bettereject

I talked and read voraciously before I knew how to walk without wobbling, but handwriting was a challenge.  My parents gave me  an endless supply of blank sheets, which I quickly disfigured with massive Cyrillic letters, fitting only one or two crooked words per page.

That summer I wrote outside, at the balcony table,  periodically staring down at the yard three floors down.  Not a yard, really, so much as a hideous quad inside of the apartment complex, a half-parking lot, with a pointless broken fountain in the midst of gravel.  I stared enviously, at a neighborhood girl who was allowed to play downstairs.  She was a bit more dirt-covered and rough, and she managed to coax stray cats into allowing her pet them.  I was jealous of that too.  

Her apartment was directly across from mine, and I could wave at her when we both stood on our balconies, but shouting was painful.  So I started making paper planes. With giant, crooked letters, I wrote notes to her.  "Hi, my name is Sveta.  What is your name?"  But shooting paper planes horizontally is no easy task.  Out of a dozen paper planes, sometimes one would land on her balcony, and it was just as difficult for her to respond. 

There was a cascade of paper planes all over the yard, and a little grumpy grandmother sometimes screamed at us for littering.  What a strange sight it must have been for the neighbors, such a parody  of a ticker-tape parade in the midst of an ugly parking lot.  Lost, crooked words, tossed from a Pandora's Box of loneliness and desperation for friendship.  Lost flimsy airplanes with a glimpse of hope under their wings.

There is a reason why we forget, why we cannot remember each crisp detail of the minutia of our daily lives. This kind of deluge of detailed recollections, a diarrhea of the past, would flood everything with countless unnecessary images. We forget because forgetting heals trauma and pain. We forget because otherwise we would not be able to live in the goddamn present, not to even mention the future.

And yet, people painstakingly try to remember, tuck away photographs and diary entries into our albums and our computers. Nauseatingly corny memorabilia. Waxing poetic about the good old days, the back when I was your age. False recollections splattered in unnecessary nostalgia and hindsight bias.  I guess people want to hang on to it, but to what? 

What I want is a completely fresh start, a virginally clean slate, a purging. I want to open my eyes and experience the present.  When I drink a glass of wine, I want to enjoy the fucking wine, I want to feel the glass of the glass pressed against my lips, to sense every warm red drop sliding on my curious tongue. I do not want to think of nighttime Jerusalem, of tasteless Cabernet  in plastic cups and the Cali Crew and kissing Libertarian boys. I don’t want to think of Valentine’s Day, of baked ziti, jazz and duct tape roses, and I sure as fuck don’t want to think about wandering on a filthy, cigarette butt-covered Marshfield beach at 4 am. I want wine to just be wine. I want Spring Cleaning.

My text message said, "I'm stranded, can I crash at your place?"

The trains had stop running; the commuter rail had shut down for the night. My ride home, gone. I had no car, no bike, no transportation back to the comfort of my bed at Wellesley. Stranded on a bench at South Station.

I contacted Paul, the one who lived in Belmont, and who would provide me with a warm bed. I could have called someone else, or a cab, but tonight I wanted to see him.

He frustrated me; everything about him disgusted me, from his smug looks, to his cliché interests in hipster music and faux religion (recreational Zen Buddhism), to the way he would suddenly grab my thighs and slide his fingers further up when I least expected it, or the way he pressed my hips against the rough bark of a tree. His sparkling blue eyes, his warm hands… It wasn't anything serious, he said. It was hurtful to hear, every time; he had too much influence over me.

When we met in Porter Square, I saw his face frozen in seriousness, those lightning blue eyes, arms crossed. The usual self-satisfied look was gone, replaced by tiredness. He was annoyed and exhausted.

"I'm really sorry," I mumbled, flustered, "I shouldn't have missed the last train. I'm so sorry for bothering you."

He shrugged. "Well, I'm your friend, right? That's what friends are for." But he still sounded irritable.

We drove home, rain pitter-pattering on the windshield, sitting in stifling silence, intermittent with a stunted joke or two, then uncomfortable laughter.

