Chapter 6
Chapter Six
MY EXPIRED LIFE
LOUISA
My couch is a Facebook Marketplace find that cost me two hundred and forty dollars and the dignity-loss of Chandler and I loading it into a borrowed van at eight in the morning on a Sunday while Jason, the man I bought it from, stood on his porch with his cup of coffee, watching, offering no assistance whatsoever.
(Jason, if you’re reading this, I hope your coffee was cold.) Even still, I love it with a disproportionate ferocity that has nothing to do with its actual quality.
It has lumpy stuffing with one armrest that sits slightly lower than the other.
Plus, it’s a forest green that lets me pretend I’m just a girl living in a cottage in the woods decorated by moss and knit things.
I have dressed it up in every throw pillow I’ve ever impulse-purchased, some embroidered with funny sayings, or my favorite, the one with a corgi on it.
(I’ve never in my life had a corgi, I’m not the Queen of England.) The way I love this couch is more to do with the fact that it’s mine, it has only lived here, in a place that is mine, in a life I built from scratch and am extremely attached to.
Friends is on, not because I'm paying attention but because the laugh track is like a lullaby, there is a lot of comfort in watching people navigate their lives with more chaos than competence and somehow always land on their feet.
(I usually land face first.) I know every episode, every beat.
I clap every time during the theme song.
But the light from the television is soft in that 90s sitcom glow, transforming these friends into more than just background noise, but a nightlight in my small space.
Ross and Rachel are currently in the middle of something I can narrate back to front, and I am paying zero attention to it because my thumb is doing the thing my thumb does on Saturday nights since Roma’s advice, which is scroll left with an automatic rhythm that has long since stopped requiring any conscious participation from me, but is going through the motions anyway.
Way too many men holding fish.
An unreasonable number of men holding fish.
I don't know when this became the dominant visual language of male romantic availability, but I want it on the record, whoever is maintaining the record (Reddit? Is that you?) that this is not working on me. There’s a man on a mountain.
A man at a wedding that is not clearly enough not his wedding, which raises more questions than it answers.
A man with a dog, which is the only profile that gives me genuine pause, not because of the man but because of the dog (which is a corgi and could fulfill the pillow prophecy), but the dog looks like he deserves better than to be used as romantic collateral.
I swipe left on the dog’s owner with some regret (for the dog.) There’s someone who says they are ‘fluent in sarcasm.’ Another bio that just says ‘I dare you.’ Absolutely not.
The screen refreshes, my thumb stops. (So does my heart and perhaps the rest of my cardiovascular system.)
The profile is as severe as the man himself.
No fish, no mountain, no borrowed dog. Just a high-resolution headshot in a suit that I know from firsthand experience costs more than my monthly rent, against a background that is a wall of books.
Dark eyes, and lashes, which, even in a photograph, come through.
His distance from me is listed in a measurement so small it’s a joke, which I also knew, because he is approximately twenty feet away through a wall and a hallway.
Hudson Ellis on this app is not something I needed to know tonight or any night, or ever, really.
This profile confirms what I suspected but didn't know with certainty besides Toby’s ‘Relationship Status Drink Order Model’ that he is single.
Like not just casually available, but on-the-dating-apps level single.
The tall, glamorous (lives her life with more competence than chaos) girlfriend, Claire, really is out of the picture.
Which makes me feel better about using him while recording. It’s not been consciously, or at least not entirely consciously.
I swipe left. (Hard.)
Harder than necessary, if I’m honest. There’s no one here, so I’m really only making the point to myself.
And with that he disappears into the profile graveyard with the fish men, and the mountain man who wants someone ‘outdoorsy,’ and the man whose dog deserves better, and I put the phone face down on the cushion beside me and throw a pillow over it.
Instead, I just stare at the television to tell myself firmly that there is no universe, not one, not even the weird ones, in which that would be anything other than a catastrophe.
