17 It’s amazing, incredible, and the fucking best
17
It’s amazing, incredible, and the fucking best
Tristan
This is what happens when you think too much, I’m warning you.
I hate light in the mornings. If I have to wake up early, fine, it is what it is. Sometimes it even helps. But if I have time to sleep in and a beam of light penetrates the room…sleep is over for me. A beam. One. So it’s easy to imagine that with the nuclear bomb of sudden alertness that exploded in the room as soon as the sun started hinting at dawn, it’s physically impossible to fall asleep again. I guess I could have put on the eye mask the hotel kindly left on the pillow, but…I just can’t picture it on me. I’ve always had a hyperawareness of looking ridiculous even for stuff like this. Plus I don’t think it’d be comfortable.
It crosses my mind a couple of times to wake up Miranda, who’s breathing open-mouthed next to me with an expression that makes me laugh. I guess this is what relationships are all about, isn’t it? The same girl can impress you, excite you, fill you with admiration, laughter, or fear of abandonment. The latter shouldn’t be there, but I’m working on it. This is my first long-term relationship, and I still have to struggle, often, with the Tristan who didn’t owe anyone anything and who hoped that one day, his time would come…the way it looks in the movies, not real life.
Love isn’t anticlimactic, but it’s like a wave that tumbles you around like a washing machine and makes you swallow water. It’s good, it’s not painful, it’s not suffocating, it doesn’t create anxiety or bad thoughts, but it is demanding. It demands from you. It demands from your partner. It demands.
And that’s what being in love is about, right? I’m asking. This is my first love story, presumably the only one, the ultimate one, the one that will last. I fell in love a long time ago, a really long time, with a girl with straight, golden hair who drove me nuts and smelled like vanilla. I wore two earrings in my left ear, and she wore supertight pants. She had a tight little butt that my friends joked I could fit in one hand. I never understood why that was a good thing. But I fell in love, even though later I didn’t want her anymore. I mean…that crush didn’t translate into anything lasting. We would make out in parks, and we’d hide from her parents and mine, and we’d pilfer any free moment to sneak off to bed. Ah, those teenage hormones…
Miranda has never been comparable to anything, much less to that first love. She came in like a cyclone, turned everything upside down, and burrowed in deep down, where I couldn’t kick her out. That’s how it happens, isn’t it? First, it settles in your head and in your stomach like a parasite. It’s in every conversation, whether you talk about it or not. You think about her all the time. You want to spend any minute you can scrape together with her. And then, when you take it in, when you chew on it, when you let it set foot inside the circle of intimacy you defend from others, this comes along. Love. Trust. Laughter. The importance of imperfection. The admiration. The plans.
And I can’t deny it even to myself: whether it scares me or not, I’m making plans. At least I am mentally, even if I don’t share them with anyone. It’s time. It’s the right person. It’s her.
Recently, on a quick trip back to Vigo, on one of those typical ragers where you end up with a kebab in one hand watching the sunrise, a friend told me that love is when you don’t feel suffocated by the idea that everything you’re going to do, you’re going to do with her. I don’t agree. I think that seems… I don’t know. It’s too reductionist. I’m not going to do every single thing in my life with her, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love her. Love doesn’t chain you down; it doesn’t mean your skin morphs and bonds you to each other like conjoined twins. And that’s what I like most about Miranda: there’s a piece of life she doesn’t want us to share, that is our own, each of us. But like all the things we love most about each other, I know this is one of the reasons we might break up someday.
It’s like extreme sports, right? If something can kill you but doesn’t, it becomes special. We are special. It could go well, or at the last moment, the parachute could decide not to open.
I should stop. Get up, go out on the little patio, do some stretches. Get out of this warm bed that smells like her and where, since I can’t sleep, I can’t stop thinking. Thinking is overrated. Thinking complicates things and rushes them. I miss smoking; then I’d have an excuse to go out and stop the wheel from spinning.
The man who thought “relationships work best when they’re short term” is thinking about the future. That must be what they mean when they say that you “mature” after thirty. When I was thirty, I bought an apartment in Vigo, and I felt like I was adulting. If you don’t feel grown up with a mortgage, the only other option is being diagnosed with high blood pressure.
So I bought an apartment…and what good has it done me? My three-bedroom apartment in Vigo is now inhabited by a group of architects who pay the rent like clockwork every month, and I use it to cover the mortgage. And in the meantime, I live in Madrid, where drivers have never heard of a turn signal and everything is more expensive.
