I’ll Look for You, Everywhere

1. MAGDALEN

1

MAGDALEN

I watch the wine in her glass tremble with each laugh, the liquid edging towards the rim, wanting to escape, no doubt, but inevitably sinking back into the glass. I watch this for fifteen fucking minutes.

My eyes zone out until the clear edge of her wine glass becomes blurred and, abandoning my sense of sight, I see the party through what I can hear. People I don’t know crowd around our tiny flat. Heightened laughter from someone attempting to flirt, the gentle tug of a cork, someone dropping their keys. A cough pulls me out of the trance, and I stretch my ankles until they crack. Watching this girl with her wine reminds me that the fullness of my left hand is not from a similar glass but, instead, a letter. It’s too heavy to be a simple piece of paper, purposely eggshell in colour and thick with feigned importance. But it is important, isn’t it? I’ve turned into a bitch at my own party.

I press the cardstock corner hard into my finger, the sharp pain causing me to look down. I watch the skin around it swell with agitation and feel disappointed that I can’t draw blood. The corner simply folds inwards, limp and lame. I want the letter to hurt me; maybe it’ll be an excuse not to read it. To scream at my mother, Your letter hurt me so I couldn’t possibly return a reply. But I realize the wine girl has asked another question that draws my attention away.

‘ Chivasso ,’ I repeat, already knowing she will ask me, for the third time, the name of my hometown.

‘I’m sorry,’ she slurs, ‘can you repeat that?’

Her face is flushed the same shade of burgundy as her wine, and I can tell she is far past the point of being gracefully drunk. Not entirely irredeemable yet, I’ll give her that. Perhaps a glass of water and a strong caffè can at least subside the inevitable headache tomorrow. She rubs her nose with the back of her hand, staring, waiting. I can tell her mind is projecting kaleidoscopic, spinning images of my face, and based on how her eyes shift from my eyebrows to my mouth, I know there are three of me in front of her. Wait till you try grappa , I want to say, but of course I don’t. Instead, I remain seated, quietly waiting for her to condense the three of me into my singular self.

A sonata by Liszt echoes from a speaker in the kitchen, followed immediately by Billy Joel. I roll my eyes. His voice streams in as the new Oxford graduates mingle and compare, melodically commanding us to slow down because we’re doing fine . But I already feel particularly slow tonight, and I’m unsure whether I’ve ever been fine.

Emily must be behind this. I love my roommate but I can’t forget that she’s also an Oxford student. Only the pretentious would transition Liszt to Billy Joel at a party. My eyes drift back to this girl, and the word stupor comes to mind. I stifle a smile, happy and sad at the same time. She is in a cosy, drunken stupor. She licks her lips, chapped from excess alcohol, and her eyes are half glazed with the inability to remember her name, let alone the name of the town I was born in. But she blinks slowly and patiently waits for me to repeat it. It’s a ritual for Oxford students to get shit-faced at the end of term. A compressed period of overzealous indulgence to counterbalance their years of late-night library runs and thesis writing.

I sigh, ‘ KEY-VA-SO ,’ deliberately enunciating every consonant, elongating every vowel. I tuck myself further into the leather armchair, drawing my knees up underneath my chin. The letter I’ve been carrying around all afternoon slides to my hips, pressed tightly between my stomach and the front of my thighs, safely protected from any partygoers with slippery fingers. On second thought, maybe it would be better to hand it to one of them. A free summer in Italy for the small price of attending my sister’s wedding. I take another sip of my beer and wipe my mouth with the back of my hand like a lonesome cowboy in an old Western movie. The credits will roll. Life will move on. A sequel will be in the works. When will my movie begin? Looking around the flat I’ve spent the past year in, I find myself disinterested. Not wanting to remember it, wanting more to avoid looking at anything. Surely that’s not normal twenty-year-old girl behaviour.

There is an antiquity about Oxford that is beautiful. No one can deny that the rich know how to decorate. The walls are steeped in dark history, held together with powerful columns of academia. Faces of brilliant men are carved into the ceilings. Women buried underneath the floor. Success always looks different for young girls.

The worn-out wood of library floors is a nice reminder of the presence of brilliant minds running to and from bookshelves. And I am here. My footsteps are etched into the very same floors; my empty ink cartridges lie underneath the mahogany benches of the lecture halls. Oxford is dusted in an almost violent intelligence that can sometimes overwhelm you.

But it’s not home. Although it had been for my mother, Vittoria, and my father, Claudio. I take another sip and see that I’m empty.

The sun can never really find its way here between the ornate buildings. And no matter the season or clothes I’m wearing, whether I’m in a hot bath for an hour or running around the campus, I’ve always felt a coldness chasing me. It’s like the memory of a rain-soaked sweater that I can never really get rid of – a permanent, melancholic mildew following me around.

Before I have time to feel blue, the drunken girl tries to get up too quickly from the opposing leather armchair and it makes a terrible squeaking sound and I look up.

‘ Oh! Kayvazso ! ’ Her eyes try to light up, but her drunkenness only allows a dull head nod. Plopping down on the armrest, I smile as I watch her eyelids succumbing to the weight of the wine, so at peace, so unafraid.

