in light years. Her unintended pregnancy by my friend Phillip turned out to be the only thing that kept us from a stumbling to nirvana. Now every time I chose not to tell her to fuck off, I knew my mission would be to enable her in some journey of both great import and great risk to her, with consequences that usually reached beyond, to Phillip, to her daughter. So I was containment, glad for my role as participant, voyeur, confessor, firewall, guru, father.

Still, though, in the haze of looking at me outside me, finding my way back into my burning house, Joan’s keys still didn’t work, even though they were the ones I automatically grabbed in the dark, on the back porch.

Someday, I thought, as I fumbled for the one that would let me in, someday I’ll get rid of those fucking keys.

The ones that don’t work, the ones that it took her eight months to give me.

The ones that always stuck in the lock, that you had to shimmy a little left-right to get them to work, leaving you standing in this place thick with warm whites and purples.

The ones that, if I were quiet, would gain me passage to her hallway that led to her bathroom that, if she were taking a shower, would permit me a view of her behind the opaque curtain, washing her hair, her bush, her tits, her legs, our unspoken compact to play out the titillating little show, all the better to fuck you with later my dear.

The keys that let me into the apartment with the deck that looked out onto the pond that held in still water the perfect reflection of the sunset, the mirror image of our dreams that we never talked about, never spoke of, because of the eventually realized fear that those dreams would lead us apart, wandering in our separate deserts, tilting at our own private windmills.

Yeah, someday. Someday I’ll get rid of those keys.

Just not today.