I’d write a screenplay about us if I thought someone would buy it. I’d cultivate all the bullshit and parlay it into Hollywood cash.

But I won’t. There’s no point. I won’t waste the time or energy. You know, better than anyone, how it is, with the hopes you had of being a poet, sitting down, stripping pieces of yourself off and placing them on paper, getting rejection after rejection.

“We regret to inform you…”

“We apologize…”

“Thank you for your submission, but…”

“We hope to hear from you again.”

“Please be sure to subscribe to our newsletter.”

But if I did, if I cared to, I believe—and don’t quote me here (not that you could because I’ll never write it)—I would write about the day I found out you were pregnant, but I would make it far more interesting than our common reality, filled with overdue notices and license plate renewals and screenless screen doors and a sink filled with roaches.

 

NOTE: THE ROACHES COULD BE A METAPHOR ABOUT SOMETHING. WORK ON THAT BEFORE SUBMITTING THIS.

 

Maybe it would be a drama, a gripping tale of love and death.

Instead of you texting me, I would hear about it through a handwritten letter.

Instead of sitting in my mother’s living room, thirty-one, drunk, and jobless, I would be twenty-one, sober, and doing something responsible and worthwhile and American, like fighting in a war somewhere, and everything would look like a 1940s comic book, and I would receive the letter in a trench somewhere on some front from the shaking hands of a corporal, and I would open the letter, and I would read it, and I would realize I needed to quit the business of war and get back to you and my child.

My child. Our child.

Ours.

Not his.

Not the outcome of, in your words, “a fucking accident.” Not a one-night-stand with an ex.

And in the follow-up sequence, I would go AWOL from the war just to be with you, my love, and my child, instead of what really happened, instead of wandering the streets at midnight, hoping to run into a friend that owes me a beer, wondering if what we have won’t buckle and crease and fall into the whatever-goddamn-metaphor-you-can-put-here.

However. It will not all be fiction.

No, I would keep the moment when we talked, and we kissed by the lake, the moment where I told you that I would support you and love you and be with you and be there for you. I would keep the look in your eyes, your smile, the wind in your hair, your floral scent, the feel of your hand in my hand.

I would keep that, as I’ve kept that.

But the months that followed that moment would be made brief so as to not bog down the story. It would be a montage of sonograms, x-rays, blood tests, smiles, the ex-boyfriend showing up at your apartment at three in the morning and beating your door instead of you for once, yelling, screaming, and us calling the cops. Then the montage will end, and the fiction will continue, and Military Police would scour the streets for me, instead of me scouring the streets for work, for a bottle, for an escape hatch, for a hit, a pill, a bong, anything.

I’m still unsure if I want to include the moment where you lost the child, the moment you woke up beside me with blood soaked into the mattress and caked in between your legs, and how, after they took you away in the ambulance and you stayed in the hospital for two days, I went back to your apartment and washed the dried, liquified bits of his kid out of the sheets and out of the carpet and mattress (I wonder what we would’ve called it), and how in the weeks afterward, silence filled our mouths like beer and ramen, and how the end came for us before we knew it, and a post-credits scene was never written for either of us.

But, hey, this is fiction, this is drama, and this can’t be the end. It needs to be punched up.

 

NOTE: SUBSTITUTE “PUNCHED” BEFORE SENDING THIS OUT. MIGHT SEEM INSENSITIVE CONSIDERING THE BLOW-UP WITH THE EX.

 

Yeah, this shouldn’t be the last thing anyone sees at the end, right? No, we need something better. We need a show.

Stick with the theme.

Perhaps, the MPs could catch me, and I can get sent to a military prison for being a deserter? Perhaps I can say something Harper Lee-ish at my trial?

Or perhaps we could duck out, leave everything, and start new lives in a new town where everything looks like a postcard.

But we did start new lives, didn’t we? Just not with each other.

Or maybe…

Maybe, it could end on an artistic note? Perhaps we will channel Fellini or Bergman, and you and I could be crucified, strung up together, unified and dying on a Friday afternoon.

Maybe a bit too much, but at least with this ending, we’d be together.

But no matter the ending, our “feel good, critically acclaimed summer romp” might just have them “dancing in the aisles,” Peter Travers would say.

And it’ll “be sure to lift everyone’s spirits,” and “jaw dropping” the ghost of Roget Ebert would say. Ironically, of course.

Too bad I’ll never write it.

And even if I did, it would probably never get optioned. And if it got optioned, it would never get made. And if it got made, no one would see it.

Oh well.

You never cared for old movies anyway.

You never liked things in black and white.

You said it always looked boring.

Pan left.

Fade to black.

Cue music.

Roll credits.

The End.