5 Is that not how all this works?
5
Is that not how all this works?
Miranda
It was torture leaving the café this morning without looking back, but the thing is I know how we end, and I’ve been thinking, you know? Thinking about why this is happening.
Well…I thought about it after going to the ER, saying I’m having hallucinations, asking them to do a brain scan, and having the neurologist on duty tell me that everything inside my skull is normal for a girl my age. I had the urge to ask him if he had found shit. Because with the flood of shit society and media spews at us, I’m surprised our coconuts aren’t full of manure.
Now that the possibility of a brain tumor the size of a Calanda peach is gone, I’ve started thinking about magical things, but it’s not really helping; I’m trying to find the logic in all this. What do I know? If it’s not a physical matter, maybe I have some kind of mental illness. I asked the neurologist. Listen, it’s not that big of a deal. It’s not something you put on your Christmas list, but if it happens to you, you get medication and that’s it. Enough demonizing mental health matters. Look, it took me all day to get to this point of self-awareness. But he explained to me that it’s very unlikely that I’d start showing sudden symptoms of a super evident mental illness that causes hallucinations. I didn’t tell him that ever since I woke up this morning, I’ve been surfing a wave through time into my past…just that when I got up, I thought it was a different year…
“Sweetheart, you’re under a lot of stress.”
I was about to go on a rant about how paternalistic that sounded, but I decided to let it go. Today is not the day to explain to a doctor who could be my father that I already have one and I don’t need the world to find others for me. I’m an adult and very in control of my own life. Of course…not today, because control, control, what they call control, I don’t exactly have.
When I get home, it’s already nighttime. It’s November; it gets dark really early. I have a few missed calls from Ivan, but I send him a WhatsApp saying I’ll tell him everything tomorrow. Procrastinating has never been as easy as it is today; I’m normally afraid of facing the consequences in the near future made less sweet by leaving for tomorrow what you can do today, but the truth is I have no idea what’s going to happen tomorrow.
I’ve jotted down in my planner a few possibilities that have occurred to me:
I wake up the day after my breakup and return to my real space-time.
I wake up on the twelfth of November, the day I originally got a message from Tristan. But of course, because I did something different today than I did, that will be an alternative November 12 where I turn into a world-famous flamenco dancer.
I wake up on some other random day.
The third option makes me really anxious. How can I live normally with no clue what damn day I’ll wake up in? I’m probably in a coma, and all this is a dream caused by medication. Or I’m dead. Or I’m cryogenically frozen like Walt Disney. Maybe I tripped on the rug in my bedroom again, and I fulfilled my own prediction of ending up gaga. The corner of the wardrobe always looked dangerous to me.
It’s gotta be something like that.
When I climb into bed, I feel like I’m Dorothy in Oz without the magic shoes, swept up in the folds of the space-time continuum…a girl who has invented a huge lie to flee from pain. But I fall asleep. Like someone bonked my head with a mallet. Immediately. Deeply. I sleep.
The grayish light around my bed wakes me up. It’s like smoke. At first, I’m scared something in the apartment is in flames. And since I have crappy vision…that didn’t help, like in eighties movies or the Insidious series. But no. It’s just that it’s very foggy, you can’t see the sun, and the sky is covered in a whitish blanket.
My head feels heavy, muddled, but for a few moments, there’s no pain or worry. Just my bed and sleepiness. It’s seven in the morning. At ten past seven, my circumstances are back to feeling as heavy as they did before I went to sleep…and I look at the date on my iPhone screen.
It can’t be.
Saturday, December 10, five years ago. Wait…what the fuck?
I don’t need to stop to think for a second what’s special about today. I already know.
Tristan and I met on Tinder, and we acted accordingly. We grabbed that glass of wine I told him about “yesterday” in the café across from the office. He took me to a pretty cringe place in the middle of Paseo de la Castellana, the kind that was “trendy” at the end of the noughties, that attracts the most flashy suited and booted cokeheads in all Madrid. Total bummer. But we giggled a lot at the tasseled loafers and the fancy hairstyles. And we had an amazing first kiss and even better sex at my house. We said goodbye in my doorway, convinced we’d probably never see each other again. But like I said before, he texted me the next day. We met up to fuck two more times…until our first date, which was something neither of us planned on.
