Valerie on the doorstep

Valerie stood on the doorstep and sighed. A sudden urge to run very fast and very far came over her. She looked down at her hands and watched as they reflexively reached for the doorbell whilst her brain looked on in horror, ‘this is a bad idea! You’re going to regret this!’ it screamed, but it was too late. The doorbell had already been pushed.

She took a step back and attempted to regain some control over her breathing. She was aware that the t-shirt she was wearing depicted Marcy and Peppermint Patty saying ‘Never give your heart to a blockhead’. It seemed somewhat appropriate.

“If this was a movie this would be the framing shot” she thought.

The three hour drive over here had been a masturbatory fantasy in which she was cast as the lead in a tragic-romantic comedy. “This is the bit where the introductory credits would roll” she decided as she pushed a homemade mixtape into the car’s ancient tape deck and lit a cigarette up, pulling away from her preferred parking spot in the office’s car park. Earlier that day she’d been sat in that car whilst having her lunch trying really hard to concentrate on the book she was reading and getting nowhere. The same words were stroked by her eyes again and again and yet none of them managed to connect with her brain. Excitement and fear jostled for pole position in the assault of feelings she was being subjected to. She was going to see him. That boy, the one who six months earlier had said he loved her, that had said he thought of them belonging together and who had subsequently pretended like it had never happened. Six months on the consequences of this were going to be played out.

It had been a long time coming.

The drive itself had gone by in a blur. Valerie’s favourite songs fought for prominence over the sounds of her rattling engine. The sky had been full of vivid reds and burnt oranges, which were so bright they were literally stunning and had made it difficult to see as she drove determinedly toward the sunset. When beauty blinds is it time to turn back? she pondered. I can be such a dick when I want to be she countered.

The service station had appeared at the exact right moment on her travels. Her legs were starting to cramp up and she could feel a spot aching to burst it’s way to the surface of her skin that needed immediate attending to. You always have such good timing she told the spot. The spot did not reply, silence was its weapon.

She shook her legs as she unfolded herself out of the car and made her way, fighting against the drizzle, into the neon lit husk containing the usual amenities; toilets, fast food, slot machines, and massage chairs. She had yet to ever see anyone pay for these massage chair services but sometimes toyed with the idea of giving it a go herself – she would always immediately discard such a ridiculous notion: people could see you in those things.

The sun had set by the time she wandered back to her car (a run-down, beat up, wreck that still worked even though no-one thought it should) and continued the journey still thinking all this would make excellent montage material for the opening credits.

Eventually she pulled up to the kerb a little way away from his house and rechecked her make up, then rechecked her make up again. Now or never she told herself, unsure what was awaiting her at the end of the garden path she dawdled up to.

She stood on the doorstep and sighed. A sudden urge to run very fast and very far came over her. She looked down at her hands and watched as they reflexively reached for the doorbell whilst her brain looked on in horror, ‘this is a bad idea! You’re going to regret this!’ it screamed, but it was too late. The doorbell had already been pushed.

The door opened. She wavered a second before walking inside.

Fading Scars

You were you again the day after. You laughed and joked and we verbally sparred. We were the most 'us' we could be. It was glorious. The cuts all over your left wrist were still there and you insisted on displaying them like a medal of honour or something. Something you were strangely proud of. Look what I did. Look how sad I am. Here's the proof. You guys didn't believe me but see, here's where it shows. Little red lines like lots of little pen marks made in an ink war conducted on your wrist, like we played when we were kids. I rolled your jacket sleeve up because you said it hurt when the fabric made contact with those little red lines and you made a joke about being 'very Don Johnson'. I said you were more like Chandler Bing due to the 'using humour as a defense mechanism thing'. You laughed and agreed. Pop culture references abound, Jeff Goldblum impressions in play.

That night I lay there in your arms and waited for you to fall asleep (I know that once you do that gentle twitching thing you do that you're unlikely to be roused) and then slipped from out under the sheets and slid onto your cold floor in my pants and your t-shirt and I started to cry.

You're too in love with your misery to be with me.

We've spent countless hours asleep in one another's arms, fucking, laughing, fighting. None of that means anything to you.

As I write, weeks later, I've still got the scars and bruises on my legs from where we got too carried away that last time. That last time I saw you and I could still see a bit of you left, a bit of you not ravaged, a bit of you that still wanted saving. I hate that I chose to save myself instead.

I want those scars to fade. I want to forget.

I still want you.

Gamma Ray

I sit on my usual bench and watch as he crosses the courtyard. I have a cardboard cup filled with hot black coffee clutched between my hands. He looks hurried and distracted. At some point in the past I feel sure he would have felt me staring at him so intently and, just by a look, I would have been able to pull him off the course he seems very set on walking now and brought him over to me. This does not happen today. It seems both very right and very wrong that this is the case.

