A/N: 05-24-02—Aha, yes; everyone go listen to Anthony's song "Always"
before reading this, if you want the full effect. No particular reason; it
was just my mood-setter. Now it can be yours. :) Here, another multi-
flashback chapter... in which it will be entirely appropriate to say "Poor
Mark" at any given moment. I'm posting in hopes that Becca will take a hint
and do the same. I'm dying here. Must have chapter five. And Liss—look, I
did it! Happy? :P Bring on the next challenge! (But no more ocean life. Too
hard.)
Disclaimer: I don't even own Hungarian Rhapsody #2. (Although I wish I did. Sigh.) And I think there's a couple more instances of Aida-stealing in here. You can hardly blame me, I'm seeing it three weeks from Tuesday. Very excited. Adam Pascal, shirtless, two rows away. *dies*
Er... yeah. On with chapter 10.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
*It's not like every devastating end brings a new beginning...*
—Matt Caplan, "Broken" (I get to see him three weeks from Thursday, woohoo!!!)
10. [M]
Three days melted into one long, sleepless tangle of sunrises and sunsets—most of which went unnoticed by me.
I found a bottle of wine left over from Valentine's Day, and tried to drink myself into a stupor... but found I couldn't hold anything down. Booze, cold cereal, cheese, doughnuts... nothing. Even a glass of water made me sick for the first two days.
Every morning I would leave my bed, and after two steps, fall into a broken heap on the floor against the wall, unable to keep from noticing how empty the room was. Every morning I kept thinking that maybe if I tried hard enough, I could pretend she was still here. And she *was* still here—her clothes, her shampoo bottles, her make-up, the photo albums that she worked on on Sunday afternoons... now all I had to do was pretend she was in the next room. Taking a shower, or playing around with my camera, or making waffles with strawberries and whipped cream (which was very rarely used on the actual waffles).
All I had to do was forget that she was gone.
All I had to do was forget how much I loved her.
Every morning, when I forced myself out of that empty bedroom, into the even emptier remainder of our little apartment—*my* little apartment, now—I would find my eyes drifting towards the window, until I gave up and actually looked down at the street. Every morning I hoped to find his car parked along the sidewalk, and every morning, it wasn't.
The fourth morning, I stopped looking.
Despite everything, I was doing a pretty good job of not thinking about it. I was still on that level of emptiness-without-a-cause; content to remain depressed as long as I didn't start thinking about why. I could still pretend that she was coming home that evening, and all my problems would vanish into thin air at the click of that front door.
My camera remained on the kitchen table, undisturbed. Once or twice a day I would pull myself off the couch and wander over to it, but by the time I got there, the few steps across the room had already taken up all my energy. I never even touched it.
It was another restless night of staring up at the dark ceiling when the knock on the door came.
Mimi had always slept on the left side of the bed, and I slept on the right. But lately I found myself rolling over to her side, hugging the empty space and being careful that my tears didn't wash away that lingering scent of coconut and strawberries that made that pillow so distinctly hers. She couldn't really be gone, I pleaded to whatever force or higher, eviler power had taken her from me. Not when that scent was so real... so vivid.
After a few days, it started to fade.
And that night came the knock on the front door. Fear crept its way into my thoughts. I don't know why. Intruders didn't knock, and if it wasn't an intruder, then it had to be someone I knew. I certainly had no reason to be afraid of anyone I knew. I should be ecstatic. A sign of life. A sign that someone was aware that, unlike some people, *I* was still alive... though barely.
For the first time in four days, I was actually glad to escape that room. I actually had a reason to. I pulled on the nearest pair of pajama pants, located my glasses, and shuffled to the door.
Behind it stood Maureen. Her soft, glowing face was streaked from crying, and her eyes blackened from the mascara and eye shadow that had collided with tears and were now running down her cheeks. Those insanely colored curls were pulled halfway up on top of her head, and she held an old sweater jacket tightly around her.
"I couldn't sleep," she squeaked.
Neither of us had enough energy to actually make it all the way inside, so instead we simply fell into each other's arms, and remained there in the doorway. It wasn't long before the cool night air from outside met the only slightly warmer air in the loft, causing us both to shiver.
I pulled her inside, and closed the door behind us. As one tormented being, we found our way down the hall, one of my arms around her shoulder, the other around her waist. We reached the door to my bedroom, but I was more than a little reluctant to return to that place... and even more reluctant to share it with someone else.
But she walked out of my embrace, crossed the room, and collapsed on my side of the bed. I watched from the doorway as she curled into a ball, choking on a persistent sob every few seconds. I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do—I wasn't used to a woman occupying my bed. Except Mimi, of course. Strangely enough, the last one who'd occupied it before her was... Maureen.
She seemed as comfortable there as she ever had, and I realized I was being granted another escape—a rare occasion in recent days: regression to a long gone time of my life, when there had been no Mimi and no suicides in the bathroom and no AIDS and no padlocked doors.
