A New Leaf
Leo H Wiggins
Friday May 19th, 2006
My drink is stirred in a quick and efficient manner, the red fluid demonstrating its liquidity by swirling, even after the long, thin spoon is removed. Money leaves my hand, and is replaced by a chilled glass. I find the cold touch unnecessarily unpleasant on this dreary day, but I gave up paper for the drink, so I might as well hold on to it. A few pieces of metal are tossed my way, and I put them into my pocket, their weight settling next to my cell phone.
I walk over to the nearest table, pull out a chair, and sit down. Placing the drink directly in front of me, I look at it for a few moments before taking a modest sip. Suddenly I realize, in a flash of self-reflection, that I’m sitting in a café, drinking a drink, and waiting for my girlfriend-- something remarkably similar to what I’ve always wanted to do. I feel unreasonably cheerful about this, and immediately I’m in a great mood.
My drink is slowly disappearing, as the hands on a nearby clock race, one of which clearly possessing a mechanical advantage. I observe some people coming in from the rain to purchase delicious things of varying size, density, and recipe, and the rest going out into the icy pluvial, water immediately perching upon their slumped shoulders, clinging to their hair. She’s definitely late.
At this point, boredom comes from across the room, and sits down with me. Ignoring it, I scowl at the clock. The sound of footsteps, for some reason or another, catches my attention, and I turn to face the door, the glass between my hands in front of me now containing nothing but glacial, unfriendly ice, with naught but a hint of the beverage that was once there. It’s definitely her, and she’s definitely late.
She doesn’t want anything from the café, so we leave.
A dense cover of clouds floats lazily over the city as my skin prickles in the cold-- my dark coat doing little to settle the chills seeping from between my lungs. Pains akin to hunger crawl through my stomach as my sneakers making damp padding noises against the moist pavement. Normally, I wouldn’t notice these things, but something has put me on edge. Her delicate hands are cold, our fingers interlaced, and I can’t help but worry about how comfortable she is in this miserable chill. The café was nice, warm, and comforting, but only enough to make the cold all the more frigid, only more uncomfortable than before. We wait, and cross the street only when a little white man gives us the “OK”. She’s thinking hard, her brow furrowed, a vast, complex puzzle being solved within her head as synaptic connections flash, as fast as light, and as restless as the butterflies swarming in my stomach.
We stop walking near a cement bench, tucked in between Shattuck Avenue and Alston Street, an EB Games peering curiously over my shoulder at us.
She indicates verbally that I should sit on the cold cement bench, and I comply, quickly changing my mind at the bracing touch of water on my bottom. Familiar voices are dropped to our ears with the rain, as a group of four draws closer. I find their appearance only a little bit surprising.
I recognize one immediately, with no lack of distaste. The other three only manage to inspire a mild boredom. Unaware of my silent disproval, one of the dull ones runs over and gives me a hug, the pure impact of which nearly causing me to fall backwards.
No one notices.
I timidly question the ferocity of the hug as I look down at her pitying gaze, which makes me all the more uncomfortable. She responds.
“You’ll see.”
I almost hope I won’t, given the sheer weight of her empathy, but she quickly breaks away, and before I’m sure of what has just happened, the four are growing smaller right before my eyes, our relative distance increasing. I turn back to my companion.
Moments pass as silence shoves its way between us, and rams its thick arm down my throat. The feeling is rather unpleasant.
Pause.
We’re standing closer now, though the intimacy I had come to love over the last two or three weeks is absent, and the cold air of fear claws slowly, painfully, up my body, into my stomach where it nestles up comfortably. With nothing else to do, I bend down, negating the height difference, to kiss her. She turns her face away.
Pause.
The fear in my stomach turns over in its sleep, uncomfortable in the throes of a nightmare.
Pause.
She begins talking now. A sharp whine fills my ears, and my vision glazes over-- my gaze fixed on a frustratingly reflective pool of water, a medley of grays assaulting me visually. She hugs me, and for the first time ever, I don’t hug back.
