I remember now, our first kiss was in the pantry at your friend Nicole’s, between a box of Oreos and a bag of Cheetos. Secret and squeezed. It was dark, and I couldn’t see you.
We all have monsters—you especially. Your monsters didn’t keep you up at night; they dragged you to sleep and wouldn’t let you wake in the morning. A bottle of wine in the fridge, a handle of vodka under your bed. The days without them, seventy-two hours straight, awake. You kept them close. In your room, upstairs, fugitives between the clothes, books, the lipstick and blush containers. Some monsters I wouldn’t know about until later. You liked to hide things for no reason. Your weed on the top shelf of your closet, in your old grey running shoes that you never used because you never ran and because “why the hell would you wear running shoes if you’re not going to run?”
At school, you would point out every pair. “Hope your run was good,” to a jean-clad kid in Asics. “Check how fast he looks,” to another. If your style opinions were truly based on practicality, then the clothes you wore yourself reached for social, or perhaps just sexual, utility—never sweatpants, always eyeliner and lipstick, two showers a day. Hair straightened, laced with perfume. The image you projected outside of your room was an expertly developed photograph, makeup and clothes stolen from Nordstrom, Bloomingdale’s, your rich aunt’s house. Never caught. You had a model’s wardrobe inside a nine-by-nine foot room, curated by you, a seventeen-year-old. For how little you seemed to take care of yourself, you took care of yourself more than anyone I ever knew.
That Friday happened like any other. Eighty-one square feet for us to do as we pleased: to witness each other, draw chalk on your one black wall, listen to music and drink and smoke until Monday came. It was morning, but too late to be late for school, so we didn’t go, pretending you weren’t graduating that spring and leaving me. Both of us ignorant of the fact that I would break up with you before then anyway. You had that Justin Bieber poster on your wall, “but ironically.” You said you were only dating me because I looked like him.
I remember how you’d always dip the cross on your necklace in the shot glass before taking your vodka. “Baptism,” you would say, knock it back, and laugh. Cuddled in bed until we both had to pee so badly we couldn’t lie there any longer. By that point I had a toothbrush at your house.
—
“You know Tristan is into you,” you told me, while I was inside of you, only our third time.
“I’m into you. Like, literally.” We didn’t stop having sex as we talked; we didn’t slow down.
“You should hook up with him. Would you?”
“He’s just a fag.” I wasn’t thinking about him. I wasn’t going to last long.
—
You forgot. My birthday, for one. Dates we’d planned for weeks. I thought it might be the weed. You showed me a lot I thought you would have hid, but you still hid a lot. I didn’t know Xanax until I knew you. Now I’m too familiar.
“I’m glad I met you when I did,” you would say later. “People will come up to me and talk about hanging out senior year of high school and I won’t even remember who they are. I lost a year. I lost people.”
I wonder how you can say something is saving your life when it has almost taken it three times.
“I’m so bad at dying,” you used to say, frowning, but expecting a laugh. “And just awful at living.”
I wonder if you remember things the way I do—if you remember them at all. I wonder, then, if you would trust the things I write. I wonder if our relationship is just mine now, kept alive only by the words I put on this page. Do you blame me for where you are now?
Neuropsychologists—you know, the ones you say you hate—claim that every time you retrieve a memory, you alter the original. That whatever you are experiencing when you retrieve that memory will affect how you will remember it the next time you retrieve it. Less authentic. Perhaps I should have written this down a long time ago.
—
You didn’t have a driver’s license. Your mom, Jane, had a habit of getting pulled over drunk, sloppy, and solipsistic. One of those people who gets a police cam video uploaded online because they cuss out a cop, absolutely trashed but somehow still managing to recite the alphabet backwards. Jane’s ‘99 Acura had a breathalyzer installed in it after her second DUI. She had to blow into it, sober, to unlock the ignition. Because Jane was often drunk most days of the week, and very often drunk on Fridays, you were usually the one to blow into it.
“Eve! I need you!” Jane shouted from downstairs.
The light through the tall pines outside cast the room in green.
“I don’t want to get older,” you told me, ignoring your mom.
“I don’t think I’d like you if you weren’t older,” I said. “All I can ever think of is growing up.” Jane shouted again from downstairs.
You rolled out of bed. “I’m sorry for this,” you said softly, slurring. It was one of those times I thought you should cry but you didn’t. You never cried in front of me, even though you always talked about how much you cried. That day, you knew you were drunk—so was I. Your mom was drunker. I sat upstairs waiting, listening to silence, then yelling, then silence. Your mom biked to work that day.
The door slammed, and then you were back upstairs, vomiting over the toilet, me holding your hair.
“I’ve never been so happy over a toilet,” you said to me, eyes closed, cheek against the seat, smiling, still slurring. “So happy it hurts. My mouth hurt this week from smiling so much.”
You fell asleep on the floor and I carried you to bed. I biked home before Jane got back from work. The sun was out, but the light was lonely.
—
Do you remember the day we broke up? It wasn’t a normal argument, this one so trite and definitive. Usually we could argue for hours.
You seemed shy, for the first time, sitting on the step outside your front door.
Why?
You wore your bright blue footie pajamas and I thought they were hideous. I loved you so much I had to lie down.
Do you remember the white van always parked on the street outside your house? We never saw it leave. We thought it might kidnap kids in the middle of the night.
Do you remember, after you’d gone off to college, when I came out to you?
I hope you don’t.