Fact & Fiction.
Breath (20 January 2007 – 23 January 2007: Compilation).
He wakes up before she does, jerks and flounders for a grounding from the grey dreamlessness he has just emerged from, feels the heat of the day penetrate through the curtains that shield the two of them from the harried rest of the world. Carefully he slips out of bed, goes and brushes his teeth, and he grins wryly when he tiptoes back into to her room and sees that she has not moved an iota. Despite his nervousness at being here, with her, he still finds amusement at observing the truth of what she’d told him, all those months ago, when he’d caught her nodding off over her students’ papers: I just don’t sleep. So when I crash, I crash hard and sleep for days. He hadn’t believed her, of course, had thought she was exaggerating – who doesn’t sleep? – and it is only now, as he lifts the covers and moves towards her, that he is able to see for himself the breaking of the sheer exhaustion that is constantly in flux under the surface.
Yesterday morning she’d slung her bare legs over his lap and told him not to be afraid, and he’d touched her knees and nodded, breathed deeply and told himself to let it go, and he had learned that when she speaks of them, of them together, the graveness in her eyes mimics the ellipses in her speech, which usually tumbles loose and disjointed, so different from his own. After over a year of experiencing whatever this connection it is they share, he’d thought there was nothing new he could learn about her, that he knew her more intimately than he ever thought possible, in the same way she knows him. Yet she has managed to surprise him, still, in the course of the past few days together, with small tidbits of her life that he is now privy to. He’s learned that even if she begins the night curled up next to him, she will eventually turn away and sleep on her side, facing the wall; that although variously perfumed shower gels adorn her shower she favors plain Dove soap; that her wardrobe is indeed resplendent with color, even if all she ever wears are black t-shirts and blue jeans; that underneath the tough outer layer of cynicism lies a mess of yearning for things she can never bring herself to ask for.
Today, now, he presses his mouth against her shoulder blade, wants to rouse her as gently as possible. There is something about this that pulls at him, pulls him toward her; he knows what it means that she has welcomed him in, trusts him enough to be with him like this. She had said once to him, over the course of their friendship which had mostly taken place during late night study sessions, that he looks different when he sleeps. I don’t know, she’d shrugged easily, picked up her glass of the cheap red wine they’d purchased at Longs, pooling together the change scrounged from her purse and his car, ostensibly to aid in their cramming in preparation for final papers. I can’t explain it, but you look different. He combs back the tangles of her hair, the softest touch, and sees for himself what she had meant – because she, too, looks different, in some inexplicable, surreptitious way. It is not only that her face is unadorned, the mascara and blush she indulges in washed off the night before, but also that she simply looks younger, looks sweeter, even though she would sneer at that particular adjective. Her lips remain compressed even as she sleeps, but in exchange the furrows between her eyes, so prominent when she is awake, are smoothed out, invisible, as if the girl who lies next to him, naked and asleep, has never had a day’s worth of worry or heartbreak in her life.
She looks nothing like the girl he loves, and this scares him.
The fear is banked, never completely extinguished. He has lived with so many manifestations of it that it now croons through his blood, and he looks at her and wonders if she knows just how much he fears for her, for himself – but if pressed for an answer he would be unable to pinpoint, exactly, what he was afraid of.
He knows the precise moment when she drifts from unconsciousness to awareness; her breathing is thrown askew even before she drowsily murmurs a greeting, even before she opens her eyes and shuts them again, burrowing into the blankets in unhurried protest. He slips his arm around her and feels the sun-warmth glancing off her skin mixed with the warmth emanating from it, a veritable slumbering furnace, shuts his eyes, loves her, loves being with her despite the warring factions and fractions within his mind, and is thus floored beyond measure when her words break the tranquil and measured cadence of their being together this winter morning.
You’re still here? The minute, upward-curling lick at the end of her sentence tells him that it’s a question, not a flat, assessing indictment as the three words themselves would seem to indicate.
Of course I am. Where would I go?
There is a pause; her spine straightens.
Are you going to break up with me now?
He lifts his head, moves to rest it on his hand, tries to catch a glimpse of her face, but she tucks her chin protectively down and retreats from his inquisitive, puzzled eyes. This is an unconscious gesture on her part, and the very ease of it, the often-used practicality about it, hurts him. He knows what she means, of course, even though he doesn’t want to.
What? he asks quietly.
We’ve slept together. So. Are you going to break up with me now?
