Hipster Love Stories: Beth

She had already sat down to eat her breakfast when she noticed that the snow from last night had stuck.  It pooled around the base of each tree in the backyard below and rested gently on the stretching boughs above.  Beth sat, chewing mouthfuls of a homemade omelet with soy cheese and locally made wheat toast, knowing that though beautiful, it would be a miserably cold day outside.

Making breakfast was a new habit, one that required time she ordinarily did not care to give herself.  Most often the meal was had in the form of lukewarm, burnt coffee from the deli on the corner and half of a green algae bar.  Being single had been hazardous to her diet.  She used to cook all the time.  Now, she barely had more than two pans in her kitchen.  One of which she bought last week, specifically to make omelets with.

Beth brushed her teeth with a minty toothpaste that came in a cool metal tube but tasted like hell.  She felt like a sucker for having fallen for their clever campaign that appealed to aesthetes such as herself.  That was her punishment for being superficial, she supposed, and though she hated the acerbic taste it left in her mouth, she couldn’t bring herself to throw it away; it had cost just shy of $15, a hefty ransom compared to Crest, which had suited her just fine all these years.

It was a Monday.  Fucking Mondays.  She wished that the whole city would call a snow day, though the meager half-inch of powder dusting the sidewalks hardly qualified as a national emergency.  Reluctantly, she pulled on a pair of pants, fastening the belt that was already in place.  Wearing the same thing every day had become extremely convenient, though equal parts boring.  Beth was beginning to feel like a tired, forty-something divorcee, not a broke kid in Brooklyn.

Beth thumbed through her messy piles of shirts, the result of not wanting to purchase a dresser, which was the result of never having enough money to buy what she wanted, though she willingly spent what little money she did have on expensive toothpaste, apparently.  The new year was approaching and Beth vowed to change her habits.  In 2011 she would love herself more.  The omelets were a preemptive stride in the right direction.

Wrinkled.  Too bright.  Wrinkled.  Ugly.  She dug her hands deeper into the darkened expanse of her closet in attempt to find something decent to wear.  Her regular standbys were at the Fluff and Fold down the street.

There, back behind her shoebox filled with rolled socks, Beth found it.  It was a shirt he had given to her when she was moving out, after she had thrown all of her own belongings into trash bags she would sort out after she stopped wanting to kill herself, an impulse she imagined would subside in three weeks time.  It was his shirt, one that she had commandeered early on in their relationship.  It was soft and torn at the neck, weathered in a way only a boy was capable of doing.  That shirt was him.

He had left it for her on the kitchen table, accompanied by a note that said something like “Blah blah blah you’ll use this more than I will.”  If he had been there Beth would have assured him that she would never wear this shirt.  She would have told him that she didn’t want to keep anything he had ever given her or anything that reminded of him, period.  She would have said all of these things and she would have wrapped up the speech telling him why: how hearing him say the words “I don’t love you anymore” had ripped her in two and that even seeing a picture of him made her want to vomit.  She looked down at the shirt that was staring up at her, a testament how emotionally charged a two-foot piece of cotton could be, and then shoved it into her purse.

Beth looked at the shirt, wondering why she still held onto it.  The sadness it brought her was abating.  Soon, she thought, she might even be able to wear it without thinking of him at all.  Eventually, she might even forget that he had given it to her at all, that it had ever been his.  Someone would ask her where she found a shirt so soft and she would grab onto its hem, assessing it from above, her chin lowered, and honestly be able to muse, “Hmmmm…you know…I can’t remember.”

But that time was still a ways off, and Beth crammed it into a ball and buried into her sock box, knowing that she would forget she had placed it there and hoping that the next time she discovered it, she wouldn’t care anymore.

