Home > Brock Belvedere's Notebook > Brock’s Obsessions: A Men’s Health Column

Brock’s Obsessions: A Men’s Health Column

September 26, 2013 Leave a comment Go to comments

By Brock Belvedere, Jr.
Senior Staff Writer
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I have loved only one woman.  But she has left me.

Yet, she still dwells in the same cold, darkened house.  In the very next room, in fact.  Upon occasion, I awake, my eyelids wet with tears from some unremembered dream, and I believe her to be there. There is a sound and then the creak of a door and she is gone.

I lay awake for hours, tormented by hostile thoughts. I scan photographs of her past lovers. A foreign artist, a sort of filmmaker, another artist– all of them more beautiful than I. And I imagine her nights then, in the mysterious woods and the endless, harvested fields.  I was not there with her and I am not there now.

I sit in a chair in a little room filled with old books and look out at the falling leaves of autumn. The giant beans from a cigar tree litter the overhang; a siren can be heard far off in the distance. What does the siren indicate?  My interpretation may be obscure to some but I have come to believe it.

I wake again, long before dawn.  Another lonely, fitful night.  She is not there.

I go to the mirror.  There is a cream purchased secretly, manufactured in Lankville by the Buntz Mallows company, a concoction made of shea butter, Vitamin E and mallows. It is meant to reinvigorate the skin.  I slather it liberally across my face– it fails to transform me.  “You are still ugly Brock,” I say, into the mirror.  “You can not compare to the past lovers.  That is why she does not want you.”  I think of more– a tall blonde dancer, a little archivist with a Christ-like body, a tiny boy of the East.

I repair to the pitch-black attic with a flashlight and a sobbing towel.  There is a box there– formerly housing a Vitiello Decorative Ham, now filled with old photographs.  There are a series of my lover and I, taken very early, when her desire was perhaps extant– our expressions are serious but satisfied as we pose for a long-forgotten shutterbug.  I look over these longingly.

Then, I come to a smaller album, decorated in lace, perhaps hand-made.  And inside, a straight-on shot taken at a dance perhaps, or some sort of party– the sort of affair to which I would have never been invited.  And my lover is engaged in a deep, soulful kiss with the artist.  I pass the already moist sobbing towel across my eyes.  I feel myself sinking.

I go to the office before dawn– no one is there.  I am assigned an article on Lingus Nets matches.  I have no interest in it and place it aside.  And I scan the photographs again.

I imagine the warmth of her body.  It has grown cold, autumn is arriving.  But I do not have it.

Where is she?

I don’t know.

Further depressing men’s health articles by Brock Belvedere will appear in future issues.

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