The Last Time

The Last Time

I’ve become a fluent reader of your tears. I know their timing and can tell apart their many temperaments from the way they graft and gather by your cheeks.

I’ve learnt how the midnight thud of the car door at our final drop-off, releases those bottled puddles. Puddles saved and invested throughout the evening, well hidden behind timed laughs and a charming performance at dinner. In the absence of even our most graceful guests, these tears roll like streams of curved music, swerving the silhouette of your nose – washing up into small sand-pockets by your lips. You hate your lips. You’ve grown a distaste for most of the features that cover your face and your body and your life.

I take your hand – piecing together its nimble and broken pieces. Your other, stays anchored in its fight-flight position on the wheel of your nice car. Your black 2018 Audi-convertible. A death-gift from your late Pa; the perfect fit for your old-lovers taste in music and in boys. You race your problems in it, cutting corners, injuring gutters.

Until you stop.

And they each catch up.

Under a roofless night, we are rained on by the ripples of your depression. Or is tonight one of your dramatic ensembles? I’ve stopped telling them apart.  It seems a position I’ve grown familiar with – the scene of onlooking the restless-eternal weep of a good friend, only able to offer a hand from across the console.

It is difficult to remember when we started sharing our affection in this way. Our high-school friendship paraded itself with banter. We were thick-skinned back then with our lunch-stealing and cruel gnawing at each other’s unfamiliar spices. We crush-meddled and trip-tied each other’s laces until we’d grown too hideous for others to join. We enjoyed having our friendship being seen and known by audiences, to whom we played our parts well to. Best friends had afforded us always-reserved seats in math and science. It’d meant no confrontation with the Bently sisters or with Mrs Saunders was ever faced alone. High school had been a collation of our ugliest moments both poured out and sipped together – later organised into an exhibition for the enjoyment of the under-befriended onlooker.

Yet it had never, in all those years, meant physical touch.

Perhaps it is an adult dialect we’ve borrowed and reappropriated from our time since spent with men. So now, in our late nineteen years, we touch gently from across the console, with no-one left to watch our performance.

Closed-eyed you squeeze my hand with the grip you only force in prayers and I remember the time I’d prayed for you. Do you remember? That morning we’d first broken our no-touch rules, holding each other outside the maths classroom. We were a still sun, dazzling in a frame of busy clouds. White clouds, bow-tied in blue, and socked-up to the knees because those were the colours and rules of tenth grade. If I’d mentioned those tenth graders, those poor empathisers, unversed in the language of grieving – would you remember them? Or how I’d returned late from the bathroom that morning, to a classroom door hanging onto a silent swing. Behind it, a pair of eyes in weather-beaten brown. Ree?

Would you remember falling into me, converging our shadows and lapping up strange syllables with your tongue? Or how I’d pieced them together into something resembling the shape of Sophie, he’s dead.

He’s dead.

Those words linger in me still. They’ve become a soundtrack to the afterimage of a tearlessly fearful face.

Part of you had died that day Ree. Peripeteia; little Zoe’d borrowed the label from first semester on Othello – innocence, lost. She said it as though it had catapulted from you, cruelly, like the pierce of a stretched elastic.

Whatever was lost, I had felt it leave you. Felt the snap, as I held up the weight of a once-life-filled body in my arms.

We were never the same.

I reach for your cheek across the console, brushing the puddles aside for later. Behind them I steal another sample of those brown-beaten eyes. I love you Ree, I say, unsure whether my words spring outwardly from behind my lips yet believing them to be true with deep conviction. I feel an urge to yell them at you. To come close, nose to nose, and scream I LOVE YOU REE HAQUE.

I. Adore. You.

My sweet and beautiful friend.

Do you hear me?

If you do, it is unlikely you’ll believe me. Self-love is one of those conversational motifs in our friendship, with issues caused by its absence reappearing in every season.

It’d begun with Tyler Dough. Sweet and kind both in nature and height, yet even with his theatrical quirks, with his parental-personal at sixteen years, he was not able to convince a girl, acute-acned and middle-browed, that she was beautiful.

They each came and went in this way. Kurtis Hill. Ben Walker.

Stephan.

With good or bad intentions, boys were let go young – their love made redundant for a lack of persuasiveness.

Forever my darling our love will be true

Ohhhh I loooooveee this song, you remind me, your lips dragging out each word.

Just promise me darling your love in return

With your sleeve you wipe away the dew from your windscreen. I smudge a heart in the corner and save it as the secret you can’t quite reach, all belted up in your driver’s seat. It’s a driving song, you promise me, whisking up the engine with your fancy ignition-less button. I remember as a kid I was afraid of people who look just like we do now.

We’re both singing with an upper-body blasé. A carelessness like clouds, whipping by giddily under each streetlight.

When you’re not around Soph, its Johnny who dries my tears.

Oh, I know.

You smile back at me because I know these things.

We are parked outside Maccas. You order your coke, I pay.  You act like it’s the greatest gift you’ve ever received, all twirly with joy. You kiss the air with the thanks of a kid whose never been provided for.

I love that kid.

We get out. Sit for a bit. Legs splattered over the gutter like drunk teenagers awaiting their uber. Some actually pass us, and that’s when you remember it’s still the weekend. Well technically, I reply it ended a few minutes ago.

I am pushed over, deservingly.

