Lovebug
From where she stood across the street, Nya could see the window of the second floor apartment they used to share. For years, she woke and surveyed the street while waiting for the kettle to boil so that she could make coffee in the french press, skimming the amber-colored foam with a spoon and tossing it into the sink, a method that Pax told her was supposed to improve the taste. Pax, who used to be a barista, demonstrated the gentle movement one morning years earlier. Look, you have to use the back of the spoon to tap and break the crust before you skim the foam, they said.
Nya and Chris shared the apartment back then, a poorly lit two-bedroom in a neighborhood known for its overpriced New American restaurants. Pax became a regular fixture in their domestic life after they introduced themselves to Chris at a neighborhood bar one night. Chris and Pax would emerge from Chris’s room sleepy eyed and in various states of undress and survey the fridge for their breakfast, like clumsy newborn puppies searching for their mother’s teat. Nya understood that Pax’s generosity was an appeal, an attempt to win her affection and embed themselves in her daily routine and by proxy in Chris’s life.
When Chris and Pax announced that they planned to marry and move in together, Nya recalled that morning, watching these lovers laugh as they prepared poached eggs, oblivious to her presence at the edges of their romance. Nya cried. Chris left the Mid-century modern kitchen table but otherwise took the rest of the furniture: the boucle gray couch, the glass coffee table, the flatscreen TV. Nya kept the window.
The view was unremarkable, a residential Chicago street of two and three flat buildings, some garishly renovated and others built from buff yellow Chicago Common bricks. Nya loved it regardless. She admired the ginkgo tree that grew in front of the building between the sidewalk and the street and its scalloped leaves that turned golden in the fall and filled the apartment with a warm glow even as the autumn days became shorter and darker. She liked the familiarity of her neighbors even though they never spoke: the two men who sat on their porch in the evenings and shared 40 oz Modelos from the bodega at the end of the street, or the lesbian couple who walked their terrier in the mornings and afternoons, encouraging him to relieve himself before bringing him inside.
When Levi moved in, Nya developed a new routine. She prepared dinner: a rotating menu of the dishes in her repertoire: slow-roasted chicken and sweet potatoes, honey-glazed salmon, shrimp scampi, chickpea salad. She finished cooking early nearly every time and would sit at the kitchen table beside the window and try to read. She never progressed to the next page during these sittings. She simply read the same few paragraphs again and again, unable to intake whatever meaning the words conveyed; though she enjoyed pretending to devote her attention to this task, the intake of language, because the serif letters themselves were beautiful, the added lines were like jewels adorning each figure. She occupied her time this way while waiting for Levi’s Blue Camry to turn onto the street, signaling that she should stand and begin to plate the food. Levi greeted her at the door with a deliberate kiss, as if he was placing a stamp and trying to align it within the printed border at the edge of the envelope.
Nya offered to hang his coat. And then they ate. Levi sat with his back to the window while Nya watched the sun set behind him, a multicolored background that shifted from periwinkle to cream to baby pink to indigo and violet. He rarely spoke while they ate. Instead Nya recounted passages from the book she set aside before his arrival, recalling the scenes she had managed to comprehend while reading earlier that morning or afternoon. She was attracted to writing about marriage or love and shared the similes that she enjoyed and underlined while reading. One evening she pulled the book from the windowsill, found the dog-eared page, and read the a passage about a woman arguing with her fiancé: “‘I had this feeling,’ she continued, ‘which I have had since and which gets worse each time we argue, that we were caught in a net of words, tangled up in all these strings and knots, and that each of us thought there was something we could say that would set us free, but the more words we spoke the more tangles and knots there were.’”
He furrowed his brow. Do you think that’s true? He asked. Nya wasn’t sure, but she thought the image was beautiful, being tangled in language and unable to free each other no matter how many words they spoke. He disagreed: I think it’s immature. They just aren’t communicating well, that’s all. He continued to question her, but Nya conceded after a few minutes, admitting that the sentiment probably wasn’t generally applicable to relationships, including theirs. She closed the book in her lap and set it on the windowsill again.
