Melissa Leventhal

I Want to Write a Love Story

I left my husband, but he got out first. At least I said the words before he did. 

I'm still afraid of goodbye. And I need my marriage certificate to file for divorce, but it's a 7 hour round trip day and I don't want to go alone. 

Maybe it's what I need to do anyway - alone, alone, alone. Always. 

That's how I'd define my marriage. Maybe it will help me move on, find comfort and solace in solitude again.

I took care of him - and he never gave enough back to refill me. I ran out of everything but sadness.

Nights like this I feel empty still - filling yourself up takes time - it's easier to sip from someone else for just a little while. Not enough that they even notice I've stolen something from them.

That's how I know I'm not as nice as people think I am. I'm a thief, stealing pieces of their joy - swallowing them greedily and watching as they turn murky. There's black in my soul and it will never wash away. 

I've learned to live with it.

It's 85 degrees in my apartment and I want to go somewhere. But not to a bar, because I don't have the money to drink as much as I want to. And somewhere between LA and here I lost my independence and discovered loneliness. So instead I'm sitting on my porch, as the sun drops down, pretending I can look half as cool as Karcher with my notebook and cigarettes.

I'm struggling - with a city finally moving forward and I'm the one stuck. Like this weed growing through a crack in the foundation, feeding off the ashes of the cigarettes before me. I am moving - like the glaciers that cut through us before the first Native Americans settled here. Millimeters a year - never fast enough to outrun my demons. And Patience has never been my Virtue. It was the first one I lost. Chastity was the last.

***

Out last night with a friend to catch up. Had a couple beers, shot a little pool. A guy came up after we finished a game and started talking to us about the sport. Neither of us were sure if he was trying to hustle us, but we were ready for a break anyway. 

"Are you sure it's okay man?" the stranger (whose name was Marcus) asked my friend, who is also a man. 

Now look - Marcus was drunk. But Marcus had observed the end of our game, and chatted for 5-10 minutes with both of us.

My friend said, "Yeah no problem" and I chimed in with, “Actually I'm paying for the games, but yeah, we're ready for a break."

I wasn't rude about it. But as subtly sexist as he was with his comment, I threw him some equally subtle feminist shade. My friend didn't notice anything weird about the comment until I pointed it out. 

"And that's Buffalo," I said. "He's not a bad guy, he probably didn't even realize what he said. And that's the problem. It's unconscious, this exclusion of women."

I walked outside for a cigarette, abandoning the table to Marcus like I was a fuckboy creeping out of a woman’s bed while she’s dreaming she’s finally found “the One”. Maybe Marcus was different and would make love with the cue stick, sinking balls into holes all night, every night. But from the slurred speech and glassy eyes, I didn’t think he would remember her in the morning and everyone would lose. And as I turned back to look through the dusty, steamed window Marcus was at the bar ordering another drink, both of us already forgotten.

And then I started thinking, maybe it's part of the reason most men from Buffalo (I'm talking those born and bred here, that have never left or experienced the world for any significant amount of time) aren't into me. Maybe it's less my looks and figure and more this attitude - that I am just as good as them. That I deserve to be treated as their equal.

And with that in mind, I started going deeper in my thoughts, about the guy that half-ghosted on me a week or so ago. I say half-ghosted because his last message to me was "I'm going away." 

Fine. Fine then. He had his own bag of issues, which I want to put as the main reason for the ghosting. But also, he couldn't handle my honesty. In how I treat everyone the same, co-worker, sibling, lover, friend: if you ask me a question be prepared for the truth - I will try to make it a gentle truth, but I won't lie.

The question he asked, that he probably shouldn't have was how good he was in bed. Kittlings, I realize he wanted his ego stroked, but I'm not going to make an exception to my rule about lying for a guy I've known a month, and especially because he wants his ego stroked. So I told him. 

The penis didn't really do it for me.

From the corner of my eye, I see Marcus has remembered his game. He’s trying to make his shot, body swaying slightly, dancing to the silent music we only hear when we’re wasted. The cue ball skips off the table and rolls along the floor. I wish I were that cue ball, able to escape the game of Buffalo with a hard enough push. I’ve been pushed that hard before – out of Buffalo, out of LA, out of New York – only to wind up right back in the same place.