One night, still in the burgeoning stages of their friendship – although, to be fair, there really had not been any sort of slow blooming, really; they had simply met and then went spiraling downward and inward together – they’d talked about sex, all artifice cast aside, and she’d told him how she felt about it, that the first one had meant too much and consequently the next ones had had to mean nothing at all. She made this comment with complete candor sitting outside of a café, her fingers deftly breaking a blueberry scone in two for them to share, a fundamental juxtaposition from her usual wise-cracking banter regarding the subject matter at hand. That’s just how it goes, I guess, and they’d looked at each other, frankly, her eyes equally bitter and bewildered and blasé. He’d been at a loss for words except to call her ex-boyfriend a bastard, and she’d neither agreed nor disagreed with him. But she had offered him the bigger part of the scone, as if the ratio of her gratitude at his rallying support could be directly tied to the amount of foodstuff handed over.
No, he says. Why would I break up with you?
Because. Her reply is immediate, and he feels her stomach underneath his hand, the slight swell of it that he knows aggravates her with its constant presence, feels the steadiness of her inhales, her exhales, feels them slow, and knows this mean she is preparing herself for the worst. Do you regret it? She asks this in a voice he knows well – a carefully modulated tone which vacillates between calm and resolve, and he realizes that she has already prepared herself. He wonders if she had lain there, her overheated body cooling down while he slept, unaware, preparing herself for this inevitable conversation, or, worse, if she had started preparing herself while her arms were still twined around his neck, while the imprints of her teeth were still visible on his shoulder, while his name had still been leaving her mouth on a seeking momentum of breath.
He wishes she would look at him. No, he says, and wants to emit all of the tenderness that had been lacking the night before into that single word, all the tenderness that had been eclipsed by a ferocious kind of madness that had overtaken both of them. No. I don’t regret it. He means to reassuringly stroke her stomach but instead finds himself awkwardly patting it. Why would I regret it? Don’t be silly.
Her body subtly shifts; the muscles tense, discreet, and he wonders if he has said the wrong thing, for four beats of simple silence he wonders if he has said the wrong thing, but suddenly her rigid posture crumples and she rotates in his arms before rising. She pushes herself off of the bed and heads to the bathroom; he hears the water running. When she returns to the spot she has claimed next to him, she drapes her arm over his chest, the side of her face against his shoulder, and he feels her kiss the spot that she’d bitten just hours ago, smells the faint minty tint of toothpaste on her breath. I like my body when it is with your body, she says, and he smiles, glad, and continues, it is so quite a new thing, looking up at the ceiling which the previous owners had left unpainted; the walls, in contrast, are periwinkle blue. He hears her silently skip to the end of the poem and finish, and possibly I like the thrill of under me you quite so new, and he feels the fond smirk in her voice more than he hears it, and I’m happy, she says.
For a moment he is confused – that is not how he remembers the poem ending, but then he realizes the last two words belong to her, are intended for him. Really? he asks, his cheek nuzzling into her hair. God he loves her hair, the texture and weight of it against his skin, his fingers, the way it looks now against the cream pillowcase on her bed. He remembers that the night before she had pulled her hair away and back from her face, twisted it into a coil over one shoulder held in place by one hand, before leaning down to kiss him, both of them moving leisurely and secure in the protection afforded them by the darkness of her room. It’s me, she’d whispered against his lips, it’s just me and I love you, and he’d felt something inexpressible, incalculable, break inside of him. It had felt as though she had whispered directly against his heart, injected stones sinking to trembling depths that had stilled at her words.
Yes. We were together and you’re still here. I’m happy.
He pulls her in closer, puts both of his arms around her as she comes, willingly. Her body is different this way, he realizes, and not just from the other people he has been with. She is bigger, taller than they had been, is bigger than he is, wider in the shoulders, but in this drowsy morning she feels very small. Perhaps it is because before last night – when he had hastily undressed her, pulled her shirt up and over her head, felt the tension between them escalate as he’d touched her at her pleading request, pushed himself into her, felt her hand scrabble at his chest and heard her voice telling him to wait, to let her get used to it, to go slow, that she wanted it slow – he had never seen her carry herself with anything less than jaunty confidence. She walks and moves with her limbs loose and free; she is someone who gives of herself, her arms and her laughter, wholly over to those around her, someone who exudes warmth and sometimes a kind of liberating, liberated lack of self-awareness in her body. Even last night, she had been uninhibited, giving to and taking from him exactly what she wanted, yet as she lies next to him, her admission of happiness undresses her even more, melts the strong sinews and complexity of her capable movements from her and leaves her bare, a corpse of pathos and vulnerability.
