Unfortunately Familiar

I’m not what you’d necessarily call a social person. I like people. I love hearing life stories. I work with people daily at the hospital, and it’s incredibly rewarding. When I’m clocked out though, I prefer people watching.

When you see people from a distance, you can catch the pieces of themselves that they usually keep hidden. The hidden lingering touches between two “friends”. The blank stare into a cup, that’s switched on to a glowing smile when someone says hello, then disappears just as fast when they excuse themselves. The eyes that search a crowd, not for someone, but for anyone. They are moments of private authenticity, and they are more fascinating to me than any story someone could weave me about their successes.

I have a routine. I pick a bar, or a lounge, or just a coffee shop. I settle in with a drink, sometimes a book if I want to send particularly clear “not interested in talking to anyone, not even you” signals, and watch. Usually, if someone tries to talk to me I’ll use the book as an excuse to end our conversation. Then I go back to my hobby of observing.

Tonight’s not a usual night. Tonight, there is someone I can’t stop looking at, no matter how hard I try. Every time I lift my eyes from my book to take a drink of my cocktail and peruse the lives around me, I catch her looking. She is gorgeous, with dark hair made up into a pinup girl style, perfectly styled eyeliner, and skirt that looks like it was custom made to draw every eye to her.

I’ve been at the bar for about an hour when she slides into the seat next to me. Her lips are a precisely drawn matte red, and they tip into a confident, sly smile.

“Hi.” She says.

“Hi.” I say.

“Can I buy you a drink?” She asks and nods to my nearly empty martini glass, a single olive on a toothpick soaking in the last swallow at the bottom. I smile back, wings of birds and butterflies shivering to life in my chest.

“Sure.”

While we wait for the bartender to work her way down the line of waiting customers, she compliments my dress and jacket, and I compliment her makeup. There is a trill in the air, the beats of a careful dance that must be done in moments like this.

“Seriously, your eyeliner is amazing.”

               Your eyes are stunning. I want to stare into them, but I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.

“Thank you! Your dress is beautiful. Vintage?”

“Yes! I got it from a place in Southpark called Milk Money, near the smash burger place?”

               Are you only looking at my clothes? Would you like to see what’s underneath?

“I love that place! I get a lot of my stuff there. My name’s Kayla.”

“Nice to meet you, Kayla. What are you drinking?”

               Please, tell me more about yourself, anything

“How are the martinis here? I’m never sure if I’ll like them at a new place, I’m kind of picky.”

“Do you want to try the end of mine?

               Do you like women?

Do you like me?

She reaches a graceful hand across to my glass and slides the skewered olive out of it. When she brings it to her mouth her tongue slips out between those perfect red lips, catching a few drops of vodka and vermouth before they have a chance to fall. It takes me a moment to realize that I’ve been staring at her mouth, and when I jerk my eyes back up to hers, they are glittering. I huff out an embarrassed chuckle and her coy smile becomes a cheshire grin.

When the bartender gets to us, she orders us both martinis.

We talk for hours.

She tells me about the pictures of raven-haired bombshells she found in a closet when she was 13, only to find out from her mother that they were of her great aunts and grandmother. I tell her about never knowing what to do with myself until a friend took me a vintage store in college and discovering an entire generation of attire that made me feel at home in my own skin for the first time. We move on to our lives, our jobs, people that we adore, the people we wish we could forget. Things that I keep closely guarded slip through my teeth without hesitation, and more than once she tells me “I don’t usually tell people that” before looking away, gathering herself, then looking at me as if she is trying to place this feeling that makes her so willing to tell me about herself.

When the florescent lights come on, she is still just as beautiful. Outside we both stall, conversation halting as the spell of the shadows and bustling conversation is broken. Just as she is saying “Well, I guess this is it.” I say “Do you want to get something to eat?” She lets out a breath that sounds like relief.

“I’d love to. Where were you thinking?”