I followed her footsteps and lay down on the bed, curling up against her and pulling a blanket around us. And something happened, something that had been no more than an unattainable dream for the last four days—
I felt slightly less alone.
I had lost my love... but she had lost her best friend.
I could certainly relate to that.
It was a strangely fulfilling emptiness that crossed between us, curled up together in a bed we hadn't shared in years, as silent tears flooded the pillows. How fast that scent of coconut and strawberries faded into the even more familiar, yet long-forgotten aroma of kiwi and vanilla and the latest Givenchi fragrance. It tore me apart, that decision lying before me—whether to hold onto that last trace of my love, or the comfort of a friend's embrace.
I chose the latter, and we were asleep in minutes.
Maureen was gone the next morning when I woke up. It couldn't have been a more familiar experience. In all our time together, I could probably count on both hands the number of times I woke up beside her. I suspected it's why I'd grown so very attached to nights with Mimi. There wasn't one morning I opened my eyes without seeing that bundle of curls peeking out from the top of the sheet, or at least somewhere in the room. The first few nights we were together, I would fall asleep wondering if I would ever see her again. And then, a week later, I woke up in the middle of the night to find her wide awake, watching me sleep. I'd never felt more secure in my life.
She had left a note by my bed, however. 'I love you. Call me later.'
That was Maureen, all right. So many pointless words in the light of day, but when night fell, and we were alone in our room with nothing around us but darkness and each other, that's all she would say. Even if she wasn't there the next morning. Even if we'd had a fight that day... which was more often than not. She would still say it, just before we fell asleep. 'I love you, Marky.'
I knew she always meant it.
That afternoon, I pulled myself out of bed. It was my first Sunday since... it.
I wasn't quite up to recognizing it as the day I lose my love, my best friend, and my future all in one night. For now, it was just... it. My curse. The beginning of the end of my life.
Sundays were our day. On Sundays I never had to go over to NYU, and she never had to be at the club. We'd wake up late after the usual wild passion of Saturday nights, eat a sickeningly huge breakfast, and spend the afternoon walking in Central Park. I would take my camera and film her, and people, and things, and whatever the hell else felt inspiring. Which, considering who I was with, was usually everything.
Today, my camera remained on the table. Untouched in nearly a week. It hadn't been out of my hands for more than a few hours since the day I received it as a high school graduation present. And now, every day it began to feel a little less a part of me.
And so I went to Central Park on Sunday afternoon, without Mimi for the first time in six months, and without my camera for the first time in four years. The last time had been on a dare. Roger bet me I couldn't go a week without taking it everywhere I went. For added meanness, he dragged me to Central Park without it, and broke down laughing when I finally sat stubbornly on a bench and declared that Central Park was pointless if I couldn't film anything. He rolled his eyes, pulled my camera out from underneath his jacket—much to my surprise—and placed it in my hands.
God, I missed him.
I reached the park, and spotted a bench where we'd shared an ice cream, scarcely one week before Roger's return. And with that single, random memory, the present became an empty space I was no longer part of.
Six months ago.
Only days after she arrived home from rehab... the night before she found the letters and I kissed her and we lay squashed on that couch in the darkness and she whispered that she loved me.
It was the first time I felt it.
We were in the living room, amusing ourselves by rearranging what little furniture we had. I'd twice been landed on by a chair, and Mimi was proving her immensely superior physical strength by sliding the couch around the room for no apparent reason. I simply stuck my tongue out at her from my spot on the floor, as I attempted to lift the chair off me.
"Hold this," she instructed, tossing me a rolled up rug as she shoved an end table (translation: wooden box) over to one side.
"Glad to help," I replied, eyeing the rug warily, but unable to suppress a grin.
I searched for the remote, but it would have been impossible to find anything in this mess. I had borrowed a television set from work for a few days to do some editing at home, and soon discovered that cable TV was highly overrated.
"Seriously, what *is* this?" I shook my head, watching the screen. "Who the hell makes documentaries on sea bass?"
Mimi tossed me a throw pillow and a grin, and effortlessly shoved the couch a few more feet. "People like you, except who live out in the boonies."
I put on quite a pout. "I don't film fish!"
"You filmed our neighbor's *bug zapper* last night!"
My mouth opened once, twice. No words came out, and she was still smiling at me triumphantly, mischievously... no way was I going to let her get away with that. In one awkward, leaping moment, I scrambled off the floor, retained a steady position on the floor, and hurled the pillow at her.
She didn't waste any time, grabbed a much larger pillow, and threw it right back at me. I realized this could go on a while, abandoned props altogether, and began chasing her around the couch. I made it only halfway around before tripping on that damn rug and falling flat onto the ground.
"Shit!" I mumbled into the floor.
She stopped running and turned around to see what had become of me. I had never seen one person try so hard not to laugh. "Oh, Mark..." she began, but lost all control and burst out laughing.
"Hush, you."
