Hello my dearest readers!
First off, let me thank you for your companionship. It has been such a joy for me to share my writing with you and receive your thoughts and reactions to it. I am so grateful for the time you spend here, and I am working to make it more and more and more interesting for you as time goes on!
When You’re Used To It is a story that is very dear to my heart, and I have decided to pause the weekly chapter until later in the Fall as I try new and different approaches to the work.
In the meantime, I am investigating ways to connect with you all in deeper and more meaningful ways. I value your feedback and your experience with my work, and I want to create more space for you here, so stay tuned for that too!
I do miss sharing, so while I work away on my end, here is an excerpt of a story I submitted to a magazine a few weeks back. Let me know how it lands!
Love and sincere thanks,
Sophy
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She woke up from a gummy night’s sleep. The linen sheets she’d bought a few months back stuck to her skin in clumps. She tried to push them off of her hot skin while her alarm blared but they were so tangled between hers and her boyfriend’s body that she gave in to the insistence of the robot on her bedside table. She turned the light on in her bathroom and found her three packed cosmetics bags. They served as reminders as to why she was up so early. She sighed, unzipping one for her face wash. She washed and patted her skin dry and put the bottle back, unzipping another bag for her electric toothbrush, using it, zipping it back up. She liked being organized. It was one thing about herself that she was unabashedly proud of. She could make herself purr with her diligence. She forced her contacts into her sleepy dry eyes and stepped back into her bedroom. There she found her suitcase, with a perfectly sized space for the three zipped bags in her arms. She placed them with muted glee and closed up her suitcase after checking for her passport and a few books she had chosen for the ride. She got dressed in the clothes she’d laid out the night before: black pants, a tight black tank top, a loose-fitting blue sweater on top. She paired it all with a pair of chunky leather boots in which she felt immune to misfortune. She moved to tie her hair into a ponytail but remembered that she had it cut a few days ago. It was no longer long enough for even the lowest of buns. She wondered for a short while if she had cut it because she wanted to or because she wanted to get a reaction out of her mother.
Her favorite thing to do when getting up this early was to stuff her face in her sleeping boyfriend’s neck before leaving. Half asleep, he would mumble a few loving words as she luxuriated in his smell and all the softest parts of his skin. She could stay there for minutes, hours at a time. She once fell back asleep right there, buried like a fox in its tail. Her phone rang loud all of a sudden. She fumbled to shut it off as her sleeping beauty wrapped himself even deeper into the duvet. It was her second alarm, and it was time to go.
In the cab the driver quickly understood that she wasn’t in a chatty mood. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to entertain the man, but cab rides at dawn brought back scores of memories for her, and she loved sitting in those flurries of faces and moments and emotions she could only glimpse at if she stayed really still. She looked out the window at the city waking up, only to find a city already awake, a city that never turned off. There was always somebody starting a shift and somebody finishing one. She imagined the people getting home to the person they loved, snuggling into bed, and she thought of her boyfriend, and she thought of home, and for a moment she felt tenderness towards where she was going to. When the train station came into view, she was back to reality, going home to celebrate something nobody wanted to remember in the first place.
She walked into the train station expecting it to be empty. She had it all planned, the coffee, the corner bench, the silent hum of a peaceful hangar. She walked in and found instead hundreds of people, all strung about the place like garlands well past Christmas. She suddenly felt as though she was in an airport after a canceled flight. Such was the atmosphere that reigned; anticipation, lassitude, and bodies melting everywhere, leaning on the walls, sitting on the floor, looking up every other minute to see if their train had finally been announced or not. She got her coffee anyway, though she had nowhere to sit to enjoy it, and quickly found it more of a nuisance than a source of solace. She found a marble column to lean on where she could put her bags between her feet and lean her back against the cold, dull surface. There, she settled in with a view of the announcement board, and drank her coffee, sip by sip, putting herself in another place altogether. It was a gift she had, to pretend that the reality she was in was an entirely different world, one in which she was not. In fact, she was only remotely watching this reality, while entrenched deeply in another more comfortable, more uplifting one. One in which things worked out the way she’d been told they always would.
She wasn’t sure if there were bathrooms on the train so she picked up her heavy bag and rushed to the restrooms across the station. She didn’t want to be late. She hated being late. It made her feel too alive, all the pins and pricks it awakened inside her, it was overwhelming in the worst way. So, on she went, her large bag falling off her shoulder, daring her not to tip a drop of coffee onto the shiny floor of this dimensional vortex. There was a line snaking from the bathroom out into the ticketing area. It made her nervous to stand there. She felt embarrassed that people knew what she was waiting for. Nothing made her feel more human than having to empty herself alongside other mammals of her kind. The woman in front of her was a girl dressed in a pink sweatsuit which consisted of a fake velour short skirt and belly top. She wondered if this girl had come from her boyfriend’s place in the city and was now rushing home before her parents woke up. She thought, maybe this girl is going to tennis lessons in an hour or two. Maybe she comes to the city every Saturday night and her parents don’t know. She looked at her flat stomach and her tanned skin. She felt creepy for doing so, but she genuinely wondered what it would feel like to dress like that, with your perfection on full display for anyone to see. She hadn’t felt safe enough to do that since she was in diapers.
