Lose Yourself

Cloudy with a Chance

Sam stood at the window of his classroom, looking at the perfect clouds. He sipped a weak cup of coffee from the faculty lounge and thought about Spain. He and Josie had gone to Seville to celebrate their 1st wedding anniversary. It seemed like a lifetime ago. They'd toured cathedrals, ate tapas, drank wine and avoided their relationship issues. Josie had rented jetskis for them but it been too windy so they'd gotten high and wandered down to the beach together. He remembered staring up at a round opening in the clouds, thinking it was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen. The wispy edged clouds seemed to be reaching for each other, the tendrils closing the slow-moving gap.

Like arms reaching out to each other, he expected the clouds to merge into one but then he realized they were only overlapping. Even though the clouds seemed to be in the same place, they were on levels that existed so far apart. He felt like the clouds spoke for him. He could be in a crowd of thousands and feel so distant from everyone. He was alone, like he would never connect with anyone.

He didn't want to talk to Josie about the clouds. It felt like a secret world he wanted to keep to himself. Sam had known, instinctively that she wouldn't understand and he didn't want to share his epiphany with her. It didn't fit into her romanticized world view, so he kept staring up at the sky, filled with silent despair and wonder as the cloud shifted onward. Tears had run down his face as he sat mutely beside his wife. They were sitting 3 feet apart on the beach but it felt like miles. Josie didn't notice that he was falling apart. At the time, he knew it was weird that he didn't care enough to tell her but maybe he didn't care enough about their relationship.

He couldn't help but compare their relationship to what he was experiencing now with Em. He was older now, not as naïve. Weighing his 15 year marriage against his relationship with Marshall was sobering. There was no comparison at all; he had never felt like himself with Josie. She had chosen him and he had gone along with it despite being in a relationship with another woman. Josie decided that they were soulmates and her certainty had felt so real at the time. Or maybe it was the drama surrounding it. He had been forced to choose between her very public invitation to have their first kiss on a baseball game or refuse and be part of her humiliation. Sam didn't want to see her suffer. Josie was fun and lovely, sweet and smart as hell. Her personality radiated outward; everyone who met her eventually fell in love with her and he had been no exception.

He had loved her but there had always been distance between them. She wanted his approval, his love, his adoration but she never wanted to get to know him.

His divorce from Josie was sad and uncomfortable but he didn't miss her. He missed being married but he couldn't say that he missed her specifically. Em was different. The thought of losing him cut him to the core. The future wasn't the future if he wasn't part of it. If he lost Em, he would lose part of himself. Was it because he knew it wouldn't last? Or because he admired and lusted for Em? Or was it because Marshall Mathers couldn't come out of the closet and a secret relationship couldn't last forever?

Sam was in a strange mind frame and had scrapped his lesson plan to start Catcher in the Rye and was trying to teach a mini-unit on Modernist Poetry to his first bell class. It was pointless, trying to breathe meaning into the bareness of prose.

He stood in front of his class, clutching a hockey puck like a talisman. "The author writes: one's not half two. It's two are halves of one. What does that mean?" Sam's class was silent. He knew he was talking to himself. His students stared back at him blankly. It had all the familiar feelings of a class slipping away from him. A slow-moving p

minds ignorant of stern miraculous
this every truth-beware of heartless them
(given the scalpel,they dissect a kiss;