Geraldine and All These Bottles

    Bottles. Bottles bottles. Bottles. Everywhere bottles while Geraldine sits rigid with that thousand-mile stare, trying to achieve some stupid new age state of full-body awareness through meditation. I bump her shoulder and tell her that blind people should be in a full state of bodily awareness all the times anyway and she just closes her eyes real slow, like it makes a difference. I scoff and she mutters something about light. Something about violins.

    I have given up on cleaning our apartment. She doesn’t see the dirt and the sand, salt stains in the winter, dust motes clouding beams of light in the summer. I keep a spot on the table cleared for her where she eats, moving the bottles off to the sides, clattering. All these bottles. She says she can tell the difference between a soda and a beer in my hand by how the tab hisses, the cap pops, the speed at which I drink, but I think she’s full of shit. One time I poured a glass of Old Rasputin’s and she thought it was Pepsi before taking a long gulp. There is still a deep stain in the linoleum.

    I met Geraldine last winter while naked on the floor of a bathroom in a house by someone of whom I was only mildly acquainted with during a party for some occasion I didn’t entirely care about nor was specifically invited to. It was six in the morning and she stumbled in, making so much noise she did not hear my stuttered breath until her panties were down and in mid-shit. She didn’t scream so much as she laughed, staring down and to the left, eye lids half lowered. I said hello and she farted and then I laughed too and six months later we started living together.

    This girl is like a simile, a shimmering ivory metaphor. Something something beauty something infinity. Yes, we have made love. I have seen her open mouth in the pale glow of a computer screen, and she has seen a spiraling blackness that none with sight could possibly comprehend. She says she can see her orgasms. She says she can see mine too. She could see the earthquake in Haiti, she says, during a meditation session. She can see God laughing at all of us from a lawn chair in Ontario, Canada, sunglasses on, froth from coffee gathered on his upper lip. That’s what she says.