Hipster Love Stories: Karen and Ben

It was the cold season.  They held hands through thick gloves and forgave each other the dry, winter-cured skin they knew lived underneath.  Every morning, they took the train into work together from Karen’s apartment, which was nicer than Ben’s in both size and quality.  Her furniture was a tasteful combination of mid-century designer pieces she had inherited from her grandmother and more gauche accessories that reminded Ben of Wonderland.  Karen made a good living, earning more money than Ben did, and though it didn’t seem to bother either of them now, it was something that would likely make Ben feel emasculated and inadequate if the roles never reversed.  But they were young, and things that like that were the thoughts of grown ups.  Now was the time for heart, not head.

Karen and Ben had only been dating for a few months, but it seemed like forever, not only to them, but to their friends as well.  “Karen and Ben” had become an inseparable entity, so much so that Karen wondered what would happen if they were to break up.  She had never met anyone before that was worth giving up so much for.  She had routines and appreciated her private time, but for Ben, for Ben she would give up everything.  This thought was terrifying.

Back when she was single, Karen used to wake up at sunrise, down two cups of black coffee in a mug given to her by her best friend, and go for a run around ten square-blocks.  Every day.  This is what she did.  When she and Ben began seeing each other, Karen would wake up at dawn, finding herself trapped under the affectionate weight of this new and strange boy and she watched, from bed, the sun change the apartment building across the street more brilliant shades of red.  At first, Karen was anxious about altering her schedule for someone else, especially a boy.

She, like any smart girl making her way to the edge of her twenties, had become wary of giving anything to a boy – love, time, affection.  Your heart is my piñata.  Karen read this line in a Bret Easton Ellis novel some years back and it had stuck with her ever since, because, often, that was how it was.  Bang!  Bang!  Bang!  Bang! For years, she watched the boys she had mistakenly loved and lusted over whack at her heart until its contents spilled forth – secrets, sex, kisses.  And when they were done with her, she was left, hung from a rafter, her beautifully colored paper coat bent and ravaged and swinging in the breeze.

After two weeks, Karen had nearly forgotten about running entirely, her shoes crammed in her closet underneath vintage sandals with gold buckles and leather straps.  And even after she gave her heart to Ben, he didn’t leave her.  This is how a relationship starts: One person doesn’t leave.

Ben had taken to her immediately.  The way she covered her mouth when she laughed, her ability to make strangers feel comfortable within mere moments, her refusal to give up white bread.  Before Karen, he had never noticed the minutia of a girl, mostly because he didn’t have the patience to just watch.  None of them had ever deserved further study.  Karen, however, was endlessly fascinating.

In the mornings Ben would watch as she got dressed for work, digging through her closet for approximately three-and-a-half minutes before deciding on a rotation of four outfits she always wore.  Following this, she walked into the bathroom, shutting the door behind her with her left hand, coming out ten minutes later looking like a tired person trying to look awake, her lips slick with Chapstick and her eyeliner from the night before have made its way down below her lower lashes.  He liked her best when she had just gotten out of the shower, smelling of rosemary mint shampoo and her cheeks burning red, her blonde hair turned a sopping brown clump.

They had met at the apartment of a mutual friend.  Ben was standing near the kitchen, his hair unkempt in a fashionable way.  Karen saw him from across the room, beyond two girls holding glasses of wine and interpretive dancing, their arms passing in front of Ben on occasion and blocking the view.  She looked at Ben and she felt so many things, but what she felt most deeply was the sense that they had met before, in some previous life, if one were to believe in such a thing.  Once, in college, she met a girl who had been told by a psychic that she had been a French prostitute during the Revolution; strangely, this suited the girl and Karen was happy to accept it as truth.

Karen, when toying with the idea that they actually had met some time ago, felt that they had been farmers in Ireland, sometime during the 1700s.  Karen, though her name wasn’t Karen then, made a lot of broth-based soups and tasteless bread from scratch and Ben sheered sheep.  They lived in a house made of stone that always smelled of dirt and burning wood.  There was nothing to justify this theory – neither Karen nor Ben were even Irish by decent – and Karen never told anyone this because even she thought it sounded a bit odd.

