Andromeda

In the living room: your partner, your gentle partner Greg, lies on the rug like a crescent moon cradling your baby, your beautiful baby Carmen. She is a bouncing, drooling star in his orbit. The apartment is a mess—piles of laundry and mail, diapers and board books, unpacked boxes shoved into every corner—but there’s Greg, steadfast in your chaotic sky.

In the bathroom: your sleep-deprived face. You palm a melting ice cube over your puffy cheeks, closing your eyes and for a second, sleeping. You startle, shuffle into the kitchen, start the slow cooker—a soup, even in this heat—and reach for your sneakers. Should we all go? Greg inquires about your usual cue to take a family walk, but you shake your head vehemently. Too hot, you say, but really you are craving the solitude of a secret ritual—of searching for your ex’s old apartment—like a cigarette. With his new-parent-exhaustion, he shrugs with indifference, without even asking if you’ll be ok by yourself like he tends to do, and turns back to Carmen, whose soft head bobbles, her full eyes watching him like a wonder.

Outside: the air is quilted with D.C.’s high summer mugginess. Late day heat emanates from the sidewalks and the stench of hot garbage is stagnant in the air. The sun wanes in an orange haze drifting behind the flat roofs of the townhouses and spindles of the desiccated city trees that line your street. You squint up at your grey brick townhouse and wonder when you’ll be able to afford to paint it. A rush of pride springs a smile across your face and for a second you wish Greg were there to high-five again about the purchase of your first home. Kids clamor by, pedaling the wrong way up the one-way street toward the distant song of an ice cream truck.

The route: a pounding walk to where you first fell in love, a pathway toward your 20s, a once crumbling boulevard that now, ten years later, is lined with freshly painted coffee shops and dimly lit cocktail bars, storefronts selling hipster shit that flicker at you like holograms of what used to be—you still see the crumbled brick pubs and corner stores, that hookah place you’d loved. How odd, this neighborhood—the only place Elina could afford then and the only place you and Greg could afford now. You glance sideways at the mirrored windows of the mechanic shop where you and Elina used to pause for selfies and wonder if Elina would relish your postpartum heft, having commented more than once on your brittle bird bones, something Greg would never do. You suck in. Collapse out. Greg. He’s so right for you, everyone—your parents, your aunts, your friends—comments when you’d revealed your pregnancy, that you were keeping it, that you weren’t getting married but you were buying a house, starting a life. It’s so right, it’s so right they say, and yet here you are. His boisterous high-fives echo in your core and it’s been so long since you’ve had anything that was just your own and it feels like betrayal, but you can’t stop searching here, as if to find something you may have left behind.  You pause and attempt a big bellied breath of humid air, but it sticks in your throat like a gulp of cotton candy.

14th street and I Street: the 1100 block, you think. The street, once bursting with families, is lined with pristinely renovated townhouses that look something like your own. It’s an unnerving camouflage of royal blues and grays that have washed over any classic mid-Atlantic adornments that once were—no more awnings or bare brick. At first, you blamed your shifting hormones for not being able to remember the house number or style, but today you recognize that it is this uniformity that disrupts your gravitation to the past. Where is she? It feels urgent, and yet you saunter, each step a tentative question that pulls at something like regret. Sweat slides down your back and you cross the street to be in the hot shade. Where is she? It’s an escape, you tell yourself, and it’s ok to escape. No, it’s time to yourself and it’s ok to have time to yourself. You turn and expect to see Greg with the stroller, with Carmen. Carmen. Your arms ache from her absence and when you look down, you realize you’re clutching one of her impossibly small socks. You shove it in the swampy space under your bra where it pastes to your skin like a band-aid.

12th street and I street: always feels like you’re getting closer. Today, surely, you will find the right wrought-iron gate, the narrow stairs you’d contorted down so many times…

House 1114, Apt B: is it? Isn’t it? Isn’t that the dirt-filled entryway that she’d turned into a twinkle-light planetarium? Shall we retire to the patio? Elina used to ask, shepherding you from her self-proclaimed 300-square-foot shithole to a blanket spread across the concrete. Elina liked to reach over and pull the twinkle lights plug, plug it in rapidly, again and again. Shooting stars! she’d yell, transforming even the dank slab into a spiraling Andromeda. Some nights, her performance prompted the dog upstairs to bark and she’d bark back until you kissed her, hard, until you were wrapped in each other, until there was no space between you.

