Speaking of Iris

Note: some implicit mentions of sexual violence. 

…

They say it’s the taste of salty lips. That it’s a knife that pierces the skin on your back, that moves slowly within you, your bones, making its way out your stomach. They even say it’s the grief, the anguish that ties you to your bed and wraps you with its icy hands to offer some sort of twisted validation in that you are utterly alone. But then? When the grief, the anguish, the distress fades, when your cuts have healed and you’ve collected yourself once again, swept the glass under your bed, and both incredulously and resentfully found yourself on your feet – what then?

I suppose, then, that it’s more complex than that. Maybe it’s the quiet, unnerving feeling that what was once whole, a real, breathing masterpiece, a pulsing waltz, has become abstract, an eerie lullaby to tuck you away, now ultimately two separate ideas connected by a thin web, so that no matter your efforts, every so often you are overcome by the awful feeling that you are still chained, that part of this complete stranger still lives within your bones, and some of you, in them. But maybe it’s the very hand that leads me back here, that reaches inside my mind to find a new memory tucked away. Or maybe it’s as simple as the way my heart drops into my stomach when I hear the phone disconnect. I suppose, then, in any case, that it doesn’t quite leave you.

…

We took the train to Mountain View. It was sunny but not particularly warm, and I was afraid because I’d never been on a train but she said she’d always done it and I trusted her. We bought dried flowers at the farmer’s market for five dollars and they wrapped it in cheap newspaper so that it rustled and folded in my hand as we walked. I bought lavender and holding that lavender in my hand that afternoon and walking in silence with this stranger I felt pretty for the first time. I realize this now, of course. That I felt pretty through her eyes, that is. 

We were looking for a restaurant and standing underneath a faulty light on the blocked, busy street. It was she who started, as if to begin a conversation. I was afraid to speak, under the strange notion that somehow breaking the silence would pierce the fragile air. That she’d up and leave if she even so much as caught the transparency of my eyes. 

Just then a man approached us, seemingly middle-aged. He wanted to know what we were doing, what we were thinking. When we didn’t answer he demanded it. I reached for her but she wasn’t close enough. He left.

Sound was coming in and out and the people who were there but not really were now really gone and I could feel the concrete swaying beneath my feet. When it was over I was suddenly cold, and I realized the sun had really faded from the condemning sky and that I had been standing there for quite some time. I was stiff and confined and uncomfortable and suddenly I understood that she was hugging me. She reached to my face and I felt the hot tears that flushed it. 

“Oh honey, stop crying. I know. But it’s just the way things are.”

I almost knew it wasn’t the man she spoke of. That it wasn’t the man I had feared. 

All at once I let myself succumb to her embrace, to melt into her cold skin. I let her breathe me in and touch me with her mind. And then I knew.

We talked about books

About the precious things.

We laughed about our own mortality

And about beauty.

We watched the sky 

Tuck away its sun.

And that was just the way things were. 

…

But I thought I was yours. 

“Things change.”

It always amazed me how a few words could turn the air in your lungs to ice. 

…

The fused smell of hastily lit candles. The stench from the overlapping scents a mere attempt at masking the smell of her depression. The sound of rustling leaves joining the harmony of the night that flew through the open window. Books arranged as shelves, too many to count. My drawings hung up. Empty kombucha bottles and old tea bags in strange mugs. Dried flowers – death forever preserved in old Cola bottles. Perfection.

…

When she told me what he had done to her I cried. We fought two nights before about her new girlfriend and I didn’t want to hear her voice. When I finally called her she hesitated.

We spent the night at the hospital. Many details have faded, but some – the smell of the emergency room, the receptionist’s expression, the police’s nonchalance, the feeling of the cheap hospital bed sheets and her shivering as I held her for the first time – some will never leave my unwilling mind. 

It was that night, when she finally fell asleep on my shoulder, that I wiped away her tears and replaced them with my own. It was that night I begged her to give me her pain, to let me feel it for her. It was that very night, when I hid her in the corner from the cop after she couldn’t look at another man, that I swore it would pass, that the calm would be back. I prayed on the stars I was right. 

But, alas, I was not. Her pain wouldn’t pass to me, but would simply spread. I could not save her; she did not need my saving. All I could offer her was some sort of peace.

…

The first time she was cruel we sat on a couch beside the fireplace. My family had gone out and I invited Iris over in hopes of escaping my mother’s disapproval of her for a few hours. The house was warm and our silence a familiar comfort. She drank tea and read her book – some obscure novel, I assumed. I sketched her with oil pencils as she subconsciously maintained her natural posture: her legs crossed, one arm holding her tea, the other draped on the back of the couch and holding the book open, her hair loose and flowing down her back, her core leaning ever so slight against the arm of the chair. Beautiful people love to pose, if you let them. 

I spent what seemed like an hour on her face, letting the smooth tip of the pencil trace the lines of her nose, echo the curve of her lips, sprinkle the page with her freckles. It seemed almost eerie how I had captured her gaze in the end. Or, perhaps, it was the gaze itself.

She gave me a polite smile when I showed her, laced with faint annoyance at my disrupting of her reading. Putting the portrait in her bag, she turned back to her book. Soon I became annoyed with her lack of attention, almost jealous of the book she held so tenderly. 

I groaned and got up from my seat. I began humming and dancing around the room, reorganizing the books on the shelf, playing with the dog. And still I did not shake her focus from the novel. So few people, it seemed to me after meeting Iris, truly enjoy reading.

