What Beautiful Stars

It started with the pants. We’d known each other hardly one week when they made their first appearance. I often wondered whether things would’ve played out the same way if you’d worn khakis instead, or the dark jeans you wore the time you met my parents. It probably wouldn’t have—that night had all the spectacular makings of a disaster. You’d invited me to a Dave Matthew’s Band cover band that your friend played lead for. I spent my entire drive to the bar tamping down the bubbling urge to say “Honestly, isn’t one Dave Matthew’s Band bad enough?” when I saw you. And then reminding myself that I’d have to compliment the band even though, of course, they’d be terrible. And then wondering whether it was wise to start lying this early in a potential relationship—and anyway did I really want to be dating someone who liked Dave Matthew’s Band?

I’d already half-broken up with you by the time I reached the East Village.

Maybe it was the shoddy bar lighting, or the cranberry and vodka I’d hastily consumed, or the bright white of your shirt. In any case I noticed you right away. When you came close, I noted the lazy, careful sweep of your hair; the slightly tilted perch of your glasses on your slightly tilted nose; the warmth in your eyes, like what you’d get if you roasted chestnuts on an open fire and set them into a face. Your eyes skimmed down my length and then returned even warmer. I did the same and that was when I caught them.

Normal, worn-in in all the right places jeans. It was the rip in the knee that had me though. One innocuous kneecap seemed to hit me with all the force of a freight train, or a paddle to the heart, like…like Massive Attack’s “Teardrops” staccato and times five. With all the weight of all the matter in the world. Like that.

We shared shitty bar food and each had two drinks and I tried frantically to keep my hands on my fries, beer, lap. Anywhere to keep from reaching for the knob of your knee. For an hour I eyed it with surprise and breathlessness and lust, until it almost seemed like you’d worn the pants to trick me into indecency. Manipulative prick, I thought. You were obviously offering a nakedness that I couldn’t ask for after only one week and eleven hours. I barely knew you.

Even with the mass and jumble of my distraction, the opening chords to “Where Are You Going?” made my insides crinkle into dry, sour paste. The band, as anyone could have predicted, was shit. You nodded your head to the beat like they were imparting great wisdom upon you with every fretless chord. My head started to throb. The freckle at the top bit of your knee suddenly ceased to matter.

But then.

In the middle of “Some Devil” your hand—with long, graceful fingers that looked and felt like they’d never worked a day in their life—reached around my back and you leaned forward to whisper your words over my skin. “I didn’t think they could sound any worse than the actual Dave Matthew’s Band,” you said.

And I swear I probably loved you in that moment. Before I could even recognize what the feeling was, I loved you. But I couldn’t say that, of course, so I just said “Oh,” and finally gave in. Stretched a thin, unsteady finger over the freckle on your bare knee. You blinked in surprise and flexed your hand across my back.

We were at your place before the hour was done.

You never apologized for being forty minutes late and I never brought it up.

——————————————

I always imagined those early days like the video they showed in high school Biology. We were just two atoms, or two particles or two little bits of matter—whatever it was that started our world—and then we collided and everything started to unfurl around us exponentially until we could barely understand all of its convoluted workings. There was nothing bigger than you and I. Everything, this whole big ugly universe, it all stopped and started with us.

——————————————

We were racing carts in the grocery store, acting like unruly, exuberant children. Maybe that’s why they were there. Maybe John and Lorraine sensed not only that I was stepping out of line, but that I was wildly coloring over it with dusty, finger-staining chalk.

Still, it was fun while it lasted.

We careened through the frozen food aisle and I kept straight while you made a hard right and almost flattened my frazzled mother. You managed to swerve in time and demolished a chip display but you would’ve thought my mom had been viciously attacked by the way she acted. She clutched her throat as she berated you, cut you down in that way that she could. My father was a silent sentry, one hand behind his wife’s back protectively.

You were pushing your glasses up your nose nervously when I got the courage to wheel over to you.

“Hi, mom. Dad.”

Their eyes lit with surprise as they embraced me. I hadn’t been going home to see them all that often. I squeezed them a bit harder. Then I took a step back and grabbed your hand. You tensed up as if to pull away. All at once I could see the cognizance in my parents’ eyes. This recalcitrant adult belonged to me. He was my guy. I was his girl.

They were not happy.

My mother’s hands flapped with disapproval as she wrung a promise from me to visit that weekend. “To catch up,” she uttered ominously.

She eyed your grocery cart with disdain as my father ushered her away with a strong hand and a wink in my direction.

