Ξ Introduction

I remember.
Long brown hair down her back. Pretty little thing. Petite in size and shape. I recall when I could see her through my own window. Reaching for her desk, she pulls up a pink piece of elastic. Holding the hair tie awkwardly in her left hand, she pushes back the hair by her ears and holds it tight in her right hand. Extending her left index finger and thumb she pushes the hair through the pink tie again and again, winding it tightly around her hair. Pacing about her dorm room, talking on the phone. She opens her closet with her free hand and rummages through some hangers and pulls out a red and black top. Holding it up to her chest, a frown appears. She throws it on her bed, waving her hands about angrily. Claire tries to console her about what outfit to wear. A confused look crosses her face, and suddenly turns into an overjoyed smile.
“Mais non, c’est impossible!”
“Ben, oui! C’est vraiment jolie!”
“Tu penses?”
“Je sais.”
Claire’s solace has, yet again, helped her decide what to wear. She puts the blouse back up to her bosom and slowly, but surely, a smile appears. She hangs it up on her door and moves to the computer to change the background image to reflect her improved outlook for the night’s mec[1] hunt. She browses through her small list of friends on both of her messenger programs and drops me a line with a new font I haven’t seen before: a purple background with green type. With another click of the mouse Winamp appears and she double clicks the first song on the playlist: Lorna Valings – Taste.
If I could have just a moment of you
Would I be wanting more?
If I could have just a taste of you
Would I be addicted?
If I could have just a touch of you
Could I tear myself away?
She takes out the hair tie and shakes her head about, letting the hair fall down around her shoulders. Her hair is long, but very thin. It looks as though she has never had a problem using anything but a comb to keep it straight. She sits in a red plastic desk chair, standard to most dorms, equipped with four uneven legs. Everything she owns is lying about her little wooden desk: laptop, matches, and a table lamp. A pink lighted mirror I bought her rests, unemployed, next to a small red pouch that apparently doubles as a purse, though it is only big enough for a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. A pair of coffee-colored Diesel shoes that look like they belong to a child and a pair of black and white puma trainers with Velcro straps she never buckles. She moves to her right to the fridge and pulls out a bottle of Boon’s. She closes the door and wanders back to her closet. With her back to me, she takes a swig of the Boon’s, wipes the excess off her lips, and gulps down the rest.
She’s a very smelly girl, but in a devilish sort of way. No matter how often she washes her clothes and no matter how little perfume she puts on during the day; she has always had a delicious and enticing smell. All of her clothes have been so often tainted in her Tommy or Clinique perfume that even on days when she claimed not to be wearing any, I could still find her in the library by inhaling the library aroma and searching for the sweet-smelling scent.
Suddenly and spontaneously, she picks up her red pouch, runs to the door, checks that the button is pushed in on the side, not to lock herself out and then runs down the hallway to the right. My eyes follow her narrow baggy jeans through neighboring windows, until I see her walking swiftly to the staircase. She walks very elegantly, one foot exactly in front of the other, without even thinking about it; sometimes she looks like she’s sailing across the carpet. She clip-clops down the staircase, not skipping any steps, but still moving fast for a girl of her petite size. At the entrance to Robins Hall, she sits on the cement stoop and takes out a cigarette.
I watch her still. The weight of memories long past hang painfully on my shoulders. She raises one of her short skinny arms to light the cigarette. And inhales.
“I don’t smoke when I’m at home,” she used to tell me.
“You shouldn’t smoke at all,” I’d reply.
“I’m not addicted, but it’s just nice.”
“There’s nothing nice about it!” I retort.
“No, not nice, but—.”
She has always been like this and I’ve come to expect these kinds of reactions. Either she never has a valid excuse or she just can’t get the words out. And when I tell her to say it in French she just ignores me, and giggles. She’s cute. She’s really cute. And she’s got a great smile.
She reaches into her puffy maroon jacket and pulls out two gray gloves, which she has conveniently forgotten to return to me, and pulls them onto her skinny fingers. The gloves sit oddly on her hands instead of gripping her hand tightly as they should. She grips her legs for added warmth and then releases them. She sits, hunched over, head leaning forward, like a crane.