The walk home is harder than anything I can imagine. Judging by the pain pulsing in my chest, the incarnate of the dark lord himself has surely just now been injected into me, and he lazily flails his arms, scrambling my insides. Hastily, my mind races to distance itself from reality, creating an alternate situation, in which I am the hero, and she the villain. She tried to kill me, but couldn’t manage it. The words she spoke echo through the void.
I don’t want to destroy you . . .
She said it with such pity, I had immediately felt worse about myself overall, hearing those words. But now, I scoff at them, giving myself a pseudo pep talk:
Destroy me? Destroy Me?! I laugh, despite myself. Hardly. You tried your best to destroy me, and you failed. That’s right, I win.
This immediately makes me feel better about myself. My newly acquired good mood manifests itself in my step and posture. The vinyl record in my head skips, returning me to the melancholic dirge of lament. Holy shit . . . I just got dumped . . . I . . . my thoughts fail me, as the sheer enormity of the situation gets its hold on my brain, and squeezes it like a ripe orange, thirsty for juice.
I clench my fists as the rain gets a little heavier. The city seems now more lugubrious than ever before, its habitually lush, green plants now sagging, burdened with my despair in this unexpectedly pluvial season.
* * *
July, 2007
The darkness envelops me as I relax in the chair, its soft cushion my only physical bond to the rest of the world, wooden arms at my sides, offering something of an embrace. A soft blue glow hugs my face as I stare into the depths of my computer, which sits complacently on the table in front of me. I reach out, and my fingers make the connection. I press down the keys of varying function, slowly at first, faster, and faster as time passes. My ideas flow from my sub-consciousness into my consciousness, where they’re formatted for communication. First they are nothing but vague feelings, but they soon become the words to dictate those feelings. From there they are converted into a synaptic flash, lightning-fast, which speeds from my brain, into my neck, through my shoulders and into my arms, finally hitting the muscles and tendons in my hands, which push and pull my fingers, literal puppets to the will of my mind. My control is fine tuned, and the keys I want to hit are soon being percussively tapped, slight pauses in my flow of thoughts causing ripples in the system, leading to moments of hesitation in the here and now.
My message is complete, and I hit enter, the decisive click echoing in the silence of my dining room. I sit back and take a breath, awaiting a reply. The “Instant” in “Instant Messaging”, after all, does not take into account the delay between thoughts and the correlating messages, for either participant.
I look around. I have no real reason, yet, to be uncomfortable, but, for one reason or another, I’m thinking ahead. The impending future is disturbing, to say the least.
It’s eight or nine-- I’ve lost track-- and, on the other side of the Internet sits Kevin, his long, delicate fingers dancing fervently across his keyboard.
My stomach shifts uncomfortably.
“Dag Nabbit,”
The words pop onto my screen with a misleadingly friendly little sound, arranged neatly in the small purple chat bubble. His words lack context, and to them I tilt my head, only a little confused as to the cause of this exclamation of dissatisfaction. I type, to express my bewilderment, a simple question mark, which, when added to the screen, is accompanied by its own inconsequential noise. His response is much more substantial, and it takes me a few moments of reading to take it all in.
In the moment, I decide it’s best to get everything out in the open-- to really come to an understanding with one another. “I don’t blame you” are the first words that leak from my fingertips onto the digital page, and I am sure it’s going to be an interesting conversation.
* * *
Tuesday, May 30, 2006
My bag pulls steadily down on my shoulders, gravity clinging to my body. An aura of music surrounds me as I march up the street towards Shattuck. It’s been a few weeks since Michelle dumped me, and I’ve been doing better. Generally, I’ve been avoiding her in the hallways, keeping myself away in hopes of moving on. I have, more or less, come to terms with the relationship being over and I feel I am ready to continue with my life, if not only a little. A flicker of movement catches my attention, which had been wandering aimlessly.
It’s probably Kate and Katie, judging from the shapes, and physical movements. I keep my eyes forward, focusing on their sounds, which slip occasionally through the music as it continues to blares on, my tiny white ipod headphones singing. Something melancholic is playing.
