City Living

That’s the thing about this city. You can be so in love with it that it hurts, so in love with it that your stomach clenches and your head aches and your heart swells every time you return, but you can also hate it so much that it’s revolting, that you want to vomit every time you even think about returning, that your eyes fill with tears and that your breath quickens every damn time.

See, the thing about this nowhere city, in the middle of the state of Nowhere, is that everybody is nobody and everybody at the same exact time. Everybody knows you, and you know everybody, and so it’s this kind of trade-off, this kind of thing where you knew that Kathrine down the street had an abortion in high school, but that same Kathrine knew about that one morning the summer before freshman year of college, that morning where you stumbled home drunk at 9am, with one shoe missing and the other covered in something that might have been vomit, but you don’t quite know.

It’s summer break when you return home (is it even home anymore? -- you don’t know) and resign yourself to staying a month in your childhood house, in the bedroom that feels so unfamiliar to you that it might as well have belonged to someone else.

It’s summer break and everything goes fine until the day before you’re supposed to go home.

You’re repacking your bags, trying to stuff everything that you brought to the house back in (it’s the same amount of stuff--how has it multiplied?), while the stale summer heat clings to your shoulders, pushes down your head, snakes its tongue down your throat like a touch-drunk lover. The ancient air conditioner wheezes out breaths of lukewarm air that are immediately absorbed by the oppressive heat, while a glass of once-icy soda pops against its glass halfheartedly.

It’s getting hot enough in the room, and your thoughts are getting viscous enough that it’s even starting to look more appealing outside, where you can see the shade put up by the aspen.

The glass is covered in condensation when you pick it up, and cold water drips down your wrist in an unpleasant trail. You let it.

You walk through the rest of the house to the mudroom, where the washer turns, oblivious to the heat. You slip on sandals. You grab your keys. If you can’t escape the heat, then at least you can drive somewhere with your windows down and maybe get something straight from a freezer.

It’s aimless driving, yes, but at least there’s nothing that can go wrong with it, plus, it’s the kind of escapism where you can forget that you’re driving through the town that you’ve outgrown, but are stuck in a kind of limbo where you don’t feel quite old enough to be alone, but feel too old to haunt the same places that you used to.

You end up at an ice cream parlor, the kind styled after those in the fifties that are meant to make you feel like you’ve stepped back in time, but (theoretically) don’t include the racism. The tile floors and vinyl seats are all lukewarm, but you’ll take lukewarm over suffocating heat any day.

You sit at one of the single-person tables in the back, and a waitress comes over, her makeup sliding down her eyelids in oily-looking rivulets. You flip the laminated menu (why is it sticky?) onto the side with the ice cream. You order the first thing your eyes stick on, some sort of cookies and cream abomination that kind of looks disgusting, but kind of looks it would satisfy the kind of junk craving someone won’t admit to themselves.

You lose yourself for an hour, maybe more, lulled into a kind of daze by the sticky-sweet of the ice cream (you were right, it satisfied some sort of craving, you just don’t know what) and the noise of the parlor. Glasses clink against each other, soda pops as it’s poured over ice, voices raise and lower in a soothing rhythm, how are you today here’s your check, I’ll have the special.

You don’t pay attention when somebody new comes in the door, but you do when they drag a chair up to your table, as if you’ve been friends, planning on meeting at the ice cream parlor to reconnect about high school with high school junk food. That would be fine, normal, but you haven’t been planning to meet up with anybody, and you’re pretty certain that nobody planned to meet up with you.

You look up as chair legs scrape against the tile in front of you, the stranger making no effort to muffle the screeching noise. He sits down in front of you, grins, deftly flips the menu over, and seemingly becomes absorbed in the yellowing laminite.

He’s handsome, you suppose, if you’re into the kind of boys that look like where they’re from, all long limbs, straw-colored hair, blue sky eyes. He has a scar just above his top lip, raised a little bit, but one that would probably only be noticeable if you’re uncomfortably close to him. You are.

“I’m sorry, but do I know you?” you ask, watching as his long fingers glide over the menu, pause, flip it over.

He doesn’t respond at first, seemingly too interested in the milkshake options to bother formulating a response. His finger settles on the strawberry one, (“Real, locally grown berries!”) and then he looks back up at you.

“I’m sure you’ve seen me around before.” he murmurs, his voice a soothing rasp.

“I’m pretty sure I haven’t. I’ve lived here my whole life, and unless you moved in last year, I know I would’ve known you”

“I am new,” he concedes, “but I know you. Are you sure you don’t know me?”

You look closer, hoping that something will resolve into a face that remains somewhere in a cobwebbed memory. It doesn’t.

“No. If I knew you at some point, I must have forgotten. I’m sorry.”

The stranger breathes, sighs, flags the waitress back over to your table with two long fingers raised in a kind of lazy salute. He orders (“Are these strawberries actually local?”) and you can’t help noticing the fact that he doesn’t seem to be as sweaty as anyone else in the diner. He seems to blend in to the oppressive heat, rather than stand against it. You’re kind of jealous. You don’t voice it.

He talks first.

“We went to the same kind of parties in high school. You really don’t remember? Because I remember you. I remember who you were.”

You pity him somewhat, and you also pity yourself. You remember what you used to be like, drunk and golden and gorgeous (or so it felt) but also enough of a mess that you cannot separate one memory from another. Your mind turns it over, cuts the deck of memory, but some cards are stuck together and some are misprinted, and so your hand never seems quite right.

The heat has made you tired and angry, and your reply sounds short.

“I don’t remember you.”

The stranger sighs in an infuriating kind of way, like he pities you, and it’s starting to more than piss you off. You don’t know this golden boy, and you don’t want to.

Besides, you’re starting to reach the dregs of your milkshake, the point where the cookies at the bottom are little more than mush, and the point where the heat has begun to creep over the rim of the glass and into the cream, turning it into a lukewarm soup.

The stranger is still staring at you, looking at you like a memory, like someone who expects something from you, and you have never felt less like yourself.

You used to live here. You used to have a name, a reputation, used to feel like you belonged to somewhere, to someone, but a golden-haired stranger has come and usurped that notion. It feels almost as if you have never existed here, like you can’t even remember who you used to be in this place.

You have a place for yourself back at college, you think, with a dorm, an annoying roommate, and a professor who asked you to research with them next year. You have a place, but here, you have lost it. Here you have become nobody. A memory, maybe. Your high school teachers reached out to you the first couple of months, but they stopped as you stopped responding. You don’t talk to your high school friends aside from professional courtesy, and you don’t feel any connection to anything here anymore.

The stranger smirks up at you as if he knows what you’ve been thinking. He’s noticed that you’ve stopped chewing your ice-cream-soup-shake concoction, noticed that it’s turned unbearably sweet in your mouth. He notices that it takes all of your effort to swallow it down. He notices, and he knows that you’ve noticed, and suddenly, you can’t take it anymore.

You push your chair back from the table, not caring about the loud screech that follows, or the looks of the other customers as the quiet lull of the shop is interrupted (you do care, actually, but not enough to apologize), or the fact that you should probably pay. The stranger stays seated, and you hope that the message that he should pay for the both of you is clear enough. The waitress seems to think so, because she lets you out.

As you walk out, you can’t help but wish that tomorrow would come sooner, that you would be able to sleep now, that you can leave this place where you have become less than a memory, that you can close your eyes and remember the man and who he used to be and forget who he is now.

You walk back into the town where you have ceased to exist in any meaningful way, sweat re-forming on the back of your neck, and you wish to be anywhere but there.