I saw her smiling at some passage and after exhausting all other distractions I sat down at the piano placed in the corner of the room. I flipped through my music and started playing Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata (the first movement, of course), and I could feel her eyes lifting from the pages. The sky was pretty again, and I continued to play through the piece. 

When I reached the second climax I caught a glimpse of her in the reflection of the piano. I realized she was filming me and, whipping my head around, begged her to stop.

“But your face,” she exclaimed, “you should have seen it!”

I simply continued to stare at her.

“Don’t look so sad, I’m only kidding.”

She kissed me and we laughed. We listened to our favorite songs and talked about Jane Austen.

I never played for anyone again.

…

We were on the phone when it finally happened. It had been less than a month after she kissed me on Halloween, two years since we met, and almost two weeks after our first date. She mentioned the blonde girl that, “dear lord,” would not leave her alone again. I had already been suspicious after the third time. Not that she wanted the girl (this I knew), but, rather, that she was being cruel. I pleaded. That she wouldn’t ruin it. That she would tell someone, anyone. That she’d just do it. That she would, please, just tell me. 

But what was there to end?

Oh sweetie, she explained, it takes two people to label something. 

So I told her. About her cruelty, my immaturity. How different things were. I explained how reckless we’d been. And how I couldn’t even bear to hear her voice. 

I told her all she’d taken.

That she couldn’t save me anymore. 

I spoke of what I feared in her eyes. And how I couldn’t love someone who my family couldn’t bear to see me with, who wouldn’t dare meet my friends. 

But most of all I told her that love does not take

That it doesn’t isolate

And that I wish

God, I wish

I’d never met her.

Only a brief moment followed before I heard the phone disconnect.

…

I was wandering down some street in Mountain View, looking for the sun, that day. I knew it was strange. The sky was hidden by clouds and yet I knew it would not rain. 

I felt tense, sick. It had been a good day. I felt comforted by the gloomy weather, admiring the idea that the sky, too, felt tucked away in the death of its sun. I felt a sense of liberation in my upset and yet was wholly at peace. 

It was nearing the end of September and I was to leave for Los Angeles that week, for college.

I watched my feet carry me down the street, past the bookstores, past the italian ice cream shop, and the restaurants. I wandered past the theater, which seemed to have grown worn down and smaller with the years, or perhaps my age. I found the park behind the building and sat down on the muddy grass broken by the roots of a tree, taking my book out and feeling its weight in my palms. Tracing the cracks in the paperback cover, following them to the soft, faded letters, I felt my face beginning to flush with tears. It wasn’t long before I tasted their salt on my dry lips, and I hurriedly wiped the water off the rusty book.

It wasn’t the drama. It wasn’t the fear, either. It was the overwhelming, solemn feeling, rather, that I finally understood. 

I didn’t dread my future anymore. I took comfort in the practicality I feared, and feared the precious things that for so long comforted me. I was to study physics that fall and I had made my peace with the fact. 

And yet. And yet I was crying. 

For the death of the sun.

For all I had known

And wish I hadn’t.

For the girl who loved candles and mugs.

And the girl who loved the night

And to dance in the street

And eat dinner on the roof.

To write amateur poems

And play music to the moon.

I cried for them both.

When the sky began to darken and they turned the streetlights on I started up to leave. I wouldn’t come here anymore, I assured myself. 

Walking down the slight incline of the park, I tripped on the root of a tree and, apologizing to a man walking beside me, I realized I had caught the attention of two small figures across the street. The sun was almost completely set, but even in the nearing darkness I could make out her face. Two years after the fact and her eyes are still faded green. Months of helplessness and her hair is still a glistening red under the faulty streetlights. She was just as pretty, just as vibrant as the day she met me. And yet, I noticed, she was no longer beautiful.

As they moved closer I observed the girl she was with: blonde, smiling, her features kind – everything I wasn’t, I suppose. It came as a relief of some sort, an acceptance. 

Her manner was unchanged by my presence and I didn’t think she recognized me. I almost didn’t recognize her myself. Her hair was cut just above her shoulders. She wore baggy jeans and a cropped shirt. Even her walk had changed, more aggressive than I’d ever seen it. But in my eyes she was still the echo of a girl who suffocated her room with stacks of books and soy candles. Who loved the mountains and preserving dried flowers in old Cola bottles. Who cried at the movies and drank tea at dusk. 

I stood paralyzed, mesmerized by her indifference, and it was not until she had almost passed me that she met my gaze. I hungrily searched for home again in her eyes, for something, anything that slightly echoed what I had once shared with this soul. But I was only met with my reflection. 

The ground swayed beneath my feet. A slight breeze caressed my face. I had thought, whenever her silhouette would once again twirl across my mind, that come many years, any year, she could walk through my door and I would know her. That I’d miss her. That she might save me. 

But here was a girl. So human. So touched and scarred and beaten. So sad.

And for the first time I saw in her a strange kindness. Her indifference was her kindness. And so despite the anger, despite the resentment and the grief and even my pity for her I felt my face relax into a sad smile, an offering, almost. She hesitated. Finally the corners of her mouth twitched and her thin, flushed lips curled ever so slightly. And there was peace.

I looked at my feet, conscious of the dent they made in the grass. I followed a spider as it made its way through the blades. It was completely dark now, and the leaves, the breeze, the little bursts of life in the night all seemed to embrace me. When I lifted my eyes all that was left of her was a little red spec on the horizon, a little flame dancing with the stars. And eventually she, too, dissolved into the night. 

I stood paralyzed. Eyes closed. One drop. Another. 

And another.

And another.