In Spite of Ourselves

“Hello, stranger.”

Standing in front of him, my heart pounding in my ears, my thumbs, my cheeks, I wait for recognition. He gazes at me skeptically at first, only a flash of hazel, green, brown as his eyes flicker my way and then back to his beer. I smile coyly, the one he loves so much. I can see him warming up, contemplating, and then his lips part and I’m greeted with those teeth, his teeth, stained and crooked from years of poor choices he’ll tell me all about in a moment.

“Hello,” he replies, almost a coo.

I long, long, long to reach out and touch his wrist, to feel his pulse and match it to mine. To know we’re still syncopated even as we’re starting over. Because the last time he saw me he said this was all tainted—the party we’re immersed in, the one I threw all those years ago for someone whose name it took me too long to remember, and the one I’m throwing now just for him.

“Drinking all by yourself?” I ask.

“I thought that was my line,” he smirks.

“But I’m the one who approached you.”

Because I have been waiting for hours, slowly nursing a glass of whiskey while I watched the clock. I didn’t want to be bloated when we met, but I couldn’t do it stone-cold sober, either. He was the aggressor last time, catching me off guard with his warm voice and even warmer skin, the kind of heat radiating off him that I couldn’t resist. He was summer, he was a hearth, he was home.

But I knew he’d be here at 6:47 on the dot and I let him dig out his first beer from the myriad of coolers I stashed around the apartment before I waded into the conversation. The one I will have to change, just a little bit, to get what we want.

“Call me old fashioned, but I think the man should pursue the woman.”

I switch my whiskey for a beer, and blushing, tell him to “Consider me pursued.”

He raises the neck of his bottle to mine, and wetting our lips in tandem, we each take a sip. Anxiety fizzles down my throat as he looks at me expectantly, going in for another gulp or three, suddenly no longer confident in his announcement. I wonder if he’s sized me up and already changed his mind about me. I wonder if he only approached me the first time because he was drunk or bored or I reeked of that desperation he’ll come to accuse me of.

But he sucks his tongue as the last remnants of alcohol drain from his mouth and he asks, “So, what’s your name?”

“That’s your big line?”

He laughs. “I’m sorry, I… I just can’t help but feel like I’ve seen you before.”

“Well I am, um, the—”

“Hostess,” he interjects.

I nod. “Precisely.”

“I’m in your home.” He looks around as though he didn’t take anything in when he walked through the threshold hold. Like he never lifted his gaze from his shoes or from me. Maybe he was always looking for me.

“Yes.”

“Which makes you…” he squints. Puzzles.

It’s on the tip of your tongue. It’s laced with venom. It’s laced with love.

“I don’t know if I should help you or not,” I say with a forced giggle.

“I’m in your home and I’m insulting you by forgetting your name.”

“I’m used to it. The only time people come over here is to see—”

“Dave,” we say in unison.

“Your other half?” he asks softly and clears his throat, one fist dug into his pocket. The tattooed knuckles are still wrapped around his beer bottle, tensing and flexing as he averts his eyes. He doesn’t want to know. He thinks the truth will hurt him.

“Used to be,” I reply.

“Isn’t that awkward?”

I shrug. “Modernity.”

“I hate to say it because that’s another strike for being old fashioned, but things used to be a lot simpler back then, didn’t they?”

“What, when the first person you kissed was the only one?”

He laughs, that boyish lilt that slips out of his tanned throat cascading off his tongue and into the air, filling me with each note that strums together to make his sound, his voice, his cadence. Even when he’s being demure, there’s a bravado to his emanations that I feel in the soles of my feet. I long, long, long.

“Well, we can’t go back in time, can we?” I ask it too plainly. There’s a sadness to my words that speaks of endings and beginnings. Of histories he can’t access, and perhaps I don’t want him to.

“No, we can’t,” he answers. He turns to vapour before me, his interest waning and his beer empty. He didn’t follow the script, but neither did I. I was supposed to steer us clear of dejection, memories, and wanting. I know his mind has flitted back to her—wounds still fresh, the scab barely formed along the contours of his new flesh and his rotten tissue.

“We should try that again.”

I reach down into the ice bucket that’s at my feet and I pull out two beers. It’s 6:47 on the dot and before he can even register his place in the world I’m shoving the bottle into his limp palm and he almost lets it drop to the floor. Startled, he doesn’t greet me with lust or love or anything like it. He seems angry, even, his countenance rigid, tense, like he knows that in his marrow he disdains me even though this is the first time he’s meeting me.

“We should try that again,” I repeat.

I throw my bottle to the floor and as the foam seeps into the aged, wooden boards it’s only seconds before the scent of yeast is gone and it’s 6:47 again and he’s walking across the living room to me.

