Or, alternatively, the best metaphor I could think of
some stories just have beginnings, and that was exactly all i had — a worst-case scenario, the first few paragraphs. on normal nights, i would have left it alone, slept through it and forget it in the morning.
but then something happens and suddenly you’re right in the middle of it, and then it starts feeling like it’s writing itself.
this one is somewhat the result of supernatural events, it may have not been mine.
[edit] disclaimer: flattered as i am by comments saying this felt too real, i must confess that actual similarities to real people, circumstances and events portrayed here are purely coincidental. this is a piece of fiction. =)
It was two years after the fall out when I saw her again – her fist in the middle of an interrupted knock. I was on my way out for work, and that was where I found her, right on my doorstep, still carrying the same bag she had carried out of the same door a couple of years ago, when she decided it was over.
“I’m moving back in,” she just said. This was how she’d always been, always catching me off-guard, like it were a hobby of hers.
The most curious things happen while you’re in the middle of a very important mission of the moving on variety, I just figured, still speechless as I automatically stepped aside, absently feeling for my phone. Outside, it looked like rain. In front of me, she looked like she wasn’t going to take no for an answer.
Of course I could have told her that she was in no position to do this, that she couldn’t just walk out like that and saunter right back in. But I figured I needed more than five minutes for that kind of conversation, so I called my boss and let her in.
When I turned around, she was taking her shoes off and putting on the comfortable pair of slippers she had left behind. They were still right where she left them; I barely touched anything of hers when she left. Maybe a part of me just didn’t want to have anything to do with them after, but mostly, I figured that perhaps some other part of me was still hoping she’d come back for them soon.
And now, here she was, finding the things that were hers so easily. I guess that’s what happens when you spend roughly a third of your life with someone — even when they leave, when they come back, they still fit, no matter how much you’ve changed.
“You’ve gained weight,” I broke in. It was not an effort to be mean, but merely an astute observation.
“That’s because I’m pregnant,” she just said, and my world did this silly turn.
Looking closely, I became acutely aware of the slight swell right where she said there would be, and from then on breathing became an all too conscious activity.
Of course I could have told her I wasn’t going to stand for this; that this was no longer my problem because it was over. I could have at least reminded her that it was her who had left me in the first place.
Funny actually how, in the wake of her departure, I had spent nights thinking of things to say to her when she did come back, but all I came up with at this moment was the stupidest, “Is that right?” And then, “Congratulations.”
She gave me this weak smile that told me how tired she’d been all these years, spilling out the stories I did not want to hear.
I’d been often told how highly evolved I was whenever I dealt with things that were supposed to hurt. Most of the time, it’s true.
Sometimes I think it’s a pity that it is.
I was young when I met her; she had walked into my cubicle, mistaking it for a friend’s. I’d always liked girls, but I’d been very discreet about it, and besides, I wore my hair long. Some people just never knew, and I was never the type to fill them in on the details.
But then with some girls, it only took five minutes before they realize what it really was.
“We should go out some time,” I remember having said, feeling bold. She’d only smiled back before slipping her number underneath my keyboard and walking away.
She was discreet and I liked it, and even if I didn’t want to admit this, I may very well have been in love at that very moment. Looking back, I hated myself, feeling like it was tantamount to selling out.
It was all downhill after that – downhill in the sense that it was easy, like water falling off a cliff and into a beautiful, crystal-clear crash. Sometimes I still hear the sound of my heart succumbing to the gravity inherent to the situation, the beat eventually lost in the current after.
And then it just wasn’t as easy as before. The world became bigger, the walls we had built to insulate ourselves, a little thinner. Suddenly people were saying things, and it was then the water ran dry, so to speak.
“I can’t do this, not this way,” was how she started her break-up speech. I saw it coming but said nothing all that while. I nodded until I couldn’t feel it anymore, thinking I’d feel exactly nothing when it ended.
