She wanted thumbtacked 3 x 5s on her walls, plush carpets, and plenty of space. Long nights and short days, love that could drive her crazy if she let it. Soft whispers in the half-light of morning, tangled up in the sheets of a twin-sized bed, iced coffee and an omelet, shared independence.
She wore her hair in loose braids and stood behind an easel in the park, painting abstractions of trees and children, birds and ponds. She barely made rent through a stale job in marketing and drank cheap rosé on a second-hand couch watching reality television, mindlessly scrolling through her phone. She wrote long-winded journal entries on what little occurred, as though she were expecting them to one day be found, preserved and treasured. Things had shifted following her graduation, her scope of the world, hopes for what she might accomplish, the number of people she kept close to her.
They met for an Italian dinner.
Short-cropped light brown hair and a slanting smile. He wasn’t the type of guy she usually went for. He was what she might describe as “typical.” He stumbled over words he was trying out, gleaned from some book he was reading.
He believed in the plight of women. There was a divisiveness on previously settled topics. History was repeating. She nodded. They ordered an espresso martini and a Miller Lite. She was twenty four, he was twenty six. He had gone to school for business, she for graphic design.
She said she had just gotten out of a two year relationship. “Oh,” he replied. She had thought they might have gotten married at one point. She didn’t mention that part.
She was still getting used to dating. It seemed she was still getting used to a lot of things. There was a tepid silence which she broke by saying she’d never been there before. He said it was one of his favorite spots in the city. She nodded and finished her drink.
“Once you’re over him, you’ll miss it,” he said suddenly.
“What’s that?”
“You’ll miss the feeling of missing him. We get used to anything.”
They ordered second and third rounds, spoke on inane topics: sports teams, movies, popular bars, people they knew in common. He had a bottle of wine at his place if she was interested in a nightcap. She checked her watch. She had made a resolution to take things slower. One drink wouldn’t hurt.
“You live here alone?” It was a spacious one bedroom apartment. There was a signed St. Louis Blues jersey framed on the wall, posters of concerts he had presumably gone to, mostly country. Shelving built into the walls containing books on finance, framed photos, a signed baseball, bobble heads, a mason jar of weed.
It had begun to rain outside, the plinking sound on the fire escape and windowpane to her right. Maybe she wouldn’t leave so soon. She texted her friend that the date was going fine, that she was at his apartment. Moments later she received a message back: “Have fun! Be careful!” She stuffed her phone into her purse.
“Is that your mother?” she asked, gesturing to one of the frames on the shelves.
“Oh, yeah.” He said, turning to see what she was referring to, before striding into the kitchen. She could hear him rifling in the fridge and cupboards. Her eyes roved over the contents of the room once more, now able to do so without his watching. She passed over all the same items in the new freedom, resting longer on each photo, on the titles of the books, on the posters and the spare items on the coffee table. An ashtray with a small pile of ash and joint butts, two empty cans of Old Style, and a glass bowl of matchbooks rested atop a pile of sports magazines– beside it, a silver Zippo lighter with the initials JMD monogrammed into its side. She turned it over in her hands, feeling the grooves where it had been dropped or nicked. She flipped open the top, watched the flame dance, flipped it closed. There was a distinctive smell she found oddly nostalgic though untethered to any one memory. When she heard him move in the kitchen, she stuffed it into her purse. The scent still lingered and when he returned she carried on in a nonchalant manner. “She looks like Jennifer Garner.”
“She used to get that all the time,” he placed a glass of pink wine in her hand, sitting down on the couch and taking a sip of his own.
“Not anymore?” She remained standing, keeping her back to him, pretending to regard the photo further, feeling satisfied, wondering why she had felt the urge to take it.
“She passed away a little while ago.”
“Oh, God.” She turned, contorting her face in order to best convey her apology. “I’m sorry I brought it up.”
“No, it’s alright,” he said. “It’s fine. I don’t get to talk about her much. All my family is still back home. I feel pretty far away from it.”
“St. Louis, right?” She took a sip of her rosé, scrunching her face slightly at the sourness of it.
“Yeah.” Abruptly, he stood to fiddle with the speakers under the television.
“Do you go back a lot?” she asked.
“Not as much as I could. When she was sick I would go every weekend. Now I don’t go nearly as much.”
“I’m sorry I brought it up.” She took a seat on the couch, resting her purse beside her on the floor.
“Don’t worry about it.”
Soft music began to fill the air and he had turned back towards her. She didn’t know the artist, some breathy singer with an acoustic. “Do you have any siblings?” she asked.
“A younger brother back home,” he sat down beside her. “You?”
“Just me. Would you ever move back?”
“Maybe one day,” he said.
“I’ve been thinking about moving.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know yet. I’m just thinking about it. Somewhere different.”
