It’s the little things that get to you during times of upheaval, not the big things. Survival is easy — comforting, even, to discover all the things you can live without. But what is time without routine? How many days has it been, if I don’t see you come home every day around 7?
The Way It Is Here in Limbo
The first night after we fought I stayed at the local Holiday Inn (aaafter party!), and ever since I’ve been on a futon mattress on the floor of my friend Tamar’s spare room. It’s otherwise empty, except for my piles of clothes, comb and toothbrush, and the two windows open to a large leafy tree that shifts and rustles in the night like a large sleeping bird.
I don’t know what happens next. Everything has been thrown into the air, scattered, dissected daily. When do I move back in? Or when do I leave entirely? Do we talk today, or take the evening off, think of other things, regroup during the hurricane of some other name? But one thing I can say, is that I sleep through the nights here, and I haven’t been anxious.
After The Fight
The afternoon after we fought, I thought I wouldn’t be able to do anything but watch stupid television. It’s a crappy coping technique I picked up recently, and we’ve even talked about it, how it doesn’t actually fix anything, or bode particularly well. But what else is there for the housebound, the mindstuck? I curl up with my heart palpitations and inner lightening bolts and I say “what’s on next.” And “Don’t touch my stomach, I feel sick.”
So when I got out of the car that afternoon and slammed the door, and realized it would take me an hour by subway to get home, and by then you would all be in Worcester, then Putnam, and that meant I would have . . . at least eight hours to kill — the only solution I could think of, beyond sleeping pills or hallucinatory drugs, was television. True Blood. Cartoons. Madmen. Netflix instant streaming, Made of Honor or some other ridiculous thing.
I opened the door to our apartment.
I tried to elicit sympathy from the cats.
I put down my things, and I sat down on the bed, and I opened my laptop and like a drug fiend got everything meticulously in order, the software installed and the piles of tissues and the plaid pajama pants, and then I thought “no” — and I changed into shorts, filled my water bottle, and strapped on my helmet.
Nearly every time I get on a bicycle, it is with you.
We decide where we want to go today, who will lead, the signals for needing to stop and rest. We pack food and water, or lock up outside grocery stores, movie theaters; we throw our bicycles onto the grass and spread a blanket. The last time we went adventuring, you wanted to reach the Arlington Great Meadows. “We need to stop,” I’d said after forty-five minutes in the July heat. “I’m tired. I want to save some energy for the ride back.” You found us a clearing off the trail, and we spread out our blanket that day and watched a little league game, wondering what the Great Meadows would be like — if we would ever make it there, or if it would just get added to the list of Things We Wished We’d Done When We Lived Here.
I am to girlfriend as terrier is to dog: that is to say, you lead, I follow. Dopily, unquestioningly, because you always know the way, and I like to think of other things. Like the smell of wet grass, or how that man hole looks like an upset monster. You would say later that this is one of the things that bothers you, that you are always the one holding me up and guiding me around, but frankly this is just how I live regardless. Dopily, unquestioningly. I exit trains and follow the masses, I drive and forget to read the signs. I’ll just keep going until I hit a T or leave the state. I’d never pay rent if you didn’t remind me every day, for three days, at the end of every month. The day after we fought, it occurred to me that I didn’t even really know how to get to the bike trail off Mass Ave — and once I was on the bike trail, I had no idea how far away the Great Meadows were, or how I would know once I got there — and I could find all of these answers on Google Maps, in two seconds. Nah. Fuck it.
This is how I live, and it used to feel like a choice I was making, but lately it’s felt like a trap, a neuron path beaten smooth and flawless as new pavement. What is the fastest way to Mass Ave?
I go the first direction my head turns, which is up the hill.
Pedals churn, I switch gears, a cool breeze shifts up cotton short edges, down collar bones. The nice thing about biking is that the scenery is always changing. What is that you say, you have problems? You’re anxious lately and you don’t know why, you’ve felt insulted, misunderstood? Signal left. Keep going, it’s bound to be out there somewhere.
I take Mass Ave all the way into Arlington, and then I finally see the entrance onto the woods of the Minuteman.
I pass the pond with the ducks and swans. Girls with wicker baskets and high schoolers waddling in oversized jerseys. Everyone is walking their little white terrier and no one thinks he needs a leash. A kid rings his bell at me and I ring back (but he doesn’t smile, because kids never act the way they do in movies, especially in Boston). I pass the little league field, the place I took our pictures. I keep going. There is no one on the path any more. The trail leads under stone bridges, their underbellies littered with crushed plastic cups, gashes of graffiti.
