From the Bathroom Sink

[TW: discussions of assault]

I was eleven when I met Anjelli, she was a bad influence before she was a best friend.

The teenage years we spent together are not my proudest moments but all the ones that came before, the sticky babygirl ones with silent-Saturdays and touch-tank-Tuesdays, have always been hard to talk about. Near a dozen sets of three-hundred-sixty-five days littered with ugly hands.

Anj, who is now too tall for the kiddie swing but too short to get treated like an adult, is shaving her legs in our bathroom when I tell her about it, and I try to make it sound like it is the first time I’ve said the words; like nobody has heard my story and that’s why I have slowly become what she thinks I am (no-fun, a-buzzkill, a-pile-of-rocks-with-a-weak-pulse). She is lotioning and tissueing the girl-fur off herself in long, clean swipes. She checks her phone every two minutes, forever moving in her skin-bodysuit.

Anj ran track all throughout school but quit when we graduated; I wonder sometimes what she does with the surplus energy she conditioned her body to make for so long.

“That’s really… sad,” she says, and it really is and I knew it even before she told me. I knew it because of therapy and the technicolor pills in the orange bottle. Before that, it was just sort of ugly. It was just sort of a part of me that emerged in my toddler-years and I assumed I’d have to live with forever.

Now it’s still there but it has a new name and it makes everybody Sorry.

And we were never really supposed to talk about it, me and Anj. But there’s been nothing to talk about for months and we’re both growing bored so I pretend to be sad about it and she pretends to be surprised. Oh well, my lungs whisper, what did we expect?

Anj washes her razor and I want to ask her to c-section the intestines out of me, to turn me organless so that we'll have something to talk about besides my past. But I don’t because I’ve seen the line of what’s acceptable and what’s not in our friendship. It would be wrong to discuss my childhood and my adulthood in one sitting. I’ve realized, after a whole life with her and testing the water, I am more palatable in small doses.

“God Roe, how do you… live with yourself after that?” she asks and the sink and tub, where she is perched, seem to shift worlds apart.

I tell her, in my head, that I am very near certain you do not.

Out loud I say that we move on and grow and adjust, that that is the most scientific and human thing we can do. I say it because therapy is expensive and this whole small talk thing is hard. She tells me science sucks balls--a fine arts major, magically--and checks her phone again.

I’m pretty sure she was my platonic soulmate a year ago, but now it all seems shaky. I’m pretty sure we came to college and picked out our rug at IKEA together, pretty sure I crocheted her hats during chemo, kissed her peach-fuzz head and watched all of Twilight whenever she asked because it was her favorite. But her hair is long now and she is waiting for the boy she has loved since high school to text her back, so I don’t complain. I get it. Sort of. I wait on the texts of my father and of my siblings, I crave the arrival of my phone bill and our rent. These things show me I exist in this plane of reality when Anj forgets to.

She keeps doing that a lot, recently.

I sit on the lip of the bathroom sink and try to remind her I’m here, the wind slipping through our cracked window and ruffling my hair. The earth sees me today, even if she cannot.

My oldest sister, Kara Joy, tells me that that’s an evil, evil reason to have a friend; that it shouldn’t all be about me and my problems. To her, I am a meni-pew-late-ur with a gawd cum-plecks.

I tell her that nothing has ever been about me.

She doesn’t disagree, and that would probably hurt if I had a body or nerves.

“Do you want to come with me to get coffee?” Anj asks, glancing up at me a few minutes of silence later, and I say no because I know she’s only inviting me so that we don’t have to sit in the Yuck of my honesty and nobody ever says the R-word again. Not in our walls, at least. The apartment is too clean and adult for that. We outgrew crying sophomore year with our skinny jeans and it’s too late to take that back. When I was a kid I remember I used to get scared if I told anyone what happened to me they would tell my mother and then she would stop coming home on the weekends because who wants a damaged-goods babydoll? I guess I outgrew my mother too, though, because now I feel there’s nothing for me to lose. What could Anj do with my gross past? Judge me and move out? She doesn’t have the ego or money. Maybe that’s why we have always gotten along: we are equally nothing-things.