I sit on the toilet with no trace of glamor in my body, but to make up for the 232 pounds of anxiety pressing against my chest, I contort my body to rest my head on the laundry basket in front of me. I remember what Ivan said when I told him about our sporadic encounters:
“Ooh, girl…you’re both going to regret starting off like that.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Well, say whatever you want, but this isn’t a fling, and in two years, you’re going to have to answer ‘fucking’ when people ask how you met. It’s the worst story…ever.”
I liked Tristan, but the way you like a boy you drink wine, talk about interesting things, and have great sex with. The kind who the most intense thing they’ve shared with you is an orgasm and the worry about not finding a decent apartment to live in.
No. Tristan and I didn’t have a fairy-tale start, but…what couple really does? Every day, love stories are sparked that start with a “Let’s get a beer” or “You have to meet my friend. He’s perfect for you.” And so what? I never understood the universe’s insistence on grandiloquence. I’ve always been a fan of things that just work.
“I don’t understand why we have to be bigger fans of champagne than the wheel,” I said once at the magazine. “Is it prosaic? Sure. But it makes the world turn.”
“Yes, but champagne makes it fun.”
I don’t remember who came up with that retort, but they were right.
In the beginning, Tristan and I were a wheel. The wheel of a car, a taxi, a shopping cart… We were something simply practical up until a month after we met, when we learned the magic of champagne.
And that day is today.
For that day to happen exactly as it did, I should get in the shower now and get all dolled up because I feel like it. Get a coffee in the Café de la Luz and read Madame Bovary . Go buy flowers in that little store where, depending on when you go, you’ll be helped by two kooky old sisters or a very cute boy. Although if I do all that and I do it right, I won’t make it to my last plan, which is buying sushi and a bottle of white wine to share with Ivan at my house, because on the way, serendipity will cross my path in the form of a tremendously handsome, tremendously bundled up, and tremendously overwhelmed man.
I grab my phone without thinking and call Ivan. It’s 7:30 in the morning on a Saturday, but I don’t have time to think about how people like to take advantage of these moments to sleep. I’ve always been an early bird. Ivan’s not like that. He likes to sleep. He enjoys it. He says it’s one of the great pleasures of life. We’ve never been able to agree on that point. I don’t understand how something you don’t feel can be a pleasure; you just do it, and that’s it.
He picks up grumpily when I’m about to give up.
“Bitch, are you crazy? Please tell me you’re dying or something, because that’s the only way I’m going to forgive you. It’s seven fucking thirty in the morning.”
“Ivan…”
He knows me like the back of his hand, and I don’t need to say another word. Just his name and the tone are enough for him to understand it’s something serious.
“What’s going on? Are you okay? Should I come over?”
“No, no, listen.”
“Are you pregnant? Ay, no, even worse…did you do an STD screening? Do you have syphilis?”
I look at the tiles on the bathroom wall, bewildered. What the fuck is going on in my best friend’s head?
“No. Listen to me. I’m going to ask you something that’s going to seem really weird, but I need you to play a game where you answer without thinking too much, okay?”
“It’s really early. I don’t think I could think even if I wanted to.”
“If you could change your past…would you?”
There’s a silence on the other end of the line; all I can hear is his sheets rustling. Then I identify the sound of his feet going down the metal stairs that separate the bedroom from the kitchen in Ivan’s tiny duplex. He’s going to make coffee.
“Is this an existential crisis?” he asks.
He’s buying time while he thinks about whether the best answer to my question would be hailing a cab in his pajamas and showing up at my house. I know him well.
“It could be.”
“Are you having an anxiety attack, Miri? A panic attack?”
“No. That’s what I mean about not thinking too much. Just answer the question.” And I squeeze my eyes shut so hard that I see sparks. “If you could change your past, something that hurt you, would you?”
“Say more.”
“There’s no more. Would you erase a love that hurt you?”
The semiautomatic coffee machine he bought himself for Christmas makes a sound that won’t let us talk for a few seconds, but this gives Ivan time to think about his answer.
“It’s fucked up that I have to answer when I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I don’t think you woke up worried about Ander.”
Ander was my first boyfriend, my stable relationship, the one you get into because you think it’s what you want, but it’s actually what you think you should do.
