In Which We Can Tell He Has Not Changed

Ad Nauseum

by JOSIANE CURTIS

He smokes three cigarettes in the time it takes me to drink two beers.

Our first trip to the patio, I sit on a bench to his right. He notices the smoke drifting my direction before I do and moves to my other side, this time settling his body a little closer, but holding the cigarette as far away as possible.

He hasn’t changed. On the contrary, the time apart seems to have exacerbated the behavior that drove me away. He’s sunken deeper into the places I wasn’t willing to go, places I tried to, but couldn’t bring him back from; the damp, dark basements of his life. “I haven’t been great,” he says with sunken, sleepy-sad eyes, and I picture high-angle snapshots of his body in bed, a montage of horizontal positions in messy sheets while the sun comes up and goes down outside, over and over in a time-lapse video of the past three months. Up, around, down. He looks like he’s been hibernating in that cement cave. I picture him groaning and pulling a pillow over his head as the spring rains start flooding the floors around him. I picture mold growing on the walls.

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Despite making the conscious decision to sit on his left when we go back out for his second cigarette, the smoke comes straight for me. He realizes and jumps to standing when I exhale heavily, blowing it away from my face.  

He wants me to know that he’s been miserable. He shakes his head, says “I’m the same asshole I was,” and “I’ve really been feeling like shit about X,” and “I didn’t—I don’t deserve you.”

All night I just nod. With my left index finger and thumb, I twist the wedding band on my right ring finger, my grandfather’s, feeling for the seam with my fingertip to let me know it’s made a full rotation. Up, around, down, up, around, down. When we were together, I would have disagreed with him. Comforted him. Motivated him. You are not worthless. You are not an asshole. You’re honest, and kind, and creative. You’re finding direction. I was consistently his source of comfort, even when he was seeking comfort for things he’d done that had hurt me directly. Now, I just nod. Up, around, down. I hate seeing him hurt, still, forever, but I cannot justify anymore trying to make him feel better about making me feel bad.

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After paying for our drinks, we lean up against the outer windowsill in front of the bar while he lights his third cigarette. By now he’s become oblivious to the smoke, and it billows into halos around our heads.

“It really is so good to see you. I just want to keep you….”

 I know that he starts the sentence intending for it to go somewhere. I want to keep you as a friend, I want to keep you as a part of my life. But he trails off, leaving me with the ellipsis.

“You don’t get to keep me,” I say, maybe too soon, maybe before he really has a chance to finish the sentence he intended. In front of us, a homeless man pulls the lid off a trash can, looking for used butts.

“Here ya go, man,” he says, lifting his arm from around my shoulder to offer the remaining quarter of his cigarette.  

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Just before the time change, we woke up one morning in the throes, the way we started so many days together, not knowing who initiated, not being able to pinpoint the moment we went from dreaming to not. It was one of the first mornings of the year that dawn was breaking as we awoke, and I remember the silver light from the room’s one ground-level window outlining his body, how he appeared to glow. He hovered above me, illuminated from behind, and I laughed out loud because he looked like an angel. I was happy. We were.   

He walks me to my car on a dark sidestreet, and I must have switched off the cabin light at some point, so even with the door open, the only light comes from a half-empty moon half-cloaked in clouds. His body is a shadow in front of me. I place a hand on his stomach, and he leans in to kiss me, maybe out of habit, but my hand, instead of sliding around his back to pull him closer, as habit would have it, stays planted just under his ribcage. My bicep flexes gently with resistance. When he realizes, when the hug becomes just a hug goodbye, his shoulders seem to crumble around mine.

He is already gone when I turn on the headlights.   

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Home, as I pull my shirt over my head, I’m overwhelmed, almost nauseous, with a blanket of smell, not just of cigarette smoke, but specifically of Marlboro-cigarette-smoke-in-hair. The scent of hair holding onto cigarette smoke is different than that of smoke itself. Like everything else tonight, it is somehow damp. Ash and mildew.

