THROUGH THE WINDOWS
Just because I was asleep when it happened doesn’t mean it wasn’t real. It was. I remember it. I felt it. I lived it. I was outside a factory, looked a lot like then one I grew up across the street from, a long rectangular, brick building with large rectangular windows and a triangular, silver-coated roof. Most of the windows were smashed, and other than a blue, rusted out pick up truck from the 70s, the parking lot was empty.
I began throwing rocks through the windows and the rocks then returned to me, following the same path there and back. Fast forward. Rewind. Fast forward. Rewind. The rocks became a football and I stopped throwing. I wanted to launch it over the building, taking 3 and 5 step drops, faking handoffs, rolling out, but every time I went to throw the thing, I pulled it back it, wouldn’t let it go.
Carson Wentz walked up to me, said try this, and he effortlessly and gracefully took the snap, dropped back, and sailed a touch pass over the building. I tried and failed repeatedly and it pissed me off.
I used to have no control over this part of my brain, or I should say I didn’t know that I had control over this part of my brain. Now when I see something I don’t like, or if there’s something I can’t do, I’ve learned how to act, how to exert my will, demonstrate control, do as I please, however you want to say it, I’m not powerless anymore. I never was, but now I’m aware of it. So the next time I tried I let it rip, the ball zipped over the building and shattered the rear window on the pick up. Carson took off running.
My buddy from high school, Tom Spellman, who I hadn’t seen in years, was there. He talked about his daughter Pearl and I told him about my son, Jack, and then he was gone. Mitch Potter, another kid from high school, someone I hadn’t thought about since high school and never liked, threw a football at me, called me over, inside the gym where he was doing some type of martial arts training, said not to worry about not being able to throw the ball. I said I wasn’t worried. Didn’t you see me throw the thing over the goddamn building?
His hair was short when I walked over but grew longer throughout our interaction; by the end it was long, like it was in high school. The dude had a ripped core, his obliques especially, and he worked out the entire conversation, some type of crunch move on the ground. Last I heard, someone had told me they saw him on Instagram posing with beer bottles in different locations around Philly, and that he was really really fat, their words not mine. He wasn’t fat anymore, but I still wasn’t interested in talking to him.
And then came the part that always tears me up. Mitch whoever disappeared or I walked away or reappeared in another room, it’s not important, but what happened next is. When I say it always tears me up, the ‘it’ I’m talking about is betrayal.
Julia was there, that’s my wife. I won’t go on and on about how we feel about one another but it’s unlike any other relationship in that it’s truly perfect. Only now it wasn’t. I told her we had to go, some guy, Matt O’Donnell, another kid I vaguely remember from junior high school, not even sure I’d ever spoken to him but here he was, he vomited on Julia, right on her face, a speckled, black smudge on her left cheekbone. I said we had to go, but she began talking to him. She wanted to stay with him. I got angry, quickly, and demanded we go. She wasn’t listening. I had lost her. She didn’t want to go anywhere with me. She wanted him. He was an animal and she wanted him. I knew it right away, everything changed in an instant, so I reacted with anger, and contrary to how I’d felt about her, I yelled at her, and acted as though I was the one making the decision to leave her, that I’d had enough of her shit. I wasn’t. I hadn’t. I loved her as much as I ever had. The way she looked at him made me sick. How could she do this? How could this be happening? You have control. You have control. You have control. Don’t let her go. Do something. Don’t just stand there, do something!
