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This writing was accepted for publication in the 108 page perfect-bound ISSN# / ISBN# issue/book... “hello goodbye goodbye hello” Down in the Dirt (v132) (the October 2015 Issue) You can also order this 6"x9" issue as a paperback book:

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Nocturne, Played With Abandon

Zain Saeed

    She broke something. I don’t know what exactly. Not my heart or anything. No. More like my nose, or my face. Yeah. I think it’s my face.
    She broke my face.
    The nerve!
    Okay well I might be exaggerating a bit. Just a little. Okay okay so she didn’t really break anything. It was a slap. She slapped me. In the cafeteria of all places! Smack bang in the middle of the cafeteria.
    I was sitting there with a couple of friends minding my own business on a blue chair next to a light blue table surrounded by people and the smell of food and munching on some heavenly absolutely heavenly beef stroganoff when I got a message from her.
    “We need to talk.”
    I pictured her with a spear and a tremendous beard. Death. I shook my head violently.
    No one used this bloody phrase before we came along. There is no account of life in the 1850s where an angry woman sends her lover a letter saying “we need to talk”. Then a week later he replies “okay”. And then another week later she replies saying “can you meet me at so and so on so and so?” To which he replies (two weeks later) “I got this three days after your suggested date. How about on so and so?” To which she replies in a further thirteen days: “Okay”. And when they finally meet the woman’s not really sure what she wanted to say in the first place and the man has already begun courting some other woman he met while milking a cow. Or maybe a goat.
    I like goats.
    Anyways. Letters. I wish we still had letters. They might save us.
    So she said:
    “We need to talk.”
    To which I replied:
    “No.”
    To which she couldn’t reply because she was apparently out of credit as I found out five minutes later along with other information she had for me regarding my libido, cheapness, fatness and such qualities. Let me explain why I said no:
    The night before, at precisely 3:24 a.m., I was caught red handed by the aforementioned girl while fraternizing with another member of the opposite sex. Note the use of the word “fraternizing”; I was merely being friendly. There was absolutely no physical contact except for our feet with the ground and our hands with our glasses and our limbs with ourselves. I must explain that it was a party (red, everything was red) and the woman I was speaking to was my sister-in-law-twice-removed anyways so I wasn’t really in a compromising position. However, as such times in life go, The Woman saw us standing in a corner exchanging smiles. I had at that very instant told my sister-in-law-twice-removed a childhood story about a play called “My Pineapples Are Chickens” (which was really all a lie I made up in that very moment in a bid to sound like I had lived a full life rife with cheeky plays) and gotten nothing close to the hearty guffaw that I had expected. The Woman stormed towards us and gave my sister-in-law-twice-removed the Stare of Perpetual Disdain (I hate the Stare of Perpetual Disdain) forcing her to back slowly out of the room. The Woman then turned towards me and said something I couldn’t hear but to which I nodded and smiled anyways. Apparently it was the appropriate reaction to what she had said because she walked back to where she was before, looking completely satisfied.
    That was why I said no. I was afraid.
    The minute I sent the message I saw lightning.
    Thunder showed up about five minutes later.
    It said:
    “No? NO? What is THAT supposed to mean?”
    I replied with some weird whale-like moans because my mouth was at that time full of the aforementioned stroganoff.
    Then she slapped me.
    Right across the face.
    In full view of the entire clientele.
    Bits of beef rocketed out of my mouth and onto the table. Audio accompaniment was provided by The Woman in the form of hurtful information as I’ve already explained. My friends pretended to pose for a picture that someone on the other side of the cafeteria was taking.
    She didn’t stop with one slap, oh no. She went for another but missed. By the time she got to revealing sensitive information about my apparent uselessness in bed her screeching had reached swan-level and the whole cafeteria was now tuned in to the action. Boxing commentary would not have been out of place.
    It took her two whole minutes to calm down. I felt the air get dense with expectation as people then turned their focus on to me. I had to do something, so I decided to do what any self-respecting man would have done in such a situation:
    I laughed.
    “HA HA HA!”
    I kept on laughing. I couldn’t stop. I hadn’t found any of that funny at all, no. I just didn’t know what else to do. It was almost involuntary. Everything was so ridiculous.
    But it wasn’t the first time. Shit like this happened if you were in love with The Woman. Which isn’t to say that I was any less of a drama-monger myself. I was probably worse. (Or better, depending on your outlook on life).
    I laughed harder.
    Knockout.
    The whole cafeteria joined in the laughter. The awkwardness died. Food became the order of the day once more. We all became twenty-somethings again.
    All of us, except her. She left, crying.
    Or was it laughing? I couldn’t tell which.

