And You May Die

Half fiction, half not...

I walk out of her back door into the snow. Sometime during the night the heavens let lose their wails in the form of frozen water, raining down thick clumps of white onto the street. It wasn’t the first snow of the season, in fact it was one of many, but it covered over the parts that had gone gray from car exhaust. When I walk outside, it’s like being hit in the face and my hat does little to protect me. It goes from warm to bone chilling, dark to bright white, in a matter of seconds. Everything is pristine, clean, new, unlike the dirty linoleum floors and dust bunny sanctuary I just came from. It’s like dying, opening your eyes not too reality but to some cold, white wonderland.
I wait on the back porch as she follows me out and locks the door. I don’t look at her, but at this point we are so in sync I can feel her moving. She lifts the edge of her long leather coat, pulling on the chain at her waist that leads to her keys, and then flips through the countless number to find the right one. She’s a medieval dungeon master, locking away her house and all the secrets of the things we did in it. Locking away last night’s date, the food, the smells, the sex. Soon as I start down the street we’ll be out of sync again, and everything will be locked away for only her to see until the next time I come.
If I come again.
I shift my backpack from one shoulder to another as I watch an adventurous squirrel dart around in the snow. The backpack is not perceivably light, weighted down by books and notebooks and my old beat-up laptop, but I imagine that it is lighter. It is one book short, after all; a skinny little play written between yellow covers, but a book all the same. Its absence makes my heart ache in a way it has no right to.
It was our second date when she gave me the first book. We hadn’t been sleeping together yet, but the tension was thick in the air like the heat was turned up too high. It was mid-October; we had stopped for Indian food that was too spicy for me but too mild for her, followed by drinks at the bar next door. She had a beer and water; I had two glasses of wine. I drove her back to her place because at the time I had a car, and she came out with a tiny white book with frayed edges. Her nickname was on a piece of green tape on the back cover, and the names of the plays on the front were just as foreign to me. But I read the little book that night, and then again, and then again.
And our dates continued. We would still maintain the illusion of getting dinner at a restaurant, or ordering pizza, or going to see a movie. But eventually we ended back at her little two bedroom house, avoiding her roommate (or he avoided us, I am not quite sure which), and into her bedroom. She wanted to see my tattoo, so I had to take my shirt off. I wanted to see the scars from her injured shoulder, so she took hers off. She wore no bra because her nipples were pierced, and while I had always loved women, her body was as different to me as the books she gave me. Unshaved, strong, muscular, like a man’s, but not a man’s at the same time. With the first layer of clothes off, the rest were soon to follow, and we became lovers. By then my car was gone, so there was no excuse for me not to spend the night
The mornings after I would inevitably have to leave, either for school or work, and she had to pack up for work. We didn’t speak of the fact she had a girlfriend already, or what I was to her, although sometimes I would politely ask after the other girl and try not to choke on the jealousy as my lover smiled so sweetly at the thought of her. Some mornings we would wake up early enough to explore each other in the sunlight, or at least I would pretend I had the luxury to catch a later bus so I could touch her. But we always ended up at the back porch, her locking the door and then turning to give me a kiss somewhere between indifferent and passionate, and I would walk toward campus while she drove away, a new book in my backpack.
But not this time. She hadn’t given me a new book this time.
I fought the bitterness that began to surface, the sorrow and anger that were battling it out to see who could climb up my throat the fastest. Instead I focused on the snow, perfect white until it reached the street where cars had already turned it black. The words lesbian, poly-amourous, girlfriend, lover, mistress, and casual sex all boiled on my tongue like food that was too hot, burning my mouth with their exotic flavors. What happened to the simple words, like love, commitment, marriage, kids, family, trust? But those words belonged to straight couples, where things were clear-cut, where you had one lover for your whole life until a second lover tore everything to shreds, a world I no longer could claim membership to. And I cursed the heavens, because at some point to be lesbian meant to be the lover of a girl with a girlfriend, and having to clamp down on your jealousy like it was a bad thing and pretended you were fine with the girl you were in love with sleeping with someone else. Somewhere, the sexual revolution and keeping an open mind took a wrong turn.
“Oh shit,” I heard her mumble in her deep voice, and I took a moment to listen to the keys jingle as I turned to her and froze my face in the mask of pleasant confusion. The expectation between us, the unwritten rule, did not allow for me to burn, so I pretended I was ice and snow as I looked up at her. Already her cheeks were glowing red from the cold, her purple hair sticking up from the wind. “I forgot something, stay here.”
