A Monument To My Waiting

I tell people that she never showed up. That’s what I’d start with—make it sound like I was wronged in a cinematic way. I was someone who had just enough pride to curtail the truth into something clean, digestible. Something I could recite in passing without feeling defective. Because saying she never said she would come? That she never even knew there was something to come to? That was grotesque. Worse than rejection, because it made me seem like I had hallucinated the whole thing. That I was unwell in some deeply operatic, unsalvageable way.

But I remember something. No, not a yes, not even a maybe. A slight raise of the brow. A modulation in pitch. A tightening of the larynx. The inflection that comes at the tail end of a sentence when someone wants to be liked, or is pretending to like you, or is trying not to wince when you touch their wrist. I took it as an agreement.

It was August, I think. The air smelled like wet pavement and overstimulated chloroplasts, like every green thing had been tricked into accelerating. The ivy had outpaced their trellises and were creeping up the buildings like a rash on overzealous summer legs. All of it—ivy, kudzu, nameless overgrowth—scrambling towards the light like they were desperate to prove themselves. A neediness so pure it looked like courage. I recognized it.

The church was dark red brick and heavy-looking, old, and not in a romantic way. The kind of obedient old building that would cave in gracefully if left alone long enough. Its faded signboard still read “COME UNTO ME”, although the M was hanging on by a thread. I remember smiling at the metaphor. Not in the religious sense, just logistically. I remember thinking, if she sees it, maybe she’ll think I’m funny for choosing this place.

I sat there for so long the concrete steps gnawed their gravelly imprint into the backs of my thighs. It hurt in the peculiar way things hurt when you’re trying not to notice you’re hurting, pretending to be unbothered for long enough that the suffering becomes fulfilling, Puritanical. The cicadas were at it. Screaming themselves inside out. I slapped mosquitos on my knees, wiped the little hot red smears on the hem of my dress, ignored the welts.

At first, in all my obstinance, I made up delays for her. Flat tire, migraine, family emergency, traffic on some implausible faraway highway. I even gave her a last-minute Chinese scalp massage appointment—forty-five minutes, an hour. That was the last one I made up. After that, I just waited. I sat there like a child. I became myself a little altar of waiting.

And when I finally left, it wasn’t triumphant, it wasn’t indignant. It wasn’t even sad, really. It just, was. The sun had started to go down, the cicadas had quieted, and I was covered in bug bites.

Later, I found a paperback she’d lent me in an old duffel. I didn’t remember her giving it to me, didn’t remember taking it. I flipped through and a bruised receipt fluttered out:

2 AMERICANO (16 OZ) … $12.56.

It was two weeks old. Or rather, it had been two weeks old then. I have no idea how old it is now. A blurred nothing, smudged on thermal paper and bisphenols, printed from a mile long scroll. A fading footprint. Here—see? We were real at the same time, in the same place. I had pressed it flat in my journal like a leaf. Folded it into jacket pockets. I looked for anything, even a pen smudge, something to make it more. It didn’t mean more. It just meant she went to get coffee once, and so did I.

I told this story once at a party. I made it funny, which made it worse. Look at me, the great misinterpreter! The patron saint of unwarranted attachment! I said that I’d earned myself a crooked little bronze plaque on that church step, a monument to my dogged resolve. “Longest Wait Around-er.” Someone laughed a little too hard and I felt a twinge, like I had sold something I didn’t really mean to. But it was nothing. A non-event. A tiny blank spot on the interminable calendar I refused to erase. You can’t mourn something that never happened, can’t wear it around like a medical bracelet and be forever greeted with cosmetic pity.

But now, the cruelest thing is, I can remember her saying it. “I’ll meet you there.” I can hear it in her voice, but then again, maybe I’ve played it in my head so many times—remembered, misremembered—and dubbed a non-existent voice over with memory. Different tones dragged and looped from separate contexts until they are spliced together with a parched, unreliable wholeness. Sometimes she says it casually, like while zipping her jacket or unlocking a door, tossing it back without ceremony. Other times it’s gentle—she brushes something off my face (an eyelash, maybe) and says it like it’s a promise, like it costs her something. Once I had a version where she mouthed it across the street. Didn’t say it at all, just shaped the words. They cycle though, a tree-ringed zoetrope, that I compulsively spin for no one. But I swear I remember the moment. Where she put her hands. The old cassette effect, too many replays, too much hiss. The words wobble, blur at the edges, like something passed over a flame. The tape warps, darkens.

The truth is I think about it more than I should. Not about her, really. About the part of me that couldn’t get up. That part of me that waited even after I knew. The undisputable pathology of it comes down to something not even on the diagnosable level of personality disorder or dopamine imbalance, something smaller, dumber. Something microscopic. A misfiring. A brutal little nucleus.

And the worst part is: I’m still there. I am still on the steps. I have been there for years.