***

    I’ll tell you how I met her.
    Three years ago. It was the year where everything that could fall into place did not fall into place and decided instead, along with other clichés, to continue in a similar shitty fashion for its entirety.
    That was until I met her. In a bar. Promise. I really did. I’d never picked up a girl in a bar before. Never. The only way I was going to leave a bar with a girl I hadn’t come in with was if she had a psychological condition that ran contrary to pogonophobia, maybe something that made her fall terribly in love with beards.
    I must admit, I had a pretty decent beard.
    I was having my usual happy hour beer at the bar when she came up to me from behind and said:
    “Hi.”
    She was neither attractive nor ugly. Her face had a slight carbuncular intensity (it was allergy season). When men through the ages thought of women in their heads, they did not think of her.
    The minute she started speaking, though, I was ready to spend my life buffing up her nails and straightening her hair (not that she needed it; curly, I love curly hair). I was ready to jump off tables and declare war on pesticides and collide with goats and pray to god (or the secular equivalent) and recycle and talk about politics and wait up for her when she was out with her girlfriends and make her breakfast in the morning or in the afternoon or at night.
    I was, simply, a goner.
    Ten minutes into our conversation she was the most beautiful thing in the universe and at any bars or restaurants present at the ends of it. Her eyes – gray, green; they could make you feel like you had no pants on. I couldn’t gather the courage to ask her for her number, where she lived or what she liked to eat. I don’t even know what we talked about for however long we sat there. Then she got up and left.
    I woke up the next day and all my hair was standing up on end because the electric charge from her hand on my shoulder had still not completely dissipated. Well, at least that’s what I told myself. My hair had a tendency to do that anyways.
    I also felt like slapping myself silly because I didn’t know how to find her.
    I kept going to that bar every day for the next month hoping to run into her (convincing myself that I was actually going because their cocktails were reasonably priced, not because of her) but she was never there.
    It wasn’t obsession. It was worse. I just thought of her at random points throughout the day: while opening the fridge door, while scratching my face, while doing the dishes etc. I also began misinterpreting exclamations as questions, which created further, albeit unrelated problems, and gave me the perpetual appearance of someone who had forgotten to lock the front door on his way out.
    I started noticing little pouches of belly fat and began to go for runs in the park. Another Doner I did not eat. I cleaned my room almost every other day. I shampooed my hair as if the lives of all the world’s children depended on it. I took special care to have chewing gum on me at all times.
    Then one day I ran into her. Well, we both ran into each other. She was still single, she hadn’t grown another leg, she was just as beautiful, just as interesting and, apparently, equally interested. So we got together. It was perfect.

***

    Three years later, today happened.
    I finished eating what was left of my stroganoff, shook my head with disapproval at my friends, and headed off to find her.
    I found her on the stairs that led up to a bank building.
    What did she look like?
    Shit. Shit is what she looked like. We’d already had several conversations as to whether our sole purpose in life consisted of intermittently looking like shit for the other person. We were yet to agree on an answer.
    “I must admit you do a pretty good bird screech,” I said.
    “This isn’t funny.”
    “I know.”
    “What?”
    “What?”
    “Whatever.”
    “Okay.”
    Then she lit a cigarette. Then I lit a cigarette. And we smoked it all in complete silence.
    “Okay. I’m sorry,” she said after she was done.
    “I know.”
    More silence.
    I wasn’t angry. At all. She wasn’t either. The stroganoff gurgled in my stomach in protest against my nonchalance but I ignored it.
    “You know, that was a relative of mine yesterday,” I said.
    “Really? Haha. That’s kind of embarrassing.”
    “Kind of, yeah.”
    “Give me your phone I need to check my email.”
    I gave her my phone.
    “Do you realize there may be a time when this stops working?” She said.
    “I do.”
    “So?”
    “So what? I know other stairs.”

