BY GINEVRA MARIA MARCOSANTI
A man I didn’t know greeted me in a café. Hello when he sat down, have a nice day when he got up. A glass of water destitute on the table where he’d been resting his elbows moments before. An exceptionally cold day. Mott the Hoople on the radio. When I realised they were playing, I thought of you again, must have been the eleventh time of the day. I tried to remember them all, tie the postcards together with a twine.
One, when I woke up after dreaming of you.
Two, when I got up and recalled dreaming of you.
Three, when I got dressed and I thought of what you would think of what I was wearing.
Four, when I did my hair and remembered the look of surprise on your face after I’d dyed it.
Five, when I checked to see if you’d looked for me.
Six, when I imagined you’d still be sleeping.
Seven, when I blamed it on the late-night chat we’d had the day before.
Eight, when I crossed the road I’d crossed with you before the holidays, wishing I could have linked your arm with mine;, it was so cold I was trembling.
Nine, when I looked up at the misty sun hiding behind the clouds and it reminded me of your skin in the winter.
Ten, when I got to the café and thought it would be so nice to have you here with me.
Twelve, just now, when that song started playing, home is wherever I’m with you.
Well, the eleventh I’ve already mentioned.
The man must have been a regular. He knew where things were. The same way I’d grown accustomed to my body, how I could map my moles and freckles, he knew the tables and chairs and the height of the counter, knew his order by heart, knew to sit far from the door because, whenever it opened, a gust of cold air crept in.
It had always been a dream of mine to be a regular somewhere. Knowing the smell of ground coffee that set that particular place apart from the others, knowing the waitress, telling her how nice she looked with her new haircut, smiling at the new ice cream flavours for the season, seeing how kid after kid sat in the same highchair, occasionally crossing paths with a familiar passer-by.
Ester tells me that I’m the all-or-nothing type, which is precisely why she likes me. Well, when I think about Ester I think of a meadow, of orange trees, of ink-stained hands. This is what I like about Ester. I met her a few years ago, but we’ve known each other for a lifetime, because we share a fragment of our soul that’s set in its very core. Maybe one day we will both move to Edinburgh and become writers. Actually, how does one become a writer? I apologise for my poor choice of words. Maybe one day we will find ourselves writing in Edinburgh at the same time. Sounds better. It entirely depends on where life takes us, because writers we have always been and will always be. Despite everything.
I think you would like Ester. She has kind eyes. That’s about all I need to know in order to like someone. Maybe it works differently for you, though. I would like you to meet her someday. There is are plenty of people I would like you to meet. My brother. I haven’t met your brother, and we all live in the same town. My brother is back home. He would think you’re funny, I think. You two would have a good time talking about movies, I reckon you like the same kind of genre.
I kiss my knuckles; my lips are always warm. My hands are usually warm, too, but today there’s a chink in the window that’s cooling them down. I heard three languages being spoken today.
Spanish, on the bus when I was on my way here.
Yiddish, by a mother of three sitting at a table nearby.
English, everywhere else.
But there’s another language, the language of my thoughts, unspeakable and unremovable, abiding, stuck to my tongue like the strawberry syrup of a molten lollipop. Persistent. It’s the language I speak when I’m not with you. Because I hope it can bring you to the present moment, when I’m sitting at a café in which the waitress only has a barely familiar face, where the tiles of the floor and the paint on the walls are strangers to me, where an open window somewhere out of my sight welcomes cold air, leaving me freezing. And I hate that the cold is the only thing that reminds me of you, but this time there’s no you to give me your gloves, no you to laugh when I put your jacket on my knees, no you to scold me for wearing a skirt when it was minus five outside, no you to roll your eyes when I blame the owners of the place for not turning the heating on.
I could have gone home, but I stayed. I hoped I could walk you to your car, which I know is usually parked on one of the backstreets five minutes from there.
But now there’s no you, and I want to go home, and your car must be in the driveway, and I decided not to bring my jacket because I assumed it would be warm inside. It keeps happening. A déjà vu, but it’s not quite the same without you.
Ester told me she wants to study physics. She changed her mind many times, but so have I. What do you want to do? A lot of people have been asking me that. I will study. I will write. And if none of these things take me anywhere, I’ll move to a small town in Provence and wait tables at a café and perfect my French. And when I have saved enough for a plane ticket, I’ll buy a one-way to wherever you are, and I’ll ask you if you want me to stay. This is my plan. I know what you might think, isn’t it too early to know? Hell, you’re seventeen, how do you know you’re going to go back to the same person after so long?
Well, the answer is, I am under no illusion that by the time we grow up I’ll have wanted others. It is simply how the world works, but I am also under no illusion that I will need you longer than God has loved Earth. I said it. I was trying to find a way to postpone this confession, and it spewed out of me like a poison extraneous to my body. But it is all but that. God sent us all a flood, what did I ever do to you? Nothing. I never spoke.
I am busy, you know? I have so much to do, yet I keep stopping in my tracks because of you. I plan it all, lay it out and then you walk in. I wrap it up, take it home, shove it in the bin. I can’t hope for anything until I truly know you.
It takes time for words to mean something. These right now are unripe fruits of a harsh winter, and I will have to wait until the summer to see them flourish or expire. It all depends on you. Now, I don’t want you to think that my life depends entirely on you, because whether I become a singer or a writer or anything else I might like has nothing to do with you. Knowing myself, I might succeed even faster without your help. I would miss you: I would have something to write about. If you asked me, even only once, what I want to do, I would tell you that I want to be an artist. If you asked me what your place in the midst of this is, which I can foresee you probably never will, but well if you asked me, I would tell you, wherever you want. The only reason why I’m telling you now, although admittedly I’m not really telling you, is because I want to have this written down. I want to know that once, I, too, was seventeen and loved. If I ever become one of those people, if I ever forget what it was like, well here it is. I don’t think I will ever become one of those people.