“No. I don’t have to be thinking about someone specific, right? I can just be asking myself things about life. I’m a woman in my thirties.”
“It’s barely seven thirty in the morning on a Saturday. If it’s not about someone, you need medication.”
“It’s a simple question.” I say impatiently.
“Fine.” He sighs. “Let’s get rid of some extenuating circumstances here: obvs, if you’re talking about an insane relationship, abusive, unequal, toxic…I’d say yes, I’d erase it. But if your question is not actually about ‘a love that hurt you’ but how much the heartbreak of falling out of love hurt, I’d say that anything beautiful has the capacity to hurt us when it disappears from our lives because it leaves a void. But that doesn’t eliminate all the positive feelings that helped us grow and believe.”
This throws me off. Ivan has always thought that love is something kind of cringe. I mean, the romantic idea of love. I guess we all think when other people fall in love, they’re kind of corny…and I’m the first to admit it. It’s a topic that has caused me some issues, obviously.
“Okay,” I say.
“Is this for an article? Did it send you on a hormonal spiral?”
“I’m going to forgive the hormonal spiral comment because it’s you, but that’s gross.”
“Some months, your period hits you really hard, girl. That’s just the truth.”
I roll my eyes.
“I’m at an age where I’m considering things about my life,” I say, not wanting to get into too many details.
“Did you see a rom-com yesterday that made you go crazy?”
I am a little crazy, but how can I explain it to him?
I come out of the bathroom and perch on the high stool at my kitchen bar, where I find my planner. I flip through the pages absentmindedly.
“A book,” I lie. “Sometimes novels can make you think a lot.”
“That’s why I don’t read.”
I let out a cackle.
“You shouldn’t brag about that.”
“You have to respect that some people don’t like to read, buttercup. I respect that my best friend calls me at dawn on a Saturday. When I should be telling you to go find other friends. The fact that I’m all you have makes me sad.”
“I don’t only have you. I have a lot of girlfriends.”
“So why don’t you call one of them?”
“Because they’re not you.”
My smile is tinged with sadness. I love my girlfriends a lot, and I believe strongly in the importance of investing time and care in every social relationship that matters to you, but Ivan will always be Ivan, and my relationship with him will always be special.
“Fine, what are you doing today?” he asks me.
I managed to soften him up, but he doesn’t want to admit it.
“Well, I was thinking about going to get breakfast…”
I stop dead when my eyes run across something in the planner I’m holding. Something that brings me crashing back to reality. The very unrealistic reality I’ve been living since yesterday. The reality that I can’t be sitting here calmly talking to my bestie on the phone like nothing is happening because I’m traveling through fucking time like I’m on a Ferris wheel.
There they are. On a random page are the notes I made last night that guessed where and when I might wake up tomorrow. This might not seem that important, but it really is. Why? Well, I made the notes yesterday, right? Yesterday, reliving a specific day five years ago. The day I really met Tristan. And if the ink of the pen I made them with is still there and it hasn’t been erased in the same magical way that I’m moving through the past, that means I can change it. That I can make things happen that I didn’t do, and the consequences should withstand time. And that maybe my decision to leave the café, to say goodbye to Tristan and say no to the possibility of seeing each other again, could have changed the wheel of events.
Is this my new past?
“Miranda?” Ivan complains.
“Yeah…I’m here.”
“I thought you hung up on me.”
“No. It’s just…I remembered something. Listen, I’ll let you go, okay?”
“Are we meeting up at your house to eat sushi and drink wine?” he asks.
I think about it…
“I don’t think I’ll have time. I’ll let you know.”
December 10, five years ago, I had a super-chill morning that has nothing to do with this version 2.0. Chill doesn’t really get along with the whole time-travel thing. The first thing I do is go downstairs to buy a newspaper, just to double-check that this isn’t some stupid joke orchestrated by all my friends. The logical me isn’t ready to throw in the towel. But no. It’s not.
“Sanchez leaves without clarifying his candidacy for the PSOE,” a headline screams. Messi is still playing in Barca. And fashion doesn’t lie either: in the street, skinny jeans and thigh-high boots are everywhere. There’s no doubt about it; we’re in the past.