“Yup,” I heard myself reply, cheerfully. As she darted back inside, I let my eyes wander again. She’s used to my lack of attention though, and is graceful enough not to acknowledge it when I am trying to hide my feelings from her. She knew when I got distracted it was when I’m trying not to think of her, trying not to love her, but at least she didn’t point it out. It almost made it worse. I jumped when I heard her come out again, and turned back to watch the muscles in her shoulders move as she locked the door.
But then she turns around, and shoves a little black book with red letters on the front into my hands. We have our kiss that is somewhere between indifferent and passionate, and she drives off as I walk to school, crying.
* * * * *
We met on an online dating site. Welcome to the 21st century.
My ex and I had split six months before, after nearly five years together. Perhaps split, though, was not the right word; I wish I could say the night I found out she was cheating stood out to me as a defining point in my life, but quite honestly between the tears and the emotions and the hurt, it became a black spot in my memory. I spent a few months being dragged from gay bar to gay bar by my closest friends, who hadn’t yet realized that I wasn’t going to jump in the sack with some stranger in order to feel better. After a while the martinis became too sweet, the bass too loud; I started burying myself in work and school so I would have an excuse not to tag along. But that didn’t make life any less lonely; I turned to dating sites because at least then I could emphasize my loneliness from the comfort of my own home.
I don’t remember exactly what I was thinking when I read her profile. Her picture was her holding a gun pointed at the screen, her glasses and purple hair just out of focus in the background. I had always had a weakness for glasses, and she was no exception. As I read on I became more and more intrigued. 17 piercings in one ear alone. Makes chain mail. Works as a software designer, but does theater lighting as a side project. Loves metal music, but used to lead a swing band. Gay. Five feet seven, plays soccer competitively. Did I mention the glasses? The dating site offered stupid little tests, and under her tab were a bunch that pointed to geeky sci-fi shows and obscure books.
Only one flaw. Listed not as “single” but “available”.
I knew in my head what that meant. I knew all about poly lifestyle, could justify it in my head but spoke venomously against it whenever asked. Dating two or more people, or having a “primary” partner but sleeping with strangers. Why not just stay single and be friends with benefits with your intended partner? And how could you not call someone your girlfriend and then get ridiculously jealous as she gave herself to someone else? Ridiculous, I would say. Casual sex happens, it’s fine, a movement between two consenting adults; I was not such a prude as to argue that. But poly-amorous love? Bah, impossible. My ex had seen to it that I found the idea of sharing my partner with another woman more detestable than any other weird or disturbing fetish. I could never date poly, as it was termed.
But I sent her a message, a bull-shit conversation starter about onions and mushrooms on pizza and asking about soccer. A week later she wrote me back.
* * * * *
She never wrote back as often as I did, so it was a game for me to decide when it was appropriate to reply to her. Was the day I saw the little red mail icon too soon; how about the day after, or the day after that? How much interest did I show in her life, how many questions did I ask and how personal could they be? How was I supposed to respond when she gave that little smile of hers while talking about her girlfriend, or when her voice got tight in her throat about mentioning her deceased father? What topics were okay? Where did I have to draw the line so as to keep my place as the casual sex partner, the maybe-a-friend if I was lucky, and not overstep my boundaries?
The books made it more difficult. The books meant that our encounters couldn’t just end. I couldn’t just get a girlfriend, slip into a monogamous relationship and cut off contact with her. I couldn’t decide to move on, to start looking again for someone to share my life with exclusively, and simply type up some pathetic reason for not meeting with her anymore. No, I had to keep seeing her, if only to give her books back. After all, these were plays with lighting notes scribbled on the margins, or novels with random lines highlighted in classic yellow; these were books from precious college years, these weren’t books she could just replace. These had meaning, power beyond the already overwhelming strength of written word. These were precious, sacred in a way; I had to fight the urge to cleanse my hands just to touch them, so keeping them was pure blasphemy.
One night I was sitting on her bed, absent-mindedly tracing the patterns on her comforter, as she wandered around her living room with her cell phone glued to one ear. She was talking to her still living grandmother about plans for the New Year, me only half listening and missing the other half thanks to her closed door. Her comforter was soft, stitched together from all the different production shirts from her university theater, and I curled up into a ball on the top of it, letting the tee-shirt material stroke the side of my face. Across from me was her beat-up dresser, the top of it covered in an indiscernible mass of papers, toys, and other small objects. Nailed to her wall was the only decoration in the entire room, and it simply a single sheet of paper, yellowed to look old. “The World Could End Tomorrow and You May Die” was typed up on it, made to look like a newspaper headline.