“Nowhere’s much different from anywhere else.”
“What about Europe? That’s different.”
“Would you move to Europe?”
“Probably not,” she said, trailing off. “Do you ever get sick of it though?”
“Sick of what?”
“The same old things you do everyday.”
“Sure. That’s just life.”
“I guess,” she said. “I’d like to think that once you’re in the right spot, doing the right thing with the right person, that everything would feel right.”
“Do you think that’s possible?” he asked.
“Do you?”
He paused for a moment. “Sure,” he said finally. “I think it all works out in the end. When we’re older it’ll all fit into place.”
“Don’t you think everyone thinks that way? Not everyone gets a happy ending.”
He thought for a moment, “I guess you just have to have trust that everything will be alright.” She didn’t have anything more to say and so nothing was said. “Do you play?” she asked, gesturing towards a guitar propped up in the corner of the room. “Not really. Simple stuff.”
“Would you play me something?”
“It’d spoil the mood.”
She shrugged, wondering if there was any mood to be spoiled. She felt his arm around her.
She said she wasn’t looking for sex right now. He nodded, extracting his arm from her shoulder and sitting forward. “Do you smoke?” he asked, glancing at the ashtray.
“Not anymore,” she replied. “I get too anxious.”
“Do you mind?”
“Not at all.”
He began the process of lighting a joint, selecting a matchbook from the glass bowl to light it. She watched him closely as he did so, at his thin fingers as they maneuvered the flame and set the space paper at the end ablaze. She mentioned the oddity of relationships, how she hadn’t known him before tonight and now she was in his apartment. He nodded as he puffed at the joint, turning it as he did so, the red tip flickering. “What about you?” she asked. “Have you ever been in love?”
He leaned back for a moment, breathing out a cloud of smoke, “No,” he said. “I don’t think I have.”
“You should try it sometime,” she said. “I recommend it.”
“I’ve heard it’s overrated,” he said finally.
“My ex used to say love was a distraction.”
“Hm.”
“He was always focused on work. He said if he hadn’t fallen in love he would be more productive.”
“Maybe he’s right.”
“I think it’s gone out of fashion–love,” she said.“People are by themselves so often now. I wonder about that.”
“Some would argue we’re more connected than ever.”
“I don’t know…” she said. “I wonder what it’d be like to live in some little town a hundred years ago. I’ll bet people were a lot happier.”
“What made you think of that?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Connectedness I guess.”
“I’ll bet it got pretty boring. Do you want me to put something on?” he asked.
“I’ll bet they had a better tolerance for boredom,” she continued. “They probably didn’t mind it at all. I’d like to be able to sit on my own with nothing to do and not get as stir crazy as I do.”
He was scrolling through channels, “Yeah…” News channels and cartoons and reality TV flashed on the screen and disappeared as he made his way through the options. She glanced at him, the lights from the screen flashing over his face. He carefully stamped out the half-smoked joint into the tray, laying it on the table to be finished later.
“I’ll bet they weren’t as lonesome. Even with less people around. Now we’ve got so many people around and I still feel lonely.” He had settled on some basketball game. They sat with the music and the flashing lights of the television before he turned to look into her eyes.
“You’re beautiful, you know that?” He spoke softly now, in the ways all the boys she had known before did as they were about to lean in. She would permit it, but nothing more. She had been involved with rotten men before and didn’t want it to happen again. He assured her he wasn’t like them.
He kissed her. His lips were dry and thin. She tried to guide him, going slow, putting her hand on his neck. He moved quickly. She was on her back and he was feeling her chest. His fingers were long and thin, circling her nipples and clutching her ass. She could feel his cock through his trousers, gyrating roughly against her. He pulled away with a grin in the half light, lifting the bottom of her shirt. Wait, she said. I don’t want to have sex tonight. He sat back. Are you sure? She nodded.
He leaned back on the couch and his gaze fell on the flashing light of the television. “That’s alright,” he said finally. There was a stillness. “Are you mad at me?” She asked, feeling self-conscious.
“No,” he turned to face her again. “No, don’t worry about it. You want some more wine?” he asked, looking down at her glass, now close to empty.
She nodded. “Sure, if you still want me to stay.”
“Of course.” He took their glasses and strode into the kitchen, filling them both with hefty pours. When he returned he apologized, “If I was too forward–”
“Oh, it’s alright. I suppose I’m just going through something.” She described the mixture of emotions that had come with the split, feeling a sudden comfortability or obligation to explain herself. When she finished her eyes were reddened and the contents of their glasses dwindled. Outside the rain had slowed to a drizzle. The clock in the kitchen showed 12:15.
“I can understand that,” he said. When she didn’t respond he added, “I was supposed to get married this summer. We called it off in February.”