She boarded the train and found a window seat with no one in the four or so rows behind and beyond. She settled in, her big bag taking up the whole seat next to her, and she felt ready to relax and give in to the trip. She had been dreading it for so long, and now–as time works–it was here and happening and she knew that there was nowhere else she should be, no matter how much she resented it. It wasn’t so much for the people expecting her, but more so about the people who weren’t. She dreaded all the ghosts that had gathered among and between them, not even shadows but invisible weights that now served as records of how much things had changed.
It was a nice train, spacious and made with quality materials. The seats were deep and made of a strong leather, not in the usual public transit colors of fake pastel and gray, but in rich shades of red, brown and black. She observed the cabin, checking where the nearest exit was. It was only a little over an hour to get to the airport, but with all the bad news circling the world, it had become a habit for her to critically analyze her surroundings. Her eyes scanned the wagon, and on the way from the door to her book, they tripped on a familiar sight. Up ahead was the face of a man she knew. A man she used to know, in one of those other realities that chased her and tried to turn her dreams into nightmares. Her heart began beating very fast. It was beating so fast. It is beating so fast that her hands are tingly and her thoughts have all gathered on the tip of her tongue and won’t go anywhere else. They won’t budge. And all she can think about, with her usual thoughts disappeared, is how loud her throat is, how empty her body, torn open so that butterflies can fly around and tell her there’s a storm coming, and she’s in too deep to get to safety now.
She can’t stop looking at this man who is standing there trying to choose his seat. He pushes down on the handle of his suitcase and is about to lift it up into the overhead space when an older woman walks past him and stops him mid-lift. The woman asks him a question, and he answers warmly, and from her seat she grows envious of the woman who can so effortlessly talk to him. He points towards the car up ahead, and they smile at each other as she walks away. He returns to his suitcase and then hesitates. He rises and decides to take his jacket off. Under it he is wearing a nice, collared shirt, open at the top. He’s not wearing a t-shirt underneath. She never knew him to be that kind of man, anyway. He lies his jacket flat onto the seat next to him, and it is as he reaches down for his suitcase that he catches her staring. She knows she’s been caught and yet she can’t stop looking. She waits for the moment when he’ll recognize her. She wonders what he will do, it's been so long. She readies herself for him to turn away and change trains. She even readies herself for him to get off altogether. And yet he is still there, lingering in the boldness of her stare. He breaks it only to bend down and grab his jacket, which he folds over his arm, patting it down as he finds her gaze again, piercing and insistent. The doors have closed now, and the train should be leaving soon.
It happens quickly that he decides to come sit next to her. Too quickly. She can’t adjust her gaze, let alone come up with a strategy to face their proximity. Her mind is awash with fog, and her body responds in kind, desperate to send her consciousness far away as it contends with the situation. But she stays. All of her stays. She is not floating in her periphery, she is there, on the seat, feeling the cushion bend and then adjust to the weight of someone new. He has placed her bag on the seat in front of him, across the table that forms this little pod of seats. It is too intimate, too straight and defined for her to access another reality. She is grounded, no airspace available for some part of her to fly away to safety.
Everything he says is laced with intention. He calibrates based on her reaction, whether to keep pressing down on the gas pedal or let go a little, and let the old girl coast and cool down. He is flirting with her, and there is nothing wrong with that per say, except that he is doing it as if they were strangers. He is doing all the things he did the first few times they talked. His jokes haven’t changed much, nor his unabashed stare, nor his fake shyness in certain moments when he is unsure if all the rest is working. She doesn’t know why but it’s all working, all over again, she is falling so quickly it’s like her body has begun a dance it knows by rote, without the slightest note of music necessary.
Their conversation is so pleasant, so energizing, that for a few minutes she wonders if she should ruin it by reminding him who she is. She toys with the idea, considers whether this would be a better way to leave things than the ending they’ve shared until now. Maybe this way she could move on. Maybe this way she could be the person she was on track to be. So she indulges him. It’s nice to be that girl again, especially to him. All over again she is young and interesting and cute just for the sake of it. She has nothing to lose and every experience to gain and all she has to do is smile and lightly tap her fingers against her jawline and he is all hers, hot and hungry, a lust heavier than gravity. They pull up to the first stop, and as people get off, he excuses himself to get his luggage and bring it closer to them. It is important, during that time that he is away, that she be sure of herself. This is, in fact, him, right? Gosh, it’s so difficult for her to keep track sometimes, of what is and what is not, that even the most instinctual, seemingly obvious things escape her confidence in herself.