So, I ask, what you up to tomorrow? But you ignore the question, querying instead, the thoughts you’ve been balancing on your shoulder all evening.

What will it take for a girl to trust a guy?

By this point you probably notice the map of hard lines on my forehead.

Like really, really trust one? You ask a second time.

Good question. Is it possible? Or necessary?

I reckon I could trust again. You lie, full of flattery. With flowers perhaps? Or a ring of commitment?

Hmm. How about with a vagina?

We laugh and I wonder if it is true. If it is why I’d forgiven you so soon.

Is it why we remain friends, even after all this time? Had I forgotten your rejection because women are simply more forgivable? Or because it had felt unfair to unwillingly hold on to hate when your name stirred up so much familiarity? So much sadness. A sad joy that ran through me with a haste of desperation to be with you again.

Or is it because all along I’d been aware of a far more dangerous enemy at hand, stepping over you, heel to neck?

You’re right. Women are better.

Is that why when you’d called me that late Easter, with puddles recollected behind your eyes and a dim gurgle in your voice – the first I’d heard from you in months – I could not help but to fear for you so sincerely that I felt compelled to come? To drive mid-storm and empty-tanked, for the mere confirmation that you were, okay.  

Had I known back then all that I’d been forgiving you for? For the many times you’d do this to me again. The missed calls and broken lies.    Unavailable.    No-shows and bruised thighs.    Unavailable.   Your battered cheeks.    Unavailable.   The smell of post-panic weed, hidden in your boot.

Unavailable.

Unavailable. 

Unavailable. 

And surely had I known all these things, I’d forgive you just the same. Perhaps because you’re a woman. More likely because you’re Ree and even when unforgiveable, I love you.

We’re back in the car.

(Well, we’re trying to be back there, from the foot of the wheel where we just stand, pathetically, looking at each other and the car – each other – the car – each other – the stupidly handsome but unpractically-proportioned vehicle we’ve wanted to drive to all the places you’ve saved in your post-school trip folder

all the places we’ve spoken about going to one day even though we

graduated thirty-five months ago yet still haven’t built the financial stamina or proactivity to go to just yet

and whilst I understand this is mostly because of time-distracting nature of that one all-consuming, semi-okay looking guy you bamboozingly call your “first love,” it still bugs me

you let him ruin your whole life, drowning in post-death desperation which by that point I’m pretty sure it had turned into a full-blown depression

I hadn’t known how to help you

when I tried to fix things for you on that one occasion, you’d rejected the cookies I’d baked and dropped off to your home, despite knowing my detest for baking and long drives

I had self-obessingly and misinformingly perceived this as a rejection of me and our friendship

by that age I had internalised a great deal of self-rejection

some of this was as a child but most was as an ugly high-schooler where we spent our most fragile years learning to chase and win and lose the interest of semi-okay looking boys

because of this, alongside false marketing of the self-fulfilling

significance of male-approval, I had learnt that even momentary feelings of unhappiness were in need of fixing through the form of disconnected relational attachments

so really it’s not your fault

not at all

but it’s much easier to call it your fault, because I at least have a prospect of fixing you

but men, even after all these years, I don’t understand.)

And so, we just stand here, pathetically, wondering whether it is best to jump the windows – consider ourselves cool a final time – or to open the door like real people, and accept our eternal irrelevance.

We choose the latter.

Actually, we are forced into the latter while your shoulder still recovers from that semi-okay looking first love of yours, who broke it.

It’s far easier to forgive you with puddles slicing your cheeks but instead I am falsely congratulated by their aridity, as though it was I who wiped them away. Do I have a problem?

Ahead of the lights, I am home. Thanks for driving me.

Anytime, you say, but we both know this isn’t true. It is not at all probable that we will see each other anytime soon. I’d considered it a privilege. I consider your life to be a privilege, not to live, but that it’s still here. Am I wrong for that?

You’d told me a funny story about privilege. How the strange, pale-skinned lady from the chemist had become so endeared by your oriental beauty, she’d felt compelled to compliment it. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before, stroking you. Take good care of it, she’d counselled, rather strange and silly because it’s the kind of thing you hear Irishry-white parents say to their children to warn them against the sun.

Just imagine being this privileged, you’d joked.

I still imagine that scene and the laughter that flew from your words re-telling it; when did people become so obsessed with what isn’t theirs? I wonder if that’s all your life is to me now. An obsessive compulsion.

Hey Ree, I say, holding your head in my hands. Listen.

Listening.

Please promise me this is the last time.

The last time?

That you go back.

You look up at me with your precious promise, still caught between the fierce grip of one hand on the wheel, and the other at rest in mine. I feel like tugging it in my lap and begging it to stay. Come home, I’d plead, clammy gripped and Maccas-breathed.

But it’s confusing and I get it.

I get it so much that I stand here foolishly in the cold, whispering my love to you from afar. I watch you drive away to that fictitious place you’ve labelled home, knowing like you, your promise will eventually break.

If I wasn’t so unforgiving, I might chase after you. I might climb through your boot, tamper with your tires. I’d stay and hide and reorder your mess and you’d never have to know.

But I’ve matured now.

Can’t you see that I’ve grown?

I am no longer compulsive over what I cannot fix, so I watch you leave like the men before you, who I’ve grown utterly hopeless in repairing.