‘Kayvazso!’ she says again, slapping her hand to her forehead comically, becoming confident and radiant with knowledge. Something about the name’s vowels and structure strikes her as very Italian, and she leaps to conflate all the knowledge she has assembled about Italy into the name of my hometown. This happens at Oxford; even in intoxication, people are always on the hunt to prove.

‘I love Italy! I went abroad last semester and it changed my life. Like really, like, the culture there is so... different... so open, you know? Like from here, I mean British people can be so...’ – she pauses, trying to find the right word – ‘ depressing .’ A giggle bubbles out of her, proud of her boldness. Impressed that she said such a racy and unorthodox thing, she giggles again because she, herself, is British.

‘Maybe Italians are too open?’ I weakly say, hoping that would be enough for her to take over the conversation. Picking up my empty beer, I start to scratch the moist label off my bottle in the discomfort. Looking at her, how the lines around her mouth are relaxed and faded, how her mascara is smudged but she’s young and fun so she doesn’t care – my blueness creeps up without warning.

My inability to relax my shoulders and join her in a drunken stupor infuriates me. I want to be silly! But I am also drunk and still painfully aware of the condensation that falls on my finger. Aware how the right side of my hair is tucked behind my ear, but the left side hangs in front of my face, mindful of the freckle that sits above my eyebrow, wondering if she has noticed I have a freckle, wondering if anyone has ever noticed that I have that freckle. I glance at the kitchen to see if there’s any more beers left on the counter. Oxford is not home.

My gaze finds its way back to her wine. I take a breath in, closing my eyes, the smell of alcohol making me fifteen and back at the museum in Torino. Anika and me sitting on the marble tile underneath the statue of Isis, a bottle of wine open between us, her MAC lipstick tattooed on the rim. If I really focus, I can hear her dad, Dexter, in the hidden office behind the third-floor gift shop, rustling papers with subtle frustration, frequently reminding us to behave ourselves. That he’s always there and can hear everything.

We used to love staying after hours in the damp darkness of our museum, as it really was ours when the CLOSED sign was hung up each night. Faces of unknown statues looked down on us, shaking their heads, whispering, No, no, no, it’ll always be ours. The backs of my thighs shifting against the cool floor, wanting to find relief from the heat of the museum, in an unbearable Italian summer.

‘The statues hate the cold,’ my papa used to say. ‘It makes them remember their death.’

Personally, I just think Italians are too cheap to buy an aircon. I stifled a groan of discomfort, wishing to feel that coldness if just for a moment. The warm effect of the wine mingled with the unforgiving heat, the back of my neck dampening to my hair. I looked up into the eyes of Isis and thought being conscious of your mortality seemed far worse than briefly remembering your death. Anika shrugged her shoes off and placed her bare feet on the base of the statue, looking up at Isis.

‘She wants to fuck me,’ she sighed and grazed her big toe against the carved foot of Isis with intimate slowness. ‘I just know it.’

We laugh. Anika describes her latest sexual encounter. I listen and know her father is also listening and feel weird but don’t say anything.

Lost in the memory of my youth, I feel the letter slip from my hand. I jerk off the chair, scrambling to pick it up off the floor. It is not the first one she has sent. Three identical envelopes sit unopened with only dust to respond, nestled between my winter knits.

My sister’s wedding.

Arguably something I should want to attend. But something about this party makes my fingers twitch. The hazy memories of crawling barefoot in the museum with Anika come back. My skin feels tight as I realize what is happening – I’m considering going back.

No! my subconscious screams. Oxford is your safe haven. Remember why you left. Who you left. Think of how long you felt sad . I sigh . Maybe I just don’t like parties. I tend to be my most melodramatic in social settings, so it’s difficult to tell when I mean what I think.

Scooting up further on the chair, I look around the flat again. The scratched hardwood floors, the chipped corner of our kitchen countertop from when Emily cracked a beer bottle over the ceramic. The memory makes my eyes involuntarily search for her. Wild curls sway around her as she argues about simple nothings with the man she is in love with. A professor, tricky. But he’s very charming and seems to listen when she speaks. Usually, this would make me smile. But I look at all of these things from outside of myself. Seeing them but feeling nothing.

My ribs burn. The drunk girl is still rubbing her nose until it’s flushed with red irritation. She is nameless, happy, and free. Give me some of that! my mind screams. I want to reach out, grab her carelessness, swallow it, and tread in her stupor. But I can’t.

I think of the walls of Chivasso, permanent and profound with age. Running away has done nothing but drag my blueness to another country. My sister shouldn’t pay the price for something I should have worked out years ago. The air becomes heavy with sadness, and I feel burdensome. My fingers dig into the letter.

Why am I always left behind? So afraid of everything and so tired of being afraid.

A deep exhale escapes me, feeling like my skin itself is deflating from the loss of breath. I have no dress. No shawl for my potentially exposed shoulders.

I feel my heart constrict so tightly I think I’m dying. I wait a moment, trying to feel the action of breath. Waiting for a pulse through the skin of my wrist. My ears fill with white noise as I look down at the letter.

But then I feel it; the rush of blood settles in my fingertips, letting me know I’m not dying, just being a pussy.

My nails slide through the hardened wax seal, fingers gripping the invitation, feeling the raised lettering of my sister’s name, feeling selfish for not wanting to go in the first place.

So I shove my melodrama back into the envelope and seal it shut.

I have a wedding to attend.