The notification buzzes through the pillow I thought was necessary to hide the screen that momentarily held his face, and makes the whole cushion vibrate.
“Louie-Gooey!” Theo is grinning on the other end of FaceTime and it’s clear he’s on the comfortable side of several pints of Guinness.
Behind him I can hear the ambient noise of a London street at closing time and laughter of people singing something that I can’t identify but which is definitely being performed with more alcohol than skill.
His face is flushed and his hair is doing the thing it does when he's been running his hands through it, which is a habit he's had since we were children which means he's been laughing a lot.
“It's Saturday night,” he announces, as though I might be unaware of what day it is. “You need to be doing something more age-appropriate than sitting in the same flat you’re in ninety percent of the time.”
“It's not ninety percent,” I say, I’m defensive because we both know he isn’t that wrong. “And I'm working, I had a full day.”
“You're in your pajamas.”
“These are lounge clothes.”
“You Americans and your ‘lounge clothes,’ but those are pajamas.” Since he moved back, he’s always teased me about being his American sister.
Something he never saw himself as, but what I always desperately wanted to be, and in all ways except the occasional swear word and my pilgrimage to the specialty grocery for the specifically imported beans, I am.
“Piss off, they're comfortable,” I say, looking down at the oversized t-shirt printed from some museum gift shop.
“The accent always comes back when you're annoyed,” he says, with a laugh and the cheerful accuracy of an older brother. “It just appears, like a little Union Jack. Pop. Hello, I'm British and I’m irritated.”
When my accent forcibly evaporated when I was a child, he clung to his for as long as he needed.
Until he replanted himself back in ‘his homeland.’ (We couldn’t be more different.) The vowels that sit slightly wrong, the words that arrive in the wrong order.
He kept his deliberately, clung to it the whole time we were in California like a flag he was saving to plant when he got back to his real life, which he always knew was there.
I didn’t know where mine was, I’m not really sure I even know now.
But so far, this is closer than anywhere else.
No one I meet now even knows that there is backstory as to why sometimes in frustration or panic my words sound a bit closer to a transatlantic accent.
Everyone just assumes it’s the voice-acting of it all.
Not knowing that my passport is a little less bald-eagle and actually has a unicorn on it.
(Which, to be fair, is perhaps the only thing that makes me want to keep it.) Hints of my accent only come out now, when I’m talking to my brother.
“Only with you, dear brother,” I say. He laughs and I let myself smile at it, because Theo’s laugh is one of my favorite sounds in the world, always has been, because he doesn’t hold anything back.
When we moved here, when I was nine and drowning in the misery of being new and different, it was Theo’s laugh that I always followed home.
He was fifteen and decided before he ever set foot on the plane that he was going back, which he did a year and a half later.
He carried his accent like a shield because he knew he’d need it later.
I didn’t know what I’d need (I still don’t), but he has always let me stand behind his armor with him while I figure it out. Especially against Mum and Dad.
“Happy belated birthday, Louie,” Theo says.
His voice fills every invisible crevice of my apartment with sincerity and the nostalgia of our shared childhood.
Even though, despite the same house, our childhoods couldn't have been more different.
“Have you checked your mail?” he asks, with the tone of someone who already knows the answer.
“The mail is fine” (I hate the mail and he knows it.)
“Lou.”
“It's a system, I swear!” I say. “The system is that I check it when it becomes urgent.” The real system is that I leave it until the mailman writes me a threatening note that he sticks to the front of my mailbox.
You know who never gets Post-it Notes about ‘exceeding mailbox capacity’ or ‘ceasing to deliver?’ (Of course you do.) 7A.
In fact, the last time I was at the mailbox doing my clean out of miscellaneous garbage coupons and loan pre-approval looking for my car registration, he strutted up to his mailbox, walking right by Mrs. Saraceno and I without even so much as a hello, not even that pursed lip smile that you do when walking down the hallway and someone is walking towards you like a game of human chicken.