She leaves to get coffee on her own, slipping a sweatshirt on by our welcome mat. It’s warm enough to walk today but probably won’t be by the time Saturday comes around. Fall in Massachusetts is ninety-three hours long. She shuts the door behind her and I almost ask her to leave it open, but I don’t. If she had, maybe somebody would’ve come by. Maybe a stranger. Maybe they could’ve held my hand or something stupid and I would grow up and have a baby and

I hear the lock snap closed and breathe; once, twice, three times. Enough to dull the buzzing in my muscles and the ringing in my ears.

When I’m sure she is gone and we won’t cross paths in the lobby I start to fish around my bag, which sits at the foot of my bed. Out comes my notebook and phone and pen and keys and gum and self esteem and condoms and wallet and, finally, a post-it that’s been folded in half and then quarters. They march across my blanket like ants, laying down in a neat little line. The wallet and keys go in my pocket, the self esteem and condoms stay in my bed. Who ever needed the rest? I can’t remember where I found it.

I take my empty bag to the supermarket because Anj loves me better when the cabinets aren’t empty and we have oat milk.

She’ll forget I’m terribly sad, I’ll put on Twilight and cook pasta with marinara sauce and no cheese because it makes her stomach hurt and I know her. We’ll become decently okay and everybody will stop bleeding so damn much.

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Anj climbs into my bed on Thursday night, which she usually isn’t allowed to do because, while I love her endlessly, it’s hard enough to sleep with my own body under the sheets. She used to try more often, to be around me; recently she doesn’t care. It’s been some days since I shared my ugly secret with her. She hasn’t known what to say, I guess.

But she climbs into my bed for the first time in a million centuries and lies on her back, face up to my glow-in-the-dark stars. We put them up when we moved in two years ago, before Anj started working a real-job and I started grad school. There was probably a point where we were living together, in that apartment, equally unprepared for adulthood. I like thinking about it sometimes, about the front we put up for each other; about the way we were both probably terrified but still liked to pretend we had it all figured out. The older we’ve gotten the harder that gets to do, the more it feels like we’ll age afraid and flailing and our muscles will atrophy while we sit on our couch crying and our bones will begin to decompose while our hearts are still beating and

Either way, there she is.

“Roe?” she whispers, which it makes no sense to do because there’s nobody else around. It’s only me and her, which is how it’s been for a while. Either we don’t exist or nobody else does. I’m not sure yet, but I worry pretty often that it’s the former. That’s why it’s been hard for her to have outgrown me: I float through life alone.

I nod into the darkness next to her and my whole bed creeks.

She says nothing for a while, letting the silence blanket me. I want to tell her silence suffocates, I want to ask for words and proof that we are all still here and alive and stuff. But I don’t because Anj loves the silence because Anj likes to forget she exists because Anj has different problems because Anj

grabs my hand against the mattress, her palm cool.

She has always had cold hands. She claims it’s bad circulation but the science says my circulation is worse, being that I’m taller, and I have always run hot. She followed me to Massachusetts even though she hated the cold, wanted to bear witness to the fulfillment or failure of my dreams, I guess. Or she loved me back then and we couldn’t bear to be apart; it may have been that one. When we first found this place, the one I let her hold my hand in, we were broker and skinnier and spent more time together than now. We would do Sunday movie nights and taco Thursdays (she had book club on Tuesdays and Thursdays were more fun anyway), would dress up for the UMass game days in our shared bathroom and split one box of Sour Patch kids in the stands. Her boyfriend, back then, was a 6'4 basketball player named Tyler who cried at the end of LaLa Land and grew up on a ranch in South Carolina with four dogs. He was cute and she liked him but they broke up because Owen, from high school, had texted her out of the blue, saying he was in the Pioneer Valley area (which he would really have no reason to be in other than to see her). Oh, well. It didn’t hurt either of them that much and by the time she realized Owen maybe didn’t like her as much as she liked him anymore Tyler had found a new short redhead to take her place who did not have an overly attached, leach of bestroomatefriend. That's love.

“How old were you, again? The first time?”

I know what she’s talking about.

“Six.”

“That’s young.”

“It is.”

She says nothing after that, she’s learning how to talk to me again and I appreciate the effort.