Sometimes they watched TV, allowing episodes to play until one of them suggested they go to bed. They pretended to have the same argument each night; Vince accused her of hogging the bed. Nya insisted they needed to stop penny-pinching and buy a new mattress. Nya often woke in the middle of the night, restless, roused from sleep by another nightmare where a strange, usually faceless figure chased her. She moved slowly in these dreams, unable to flee, always inches from her pursuer’s grasp. She climbed out of bed carefully to avoid waking Levi and walked down the hallway to their kitchen. As she filled a glass of water, she searched for the meaning of these nightmares on her phone and was unsurprised by the facile interpretations: anxiety or feeling vulnerable or powerless. One website encouraged her to identify the unknown stressor in her life. Another suggested that she was avoiding confrontation in her waking life. Nya scoffed and left her phone on the marble countertop. She stood before the window and drank the glass of water while watching one of the ginkgo tree’s branches sway underneath a street lamp.
But neither the window nor the apartment belonged to her anymore. She conceded ownership in the breakup. Levi continued to live there, alone. Nya was crashing on the couch of a mutual friend’s apartment and living out of a duffel bag. The rest of her belongings were in a storage unit near the highway until she signed a new lease. She wore the same black dress everyday and rarely brushed her hair before walking to the nearby coffee shop each morning to send emails using their Wi-Fi.
At night she laid on the couch and watched TV on her laptop. But she still had access to Levi’s email. He logged into his account from her computer one afternoon to work, and she never logged out. The evidence was paltry, a verification email from a dating app and a receipt for flowers. Nya tried to rationalize. They were separated. He was allowed to date, but a few minutes later she searched for the girl’s account on Instagram. There was a photo of beautifully plated dishes in her story, and a sliver of a man’s torso. Nya, of course, recognized that ivory dress shirt, the marbled buttons, one restitched with red thread. She closed her eyes and tried to sleep.
Eventually she rummaged around in her duffel bag and took one of the painkillers left over from her surgery. The white tablet did little to calm her nerves. She tried breathing exercises recommended by her therapist. Nothing worked. She checked her story again. Nya’s entire body shivered uncontrollably. She felt like a child who purposely licks the cathode and anode of a 9V battery and cries when she experiences the uncomfortable electric jolt. Nya pulled on a hoodie, her bomber jacket, and a pair of boots and propelled herself out the front door and toward the bus stop. Before boarding the bus, Nya turned off the location services on her phone. It was unlikely that her friends would check her location, but she could not fathom explaining to them why she was in her old neighborhood.
On the bus she picked at the nail of her left index finger, peeling slivers of keratin until her nail bed was exposed and began to bleed. She sucked on it to slow the bleeding. Seemingly no time passed between her walk to the bus stop, the ride itself, and the walk to the apartment. It had started to rain and mist soaked her hair, adhering strands of her bangs to her face that she left untouched. Her hands felt unwieldy, club-like, as if the fingers were molded chocolate that had warmed and melted into an indistinguishable shape.
Nya wondered why she was outside the apartment they used to share together, whether she was suffering a psychotic break that would eject her from society and make it impossible to ever behave rationally again. She dodged this question though, compelled by some insatiable desire to know for certain, as if proving her suspicion would vindicate the absurdity of her behavior and return her to some state of normalcy where events occurred exactly as she understood they might.
She looked up at her beloved window and saw the back of the leather dining room chair where Levi used to sit. The colored lamp that Levi loved filled the room with bright purple light, but Nya could not see any movement. She knew that it was impossible to definitively prove that what she thought was taking place inside was actually occurring but Nya’s imagination was vivid and she felt as if she was a voyeur watching it unfold from the window of the neighboring building, a two-flat with pale blue siding; He was reclined on the couch, a leather L-shaped section. His gray boxer briefs that had lost their elasticity were abandoned on the floor. The girl was crouched on all fours like a cat, and her makeup was done to match, pointed eyeliner that complimented her diamond-shaped face. Her skin was like porcelain, pore-free and unblemished, at least in the pictures.