“Hello, stranger,” he says, keeping his smoulder trained on me as he reaches down and pulls out two bottles of beer. Gracefully, he removes the cap without breaking our stare and hands me my drink.

“Hello, you.”

“Forget my name already?”

“Never. I just prefer nicknames. They’re more intimate.”

He chuckles, the wrinkles around eyes deep yet languid, as if they were meant to be there, as if he was born with them. Mature and beautiful and expressive. “Yes, the most romantic name of all: you.”

“Unique, too.”

“Right, right. I’ve basically never heard that name before.”

“And you’ll never hear it again from anyone other than me.”

Storm clouds roll over his head; his arm is frozen in place, halfway raised to his face, his lips parted, ready, open. I long, long, long to take it back, to rewind the tape, but the film is unravelling from the tracks and I’m surrounded, covered in plastic and regret. Was he always on a hair trigger that night and I somehow evaded it? Treading as carefully as I could without knowing, walking a tight rope I was only successful at crossing because I didn’t know then what I do now. Ignorance is bliss and all those clichés. But I thought this is what we said, line for line, beat for beat. I wrote it down from scratch, though—wrote it from memory. And it’s burning a hole in my pocket as the silence between us continues to fill the basin that is our sinking relationship.

“That’s bold of you,” he announces finally, resuming his journey of bringing his drink to his mouth and as he swallows he sighs comfortably. Like things are settling into place.

“I’m not one for wasting time.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” He inches toward me, his shirt perfumed with detergent and sweat.

“I like you and you like me. Why do we need the small talk? It’s just filler.”

“What about—”

“Dave?” we ask in unison.

“We broke up,” I continue matter-of-factly.

“Well, we’re still like, in his apartment.”

“Our apartment, first of all. And secondly, I’ve already mourned that relationship for years. I’m over it.” I don’t think I’m lying. Maybe I was back then but I for sure mean it now. If only he could have been the one to do this, to be years removed from his own loss, his own bullshit, and come back to me when he was actually ready. When he could start fresh and mean it, too. But that is only wishful thinking. I can’t veer off course now.

“You sound… well-adjusted.”

“I am. I have everything I want.”

He’s pulling away again, that fissure, that divide, impossible to outrun. Fingernails nudge the label on the bottle and he’s thinking, deliberating. Flustered, though, he shakes his head, utterances gurgling in his throat in the form of exasperation and embarrassment. “I’m sorry, I… I just can’t help but feel like I’ve seen you before.”

“You’ve definitely heard of me.”

“I know, I know. But this is my first time… meeting you, right? Because it doesn’t feel that way.”

Blood pools in my cheeks. “Is that a bad thing?”

“No. But it’s strange. It’s like deja vu but I can’t see the vision in my head. It’s just my gut screaming at me. The ghost of you or us or something.”

“And if I told you that we were together before?”

He doesn’t answer. Shadows eclipse his eyes and I can’t see what he’s thinking. Outlines of his broad shoulders, his curly hair, of his chest heaving and caving. “I’d believe you,” he whispers. We are alone in this room, two spotlights converging where we stand. “Isn’t that crazy?”

I only shake my head.

“Is this, I don’t know, fate or whatever?”

I crack a smile. “Depends on what you consider to be fate: intense meddling or happenstance.”

“Shouldn’t it be a mix of both?”

“Then you could say this is fate, yes.”

“How did you meddle?”

“I turned back time. Just a little bit.”

“How much time?”

“A few years. Four to be exact.”

“Why?”

“To come back for you the way that you never did for me.”

Voices fade and the music turns into a drone that blends with our words and your breathing which is my breathing. We’re slowly finding our way back to the rhythm. I stare at your fingers while you speak. You stare at mine. There is a reality that is prodding around the corners of this room, bleeding into the microchasms and particles and the gasses and the tissues encased around our skeletons. I wanted to do better at holding it back but maybe that’s what got us into trouble all those other times before. Maybe I’m giving up. Maybe I’m really trying something new.

“Was I supposed to?”

“I don’t know. I guess I was just always your second choice in that timeline. Maybe now I’ll be your first.”

“But you’ve already told me your plan. Now I know what you want. And I know that I don’t give it to you.”

“You can, though. There’s still time.”

He pauses. Exhales. “How was this supposed to go?”

“Similarly.”

“Really?”

I’m going to lie just one last time but he needs to hear it. I need to say it. After this I will scrub the desperation out of my pores. I am going to stop making the same mistakes. New, new, new—yes, we are trying something new. It didn’t work before because I am needy and emotional and he sensed it the way he has sensed every mood and rift and thought that has trickled and then swelled and then poured out of me. He knows me too well. He will know, eventually, about this fib. And he will choose to love me in spite of it. And if he doesn’t, I will come back to this moment and I will try again.

“Yes.”