When She Went Back Over It All in Her Head, the Signs, They Had All Been There. from The

Julia-Scott Dawson

English 307

4/17/14

Signs

When she went back over it all in her head, the signs, they had all been there. From the faltering way he said her name to the blankness in his eyes when he woke that second morning. As though someone had pulled a sheet over his brain behind his eyes and left her sleeping with a skeleton. It was all so gradual and insidious, each day progressively growing dimmer in her mind and the words he had said and the way he said them was equally dim, but the way she felt each time was sharp as a knife. Hadn’t someone, maybe Oscar Wilde, said that this, above all other details, was what humans always remember, the way they felt?

The memories she did have were so vivid she liked to play them in her mind like a movie. It left her feeling breathless and dizzy, half-floating and intoxicated with the smell of his aftershave and the warmth of his hand burning a hole through her winter coat.

Eve remembered the first time they had first spoken. It hadn’t been pleasant. She had lambasted him for liking Drake, a rapper who she found at once unsettlingly ugly and also a prime example of what was wrong with the music scene. He’d simply wrinkled his brow at her and asked, “Are you a student here or a professor?” So earnestly had he said the words that a giggle floated up from somewhere within her and escaped before she had time to catch herself. He was sitting there, and light from the window hit his face and slid down his cashmere sweater to catch the glint of his watch. It was as though something clicked when she saw them, a piece that had long since been missing suddenly slid back into place.

First, there had been the meeting. The awkward date to Starbucks where she had flatly refused to drink anything but water, and he had managed to convince her to try a sip of whatever sugary concoction he was drinking. “You have to try it,” he said evenly, “don’t knock something until you’ve tried it.” And then there was the trek to the parking lot, where she had automatically gone to a row of nice-ish sedans, assuming they were his, and he had steered her carefully back to a shiny black Mercedes, winking at her in the sun. Eve sat gingerly in the leather seat, afraid to move and breathing in the smell of rich people.

That ride had been the moment when Eve told herself, “there will be no second date.” She should have known it wouldn’t work, what with his sugar addiction and love of Drake and Asap Something or Other, and his car that cost more than her Catholic school education. She said those things and then he had looked at her with those brown eyes in the kitchen of his apartment, looked right at her and told her she looked beautiful. No one had ever told her that, not even her parents, who plastered report cards and A papers on the fridge at home. She didn’t know what to say, so she just kissed him with all of her might.

Being loved was something that she kept in the back of her head as an option. It was something that might come with time, and if it didn’t then that was probably through some fault in her. She had always assumed that love was some serene, quiet, and peaceful emotion, but it was not. Loving him, all of him, was unsetting. The moments they were apart, it was as though that missing piece left her body of its own accord. She felt unsteady and somehow naïve. “I can’t sleep when you’re not here,” he told her one cold winter day, hands wrapped around hers in a coffee shop, and she felt tears pricking her eyes because the words rose up in her throat and refused to move until she spoke them. I love you.

The moment the email from her mom came, she knew that it was over. She cried for three days, refusing to say why, and then finally told him the truth. “I’m going home to Canada for the summer,” she said, half whispering, “my dad is really sick.”

“It’s okay,” he had said, “we’ll talk on the phone and I’ll come visit you.”

It was spoken so naturally and easily that she forgot to search his face for any signs of disaster. But after that, things had changed. She awoke every morning in his bed with the muscles in her legs as tight as guitar string, taut and aching.

“It will be okay,” he kept telling her, but each time it became less and less of a statement and more a question. She felt like one big question mark, sitting there as bold as you please on a single page. That tone made her flinch and inwardly wither. It will be okay? And she no longer found solace in his company, at least not like she used to. Every day, a part of him was missing, whether the warmth in his voice or the light in his eyes, but by the last day it was like talking to a zombie. He barely spoke when he dropped her off at the airport, kissed her so lightly it was like a moth grazing her cheek.

“I love you,” he said, but the words died before he’d even spoken them and hung awkwardly between them. Eve had started crying then, and kept crying as she watched him disappear in the crowd. That last look he gave her was like the first: a question. Are you a student here or a professor? Do you know how beautiful you are? Why do you have to go, I need you…It was always a question.

Getting your heart broken was beneficial in many ways. Eve felt as though she had been pulled from the bottom of a deep lake, and was gasping, flailing, fighting for breath and more alive than ever before. The pain kept her moving, frenetic, afraid to stay to long in one place for fear she’d lose more than she had so far. And all of life suddenly contained land mines, things that screamed his name and threatened to destroy her. A song on the radio, a waft of aftershave, a Starbucks coffee cup lying discarded on the sidewalk. In the end, he left with her nothing but silence.

And it was one day, walking down a Vancouver sidewalk, that she had checked her phone to see his number and Eve almost choked on her tears.

“Hello?” she said, and heard his voice, so rich and full in her ear, talking about some scholarship he’d gotten, not pausing, so strong it was as though he stood next to her. And then Eve remembered the blankness in his eyes, and everything fell into focus and was no longer a question. And the city was loud and bustling around her, so solid and definite and completely devoid of any uncertainty, and she was live and breathing and solid and glued to a shadow that existed on the other side of a telephone. For the first time, she realized he hadn’t asked her how she was, or how her father was.

“I love you,” Eve said, and it was true but it was not right. She already felt his soul latching onto hers, leeching away some of her certainty, “I love you but I have to go now.”

“What?” he said, “why?

The sun blazed up over the skyline and hit her full in the eyes, blinding her momentarily.

“Goodbye,” she said, and maybe he heard her, maybe he didn’t. She dropped the phone in the bottom of her bag. The image of him that would always stay with her was merely imagined, him standing incredulously in his apartment, holding a phone to his ear and listening to the dial tone and her voice suddenly gone, standing there waiting for something that would never come.