It's at this point my friend last night stops me and said, "I'd have ghosted on you too with that answer".

"But, he was more than fine with other things! Which I told him!” 

But still, the penis is king I guess, and I bruised his frail ego. Which is another mark of sexism.  

"Male egos are frail, you need to be gentle with them." 

But a woman is supposed to let shit just roll off our backs? How about instead we try, "Any ego is frail if it's connected to an insecure soul."

And my ego gets bruised all the time - rejection in any form hasn't hurt any less over the course of my lifetime. I've just trained myself how to keep moving and pretending I'm fine. I've also learned to not ask questions I don't want to know the answer to. And again, that was learned the hard way when I asked an ex where he saw our relationship going and he replied with, "You're fun, but I just don't see myself marrying someone like you."  

10 years later and it's still a raised welt on my heart.

***

There's an old Church in the city - I know what it wants to become. But the historical or preservation board or society, or whatever it is, doesn't want it to change. There's value in the original structure, even though it's decaying from non-use. Its stained glass ripped out or broken and boarded from the inside out. And people want to prevent the transformation that will bring it back to life as something new. 

That church is Buffalo and Buffalo is me - on the cusp of fully becoming. Still being held back by antique ideologies. But I have Faith in this Trinity - we are all holy and worth resurrection.

***

I remember gliding along the Virgin East Coast train to Edinburgh. I think we just passed a castle. In the distance, small mountains are dusted with snow left over from the storm two days’ past. 72 hours in this country and I’m already thinking like a native Brit. Reversed English, a rounding of vowels unlike anything else.

This guy sitting across from me isthe whole package. Successful techie in the biomedical field. Cute in a Lanier Colin Firth sort of way. His name is Craig, perfectly British. He's been caretaker to his mum, but is packing her up to go to an assisted living facility this weekend. He lives in the main house. She has a little in-law type two room apartment. He lives around Newcastle and is a pilot. He enjoys the arts, theater and opera. He was in London last night at the ballet. Giselle. Politically conscious. He is, on paper, a perfect specimen. The type of man an intelligent woman couldn't help but fall in love with. His friends are similarly intellectual. There's been no talk of social media. Or Trump. Or bullshit small talk. 

This is why I could live in this country - they are talking about politics right now, and he's saying this about the new PM: "I'm finding her a bit unimpressive. She's no 'heir to Maggie'." 

I can only imagine by Maggie he means Margaret Thatcher. Probably in his early 40s. He is, in a way, everything I'd immediately be looking for in a man. Educated, cultured, knowledgeable, moderately attractive, dressed simply enough, not arrogant or self-centered. The conversation between him and his friends is equal in measure and content. A glorious specimen. An adequate specimen. The type you'd expect would make a caring, concerned and equal partner, who would support you and come home with flowers on the requisite holidays and occasions. His lovemaking would be sweet, gentle, and predictable. There is nothing dangerous or overtly thrilling about him.

I should want gentleness. My brain constantly tells me to want this type of man. But my heart. My heart demands fire and passion. Suffering. Intense emotional experiences. Addictive qualities that threaten to combust my very soul. 

Was I born with this flaw, this desire for pain and pleasure combined? Or has it washed over me, been honed over years of riding the waves of intensity found only on the stage? These emotions. How I long to mute them. Not to destroy them completely, but to dull the edges, fade the colors. I could, if I tried to, teach myself how to feel less and still be complete. But how long would that last. How long would the content last? 

No. The contentedness I'm looking for can only be found in the unpredictable, the fire that threatens to consume. I feel too deeply, paint with all the colors available and then create my own. The brain wants. But the heart needs. So the heart is what must drive me.

Tranquility will only keep me happy for so long. The temporary nature of life, that is what I relish. Wait five minutes and something will come along to change a mood or situation. 

Everyone interacting with everyone else and you realize, "We're all connected."

Even when we think we're not.

Even now, everyone in the train car is trying to be silent. Except for this infant, who is colicky and crying, screeching the high-pitched pain of a little human not yet old enough to articulate what is really wrong, what he really wants. He hasn't yet learned how to modulate his voice. Everything is turned up to 11. The unsympathetic half of me wants to tell his parents to get control of their child. The empath side of me wants to lay hands on the child to quiet him.

