this inventory of you

With a careful hand, I twist my spare in the keyhole of your apartment door. After two years I still remember its quirks; I pull the knob towards me and turn the key twice to the right until I hear a thunk and I know I’m in. It moans open and suddenly, I am awash in the smell of you. It’s just as I remember it. I close my eyes and let it flood my lungs: 

The chemical scent of clean canvases and paint; 

The charred earthiness of spent spliffs; 

The sweet breath of your cheap peony perfume; 

Those expensive little candles, clove and coconut; 

Mildew. Must.

All this I’m sure you preferred to the bleach-clean stink of medicine and bedpans. Listen, Candy: I’m not going to your funeral today. I hope you understand. That person in the casket, that string of weak bones draped in a thin, gray cloak of skin, she is not you. This is you: these smells and your paintings, the shape of your body carved into the mess of blankets on your bed, the red print of your lips on the rim of a wine glass. Yes, this is unmistakably you. 

I lay in your bed for a beat, still without a frame or a headboard, catch my breath. It’s as if I can feel you now, sitting on top of me, pelvis perched on pelvis. I watch as this vision of you rolls a bitter mix of weed and tobacco between a square of crisp, thin paper with your expertly steady fingers––“it’s no pedestrian skill to roll the perfect spliff,” you’d say––then light it and take a long drag, the tendrils of milky smoke curling from your lips like claws.

I suppose now is as good a time as ever to tell you why I’m here on the day of your funeral, two years after our split.

I want a painting. It is only a matter of time before your parents send a crew of cleaners loaded with lemon and lavender sprays and brooms and mops to excavate this apartment of you. Who knows what your parents will do with the paintings, those dreadful reminders of your decision to drop out of law school. (I remember how they threatened to stop paying your rent if you didn’t start taking your life seriously, though you could always call a bluff; yes, spineless cogs, you liked to call them.) The thought of your paintings collecting dust in their dilapidated basement or worse, being sold for cheap to tasteless strangers makes me sick; yes, I need to save at least one painting from that blasted fate. And yes, Candy, I need to keep a piece of you for myself.

I sit up, dizzy with longing. It is a longing that burns and stretches in my stomach like potent hunger. For these past two years I’ve dreamed of your mouth; that beautiful, pink mouth that tasted of smoke and licorice and felt like silk pressed against my neck, my navel, inside my thighs. I force myself to stand, to keep moving. 

In your bathroom, I splash cold water on my face. I open the cabinet; as I expected, it is a cluster of creams and oils and sprays. In many ways, you lived minimally. Your fridge was always sparsely stocked, only the basics. Meat, cheese, fruits, and vegetables with dirt still dusted on the skin. You owned just a few articles of clothing, only shades of brown and nude hanging on your metal rack like deflated skins. In this bathroom, though, you lived in excess. I take stock, coating my skin in these relics of you:

Lemon sugar lip scrub and avocado eye serum; 

A firming mask that sizzles on the skin like oil in a pan; 

Cooling cucumber face cream; 

A lip plumper that stings like a sunburn as my lips swell;

And the finishing touch: a rosehip mist. 

When it feels like my pores are breathing and my skin is slick and shiny as a wet cough drop, I close the cabinets, leave the bathroom. Get it together, Gwen. I’m here on a mission, not to play house in my dead girlfriend’s bathroom. Ex-girlfriend. Forgive me, Candy.

I, too, have dated around since you. Some girls, some guys. Beefy buzz cuts and bony rib cages and platinum blondes. Their faces are fleshy and featureless as thumbs in my memories. Not you, Candy. You’ve haunted me. 

I open your freezer now. Bingo. A frosted bottle of vodka. I take a pull, the thick, cold liquid clinging to the walls of my throat like syrup as it slides down.

I’ll tell you something now, something painful to admit: after the breakup, I imagined you dead in many cruel and strange ways. Your head plunged lifelessly in a paint can; a paintbrush lodged in through one ear, popping out the other; your body crushed under a chandelier you don’t even have, red freckles of blood sprayed on an otherwise clean canvas in front of you. 

And now you really are gone (I can imagine you bemoaning your own death: “A car crash, seriously? How painfully ordinary!”) and your absence is just as potent as your presence. I take another pull.

Finally, I head to the back room where you store your paintings. For typical tenants, this is the room where a bed (with a frame and a headboard) would go, and a dresser, a nightstand. Perhaps a mirror, some framed photos of friends and family. You, of course, were no typical tenant.

Here it finally is, your art. The very pulse of you. The paint fumes are strong as smoke, burning my lungs and eyes. Canvases upon canvases fill the space, some hung up, others stacked against the walls. I turn on your record and spin around to the high-pitch tune of Lesley Gore’s 3 voice like a drunken ballerina, draining the bottle down my throat and taking it all in. Images from your paintings lurch, like testy predators, in and out of my vision: craggy, green teeth and eyeballs without irises bulging from their sockets like hard boiled eggs, and curly, purple tongues. Sharp mountain peaks and inky black rivers. Bones and smoke and shadows. Spiny, seaborn creatures. All the darkness inside you expelled on canvas.

