There was a time before. There was a time before she started
teaching at a yoga studio, when “mercury” was nothing more than a thing of
thermometers, forgotten planet, distant origin to the word mercurial—which to this day, she’s not sure she understands. “She’s
so mercurial,” they’d say, the
speaker dropping the word like a soft bit of candy; something that should slip
out of the mouth unnoticed, but doesn’t. “It’s okay because she’s young.”
Changeable, lively. Impulsive and brilliant. Here, but illusory.
Young.
Now there is only one way she encounters the word: in the
context of Mercury retrograde. That dreaded fat uncle who drinks at
Thanksgiving, sloshing his way past your mom. The backwards advance of one planet
that brings every man to his knees— provided, of course, he is aware of it. If not,
no harm done. Like a tropical disease; before Web MD, it was only a rash. But
now everyone has the bird flu.
She enters the studio holding a crumpled plastic bottle,
making no effort to hide the pink veins in her eyes. She fidgets with her
shirt, which looks like it was bathed in a dumpster— but she hasn’t had time to
wash it, not when she’ll be leaving again. There is movement inside her. The
weight of it all wakes her up in the night, and she stores snotty Kleenex in an
empty cereal box. She feels no remorse not recycling. She thinks about people
who starve during breakups: emerging all birdlike and flushed at the end of a
month, watching people watch them dissolve. They are not the same people who
eat cookie dough with a fork.
They are the same people who breathe a “How ARE
you?” as soon as she walks in the door, their eyes milky-blue and unfocused. I’m fine, she replies, wordlessly gauging
whether to unpack her suitcase of grief. In four or five minutes, the
milky-blue people can’t help her: they reach for a planet and let it explain,
and rake their small hands through her hair. “Oh girl, this Mercury retrograde
is so powerful. It’s the worst one in years. Remember the economic crash of
2008? Same deal.
“Just breathe, honey, breathe. No one likes to feel like
they’re regressing.” And they wrap her half-smile in their bones.
(She takes scalding showers
at night, and sometimes forgets she is humming.)
She takes shifts at a restaurant to fill in the gaps: the
same place she worked years before, but left so long ago that it smells like a
past life. The same excruciatingly smooth jazz plays out of muffled speakers,
and the soup tastes like summers gone by— but her hair was shorter then, like a
boy’s, and she hadn’t yet found the right jeans. “You tall and skinny!” the
busser says, banging his way through the kitchen’s double doors. My hair is longer, she replies, not
taking her eyes from the fridge. “Oh…maybe that’s it,” he shrugs, and bangs his
way back out again. She rocks to and fro on her heels, lightly touching the end
of her braid and the split-hairs of time that have stored in each strand. Plates
burn her palms as she delivers food, watching people: on dates with their cell
phones, burying into iced tea. People who order three-times the amount they can
eat, and leave sixty cents for a tip. People killing time until their first
kiss; people drinking so much Diet Coke that their knees move independently
from their bodies; bachelorette parties adjusting bra straps, unconsciously
tilting the cheek that looks best in a photo, distractedly ordering wine. Her
nights are a chorus of “Where is the bathroom?” and children who snap crayons
in half, and the same homeless man who rolls by with his sign down, occasionally
asking for bread. Another man walks in like a ghost every Friday, eyes vacant, always
expecting a matchbook. He occasionally shows her pages of scribbly-lined
drawings, and she touches each one with her hands. They all look the same, like
a broken kaleidoscope, like her view as she stands at the door.
(She can’t shake the feeling
of backwards. Like déjà vu that has snagged on a nail and spun round.)
She comes home to a place she used to live, and is
occupying again with the dull gratitude of a child being led through a zoo. She
is aware of the person she left there before, one who let boundaries peel back
like blue paint used to peel from the walls. They are white now, painted over
and clean. She fell in love in that house, in that room; and she aches for that
tenderness now, for the definitive longing of knowing her life was in two-part
harmony. At some point, the note had turned sour; and with it, she shut off her
inner voice. She told it to stop, and it did. Now as she lies in the dark,
staring up at the posters delicately taped to the wall—so they’ll leave no mark
when she’s gone—she asks it, so sweetly, for guidance.
Who, me? The
voice inquires. Go. You have to move
forward.
Go.
But before she can move, she hits pause.
(Imagine a slingshot: in the
split second after pulling back, before shooting forward, she savors the space
in-between.)
We’ve all had it—or wanted it, one of the two. Sometimes
both simultaneously, as the world rushes past outside someone’s small window,
and you’re eating cold pancakes for dinner. She lies on his bed, propped up on
her elbows, hovering in the suspension created by love. Mercury retrograde makes you move backward, they told her, but first you turn inward. You stop. The
night before, she stopped at the curb by his house, looking up at the sky—out
of routine, not counsel—and folded herself out of time. For 6 days they swim in
this glorious interim: their world is the moment of morning before senses kick
in, where you forget what you need to do before work, or the sadness you felt before
sleeping. They are movies, soft kisses, wet hair. They are grocery stores, midday
fog, salt. She tucks into that space, and under his arm, with the silkiness of
one being held in the light: a child resting in motion. It’s like falling
asleep with your head on a shoulder, trusting that legs will walk you to the
car and drive home.