I have a copy of Madame Bovary in my bag that I found on my bedside table, but as much as I want to recreate that day, I have to be honest with myself and admit that memory is not my strong suit. I don’t remember how late I was getting to the café or how long I spent there. I don’t know if I went straight to the florist or if I stopped to pet a dog, because the truth is I’m one of those people who smiles at dogs I come across on the street. So I’m nervous because I have no way of being able to find out empirically whether everything changed with my decision from yesterday or if this really is a parallel reality where, at any moment, ferrets and cats are going to revolt against humans until they control us.
To break it down: the fact that “yesterday” I left the café without agreeing to see him again could have led to the result…
a)
That in this present, we never fucked, so the opportunity of being an “us” has passed us by and we’re not going to randomly bump into each other today.
b)
That my decision had the equivalent effect on the universe as when I say “I’m not going to drink even a single glass of wine this month”: as in, it hasn’t changed a single thing.
I try to repeat the steps I can remember exactly. I order the same thing: an Americano and a piece of pan con tomate. I try to read, but I can’t. I go to the bathroom. I give a friendly answer to a girl who asks where my sweater’s from and stroll unhurriedly to the florist. I don’t remember what flowers I bought or how many for the bouquet, but I know it had some pale-pink flowers and white ones, branches of eucalyptus and everlasting flowers in lilac, plus some other stuff. I do my best to describe it to the shopkeepers, not knowing if these are important details.
“I want…like…lilac, pink, and white. I know that’s kinda boring.”
One of the women helping me smiles, and I feel just like the bouquet: totally cheesy. Especially compared to her, because this woman owns a floral shop, but she looks like someone whose favorite flower is broccoli.
I’m nervous. I need to somehow figure out how time behaves when something changes. Today, I woke up on a different day again, so nothing makes me think that the same thing won’t happen tomorrow. And I need to understand it.
I stroll along with the bouquet in hand, just like I did, but I’m not in the same mood. I was happy that day. I felt like I had managed to make my life my own and not be constantly worrying about relationships or crushes. I thought I had learned how to live without needing anyone. And I liked it that way, mostly. It was my life. My independence. Saturdays. My house. My routines. My chaos. Family. Friends. Fun. My sheets. Which is to say everything I decided and how I decided it. Now I know that meeting Tristan today diverted me from that path. Or maybe it simply transformed it into a love story.
It happened when I turned onto Calle de Fernando VI. And no, it didn’t happen like it did back then. I didn’t see him from afar, at the same moment he recognized me. We didn’t approach each other with a slightly bashful smile because the last time we saw each other, we were naked…or because we’d seen each other more naked than dressed, to be honest. This time, it happened out of the blue, leaving me no time to prepare myself and decide what to say.
I turn the corner, take three steps. Bam!
“Miranda?”
The voice comes from behind me, out of nowhere, like magic makes everything possible materialize wherever it feels like it, wherever I least expect it. I turn around, and there he is. His beard is a little messy; his hair brushed to one side haphazardly, definitely with his fingers; his eyes full of that fog that never lets you see what color they actually are, whether they’re green, honey-colored, gray, or dark. He’s well dressed, in a checked shirt and jeans, and wrapped up against the dry Madrid cold in the same good wool coat with worn cuffs as always.
“How’s it going?” He smiles.
“Good. You?”
I don’t want to say much. I need to establish our relationship to each other. Did I change something yesterday by behaving differently? Have we slept together yet? Yes, no, a kiss, a hand job?
“Good. I mean…a little overwhelmed.” He wrinkles his nose. “Finding an apartment is impossible. I guess I told you… I just moved to Madrid.”
“Yeah, that rings a bell.”
“I would’ve told you more, but…” He flashes me another flirty smile, a little charming and nervous at the same time. Now I know he believes it doesn’t do any good to be nice with strangers. “You told me you know how that glass of wine I wanted to invite you to was going to end and…”
“Yes.”
“Sorry, I just rushed right over to you, and you were probably on your way to something. Did I catch you at a bad time?”
I’m aware that I was answering him almost monosyllabically, but I’m trying so hard to figure out where we stand, he should consider himself lucky I can even manage that.
“No. I’m actually on the way home,” I say, brandishing the bouquet. “I just came out to run a few errands. You know how it is, grab some breakfast and read a little, go buy some flowers for the house and something to eat… What about you?”