The smell reminds me of being 18 in Australia, waking up hungover with friends from high school after spending the night dancing, sweat-drenched in smoke-filled bars. Strangely enough, it doesn’t remind me of him at all. In the year that we were together, I never once noticed my hair smelling like cigarettes. Maybe we started so hot and fast that I got used to the smell before I could notice it. Maybe I unconsciously chose to ignore it. Part of me wants to believe that’s all love is: ignoring the things about a person that you wouldn’t be able to stand, if you let yourself see them. If I can reduce love to this, it would imply that, tonight, pacing topless around my apartment, contemplating a 10 p.m. shower to keep this moldy-cigarette smell out of my sheets, I am no longer in love with him.

I don’t shower. And while I hate that he managed to find a way into my bed, I also know that he is descending those dark stairs tonight, alone as he has ever been. I left him without a scent, a strand of hair, without a scrap of the person I grew into after him. It took me three months to get back what I gave, to redirect that comfort and motivation toward myself, to make myself whole.

And only I get to keep me.

Josiane Curtis is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Portland. You can find her twitter here. You can find her website here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about tiny things. Her work recently appeared on The Rumpus here.

"Love Beside Me" - Sarah McLachlan (mp3)

"Surrender and Certainty" - Sarah McLachlan (mp3)

In Which the Possibilities Are Not Exactly Endless

photo by Anna Jones 

Tiny Things

by JOSIANE CURTIS

The baby was full-term, healthy, born four days before her due date. She weighed five pounds, 14 ounces. This is very small, although not technically underweight, the cutoff for which is five pounds, eight ounces. It seems morbid, disturbed even, to recall that I looked at her in my arms, a few hours old, and thought that I could crush her head in my hand. I would never, obviously; I was overwhelmed with love, and an immediate willingness to protect her at all costs. But these feelings only magnified her fragility. I looked from her face to my hand, my arm, barely flexing under her weight, and thought about the few times I’d caught a softball in high school gym class. She would have fit inside a catcher’s mitt.  

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Boys are carried out, and girls are carried up. The first-born looks more like the father. Men inherit baldness from the maternal side – so men, look at your mother’s dad for a glimpse into your future. A woman is deemed most attractive when she is at peak ovulation in her monthly cycle. Women, correspondingly, rate men’s attractiveness more highly on average while ovulating. Each woman has a finite amount of eggs at birth, and will ovulate approximately 300 to 400 eggs in her lifetime, before reaching menopause. A full-term pregnancy is actually 10 months after egg implantation, not nine. Sudden infant death symptom (SIDS) is exactly what it sounds like: the sudden, unexplained death of an infant. Doctors used to think it could be caused by babies sleeping on their backs. Today, they think stomach sleeping may be a leading risk factor. There is so much we don’t know.

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When I was 25, I donated my eggs. Egg donation is not exactly what it sounds like, because the donor is always paid. “When I was 25, I sold my eggs,” sounds callous, but I wouldn't have done it for free.

My profile was chosen within minutes of uploading my initial background information and photographs. I can’t say I wasn't flattered.   

From start to finish, the process takes between two and three months. The donor is examined weekly throughout the last month, with an endoscopy and blood samples taken daily for the last week. During the final week, the donor is also required to self-administer hormone shots up to three times a day. I cringed at the prick of every needle into a gathered skinfold of my stomach, and also at the irony of using the baby changing table in the office restroom to mix hormones before loading them into the syringe. Donors are restricted from high-impact exercise during the last two weeks of the cycle, so I exchanged my morning jog for swimming laps at the community pool across the street from my house. Toward the end of the process, I became aware of eyes lingering on my bare midsection, which was painted a leopard pelt of bruises from the shots. 

It was comforting knowing the recipient would undergo an even more difficult process. Not because I desired commiseration, but because it meant that whoever would be getting this baby wanted it so badly. It would be so loved. I felt happy to be able to give that gift.