Adams Morgan: where you’d met. At Greg’s graduation party, when Greg was a friend whose glances in your direction filled everyone with suspicion. I don’t like him, you’d say of your impish, Georgetown law-bound friend. Across town, where the city still swarms with twenty-somethings living in shitty apartments with the air of a glorified dorm room. The party teemed with friends full of vodka and emerging public personas needed for a successful life of D.C. public service. Though you’d also head to the hill for another summer internship at your father’s insistence, you sat away from your classmates on a soggy patio couch. The D.C. statehood spar again? was the first thing Elina said to you as she flopped next to you, nodding toward the belligerent crowd and smiling like you knew each other. So trite, was the second thing she said and an exaggerated eye roll was the first thing you’d said in return and Obviously D.C. should be a state! was the second. It was all so boring, you’d agreed. Greg came by, shirtless, with a tray of jello shots, which you each happily took. Nice night, he’d said, and you and Elina had nodded, laughing at the absurdity of his bare-chested presence. The night was hot, but not that hot, and sensing their amusement at his state, he covered his nipples and started naming every country in the world, by continent, to prove to you that he wasn’t that drunk. He asked if you wanted to grab a drink, but you said you had to leave soon. Really, you weren’t interested;  eventually he went away.

Elina: a new friend. You swirled the jello from the mini plastic cups. Good grief, Elina said after a while and then Do you have to go? You shrugged. Let’s go, she’d said, and you did. With her, you traversed the city, walking all the way to the exterior steps of the Lincoln Memorial where you stayed until dawn broke over the murky Potomac, talking and smoking. You were both lonely, aimless in the face of graduation. Maybe she’d go to art school, maybe you’d join the Peace Corps. You didn’t tell her about your internship, or your controlling father, but you did tell her about what you really wanted—to leave this town. You decided to go to the textiles exhibit at the Smithsonian together the next day. You both loved art, dance, the stars – and in synergistic excitement, you held hands so naturally and you didn’t notice until she laughed and noted your entwined fingers; how you’d recoiled like you’d been stung, then drifted into your first kiss, your togetherness suddenly an inevitability.

The inside: is blocked by haphazard slatted blinds fanned open on one side. A light’s on, you squint through the slats. The apartment is bare, save for a folding chair, a TV on the floor, a far cry from the place you once knew.  But it was these steps, right? With the grass sprouting from cracks like armpit hair? Yes, you’d rushed up these steps to your internship, so many mornings, you’d watched these bushes shake as the rats scattered. Right?

Elina: an oasis. My palace! she’d exclaim anytime you came over, anytime anyone else came over, which was often. You see your crowd of friends, luxuriating in Elina’s space, for nights that drizzled into day. How loved you felt, to be the only one in Elina’s bed come morning. You repopulate the space with Elina’s finery: the towering monstera, the peeling photo gallery, the bookshelf she’d hung from the ceiling– a swaying pile of poetry, astronomy, mythology. That’s us, she’d say, pointing to a page about the Antennae Galaxies, their entangled magnetic fields.

You: a desert. Weeks into your fervid romance, she’d begged you to stay over, crying that you never stay over and you told her finally about the internship, the job offer already for the fall. How she’d gone into the other room coming back with wine to toast for your success, then the next day insisting on shopping for professional wear without another question. You don’t have to hide from me, she’d said and you’d rested your head on her shoulder, so grateful for her lack of judgment. She renewed her lease at the end of the summer and stayed another year. And then another summer. Another year. But she was miserable, working at a bookstore in hours that barely overlapped with your demanding schedule. What about doing something other than work? For yourself? For us? she’d gently suggest, but each day you moved deeper behind a barricade of stress – the pressure from the office, the pressure from your father, the pressure to have a future. It’s respectable work, the government, your father would say. Love sustained the relationship until it couldn’t.

One day: an acceptance from art school in California. I’ll go with you, you’d panicked, California! You knew you wouldn’t go, but daydreamed nonetheless—gleefully looking up apartments on Craigslist while each day voicing a new fear. The distance, the cost, what you would do for work, breaking your lease… maybe you’ll join when your lease ends in December. Finally, she cracked open the faultline: What are we doing? she asked, finally. To which you’d pleaded: What do you mean? I’m coming with you, I am, I know, I’m scared, but I’m coming with you – but she knew that you’d never tell your parents about her, that you’d never quit your father’s precious job, that you’d stay in this swamp forever. I’m leaving, she’d cried, I’m leaving. The more you insisted, the deeper the wedge. In one of the final deliberations, she’d seethed, You can just go back to men. As if you’d loved her on a dare, to see what it would be like.