We spent the next few moments picking up fallen chip bags in silence before you grabbed me in close and exhaled heaving laughter into my neck until I joined in.

——————————————

You’d tell me stories and stories of home. Of French-onion dip and blue oceans like sadness you could drown in. Once though, we watched a documentary about deep sea trawling and your face puckered and pinched midway through. You never did tell me why. When I tested your barriers you pushed me away, unraveled the seams of our skin and turned away with the pillow over your head.

I turned the lamp off then slipped away, home home, when your breathing was even.

——————————————

Your tub was always too high. We joked about it in between kisses and caresses, but the extra inch we lifted ourselves to get in didn’t worry us much. But that day, when you left to go pick up your family and suggested I stay behind to get ready, my wet foot nudged the too-tall corner and I pitched forward. I barely registered the loud, unnatural crack of my collarbone before I toppled over and my face slammed into your steamy, damp floor.

I didn’t even try to get up, knew that the searing, all-encompassing fire pain that echoed over every inch of my body would keep me immobile. I laid there, staring at the stains at the base of your toilet; the mold growing where the corner met your bathtub; the summer ant steadily making its way across your floor; the sweat beaded over your painted walls.

Deliriously, I thought, “What beautiful stars.”

Then I passed out from the pain.

I always imagined what it was like for you to have found this entire spill of my unconscious frame. My dripping hair running rivulets across your floor and down the mundane splayed canvas of my body. One arm outstretched towards a fluffy blue towel I never reached. The little line of hair I missed shaving on my calf. The notches of my spine that you’d slipped your warm fingers over a mere hour before, prominent and stark and damp to the touch. The blueblack fracture of me when you turned me over, my collarbone with its own heartbeat, fluttering and beating wildly yet ineffectually, like the broken wing of a baby bird trying to fly.

I always imagined that I looked beautiful.

——————————————

Once, I couldn’t have been any more than eight years old, I was walking home from the bus drop and there were these two pigeons fluttering madly over and around each other. When they shifted I could see a small hunk of bread clasped between one pigeon’s beak. The other was fighting to take it away. Wings flittered and pitched and ruffled but in my youthful naiveté, I imagined them to be friends, brother pigeons that were only roughhousing like the boys at school did. Then the empty-mouthed one twisted and savagely went for the soft spot between the other bird’s head and its wings. And that pigeon made a little sound that was something like crying, a sound that caused me to falter a step as it dropped the bread from its mouth. They scuffled over the fallen snack, only this time, without the bread as reference, I couldn’t tell which bird ended up with the treat. And then they flew away moments later, in the same direction, but with an ever-widening distance between them as I continued home.

——————————————

I stared at our reflection in the window of the coffee shop we were passing. I tugged at your arm, so much warmer than mine, and made you stop. I just stared and stared, trying to imprint this vision of us in my mind. All the small details: my chapped lips, your pink cheeks, the bright, vibrant red of your scarf muted in the reflected light, the round buttons of my coat, the lone snowflake that dared to fall in your hair. All the details I couldn’t explain: how I could feel the rough, wooly texture of your scarf even though I wasn’t even touching it, the way the sun sank slow as I watched and it seemed to say here, this is for you. How somewhere in me, I thanked it without meaning to and gratitude welled and how we were the only two people in the world, that’s what it felt like, like we were the only two.

But then you pulled your arm free from my frozen fingers—and only then did I remember that I forgot my gloves. I’d realized somewhere along the way but forgot that I remembered and your skin slipping from mine pushed the thought back into me. Then I noticed how the coffee shop was busy; the hum and clink of people and machines and cups and plates and the jangle of Christmas music playing from tinny speakers and a woman’s loud laughter spilling from the slightly opened door. And just past us, just past you with your scarf and snowflake and red cheeks and mouth pulled down in a frown at the delay, there was a couple sharing a slice of chocolate cake—just one, but they were looking at us, wondering why I was staring, not realizing they didn’t exist, not one tiny bit, until only a moment before. And suddenly I envied them deep down in the bones of me, but then you grabbed my hand and I told myself firmly that I didn’t anymore, that this, here, was enough.

Then it was the warmth of your skin again, the tug of your fingers pulling me away from the hum thrum clink jingle of that separate world that we existed in only as a reflection, only as a moment. I followed you down the street, the camera panning out to show us from above, so small, so fragile, like bugs in between the cars and trees and buildings as the snow fell quietly on, fleeting but indelible, like the stamp of our shoeprints in the crunch of the snow on the street.