Keith

Today Keith is twenty-three. He was born under the sign Leo, and he is very proud of this. It makes him feel powerful, regal and dangerous. I wrote him a card, off-white with a pen-ink Scottish lion drawn on the front.

Keith-

Wishing you a very happy twenty-third year.
Today, you get to change your name. That is the gift I am giving you.
Which one would you like?

Keith hates his name. This is what I have loved about him. The way his body, his face, his name can never seem to contain him the way other people’s do.

We were pen-pals, in the beginning. I was living with my invalid mother and selling baby clothes at Sears. It was summer and every hope of love and kindness had evaporated from our rural town like morning’s soft dampness on the hoods of cars. The inside of Keith’s skull became my tree house, someplace shady and secluded, made for introspection.

His complaints were numerous. His family was dysfunctional. He wrote that about his father’s depressions and his aunt Mary, who he described as a cantankerous she-beast who frequented both bars and psychics.

His friends were loud. He wrote that he loved them but you'd think it was open mic night the way they carry on. They just bombard you.

He bemoaned his fate with women. None of the decent ones liked him. If attracting crazies were a job, he explained, he would easily be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company.

I understood these things. My sickly mother was both needy and cruel and my kindly, aging father was incurious. The few people I did know in town confused me. They seemed to spend their lives working half-heartedly, aiming for nothing. They were terrifyingly content.

And I was desperately alone. I started buying drugs so a dealer would come visit me. He and I had ridden the same school bus and I liked the softness in his brown eyes. When I confessed that I wasn’t using his wares, he started buying back from me in the dry spells.

When I was finally offered a job in the city, I wrote Keith.


Keith-

Planning on moving to the city. Be there a week from Saturday.
Would you meet me and fill me in on your thoughts on living there?
I’m sure you could write volumes, but it would take less time in person.
Plus, I just think you’d be fun to talk to.
If you’re concerned that I’m a kidnapper, you’re not obligated.

We met in the kind of cafe that hangs painted plaster casts of fat women as art to challenge your standard of beauty. I hate this kind of art, but I didn’t say anything. He wore a Stooges shirt and a terrible moustache that curled into his top lip. I didn’t mention that, either.

Compared to the quiet astuteness of his writing, his physical persona was jarring. His eyes were large and feral with mental activity. His hands danced in all directions as he spoke. He would later tell me that all he was thinking about that day was kissing me, but if he had tried, it would have terrified me.

Days later, the kissing came. After a glass of wine and a movie had soothed the animal burrowing in his brains. After some weeks and a walk in the zoo calmed the flightiness of his fingers, he asked to be my boyfriend.

Months later, after bottles of wine and countless pipes of hash had rubbed the softness from his vulnerability, I began to see how Keith sees everything. The wrong way.

His friends are jovial and warm with modern sensibilities. They would take me to bars to watch football games while we waited for Keith to finish work. They included me in debates on which beers were better, which team should win. I had no opinions, but they always asked.

His family was, although wealthy and eccentric, entirely average. They allowed me to join their Christmas when I was trapped by endless snow in the city. And while my dying mother screamed every epithet to me over the phone in their basement, they drank wine upstairs and opened their gifts: magazine subscriptions and sweatshirts.

And I tried to love him. I did try. I had not realized what it would be. Keith has a strange way of loving a person. He loves you like someone loves their arm. Negligently. The tighter you draw, the less present he becomes. Like a far-sighted poacher, always aiming at kills in the distance, as we all sat in the same room, invisible.

After I had gone, I offered him kindnesses, my friendship. In those days, he could see me again. Like an amputee, he now fretted over me. Would ask things. When he never asked me anything as I lied in his own bed.

And for the next year, he looked me in the eye as we shared pints at the pub up the street. Fell asleep in my lap, crying, as I massaged his temples, gently pulled his hair. Drunkenly asked if we could make love. Sometimes, he would even hug me.

And now, today, my Keith, my sweet prince of mistaken narcissism, is twenty-three. If there is a party, I was not invited. Somewhere, they are all drinking pints at some pub, likely that one up the street.

People he cannot see through the fog of his poorly-reflective mind are toasting him. Across town, I, who will love him more than he’ll ever know, am at home, drawing the symbol he has chosen for himself, one so ill-fitting of a Keith, one that would be better for a Stephen or a John, on off-white card stock. I am offering him the gift he wants more than anything. But to be honest, I don’t think he deserves it.