Chicago. [Part I] --- A Christmas Story.

In my mind, she still walked along that thinning street corner, arms extended outward and her black hair falling just above her ears, the place where I would have liked to smell. My fifteen year-old stomach had trembled and turned, forcing up nervous smiles that grew far too wide, and the earth would grow beneath her feet as she turned, and she would laugh.

Would it be too bold to say that she had been mine, with her spare time spent with me and only with me, with all of her creations (her clay hand print) lining the bottoms of my desk drawers? Would it be too bold to say that we had loved, for a time, unconditionally, as we were too far within the bliss that was the collective entity of “us” to understand such a concept as “condition”? We were simply we, and we were no more, and we were no less, our hands intertwined into such a tangle that it took us nine years to understand that we were, in fact, two completely separate bodies.


Hello- a word that failed to fill the void between us, and she watched me with a veiled expression. My eyes fell weakly to her hands, holding her school books in one arm, the place where the tips of her hair brushed thinly, and something in my stomach dropped. Her eyes did not cease their scrutiny, peering out from beneath the line of hair at her brow. A man passed us through the doorway, and only then did she release me, gaze falling downward, where her lips trembled. Shoulders falling, eyes closing- my legs felt like ghost limbs beneath me, and she turned, passing me, her mouth having never released a sound.


My last memory… Junior high had pulled us from one another like ill-behaved children on an elementary school playground- such injustice was the breaking of friendships, even as subtly, even as quietly. My greatest fear had always been the loss of her voice, and decidedly the worst and most unjust punishment of all had been that the world had made- forced me to forget until the match had been lit. That bridge had burned five years previous, leaving only traces of its former self to be scattered, white ash floating at the surface of my mind’s eye. As all memories do, she broke down, and she was forgotten.

And then, again- her hair, so firm and so soft, only five years later appeared to lack its former luster, and her eyes, wide and tender, now watched the world with a cautiousness- an untrusting gaze that pushed itself through the cracks in me and made a nest. It grew, that black thing that was the tainted remembrance of her smile, and ever so often, when I would open my top drawer and catch a glimpse of her (that clay hand print), it would writhe.



Leaves grew and then leaves fell. Snow came… snow melted. The warmth would come and then the warmth would leave like a dying wind, but when that warmth would come again I would smell the dirt at the air, catch the smell of heat in my nostrils and I would forget Johanna. An adventurer, my mother would say, like my father, and when I came home with my hands flecked with spray paint and my eyes bruised, she pretended not to notice. I wish she had.


Hello- a word that failed to fill the void between us, and now we both had changed. Her hair was still long, but her eyes contained a light that shone, revealing me, and all of my purposefully darkened places. My eyes were red, my brown hair a disheveled mess of bed-head and grease, and my chest heaved. Johanna gazed up at me, her emotions indecipherable, and we watched one another for a long time.

“Hello,” I responded, out of breath. My legs wobbled and I leaned against the wall for support. She smiled a little and laughed. The black thing wriggled uncomfortably.

“Are you okay?”

“Fine- long run from the apartments.”

“Yeah. I lived there my first year. It’s a real pain, right?”

“Yeah.”

The silence came again, reminding me that the dark place between us still remained. I wondered how her life was going. What kind of friends did she have? How was her father? I opened my mouth.

“So, what’s your name, Stranger?”

Sinking. My mouth opened.

“You sure you’re okay?” She waved her hand in front of my face. “You look sick.”

“Allen.”

“What?”

“My name is Allen.”

“Well, Allen, I think that you,” –she turned me, taking my shoulders and forcing me to face back toward the hallway- “should visit the nurse’s station. You look flushed. Want me to walk you?”

I shook my head slowly- no arguments. “I’ll be fine.” I didn’t move until she had gone into the lecture hall, and the click of the door’s lock was a sound that was roughly final- the end of something too sweet to consume. Watching my shoes, my feet carried me passed the nurse’s station, passed the front doors, the creature within me tumbling.


Occasionally, I have learned- things surprise you. Things don’t have to jump out, or be particularly scary or moving- they just have to be, as simple as it seems to say, unexpected.

Johanna surprised me, her hands full of bags and her hair covered in snow, her smile so wide. She looked at me from underneath her bangs, not noticing the black thing in me that screamed (how could she?). “I know that you didn’t expect me to show up like this. I didn’t have your number, so I couldn’t exactly call you or anything.” She shifted the bags at her chest, her breath forming moist clouds in the air that brushed me. I flinched, standing in the doorway with my hands at my sides like some rigormortis-stricken corpse. “I thought I’d stop by and see if you were okay. You weren’t at the nurse’s station when I came back- said they hadn’t seen you.”
I looked down at her shoes. She followed suit, and for a moment we both understood my inner-workings, my cogs and my mechanisms. We understood me, so delightfully.

“Well, other than your over-abundance of pride, is there anything else that I should know about you, Allen?”

“You don’t need to worry about me.”

The words were spiteful, and I regretted them. In my mind, I saw her red eyes, peering out from beneath those bangs, as though it had (and perhaps it had) been I who had sown her mouth shut, had forced her words back into her throat, so that at my greeting all those years ago, she could not reply.

She did not stop smiling- her eyes still lowered onto the floor, and she shook her head. “I have something for you,” she said, a hint of indifference in her tone. “This wasn’t calculated, you know- not really. I was at the store and I thought of you.” A wind blew, and she shivered, and I gave in.

I let her in and shut the door. When I turned around, she was already taking off her coat.

“I make a wicked hot chocolate,” she said.

“I’m not a fan.”

She turned her head to me, one damp strand of hair stuck to the place on her neck that I would have liked to smell, and she rolled her eyes. “Whatever. I’m making you some.”

Again, I couldn’t argue.


I pretended to watch TV while she made herself acquainted with the household appliances, the ones I never used and the one’s she scolded me for leaving dusty. At every spoon scraping, at every sound of a pot or a cabinet shutting, my body would, without my consent, perk attentively. For a while, at least a few moments, I forgot about life, about love, and savored the sweetness of her presence, the light that had been absent that day five years previous.

The dark brown liquid she sat down onto my coffee table did not look like hot chocolate. It was thick, steaming, and in the second that I was about to judge what my first taste would feel like, I smelled it. Melting. It is the only word I can find to date that could describe my stiff shoulders, my joints, my riled mind- all melted simultaneously, the itching and scratching of the beast at my stomach now somewhere far, away.

“It’s my elixir. I think it’ll make you feel better.”

“I’m fine.”

She laughed and she shook her head. “You don’t let on easy, do you, Allen?”

To this, my silence was as good a reply as any, and I took the mug carefully in my hands, taking a long, slow drink. It fell onto my tongue like mud, heavy and rich, but went down softly, caressing my pipes like warm fingers.

Warmth.

Her arms wrapped around me, the touch of her chest at my back like a wavering memory, her hair at the edge of my eyes as a constant tickle. I did not look up from the mug, accepting her with as much grace as possible, and closed my weary eyes. “See? You’re better already. I guarantee you- you finish that, take a warm shower and go to sleep early, and you won’t even need a pick-me-up tomorrow.”

She pulled back, putting back on her coat and grabbing her bags. I turned to watch her back, the slow movement of her muscles as she receded.

“How do you know?”

She turned again with her eyes alight. There was a fire beneath her skin, her cheeks glowing hot. “I don’t know, Allen- intuition.”

Johanna closed the door behind her, disappearing into the wind and white, and after watching the mug for a long time I finished off my hot chocolate.