The diner isn’t what you’d call classy. The vinal in its booths is original, which is to say cracked and patched so many times it’s hard to tell the original color. Its coffee is always burnt and old, even when its freshly brewed. It will sell you breakfast at eleven pm or a burger at six am. It’s open twenty-four hours a day, and with its sticky tables and off-color lights, it’s the kind of place where time takes a vacation.

By the time the sun starts to come up, we’ve burned through anecdotes, coming out stories, heart breaks, and have fallen into a comfortable silence. Our plates are half full of pancakes, mine topped with whipped cream, hers with chocolate chips and peanut butter. Our fingers are tangled together on the table, the only part of our bodies that have touched all night. I’m watching the steam rise from our newly refilled cups of coffee when she asks me.

“Have we met before?”

The fluttering wings that have been soaring through my organs freeze all night.

“What?”

She shakes her head, her lips still smiling. She does that a lot, I’ve noticed, shaking her head but not to disagree. More to shake loose the words she plans to say next, to let them fall into the right order. She’s looking at me now, but her eyes have taken on a searching quality, as if she can find the answer to a question in the curve of my jaw or the line of my lashes if she only looks long enough.

“When we first met, I had the oddest sense of de ja vu. It’s why I came up to you at the bar, if I’m being honest.” Her eyes drift to my mouth. “That was before I discovered what good conversation you are.” There is a slight purr to her last sentence, a suggestion of an insinuation. Still, her eyes continue to move over me, looking for something, and not quite finding it.

The birds and butterflies between my bones begin to plummet. I can feel their impact inside my ribs, slamming into the bars of their cage with each beat of my heart. I send out a silent request to any being that might be passing by that this time it will be different. That this time it could just be that a beautiful, smart woman saw me in a bar, believed in fate, thought I looked a little like that one girl from that one place, and wanted to buy me a drink. I look down at my coffee.

“I just have one of those faces, I think. I get asked that a lot.”

When I look up the last bird collides with my ribs, and I feel the final butterfly’s wings crumble into the bottom of my stomach. Her beautiful smile is smudged and bloodied. Her mouth is torn from the corner almost all the way to her ear, perfectly straight white teeth exposed behind a jagged rip in her flesh. Her cheekbone on the other side is crushed, the eye above it a pulpy, bloody mess. Her neck lists to one side at an unnatural angle, tilting her head like a confused puppy. Her chest and arms are a sea of scrapes and gouges filled with gravel and pieces of asphalt. Her hair is in disarray, and something dark is caked in her hairline.

I blink, and she looks normal again. Her gaze has turned back to the window, her hands cupping the mug of coffee, a soft smile brushing over her still-perfect lipstick. With a contented sigh she says “I should be getting home but I’d love to get your number. Maybe take you to dinner?” When she looks at me now it is shyness cloaked in confidence.

I recover myself and draw a smile on my lips. I should be used to this part, but I don’t know if I ever will be. I reach for her hand and trail my fingers down her knuckles, over the ring that her grandmother gave her, past the scars from her cat, whose name escapes me as I try to right myself and swallow sharp feeling in my throat. I take a moment to savor her humanity and all the little marks of passing time that decorate her.

“I’d love that.”

We put our numbers in each other’s phones. I offer her a ride home, but she turns me down.

“I’ll walk,” she says, “it’s not far.”

We do the awkward goodbye of two people who have no baggage, no history – not yet – only a possible future. Our fingers linger against each other until we are too far apart and are forced to separate. I want to kiss her, but I don’t. I watch her until she reaches the end of the block. Then she turns and is out of sight.

I’ve been told that I feel too much. That I should be able to do my job without a chasm opening inside of my chest each time. Sometimes I can. If I meet them right at the end, when my feet are no longer on the living side of the world, and their loved ones can dismiss their questioning of the air as a part of the process of letting go.

“Have we met before?” The old man asks me from his hospital bed.

“Have we met before?” The child asks me while waiting for the school bus.

“Have we met before?” The woman asks me in the elevator.

I’m honest with them. Sometimes we have crossed paths. Often, we haven’t. Often, I am simply the welcoming face that they will see as they are guided away from the side of the world that they have known all their lives. I hold them if they cry, walk silently if they don’t, make small talk if they like. I make myself whatever they need after their heart has stopped beating.