But somehow, that home is not here. They’re a tiny house
in the middle of nowhere, or the elderly couple tucked into bed as the freezing
waters of a sinking Titanic swirl all around their cold feet. She banishes this
thought from her head, drunk on the weight of the drama; a weight that she throws
back and forth out of habit, and occasionally holds to feel real. I love you, she tells him. Even when I don’t love myself.
“Then take me out of the grey,” he tells her.
I’m yours.
“Til you
leave,” and his eyes become cold. “Go away.”
He is
real.
“Let me
go.”
So she sits in her car in the dark. She thinks of a
friend who didn’t cry when he left his relationship, waiting around to feel
pain; longing, like a boy anticipating puberty, for a shadow to fall on his
face. She crawls into her small bed, looking up at the posters—their flat,
fraying edges—and waits for the limbo to break. Surely there must be some value
in keeping motionless, pocketing morsels of truth?
“My wheels are spinning,” he says. “I need to move forward—one
way or another.”
(But One Way ends up being circles, and Another turns out to be gone.)
There are many ways to let go of love, so that a
different type may come in. It requires trust—not that the person will repel back
into place, but that love will float back on its own, like an umbrella released
from a roof.
After he
tells her to leave, she flicks herself into motion and surrenders to something
like peace: but one day later, the stillness unfurls with a crack. Momentum
slams into her gut. Everything feels like regret—every move is a question; each
thought is a moment to doubt what is real. Was it irresponsible to begin when
they knew it was dangling in space? Can it ever be wrong to give love? The
memory of him, still wet paint, corners her in moments of silence. Their days
of pretending had never felt fake, and she knows the real teacher is rhythm; but
one-two-three one-two-three nothing
had changed, and their feet weren’t moving together. Their beautiful stillness,
“We’ll give it the weekend,” had always been seeking the earth; his heels were
dug, but she’s floating. She’s waiting, just wanting the floor to feel near.
He burrows
downward and she tiptoes on air. A feeling of panic escapes through her body
whenever she picks up the phone, afraid of the script of her past—but as they
slop through technology buzz, the low hum of no one moving, she realizes their
bodies have left. She’s gone, he stood up, they’re not spinning; at some point
they changed, and they learned.
But it never feels wrong to give love.
That’s right, it
tells her: that voice in her gut. She is eating fried eggs at the table, Cyndi
Lauper coming out of warped laptop speakers as afternoon sinks to the ground.
She’s making an effort to chew her food slowly, to taste every bit of the thing
she has made. It’s been two weeks since she sat in his bedroom, deep inside her
best Ugly Cry. There is so much she wants to ask him: What did you eat for breakfast? Are you okay? Does Walt die on Breaking Bad? Do you miss me? Do you know how fiercely
you’re loved? Are you okay? The woman she lives with walks through the
kitchen, taking her pants off on the way to do laundry, words barreling out
like a brakeless car. And just like that, she knows: she doesn’t fit here
anymore. She falls in love with the fact that she’s shifting. It is silent,
this change in her heart, but it happens, and only she knows that it does.
As she
walks by herself in the morning, she doesn’t find someone to call. She still
writes imaginary questions to ask him—are
you sure glasses make your eyes weak? —but eventually stops looking for
every car to be his. She notices the way the street smells, senses piercing the
air like any person who’s walked through their fire. She sees Mormons with
pocket protectors, hears synth-rock pour out of a restaurant as someone pulls
the stools down, wiping the counters, allowing the day to begin. She skims the
back of her neck with her hair in her hands, and drinks boiling tea made of flowers;
and she feels, she feels. She feels herself bleed to a singular point, like a
James Blake song that makes music move forward and backwards; like a planet
that’s finally unstuck.
(“It’s okay to move
backwards,” her friend whispers to her. “As long as you don’t turn around.”)
So she walks with her hands in her
pockets; discovering the tenderness to refer to herself as a She at the same
time she comes to the bravery required to finally start being an I. Not a Them,
not a You…maybe someday, an Us. But right now, just a girl. Just a Me.
~
People ask her why she’s leaving town, and she asks if
they’d like freshly ground pepper on their spaghetti bolognese. I dunno, she lies. I just have to? They nod, terrified. “Well what are you up to right
now?” they chuckle. In her head, she answers:
I’M
WORKING ON MY SELF-ESTEEM, DAMNIT! IT’S A FULL-TIME JOB!
AND
BESIDES THAT, I’M GROWING OUT MY HAIR!
But instead, she blinks softly, and smiles at her future:
her past, and the voice in her head. To
be free, she replies, when they ask what she wants.
And she laughs, and she already is.