“Why don’t you sit up straight?”
“What?” I say turning my head away from a video game. “Oh, uh, I dunno, I don’t really think about it. One can’t really know that they sit hunched unless someone tells them they do, and then its too much effort to constantly be conscious of how you sit, right?” She turns away and continues browsing for songs on my computer in the same hunched position that she accuses me of sitting in. I look at her, roll my eyes, and wonder who she thinks she is and how I ever go to know her (but that’s all history).
Actually, I know exactly how it happened; it’s my roommate’s fault. He got drunk one night in the very beginning of junior year and came back to the room to steal two bottles of wine from me to take to the room of a couple girls. What’s more is that he knew my mother had bought them for me less than a day ago after dropping me off at school for the commencement of the fall semester. Luckily, they knew he was drunk and locked him out and he was back in my room within fifteen minutes. He laid the two bottles of wine down on his chair, took off his shirt and threw it on the ground, jumped in bed and half way through taking off his pants and shoes passed out. All of this I watched from my bed, wondering if he was going to turn the lights out. When I finally saw that he didn’t look like he was budging I was about to ask him to turn them out, but then I realized I could already hear him snoring.
The following night they came around to my room to say hi to him and I was asleep when they knocked. I climbed out of bed, the room in darkness, and opened the door. I never saw my hair, but after eighteen years of waking up with my hair looking the way it does and winning an award on a school ski trip for best morning hair-do, I was pretty certain that it was going to look its’ usual monstrous self. The looks on the girls faces as I opened the door proved that they thought they had made a mistake and knocked on the wrong Alejandro Mattiuzzo’s door.
The ten seconds that I stood there at the edge of the door felt like an eternity. I looked outside into the blinding fluorescent light, and saw only two small colorless pure black shapes. Is black the color of virtue, if white is the color of light? Or can none of us be as virutous as the light.
“Oh, hi!” said one, clearly surprised at my countenance.
“Is Alejandro here?” said the other.
I looked at them trying to discern what I was seeing, too lazy to rub my eyes. I stood, half naked in my boxers, looming over them like a giant. Boxers covered with little red ants. I stepped back and finally massaged my head and smeared some life back into my face. I looked back into the room, which now seemed even darker than it had been before, the changing hues putting me in a doubly dire dilemma. Headache struck, like a pain rushing to my forehead screeching to a stop at the tip of the skull. I shook.
“We can come back another time,” one chimed in.
“AWWWHHHHNNNNNNNNN!” I yawned aloud. “Yeah, let me, um, uh, give me a sec.” I scratched my back briefly and straightened myself out, and then stretched my arms out over my head. I gave another loud yawning inhale and exhale and then leaned against the doorway. “Why don’t you come back at like ten or eleven, we might be hanging out now. I mean then. And I’m going to go back to sleep, so just give me a buzz at like ten and I’ll take a shower.”
“What’s your phone number?” Black shapes began to take form to my heavy dazed eyes. I realized I didn’t even know these people. Two strange looking little girls, who looked as if they might still be in high school.
“Um, nevermind, do I know you guys?”
“Mmm, wel, um, we met Aleandro, yur rummate at a parrrty ze osther night.” The one on the left says in a strong French accent.
“So I don’t know you, okay. Yeah, so, I’ll tell Alejandro you dropped by. Have you seen him today? I haven’t seen him all day.”
“Yeah we saw him todaaaaaay,” I look to the right, catching a glimpse of a puny little person with a screeching voice, adding a new degree of pain to the ache in my head. “We gave him our IMs, yeaaaaaah, there they arrrrrrrre.” The shorter one says in her chalkboard scratching voice. I follow her short arm to her stretched out index finger and look towards the desk. She’s pointing at a small blue post-it note on my roommate’s desk. She looks kind of cute and kind of putrid at the same time, but then again I just woke up, don’t have my glasses on, and my beleagured eyes are still just adjusting to the bright hallway. In fact, they both looked kind of emaciated and smallish. I began to wonder how drunk Alejandro had been when he met these two. And then I remembered that that he had fallen asleep with his pants still on his legs. I closed the door and navigated my way back to my bed, bumping into luggage still on the floor, someone’s shoes, and a chair, before falling back to sleep on my nice big long-bed in Jeter Hall room B114.