She plopped down on the floor to help me up, but by the time I reached a seated position, neither of us really wanted to go any further. Her arms were around me, and I took advantage of my incapacitated state to rest my head against her shoulder. For a long, silent moment, we simply remained on the cold floor, leaning against each other and the back of the couch, half- listening to voices from the television discuss various sorts of bait.
It had become like that, in recent days before this. One of us would walk up behind the other, or sit down beside the other, with the obvious, simple need for nothing more than a hug. And then for a few special moments, everything would be silent, and blank, and perfect.
But this was the first time her touch had ever made my heart beat faster.
Today on that park bench sat another couple, also sharing an ice cream. I wondered if maybe, four weeks from now, they would be torn from each other as we had.
No, of course not. Things like that only happened to me.
How ironic it was, really. I'd known her for years, and we'd been together for months, and all that time, I knew someday she would leave us. And I knew it could be someday soon. But 'someday' was never today. It was always tomorrow. Every morning I would wake up and be glad simply that we had made it through another day. All my worries could wait until tomorrow.
And then tomorrow came too soon.
It was so unfair. She'd never wanted to go. She may have believed in 'no day but today', but when it came down to it, I knew how scared she was. I knew firsthand...
Three months ago.
Neither of us had said a word on our way home on the subway. True, New York's underground transportation isn't exactly the milieu of choice to discuss especially personal issues out loud. But complaints of silence were just my excuse—what I really missed was the little things that took place when we were out together. The way she would reach under the table at a restaurant and take my hand, or glance at me across the subway car if we couldn't find two seats together, with that wildly seductive, 'You're mine when we get home' look.
This time we'd found two seats together... but there was none of that today.
We were coming back from her doctor's appointment. Just a routine check-up as always. They were generally pleasant excursions—they would say how wonderfully she was doing, and we'd go out for ice cream to celebrate. That's how it always was, for as long as I'd been tagging along. I didn't know it any other way. But today was different. Today they'd called us back to a stuffy white room with posters of internal organs tacked to the wall, and told us her T-cells weren't doing as well as they'd hoped, and that they were changing her prescription.
I'm not sure why exactly this formed a silence between us. Maybe that memory we'd repressed was just coming back to haunt us—the one from the first time I went along to her appointment. She'd introduced me as her boyfriend, and her doctor smiled and shook my hand, and asked if I was HIV- positive too. I said no. He'd looked at me blankly for a moment before replying, "Oh."
The silence from the subway continued throughout the day, although it wasn't a silence of resentment or grudges. We had nothing to be mad at each other for. It wasn't anyone's fault. It was one of those moments I just despised, where I knew we wouldn't be able to carry on a conversation if we tried, and it only pissed me off more to think that we'd even *have* to try.
I crawled into bed early that night, and was doing my best to concentrate on a book, when she finally stepped into the room.
She shot me a smile—a brief one—but even with that, the wave was lifted and I recovered my voice. "Hey."
Her eyes locked with mine as she crawled onto the bed, lifted the book from my hands and placed it on the nightstand, and kissed me.
Words really are overrated.
Some while later, we lay curled up together, wide awake but utterly still, as I willed my heart to beat in rhythm with hers. It had grown considerably darker, but I could still see my shirt hanging on top of the closet door, to where it had been hastily thrown some time ago.
I was idly stroking her back, my eyes fixated on the black ceiling, when I felt a cold drop of moisture on my shoulder. I lifted my head to look down at her, and she was crying.
"Oh my God." I lifted us both up. "What's..."
I fell to a silent halt as I watched her, and was met with that look of helplessness I so rarely encountered.
"Talk to me," I pleaded.
She blinked, once. Twice. Fresh tears were sent streaming down her face.
"I don't want to leave you," she whispered.
I wondered how I could still hear those words so clearly in my head, after all this time. Especially with the inevitable bustling noise of Central Park. Even on a Sunday afternoon. Peaceful, yes... but silent, no.
As I kept walking, my significant lack of a camera was beginning to take its toll on me. It shouldn't, I reasoned; it should be the last thing on my mind at a time like this. But habit was too strong, and I found myself glaring with envy at the tourists who walked by me with their camcorders, gleefully filming landmarks and signs and homeless people, desperate to hold onto the memory of that New York experience.
A slender young woman brushed past me in an obvious rush. I turned around, watching her run further and further in the opposite direction. Before she was completely out of sight, however, I spotted the pointe shoes she was carrying by the ribbons, and a pair of pink tights hanging out of her dance bag.
Five months ago.
It was a typical 2 a.m. chat, although this time we had assigned ourselves a topic—what we wanted to be when we grew up. All right, so we'd had a few drinks. That might explain why we were laughing so hard.
She hit me with a nearby pillow, giggling uncontrollably. "You're not serious."
"Oh, come on, it's not that weird."
"A paleontologist?! What, like Ross on 'Friends'?"
I rolled my eyes. "Well, when you're seven, it sounds cool! Digging up dinosaur stuff and whatnot, ya know..."