I hope that she will be taken to a hospital. That she will be cared for, have every attempt made to save her life, and that when we meet again it will be with her holding the hand of a tearful parent or friend with love on their lips. Unfortunately, the car that hits her is speeding through the empty alley behind her apartment building, impatient to get around a late-night traffic jam caused by road work. She is hit, dragged, then left behind when the inhabitants of the vehicle panic and flee.

She is standing above her body, facing away from me, watching the retreating taillights of the car that now carries smears of her blood and strands of her hair in its grill. It is a long time before I see her shoulders begin to shake, for her to crouch close to the ground, her head dropping forward. Sobs too rich, too deep, too buried to rattle out into the world, turn her breaths into gasps. I move next to her and place my and on her shoulder. She looks up at me with those stunning, perfectly lined eyes, her beautiful red mouth hanging open in pain and disbelief. There is not a hair out of place. Though her tears drip down her cheeks, they leave no mark, smudge no makeup, leave no puddle on the ground. When she finally speaks, she says

“Those motherfuckers.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“What am I supposed to do now?”

“Come with me.”

She looks between me, her broken body, and the mouth of the alley.

“I’m sorry,” she says, watery, wide eyes landing on me again “have we met before?”

The chasm in my chest cracks open just a little bit more, and I want to say “Yes. Yes, you we have. You want to get dinner with me, and I want to hear every word that you will ever speak until the day the sun explodes. You have left breadcrumbs of yourself that I want to follow until I find the whole of you. You have given me the corners of yourself, and I want to learn the rest of your architecture.”  

 Instead, I smile, soft, kind, the antithesis of the jagged feeling in my chest.

“Yeah.” I tell her “We have. We have dinner plans, remember?”

Her eyes flash with a moment of recognition, a buffeted ship spying a lighthouse in the storm.

“Oh. Oh, yes, right. I’m sorry. Yeah, let’s go.”

I help her up and we begin to walk down the alley, away from the body of a woman, towards the place where the car fled into the night, the place where a road is supposed to be. There are no streetlights, no cars, no sidewalk. Instead, there is a soft, welcoming darkness, spotted with floating warm lights. Hanging guideposts to light our way.

“I like your ring.” I tell her.

“Oh, thank you.” She touches it and smiles, just like she had at the diner. “It was my grandmother’s.”

We pass the brick walls of the apartment buildings that flank the alley, and step into the darkness. Above, the stars disappear. Security lights give way to lamps hanging high above our heads. Concrete and asphalt are replaced by smooth worn stone.

“Tell me about her?” I ask. I know that she’ll say yes.

She grins and she shakes her head fondly, her tears dried and forgotten.

“She was the most amazing woman.” She starts. Behind us the living world recedes, fading away just as sirens and flashing lights begin to fill the alley. They are there for a moment, a last, raucous flash of life. Then they are gone, and only the shadows thrown by the lamps on the corridor walls dance behind us. The sound of her voice wraps us in her memories, as we walk, and we are left in peace to complete our journey, fingers intertwined, my thumb rubbing over her knuckles as she talks.

A few days later I will see the news report and hear the sterilized facts of her life. I’ll learn her height, her last name, and those of her grieving family members. They won’t mention that her tearful father kicked her out when she was fifteen and hadn’t spoken to her since. They won’t mention the cat she loved so much it didn’t matter that he bit her hand when she was watching movies, drawing blood to get her to pay attention. They won’t mention the grandmother who was a radical, who taught her about queerness and love, who left her a ring with a compartment for poison, and a surefire recipe for getting the perfect cat eye every time.

I will think about her more than the others. She will come to mind in bars filled with shadows and vixens, and bright diners filled with the smell of burnt coffee and too sweet pancakes. She will be the last name in the notebook that I keep, a record of every life that I've been touched by, until someone stops me at work or on the street or in a bar and asks me.

“Have we met before?”