Of course, that wasn’t true, that part about not feeling anything. But it ended anyway. We were together seven years, but it ended anyway.
And now here she was, four months pregnant after having left me for a boy. She said she’d known him all her life; that she believed Fate had brought them back together, and that at the time it had felt so right.
“And then I got pregnant, and I realized I didn’t want to be with him anymore,” she just said, shrugging nonchalantly as if that was how pregnant girls really felt afterwards, like they all wanted their children away from their fathers.
I gripped the cup of coffee in my hand tighter, not minding the heat.
Of course I could have asked her why it was she had come back. I could have pointed out I wasn’t really in this equation anyway, that the best thing she could do at the moment was reconcile with the boy and have a family. For all I knew, she just came back for advice. It was something we knew so well – I play the shrink, she plays the patient. A lot like a game.
Instead, I just said, “So what is it that you want me to do?”
And as if it were the most obvious thing on Earth, she just answered, “Let’s raise the kid as ours.”
Outside the rain had started pouring, and as if on cue, lightning flashed unusually near my window. I gave myself a moment to flinch – at the light, at the thunder, at the concept that was she and I and the child that wasn’t mine.
Over dinner, she made it very clear that she had no intentions of leaving. It was then I told her that a lot has changed since the day she walked out.
“I’m seeing someone,” I said, not even looking up from my plate. “She’s nice and she doesn’t mind people knowing.” A part of me was tempted to look up, just to check if she had flinched, if the statement had at least stung, but I kept my eyes fixed on the edge of my spoon.
“Does she come here often?” I heard her ask. I gave her a slight nod. There was an audible swallow before, “I’ll stay in the other room, then. If you don’t mind.”
Of course I could have told her that at this point it was too late to mind anyway; that with the rain outside and her bag in the living room and the four-month-old baby in her stomach, there was really no way I would kick her out of the house.
Instead, I just said, “Okay.” And then, “She doesn’t live here, you know.”
With my eyes still fixed where my fork touched my plate, I felt her small smile wash over me, ticklish as it traced the edges of my face.
I hated myself because I still loved her but it wasn’t like I could do anything about it.
I kept my eyes on the door that night, fighting off sleep. I was an only child and I had no idea what needs pregnant women had. All I knew was that I had to stay awake, should she need me in the middle of the night.
After all these years, still so ready to answer any of her whims. The fact that she was pregnant did very little to ease the disgust I had for myself – for the weakness, for the vulnerability. I was not raised like this.
But then, there I was – the night and the bed and the space between our rooms so wide and pronounced. I clutched the sheet around me tighter, nails digging through the fabric and into my palm. All the seven hundred nights I’d spent without her, the endurance I had built for myself, all gone.
And then there it was – the sound of her door opening, and then mine. The shuffle of feet, the familiar give of my bedside.
“He looked just like you,” she’s saying now, touching my forehead gingerly. “He had your eyes when you smiled.”
There were things falling into place in my head, and with my sleep-deprived mind, I could barely process them. “That was it, wasn’t it?” I found myself saying, sitting up. She was moving closer, and despite myself, so was I.
An unsure nod against my head, a hand on my shoulder. She was shaking and so was I.
I was an only child. I did not know what needs pregnant women had.
My friends used to ask me how it was, sleeping with the same girl for the past seven years. Back then, when we were still happy, I only shrugged. A decent woman never kissed and told, right.
Looking back though, prone as I was to metaphors, I preferred to liken it to bicycle rides – at first, intimidating, but then you learn and the first few times, it’s exhilarating. And then it becomes a challenge. And then, when you’ve nearly had your fill, that’s when the routine feeling comes in.
It’s routine until you stop. But then, given the chance, the moment, it’s like you can get on and it’s as if you’d never stopped. You pedal and you push and it takes you places. Of course, new bicycles had their own difficulties, but they’re nothing you couldn’t master in due time.