She shook her head disbelievingly and kissed the tip of my nose. "You're such a dork, Mark Cohen."
I smiled—dorkily, no doubt. "Your turn."
She sighed, looking away. "Nah."
"Come ON!" I pulled her onto my lap and dropped a kiss into her hair. "You have to. I told you mine."
"Fine," she sighed again, fingering the end of my shirtsleeve. "I wanted to be a ballerina."
My attention had been caught. "Really?"
"I studied for eleven years."
I fumbled for words as I pulled myself up from my slouched position and stared at her. "You never told me this."
She smiled. "You never asked."
"Well..." I shifted spots on the bed until I was sitting on my pillow. "What happened?"
"I got kicked out of the house and became a junkie," she replied simply.
I wasn't sure how I was supposed to respond to this. I couldn't say, 'Oh, you're exaggerating.' I'd taken her to rehab myself, after all. And I couldn't imagine a person more likely to get kicked out of the house. Probably before her sixteenth birthday, even. I wanted to ask her all about it—about her family and what happened to her on the streets and how on earth she could have ever fallen in love with someone like me...
But what I actually found myself saying was significantly less verbose. "You should do it."
"Do what?"
"Be a ballet dancer. What's stopping you now?"
She shrugged, smiling wistfully as she turned away. "Some things just aren't meant to be, baby," she informed me softly.
"I don't believe that." I pulled her close to me, breathing in the strawberries and coconut, and it wasn't long before we were both fast asleep on that old, flattened mattress of mine that we had come to know so well.
The next morning, I awoke in an empty bed. It wasn't an alarming circumstance; she was either showering or making us breakfast or something of the like. But there were no sounds of running water or frying eggs this morning.
There was music...
I drifted out of bed and started for the door, when I realized the music was coming from the living room. I closed my eyes, one hand on the doorknob, determined to recognize it. Yes—there it was: Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody #2. The only thing I'd ever enjoyed about those seven grueling, mandatory years of piano lessons.
I didn't know we had a stereo.
With one hand, I pushed the bedroom door open just a crack, and poked my head out into the living room. The coffee table was shoved over to one side of the room, and Mimi's small CD player had been dragged into the scene from downstairs. And in the center of the room, clad in stretch shorts and an oversized t-shirt, was my love.
She was moving through an elaborate combination of ballet and modern and... whatever else dancers tend to do. Obviously something learned years ago, but now executed with the passion of rediscovery. Her attention was lost in the music; not once did she take note of my presence. Even the pieces of furniture in the room seemed to have halted, in their usual routine of doing nothing, to glue their eyes to her. She commanded the room, the movements, the music. I couldn't believe this was the same girl who once gave me a lap dance in a sleazy nightclub before I even knew her name...
Instinctively, my hands moved towards my camera, resting on the dresser. My eyes never leaving her, I flipped the 'On' switch and stuck the lens through the small space in the door, and for seven minutes, I filmed.
She never knew I saw her.
I'd never seen anything so beautiful in my life.
...And those were just the good memories.
Never mind the rest of the downpour that was flooding my mind—the times we argued about Roger, about commitment, about where she'd been if she hadn't come home one night. I'd storm out of the loft, or she'd become purposely distant, just to drive me into a whirl of insanity and suspicions. Then later I'd drift into her room and discover an unsent letter on the dresser, telling me how much she loved me.
Then I'd notice the ancient date at the top of the paper, and realized she'd written it to Roger.
I'd always tried to dismiss it—tell myself Roger was in the past. She would always love him, and so would I. But I'd won in the end, I would tell myself. Little did I know that the end hadn't even come, and now that it had, we'd both lost. Dismally.
My thoughts, suddenly darker, carried my steps to a far more deserted area of the park. Only minutes from the bustle of Fifth Avenue, but utterly abandoned. That was one of the amazing things about New York City. You could turn a street corner and find yourself in another world. And those new worlds never failed to fascinate me—I hadn't ever encountered the same one twice.
Tourists were nonexistent here, and the only sign of life—if you could call it that—was some fifty feet away. The man I'd never had the misfortune of encountering directly, but nonetheless recognized on sight. A dark, hooded trench coat—very Lord Voldemort-esque; pockets bulging with little bags of white powdered poison. Or bliss. Depending on how you saw it. For months I'd watched helplessly as my roommate, my songwriter/musician/best friend, would return to him time and again; and later as his girlfriend—a small, crazy, charming little girl with dimples and big curly hair—followed in the footsteps he'd tried so hard to erase, and finally landed herself right into rehab.
Today, the man was preying on another desperate weakling of an individual. But this one didn't look quite as lifeless as the typical junkie—he was fully alert, eyes darting wildly around him as he slipped the man a wad of bills and stuffed a little white bag into the pocket of his leather jacket. I couldn't see his face, but that mass of curly bleached-blond hair was a little too memory-evoking for my taste, and I started to walk away.
And then I froze.
