From the moment we met in the crowded strip mall bar, I felt an uneasy closeness to her. Our long hair, our long dresses, the way we both apologized before even opening our mouths. It was like the best play date I’d ever been on – one that makes you the good kind of afraid, the excited, nervous kind.
Having shared drinks and formalities as the sun set around us, we shivered and skipped through the twilight, down the empty street from my local haunt. Everything was so still, I thought I’d stepped into a childhood memory, into a Midwestern town with old brick roads and a communal driving instructor.
Los Angeles has a way of surprising you with slowness, but never stillness – even our customary stops at stop signs are fluid, aptly titled the “California roll.” We fear if we stop, just for a second, we die. Or perhaps that our past self, the one we sacrificed to get here, will catch up with us.
I jolted to a complete stop at a crosswalk. The hand blinked and my date told me she’d noticed I was working on my patience. I love how a joke becomes a poem when you strip away the set up and slow down the punchline.
Inside my apartment, we sipped sluggishly from my roommate’s martini glasses, the ice inside melting quicker than we could drink. It was early summer, foreplay to a five-month long heatwave – nights that chilled just enough to disarm you before the sun rose again.
We giggled so much, our silk dresses slick against our shaved legs, eager for the cool desert evening after the wide, hot day. There was something forbidden between us in my empty apartment, almost like we were trespassing or roleplaying as naughty girls who sneak out when their parents fall asleep. We couldn’t stop giggling, delirium embracing bad tequila, perhaps the other way around. I didn’t know how to touch a woman casually, so our bodies kept just apart.
We were both so tired, our lids heavy as we slouched lower and lower, closer and closer on my velvet couch – neither of us ready to break first. The last girls awake at the slumber party, the sexual tension thick in the June air. I was sure I’d fall asleep but I didn’t want her to leave. I didn’t want to feel what being without her was like after meeting her. I was too drowsy to discern whether I wanted to kiss her or just feel her sunshine hair within the walls of my home.
She was apologetic for how she looked – blonde, skinny, tan, tall, femme. She said plenty of men who played lacrosse had told her how beautiful she wasn’t. I was never blonde, but had endured much of the same–though her lacrosse players had majored in gender studies while mine had majored in minors. We carried their comments with us, heavy upon our backs like an anxious teenager on her mother’s scale–hatred stolen and stowed away, compact as a mirror that will fit in a clutch and taking up as little space as we could, breathing shallow, vapid breaths of Angeleno air.
My pain confirmed hers and vice versa, so there was no need to directly address it. We had made it out from under the hot, unforgiving breath of lacrosse captains so we saved a seat, not for Elijah, but for the men who had told us who we were allowed to be and for the women we buried alive to make room for who we would become.
This, her phobia of Trader Joe’s, and a handful of glances I’ve been fluent in my whole life revealed her past to me–laid bare like our golden skin in the brutal light of my apartment. I felt seen, immersed in an intimacy only a woman can provide. The kind without words.
She took my hand, allowing me to discover a scar that healed her white skin whiter on her exposed low shoulder. “The stairs were six feet away from where she sunk her teeth into me,” she said. “So, she dragged me for six feet before dragging me up the stairs.” I felt the outline of the German Shepherd’s tooth, as I traced the story across her back. “Sometimes when I get sunburnt, you can see the whole outline of her mouth,” she said. The skin of my back bristled taught against my shoulder blades with fearful sympathy.
She had completely blacked out when the dog attacked her, and thanked her brain for protecting her just like the German Shepherd had been protecting her pups. The dog sensed danger and acted accordingly; my Tinder date’s brain did the same.
My dog bite story was less interesting because I don’t have many memories to draw on. My brain has been protecting me for a very long time. It’s overprotective, in fact, and I resent it as such for its helicopter parenting until I glimpse the danger. A flash of a memory that’s been hidden from me for so long. The memory begins to emerge in full, gnarled and putrid, horrifying and mutated after decades rotting in the dark. I’m face to face with the monster under the bed. Then I understand. I would drag myself as far as possible from my past, just the same.
When I dropped my date home, she told me, in a shy, quiet voice, I’m feeling kinda subby but I want to kiss you. I asked if she wanted me to kiss her first. She nodded with such sincerity; I had no choice but to oblige. It all felt like we’d been playing house, this was the moment of truth – I was the dutiful husband, as I’d practiced in youth.
I mimed parking in front of her place again, her fantasy, take 2. I kissed her taught, plush lips. I could’ve chewed them off and blown them up to coat my own, like a juicy pink hunk of Hubba Bubba. We pulled apart, our lips moving back to their respective faces. As quietly as she arrived in my life, she disappeared–a waif of a thing–into the forgiving desert night. I could only be sure it hadn’t been a fever dream by the taste of her lip gloss upon my own.
She texted me a week later, telling me she’d realized it was too soon after her recent breakup for her to be dating. She used words like “amazing,” “cool,” and “disarmingly beautiful” to soften the blow. I sent her a script, in true Los Angeles tradition, and she said she’d read it–our mating ritual now played out and complete. We said we would stay in touch as friends and of course, we did not. The slumber party was over. It was time to wake up.
She lived once in my phone, then on my lips, and now, forever to reside, deep in my subconscious. Just enough clarity to haunt me with a flutter in my stomach anytime I spied flaxen blonde locks pressed flat across high tan cheekbones or whenever a German Shepherd crossed my path. From now on, she would only exist in that careful, feminine space between repression and suppression. A gentle scar to heal sweetly on my back–not a warning, but a memory to share with lovers to come.