There are portraits of all your strange subjects too, those shady figures you lured here from who knows where; probably those seedy, hole in the wall dive bars you loved so much. They’re sultry, alluring, some angelic even, though there’s always something insidious lurking in the margins of each portrait: a pupil askew, faint claw marks on a collarbone. On your wooden easel there’s a canvas with the whisper of a face traced on it. All pencil, no paint. An unfinished piece, your most recent work then. I look closer and my stomach sours––it is the woman who broke us, Holly.

You two were just friends when we were together, but I could see it in her watchful, hungry eyes. She wanted you to herself. I knew when we fought in the end that your words came straight from her tongue. Consuming. Volatile. Explosive. “It’s all just too...intense,” you started saying. But wasn’t that what made us exceptional? Yes, there were fights that left us brittle and breathless, our tongues heavy with the poison of our own words. But what about all those hours we spent washed in the apricot haze of a setting or rising sun, reduced to breath and sweat and mouths? There is a price to pay for something so intensely sweet, a balance to be struck. 

Holly’s face is a reminder of that pain you were––are still, even in death––capable of wielding.

That is because, of course, you never painted me. “Why do you bring in these strangers when you have me?” I once asked.

“I’m not painting you,” you said. 

“But I want to look through your eyes, see how you see me.” 

“Do you know how painfully cliche you sound?” You said. A snap. 

“Please.”

“Can’t you understand no for once,” you said. And that was that. Your rejection was a blow that burned for weeks, following me like an oppressive fog. 

I guess things were different with Holly. 

I lean closer to the sketch. Holly’s beauty is clear, yes, her bone structure sharp and features pronounced, but she is vacant, joyless. The corners of her mouth and eyes sag like she’s melting, and there is a dullness in her expression. I’ve never seen such drained quality to your art; even when you paint of death, it bursts with color and vigor. I must admit, this is not your best work. But I think you must have known that already. It is unfinished, after all. Unsettled by Holly’s gaze nonetheless, I suck my thumbs and smear her eyes into blur. Bitch.

I flip through the stacks piled against the walls now, still looking for the perfect painting. Curved lips painted with blood clots, matted fur, crooked bones, bruise-colored pumpkins rotting on a curb. They’re all delicious, yes, but when I see it––the one––I know. Suddenly I am warm and drowsy with want. I wish I could dig my hands into it, like it is cake. Bring fistfuls into my mouth, rub it on my skin. My Candy, it is a portrait of you. Carefully I pick the canvas up, prop it against an open wall, and sit before it. 

Here you are in front of me, all edges and effervescence. I trace my fingers along each curve, the longing swelling in my chest like the air before a storm. Yes, here you are: 

Pale gray eyes like little crater-eaten moons, stony and cold; 

Radiant, black hair, cut severely at jawline;

An opened rose of a mouth, round and red, ripe for plucking; 

A snappable collar bone bulging beneath the skin; 

A long, slender neck begging for the touch of teeth, a tongue, fingers. 

I hold your self-portrait, you, to my chest. I imagine your warm breath wetting my neck like morning dew, your steady fingers tracing my gooseflesh, coursing up and down my spine and along my stomach, and slipping inside. Yes, this is the one I will keep.

Before I leave, I walk once more around the perimeter of your apartment, breathing it in, trailing the ghosts of us as they dance and cook and curl into each other. 

My eye catches your closet door, slightly ajar. 

This closet once housed nothing more than the leftovers from a long day: a pair of shoes, a ruffled jacket, grocery bags. Curious, I open it to find a collection of canvases faced away from me, crammed in its depths. They’re packed so tightly, one against the other, that when I pull one, it doesn’t budge. I pull and pull and nothing. I sit on the ground, prop my foot on the door frame for leverage, and pull the edge of a canvas so hard that when it finally dislodges, I am flung backwards like a loose ragdoll. The canvases burst and slide from the clutches of the closet, surrounding my feet. I sit. I turn them over, one by one, revealing their marvel:

Me, submerged underwater with puffed cheeks and tiny drops of blood like pomegranate seeds bubbling from my lips, my skin lunar blue, a crown of undulating seagrass for hair; 

Me, with a crimson ribbon melting into blood wrapped three times around my neck and my face a swirl of cream-colored paint; 

Me, or my contorted torso anyway, naked and pale on a steel table under a fluorescent light (my constellation of moles mapped perfectly, though the moles are little maggots budding from my flesh);

Me, sitting in the sand at our favorite place, Orchard Beach, in my green bikini, a wide smile spread across my face and a pile of bubblegum pink intestines spilled in my lap, glistening like fleshy oysters. 

After I’ve seen them all, I draw my knees into my chest and cradle myself like an infant. I cry. It is a throaty howl, raw and red as an exposed wound. I cry until my voice frays and my hair is wet with salt and snot and the strands bend around my throat like long fingers. I cry until my lungs shake and I’m laughing the hardest I’ve laughed in a long time. Through these convulsions, I pull your portrait, your lovely face, into my chest, hold you tighter than ever. Through this tangle of bone-deep grief and sorrow, an undeniable pleasure pulses sweetly through. You too, my beloved Candy, were haunted.