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June Again

by ALEX RONAN

It radiated from him, that stink smell. It was bitter and seeded; it meant he was alive. The next morning I got a slip of soap, a towel, a cup of hot water and peeled back the covers. It was hard to see his vulnerability so clear in the contours of his pain-ridden body. But he let me, he needed me, there was nothing else to do but raise one arm so I could scrub the hair beneath.

One night he called and said, “Everything’s okay, but I’m in the hospital.” That night he couldn’t quite remember what happened, sputtering something about the car, and then soon after drifting off to sleep. We hadn’t even been together for two months when I found myself bending over his hospital bed to kiss him shyly in front of his grandmother. He later told me that I was the first thing he thought of upon waking, and I was proud but mostly surprised.

When he was released from the hospital with a fractured spine I stayed over for a week. There was no one else to carry the bottle of his pee, bright with painkillers, from his bedside to the toilet and back again. I let the dogs in and out. I made scrambled eggs and put away his laundry. 

Lying beside him for hours I thought about debris and car parts, but also wrappers and beer caps, the days we’d spent together before and those slow ones, watching him sleep, waiting for him to wake. Often he would jolt up in bed, hands out in front of him, bracing for the accident that had already happened. I would rub his chest and whisper, “it’s okay, it’s over,”  but still he slept.

A few months later, on a warm spring afternoon he said, “I can’t do this anymore.” I reached for him and anything that would make him stay. “But, but I took care of you,” I sputtered. “I’m sorry,” he said. Dumbfounded, I watched him walk away as I wiped my eyes furiously. 

In the days after he left me I began to gag — suddenly and without warning. Nothing ever came, just a wetness to my eyes as I leaned over the bathroom sink. But the impulse I was interested in. What was my body trying to expel when nothing would come?

Weeks passed. A moth got on the subway at 72nd street. I trapped it in my hands and could feel its wings against my palms. I was going to let it free when I got off at 96th street. “You know you’re not holding anything,” my roommate said, I looked, and it was gone. The heat broke. Rust colored water ran from the shower. I felt vaguely miserable and specifically unhappy. Putting pillowcases on seems unbearably strenuous and not worth the effort. Memories landed again and again, the pain radiating outward. 

When we met at a New Years party, we had already known each other for thirteen years. So it’s not true, but also it is, because that night he looked at me differently and I talked with a certainty I’d never found around him. And anyways, for those thirteen years when we supposedly knew each other, we hardly did at all.

The next night we went to a bar in Brooklyn. I was wearing lipstick, though I never do. He called to ask where the bar was and then we saw each other and hung up. I watched him walk to me and I slipped away from my friends. I was suddenly shy and we hugged and my lipstick stained the collar of his coat.

That night he bought me a drink and put his hand on my leg as we sat in a dark booth talking. It was a perfect night, but the point is that for weeks after the lipstick stain stayed on his jacket and when I saw it, the mark I had given him that he either did or didn’t know of, I felt a certain loose ownership, that maybe he could be mine, though I didn’t really let myself think about it that way.

He doesn’t have the jacket anymore. It was lost or stolen at the hospital and it’s summer anyway. He’s no longer mine and I don’t know the way he fills his days or what he thinks of before he goes to sleep. But for weeks he wore a stain of my lips right by his collarbone.

I called him a few months after he dumped me, and we talked like teeth hitting. I don’t want to remember that, though I think it will be hard to forget. I don’t want to remember that you can know someone and then lose them to a not knowing; you can share a bed, and nights, and a chicken sandwich, only to find that one day there is nothing left between you but stupid questions like “what’s up?” to which the only answer is “nothing.”

Nothing between us but still I recall the way he had taken care of me one night, when I began to shake and sweat and heave again and again into the toilet. I told him to sleep way on the other side so he wouldn’t get sick, instead he curled his arms around me and rubbed the back of my leg till I got up to vomit again. It was a comfort, but more than that, a promise. He wasn’t even scared of the sickness catching; he stayed all night beside me.

Now he is gone. I walked down the subway steps one day and there was a boy around my age leaning over the rail heaving and sometimes throwing up. A girl who was, I think, his girlfriend, stood beside him rubbing his back. She spoke softly or not at all. Before my train came he stopped throwing up, uncurled his upper body from the rail and they walked up the stairs together. I watched longingly. I wondered how I’d lost that.

I planted lilies with my mom in the garden along the driveway of her house. She said we’d probably need spoons for them, so I returned with two kitchen spoons and she smiled. “Those are too small, I meant serving spoons,” and then she just handed me a garden tool anyway. We worked and talked and it was nice to be squatting in the driveway, touching the earth, the sun still out. “They’ll probably all die,” she said, noncommittally, smiling even. One plant that leaned heavily to the side I propped up using two dried out twigs as a sort of brace system. It flopped to the side. I braced it. It flopped again. 

I couldn’t let go. Instead I wrote it down, the way we were and could be and have been. I felt the loneliness in being the only keeper of something shared. I wrote, but mostly I waited — supine and listless — for the arc to change, for the ending I wanted. I held on to the hope that he would call and say “I made a big mistake.”

I paced around the city putting distance between us. I hit 86th and it hurt, the next time less, then more, and then less and less. His doctor works down the block and I wondered if he remembers the way we stood across from one another on opposite sides of the crosswalk and I couldn’t hold my smile in. It was right before he said, “I need to tell you something.”

I wanted to forget him but I couldn’t give up remembering. My sadness was like the smell of a wet sponge, detestable and detectable and hard to rub off. But slowly the despair slipped away from me. What was between us became past instead of possibility and I found that I could cup those times in my hands without the hurt of holding.

I’ve stopped writing down the ways I remember him, they no longer feel so urgent. Occasionally, during rush hour, I’ll see him across a crowded subway car. It never is, though. I don’t know how his skin smells and I don’t really think of the days we shared. But sometimes I wonder about him: if he got a new coat, though I’m sure he did, and whether he is okay.

Alex Ronan is a contributor to This Recording. This is her first appearance in these pages. She is a writer living in Providence. You can find her twitter here.

"2013" - Arctic Monkeys (mp3)

"Do I Wanna Know?" - Arctic Monkeys (mp3)