Keep Your Head Steady

Finally done with those paintings

The Devil, The Jester and The King

Took me a year

I have a joke with my friends about a girl named Heather. 

I had a one-night stand with her three years ago. We met each other at a party, she was dressed like a schoolteacher, I was coked out of my mind, she told me she was a virgin, I ate her out four consecutive times, and the world probably didn’t end, I think.

I wrote a seven-page-long poem about her. This is the function of a poet. We take the banal and make it aphrodisiacal. We water a list until it grows into a map. 

The joke, which isn’t very funny nor makes any sense, is that I want to find her. The #findheatherfoundation.

My best friend once asked me what my type was while we were ogling the waiter at her local Cheesecake Factory. 

I could have said something else, but I described Heather in the most careful detail I could - freckled with auburn hair, fat in that smooth, societally acceptable way that I would have loved to have been before the drugs, with big, brown eyes like my Brautigan boy or Winona Ryder. 

I could have said something else, described some hypothetical girl with dimples and blue eyes, but I wanted to bring her into that room like a seance.

I wanted her to walk through the doors, dressed like a thrift store mannequin, smelling like her perfume and sex.

I never want to find Heather. There is only so long you can spend shaping a woman into all that is good and perfect and epicurean before you lose her within it, folding her into herself until the imperfection is concealed beneath smooth memories, the ones that go down easier.