The Supercut of Us

Separate the good from the bad like the white of the egg from the yolk. The beginning of a great, but doomed romance. He held my hair back for me every time I threw up, rubbing my back in gentle circles, offering me crackers and apples. He spent hours looking for me when I didn’t pick up the phone after class, shining headlights down emerald green streets, dotted with dark figures, other lives, separated from me by a thin, translucent sheen of fantasy, another world of blinking lights that were rooted strongly to the agony of this reality. I remember riding in the passenger seat finally, in silence, invisible shadows and fingers creeping around my vision. I caught a reflection of myself in the side mirror, a pale, frightened face, with wide, murky eyes, half deaf from the scream of voices, then suddenly a touch made me jump. He had reached his hand across the vast darkness and space between the car seats and put it on my knee. He was talking, his words, even though I couldn’t comprehend most of them, settled around me like the pillowy hush of fallen snow. His face turned slightly toward me and he smiled, deeply, like the edge of the tire of a Mustang standing still in the red murkiness of sunrise. All of humanity has smiled like that at least once. Time was running like the scratchy in-between of an animated sketchbook, shivering in curves of ink, the frames shifting in and out of focus. We went to Macy’s to look for a new blender for the apartment and he let me carry it to the car, the moment is preserved like a bookmark, folded in the faraway reaches of his camera roll, a place I would never see again. He was the one to pick up Audrey in the shelter. I sent him in like a platoon soldier who didn’t know where the bombshell was going to land, armed with nothing but a smile. She clung to him, lime green eyes half shut, glowing, little soft white paws stuck in the soft white fabric of his t-shirt. There was no furniture in the apartment for her to hide under so she made do with the dusty crack between the oven and the counter. Dawn was a gentle time in our life. The TV would be on, Bloomberg anchors talking silently in the chalky emptiness of the living room, sharp taps of metal coming from the kitchen, spoon against glass, frothing coffee into waves of creamy foam. I’d reach out to him, under oceans of blanket, trying to find warmth to stick my cold toes against, but disturb the cat instead, who would squawk indignantly. Cigarette smoke swirled out against the glass of the balcony as he told me about how the news lady had been caught last night in the booth of a peep show, or about the basil garden he always wanted to have, or how blue the sky was upstate, or how they used to use strips of paper to trade stocks on the floor, shot through pneumatic tubes. We had a little Chinese restaurant near the mall we’d go to all the time and share a laugh over noodles and soda, sitting on the same side of the booth, our hips touching. I pocketed kind brown eyes like you do with receipts you don’t know if you’ll ever see again. I coaxed him into taking baths with me, lowering the temperature till he finally agreed, sidling towards him and eating the heat from his skin as frigid water from the tap swirled under heaps of lavender bubbles. We watched TV sitting on the pebble gray couch, sipping coffee, half turned towards each other like we were on a late night show. Even though I can wear his gray sweatshirt he gave me because it shrunk in the wash, some Lorde songs stun my brain like pricks of eggshell embedded in your skin. He had dinner with my mother in the cafeteria of the hospital, shrouded by fluorescent lights, fear hanging between them like vapor rising from a hot cup of tea, trying not to scream at each other. We kissed on the highline above Chelsea market, and on the pink striped rug in my dorm room, and in the Macy’s dressing room, and under starry Alabama skies, and in the paper white bed of the ER, and at the Greyhound bus station, and the Wendy’s on Lexington and 3rd. He brought me Starbucks to work, white chocolate mocha with one pump of raspberry. It’s often hard to separate eggs though, you always end up with transparent dribbles of yellow, hiding in the slushy memories and the whites won’t fluff, no matter how much you want them to. We’d try to give each other massages but always end up making love, like two jigsaw pieces fit together in the crevice of an unmade bed. We played phone tag all the time, he worried, and worried, across miles and rivers and crackling telephone wires. I went fishing for those strands of yellow all the time, nails scraping against ceramic, staring at unlistened to Spotify playlists, haunted by shimmery morning dreams of limbic places, of empty beds, and shoes by the door and lingering smells of Marlboro, of tortoiseshell combs and chocolate smiles and missed trains and withering basil plants, of kitty litter crunching under rubber soles and beer bottles piling up in the recycling. I liked to put my head under his arms when he was reading the news bulletins, like a tea bag stuck to the lip of the mug, cotton tail drifting lazily in the wind, trying to wrap itself around the thin black handle, from which it would be untangled unceremoniously and firmly. He sent me a grainy recording of my favorite tenor singing Daisy Bell, the first song I learned to play on the violin and I made him a jar full of scraps of paper with different reasons of why-I-love-you. He told me not to get a perm, I got one anyway and he helped wrap the towel around my head to stop chemicals from leaking into pillows. He kissed me through the sour smell. It began the way it ended, with fireworks and charred skin.