Her room was like the books she gave me, and together they told me more about her than my questions would ever get me or she would ever grant me. At first glance the bedroom was a mess, the whole room having this feeling like it was beaten into submission by the piles of dust, and books, and clothes and who-the-hell-knows-what-else. Then you noticed the obvious; the four book shelves crammed into a small space they had no business fitting themselves into, the giant metal framed bed, the beat-up dresser, the aged cardboard box that sat away from all the mess like it was too good for everything else in the room. Then more detail; there were D-rings welded onto one of the bookshelves, another was caving under the weight of the books on it, the comforter with the strange names on it and the hand-drawn designs, the closet door that was always half open because it was always too full to close. And then the details had details; the sign proclaiming the end of the world was too small to have come from an actual newspaper, there was a section on the book shelves that was only children’s books, the scratch marks on the floor from the bed shifting.
And like the books, I understood some of the finer points but not all of them. The cardboard box held either legos or her father’s broken pottery, and she was too scared to open it to see which. The too big furniture was from when she moved from the larger bedroom in the house to the smaller one, not because of the roommate but because of her charming ex-girlfriend, who ended up moving out only a month after. The dust because she only came home to sleep, and once in a while to see me, but was otherwise out in the world working or playing soccer or in the bed of another woman who wasn’t her girlfriend either. These things I could piece together, and I wondered what other reader knew what other details.
After a while though, my hand had stopped moving and I was just curled up. This was how she found me, when I was so busy studying the details with half-open eyes that I didn’t realize her voice had gone quiet. She stepped into the room and closed the door behind her, and I must have heard that, but I think I was too distracted and didn’t understand what it meant. But I did feel the bed dip under her weight, and I jumped a little and looked up at her.
“You should have told me if you were feeling sick again.” I hated how her voice could sound so accusatory sometimes, especially when she was doing something so sweet as to push my bangs away from my face. Her eyes behind her glasses were a murky brown, somewhere between amber and green, but I thought they were stunning even if they sort of looked like dirty water. She looked concerned. I took a moment, feeling out my body; I did feel dizzy, slightly feverish. I wondered how much of that was her.
“You were talking with grandma,” I heard myself say. Her grandmother, not mine. Although sometimes I called my lover “grandma”, because it was easy to tease her about the difference in our ages, and I often couldn’t think of anything wittier to tease her about. “Grandma comes first.”
She made a sound in the back of her throat, and physically lifted me up. She was about eight inches taller than me, and a great deal more muscle from all that soccer practice, whereas I lived the student life and it was only stress keeping me thin instead of an active lifestyle. A few seconds later, and I was lying against her chest as she rested against the headboard, bracing her neck against the wider metal pole that ran across it. One of my ears was pressing on the collar of her shirt, half of it sticking to her skin; I could hear her heart beat, a steady and deep bass line from beneath her rib cage.
“I’m sorry.” She hated it when I apologized, but I always did it anyway. For a moment I wondered if her girlfriend got to lie like this, wrapped up in the tee-shirt comforter and strong arms, listening to a heart-beat song that was older than time but still only twenty-nine years old. But I guess I knew the girlfriend did; the girlfriend got everything I got plus more, more than I could imagine because I already felt like what I got was beyond what I was entitled to. “I’m fine, really.”
“Uh-huh.” She wasn’t convinced, but I didn’t expect her to be. “When was the last time you had dialysis?”
I pressed my lips together tightly and went silent, trying to think. When was the last time I had gone to my doctors? I was supposed to go weekly, but there was school, work, seeing her…more than a month ago, at least. “Uh…maybe last week?”
She made a little snorting noise through her nose, and her arms tightened. My ear was now completely against her skin, sticking to it, and I hoped my earring wasn’t cutting her. But I didn’t move, I stayed still in her arm, listening to the thump-thump-thump that pushed life through her body. After a while she shifted us so that she was lying down as well, but my ear remained pressed to her chest, glued there. I struggled against sleep, not wanting to waste our alone time, but I could only pout when I felt the little spasms go through her body that meant she was sinking into sleep herself. So I listened to her heart slow, my own battle quickly being lost as I felt my eyes droop closed.
