33 “Your pillow smells more like you than you do yourself”
33
“Your pillow smells more like you than you do yourself”
I hear Tristan taking a shower, and I check the time. I should have logged in already, but who cares? I don’t feel like getting out of bed. I checked the date on my phone, and the world is still stopped out there, so it doesn’t matter if I keep lying here. I hug my pillow, which smells like him, and it makes me think about how it smells more like him than he does. Sometimes memories are the same. I don’t know if that makes sense. It’s like he’s fading away, like he’s ceasing to be a tangible person. I hear the shower turn off, and then the bathroom door opens, and Tristan comes out in his boxers.
“You’re still in bed?” He sounds surprised.
“No, I’m a hologram.”
He pouts affectionately, pulling on sweatpants in an award-winning balancing act, and then comes over and sits down next to me.
“It’s hard for everyone, Miri. But we’re getting closer to the end of all this. It’ll be over soon.”
I nod.
“Can you get in bed with me for a little bit?” I ask him. “Five minutes.”
I know he considers it, at least for a second, but then he says no.
“I have a call. I can’t. I’ll make coffee?”
I take forever to say yes. By the time I say it, Tristan’s already halfway to the kitchen.
I feel like a weirdo, but I can’t stop staring at him during his Zoom call. I’m frozen there watching him, like a sentry, with my headphones on, hugging my knees to my chest in the wicker chair I usually sit in to work.
“Falling” by Harry Styles is playing in my ears, and it’s playing really loudly. I can’t hear anything but his voice. The world is silent, and even the wind sounds like piano.
Tristan is wearing a white polo for the “meeting,” trying to look a little more professional, even though he’s sitting in his living room, in front of the only bare wall in the house. I can’t hear what they’re saying or what he’s saying. I just see him nod seriously and watch the way his lips move with the rhythm of some words that look firm. He smiles, and it makes his eyes squint. His left hand fidgets with the skin on his neck, meandering back and forth in a kind of nervous gesture. His hands will smell like cologne later, but I won’t dare smell them, shove all the papers off the desk, sit on it, and tell him I want to breathe him in until I drown. Only couples who still have a lot of hope left, who aren’t tired, can say stuff like that.
I’m tired. I can’t deny it.
I’ve revisited our story patiently, affectionately; I put my life on pause to do it. And it’s not fixed. It doesn’t work. What will become of me now? Am I going to be trapped here? Am I going to be the ghost, the hologram of the girlfriend I used to be in a couple that doesn’t exist anymore?
Who am I without him? I know I’m someone. I was before him, I was during, and I will be if he leaves in the end, but I can’t be bothered to discover her again. I just want to climb back into bed.
And for this time-traveling thing, all this coming and going to end. I don’t care how, but it needs to end. It’s exhausting analyzing, assigning blame, reliving every episode looking for the seams to try to resew them with needle and thread, trying to make them stronger this time, and finally seeing that there’s no point. And here I was thinking the problem was that I had fucked up. I thought I could patch it up.
Tristan is saying goodbye. He smiles, waves, and closes the laptop screen so he can take a deep breath. His shoulders fall, his smile disappears, and the shadows under his eyes become more visible.
You’d have to be blind not to see that he’s burned out and worried about something. And I know it’s like I disconnect at night, like I’m not there, but I travel back in my memory and remember how we spent those nights warming the mattress, tossing and turning, sighing. Awake.
Do you remember what happens with things left unsaid? Well, they have an even crazier friend: things left undone.
Tristan waves his arms to get my attention, and I take off my headphones. The world goes back to having real edges, and Harry Styles is left trapped back in the playlist I listened to on repeat during the pandemic when reality wasn’t enough.
“What’s up?”
“Should we make lunch?”
“It’s so early,” I grumble.
He raises one eyebrow.
“It’s almost three.”
“How long did your call last?”
“Two hours. I had two. One was one hour, and the other was two hours. I’m dead.”
Me too, but in another sense. I stand up agreeably, trying to make up for all the heartache.
“I’ll make lunch. You…relax.”
“You’re going to cook?” he teases.
“Yes.” I go to the kitchen pretending to be in the mood, skipping a little, and I open the fridge. “I’m full of creativity and ready to cook something for you…um…let’s see…”
I glance at the potential ingredients, but when creativity was doled out, I didn’t get in the line dedicated to cooking skills. I make a face.
“Spaghetti?” I suggest.
“I think you need a sous-chef.”
“Maybe. Every master needs young blood by their side with new ideas. You know.”
Within a few minutes, a frying pan is steaming on the induction burner, browning an onion and some minced garlic, and Tristan is straining crushed tomatoes. I want to stop the world. And yeah, he’s just making spaghetti, but he’s going to do it right, with his homemade Bolognese.
“It’ll be done in no time.”
“In no time, you can open a jar of tomato sauce, babe. Bolognese is in a different category.”
“We’ll be eating in twenty minutes, you’ll see.”
“In twenty minutes, I will have nibbled away all the cheese in the fridge. Silently. Like a termite.”
“But I’m the one who had to remind you it was lunchtime! Jeez…”
A phone buzzes on the coffee table, buried under scribbled pages.
“That’s mine. Can you grab it for me?” he asks.
I run to catch it in time, even though it’s not far from the kitchen to the living room.
“Who is it?”
“Your sister.” I pretend to gag, taking advantage of him not being able to see me.
“Pick up and say hi!”
I swallow. Every call with his sister during lockdown has been a huge kick in the ass. Supremely stupid. Unbearably strained. Now I know what day it is today. Of course. I wasn’t going to wake up just to watch desire fade.
“Hi, Uxia,” I greet her. “How’s it going?”
“Is my brother not there?”
“We’re in lockdown, like the rest of the world. Of course he’s here.”