Beyond their quieted footsteps, I pick up a sound, which is only a little bit sharper, heavier on the ground. It’s faster than a walking pace, but its source is definitely bipedal. I peek back to investigate visually. Kate and Katie have fallen back, and a more familiar individual attempts to sneak up on me. I smile, but quickly decide against the expression, and allow it to fade, going for a more stoic figure.
Michelle slows her pace as she reaches my side, I don’t look down, hoping she expects some sign of my surprise.
No, you won’t surprise me anymore. The hero inside me smiles, the villain’s dastardly scheme foiled yet again.
Removing my headphones, I glance down, very slightly, playing it as cool as cool can get. She makes a face, and puts out her hand, as an offer. I accept the handshake, only a little confused.
“Nice to meet you, my name is Michelle,” she says, a firm determination discernible in her voice.
Caught off guard by my antagonist’s move, I, as the hero, suffer a powerful blow.
“Nice to meet you too,” I say, still collecting myself. In an attempt to explain this dynamic development, my mind runs over all of the possibilities, the most likely being that this is her try at a new beginning, to rekindle the friendship I chose to forgo.
“Well, I have to leave,” she says, looking around, a little bit unsure of what to do.
“Take it easy,” I say. She walks off, straightening her plaid skirt, soon joined by Kate and Katie, who slip by me, supposedly unnoticed. Together, they walk off.
I smile. “That was really random,” I say, for the sake of saying something conclusive.
As the dialogue proceeds, I find my earlier prediction dauntingly accurate— this is, indeed, a very interesting conversation. Taking turns, we exchange statements of varying length and meaning, and, steadily, otherwise confusing and mysterious topics are becoming much more easy to grasp in their entirety. I can’t help but notice the similarities between this meeting and a conversation I had with him nearly a year ago. This nudges me into a state of reminiscence.
*
As I sat at my place at the table, comfortable, and happy, the seconds, minutes, and hours slowly meandered by, leading me by the hand towards the darkness of a nocturnal utopia. That procession was interrupted, however, when Kevin contacted me over the Internet. I pulled my laptop forward, and began typing.
When one particular message hit my screen, the otherwise steady progress that time had been making suddenly ended, a chipper walk reduced to a feeble crawl, weighed down by a wrenching discomfort in my gut. He began to elaborate.
I read along as his explanations spilled forth slowly, and concisely, like a gelatinous blob of printer ink. I couldn’t believe it— I was being asked whether or not I’d be alright with he and Michelle dating.
*
When he said that, back in the September of 2006, I had immediately been against it. Nevertheless, I still ended up typing out, almost without thinking about it, “I won’t stand in the way of anything.” My hands wrote and sent it almost without my consent, but I didn’t stop them, ultimately deciding it was the right thing to say and do.
As the conversation in the here and now continues, it seems that we’ve both been oblivious to a great deal more than anybody could have known. While some people, during the last eight or nine months, have told me, in some sort of an attempt to console, that I have every right to feel angry, hurt, and betrayed, I find this wholly inaccurate. Not only did he ask, I gave him permission, and, when it comes down to it, he’s behaved more elegantly considerate than anybody can be rightfully expected.
He still seems to feel guilty, though, if not only a little, so I explain my stance, and the mood begins to lighten. After a few minutes more, the conversation starts winding down, as we are now nearly to a point of mutual understanding, and it feels great. I find myself a little bit hyper, intoxicated by his empathy, his civility, and by the future, which now looks brighter than ever before.
Our hero Mario leaps forward, his eyes set firm on his target. His fists clenched tight, knuckles whitening, he pulls his hand through the air, hardly breathing. The anthropomorphized fox he had been aiming for dodges, its speed far greater than anything Mario can muster, even as it’s burdened by a considerable amount of clothing. Sliding to a stop, it clicks a trigger on a small pentagonal mechanism on its belt. A barrier erupts from the device, and its surface, which acts as a bumper, collides with our protagonist, sending him skidding off the edge of a sizable cliff.
I gesture wildly as I watch the number of my lives fall. I look over to Kevin, whose masterful control of his character has, yet again, left me on the losing side of this digital conflict. We both smile.