I want to write a love story for him. The story we should have. The love we should share. What we should be to one another. My fantasy that would be reality if I could will it into existence. There are more words than stars inside my heart. Shifting, a kaleidoscope transforming the sentence. The structure. Every moment is a different story.

---

Melissa Leventhal (Instagram: leventhralled, melissaleventhal.com) is best known for her cock-eyed optimism and biting sarcasm. She has performed with the Academy of New Musical Theater (Los Angeles) and Off-Off-Broadway (Anna Karenina) as well for numerous theater companies in Buffalo, NY (current location), having received an Artie Award Nomination for her performance as the title role in Mother Jones: In Heaven and Hell. In addition to writing and performing, she enjoys travel and photography.

Shannon Frost Greenstein

Insight into the Middle East Peace Conflict with Regard to the Intellectual Boycott, Which Struck One Afternoon While I Was Being Confused by My Half-Jewish Son’s Bris

The afternoon of September 9th, 2015, my son was circumcised in a traditional Jewish ceremony called a bris. 

It was his first bris.  

It was mine, too. 

I watched, somewhat bemused, rife with the fourth trimester and the giddy haze of post-Caesarean painkillers, as heirloom tchotchkes gained sacred significance in a language completely foreign to me during an ancient choreography that ended with him and I in sobbing tears as, concurrently, perplexedly, celebration and love made themselves felt. 

I used to be a Lutheran. 

Used to be a lot of things.  

Then life in my womb, and in his DNA, three thousand years of history, a story of strife, a culture, a tribe. 

A son, lambs’ blood on the lintel of my hospital room, my Jewish husband asleep on the pull-out couch as oxytocin floods my nervous system, a stream of visitors, new cousins and grandparents, evolution incarnate as Darwin sings in the background with his finches like a Greek Chorus. 

And suddenly, the non-observant, non-practicing, sardonic, sarcastic, secular, punk rock, THC-loving worldly father of this child is insisting on a bris in eight days, like his, and his father’s, and HIS father’s, and I’m mispronouncing “mohel” as I do internet research while my incision heals, and then, eight sleepless nights later, we gather. 

And while it’s all happening, while my stitches are dissolving and we are learning to be a family of three and I am being confused by the Hebrew used to describe the people and objects involved in the coming ceremony, Stephen Hawking is calling out to Academia to boycott Israel, to keep papers and science and intellect and progress away from a government he accuses of genocide, to starve the Tech-Giant of its diet of knowledge and wisdom in a bitter siege, to take its professors and scientists and writers and artists and astrophysicists and go home.   

And while Stephen Hawking is calling for an intellectual boycott, and my son is having a bris, there are Palestinians suffering, restricted, in fear. They cannot lay roots; they cannot grow. But there are Israelis suffering, too, restricted, in fear; skies raining shrapnel as children, conditioned to trauma, huddle in shelters when they should be asleep. 

I was once an Academic. I share empathy, with Stephen Hawking, with the Palestinian people, with mothers with new babies, and as the Rabbi chants sacred words and pours wine into a kiddish cup while I am firmly situated within my extended Jewish family, a shicksa they accept nevertheless, I think about intellectual boycott.

In an ethical world, do we deny all of humankind its breakthroughs, at the expense of human beings?

And as the Israelis and Palestinians suffer and Stephen Hawking calls for an intellectual boycott and my son has a bris, my husband holds him, the next scion, a connection, of blood, of genes, of generations upon generations which came before, natural selection at work, and the prayers echo, and the grandparents beam, and my husband smiles. 

Why does it have to be a bris? I’d said. Only one of us is Jewish, I’d said. I am extremely anti-organized religion, I’d said. 

It’s important to my mom, he’d said. 

And, as I watch him, and his mother, and his son, Jewish by culture as they self-identify, I am struck with insight. 

We all just want to love.  

We all just want to raise our children and find work that is meaningful and feel safe in a space that is our own. Arbitrary boundaries dictate whom to blame for all of the suffering, but love has no bounds, and thus it disseminates, seeps away into the ether, so there is no more love but only suffering. 

I’ve solved the Middle East peace crisis, I want to announce over the sounds of my son’s tears, as he joins The Tribe in an instant, like his father and grandfather and so many great-grandfathers passed, Jewish by culture, alive in everyone’s memory.  