Her lips glistened with gloss that she freshly applied in the bathroom beforehand. She moved them closer to his groin and smirked. He leaned forward to smack his hand across her left ass, grinning when he saw her skin turn a bright pink color, and tugged at the lace of her lingerie. He was still wearing his undershirt and wouldn’t remove it even if she tugged playfully at the hem. He never did with Nya either. Her waist was slimmer than Nya’s, more grabbable, and he gleefully watched as she took himself in her mouth, her ass in the air, perfect and heart-shaped.
When he grew bored of watching her tearfully swallow his cock, he signaled for her to turn around and she obeyed, sitting primly with her hands on either side of her. He stood up, slid his hands underneath her thighs, and lifted her onto his lap, a position he had attempted but never accomplished with Nya. He pulled aside the pink strap of her thong, spit into his hand, and forced himself inside her, biting her shoulder as she moaned noisily. He finished like that, more vocal than he had ever been with Nya, whispering pet names: baby girl, princess, slut.
Her imagination ended there and spared her the image of the pair laying side by side on that same cramped mattress where Nya used to warn Levi that the “Lovebug” was coming before tickling him. It started to rain harder but Nya did not reach for the umbrella in her bag. She stared at their text message thread. The last message was from her, an elongated blue rectangle without a response. Droplets of water landed on her phone screen. She wiped it on her jeans and considered clicking his contact and calling him. His picture was a photo of a cat wearing a military helmet. Nya saw it on Twitter one night after they smoked together and showed him the image, insisting that it looked like him and laughing so hard that she cried. Nya wondered why she felt unable to cry right now. Her socks were wet. It was unclear if the water had seeped through a seam in her boots. Her jeans were soaked below her knees, both pant legs were an indigo ombré.
Nya felt empty, like the hollowed inside of a rotting tree, or a latex balloon that had gradually shrunk after being blown and tied days earlier. The emptiness symbolized something that no longer belonged to her, but she could not articulate what was missing, if she had given it willingly or if it was taken. And she could not imagine what could reverse this feeling and doubted it was entirely possible. His voice, maybe, though it was equally capable of inducing pain. The last time she and Levi spoke, he told her, You are so special. There is no one else like you. He placed his hand on her wrist lightly, as if offering her reassurance before the doctor delivered a terminal diagnosis. For a moment, she considered vomiting, some kind of physical expulsion of the self disgust that was roiling inside her. I want you to be happy, Levi insisted, and Nya curled her fingers, stopped herself from grabbing at her face, trying to externalize the anguish she felt at these words. But she could not bring herself to be honest, to admit, I will never be happy without you.
They said goodbye, and Nya walked aimlessly through the city and sobbed openly. If passersby found this behavior concerning, they made no attempt to intervene. Nya walked until she no longer recognized the street names and ordered an Uber back to her mutual friends’ apartment, where she continued to cry into the pumpkin-colored cushions.
This time she could not move, or she at least found it impossible to leave this spot, as if leaving the window meant she would be forever ejected from the life they previously shared together, the memories fading like one of the ginkgo leaves that had fallen to the concrete and turned a pale manila color. She nudged the leaf with the toe of her boot, enjoying the sound of it crinkle. And then she bent down, picked up the leaf, and tucked it into her pocket before making her way back to the bus stop.
Image: Nicole Eisenman, Watchers, 2016.
Currently: Sorry for the onslaught of emails. I don’t sleep anymore so my nights are spent writing instead; I’m still trying to find my voice, but I hope some of these experiments and attempts are enjoyable at least.
“Someone Like Me” by St. Vincent and, somewhat shamefully, Sally Rooney’s Normal People.