It bothers me, he sighs, it bothers me that it takes so little to make you happy.
He wants to say This shouldn’t be out of the ordinary for you. He wants to say You deserve all of this and more, you’re wonderful. He wants to say Don’t sell yourself short like this, you know? He wants to say I wish I could give you everything.
Maybe it is because he knows she won’t believe him that he refrains from saying any of it; maybe it is because he knows if she were the one saying the words to him, reciting these incantations of devotion, he wouldn’t believe them, either.
No, baby, she says, that’s just how life goes, you know? and he wishes he could push the words out anyway, offer them to her as a tribute, a rebuttal. She stretches; her toes reach down past his, her arms above her head, and now her body is limber, now her body is malleable – he realizes that she is trying to force her body to genuflect at the altar of her faith, that her body in this moment, and always, is a descendent in the house of Iscariot, ever ready with a crown of thorns for sale. He catches her gaze, troubled, and she raises her eyebrows, looks no more perturbed than she would asking him what he wanted to get for dinner, before giving him a sunny twist of the mouth that is a hesitant caricature of her usual smile, before shifting so that her back is to him once more. At that moment he realizes that the hurt she carries is much heavier than he had originally thought; he realizes that the hurt she carries has the potential to break them both because she does not see it as a malignant tumor that must be removed, but rather as a natural affixation to her being, a child she perversely nurses on the blood of her past. She has been like this for so long, and he feels, keenly, the years of history she no doubt amassed before the night they met dig cruelly into his side.
He does the only thing he can think of, says the only thing he can think of; he shifts closer to her, fits the curve of his body around hers, mirrors her and moves her back flush against him. I’m happy, too, he says simply, reaching for her hand. There is nothing more he can say, really, and there is nothing more she will hear.
They lie like this without speaking, his hand and hers touching, lifeline pressed to lifeline, playfulness that transmits a tangible promise; their breathing is the only intermittent sound in this room, in this sector of existence that belongs solely to them. In the silent lassitude of their first morning spent together as lovers they allow no one else in – it is simply, as it has not been for so long, the two of them. It is only when he hears the slight rasp that is suddenly present and alive, rubbing against the grain of stillness that enshrouds them, that he understands that she is shaking from an effort to keep her crying from him.
Panic drops like a blanking veil, and he wants to ask her what is wrong, to tell him what’s wrong, but – no; hatefully he recognizes that what he wants, really, is for her to reassure him that he has done nothing wrong, for her to look at him, tell him that he is not the reason she is lying in her bed, under a comforter that smells of fabric softener and her fragrance, while her breathing slows to an adagio tempo, while she forces her hand to remain unclenched in his. Yet part of him, masochistic and sly, wants her to tell him it is his fault, whatever it may be. Blame is a familiar acquaintance of his; they’ve partaken in the breaking of bread together, and it is far easier to greet like an old friend than her steady, unquestioning love for him.
He can read her well enough to know that her answer would satisfy neither of them; either she would lie and he would know it, or she would tell the truth and he would know it. He had touched her intimately for the first time only the night before, true, but for the two of them intimacy had come long ago; before any physicality had transpired, each had recognized and hailed the other as the purveyor of temporalities well met. And thus he knows the way she holds her arms across her chest, keeping the structures of her guilt within, the absolute discipline she wrests and demands from herself, evident in the infinitesimal trembling that she cannot help but yield to. He knows that she is berating herself for this, that she sees this as a confession of a fallibility she should have relegated to the peripheries long ago to die.
He knows that what she desires, he cannot provide; what he wants, she does not know.
He knows, too, that what he wants, he is unsure of.
Here, away from the clawing and climbing of their lives and livelihoods, he smells the clean scent of soap on her skin and breathes deep of it, he holds the girl he loves as she cries, secretly and shamefully, perhaps having realized that he knows of her tears, or perhaps not; he holds the girl he loves and knows unquestionably, a maelstrom of sorrow rising in his throat, that this will not be enough, that this will not be enough to save either of them, that this will not be enough to save either of them from the nameless fear that dances and follows him like a shadow. He wants to move to face her, to fiercely kiss her down-turned mouth and thumb away her tears, but he knows, intuitively, she will be able to taste the mourning on his tongue, will glean that he has now, somewhere between the night before and the morning present, started down the meandering path of grief away from her, away from this, and away from them.
He feels very young.