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Growing up, I knew of my father, but never knew him. Perhaps because of this, I've always leaned more toward the side of nurture in the nature/nurture debate. In the clinic-mandated pre-approval therapy sessions, I believed it when I said that this would not be my child.

photo by anna jones

The donor is required to provide a detailed medical history, at least two generations back, from both the maternal and paternal sides of her family. About halfway through the donation process, I spoke to my father for the first time in years. Over the phone, he told me that his parents had died of natural causes and no they didn't have any specific ailments or allergies and yes, he still has a full head of hair. I heard myself in his cadence.

I imagined that sometime down the road, a teenager might appear at my door wanting to know why she smiled crooked or threw her head back when she laughed. I would invite her in.

That I came to terms with the full weight of what I was doing, that it felt good to give such a gift, isn't to say that it wasn't emotionally draining. I began to look at the children around me differently, especially the blondes. I wondered, since I would not ever meet the recipients, if three years into the future, I might pass a couple on the street and see my own green eyes looking back at me out of a stroller. In my mind it was always a girl.

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My egg retrieval was a success, meaning my ovaries produced plenty of eggs (above the average number for donors at that clinic, I was told), and they were harvested from my body successfully. However, the implantation was a failure, meaning the clinic used all the harvested eggs in attempting to fertilize and implant at least one into the recipient’s uterus, but the end result was not a pregnancy. This is not necessarily a reflection of the donor’s ability to bear children, I was also told. There are many factors at play, and many women seeking in vitro fertilization may have difficulty with the implantation stage. I’d be lying if I said it didn't scare me anyway.

In egg donation, the donor is always paid, regardless of the end result. Let me tell you something about guilt.

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Apparently, it’s not entirely uncommon to think of babies in relation to sports equipment. In the hospital, while the tiny baby’s mother, my best friend, rested, the baby’s father swaddled her in a yellow blanket with grey elephants, tucked her gently into his elbow, and said something about the way a running back’s most important job is to protect the football. Later, after most visitors had come and gone, he sat and gazed at her as she slept peacefully on the tops of his thighs. “I wonder what you’re gonna be like,” he whispered.

photo by anna jones

If you have siblings, it’s a fun pastime to note your similarities and differences, and think about all the possibilities for other offspring your parents could have had. My brother and I have near-identical features, and have often been confused for twins, though he is three years older. Among friends who come from larger families, the differences between siblings can be both subtle and striking. Imagine how those possibilities multiply exponentially when you consider one parent’s genes combined with any number of partners. As a child, I sometimes wished for a different father, one who was around. If true, it would mean, biologically or psychologically or both, that I would not be who I am. Who else might I have been?

The possibilities for the baby I could create are not exactly endless, given the finite amount of eggs a woman will produce in her lifetime, but close. There is so much we don’t know.

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There are some things I do know. People say we come into this world alone and we leave it alone, but I know that’s not true. The baby is almost three weeks old, and she has never been alone – not for one second since she was born. She looks more like her father than my best friend, and she sleeps on her back. She is gaining weight, but her nose, lips, fingers are still remarkably delicate, doll-like. She fusses, as babies do, when she is hungry or needs to be changed, but she quiets if you saunter and slide across the hardwood floor in socks, bouncing gently to the beat of Paul Simon’s “The Boy in the Bubble.” She quiets everyone else, too; people speak softly in her presence. She quiets the sound of the bills through the mail slot, the crash of the garbage truck outside on the street, the mental din of work and emotional clatter of a recent breakup, of money problems, of time and worry and wondering if you will ever make anything as beautiful. She will be so loved.  

Josiane Curtis is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Portland. You can find her twitter here. You can find her website here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about an end to flight.

Photographs by Anna Jones. You can find her website here and her instagram here.

"Strong" - London Grammar (mp3)

"Wasting My Young Years" - London Grammar (mp3)

In Which An Elaborated Ending Becomes Called For

An End to Flight

by JOSIANE CURTIS

finifugal, adj. [fan’ee-fyoo-gal]:
(from Latin fini-s end + fug-a flight + -al) 

Of or pertaining to shunning or hating endings; someone who tries to avoid or prolong the final moment of a story, relationship, or some other journey — like a child who doesn't want a bedtime story to conclude, or an adult who's in denial about how it's finally time to wrap up long-unfinished business.

