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Scars Publications

Audio/Video chapbooks cc&d magazine Down in the Dirt magazine books

 

enjoy this writing from
Patrick Trotti in the Scars Publications
free 2012 PDF file chapbook:

Sadly, Forever
(click on the front cover image or the
title text to download the free PDF file)
Sadly, Forever, a Patrick Trotti chapbook    
Accidental Memories

Patrick Trotti

    I found her by mistake. Complete accident. I’d been here a thousand times. Relegated the whole act to nothing more than a daily chore. A means to an end. This was different. This slowed me down, brought feelings to the surface. I wasn’t looking for this but I found it. I wanted to turn it off, go back to the previous page, and somehow erase her face. Click on those countless other thumbnails to diminish her presence. But I couldn’t. My eyes froze, locked in place with warm memories of our common history. A familiar story, a link back to the real world.

    The last time I saw her, she was signing my high school yearbook. She was crying silently, knowing that things would never be the same between us. I was going to the local state college, the only school that accepted me. She was leaving early to participate in a summer session out west at some prestigious liberal arts school. We both hoped it could continue. That we could make it work, find a way to stay connected, to continue our last year of high school indefinitely. And it did, for a while. I had to sign up for a more expensive unlimited cell phone plan. Thoughts of infinite minutes and endless texting kept my spirits high for the moment. By the end of August the phone calls turned to chats with her voicemail. With her busy class schedule I was resigned to emails. Facebook chats were conducted in the early morning hours, because of the time difference. Further accommodating her new life. By mid September I was logged on to Facebook on my cell phone continuously, staring at the screen during freshman composition classes, anxiously waiting for her to log in. I hid the real reasons behind my postings with stories of my school and life. Slowly, the reasons for contacting didn’t matter. I began littering her wall with pleas for contact, desperate for something, anything. Thanksgiving came and I still hadn’t heard from her.

    The homepage advertised free fantasies. They never said anything about feelings. It was an aggregate site, free of charge. Just another site featuring free daily links of sex videos. You could watch, stream them to your desktop, but downloading wasn’t an option. They gave you momentary pleasure but took away any opportunity at sustained happiness. The inability to own the images, to turn off the computer with the knowledge that the videos would be there, waiting for me when I came back, left me paralyzed; addicted. I was a voyeur, projecting myself into these dream scenarios. They were fleeting but powerful. She was another body in a sea of flesh. One of dozens of individual screen shots previewing hardcore action. She was wearing a lace mini skirt, knee high stockings and a pulled down tank top, showing off her breasts. Pigtails finished off her image. I was surprised they didn’t have her sucking on a lollipop.

    I questioned all our mutual friends while they were home for the holidays. My investigation gave me a purpose, could provide a chance at real answers, an explanation. Word was that she dropped out of school halfway through her freshman year. A friend of a friend had a cousin that went to school with her. She said that she started dating a local guy in town who was dealing drugs. She’d gotten into meth. The decay was precipitous, first her grades went down, then she stopped hanging out with her friends before she dropped out altogether and moved in with him just off campus.

    I convinced myself that I would go out there and find her. Someone had to step up, do something. In my mind I relished being the good guy, playing the savior role. I imagined how the scene would unfold in my head dozens of times. I would solve everything, would right her wrongs, show her where she’d strayed. I calculated flight costs and rental cars, the weight of the numbers momentarily numbing me to the reality of the situation.

    I visited her parents first, figured it was the right thing to do. I wasn’t sure how much they knew, if at all. They knew enough, too much, more than I did in fact. They’d banned her from coming home. She was on her own, totally dependent on her new boyfriend. Her father said that their family counselor thought it was for the best. Her mother stayed quiet, deferring to him, busying herself with tidying up the coffee table as I sat down in the living room. The pile of unopened mail was beginning to collect dust, a small casualty. They said that she’d recently called, asking for money. They refused, apparently reciting from the agreed upon script determined by the counselor. They look relieved just to mention that they had heard from her. Confirmation that she hadn’t died. Her father was growing firmer by the moment as his wife held back her tears. My time had expired. I was doing more harm than good bringing all this up. He walked me out to my car, the mother standing catatonic at the doorway, and warned me, “You can’t help someone who doesn’t want to help themselves.” I left defeated, resigned to late night high school memories of her.

    It was a simple business model. Litter the screen with pop up windows of ads and large banners. On the bottom corner of her video a website was highlighted in bold neon letters. I went to the site, leaving the land of free porn in my past. She was the featured girl, “newcumer of the week.” I only was able to get a thirty-second trailer. If I wanted the entire forty minutes of her I’d have to pay. As I thumbed my credit card, already maxed out from beer runs with my buddies on the weekends, I wondered if I really wanted to see what was behind the payment form. No matter how curious, I was ill equipped for it. To see her as an object, a commodity, a piece of flesh whose sole purpose was extracting pleasure from others, was soul crushing.

    It cost me thirty dollars to see the girl that I planned on losing my virginity to have sex with a stranger. I felt like a creepy old man, a pathetic loser whose closest relationship with a girl was through a screen. She did a short interview with the cameraman before she undressed. Hearing her say our hometown out loud made me squirm. It was the first time I’d heard my nothing of a town spoken by someone else outside of Main Street. The room looked like a cheap motel, the drapes were barely open, letting in a slight landscape of brown mountains and a dusty ground. Best guess was Las Vegas or Southern California.