“I thought you said you hadn’t been in love before.”
“I don’t like to talk about it much.”
“How did it happen?”
He expounded on the seven-year relationship, going all the way back to college. “We grew apart. I fell out of love. Got caught with another woman.”
“Do you regret it?” She took a sip of her wine and looked about the room, re-imagining it as a shared space with an ex-fiance.
“Sure. I wish it hadn’t happened. But there isn’t much to be done about it now.” It seemed as though he understood more about her than she had thought. “I’ll still see her from time to time. There aren’t any hard feelings left. It takes getting used to. First dates after a relationship like that.”
There were remnants of the past reconfigured in a new context. The couch and armchairs once picked out as a couple now used to entertain one-off flings and pass nights alone. The shelves once filled with shared interests, the ex-fiancé’s Virginia Woolf novels next to his nonfiction business books, her collection of Joni Mitchell vinyls alongside his modern country, pictures of her sisters and family, the two of them together, and all the little trinkets that amass over time, now encased one personality. She imagined his ex’s shampoo still in the bathroom out of an inability to dispose of it, even after all these months. She pictured the weeks after the break-up, the air of the apartment gradually losing her perfume until it was stale and plain, unrecognizable.
Her own apartment, still laden with elements of her ex, his deodorant and toothbrush on the bathroom counter, his shirt still hung up in her closet, the notes and jewelry he had given her for birthdays and holidays. She wondered how much of this apartment was as contaminated as hers.
“Sometimes it feels like I got knocked back to square one,” he went on. “It takes figuring out. You’ll be alright.”
As she left he stood in the doorway of the apartment, his gaze on the back of her neck as she made her way down the hall. He wished her good luck when she was ten paces or so out the door. She turned, “With what?”
He just shrugged.
She made her way home under yellow streetlights, still under the influence of the cocktails and the wine, wondering now if she had made the right decision. She felt the warmth of the moment drain slowly, the redness of her cheeks cool in the damp Chicago air, replaced with a hollowness in her chest. She pictured him putting the glasses away in the sink, straightening the sheets and climbing into bed. The quiet of the apartment and if he thought of her now. If he would think of her tomorrow.
She remembered late night drives in Jake Tenenbaum’s old Chevy, parking on the brink of some dark wood and turning off the engine. The thrill and wonder she had in doing these things for the first time, the sensation that had filled her entire being, now confined to that forever seeking of a feeling that would never be felt again.
She closed the door to her apartment and moved to the kitchen with tears in her eyes.Her mother would scold the melodrama. She didn’t have it so bad. She had a place to sleep, food to eat, people to call. But there was the hard tile floor, the cold white of the refrigerator, the mocking yellow of the lights, the bitter shadows, the persistent awareness of what could be.
She set her purse down on the kitchen counter, catching sight of a glint of metal inside. She turned it over in her hands once more, flicking the lighter open and regarding the flame closely. Then she closed the lid with her other hand and set it down on her bedside table. She climbed into bed with her makeup on, stared at her phone for half an hour, and went quietly to sleep–thoughts around what he had said about trusting that things would be alright mingling with a mild anxiety that he’d only said those things to get her into bed.
Though she never saw him again, she thought back on that night every so often, never quite knowing which moments would be eventually woven into the tapestry of her life. There were those she had expected would carry significance: her first time in Cary’s bedroom, the trip to Florence with Victoria and Laney, her graduation. Late nights in her first apartment laughing and talking about nothing, the unreasonably hopeful mornings.
She had been married since, divorced, had put her paintings on display in a gallery, moved back home, changed cities and made new friends. And if she saw the woman she had been on the “L” train or standing at the register in some corner store she would’ve guessed from the stick-and-poke tattoo of a rose on her upper arm that she had questionable taste, that she was prone to spontaneity and borderline self-sabotage. That when her mother first saw it on that June day at the lake, she tried to rub it off with a smooth rock from the shore. That she was uninspired, her hair unwashed and her eyes red from too much crying–an embodiment of a youthful vagrancy, a conscious choice to live below her means. That she had no real conception of what she wanted, play-acting at being an adult, moving about in pantomimes. That she had known loss–and hadn’t. That her life, up until that point, was just preparation for what was to come next. And then her younger self would have shot her a distrustful glance before pulling her tote bag close and trudging off.
James O’Meara is from the suburbs of Chicago, Illinois and has been writing fiction for a number of years. He has written a number of short stories, one of which was shortlisted for The Letter Review Prize for Short Fiction (Jan–Feb, 2024) as well as a novel which was shortlisted by The Letter Review Prize for Unpublished Books (Nov–Dec 2023). He has a bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University in English Literature with a minor in Music.
Euphony Journal 