My eyes clung to his distant figure for a last moment, watching as he nervously ran his hands through that bleached-blond hair—a gesture I knew better than any of my own subconscious habits.
It was Roger.
[So... nyah. :P Here ends my concrete outline for the story... unsure how exactly to continue... review if you want more—it would be very easy for me to drop the whole story at this point... ;)]
Disclaimer: I don't even own Hungarian Rhapsody #2. (Although I wish I did. Sigh.) And I think there's a couple more instances of Aida-stealing in here. You can hardly blame me, I'm seeing it three weeks from Tuesday. Very excited. Adam Pascal, shirtless, two rows away. *dies*
Er... yeah. On with chapter 10.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
*It's not like every devastating end brings a new beginning...*
—Matt Caplan, "Broken" (I get to see him three weeks from Thursday, woohoo!!!)
10. [M]
Three days melted into one long, sleepless tangle of sunrises and sunsets—most of which went unnoticed by me.
I found a bottle of wine left over from Valentine's Day, and tried to drink myself into a stupor... but found I couldn't hold anything down. Booze, cold cereal, cheese, doughnuts... nothing. Even a glass of water made me sick for the first two days.
Every morning I would leave my bed, and after two steps, fall into a broken heap on the floor against the wall, unable to keep from noticing how empty the room was. Every morning I kept thinking that maybe if I tried hard enough, I could pretend she was still here. And she *was* still here—her clothes, her shampoo bottles, her make-up, the photo albums that she worked on on Sunday afternoons... now all I had to do was pretend she was in the next room. Taking a shower, or playing around with my camera, or making waffles with strawberries and whipped cream (which was very rarely used on the actual waffles).
All I had to do was forget that she was gone.
All I had to do was forget how much I loved her.
Every morning, when I forced myself out of that empty bedroom, into the even emptier remainder of our little apartment—*my* little apartment, now—I would find my eyes drifting towards the window, until I gave up and actually looked down at the street. Every morning I hoped to find his car parked along the sidewalk, and every morning, it wasn't.
The fourth morning, I stopped looking.
Despite everything, I was doing a pretty good job of not thinking about it. I was still on that level of emptiness-without-a-cause; content to remain depressed as long as I didn't start thinking about why. I could still pretend that she was coming home that evening, and all my problems would vanish into thin air at the click of that front door.
My camera remained on the kitchen table, undisturbed. Once or twice a day I would pull myself off the couch and wander over to it, but by the time I got there, the few steps across the room had already taken up all my energy. I never even touched it.
It was another restless night of staring up at the dark ceiling when the knock on the door came.
Mimi had always slept on the left side of the bed, and I slept on the right. But lately I found myself rolling over to her side, hugging the empty space and being careful that my tears didn't wash away that lingering scent of coconut and strawberries that made that pillow so distinctly hers. She couldn't really be gone, I pleaded to whatever force or higher, eviler power had taken her from me. Not when that scent was so real... so vivid.
After a few days, it started to fade.
And that night came the knock on the front door. Fear crept its way into my thoughts. I don't know why. Intruders didn't knock, and if it wasn't an intruder, then it had to be someone I knew. I certainly had no reason to be afraid of anyone I knew. I should be ecstatic. A sign of life. A sign that someone was aware that, unlike some people, *I* was still alive... though barely.
For the first time in four days, I was actually glad to escape that room. I actually had a reason to. I pulled on the nearest pair of pajama pants, located my glasses, and shuffled to the door.
Behind it stood Maureen. Her soft, glowing face was streaked from crying, and her eyes blackened from the mascara and eye shadow that had collided with tears and were now running down her cheeks. Those insanely colored curls were pulled halfway up on top of her head, and she held an old sweater jacket tightly around her.
"I couldn't sleep," she squeaked.
Neither of us had enough energy to actually make it all the way inside, so instead we simply fell into each other's arms, and remained there in the doorway. It wasn't long before the cool night air from outside met the only slightly warmer air in the loft, causing us both to shiver.
I pulled her inside, and closed the door behind us. As one tormented being, we found our way down the hall, one of my arms around her shoulder, the other around her waist. We reached the door to my bedroom, but I was more than a little reluctant to return to that place... and even more reluctant to share it with someone else.
But she walked out of my embrace, crossed the room, and collapsed on my side of the bed. I watched from the doorway as she curled into a ball, choking on a persistent sob every few seconds. I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do—I wasn't used to a woman occupying my bed. Except Mimi, of course. Strangely enough, the last one who'd occupied it before her was... Maureen.
She seemed as comfortable there as she ever had, and I realized I was being granted another escape—a rare occasion in recent days: regression to a long gone time of my life, when there had been no Mimi and no suicides in the bathroom and no AIDS and no padlocked doors.
I followed her footsteps and lay down on the bed, curling up against her and pulling a blanket around us. And something happened, something that had been no more than an unattainable dream for the last four days—
I felt slightly less alone.
I had lost my love... but she had lost her best friend.
I could certainly relate to that.
