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Hipster Love Stories: Tess

Tess watched the last leaves before winter float through the air like lost birds.  Aviary papiery, she thought to herself, and she smiled because in her head it made sense and she imagined a room filled with paper birds, the light from above filtering through their flapping wings as they moved under trapped glass.  Aviary papiery.

Papiery was a word she borrowed on her walks down this same street every day.  It was written on a dirty neighborhood trashcan, and neither the neighborhood nor the plastic container was fancy enough to warrant the labeling of such with such a beautiful word.  Each time she passed it she would laugh, wondering if the person who wrote the words also understood the joke.

She ducked under concrete and the earth’s surface onto a subway platform, where she dropped a penny on the ground.  She watched it fall and didn’t reach for it, the copper playing nicely against the steely gray it was rushing towards.  And Tess left it there so that someone could then have a lucky penny for themselves.  The transference of intention, she thought to herself.  Tess often made up big words in her head – words strung together to form phrases that sounded good in partnership with one another but probably didn’t make sense to anyone else.  That didn’t matter; she was the only one living in her own head, anyhow, and it would always be like that.

As she waited for the train she thought about love because she was listening to a song about love on her headphones.  Most songs were about love, that fact was unavoidable – except rap songs, which were about fucking and degrading women and coming up in a world Tess had no personal connection to.  Tess thought about love and why everyone wrote about it and cried about it and consumed days on end with it.  Despite her penchant for pretty words, Tess was always of a very analytical mind – mathematical, logical, scientific, and cold like the floor of an operating room.  She could never understand how people had such visceral reactions to such an intangible, fickle, unproven thing.

Tess was twenty-eight and had never been in love before and she wondered if that moment would ever come.  If it didn’t, she didn’t mind.  She had reached a comfortable homeostasis with her emotions that went unperturbed by trivial, fleeting interactions with boys.  She had seen what love had done to her friends – lying despondent in their bedrooms, sitting in front of untouched plates of food, sleeping with the wrong people to get over the wrong person.  Why would anyone want to subject themselves to such horrors?

As she got older, Love the Concept became increasingly difficult to understand, as things typically do when we attempt to learn as adults and not children, our heads filled with can’t dos and never have dones, the logistics of accomplishment becoming bothersome and overwhelming.  Riding a bike, learning to drive, falling in love.  These were all things better first attempted as a child, when the possibility for pain and injury is not of primary concern.  Wounds healed, hearts mended, we would live forever.

Tess waited for the train and someone sang in her ears about a broken heart.  It wasn’t the first time she had heard the song, but it was the first time it had made her think about her own heart – unmarred, uncut, left alone.  The train came near, its glowing yellow light like a swiftly moving lantern seen through a dark well, and she was struck with wave of crushing sadness.  A safe heart, like safe skin with no stories to tell, is one that had never been loved or been in love.  And in that moment, she felt her heart break by her own hand.

Summer Feels Forever Ago

I watch a father share a Linzer tart with his two small children, both wearing hats to shade their face from a summer afternoon.  Their hair is brown and cropped.  Their skin, elastic and poreless.  The tart comes from a white paper bag.  The youngest watches as his father’s big hands unwrap the tight, clear cellophane with a dedicated, salivating attention.

Light catches fallen green buds carpeting the grubby asphalt, turning the flora momentarily gold, sitting in its skin, charged and radiant.  Little girls wear pink and boys shoot at each other with water guns.  The bad ones scream bad words at one another. The parents sit on benches and they don’t care because they must use bad words at home.

Next to me sits a Pan Asian fashion whore in purple shoes and silky harem pants, his Buddha’s belly resting above the dropped-crotch that would probably look better on someone thinner.  He dips a narrow plastic spoon into a cup of slow-melting gelato, gossiping about his sister on a phone in the hand not forking cold cream into his wagging mouth.

I let the afternoon rest upon my anxiety, forcing me to feel better, calmer, normal.  I feel softened after reading a pretty book with words I hope to find myself capable of.  The sky turns faded shades of a robin’s egg left to fade in the sun, slowly turning shadows of the colors it had once been.