I can’t remember if we did anything that night, probably not, but as time goes by, nights seem to fade between each other. Some I remember. Most I don’t. Time blends, days mingle, years collide, and I’m lost in the middle of it all.
I do remember some things.
I remember a young man who had a hole in his soul.
I remember me.
I remember a young man who filled that hole with love.
I remember me.
I remember falling in love.
I remember crying.
I remember a part of me dying.
I do remember some things. Most of them painful.
I remember a young man depressed and crying himself to sleep.
I remember me.
Sometimes I still ask myself the unanswerable question…Why?
There were many nights between us, many odd nights. She would come over, to smoke and hang out, and she wouldn’t say much, but she kept saying she wasn’t bored. And we’d watch movies or listen to music, and I’d ask her questions, but she wouldn’t really answer them and I ended up telling her my life story. She is simple and to the point, at least in English, in french she doesn’t shut up, . She doesn’t say much, but when she does she says a whole lot in a few little words. And yet all the while I didn’t really understand why she was there, why she was there, why she was there, why was she there? But now I do know. I know that I’ll never understand.
Sometimes I reflect on our first night together, our first true kiss, and the words she used. I had been waiting for her to say yes for so long and it had finally come on Halloween night. I remember it vividly, only because we went out to dinner together and there were a few patrons curiously dressed up for the occasion. A Jack the Ripper type figure served us and a Freddy Krueger-toting bus boy cleared our tables. I had borrowed a friend’s Jetta whose dashboard lamps didn’t work and I had only had about an hour’s worth experience of driving manually. The car stalled about a dozen times, because I was still learning how to get the car in first gear. When I took her home, I thought it had to be the most terrible night of my life, and yet there was a brief, but both enduring and endearing, goodnight kiss reserved for me.
“Does this mean we’re dating?” she asked me.
“Do you want that?” I asked knowing full well of my own desires.
“Do you want?” she said in broken English.
“Of course I want.” I replied imitating her English. She gave me a lunging kiss and then ran off down her hallway to her room.
And that was that. She locked the door and went to sleep.
I, of course, stood there for a moment trying to figure out what had happened, what I had done right? But perhaps it’s not always about what is right and wrong; there is a well worn-out word for this situation: chemistry. Truly there was a sense of chemistry, no definitions of commonality or race or size or looks, it just was. There was a feeling, a wanting desire, filled with emotion. And still words cannot explain it. Call it love, but love is as definable and explainable as God. God, an all powerful being. But God is just a word to describe omnipotence of something intangible and of no texture. Love is the same. It’s an international language of emotion and chemical impulses or imbalances somewhere within the body. Was I in love? After one night? Yes, but it was not love that developed in one night, it was love that had developed through all the inexplicable nights with her sitting in my room for almost two months straight. I was in love, and that was all I knew.
The second night was the hardest night. She said things to me which I took to close to my heart. “I don’t know why I waited so long for this?” she said caressing the back of my head with one hand as she stood on her toes trying to kiss me.
“I know, you’re an idiot, that’s what I’m always telling you.”
“myeah,” she smiles, the Belgian version of yeah I guess you’re right.
In that moment, she’s special, she’s special to me, and nothing else matters. Time stops, all the problems in the world are meaningless, reality is a myth in the realm of love. But I’m drunk, and so is she. And as usual, she is far drunker than I, and in the morning we embrace and kiss again, and for me it’s the same feelings as the very first night we kissed and for her it’s a fear of relationship going back to prior boyfriends and prior hook-ups, or is it? I am not her I know her well, but I cannot speak of what I know not.
And sometimes the fog roles back over my hills, condensing against my window to the world. And once again I cry as I did many moons ago, but not so long. I sit and stare out my window, the window that has been given me through love and affection, the window that has been tainted by love and desire, a window blinded by endless reflections. Through the gigantic cobweb that spans my window, I yearn for things forgotten and one who made my life seem complete. And sometimes, I can’t even remember her name. Or maybe I just try to forget; the same way she has.
Marie.