And then you come back to your old bike, that first bike, the one you thought you’d completely grown out of, only to find it all too familiar, the nostalgia hurts.
“I’d never done this before,” I just say, still shaking, trying in vain to still my hands.
And she just says, “Neither have I.”
I tried to break-up with the girl I was seeing a few days later, using the bicycle metaphor that she ultimately did not understand.
“This is unusually sudden,” she’d said, stirring her cup of coffee absently one cloudy afternoon.
Of course, I could have told her about my old pregnant lover who was staying in the other room of my house, about the seven-year relationship I had lied about not having, about the undertow that was sucking me in a second time.
Instead, I just said, cryptically: “I am fixing an old bike.”
Needless to say, she never talked to me again after that afternoon.
When I came home after that afternoon, the house was unusually clean. In the middle of the living room table, there was a bouquet of flowers. I felt like crying as I approached, hesitant as I took the card.
In it she said, “Thank you,” in painfully beautiful script I remembered so well from old love letters. And then, “I’m sorry.” She signed it with her name, the final “a” of her name with that trademark tail that had so annoyed me before, though eventually it had its quirky way of endearing itself to me.
At the end, she appended a number. I recognized it as the number to her mother’s house.
Alone again, naturally.
By way of coping I went back to my father’s house as well, locking up my apartment in the city and taking a month’s leave. He had looked at me quizzically when I showed up on a Tuesday afternoon; the likelihood that I wound up in our old house was so slim even on weekends, given I was the workaholic that I was, so this was entirely new.
The way he looked at me as I wearily dropped my bag right in the middle of our garage told me he knew something was amiss, but the taciturn man that he was, he never let me in on what he had figured out, and as that was the way things had always been between us, I didn’t really mind.
My father understood. In the end that was all that mattered.
(“You’re a big girl now,” I could almost hear him saying as he eyed me. “You know what you’re getting into.”)
The next morning I asked him if my bike was still in the garage. He eyed me weirdly again before saying, “Yes it is, but it’s old, I’m not sure…”
“Old is nice,” I cut in, finishing my coffee. “Familiar is nice.”
It was an old BMX I last used when I was fifteen. I’d never realized it was that long ago until I got on it and noticed how badly I fit in it at first, my legs surprisingly longer.
But then, you know how it is with old things – at first you feel so awkward until you find the rhythm and it works.
I pedaled through the neighborhood all morning, past houses I once knew, smiling at the people I used to know, as if it were a perfectly normal sight, a 20-something riding a nearly defunct BMX that didn’t suit her anymore.
I pedaled until I reached the part where the road dipped – our house was built on a hill, you see – and let myself go, my feet fixed, the wind against my face. This was where I got the ugly scar on my knee when I was twelve, and as it would turn out, this was where my BMX would meet its horrid end as well.
I came home limping that afternoon, my creaking BMX in tow. When my father saw the mess I was in, he only laughed. “If your mother were alive, she’d have a fit.”
The round of laughter we shared after, right there in the garage, was absolutely priceless.
When I returned to my apartment a month later, I stepped on a note someone had slipped under my door.
It was a letter from her, saying sorry and thank you again. And then, “I decided you were right.” I closed the door behind me, leaned against it for support. She’d come to her senses, gone and tried to repair the relationship she used to have, the one she didn’t have with me.
I let out a sigh. It was mostly relief, albeit mixed with a strangled cry.
Fishing out my phone, I struggled to call the girl I had broken up with a few weeks ago. Reaching her answering machine, I just said, “I’m done fixing.” And then, “There’s nothing more I could do. I’m sorry.”
She picked up the moment I was to hang up, her voice spent. “You’re done?” she asked. It was 10 in the evening, and the night was clear outside.
“I am,” I said, clearing the tears out of my throat. “I want back in.”
The most curious things happen while you’re in the middle of an important thing, when you could both look back and look ahead.
On the other end, she’s saying, “Then come back in.”
In my head, I hear the water running and falling.#