“Can you put him on?”
I stop in front of Tristan, who’s putting the ground beef in the pan.
“Put him on,” Uxia rudely insists.
“I was just trying to…” I justify myself.
“I have to tell him something.”
Go fuck yourself.
“‘Hi, Miranda, how’s it going? I’m fine. How are you? How are you feeling?’ That’s the bare minimum, right? Even if you’re just being polite and you don’t actually care.”
Tristan only lifts his eyes, his head frozen in place, and holds his arm out toward me.
“Give me the phone.”
I hand it to him.
“She hung up.”
He stiffens up, unlocks the phone, and redials her without looking at me.
“Don’t even think about being pissed off at me,” I warn him.
He slowly licks his lips and turns off the stove with a gesture that seems to say he’s not pissed off…he’s beyond that.
“What was that?” he says when his sister answers. “I’m sick of this. No, no, Uxia, I’m sick of it. Of both of you. Both of you!” His voice rises.
He glares at me.
“If you’re sick of it, imagine how sick I am of your brat of a sister,” I toss out, my mouth full of rage.
“Shut up. Please shut up.” He puts a hand up between us.
“Don’t tell me to shut up.”
“One thing at a time, I’m begging both of you.”
With the phone pressed to his ear, he strides over to the bedroom and slams the door. Great. I was totally in the mood to reunite with my teenage boyfriend.
The conversation gets loud…really loud. I guess it gets louder than ours will, because you can’t argue the same way with a girlfriend as you can with a sister. At least I hope so, because I would never tolerate a boyfriend speaking to me that way. Not even him. Not even from his lips.
I catch a few words that help me build a map of the situation while I wait in the kitchen, my arms crossed: fed up, babies, tired, ruin, future, bitter, not enough, competition, protection, adult, embarrassed, unbearable, trapped.
When he comes out, he’s shaken.
“Come on,” he says. “Your turn.”
“I’m not going to tell you where you can shove that condescending tone, because we’ve never argued like that, and we’re not going to start now.”
“It’s not condescending. You seemed like you had a lot to say, right? So talk.”
“No.”
“Oh, no? Now we’re going to play silent treatment? Very mature.”
“I have nothing to add right now, because this topic doesn’t merit discussion. That’s it.”
Tristan rubs his forehead.
“I pick up the phone, try to be friendly, she gives some snotty answer, and I’m the one getting yelled at?” I say, livid. “No, sir. That’s your sister, your problem, not mine.”
He slumps onto a kitchen stool, his head in his hands.
“Well, you did have something to add, right?”
“Should I tell you to go to hell, Tristan?”
“I’m already in hell, sweetheart. There’s no need.”
“Very nice,” I spit.
“You have to put up with her…how many times a year?”
“That’s not what this is about, because I don’t have to put up with anyone as rude as your sister for even thirty seconds. And on top of that, she makes it clear how disgusting she finds me every chance she gets with total impunity.”
“She’s thirty-eight.” He looks at me with his eyes wide. “What am I supposed to do? Make her copy it a hundred times?”
“Ay, look, Tristan, it’s just that…” I get desperate. “The problem is that we’re arguing about this in the first place. Because we shouldn’t be. If I heard Ivan talking to you that way…” I bite my lip.
“Ivan is a friend. Uxia is my sister. I didn’t choose her; we came as a package deal. And I know what she’s like. She has a weird way of showing affection, I know. She thinks it’s her way of protecting me as a sister because I’m her little brother and…”
“No, Tristan. You sister has an inferiority complex, and she needs to get that poison out before she withers away. She hates everything that represents what she’s not. Obviously, nobody’s ever going to be good enough for you, but you have to admit that the bulk of the problem is that Uxia isn’t who she wants to be, and she hates the rest of us for striving to be who we want to be…because she doesn’t dare. And you refuse to tell her that.”
Tristan doesn’t answer. I had never, ever laid it out that clearly for him. I had thought it a thousand times. The idea had been forming in my head and gaining power like a summer storm, but it might be the first time it’s ever materialized in my mouth. And he still has his right hand pressed into his forehead and his eyes clamped on the counter.
“I’m just asking to stop arguing, Miranda,” I hear him mutter.
“The thing is, sometimes you have to.”
“But I don’t want to argue about her.”
“Well, then take her out of it. This is between us.”
He snorts.
“I’m never going to ask you to choose between your family and me, but I can’t tolerate being treated like this. And you shouldn’t either. And that’s it,” I say.
The silence hovers over our heads for a few minutes until it lands on the kitchen floor with a deafening clatter. And it stays there, with us, until I can’t stand it anymore. I try to leave, but when I pass by him, one of his arms shoots out and wraps around my waist. I could keep going, because he’s not holding on very tightly, but I’m weak, and I hear a ghostly “tick tock” in my head, so I stop and let him pull me over to him. When I bury my face in his neck and smell him, I feel a sad relief that ends in an embrace.
He doesn’t say “I’m sorry.” I don’t either. Deep down, neither of us is sorry, because I’m clinging to the truth for dear life, and he’s clinging to his resignation, but neither of us wants this to be the reason we end. I guess we have too many of our own issues to fall down at this hurdle.
“Hey…” He makes me look at him. He smiles timidly, and his bao bun lips look even more beautiful than ever. “I’m going to finish making this sauce, and we’ll eat lunch listening to music, okay? None of that TV stuff. Just a little music to relax us.”
Light music… I remember the Italian song Ana Mena will make a Spanish version of next year, which talks honestly about this, about the need to put on music that distracts us and lightens the painful silences.
“Sound good?” he insists.
I nod.
He makes a face.
“Say something,” he begs. “Please.”
“Your pillow smells more like you than you do yourself.”