It was a strangely fulfilling emptiness that crossed between us, curled up together in a bed we hadn't shared in years, as silent tears flooded the pillows. How fast that scent of coconut and strawberries faded into the even more familiar, yet long-forgotten aroma of kiwi and vanilla and the latest Givenchi fragrance. It tore me apart, that decision lying before me—whether to hold onto that last trace of my love, or the comfort of a friend's embrace.
I chose the latter, and we were asleep in minutes.
Maureen was gone the next morning when I woke up. It couldn't have been a more familiar experience. In all our time together, I could probably count on both hands the number of times I woke up beside her. I suspected it's why I'd grown so very attached to nights with Mimi. There wasn't one morning I opened my eyes without seeing that bundle of curls peeking out from the top of the sheet, or at least somewhere in the room. The first few nights we were together, I would fall asleep wondering if I would ever see her again. And then, a week later, I woke up in the middle of the night to find her wide awake, watching me sleep. I'd never felt more secure in my life.
She had left a note by my bed, however. 'I love you. Call me later.'
That was Maureen, all right. So many pointless words in the light of day, but when night fell, and we were alone in our room with nothing around us but darkness and each other, that's all she would say. Even if she wasn't there the next morning. Even if we'd had a fight that day... which was more often than not. She would still say it, just before we fell asleep. 'I love you, Marky.'
I knew she always meant it.
That afternoon, I pulled myself out of bed. It was my first Sunday since... it.
I wasn't quite up to recognizing it as the day I lose my love, my best friend, and my future all in one night. For now, it was just... it. My curse. The beginning of the end of my life.
Sundays were our day. On Sundays I never had to go over to NYU, and she never had to be at the club. We'd wake up late after the usual wild passion of Saturday nights, eat a sickeningly huge breakfast, and spend the afternoon walking in Central Park. I would take my camera and film her, and people, and things, and whatever the hell else felt inspiring. Which, considering who I was with, was usually everything.
Today, my camera remained on the table. Untouched in nearly a week. It hadn't been out of my hands for more than a few hours since the day I received it as a high school graduation present. And now, every day it began to feel a little less a part of me.
And so I went to Central Park on Sunday afternoon, without Mimi for the first time in six months, and without my camera for the first time in four years. The last time had been on a dare. Roger bet me I couldn't go a week without taking it everywhere I went. For added meanness, he dragged me to Central Park without it, and broke down laughing when I finally sat stubbornly on a bench and declared that Central Park was pointless if I couldn't film anything. He rolled his eyes, pulled my camera out from underneath his jacket—much to my surprise—and placed it in my hands.
God, I missed him.
I reached the park, and spotted a bench where we'd shared an ice cream, scarcely one week before Roger's return. And with that single, random memory, the present became an empty space I was no longer part of.
Six months ago.
Only days after she arrived home from rehab... the night before she found the letters and I kissed her and we lay squashed on that couch in the darkness and she whispered that she loved me.
It was the first time I felt it.
We were in the living room, amusing ourselves by rearranging what little furniture we had. I'd twice been landed on by a chair, and Mimi was proving her immensely superior physical strength by sliding the couch around the room for no apparent reason. I simply stuck my tongue out at her from my spot on the floor, as I attempted to lift the chair off me.
"Hold this," she instructed, tossing me a rolled up rug as she shoved an end table (translation: wooden box) over to one side.
"Glad to help," I replied, eyeing the rug warily, but unable to suppress a grin.
I searched for the remote, but it would have been impossible to find anything in this mess. I had borrowed a television set from work for a few days to do some editing at home, and soon discovered that cable TV was highly overrated.
"Seriously, what *is* this?" I shook my head, watching the screen. "Who the hell makes documentaries on sea bass?"
Mimi tossed me a throw pillow and a grin, and effortlessly shoved the couch a few more feet. "People like you, except who live out in the boonies."
I put on quite a pout. "I don't film fish!"
"You filmed our neighbor's *bug zapper* last night!"
My mouth opened once, twice. No words came out, and she was still smiling at me triumphantly, mischievously... no way was I going to let her get away with that. In one awkward, leaping moment, I scrambled off the floor, retained a steady position on the floor, and hurled the pillow at her.
She didn't waste any time, grabbed a much larger pillow, and threw it right back at me. I realized this could go on a while, abandoned props altogether, and began chasing her around the couch. I made it only halfway around before tripping on that damn rug and falling flat onto the ground.
"Shit!" I mumbled into the floor.
She stopped running and turned around to see what had become of me. I had never seen one person try so hard not to laugh. "Oh, Mark..." she began, but lost all control and burst out laughing.
"Hush, you."
She plopped down on the floor to help me up, but by the time I reached a seated position, neither of us really wanted to go any further. Her arms were around me, and I took advantage of my incapacitated state to rest my head against her shoulder. For a long, silent moment, we simply remained on the cold floor, leaning against each other and the back of the couch, half- listening to voices from the television discuss various sorts of bait.
