It was well beyond last call while Marie squealed, drunk and excited, at another girl about boy bands in the half-dark of the bar; the only lights left were the ones from outside, halogen white shining in through the plate window and turning the pair screeching at each other about the Backstreet Boys into a missing Escher print, a lost frame from an Arbus contact sheet. You and I were by the door, tired and waiting, your head tipped back below the unlit Molson Canadian sign, and without any warning you reached out and tucked me under your arm, held me there.
Somewhere in the space between the end of Henry and the beginning of now, I’d somehow lost this: easy familiarity, casual flirtation. Being comfortable. You radiated warmth and I turned into it, tried to breathe, suddenly ticking through all the small kindnesses I didn’t even know I was collecting – stupid texts and terrible shots, nicknames and dumb jokes and everything layering one on top of the other like the sediment in rock, fortified enamel.
“Hey, goose,” you said, simple as anything, and I closed my eyes.
…
You’ve got to know that I learned early to swallow up my secrets: if others didn’t know, it couldn’t be taken, couldn’t be turned against me. It was easier to keep the truth close to my chest, or else lock it in irons, box it up in a safe – better still if I lost the combination, after, tossed it in the ocean for good measure.
It’s sad, but it’s true; everyone else lit up like signal flares, sent their firework hearts across the sky, while I drifted through their waters in my leaking raft and narrowly avoided the rocky shore, the undertow. These waters were for living men, and I was terrified of drowning somewhere in the dark.
I don’t know why I’m telling you this, except that for a long time, it was easier to drift alone.
…
Ben laughed and said I’ve got it wrong, that Laura is the one you’re fooling around with, that Laura is the one waiting up for you when her boy is off at drill, and have I seen the two of you? Chemistry central, right there. I smiled, sick on the inside, and when Ben glanced up at the hockey highlights on the television I asked him, what, you don’t think I have a shot?
“Not really,” Ben admitted, reaching blindly for his beer, “You’re just – you’re you,” and sparks crackled in my fingertips as I balled my hands under the counter, fumbled for my phone.
Ben is as fluent in geek as he is Italian, he waxes poetic about archaeological digs and Doctor Who and sees me as a sister, sees me as extra flesh and a smart mouth, jokes and advice and not a challenge, not competition. He said that Laura is the one you’re after and I wanted to push my phone into the side of his face, wanted to tell him, Look at what he’s said to me, the dozens of little green word bubbles, all of them I want to get you drunk and I’m sorry I bit you and you should be banging something way more fun than your head and
and
I put my phone away.
…
I’d known Henry ten years and he’d asked me to marry him, once, the two of us alone in the orange streetlamp glow outside the pool hall on the Boulevard; we’d had a decade of shared space and inside jokes and blurred lines between us, but at the end, I couldn’t reach him – in the end, he didn’t care. I’d loved him more than anyone and that last time, hunched against the wall outside my father’s hospital room, anxious and angry and wrapped in scarves, a coat too light for the weather – that last time, the phone held tight between sweaty, shaking hands, begging and pleading I need you, I need you, I know we’re not talking but please, please, call me back –
With you, I never had to ask.
…
Coming back wasn’t quite coming home and Marie always warned me not to go out by myself, warned me not to be around you alone, but I’d been itching in my own skin since I stepped off the plane from Tel Aviv, split open like a melon rotting in my mother’s kitchen. Everything felt off kilter, like I was continually missing the dropped step in a stairwell: moving was a chore, talking torture, even breathing was too much weight to bear. I’d wrapped myself up in heavy jackets and sat on the porch at night; I’d been sick and miserable in the desert but on the stone steps, snow melting into the hems of my pajamas, more than anything I wanted to be back across the ocean, more than anything I wanted to see you.
The place was crowded – busier than usual, even for a Friday, and if I had to pick a moment I think it would be this: that half-second before you looked up and saw me, walking through the sea of people parting unintentionally around me like some lovestruck Moses, the tension in your arms as you leaned over the counter, distraction melting into recognition, revelation, affection.
This is the moment I would want to keep, trap it in a locket and wear it around my neck: the two of us on opposite sides of the bar, two sets of arms folded on the polished countertop and touching only through coats and long sleeves, the brushing of hands around an offered glass. Feeling like I was finally settling back into myself, far away from that fitful, half-awake delirium of an in-flight dream, from that dark shoreline in Bat Yam where I stood with my feet in the Mediterranean and my heart somewhere else entirely. Feeling like I was home.
…
The only place I don’t think about you is in bed.
I feel like that’s about as fair as I can be.
…
Marie looked me in the eyes that first night and when she said I want him all I heard was welcome to the arena. I was somewhere between ready and not, no sword save for the words up my sleeve, the shield around my battered heart so dented it was useless. Marie had her weapons but I’d cut off my armor; somehow I managed to keep my footing, remembered how to parry and block, a veteran of heartbreak thrown into battle until Marie finally slunk off in defeat, stumbled down to the end of the counter to lick her wounds, to wait for last call.
I was left blinking against the sudden glow of you, unused to attention and blindsided by interest and a wide smile, a kiss on the cheek. The tequila set the whole world shining and hope was blooming somewhere in my chest, roses bursting through the gaps in my ribs; Marie tugged on my collar as I pulled on my coat and I tossed a grin like a paper airplane over my shoulder as we left, all the while thinking, maybe, maybe, maybe.
I was drunk and dizzy when we pushed through to the parking lot, spinning so that the whole empty plaza was a carnival ride of color and light – a rollercoaster run off the tracks, a tilt-a-whirl gone horribly awry. You are ruining my life! Marie shrieked, and I was so far gone that I couldn’t tell anymore if she was being serious or not, so far gone that I couldn’t do anything but laugh and spin, laugh and fall, laugh and lay there, stretched out on the dirty asphalt and stare up blindly at the washed-out pinpricks of stars spiraling out above me.
…
This is the way it happened: you went to the jewelry store on your lunch break, stealing away in the middle of the day to the mall down the road, circling through well-lit cases until a clerk approached and offered suggestions, helped you choose. Monday, Monday, my last day was Monday – you carried it in the glove box of your car for a week.
This is the way it happened: Anna looked over your shoulder as you clicked through an online catalogue, trying to find something that would fit me, that would put a smile on my face. She knows bits and pieces but not the whole story; she knows you’ll miss me, my Friday stops and our stupid banter, horror movies traded like baseball cards – I can picture her standing in the middle of your living room, picking up discarded DVD cases and giving you a look, the corners of her mouth twitching as she asks, More porn from your girlfriend? She trusts you. She loves you.
Anna and I have never met but I’d like to think that we could have been friendly if we had, that she would be the one to tell you that silver was a better choice, that hearts are too ostentatious, that she would be the one to tap the laptop screen and tell you, “That one. That one would work.”
This is what it means: grace, power, change. It means that someone out there cares about me – that they want me to be happy, that I matter. It means that I wear it with pride, with courage, with love.
Rach (Out Loud) 