Writings: Home In The Inbetween

Dear Significant Other Number One,

When people ask me about you I tell them about our first date. I tell them of the coffee shop on Jane St and how you paid for my tea. I tell them how we sat across from each other at a small table in the back, talking in between sips, silences left filled with the clinking of cups on dishes and the murmurings of strangers. When people ask me about you I tell them how it felt like a punch in the stomach when a couple months later you told me you found someone else.

I lied when friends asked me where I was going. I lied and said I was going to get lunch with someone from class, but the way the sun felt on my skin as I walked along a West Village sidewalk made up for that lie, and you made up for the rest of them.

I peered through the window as your gaze moved up to meet mine, and I swore that your hazel eyes made the world stop spinning on its axis even if just for a second. My hands wrapped around porcelain, tea thawing the cold and hesitation from my body. It was then that you were no longer just part of all the background noise. My eyesight was now glazed over with tints of your auburn hair. I looked down at my rippled and cloudy reflection projected down into my cup of green tea, wondering what you could ever think glancing across the table.

New York City felt softer as I wandered the seven block trip home. The buildings seemed less towering and imposing. I did not feel as swallowed up as I sometimes did, that maybe I was not so insignificant. The brick and concrete began to drink up the last of the day’s light. I walked a little slower home, not wanting to seal you back up inside my head.

A week later, your words illuminated the inanimate bleakness of my phone in the back of a taxi. I could hear your delicate voice in my ear, turning my vision into the rose-toned haze that first loves often cause.  

We walked across the Brooklyn Bridge at three in the morning, the taste of alcohol and then you remaining on my lips. The March wind flushed my face with tones of pink and red, lights from Manhattan’s skyline creating luminescent flecks of exposed skin. I felt a part of the city with you, not just an outsider observing everything from a distance.

I rested all my weight over the side of the guardrail, my hand clutching yours as if it were an extension of my own. The water below although dark and murky seemed inviting, as if I could jump straight into it and not feel a thing. I wanted to live infinitely in those few seconds, but even your hazel eyes could not stop the moon from being swallowed up by a new day. Even your hazel eyes could not stop things from changing.

When the June warmth replaced the lingering spring rain your phone kept going to voicemail and my text messages remained unanswered. Three days ago I thought we were fine.  Three days ago you must have seen something in us that I did not. Three days ago I never noticed you loosening your grip on me while I tightened mine on you. That pastel, sweet smelling fog had faded uncovering the desolate reality that was always hiding beneath it.

My question was answered but I needed to hear you say it anyway. I needed the actual words to sting me like that bee in the sixth grade; appearing out of nowhere and leaving me with an odd sort of pain that didn’t seem to fade.

You kept talking but I did not hear any of it. Everything else was muffled and cloudy. I was underwater and you stood on the edge, slowly watching me sink to the bottom. I then watched the olive green jacket you always used to wear evaporate into the blur of strangers and concrete.

With the faucet turned all the way on I got into the shower and tried to scrub off the rest of you. Let the burning water fall down my spine and circle around my ankles. Try to wash away the feeling of your skin against mine and allow all the pieces of you to swirl down into the drain. But after a few hours I stood naked and freezing, with no more hot water and a now empty bottle of soap you were still there.

There came a Tuesday when I stopped seeing your reflection in the windows as I passed. When I stopped hearing your voice whispering in the back of my head as I feel asleep. I realized now that you were finally gone.

When I got home I climbed underneath the protection of my sheets and cried not only because I lost you, but because I could slowly see a part of myself slip back underneath the surface. You allowed me to uncover that part and now that you were gone I was afraid that it would leave along with you.

I try not to rely on other people, but I also make a habit of turning a person into more than just a person; of turning them into my own personal sun. Maybe I did not realize how much I leaned on you, because with you gone winter permeated its way through the drafty apartment windows and into my bloodstream.

To everyone else around me nothing had changed, you did not exist to them. I never let them see that you were there, so how could they have noticed when you left. My life was divided when I was with you, and I have realized I do not want to do that a second time. People should have known about you. You should have existed in their lives and not just in my own. I should have told them that it was you sitting across from me in the back of that coffee shop.

Dear Significant Other Number One,

When people ask me about you I do not tell them that your name was Hannah. I do not tell them I fell for another girl or of how I learned of the large gray space between straight and gay. I was not with you a long time, but I needed you to finally feel settled into myself; to learn that each thought and every feeling that passed through my head was okay to be there. I know I did not leave any footprints on your memory and I am just a sentence for you, a sentence that could easily be erased and not make any difference to the story. While you are an entire chapter for me. But I needed you as that chapter, to allow all of the others to be written. Being with you made me unafraid of the gray space, I slowly realized that the fear other people find in it does not have to be my own; that I am okay to be at home somewhere in the inbetween.

Dear Hannah,

This summer I found myself wandering back to the corner of Jane St. Something in my body involuntarily brought me back there. Something remained below all the layers of skin and muscle, past my ribs and lungs, that wanted to see the start of it all again. I walked up and down the street, still lined with the same brick townhouses and oaks. Trees that a few months ago stood bare and exposed were now bursting with different shades of green life.

I kept walking up and down the block but I could not seem to find that coffee shop. Maybe it was gone, left open only in memories of the past. Maybe it only appeared when we were together. A secret universe hidden behind a large wooden door, just for you and I.

[This piece was originally written in November 2015 for my freshmen English 101 class]