I tug at the collar of my jacket so that it is pulled up further around my neck (although it is summer the temperature demotes a much chillier time of year). As I do so I get a flashback of when things changed. There are some sentences that will do that to a relationship. One minute they are one thing, the next, something completely different.

‘I love you’ does that.

‘I slept with someone else’ does it too.

Then there is the sentence he said to me: ‘Today is the day my father died.’

We were lying on my bed. Sunlight was streaming through the window and falling across the upper part of his face (when I think of that summer this is how I always think of him; half in shade and half in the light).

I frowned slightly. This wasn’t the response I’d been expecting when pointing out that he didn’t seem his usual, affable self.

We lay there for a moment considering each other. Me resting on top of his chest and he with his left arm under his head propping him up slightly. Finally I quietly said; ‘how?’

‘He drunk himself to death. I was 16 when it happened.’ He shifted. The sunlight poured onto the pillow under his head as he reached for the cigarettes (I should clarify, my cigarettes. I paid for all the fripperies like these) on the nightstand. He drew two slowly out off the pack and offered me the extra. I kept my gaze steady and considered what to do or say next. In the absence of anything better I kissed him. I tried to use that kiss to give him back everything he’d lost, everything he’d never had. We’d been playing before and now it was real. He gave me a part of his past and I gave him a part of myself.

He reaches the double doors on the opposite side of the courtyard from where he started. I watch him disappear and take a sip of my coffee and wonder to myself how many other people know that today is the anniversary of when his father died.

Isabel

They stood resting their backs against the rough brick wall of the pub, smoking and resolutely not looking at one another.

The weight of things unsaid made the air around them feel heavy.

She stared down at her shoes. They were ratty old converse high tops and had tears running up between the material and the soles; along where the stitching had once held things neatly together. The red of her socks shone through the open wounds of her sneakers. She sucked hard on her cigarette and flicked the tip after every puff.

He turned to look at her. She didn’t seem that different. Her hair was now blond but it seemed to him that her hair had been different every time they were together. Red, black, pink, purple, short, long, curly, straight, in a ponytail, flowing down her back, waxed, in plaits; always something different and yet always unmistakably her.

She pulled her eyes up off the ground and slowly lifted them to meet his.

‘Do you love her?’ she asked. That wasn’t really the question. The question was ‘do you still love me?’ but that was not a question either one was capable of asking or answering.

‘She’s amazing. You would like her if you got to know her properly.’ She chewed the inside of her cheek and frowned at him. That wasn’t what she wanted to know.

‘Does she know you’re in love with Isabel?’

He hadn’t been expecting that. That was too honest and brutal. Their relationship had been based on pretending and projection. They had told one another personal details they had never told anyone else, they had discussed their feelings for one another in embarrassing depth, they had lain in bed stroking one another’s faces and not saying a word. The one thing they had never done is discuss how he felt about Isabel. It was a tacit agreement that this subject was off limits.

‘I’m not…’ His voice trailed off and he looked down at the pavement again, ‘she likes Isabel’.

‘That’s not what I asked’. She said this reasonably. There was even a hint of sympathy in her voice like she knew how hard this was for him. He had always said to her that he loved talking to her because she made him honest which made him realize things about himself that he otherwise wouldn’t. She would demurely drop her eyes, blush almost imperceptibly, and be unable to stop a smile creeping onto her face when he said these things. She knew honesty and her and him were all tied up in how he thought of himself and this was a subject that ruined all of that.

They returned to silence and to staring at her broken shoes. Nearby patrons of the pub were laughing and smoking and carrying on as if this was another normal Saturday night where people can laugh and smoke without consequence.

Finally he said simply, and without apology, ‘Isabel is my friend.’

She sighed and pushed herself off the wall so she was no longer leaning but stood up straight, defiant, finally strong enough to confront the things that lead them to this place where they could barely look at one another ‘I know that. I asked if your new girlfriend knows that you are in love with Isabel.’

He shook his head. It wasn’t a no, it was more a; I can’t answer that without having to then face a whole load of other questions that I never wanted to ask myself, or have anyone else ask me.

She shook her head in return but there was no malice there. She understood completely. She had always understood but now the pretending and projection was gone. Reality had replaced it. She could admit that she understood completely and had hoped he could now do the same. It seemed this wasn’t the case. She turned to leave, ‘are you coming?’

The stub of his cigarette had burned itself out. He looked at it for a moment and then flicked it away but stayed where he was: leaning against the rough wall of a pub, eyes down, shoulders slumped. She nodded ok and walked back into the light and warmth. He continued leaning.