“Well…” He looks around. “I came down to buy some food to make lunch. My fridge is completely empty, and I don’t feel like spending the whole weekend eating takeout. Plus… I wanted to cook something delicious, you know?”
Yes. Yes, I know. A steak tartare, with the sirloin cut by hand, patiently. A bottle of good wine, a Pago de Carraovejas, a little foie, to which you add some thin slices of caramelized apple and serve alongside warm bread.
That Saturday was the first time we ate something together. We usually just had a glass of wine and went straight to bed. It was the first time I saw him cook, but not the last. When we first started dating, Tristan liked to cook for me because he said he thought it was sexy when I told him interesting things while he made food for me. We discovered a lot more in each other that day than we had ever expected to see, and…we were left wanting more. It was…sexy but also magical, interesting, maybe a little cheesy. A beginning.
The bouquet I was carrying, or actually its twin from another reality, stayed at his house. He dried the flowers. Five years later, they were in my living room, slightly faded but hanging in there in a beautiful white vase with rabbit heads from Abe the Ape that he gave me the day he moved in with me.
“Hey, do you wanna come with me? It could be fun, right? We could go to the supermarket.” He tilts his head toward it. “We could buy a few things, and you could be my sous-chef while I pour you a glass of wine.”
I stare at him. His lips. That mouth born to kiss. That perfect nose. Those foggy eyes. He’s just as handsome as I remember. Actually, it seems like years haven’t really passed for him. And it’s not just that I don’t know what to say to him. It’s also that I get a little dopey thinking about nineteenth-century romance novel bullshit, and I lose my train of thought. And since my silence makes him nervous, he launches into speaking again, this time a little more awkwardly.
“I guess you’re still thinking you know how this ends, huh?”
“Yes.” I smile sadly.
“I bet you’ve met a lot of morons like me and you’re a little sick of it all, but…I’m just asking you to come eat and talk. Maybe it’s not that big a deal.”
I know how lonely he felt back then. The original back then. He missed his group of friends, the most diverse gang I’ve ever met, who were nothing like him. That he was questioning his decision to accept the position in Madrid and that sometimes, when he got into bed, so tired and so alone, he thought the capital, hulking and hungry, would end up swallowing him. But still, I have the power in the palm of my hand to avoid our whole story, and maybe tomorrow, when I wake up, I won’t even remember him. So maybe it’s possible I won’t be hurt, and I’ll keep being fine being alone or, who knows, maybe I’ll end up falling asleep in someone else’s arms…someone who doesn’t want to leave me, who doesn’t break my heart after years of dinner, wine, plans, trips, and I won’t end up scarred.
I can’t think about it clearly.
“The plan sounds really nice, thank you so much,” I say, being very, very friendly. “But I have plans to eat sushi with a friend at my house.”
He raises his eyebrows. He thinks I’m dating someone. I guess he’s wondering what the hell I’m doing on Tinder, but he doesn’t say it.
“Ah.” He makes a face. “Sorry. Umm…I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”
“You didn’t make me uncomfortable. It’s a great plan, but maybe I’m not the right girl.”
He nods, and I take a step back, in the direction of fleeing. Just like yesterday in the café, I’m not sure I have enough willpower. Because every urge in the world is pushing me to live that day all over again, to forget that in the end, as I know all too well, he’s going to leave me. Living through it with him, opening up to him, seeing him again with the eyes of someone discovering themselves through someone else.
But it hurts.
A lot.
I loved him. And he stopped loving me.
“Nice to see you again,” I say. “Hope Madrid treats you well.”
I don’t wait to see his reaction. I turned around and start walking. I feel a kind of relief mixed with pain, but tomorrow, all this will have passed. The man who I loved and trusted, who I wanted a future with, won’t betray me, telling me he doesn’t want me by his side, that I’m not his happy place anymore. Because I love him, and maybe I’m tempted by the idea of taking refuge in memories, but if I can save myself the anxiety of knowing he’ll leave my side, I’d rather go to sleep and forget about him. I wish that tomorrow, all this will be no more than a fuzzy feeling that’s hard to shake after a really vivid dream.
Or is that not how all this works?