“The world may end tomorrow, and you may die…” my mind whispered. I was in that half-awake, half-asleep world where thoughts became messy and disconnected. “Which is all well and good, because you could be dead tomorrow anyway.”
* * * * *
Another morning. Spring has come, and the ground outside her back door is a mess of mud and grass that hasn’t made up its mind whether it wants to be brown or turn green. There are more squirrels now, darting around like lunatics, shaking water from the trees and power lines onto the unsuspecting people below. The neighborhood wakens around this time, students off to class, new families off to day cares, actual adults off to work. There’s a fence and a line of hedges protecting us from everyone’s view, but from the raised porch I can see them going. She’s locking the door behind us.
It’s one of those rare days where I don’t have work until late, and no classes beckon me toward the campus. But rather than take the time to spend more time with her, she has an actual, honest to goodness, nine-to-five job that cuts our date short. And it’s a Monday, meaning she actually has to be to work on time for the weekly meeting. I feel bad when our dates come up on Sunday, knowing she won’t get much sleep before that early meeting, but sometimes it’s the only night I can get. Monday and Thursday nights are Soccer, Tuesday is a night with friends, Wednesday goes to her girlfriend, Friday and Saturday spent in bars hunting for a warm bed. So I get Sundays, every other week. I secretly wonder what it means that I see her half as much as her girlfriend, but all the other girls only see her for a night, maybe two if they’re super cute.
It’s nice out, but I’m still wearing a coat and it causes my purse to keep sliding off my shoulder. In my coat pocket I can hear a piece of paper rustling, and I smile when I remember what it is. I walk toward the edge of the porch as she messes with the door, bracing my hands against the wooden railing and breathing in spring. Kidney function within normal range, liver performance optimal. Congratulations, the letter says. You are going to live. Keep exercising, maintain a good diet, remember to brush your teeth and listen to your mother, blah blah blah, and you will live, the letter says. As I watch the squirrels, I feel her come up behind me, bracing her hands on the railing beside mine as she kisses the top of my head and leans into me. I smile wider.
“So what are you going to do with your free time?” She asks, teasingly. She still has her leather coat on, and it makes a funny noise as she moves her hands and wraps her arms around her. I sink into the feeling, knowing her girlfriend’s birthday is next week so it might be a while before I see her again. Part of me is disappointed; another part is too happy. “Drink coffee where that cute barista works?”
“Ah, I think she might actually be straight. I’m totally heartbroken,” I say, mockingly. Contrary to popular belief, it could be hard to tell who was lesbian and who wasn’t; gay-dar was a myth. So was recruiting, although that never stopped us from trying. “However, there is this one at the book store on State…”
I feel her laugh before I even hear it, and release my hold on the railing so I can lean back against her, putting my hands on her arms. She’s warm, and I’m starting to sweat, but I don’t move. At this rate she’s going to be late to work, but I don’t want to let her go. “So…” she whispers into my ear, “if you don’t get anywhere with the book-keeper, would you maybe want to catch dinner with me and Gina on Wednesday?”
Gina. The girlfriend. I don’t think I go still, but I must have because her arms tighten. I can’t imagine she’s nervous, but I know I am. Images go racing through my head; the few pictures I had seen of Gina, scenarios playing out where she hates me or- even worse- where she doesn’t, kissing her, hitting her, her hitting me, yelling, fighting, and- oh please no- even sex. What if I ended up having a threesome with my lover and her girlfriend? How horrible would that be? But she’s waiting for my answer, and for once I can feel that she might be kind of nervous to see how I am going to respond.
“Sure, that would be great.” I turn in her arms, and kiss her lightly. All bubbles, all smiles; my eyes are slightly distracted, but I’m not ice this time. Nor am I burning. “But hey, I got something for you!”
She lets me go so I can dig around in my purse. It takes a moment- I am always so messy- until I pull out a small paperback. She takes it from me, looking over it in curiosity; the binding is white with big bold black letters, and there’s a piece of blue tape on the back with a name scribbled across it. I take her hand and we head toward the car, and I kiss her at the driver’s side in a way that’s somewhere between passionate and comfortable. We finalize our plans for Wednesday, she kisses me this time, and drives off. I walk toward campus, secretly pleased my purse is a little lighter because one of my favorite books is sitting on her passenger seat between her coat and her lunch bag.

Somewhere between ice and fire,
Eve