We meet while waiting to view the apartment. What did the neighbors think of us as? Friends? Sisters? The apartment smells natural and woodsy. Wilted flowers fill the vases, moss lines the bathroom mirror and lichen sutures the kitchen tiles. The apartment is small, so we share the room. You unpack your paints and guitar as I unpack my clothes. You wear a corduroy jacket and docmartens. You’re short, soot black hair is wavy with jellyfish strands and bangs; there’s a lilac hydrangea on each side of your ear. Your left cheek has a pit which appears each time you flash a smile at me. Your eyes are brown, like sunlight through whiskey. Beige freckles are sprinkled over your face. Lyrics for new songs are sharpied to your arms. You walk with little jumps sometimes, which reminds me of floating ice cubes. The smell of cinnamon and chocolate ripples around you.
We never ask questions about each other. You tell me you ran away from your home when you were 13 and I believe you. I tell you I am a bartender and you believe me.
We always stay up late together. I sit out in the patio, staring into the night, sometimes at you; while you paint shards of glass from a broken plate or daisies on papers to cover the peeling plaster of the walls. The night you were painting a glass of wine in the pale hands of a woman, you want to eat something sweet. We amble to the grocery shop with a flickering green and yellow neon sign round the corner. As you try to decide the flavor for an ice cream, I look at you. It’s two on a winter morning, the tip of your nose is cold and your teeth dig into your soft lip. I smile. You pick Mint for yourself and Rocky Road for me; it’s my favorite flavor now. That night we go to bed with you smelling like mint.
I give you one of my dresses to try; it’s a cinnabar colored shift dress. It’s not what you’d wear but you try it out anyway. I watch the distorted reflection of your bare shoulders in the brass doorknob. You have a moth tattooed across; it makes your shoulders look winged. When you turn around I can see the other tattoos. A tiny ferns sits on your right collar bone, the moon and stars and the sun grace your left shoulder, and there’s a 4 line verse written across your inner upper arm. I want to read it, but I’m not close enough. You like the dress. I let you keep it.
Each night I hear you sing. Maybe you sing for me to hear you. It makes me feel organic and paints images in front of my eyes. The twangs of the guitar strings dissolve in your soft voice. The sounds rise up and down and surround me, creating a pocket in time for me to slip into, make the world my own for a while. This makes me feel special, being able to listen to art at its rawest form. If only I could find a note to make you understand, I’d sing it softly in your ear, hoping it would stick to your heart like your favorite tune. I want to grab your hands and kiss your wrists and arms, the birthplace of your music.
We go to bed and I watch you sleep. There’s a small scar below your lower lip that you got from a chipped cup when you were seven. And a cluster of freckles beneath your left eye. There is an unvoiced urge to touch your lips, slowly, softly, with my calloused thumbs. If I’m calm enough, I can see the blood pulsating beneath your skin. I want to rest my fingers on your neck, feel the beats. Sync mine with it. I feel like we’re like two queens in a king sized bed.
On most mornings I wake up before you. I wake up to see your face sunkissed in the light coming through the paper thin curtains. On other mornings I let you wake me up. You do it gently. You put your hand on my cheek and say my name softly. There’s something different about the way you say my name. I just know it’s safe in your mouth.
I’ve given up Glen now. I bathe myself every day after work, washing away the smell of the bar. My stench of cigarettes and alcohol feels like violence towards the softness that hangs around you. Sometimes, when alone in the shower, I whisper the words I have for you, just to feel them in my mouth.
You asked me if I could be your art model for a painting. And I said yes, ofcourse, like I would a hundred times more.
Before we start, you give me your white blouse with the puffy sleeves and a missing button. Wearing it makes me feel like touching the boundaries of divinity. I enjoy it. Enjoy being observed by you, feeling your eyes all over my body, trying to gauge how to recreate me on a canvas. I imagine how I would have painted you. It would be a halo-ed figure of you with moss and tiny white flowers in your hair, lips painted red with berries, hands raised in the air, in the middle of a holy dance ritual, sunlight filtering in through your peach organza dress.
I want to tell you I love you, but I just smile. You look at me as if you know there is something stuck in my throat I won’t let go of. I hope you know. Or, rather not.
The preacher may never marry us and my mother may never know you, but I’d kiss you and dance with you under the stars and if that isn’t love, I don’t know what is.
Your jeans are flecked with paint by the time you’ve finished the painting. Your smile beckons me over to see it. My hands shake and I can feel the blood rushing to my cheeks. You’ve painted my hair loose, unlike how I actually keep them. My hands hold a glass of wine and my eyes happiness.
I feel prettier after seeing what you’ve painted me as. The girl on the canvas is made to be me, yes, but I know is a better person. Somebody who wouldn’t cheat at poker or steal the free snacks from the café, someone who’d smile at strangers more often and not cut the line. It is like you gave me a new life, and I realize, I look at a god.
The only god I would ever believe in was the God in Jeans.
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Once more you pace towards the ocean and sit down at a distance from it. The sand sticks to your bare thighs. You set one cup down on the sand –it is warm, the ice cream will soon melt- and dig into the sludge sitting in yours. The cold ice cream sends sparks up your teeth, reminding you need an appointment with the dentist.Why did you buy the other ice cream, you question. To remind you of its owner? Who should have been here? Funny, wasn’t it? How realistic it had seemed when you had promised each other an ‘evergreen, everlasting friendship’; to always share love. And then how it had dissolved into nothing. Your lip quivers as you remember how many years it has been now, you deny to accept it and continue to lie to yourself, that very soon, things will change. The promises had been very much real and worthwhile when they had been made. But they are broken now. You hate them. Broken promises. Not promising you anything is better than breaking the seemingly insignificant ones.
Early on, you’d try to ‘hang out’ with her new group, trying to make your existence matter for her. You had hoped she’d see your face, and that she’d be reminded that for you, it isn’t over. But you were just an outsider of an inside joke.
The day you had got a new number, you had –after hours of over thinking- dared to call her up. She didn’t pick up on the first try. By the time she did, your courage had extinguished and had hung up without replying. You’d be spending the next hour crying, wanting to drown in something other than your thoughts.
People tell you that you’re overreacting, “she was just a friend” they say. But that’s the problem with you; no one can be a ‘just’ for you.
You have finished your ice cream and now you pick up the cherry rolling at the bottom of the cup glazed white with liquid ice cream, and eat it, but you still don’t like it. You look up, no one’s there; the ice cream cart has disappeared too. The waves hit the sand the same way they did when you had come here together for the first time. Did your friendship really mean nothing? Your eyes search the length of the beach, to just even hallucinate someone. You lick off the last of the ice cream. It’s too much now, but you can’t help keeping up the usual paradigm to appear at the beach on 22nd of February – your ‘friendship’ anniversary.
You should give up, you tell yourself over and over. But you don’t -can’t. You made the mistake of being vulnerable, of giving away pieces of yourself to her. Because they’re missing now.How did you even end up like this? You remember the starry look she used to have, and that intelligent smile. It was the class photo you noticed the first time that she didn’t have them anymore. What had happened? Had she lost them? Or did she not have them in the first place? You see the world through a rose tinted glass and the people as not what they are but as what they could be. Had you judged someone wrong, again? You don’t know whose fault you want it to be.
There’s a lump in your throat. It is several minutes until you finally get up. The other paper cup with a scoop of mushy vanilla ice cream and cherry is sunk halfway in the sand in a tilted, abandoned manner.
You let it stay there.
Just in case.