The goal was to beef up my experience with the firm and come back to the office in Vigo as a partner in a few years. Until I met Miranda, of course. Until I fell in love. I want to go back, but I know it’s impossible to tear Miranda away from Madrid.
I miss the sea, the pace of life I had, my friends, the Tristan I am there, but Miranda makes up for everything. I look at her next to me, clutching her pillow. Her mouth is closed now, and her nose is crinkled with sleep. If I have to choose, I choose her. Her over me…at the risk of that destroying us too.
I wonder if you have to be old to be able to feel things as intensely as they sound in love songs. Maybe you just have to be in love to understand them.
So…well, I’ve always been an easygoing guy. If you have to change plans, change them. There are things that worry me, of course, like those days when she’s even weirder than normal. It’s not just that she’s quirky, but sometimes she gives the impression that there’s such a full and complete universe inside her head that it’s hard for her to get out into the real world. But I’m not too worried about it either…maybe just for when I introduce her to the family. Well, first we’ll move in together, and then I’ll introduce her to my parents. Will she ever want to get married? I don’t really care. And we’ll talk about the rest…whether we want to keep living in the center, how long to wait before we consider becoming parents…Did I just think the word “parents”?
I push the quilt aside and jump out of bed to go wash my face. On the way back, I make as much noise as I can, trying to wake her up, but she’s still curled up peacefully.
“Miranda…” I sit down by her side and stroke her temple.
“Mmm…”
Last night, she was resisting sleep like I’ve never seen anyone resist it. My eyelids were getting so heavy, but she wouldn’t quit pacing around the room, like she was trying to scare off sleep.
She was telling me things about the stars, downloading apps on her phone to tell them apart, humming, trying to hold my hand. When she finally lay down, she seemed really sad. And I thought of the sadness that fills you when you realize you’re living a moment that is so happy it’s ephemeral.
See? You have to take off your armor to understand song lyrics.
“Miranda,” I insist, “the sun’s rising.”
“Great,” she mumbles, more asleep than awake.
“Seriously, it’s beautiful.”
“So take a picture.”
I laugh. This girl is nuts. Why didn’t I run in the opposite direction when I had the chance? Oh, right, I did. But I came back.
“Miranda…you’re really gonna miss out on seeing the sunrise from a giant bubble?”
Something in those words seems to jiggle her conscience (which is not conscious), and she opens one eye, like the dragon sleeping on the dwarves’ gold in The Hobbit .
“What did you say?”
“Look…” I point in front of us.
The bubbles are oriented so that the sun rises behind us and impedes our sleep as little as possible, but the dawn is tinging the sky with some fabulous colors. From the deep blue of the night, it turned into indigo a while ago, the color I woke up to. Then to mauve. And later lavender. Now that color is fading into a delicate orange that is sure to bring a soft yellow with it. I admit, I woke her up so I could stop thinking, but it would be a bummer for her to miss this show. It’s one of the reasons I brought her.
Miranda sits up, propping herself on one elbow. One of her boobs has escaped from her nightgown. It would be more complicated for it to stay in with so little fabric. This girl’s underwear and pajamas are like costumes for Toulouse-Lautrec’s Moulin Rouge .
She looks at me again. She has a little spit dried on the corner of her lips, and she has crazy bedhead. I can’t imagine a less romantic vision, but it reminds me again that love is made up of many more layers than what we see in movies. I adore her. Does she know?
Yesterday, she told me it surprised her when I was affectionate with her. And I wouldn’t want to have things left unsaid. I know how I am, how I can be a bit harsh, especially for someone as completely over-the-top as Miranda, who was born with a fucking speaker on her chest that plays songs that make you want to dance. She is the queen of excess. And I’m the king of quiet enjoyment. Maybe I should make a little effort…a little more, to verbalize what I take for granted. I don’t want to look like I don’t care, even though…that’s who she fell in love with, right?
“Miri…” I smile at her. “Your nipple…”
She adjusts her nightgown without looking at me, pushes her hair out of her face, and swipes the back of her hand over her mouth while she studies everything around her in amazement, as if it were the first time she’s seen it.
“It’s beautiful, eh?” I repeat.
“It’s not beautiful…it’s amazing!”
When she looks at me, her eyes are shining. Jesus…so intense.
“It’s pretty, but…” I try to calm her down.
“No, it’s not beautiful, Tristan. It’s…amazing! It’s incredible! It’s the fucking best!”
I can’t dodge her leaping onto me and plastering me to the mattress and kissing me passionately on the mouth.
I would have preferred us to brush our teeth first…but…what the hell?
She’s right. Enough thinking. It’s amazing, incredible, and the fucking best.