You Were Warm, Like Rose Pink And Coffee Stains

March 27th was the first day that didn’t require a jacket in four solid months, so it was the perfect day for Lloyd to kill himself. But before committing his heroic act, he thought himself obliged to bid all those places he had fallen in love with one final adieu, and this is how he ended up on a bench under a willow tree in the Public Gardens. When he was young enough to still enjoy things like the Swan Boats, Lloyd’s mother brought him here to throw bread at the begging ducks’ heads while a sullen teenager paddled the adorably red, flat boat around the shallow pond. Two days later she died of a brain aneurysm while reading to Lloyd Make Way For Ducklings, something he never quite forgave Robert McCloskey for.

He thought it appropriate to do his last deed in that place that would lead to his greatest heartbreak. There were no razor blades to the wrists nor nooses around the neck in Lloyd’s final plan; he decided to quietly down a vial and lay under the willow tree, letting it’s drooping, nurturing arms be the last of his views of this world he no longer belonged to. Not that he ever did belong. At an early age Lloyd came to the conclusion that he was not like other children when he watched his first television show and was disconcerted to see that no one else’s closet consisted of strictly fire-engine red pants and stark white t-shirts. When Lloyd went to elementary school he noticed that none of the other children were wanting to discuss Durkheim and how religion is the social solidarity of our society. During the middle school years he took less interest in how he was the only seventh grader to spend their weekends inside the walls of the Museum of Fine Arts, editing their fourth opera in an overstuffed armchair underneath Michelangelo. And Lloyd certainly knew that he was the only teenager to celebrate their sweet sixteen by meticulously counting how many bricks were used to construct the southern wall of the Old State House. But that’s just how Lloyd was, and he reflected upon this as he sat and watched a duck bob underwater to get at the plant life growing beneath the murky water’s surface.
On the other end of the same bench under the same willow tree watching the same duck bob sat Allison, a pretty yet meek Christian girl who had just handed over her virginity to a father of two. Needless to say, it was not her ideal vision of a day going smoothly. How would she tell her evangelical parents that she would no longer be joining them in the Lord’s eternal kingdom? Some how she didn’t think they would be very pleased upon hearing news of how their delicate flower had lost it’s petals to their pleasant neighbor who, turns out, only agrees to eighteen holes of golf every Saturday with Allison’s father in order to to get himself his own piece of the Virgin Mary. As far as Allison was concerned, she was done for, and the only answer to this heathen act lay in the barrel of the gun that was tucked inside the waist of her jeans, hidden by her monogrammed sweater. Her only solace was the thought that her damned mess would leave something warm for the ducks to eat for dinner. Surely the mucky treasures that baked at the bottom of the water were not enough to keep even a duck satisfied.
Lloyd never had a girlfriend; the world doesn’t allow the ones who don’t belong to love the ones that do. And Lloyd knew this and accepted this fact after he slipped a valentine into Susy McDuggan’s locker in the fourth grade and she reciprocated the gesture by lovingly spitting in his left eye. After that he decided to only love turtles because people were just things for him to avoid; also, turtle’s don’t have salivary glands. Lloyd no longer noticed pretty girls, of even the ugly ones for that matter, so it was puzzling to him when he noticed himself noticing Allison who seemed to be noticing something that wasn’t there in front of either of them. He wondered if that something ever noticed her back. He was fairly certain she hadn’t been there when he had sat down, but then again it had been some years since he took part in reality. It was odd to Lloyd to be sitting in such close proximity to something that had the ability to see him back, as he made it his number one priority to only sit by things like dictionaries and vases and the occasional turtle. So he was caught off guard when the pretty girl turned to meet his stare, something one would never experience from a dictionary, and it no longer mattered who had been sitting down first.
“I know what you are thinking,” were the first words that had been said to Lloyd since last September when someone had apologized for stepping on his foot in the farmer’s market at Copley Square. Lloyd was silent, unsure of how to use his voice box; one of those “use it or lose it” types of things.
“I know, and I’ve had that exact thought until I realized that I was a fool. You should know that. You should know that I was a fool.” Allison stared at Lloyd as if she were catching him rummaging through her closet and discovering the old diaries from eighth grade that she had stashed away, embarrassed but what they had to say of her.
Again Lloyd was silent. Allison turned her stare to the duck that was now perched on the stone edge of the pond. Unable to look away, Lloyd struggled to find all the words he wanted to say, how he wanted nothing more than to turn everything back and to put the world in reverse. He tried to figure out how to form the words to explain that he all he wanted was to make the leaves drift back up onto their respectful branches and to make the books go back into fountain pens and to take all the words that were never meant to be said and put them back into strangers’ apologetic lungs. He wanted to tell Allison about all the sentences he had never said and about all his lies and his facts and his stories and his truths that could sound like lies if not said at the correct time of day. He would tell her about the lives he wasn’t living and the ones he would grow to live. He would tell her of his vial and how he wouldn’t need it anymore because maybe he could be OK if he could just sit on this bench with her and her monogrammed cardigan for the rest of time.
Lloyd opened his mouth to say these things, beginning to form his tongue and lips into familiar feeling shapes when he realized the ground under his sneakers was starting to tremble and his ears were filling with an overwhelmingly loud roar that was vibrating the air. Taking his eyes off Allison, he raised his face to the sky to meet the underbelly of an abnormally low flying commercial plane that seemed to be gliding in slow motion above the tops of the trees. As he stared, perplexed by this occurrence, Lloyd thought that he could faintly hear a pop that had been almost drowned out by the noise of the massive engines, and thought that he felt a warm slime on the his cheek that had been facing Allison. When he looked back to face her, Allison was no longer sitting there but instead seemed to be napping on the ground next to the bench underneath the willow tree with its drooping, nurturing arms.