It had become like that, in recent days before this. One of us would walk up behind the other, or sit down beside the other, with the obvious, simple need for nothing more than a hug. And then for a few special moments, everything would be silent, and blank, and perfect.
But this was the first time her touch had ever made my heart beat faster.
Today on that park bench sat another couple, also sharing an ice cream. I wondered if maybe, four weeks from now, they would be torn from each other as we had.
No, of course not. Things like that only happened to me.
How ironic it was, really. I'd known her for years, and we'd been together for months, and all that time, I knew someday she would leave us. And I knew it could be someday soon. But 'someday' was never today. It was always tomorrow. Every morning I would wake up and be glad simply that we had made it through another day. All my worries could wait until tomorrow.
And then tomorrow came too soon.
It was so unfair. She'd never wanted to go. She may have believed in 'no day but today', but when it came down to it, I knew how scared she was. I knew firsthand...
Three months ago.
Neither of us had said a word on our way home on the subway. True, New York's underground transportation isn't exactly the milieu of choice to discuss especially personal issues out loud. But complaints of silence were just my excuse—what I really missed was the little things that took place when we were out together. The way she would reach under the table at a restaurant and take my hand, or glance at me across the subway car if we couldn't find two seats together, with that wildly seductive, 'You're mine when we get home' look.
This time we'd found two seats together... but there was none of that today.
We were coming back from her doctor's appointment. Just a routine check-up as always. They were generally pleasant excursions—they would say how wonderfully she was doing, and we'd go out for ice cream to celebrate. That's how it always was, for as long as I'd been tagging along. I didn't know it any other way. But today was different. Today they'd called us back to a stuffy white room with posters of internal organs tacked to the wall, and told us her T-cells weren't doing as well as they'd hoped, and that they were changing her prescription.
I'm not sure why exactly this formed a silence between us. Maybe that memory we'd repressed was just coming back to haunt us—the one from the first time I went along to her appointment. She'd introduced me as her boyfriend, and her doctor smiled and shook my hand, and asked if I was HIV- positive too. I said no. He'd looked at me blankly for a moment before replying, "Oh."
The silence from the subway continued throughout the day, although it wasn't a silence of resentment or grudges. We had nothing to be mad at each other for. It wasn't anyone's fault. It was one of those moments I just despised, where I knew we wouldn't be able to carry on a conversation if we tried, and it only pissed me off more to think that we'd even *have* to try.
I crawled into bed early that night, and was doing my best to concentrate on a book, when she finally stepped into the room.
She shot me a smile—a brief one—but even with that, the wave was lifted and I recovered my voice. "Hey."
Her eyes locked with mine as she crawled onto the bed, lifted the book from my hands and placed it on the nightstand, and kissed me.
Words really are overrated.
Some while later, we lay curled up together, wide awake but utterly still, as I willed my heart to beat in rhythm with hers. It had grown considerably darker, but I could still see my shirt hanging on top of the closet door, to where it had been hastily thrown some time ago.
I was idly stroking her back, my eyes fixated on the black ceiling, when I felt a cold drop of moisture on my shoulder. I lifted my head to look down at her, and she was crying.
"Oh my God." I lifted us both up. "What's..."
I fell to a silent halt as I watched her, and was met with that look of helplessness I so rarely encountered.
"Talk to me," I pleaded.
She blinked, once. Twice. Fresh tears were sent streaming down her face.
"I don't want to leave you," she whispered.
I wondered how I could still hear those words so clearly in my head, after all this time. Especially with the inevitable bustling noise of Central Park. Even on a Sunday afternoon. Peaceful, yes... but silent, no.
As I kept walking, my significant lack of a camera was beginning to take its toll on me. It shouldn't, I reasoned; it should be the last thing on my mind at a time like this. But habit was too strong, and I found myself glaring with envy at the tourists who walked by me with their camcorders, gleefully filming landmarks and signs and homeless people, desperate to hold onto the memory of that New York experience.
A slender young woman brushed past me in an obvious rush. I turned around, watching her run further and further in the opposite direction. Before she was completely out of sight, however, I spotted the pointe shoes she was carrying by the ribbons, and a pair of pink tights hanging out of her dance bag.
Five months ago.
It was a typical 2 a.m. chat, although this time we had assigned ourselves a topic—what we wanted to be when we grew up. All right, so we'd had a few drinks. That might explain why we were laughing so hard.
She hit me with a nearby pillow, giggling uncontrollably. "You're not serious."
"Oh, come on, it's not that weird."
"A paleontologist?! What, like Ross on 'Friends'?"
I rolled my eyes. "Well, when you're seven, it sounds cool! Digging up dinosaur stuff and whatnot, ya know..."
She shook her head disbelievingly and kissed the tip of my nose. "You're such a dork, Mark Cohen."
I smiled—dorkily, no doubt. "Your turn."
She sighed, looking away. "Nah."
"Come ON!" I pulled her onto my lap and dropped a kiss into her hair. "You have to. I told you mine."