Suddenly she can’t contain herself. The coffee has worn off. She is hot under her sweater but can’t take it off. She can’t move when he’s around. She shakes out her hands a little, just enough so he can’t see. She pulls her sunglasses out of her purse and is very grateful to have found the next best thing to a backbone. Her eyes covered, the itch subsides, and she regains a bit of her hard-won composure. She looks out the window as the train begins to move again. She is relieved, she is protected now, a barrier stands between him and her, the him she now knows to be true, deep down in this costume of a good person he wears all too convincingly.
He sits back down next to her, owning the space as if they’ve always sat down next to each other, and he asks her where her beautiful eyes went. She smiles a bit, her lips not fully parting from the front of her teeth. The sun pokes its rays into the window, and she leans her face into the light. Now that she knows who he is, she wants to linger in this space a while longer, linger in the goodness of it, how it makes everything else simply disappear. He takes up all the air around her, swells up like a handsome blowfish while she wades into the anonymous waves of the vast ocean inside her. They don’t talk for a few minutes. He checks his phone, patiently, and sneaks a few looks in her direction every so often. Her gaze is glued to whatever comes to pass beyond the window. However much riveted her mind’s eye, her body, long and relaxed, spreads closer and closer, inch by inch, towards his. Her boots slide down on the rug, the wide legs of her pants shimmer a bit and move closer to his. Her hand drops for a moment, and there it is, alone, in between the two of them, waiting for meaning to take hold of it. The invitation is almost too much to bear. She can’t stand being so close to him and yet there they are, again, pulling each other in and pushing the rest of the world out.
There is nowhere clear to go from here. She knows it, he doesn’t. There is nothing to excavate, because as her hand hangs in the limbo of their predispositions–hers to suggest desire, his to grab it by the neck–she recognizes that the person she has become is not part of his voluntary reality. The one she used to be belongs to the badlands, those he only remembers when he’s sleeping sometimes. Those for him to shake away with a good breakfast and a prompt coffee. She is not even a whiskey shot, not even the light blinking on his answering machine. She has been and is no more, so much so that she is somehow now brand new.
And yet, this discovery is kind of exciting. She is suddenly looking at her world at a different angle. She is below the surface of the ice, wading the waters of this new territory in which she knows more than he does. So much transpired under his charge, and she feels inclined to find out what would happen under her own. She leaves her hand on the seat. She turns her face towards him, and they look at each other for a moment. His smile curves the same way it did the first time she let on that she was willing to kiss him. With her other hand, she reaches up and pushes her glasses to the top of her head, leaving a cascade of hair on either side of the stems, and uncovering her whole face for him to see. They are close now, and her fingers on the seat tingle with joy at this little experiment.
The train vibrates along. She is inside the bullet, traveling through space, protected on all sides by a metal casing that is in all likelihood going to explode upon hitting its target. She doesn’t know what her target is. In fact, she thought that this treasure trove of growing pains had been buried long ago, after too many birthday candles blown wishing for a better year. She deserves this lingering. She deserves to be new. In fact she needs to be new, because she has excavated all there was to analyze, squeezed every parcel of their time together, and still, the stamps on the pages of their adventure’s passport hold no logic. One could not explain the other, no matter how many pages she ripped and stuck back together. There was no sequence, no specific idea, no plan behind the trickery she woke up from in a start some collection of years back. She took things seriously, and now she doesn't feel like it anymore. Now she feels like playing, she feels like being a pussycat, playing with a fire that has already burned her if only to see whether she’d know this time when to pull her hand away.
So, what is it that she wants from him? As this dance now begins to start over again, as his fangs glisten with the saliva of his next catch, why doesn’t she run? Hasn’t she learned her lesson? The truth spreads across her like butter. It’s not an apology she cares for; pussycats don’t hold grudges, they simply play better next time around. No, what she wants, beyond the fun, beyond the carelessness of another whirl around the dancefloor, is the information that will make the pesky little flashbacks go away. In earnest, she’d do it all over again and ten times worse if it meant that those flashing images that tethered her to him like an astronaut to its vessel would never again cross her mind’s sky. So long as the rope holds strong, he is there, orbiting her as her engine putters away, trying to get back to earth and away from the dark hole he became all those months back. Far, far away.
