Blah Blah Blah

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
   Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
   Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
   As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
   To move, but doth, if the other do.

John Donne

-

When they say goodbye to each other, for the first time, it’s a sad goodbye at an airport, with the maw of the security check-in beckoning.
“What was the absolute latest you could leave it before going through?” he asks.
“Now,” she says, embarrassed at being the responsible one.
“Are you sure?”
“No,” she says, “more like five minutes ago,” and at least she feels just as bad about it as he does, he thinks, or at least she sounds like it. They’re aware of the spectrum of goodbyes being enacted around them, from the two brothers exchanging awkward handshakes to the late-30’s couple making out with the shamelessness of drunk teenagers. “Let’s have some standards,” she says, nodding at the couple.
And after she’s gone, which feels sudden, it’s funny, he’s thinking, how cold it got, so quickly, like the clouds so heavy the sun could have gone anywhere. The winter ends up running long: it’s a time of strenuous effort undertaken fearlessly, of Skype calls between one room at dusk and another at dawn, across an ocean and half a continent, and every time for one of them the other’s face gets lost in the webcam’s poor exposure. It feels temporary the first month. They fall asleep with a dimmed screen and the green light of the camera on the pillow, like land and sea are the space between two sides of the mattress. The second month is harder.  They hide it first, then share, and agree that they are the sort of people who can, will, will this all better, are above the bad moods and the bad days and the rough tides of feeling, that they are the sort of people who can handle the moments when they wake, each of them, from dreaming of the other, wake to find themselves having in their sleep twisted pillow and sheet into a kind of faceless doll with the proportions of the other, that they spooned as they dreamt, that they chewed on (the doll) and drooled on where the ear and shoulder would have been if it were the other. They decide, agree, hope, pray that that the feelings will pass.
When they finally have it, that fever-breaking night of telepugilism that gave a voice to the doubts, they deal in their own similar ways. They call friends and go out on one of the Friday nights they are so used to spending indoors with laptop and green light.
She goes to a dive bar, he to someone else's house. Her friends are celebrating an engagement, his are celebrating Friday. He's drinking around an IKEA coffee table with familiar friends, she drinks the cheapest white wine out of fancy glasses. He follows his friends to find the club with the best music and the worst lighting and the prettiest girls at around the same time (her 6pm to his midnight) that she is walking out into the cool air of the day just-ending, feeling light and omnipotent from the second glass of wine and from the crowds of people in love that tolerate the noise and the dirty air to sit in the chairs outside of bars on the first day of Spring. “This feels wonderful,” she’s thinking, like a burden has been lifted, like she is a dog off a leash; he feels like he did when he left home, like some sort of burden has been lifted.
At some point they excuse themselves from their group, to order drinks and reflect. Not wanting to waste time, let’s just say they each meet someone at their bars, under circumstances as cute as the new partner: she rescues Ben from the advances of the now-hammered fiancé-friend; he and the girl with the blue streak in her hair have a moment of eye-contact and an air-5 when they hear the opening bars to a favourite song. It works out that they are overlapping in speech, almost to the second, when she give Ben her phone number (who, Ben, asked her for it) and when he pulls out of kissing the girl with the blue streak in her hair to say something in her ear, to which she nods and kisses him again before he pulls her by the hand out of the door. And later he is making love with one eye open to the girl with the blue streak in her hair thinking “What am I even doing here?” as she, in bed early and glowing with good flirting like she hasn’t done for however long, gets from Ben the first text: “Hope your friend doesn't feel too rough tomorrow. Coffee Saturday?” And she doesn’t understand why this would be thing that suddenly causes her to cry, while he asks the girl with the blue streak in her hair, who’s already asleep, “Are you OK?”, thinking he heard something.
They continue to deal in the ways that come easily. For her this means, the next morning, confirming that coffee with that Ben, which that Saturday turned into this whole day-long thing of her opening up and closing up to Ben’s efforts, feeling herself be won over like against her will, but also not against her will. It was weeks before she told her friends about Ben, even then making it sound more casual than what it had become; the whole time they’d been handling her with care, and she’d liked the way they kept him in mind by not talking about him with such a lack of subtlety. And they stopped when she told them about Ben, like she knew they would.
He, on the other hand, tries harder to care less. He lets no girl take root too deep, makes the most of the one night and moves on. His friends compare it to the guerrilla tactics of the Taliban.
Someone asks her what she likes about Ben and she says the first thing that comes to mind, which is “The stability.” Ben, like most Americans, does not even own a passport.
He tries to make something political of what he was doing. If anyone asks, he tells them he dreams of conquering a girl from all the world powers, of being able to sublet his own bed out of disuse, of becoming a kind of athlete of love. Even if nobody asks he sometimes says these things.
Months of this go on and on for each of them, until mid-Summer when she thinks she sees him at Union Station, with flowers waiting for someone. She moves closer, buying a Snickers from a vending machine as excuse for a better look. When the girl the stranger is meeting shows up and she hears him speak, which puts an end to doubts, she was ready to go right up and talk to the stranger, just so she could stop thinking about it. That night she goes out on the apartment’s balcony, leaving Ben sleeping, to call the number she didn’t delete with the + sign and the forty-four at the start, operating on a mix of instinct and 2am insomniac clarity and without expectations of anything in particular, just wanting something, right then, some kind of contact, picking the wound which is ready to close. He misses the call, the phone lying dead beneath his jeans in the room of another girl, this girl someone who gone up because, scarily so, this girl looked so much like her - so much so he’d taken this as some kind of communication from the universe, not just a biological imperative but a metaphysical call. It’s not until the following afternoon that he powers up his phone and gets the message from a number he actually did delete from his phone, but recognises by raw digits anyway: a familiar voice saying “I guess no one being there is a sign,” going quiet, hanging up.
He dates the girl who looks like her longer than any of the other subjects - girl with blue streak in her hair, girl with God-awful taste in television, girl who only eats round things, girl who never eats round things, girl who refused to let him leave in the morning. It ends when he introduces girl who looks like her to friends, who are as stunned as he was, and concerned. He’s taken aside. He books a flight the next day.
He drives past her place, an apartment in a building with dead autumn leaves covering the parking lot. He remembers the building from a visit that is, surely not, nearly a year ago at this point, and in her space is parked a masculine car. There’s no way he can know that, literally just a week ago, she found a tenant to sublease the whole place, so she could move in a more permanent way into Ben’s place.
He’s driving around and notices all the couples sitting at the tables outside of the bars, now wearing coats and looking wistfully at all the taken tables indoors, and he relents and pulls in and walks into the first place he see, is ordering when she walks in, alone, and when she walks in she sees him, stops, startled and mind-blank.
She touches him on the shoulder, and this time it’s really him. She immediately excuses herself to the bathroom, and he thinks about moments in movies where that is the classic excuse in preparation for an escape out of a fire-exit, or like the retrieval of the pistol behind the cistern. She puts a toilet seat lid down and sits and thinks. She’s looking at the new ring on one finger, a recent surprise, which still feels like something that’s been grafted on, feels other (although, she’s been told by everyone with the experience to know, parents and that friend who had just become engaged the night she met Ben included, that every ring, given enough time, will come to feel a part of her). She slides it, the ring, up and down her finger.
Going from shock to joy to kind of stupefied, he’s wondering if she really did sneak out, how long she’s taking, out of what he guesses must be her own version of his embarrassment or fear of the awkwardness, and he’s trying to catch the eye of the girl with the red hair and the black leather notebook down the bar, drink order already in mind, when the girl closes her notebook and leaves, and beside him she sits with that ring removed from her hand, he sees.