“Have we met before?”

Karen had made her way over to the kitchen, where Ben was now standing alone, rattling the cubes of ice against the glass holding his drink together.  Ben looked at her for a length of time that existed somewhere in the realm of creepy or romantic, depending on how it was perceived.  “Ben,” he said, not answering the question, extending his hand made of slender fingers and a soft palm and wrapping it around her own.  How nicely they fit together, Karen thought.

Hipster Love Stories: John

John sat on the train across from a pale, brunette couple holding hands and mouths and he felt the pang of loneliness he had been so diligently trying to avoid.  Dinner with friends, movies with friends, dancing with friends, drinking with friends.  It kept going and it had been going on for the last three months.  He left her in June for a Single Summer in New York.

They met in LA because that was where they both lived at the time.  On their first date he picked her up in his friend’s old Mercedes with a missing back window.  He wore his gray pants made out of a nubby wool that would end up being her favorite pair, that was in course, until he broke up with her, at which point they were her least favorite pair in the whole world.  In fact, whenever she saw gray pants with a dropped-crotch and skinny legs she would shudder and avert her eyes.  She knew it was ridiculous but she couldn’t help it.

That night John took her to a bad club, the kind where girls wore spandex dresses and hooped earrings and danced to things like 50 Cent.  His friends came, too – two shorter boys that reminded her of elves.  But it didn’t matter that the club was terrible; they had fun anyway.  And when he danced, hopping on one foot and pretending to throw a pair of dice, she laughed under the changing lights.  He watched her as he did this, this hopping around thing he’d been doing since he was fifteen, he watched her face under the purples and blues and pinks and knew that he could love her already.

They kissed in a dark alleyway off of the main drag where his little elf friends were walking.  Neither of them was drunk and they would remember it later and it wouldn’t embarrass them.  Though now that moment had happened so long ago – years, nearly – that neither of them could remember the specifics or even the feeling.  It was all evaporating – everything they had.

He slept over at her house that night, and many nights thereafter until they ended up prematurely moving in together – something that happens when you’re young and don’t know any better, before you know what endless amounts of exposure to another person can do to a relationship.

In the morning she would make him eggs and each time she set the plate down in front of him she would apologize because she wasn’t good at making breakfast foods, especially eggs.  She was better at dinner, she would say, which was true.

If she slept at his house, she would wake up in the morning and make coffee with a little French press to quell the hunger while waiting for him to make breakfast, which was tastier than her own.  He always had asparagus in the fridge, so they would eat that.  And he was recently into turkey bacon, so they would eat that, too.  They sat at a small table next to a window overlooking Korea Town, drinking coffee and watching each other, sometimes not talking at all.

Those were the good times.  Times when they made each other mix tapes and were still nervous when they held hands.  The first time he went to hold her hand, she didn’t trust him because no one had ever wanted to hold her hand before.  Eventually, he stopped holding her hand when they crossed streets together and this made her terribly sad.  It made her remember what it was like to not have someone want to hold your hand, and it was worse because you were living with the person who didn’t want to hold it.  That was the worst part, the handholding, how it stopped.

The subway lurched to a halt in between stations and John felt awkward sitting across from the couple he had unintentionally been staring at this whole time.  He shifted in his seat and looked out the window next to them at the unintelligible graffiti made by teenage children who thought they could outsmart trains.  Love, he thought, love was such a thing.

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www.fifthgiant.com

Hello, friends.  I’ve been updating the Fifth Giant blog more frequently as summer has officially slipped away, forcing me indoors more often.  In addition to little brief words on Fifth Giant I am posting music daily and pictures, as well.  Anyway, please visit and enjoy.

And also, I started up another blog “anonymously”, but for followers of JBLY, I’d like to forward you on if you feel like it.

Email me at jennyblovesyoudaily@gmail.com for that info.