You: a desert. Searching, always searching.

House 1114, Apt B: the door swings open and a round older woman heaves onto the patio, a dripping spatula haphazardly hanging from her hand. You press yourself against the wall, steadying your heaving breath. You close your eyes as if that would make you disappear. You! You! I see you! Why do you come here? It’s not the woman who scares you but the final image that floods your mind: the sparse piles of boxes the weekend Elina left. How you’d showed up at her goodbye party even though she hadn’t invited you directly. How you tried to ask, what about long distance? as if your sad face would convince her to love you again, to at least admit she still did. You touch your face and your cheeks are gritty from sweat and though Carmen is no longer in there, you touch your belly as if she were, your flesh plush, still retracting into some former shape. Oh my, the woman says and disappears inside, leaving the door open. The cool air conditioning whispers around you and you realize how overheated you’ve become in the late afternoon sun. You back away from the wall and sit on the bottom step, holding your face in your hands and wondering if you’re going to throw up. Here, the woman rasps, shoving a cold water bottle under your face. You pick your head up and wave your hands as if to reject the offer while taking the water– you twist the top and gulp. The woman watches from behind her red glasses, nodding and wiping her hands on her checkered half apron. She shuffles barefoot back to the door and pulls it partially shut while staying out on the patio to make sure you’re ok. You’re out of breath when you finish but you manage, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, this is so embarrassing, I used to live here, well my friend did, no, my girlfriend did, I’m so sorry—the woman reaches out and lightly touches your elbow. It’s quite alright, dear. No need to apologize, dear. You pause and nod and insist that you’re OK, that it’ll never happen again, that you’re sorry for the intrusion.

Your girlfriend: Elina. You would have gone anywhere with her; you didn’t go anywhere with her. It was a coincidence that you ran into Greg at a networking event and you’d been so inconsolable and confused that his unfettered delight when he saw you there at the bar rejuvenated you unexpectedly. Where have you been!? he’d asked, and you never tell him and you congratulate him on finishing law school and when he asks to see you again, you say yes and fall in love with his familiarity and his exuberance for aspects of the city you tended to find exhausting. You blow off steam from your high-pressured jobs into the dim morning hours inside the sticky-floored bars of Adams Morgan and smoke joints with circles of friends huddled around fire pits in tiny backyards. You see dolphins in Rehoboth and camp in the wilds of West Virginia and you fly to Napa and Houston and New Orleans and Maine and Chicago and Mexico City and Boulder to watch friend after friend get married. You feel stuck at work and Greg helps you find a new path. You apply to public policy school. You go to public policy school. You make new friends, you build a new life. Your parents love Greg; your father loves to “talk shop” with him. Not yet, you say when he asks you about marriage, but if he asks again, you think you’ll say yes. According to social media, Elina is living a new life, too. You move in with Greg. Then Carmen is there, too.

Your life: is them. You touch your stomach instinctively and it is still deflated and empty. You lock eyes with the woman and apologize again, thank her for the water. She nods and touches your elbow again saying, You’re welcome to stop by anytime. It’s just me here! But you’re gone. You take off in the wrong direction, looping around the cracked blocks until you’re pointing homeward. That wasn’t it, it couldn’t be—that empty apartment. You blame your shifting hormones again, maybe to avoid a nagging truth: that maybe you’re simply not meant to remember.

In the living room: Carmen coos from her bouncer seat; Greg snoozes on the couch above, a hanging arm bouncing her rhythmically. The air springs with an embracing aroma and you remember the simmering broth.

In the bathroom: a close, porous look at your sleep-deprived face. A full moon but all you see is craters. From cupped hands, you splash cold water on your face. Greg appears groggily in the doorway. Hey, he says arching over your tense shoulders, cradling you like a moon, but you, you’re still drifting in some other universe, some other time, some other place and in the mirror, you don’t see anything at all.

JAMIE HENNICK is a queer literary fiction writer from New England. Jamie is currently working on a debut collection of short fiction that explores the dimensions of non-romantic intimacies, grief, sisterhood and memory. She earned her MFA at American University, along with the Myra Sklarew Award for remarkable originality in a prose thesis. Her work can be found in The Dickinson Review, Grace & Gravity, and The Colorado Review (online) among others. Her favorite aquatic flower is the spatterdock.

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