She looks into the dark eyes of this black hole now. She peers into them, those long lashed, chocolate colored pupils that she would not have dared to look at when they’d first encountered each other. They’re creamy now, doughy. They invite a sort of luxurious, lazy stare, demanding the eyes park themselves there and melt away, deep into his self-ascribed complexity. Oh how she’d grown tired back then of imagining the meaning behind those eyes. So many years flushed down the wrong time toilet, pining after the one who took her further from life’s miracles, and closer to the melodramatic pain porn that had become fashionable in this bizarro land of the twenty-first century. This was her test, the last frontier before his permanent removal from her mind’s eye. She is about to speak, about to give him a hint as to who she is, and why he should remember her. She wants to whisper it in his ear, her face close enough to his skin to feel the sensation of the memory climb through his veins like ice across a small pond. She leans in and as she breathes in the courage to say her peace, his smell suddenly challenges her resolve. There is a lot of evidence pointing to this being her opportunity for closure. On the other hand, could this encounter be a reward? An olive branch from high up rewarding her for processing, as it were, what it put on her path in the form of him? Perhaps this was proof she had ascended–on her own–beyond a need for closure. And now, it was a choose-your-own-adventure kind of situation, and the time to take advantage of it was running out.
She feels first a jolt run through her arm, then through her chest right into her throat and behind her right eye. It is so instantaneous, so there and then not, that she feels buzzed, sort of concussed by the sheer strength of it. He has taken her hand in his. He rubbed it at first, with the tops of his fingernails and the tiny spot of skin right below them. He touched her skin and then, holding her bones firmly in his own, has sent millenia of spells and destinies swirling beneath earth’s surface, ignited with the gasoline that dripped now in pearls down the notches of her spine. The pussycat has disappeared, and fallen limp now. The power she was drunk on mere moments ago now hovers above her, and she can see it but can’t reach it. She can’t get to it, she never could who was she kidding. She wouldn’t be here with him if she’d known how to use it well in the first place. She tries to reach for the wand with the strength of her mind, her forehead filled with pressure, her eyes trying desperately to part from his eyes. Those plush, thickly lashed eyes filled with quietly devastating poems.
He doesn’t recognize her. Still now, he doesn’t recognize her. And how could he? She has changed. It has been years, and it has been work, and she has learned to live without the pieces of herself he unceremoniously stole back there where she used to be. But now she squeezes his hand, and presses her thigh against his. Their skin touching, the old urgency nipping at both of their breasts, urging them to find each other like they used to, will he ever just say her name, or just give her a nod, or find a way to show her that he has registered her existence, and she is someone in his eyes. Not nothing, not anymore. Will that happen? Now that they are close enough to hear each other’s heartbeat, now that the smile of seduction upswirls his pillowy lips, now that she has given in in the hopes of reminding him how she was back then, now that everything is in motion…
The train arrives at the station. Their hands part. She can’t know if she took her hand out or he did first. His mouth is moving and she knows he is saying something but all she can think of is this is her stop. She has to get off. She has to get where she is going or else…or else…all of this will have been for nothing. The noise of the busy station slowly fills the train as the doors open to exchange passengers. He smiles at her. She smiles at him. Faintly a glimmer appears in his eye. His head cocks to the side a bit. She hides her nerves because she no longer wants him to know who she is anymore. She has to get off the train and be someone else, somewhere else. He whispers that was fun, and she wants to scream. Instead, she places a strand of her hair back behind her ear. He passes her a piece of paper between his fingers. She needs to get up and go. She knows where he lives. She need only see the first four digits of his number for the other six to appear, dropping like confetti or bombs, depending on the day. She needs those numbers to disappear, that address, that house, those sheets, that paralysis, that shock, that disbelief, that naivete that led to the disbelief that led to the shock that led to the paralysis–all of it. She needs to unremember it all, just as he seems to have done. Yet here she is, steeped like a teabag in their past while he collects the pussycats like feathers on his hat. She summons the courage to rise up. Their bodies rub against each other one more time as she shuffles past his open arm gallantly ceding the way. She takes her bag and her empty coffee cup and begins to make a path for herself among the ghosts. She implores herself not to turn back.
When she steps off the train, this is all over. The fun, the possibilities, only held by a piece of paper once she steps off the tracks. She tosses the coffee cup and considers this paper he gave her. She jostles it between her index finger and thumb. What if it’s a new number? She rolls it up small, so small, imperfectly globular, like the planet they have to share. So many things happen on this planet, so many things she wishes she could forget, and yet, here they all are, between her fingers, refusing to shrink any more. The train’s engine roars back to life and she wonders, if she turned, would she see him looking in her direction? The train is going to leave very soon. They say so on the loudspeakers. She wonders if she should stay on, or go to the place her mother awaits. Bells indicate the doors are closing imminently. Her worlds are all around her, sleeping, dead, balls between her fingertips and anxious hearts waiting in parked cars. She has to make a decision. Always, she has decisions to make. Where does this world go, the one between her fingers? What was it all for? She has to know, needs to know…she could know.
~