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We break up in every room in his house, and twice in the backyard.

The first time it happens, we aren't even officially a couple. Maybe it doesn't count as our first breakup, then, but it feels like one. We weren't exclusive, because he was leaving town for the summer and I didn't want to do long distance. It was my choice not to give ourselves a label, but when he tells me he slept with someone else, it still feels like betrayal. We sit on a bench in the backyard and I don’t cry or leave, so we sit, mostly quiet, until we can’t stand to sit quietly anymore. We have dinner plans so we keep them, and I finally make sense of all the times I've waited on couples who sit awkwardly across from each other and barely speak throughout their meal, some mix of caring and caution in the air over the table. I sit up straight and tense; his shoulders slump. We speak only when necessary, expelling words gently, apologetically, as if they have to walk over shards of broken glass to reach each other. He spends the night in my bed and I curl around the edge of the mattress, pulled so far away from him that he might as well be sleeping in another city already.

Sitting on dining room chairs at the corner of his kitchen table, he takes my hands in his and we break up and become an official couple in the same conversation, depending on who you ask. He’s moving back to town and thinks we’re starting a serious relationship, and I think we’re ending things because he isn’t ready for a serious relationship. We have what I think is breakup sex and what he thinks is make-up sex. At a bar later that night, I’m ordering a drink when I feel his towering frame, his arms wrap around me from behind. He rests his chin on the top of my head. “I have the prettiest girlfriend in the world,” he says.

I enter through the back gate and sit in one of two patio chairs he’s arranged, facing each other. I tell him I’m done. I think we’re done until he moves closer to me, his long legs encasing mine, elephant trunk calves pressing my own knobby knees against each other. Skin touches skin, sweat touches sweat, and like that we’re liquid, we’re inside, we’re changing our minds, deciding, again, that we’re not done, not yet. Since the night we met, our bodies have always had a way of finding each other, each part fitting effortlessly, a hand in a hand, a head on a shoulder. In private or public, we flow intuitively together, the way water in a river never has to think about where it’s going.  

That bed in the basement, where after, I feel something grab hold of me in the dark and understand that we have crossed some dangerous threshold. While he snores, I gently trace the outline of his face: strong jaw, Italian nose, lips that, when they smile, pull his eyes into a squint, stretch every part of his face wide along with them. I feel happy but trapped. I wonder how this will end. Understand, now, that it will hurt both of us when it does.

When you realize you are in love with someone in the same moment that you realize you will one day leave them, there is no way it won’t end badly. He tells me that as a child, he could see the way events were going to unfold before they happened. A confession: I write most of this essay while we are still together.

We break up once in our subconscious. He falls asleep on the backyard bench after going outside to smoke and I doze off waiting for him to come inside to bed; both of us, confused and angry at being alone in sleep, pass breakup dreams back and forth like a breeze through the sliding screen door.

On the loveseat by the entryway, angry and hurt, five minutes, I keep my shoes and jacket on. I stand before he finishes talking, afraid I won’t be able to stand my ground if I sit; if we touch. The next week it snows, and I show up at his front door without a jacket and say, “Some nights the best place to find warmth is inside of another body.” I’m not ready to be done. His arms are always open. He is always waiting for me to leave.

My head on his chest on the living room couch, with the TV on in the background, finally. I say I need to take a break, knowing that if I call it the end, it won’t be. He nods, a calloused hand brushing the hair back from my face so he can kiss me on the forehead.

“I know,” he says.

What happens to the child who wants the bedtime story to last forever? A little girl who knows how the story ends, but still begs for it to start over, and over, and over – what happens to her when it finally concludes? She sleeps. She takes deep, steady, peaceful breaths in sleep, and the next morning she wakes up.

Maybe, she’s relieved.  

Josiane Curtis is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Portland. She last wrote in these pages about trash in the yard. You can find her twitter here. You can find her website here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

Photographs by Stephanie Crocker.

"Two of Us On The Run" - Lucius (mp3)

"Turn It Around" - Lucius (mp3)