Then, plumes of unfamiliar white flowers explode on either side, and suddenly the woods open up, and the horizon melts into an endless sea of green and purple — blue violets swaying in the wind, some ancient house on the top of a hill, slowly peeling white paint. I put on my breaks abruptly, turn around to pull my bike off the trail. I lean against a block of wood only to realize it read “Great Meadows.”
So here it is. Where we didn’t go. The air is clean and good, mosquitos nip at my ankles. There is a sign posted here, nature hikes every third Saturday. Fire pits scar a grassy hill, leaves rustle overhead. And beyond, the endless blue violets. I stand there for a moment and look over it all like some lonely king.
Then I get back on my bicycle and ride and ride and ride until it is dark, I am home.
The Last Time I Saw You
The first boy I would ever love I met when I was twelve years old. I had just begun junior high, and would watch him out of the corner of my eye during band rehearsal (trumpet, clarinet) and study hall. I would watch him like that for two years. Occasionally I lent him pencils. Every day of this pretty much vehemently sucked.
My locker was right next to another girl’s from our study hall, and one evening after an 8th grade school dance she bounded down the hallway and gave me the happy news that the two of them had just slow danced to the last song, and it was so romantic, and now, they were an item. I stuck my face into my locker. “That’s great!” I said, muffled in tin. “Congratulations.”
Thank god, high school was ahead. I rarely saw him through the next four years, and my diaries filled with other names, scrawled things, song lyrics, realized kisses.
When graduation rolled around, it was with tornado warnings. Our ceremony was relocated to the school gym. The smell of chlorine and old shoes was in the air; we sat patiently, sweating in polyester robes. After all of our names had been called and certificates handed out, we’d shuffled back to our folding chairs, and were asked to stand. I hereby present to you, the class of 2001! and suddenly struck with some kind of John Cusack necessity, I darted out of my row, raced one hundred and fifty people up, where he was standing, and I poked him importantly on the shoulder. Black hats were soaring into the air like flattened crows, everything was floating, tornados were possible. “I just need to tell you,” I said, “you were the first person I ever had a crush on — and it went on pretty much forever.”
He looked over at me and smiled the most wonderful smile. It’s what had gotten me in the first place, those two rows of amazing teeth, brightlipped. Thud, thud, thud, went the hats. Everyone was cheering, 2001! “Why didn’t you tell me before?” he said simply, tilting his head.
I smiled goofily and shrugged.
The last boy I broke up with, I largely consider to have ruined at least one year of my life. At least. That is the time we were dating, and of course does not take into account the painful emails after the breakup, or the perfectly benign text message six months later, which nearly inspired extreme violence toward its poor messenger (Samsung, recently replaced under warranty due to water damage), or the year of therapy following, or the various ways in which I am insane now.
I broke up with him over the phone, at a friend’s house, because we lived three hours away from each other and I didn’t have a car, and because he had just accused me, again, of cheating on him with said friend. Any male friendship or interaction I had at the time was extremely suspect, for reasons I could never divine. It got aggravating after a while. So we broke up and my friend’s mom ran a bath for me and I sat and cried in it for five hours and the next morning I woke up the happiest I’d been in a long time.
The last time I saw him was about three years ago. I was visiting our college campus to see my new boyfriend. I was drunk, and my head was bleeding (rolled in tube down hill, stopped by trees, knee into forehead).
I didn’t actually see him at all, technically; we were standing in a dirt parking lot, and I recognized his headlights. I knew his car by heart — all shiny new and blood red, with its completely silent sunroof and bright oval eyes. I saw that he was slowly coming towards me. I backed up in horror, ran up a flight of stairs, grabbed a doorknob and flung myself into a dark room, then immediately blocked the door with my body, clinging to the nearby window frames. I had entered some dorm laundry room. The machines were shaking.
“Adrianne?” my new boyfriend called from the parking lot. “Uh, where’d you go?”
I’ll grant you that I wasn’t myself at the time; twenty minutes earlier I’d hit my head so hard the whole world had filled with bright light. Alcohol obviously hadn’t ameliorated this. I stayed very, very quiet, holding that door shut until my fingers turned white.