***

    I don’t recall when I first realized that everything I had thought about her after that night at the bar owed a massive debt to my powers of description; that if I began to forget the words I’d used, she’d shed skin. Maybe one day she’d disappear completely, dissolve into a flaky powder, all because I couldn’t describe her to myself anymore.
    I did forget my words. Very soon. But she didn’t disappear. No. In fact she became more solid – words now seemed to beat a hasty retreat, bouncing off this force field she’d conjured. I soon found out that I could conjure one up for myself too.
    And just like that, words were defeated.
    She probably didn’t disappear because she realized at the same time as I did that our lives really weren’t going to change just by us having run into each other. The fact that I’d met her, and that she’d met me, and that there was enough electricity between us to power a small city, meant nothing in the present.
    In the past, yes. In the past it mattered. In the past everything was either perfect or completely shit. There was rarely an in-between. Smiles were unnaturally happy. It meant something. It was something to think about during a rough day at work. It was something to wallow on when the feeling took you. The past was what you saw in the movies. It was scary. It was whole. Solid.
    In the future too, yes. It mattered. Everything mattered. We were closer. We knew each other better. We’d gone through what most people were supposed to get through. It was something to look forward to, something we were moving towards.
    But in the present, in the moment, nothing meant anything. No matter what had happened, or would happen, nothing mattered. Someone would always be a second away from being shat on by a pigeon, from standing, lifting, opening, grilling, bumping, turning, changing, scratching, glancing, sneezing and tapping things. And then nodding and leaving.
    Nothing could affect how all of the above could happen simultaneously and change something. How being shat on by a pigeon could lead me, while standing on a balcony, to lift up my coffee cup and with one hand open a door that led somewhere where people grilling chicken were bumping lips against each other while someone was turning the door knob from the inside of the bathroom opposite and the delivery man below was changing the songs on his IPod while scratching his collar bone and glancing constantly at the balcony (where someone was sneezing and tapping their fingers on the railing) because my doorbell wasn’t working. And then him nodding and leaving.
    He left, taking the cake she’d sent me with him. I was sad. I was mad at her. I refused to listen to her. We had our biggest fight in months. Over confectionery.
    There was not a spark in sight.
    Bloody pigeon.
    No wonder people who live in the moment go mad.

***

    We sat there for two hours. By the end, she’d forgotten everything, and I’d forgotten everything.
    That was how it had always been. Lines between affection and pure, unadulterated loathing would occasionally become blurred when either of us got bored. When that happened, someone would flip out and do their best to get under the other’s skin. We’d either stand face to face and yell things at each other or send messages at random intervals so it got doubly annoying, so the other couldn’t get extended periods of reprieve. We’d begin with sarcasm and snideness. We’d follow it up with hyperbolic anecdotes that neither of us really recognized. Then we’d bring out the big guns: the superlatives. Next came the silences: long, winding, deafening. After that came repetition. We’d say the same things that we’d just said, sometimes in the exact same words, thinking that the other wouldn’t notice that we’d run out of points to drive home. Any rational conclusion was then out of the question and whatever followed was orchestrated purely by a thirst for adrenaline. It felt good.
    And then suddenly, everything was fine once again.
    By now, we’d become semi-professionals at upsetting each other.
    It was perfect, really.
    We got up off the stairs and began to walk along the street.
    “So. Are we human or are we clouds?” She said.
    “What the...?
    “Just wondering.”
    “You’re weird.”
    “So are you.”
    Silence for a minute.
    “So tell me something. Uh... Do you think it’s possible to fall in love with a conversation?” She said.
    I wanted to ask her if she was talking about our first conversation, but I knew better. We didn’t talk about such things.
    “Em. Yeah probably.”
    “I mean just the conversation. Not the person you had it with.”
    “Em. What?”
    “Well. Imagine you wake up tomorrow and remember every word of a conversation you had, but you don’t know who you spoke to, what they looked like, what their voice was like, whether it was a man or a woman, whether they...em... used abbreviations when they typed, where and when you had that conversation. Nothing.”
    “Like something I read in a book?”
    “No no that would mean knowing where the conversation happened. No. Just words and sentences in your brain. Things that make you smile, laugh, cringe, cry. Everything you ever wanted someone to say, and everything you yourself wanted to say to someone, all in one conversation. All in your head. In your own little nutshell.”
    “Hmm. Er. I don’t know. But no. I think I’d have to know who said those things.”
    “Even if you didn’t need to at all? I mean, what more do you want?”
    “Yeah. I don’t know. You have massive ears.”
    She bumped into my shoulder.
    She coughed.
    The usual things.
    We walked for ten minutes and got to the bus stop. We sat on a bench to wait for the bus.
    “I really am sorry.”
    “I know I know.”
    “It’s those glasses of yours...”
    “My glasses?”
    “Yeah. They look...ugh. Bloody hell.” She kissed me.
    “That escalated quickly.”
    She coughed again.
    We sat in silence for the next - I don’t remember how long - for the next really-long-period-of-time. Her head was on my shoulder. I could smell the Old Spice on her. I was looking straight ahead. If only I knew what she was thinking then...
    Not really, though. Even if I did know, it wouldn’t have mattered.
    Everything else I thought of that night I’ve forgotten, because thirty seconds later her breathing slowed down, her whole weight settled on me, and her movements became scarce.
    I never knew having someone fall asleep on me on a bench while waiting for a bus could feel like the greatest feeling in the world.
    It did.
    We missed our bus, though, because I too fell asleep. She wasn’t too happy about it.
    But, as I was slowly beginning to find out, happiness, really, was hardly ever the point.

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