We hadn’t talked, afterall--like really talked--in a while before that. Maybe that’s why I told her. Maybe I was trying to make her feel bad enough to love me the way she used to again, to make me real. I wouldn’t put it past myself, I’d done that sort of thing before (Ninth grade when we got into a fight over higher powers and I broke the silence to call her and tell her my grandmother died).

But I should’ve known better.

Because now she lays in my bed, none of the words people usually say tumbling out of her. I appreciate this too, sort of. I don’t need any more apologies and platitudes and descriptions of other people's first times that were not assault at all but they just want an excuse to talk about.

“Owen is going to come over tomorrow,” she tells me, “Around lunch.”

“Okay,” I say.

She doesn’t ask what happened to our friendship or where we went wrong or anything and that’s fine. It’s not like we had a shared collection of matchbox cars or watched every single Barbie straight-to-Blu-Ray DVD together or she was the first kiss I wanted or I was the third she just happened to have. It’s not at all like any of that.

We know what went wrong after all, kinda. It definitely has something to do with me.

She doesn’t stay in my room, but she waits until I’ve fallen asleep to leave.

When I wake up the curtains are drawn back and she is gone.

The sun eats me whole.

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Owen does come on Friday and he smells like Boy and brings up the haircut I had junior year out of nowhere. Anj can tell it makes me uncomfortable, she takes him away to the movies and doesn't come back until evening, tells me she’s starving and apologizes for missing dinner. I accept the apology and realize I have missed dinner, too.

We order take-out from the Chinese place down the street, little food in little boxes. She recognizes the delivery girl from her spin class and suddenly they have more in common than we ever have.

We eat in front of the TV and watch the Great British Baking Show, even though neither of us like it, which makes her laugh and sort of whisper that we’ve become an old married couple, of sorts.

I want to say back that old married couples have it better than us, but I don’t.

What she means is she is forgetting how to care for me and that’s a little sad.

✮ ⋆ ˚｡𖦹 ⋆｡°✩

She’s gone when I wake up again, out running.

I clean up our leftover boxes and read in the living room, my feet tucked under me on the couch, until she comes back. 

I used to worry, some mornings, that she wouldn’t. I couldn’t tell you why, she has nowhere else to go. But I would worry about it and, of course, she would always show up.

She shows up today, too, her forehead sweatslicked and nose red. She used to be insecure about that, but she’s 23 now and stupid insecurities aren’t really her brand, they’re mine. Either way, it’s the first time she’s run in as long as I can remember but I don’t point this out because I’m not sure what to make of it.

Instead, I unfold myself and walk to the kitchen, leaving my book upside down on the couch.

“Breakfast?” she asks, which only means Are you making breakfast? 

I nod, I am and I do, mostly in a silence that’s occasionally broken by the beeping of the stovetop and sound of the running tap.

“Roe?”

I make eggs, beating them together in a plastic bowl that my little sister brought me as a souvenir from Disney World because oh, yeah, there’s a whole planet out there. Shocker.

“Anjelli.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

Again, I know what she’s talking about. There has literally never been anything else.

I pour the eggs into the pan and listen to the cracking sound of the butter. I could break down right now, but I won’t.

“We’ve been weird. I’ve been weird. I’m sorry,” she’s talking and I’m listening through one ear while also waiting for my tea kettle to go off.

“Rowan I’m sorry, okay? I know I’m not any good at this sort of thing and you don’t need me now and you’ve always been better at feelings and talking about things and, like, being a fucking adult,” she pauses, waiting for me to disagree. I don’t, I won’t. “But I’m still sorry.”

I nod into the fridge, “I know.”

“You don’t need me anymore,” she says again and she sounds like she might cry, which is not allowed. I’m not sure what to say to make her stop. “I’m not good for anything real.”

“It was a long time ago,” I say, instead of anything else. I could disagree with her, but there's no point. She already knows she's wrong, she just won't hear it right now anyway. I shut the tea cabinet quietly, “It’s all over now.”

The water is boiling and the world is turning, the steam rises and licks my cheeks as I pour it into the two matching mugs on the kitchen island.

“Is that for me?” she asks, as if to imply there has ever been anyone else.

Fall is gone, it is winter in Massachusetts.