It’s just boundaries that are the trouble, I want to continue. We are the same. We all just need love. 

But there is more prayer and celebration and food and someone hands me my firstborn, impossibly tiny even after I’ve had eight days to grow accustomed to his size, and I offer him a bottle of milk as instructed, soothing him, rocking him, vestigial tears dripping off my nose, an instinctual Marco Polo to the sound of his cries, and I do not speak at all, and instead just listen. 

And I, an Existentialist, a Christian once upon a time, know that somewhere, in Israel, this very same ritual is happening at this very same moment. 

And I, an Existentialist, a Christian once upon a time, know that somewhere in Palestine, there is a sacred ritual, too. 

And they are not so different. 

And as I feel swept up in love, in acceptance, in meaning, in family, I am glad we opted for this route, my mother-in-law’s only criteria for properly raising a little boy, and I am glad to have played a part in the experience; because now I am tied, inextricably, by culture, by association, by law, by love to the Jewish faith — I am my beloved and my beloved is mine. Just as I am tied, inextricably, by culture, by association, by law, by love to my own history, independent from that of my husband’s, from which I cannot escape the formative foundations first set. 

I cradle my newborn in my arms, watching family members eat and drink as he gazes back at me sleepily, the past already forgotten, completely content with the world because the whole world is me. 

And in the Middle East, on either side of the border, of the meaningless invisible line, maybe so close that they are separated only by inches, two mothers cradle two babies; identical needs, Madonna and child, just love. We are all kindred. 

And I feel blessed.

---

Shannon Frost Greenstein resides in Philadelphia with her children, soulmate, and persnickety cats. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, a Contributing Editor for Barren Magazine, and a former Ph.D. candidate in Continental Philosophy. Shannon was awarded a writing residency through Sundress Academy for the Arts in October 2019. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Crab Fat Magazine, Chaleur Magazine, Bone & Ink Lit Zine, Rhythm & Bones Lit Mag, Ghost City Review, and elsewhere. Follow her on Twitter at @mrsgreenstein or her website: shannonfrostgreenstein.wordpress.com. She comes up when you Google her.

S.W. Campbell

A Public Service Announcement

Please remember that it is against the law to smoke within ten feet of an entrance, exit, accessibility ramp, window that opens, and/or air intake vent.  Please understand that this law is not in effect to protect you from the negative consequences of puffing away on your cancer sticks.  We could really not give a shit over what method you choose to use to hasten your inevitable march towards death.  Nor is this in anyway meant to protect your fellow hyper-intelligent primates from the so-called dangers of inhaling secondhand smoke.  Despite all of their pointed fake coughing, we find such worries well beneath the real concerns of the government.  

These laws are in place to protect against gnome attacks.  Yes, that’s right. Gnome attacks.  Did you know that gnome attacks are the 1,171,195th leading cause of death in the United States and that on average one person dies of gnome attacks every 11.62 years?  While most of us prefer to imagine gnomes as those whimsical pointy hatted figurines lovingly placed in our grandmama’s garden, in truth gnomes are red hatted bearded thugs who are willing to kill with little to no provocation.  Thirsting for blood, gangs of gnomes run rampant throughout our cities, hunting for the unwary, waiting for the stupid to let their guard down.  Do you know how many injuries are caused by gnomes?  Zero.  Gnomes are not playing.  They are not interested in your valuables.  No, gnomes are just interested in defecating on your corpse. 

Smoking laws are in place to help keep the public spaces where we are at our most vulnerable safe from the gnome scourge.  Gnomes are well known heavy smokers, never being far from their menacingly long pipes filled to the brim with a wide assortment of flavored tobaccos.  Is that rich aroma the smell of Jan from accounting’s smooth filterless Virginia Slim, or is it the pungent burning odor of dried dandelions and human hair emanating from a vile gnome calabash pipe with meerschaum bowl?  There is no way to tell.  Why take such a horrible risk?  These laws are in place to protect you.  

Remember, if you see a gnome, don’t bother reporting it, because you’re already dead.

---

S.W. Campbell was born in Eastern Oregon.  He currently resides in Portland where he works as an economist and lives with a house plant named Morton.  This is his 29th short piece to be published.  If you’d like to read more of his writing, check out his website: www.shawnwcampbell.com