A young woman is greeting another. They must have met by accident. One of them is accompanied by her friend, who just introduced herself, and the other by a man who looks like he could be her father.
I feel something inside of me break whenever I see a girl with her father.
I think of the moments I had with mine before he grew tired. Now he almost always is. I see him sitting at the dinner table, and it seems that his soul has broken away from his body. I think his wife has something to do with this. The same way she wore me out, she must’ve done to him, too. You told me about your mother once, after I told you that I’d dreamt of her. I wish I knew everything.
Remember when I told you I wanted to be a regular somewhere? Well, you are like a library. Because all the chapters of your life intertwine with the chapters of someone else’s, and then there’s your family, and then there’s your hometown, and all the stories that make up the person that you are, they could fill an entire library. So, suppose you were a library, really. A real library, I would imagine you to be a small one, warm, always thick with the scent of earl grey tea, hidden in a corner of Ship Street maybe. In that case, I would want to be a regular. Do you see where I’m getting? Now that I’m more confident with my own words, yes, I can tell you I would want to be a regular in the library of your present and past. Whether you’ll let me into the library of your future I cannot tell, nor guess, until the moment you hold out your hand. But even then, will I know whether you mean it or not?
The way I talk about you here is how a poet would talk of their first love, engrossed in every detail, losing sight of the reality of it all. Thing is, I’m not a poet, and you’re not my first love. Poets’ love isn’t real, it’s an ice statue, due to melt once their verse has got them far enough to fuel the fire in their house. I’m real, you’re real. I’m not talking about anything that hasn’t happened or that I didn’t truly believe. That probably means I chose the wrong metaphor, my apologies. Now that the possibility of losing you to my imagination is out of the way, I want you to sit down. I will make you some tea, that’s your armchair right there. Tell me how you feel. And before you’re done, don’t even stop to ponder about me or what I might think. It does not matter. Open your hand. Here, on the table, lay it down. Let me read your palm. Interesting. I see different lines intersecting and curving up and down. I have no idea what it means. Those lines have been there long before we met, so it either shows that we’re destined to be together, or it shows nothing at all. I think if I were a palm reader back when people still believed in it, I might have made a fortune out of it. The lines on your palm are a ghost to me. I’ll tell you it means we’ll get married and we’ll be happy forever.
The table where I’m sitting now, it’s the same table I was sitting at with Nastya a couple months ago. She wore her red jacket, blue eyes glimmering behind the fog of her teacup. I always thought she was beautiful, in her soul and her words and her face. I move my table so that the lady sitting next to me can get out. Everything is so close together in here. I want to go home. On that day, Nastya told me about how she celebrates Christmas two weeks after me. I thought it was interesting, not because I particularly cared about Christmas day, but because it was the same God, in the end. And he had two birthdays, supposedly. Good for him. Or maybe not. I hate birthdays. When I was a kid, I hated them because I didn’t have many friends. Now I hate them because there’s a lot of food and people talk loudly, and they expect me to act like them. Not that I’m unable to have a conversation, I just feel uncomfortable on those occasions. I’m sure you’ll understand. Will you ask me if I hate my birthday, too? You can’t ask me right now because you’re not here. Well, in case you were aching to know, yes, I do. I started hating my birthday when I was around ten years old. We were playing hide-and-seek, and I didn’t win, and I was sad. But then it struck me that everyone else was having fun, and it was my birthday, so I should be having fun, too. But everyone was so absorbed into a conversation about I don’t remember what, must have been a new movie or something of that sort, and I felt like an animal in a glass case watching families walk by. And it was my birthday! Can you believe it? Well, I had felt like that before. It happened both ways. Sometimes people would talk about something particularly ordinary, and I couldn’t make any sense of it. I simply did not understand. But then, other times, I would talk about something genuinely interesting and took too long to realise that nobody was following me. I don’t think I can blame them. I was eleven, at the summer camp canteen in the English countryside. I had gathered a decent group of friends, as I said I’m not actually a total outcast, well anyway, we sat for lunch. So, I started telling them about black holes in my broken English. I’d just read Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. Someone smiled politely. Halfway through, I gave up. Not that I regarded myself as a beholder of superior intelligence in the midst of my ignorant peers. I just read the room. I think this might have happened to you, too. You’re a bit like me. Maybe you were like that as a kid. Now I have changed. I was forced to change. Most of these people, the ones who are like me, struggle to mask over time. I became quite the opposite. A skilled actress. I have become charming, charismatic. I make jokes for everyone to understand. Occasionally, some high-register words make their way into my sentences, but it all makes part of my plan. People think of me as a poised, albeit a little conceited, young woman. It only helps that I look older than my age.
That’s what they believe. I don’t mind them thinking that I’m a little arrogant because, at the end of the day, I will have made a few customary self-deprecating jokes. And I never brag. About anything, ever. Maybe just to say that I speak five languages. But that’s about it. And it always comes out as a joke.
I never thought of myself as a funny person, but people laugh. Both the ones who are funny and the ones who are not, even the ones who barely ever laugh. The only other possible alternative is that I’m so ridiculous that even just my presence makes people crack up. That’s probably not the case. But then again, I’m safe.