    Hints of her former self shinned through. Her bubbly smile, her vague answers, the way she twitched her nose when she grew nervous. Somewhere, deep down, her real self was still in there. But I had to strain to find it. She looked different, a caricature of her teenage self. Her hair was full of bleached blonde extensions, killing all the roots. Her face was sunken in on itself, as if it were trying to hide from the camera. Her chin was acne riddled. She was rail thin; if you looked closely enough you could see the outline of her ribcage. Her boobs, once supple and modest, were inflated balloons, slightly misshapen distortions. I gagged a bit, fighting the faintest taste of warm bile back down into my gut.

    Her eyes were a shade of grey I didn’t remember. Countless afternoons spent together skipping out on school to go sneak into the local movie theater or wander around the mall came flooding back to me. We went to Junior and Senior prom together and were even named homecoming King and Queen. She looked like a princess in her prom dress. Everyone’s eyes were on her when we were on the dance floor. The other girls were jealous of her and the guys were jealous of me for being with her. I thought after Junior prom I’d surely be able to have sex with her. She said she wanted to, but she tossed around conflicting words like love and responsibility with not ready and too young. I drank myself into a stupor that night, leaving her gossiping with her girlfriends until the sun came up. I loved her, as much as I could at that age, and was willing to wait.

    The eastern European Neanderthal that was sharing the screen with her oozed masculinity. His muscles bulged, stretching his upper arm tribal tattoo to its limit. His gelled hair was short and it looked as if he plucked his eyebrows. No doubt he was hung, easily twice as big as mine and much thicker. It was like a mallet, ready to inflict pain on his next assigned co-ed, my co-ed. He was a real pro, slowly tricking her into a sense of comfort before unleashing his domination.

    She handled it adeptly, like she’d done it a thousand times. Stroking and caressing it into shape, becoming stern with it as it grew in her mouth. As her chin grew sloppy with spit, and his hands tightened against her scalp, roughly guiding it back and forth, her eyes deadened a bit, losing that life that I’d once fallen for. Her head bobbed violently, trying to match the guy’s growing intensity. His moans descended down on her, telling her how he liked it. The dirty talk started soon after. Words like “dirty slut” and grunting affirmations of “you like that, don’t you” filled the room, echoing off of the smoke stained walls.

    I unzipped my pants and reached for my penis. Force of habit. The coldness of my hand scared it at first but it was too late. I began thinking of how she used to handle me. Calmly, with care and a slight hesitation. Never going down all the way. Mostly massaging the tip, tickling the head. There were feelings involved, cheapening the lust of the moment, deadening the excitement, complicating the raw instincts that should’ve overtaken the situation. A token gesture meant to show her affection, to somehow please me while also holding off additional advances, further violations of her pure body that we both knew I wanted.

    He inserted it without hesitation, watching him do it so quickly, and without care made me squirm, reconsider all of my failed attempts at reaching the very same precipice. I felt trapped, suffocated within this sphere of virtual fantasy. My heart began beating faster. I could feel the blood pumping through my veins as her moans intensified. My hands sweaty with anxiety and anticipation. My chest started to thump in unison with the background music. Her skull hit the headboard repeatedly. I was focused, squinting and inching closer to the screen for a better look. I owed her that much. I was paying her my final respects. It was the only amount of control I had left. She turned her head away from him and the camera several times. He had to grab the back of her neck to get her to look up at him. Her refusal to make eye contact was a sign, confirmation that she was, indeed, in need of money. This realization broke through the barriers of fantasy that had taken me this far. This was her job.

    I zipped up my pants. I couldn’t go through with it. My inability the final sign of my true feelings towards her. No amount of lighting, no amount of camera manipulation, could force myself to derive pleasure from her circumstances. I thought I saw tears in her eyes. That was the only emotion left. For either of us. He grabbed her by the hair, threw her to the floor in a quick whirl, like he was handling a barn animal, and finished on her face without a warning.

    A forced smile, an exhausted wave and a wink to the camera and it was all done. She looked miserable, her pigtails loosened, face glistening with sweat, mascara running down her cheeks, slowly mixing in with the congealing sperm. She looked trapped, a prisoner of male control.

    I wondered where her boyfriend was. Probably dealing on campus, or back at the apartment cooking up a batch. I built him up in my mind then tore him down just as quickly. His magical potion of household cleaning supplies and over the counter pharmaceuticals inducing my once precious angel into a life of public degradation. She’d gone from head cheerleader to drug addicted pornstar in less than a year.

    The video ended abruptly. No music, no slick transition, just a black screen. The words of the website flashed in front of me, taunting me, laughing at me, a reminder of their conquest, of what I could never accomplish, of what I let slip away, what I lost, what she lost.

    I downloaded the movie and saved it to my desktop. Just in case, I rationalized to myself. Tears were the only fluids that my body was capable of creating at the moment. I cried over our shared losses, missed opportunities. I found my high school yearbook. Her smile staring back up at me on the page. I studied it for minutes, every inch of her face burned into my memory, convinced that this is how she should be remembered. I deleted the movie. One last grasp at our shared past. I clung to her smile instead, and for those few minutes, everything was fine again.



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