Plywood Utopia in the Plaster of Paris

Friday.  It was move-in day all right, but, well, Maria hadn't exactly been forthcoming with me: was I in the house on the left, or the pseudo-squalid-possibly-foreclosed abode on the right, or gauche as she said, her diction an amalgamation of french (canadian-born, raised in Paris from an early age, moved to Chicago last year, on her 28th birthday: does this make her French Canadian?) and english.  Occasionally, when we'd sleep together, as undulations hastened and intensity swelled, she'd moan these sexual commentaries en francais as she came -- despite the language barrier I found this terribly Hot.

Come to think of it, the very last time we were intimate (she'll only refer to it as fucking: we fucked; the last time we fucked; while you were fucking me: I found this, in tandem to her nondescript bilingual utterances while inside her, to be very alluring) is how this all started.  We were at my place, boxes stacked like the most downtrodden game of tetris you'll ever play, and, as she so lovingly puts it: Fucking.  All that remained was my king-sized mattress, taking up a majority of the room; a crowded train with 2 empty seats; a portly man in a petite bath tub.  And we, inadvertently blowing a little too much cocaine at Fred's Intermittently Racy House of Burlesque (A dive bar down Armitage Ave., Fred was a College Dropout in some intense Creative Writing program at Cornell some years back -- this was his sardonic revenge), were really going at it.  A primal element washed over us and a new, heightened physicality, pronounced itself.  At it's peak -- we finished together this time -- I was behind her, she was balancing herself on the fortress of my varied belongings, and in some post-coital shock wave the boxes came tumbling down.  Maria, nude, pinned supine on the floor, bested by a box of old Dwell and The Atlantic magazines, laughed, her full, exquisitely symmetrical breasts pushed up towards her chin.  I found myself laughing with her, my heart still racing from the blow, from my effusive orgasm, and I helped free her from the shackled of stale periodicals.  We lied on the floor, spooning, shaped like two SS's, me from behind, cupping her right breast with my left hand, intermittently kissing the slope of her neck.

She inquired why I was moving.  I told her my roommate, who owned the condo (she found it to be cookie-cutter, I conceded it was enervating my writing in a furtive, subversive manner) had recently converted to Judaism with a woman he had met on match.com, and they were embarking on a Spiritual Journey through Israel.  Thus: all belongings were to be sold off, condo notwithstanding.  I had a solid three weeks to find a place, but, in my dedication to The Page I resigned myself to profligate not having my shit together and didn't exactly, um, well, look.  Henry Miller told me, via his work at least, I needed to bang out 5000-words a day if I even wanted to label myself a writer: so who has the time to look for an apartment?

Thankfully she found this an entertaining yarn, and chose not to call me out on my gaping, plot-hole in the narrative of being an Adult, and offered me a room in the house she had just closed on.  It was somewhere in the Southside, between Pilsen and Bridgeport: I knew this area like I know Quantam Physics/The ins-and-outs of Dubai Nightlife/if the Sun-Times is actually a real newspaper, um, you get it -- I didn't know my way around.  But it's my time now.  Literary Greatness has caught my scent, and a previously-thought obscure locale would be just what the Doctor (I really hate this phrase, and must voice my insecurity and bizarre compulsion to use it) ordered.

And here I am, Uhaul chocked-full of my belongings, the new chapter in my peripatetic sojourn, grinning, but: there's two houses.  One living, one dead, light and dark, good versus evil.  I immediately felt my heart slam against my sternum, like an angry god.  Tunnel-vision ensued, sound escaping me.  I passed out; and now, on the verge of my greatest, no!, my real accomplishment, my first novel published, here I am lying on the floor in my Agent's office, a vessel, abuzz with a new, realized-energy, and this all I can think about.

Something was escaping me...