"Fine," she sighed again, fingering the end of my shirtsleeve. "I wanted to be a ballerina."
My attention had been caught. "Really?"
"I studied for eleven years."
I fumbled for words as I pulled myself up from my slouched position and stared at her. "You never told me this."
She smiled. "You never asked."
"Well..." I shifted spots on the bed until I was sitting on my pillow. "What happened?"
"I got kicked out of the house and became a junkie," she replied simply.
I wasn't sure how I was supposed to respond to this. I couldn't say, 'Oh, you're exaggerating.' I'd taken her to rehab myself, after all. And I couldn't imagine a person more likely to get kicked out of the house. Probably before her sixteenth birthday, even. I wanted to ask her all about it—about her family and what happened to her on the streets and how on earth she could have ever fallen in love with someone like me...
But what I actually found myself saying was significantly less verbose. "You should do it."
"Do what?"
"Be a ballet dancer. What's stopping you now?"
She shrugged, smiling wistfully as she turned away. "Some things just aren't meant to be, baby," she informed me softly.
"I don't believe that." I pulled her close to me, breathing in the strawberries and coconut, and it wasn't long before we were both fast asleep on that old, flattened mattress of mine that we had come to know so well.
The next morning, I awoke in an empty bed. It wasn't an alarming circumstance; she was either showering or making us breakfast or something of the like. But there were no sounds of running water or frying eggs this morning.
There was music...
I drifted out of bed and started for the door, when I realized the music was coming from the living room. I closed my eyes, one hand on the doorknob, determined to recognize it. Yes—there it was: Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody #2. The only thing I'd ever enjoyed about those seven grueling, mandatory years of piano lessons.
I didn't know we had a stereo.
With one hand, I pushed the bedroom door open just a crack, and poked my head out into the living room. The coffee table was shoved over to one side of the room, and Mimi's small CD player had been dragged into the scene from downstairs. And in the center of the room, clad in stretch shorts and an oversized t-shirt, was my love.
She was moving through an elaborate combination of ballet and modern and... whatever else dancers tend to do. Obviously something learned years ago, but now executed with the passion of rediscovery. Her attention was lost in the music; not once did she take note of my presence. Even the pieces of furniture in the room seemed to have halted, in their usual routine of doing nothing, to glue their eyes to her. She commanded the room, the movements, the music. I couldn't believe this was the same girl who once gave me a lap dance in a sleazy nightclub before I even knew her name...
Instinctively, my hands moved towards my camera, resting on the dresser. My eyes never leaving her, I flipped the 'On' switch and stuck the lens through the small space in the door, and for seven minutes, I filmed.
She never knew I saw her.
I'd never seen anything so beautiful in my life.
...And those were just the good memories.
Never mind the rest of the downpour that was flooding my mind—the times we argued about Roger, about commitment, about where she'd been if she hadn't come home one night. I'd storm out of the loft, or she'd become purposely distant, just to drive me into a whirl of insanity and suspicions. Then later I'd drift into her room and discover an unsent letter on the dresser, telling me how much she loved me.
Then I'd notice the ancient date at the top of the paper, and realized she'd written it to Roger.
I'd always tried to dismiss it—tell myself Roger was in the past. She would always love him, and so would I. But I'd won in the end, I would tell myself. Little did I know that the end hadn't even come, and now that it had, we'd both lost. Dismally.
My thoughts, suddenly darker, carried my steps to a far more deserted area of the park. Only minutes from the bustle of Fifth Avenue, but utterly abandoned. That was one of the amazing things about New York City. You could turn a street corner and find yourself in another world. And those new worlds never failed to fascinate me—I hadn't ever encountered the same one twice.
Tourists were nonexistent here, and the only sign of life—if you could call it that—was some fifty feet away. The man I'd never had the misfortune of encountering directly, but nonetheless recognized on sight. A dark, hooded trench coat—very Lord Voldemort-esque; pockets bulging with little bags of white powdered poison. Or bliss. Depending on how you saw it. For months I'd watched helplessly as my roommate, my songwriter/musician/best friend, would return to him time and again; and later as his girlfriend—a small, crazy, charming little girl with dimples and big curly hair—followed in the footsteps he'd tried so hard to erase, and finally landed herself right into rehab.
Today, the man was preying on another desperate weakling of an individual. But this one didn't look quite as lifeless as the typical junkie—he was fully alert, eyes darting wildly around him as he slipped the man a wad of bills and stuffed a little white bag into the pocket of his leather jacket. I couldn't see his face, but that mass of curly bleached-blond hair was a little too memory-evoking for my taste, and I started to walk away.
And then I froze.
My eyes clung to his distant figure for a last moment, watching as he nervously ran his hands through that bleached-blond hair—a gesture I knew better than any of my own subconscious habits.
It was Roger.
[So... nyah. :P Here ends my concrete outline for the story... unsure how exactly to continue... review if you want more—it would be very easy for me to drop the whole story at this point... ;)]