When we arrived, the house was completely silent. "Do you want a b-e-e-r?" he asked, finally smiling. I stared at him, confused, unresponsive. I wasn't entirely sure why was he asking me to drink with him. Did it mean anything, or was he simply being friendly? Reading him was nearly impossible.

"A beer, do you want a beer?" he said, as if I hadn't understood the question, "Are you okay? Are you stoned or something?" he joked.

"What, do I seem like it?"

"Yeah," he answered, a little more seriously than I'd expected, "you seem really out of it."

I said that I was just tired. He walked me downstairs, pointed to a nearly empty room with a large white bed, told me I could sleep there, and walked away.

All I could think about was the girl, the girl, the one he had chosen. Pacing around the room, I stared at the crisp white sheets, the phone, the white blank walls, the pillows. I shuddered; the room was so very lonely and empty. And all I could think of were the white white walls, the white sheets, and the girl that he took seriously. The blinding white, the suffocating white. I could hardly breathe.

I walked back upstairs. "Hey, couldn't sleep after all." He shrugged indifferently, and mumbled, like a frustrated parent trying to calm his sleepless child,

"Okay, I guess you can hang out here for a while." He was lying on the bed, staring at his laptop, paying little attention to me. We spoke, and I talked not to say anything in particular, but just to speak with him, to be near him. Nonchalantly, I began stroking the soles of his feet with my fingertips. Conversation faded. His eyes lit up, bright blue. I kept stroking his soles, his toes, his ankles rhythmically.

"Hey, do you want to give each other foot massages?" he suddenly asked.

I lay out on the bed, put my foot on his lap, and he placed his near my chest. I rubbed his feet, his soles, his toes, pressing his skin closer and closer to the crevice between my breasts, and my toes slowly but deliberately between his thighs. And the entire time, those eyes stared, stared right through me. I caught him, for a second, glancing up my skirt. That gaze, so overwhelming and serious. He was no longer massaging my feet; his hands somehow traveled all the way up to my calves, my knees.

I stood up, unexpectedly, abruptly, sat on his lap, and kissed him clumsily. Pulling off my blouse, I asked:

"Are you allowed to be doing this?"

"No," he answered quietly.

"Do you want to stop?"

"No," he said, his voice colored slightly by sadness, as though he wanted to say yes, but couldn't. As though he had no choice. And as I slipped off my blouse, I thought of how much he disgusted me. He was scum, after all. He was spineless, he was weak. He was a traitor. A liar. And I felt powerful when I slipped off my skirt. He had proven himself worthless, and I was joyful, very joyful, that he had chosen her and not me.

His mind was mush, a great puddle of it.  The bright light poured from his window straight onto his eyes.  The sunlight was too bright, and his eyes opened to a very blurry world.  A muddled version of reality.  So he'd had one too many last night, and suddenly he realized, that he couldn't remember what he'd said to her --

He couldn't remember at all, and the more he thought about it, the worse his migraine became, until the world turned into one throbbing, pulsating, much-too-loud mess.   
 
Nearly half a year ago, they  tried to share a small apartment, but he was no good at sharing -- an only child.  He was prone to theatrics, to spewing his emotions at the spur of the moment.  He exaggerated constantly, because everything small that he felt erupted like a volcano on the inside.  His paranoia, his panic attacks, his bitter fits of jealousy -- it all made sense, but only to him.  

"I don't love you anymore," she said one day, very succinctly.  He didn't ask why.  He didn't want any explanation, he did not meditate, and he did not tell her how he felt.  Instead, he knocked one of her favorite vases over with his fist.  "You are a child," she sighed.  He walked over to the kitchen, picked up a plate off the counter, and smashed it against the wall.  "I'm taking our cat with me, because I don't trust her to be in your possession."  

Another plate landed on the floor.  "I know why you are leaving.  I know that you're sleeping with Ben.  You've been fucking everyone, haven't you?"  he hissed. 

And she left, just like that.  Of course, he'd been wrong about Ben; she was honest and faithful, and he had become what..? An alcoholic, overwrought by jealousy.  And catless.  Most of all, he missed the cat.