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{bauhaus} cassie schoon There is such a difference between quiet and silent, I think, as I watch him read. There is not a lot else for me to do. I am not interested in what the P-I has to say about the economy or about a woman who voted for Obama, though she'd voted Republican for every election since 1958. He is fascinating to watch. He is silent. He is not simply quiet. There is no sound to him at all this morning. Even his coffee cup seems to hush itself as he gingerly sets it back on the dinged, wobbly table. The coffeehouse is everything I ever imagined a Seattle coffeehouse to be. Books everywhere, a light patina of time, wear, smoke from a bygone era. Young people tapping away on computers as obscure and beautiful music plays inobtrusively from unseen speakers. I like it here. I have no memories of this place, but he does. I imagine these memories, flashing forward and pausing in his mind as he sits, silently, each moment like a car in quickly-moving traffic. There are moments like these where it doesn't take much to coax my mind into constructing memories that never happened. Memories like, perhaps we came here together once. Perhaps this is where we might have met, once, some time ago when we were younger and less resistant to the things we allow to make us happy. We have come to Seattle for a few reasons. I am curious- this place where he misspent so much of his youth, a place I've never seen, a place where so much happened around him in those early years of his 20s. My youth seems so quiet in comparison. So lonely. He knows that I am, perhaps unnecessarily, ashamed of my comparitively tame twenties. He knows I was a virgin until 24, he knows I spent much of my time worrying about old-people things like my 401k and proper car maintenance while he bed-hopped, chain-smoked and binge-drank his way through those violent, overwrought years between 20 and 25. He tells me, in his less-silent moments, that it wasn't worth it. I would like to believe him, but I feel there is no way to know for sure. Perhaps skydiving isn't worth it, or wearing diamonds. I wouldn't know. The colors with which my mind paints his past are so vivid compared to the shades that illustrate my small past. I feel a little out of place, as I always do when I travel. This is not my city. It is so beautiful, the people are so driven and lovely and kind. I want this to be my city. But I am foreign here. I could make anything my story. I could be an army brat, raised in bases around the world. I could say this in passing to the girl serving my coffee and she'd never know the difference. Perhaps she'd mention this imaginary me to another of these lovely, kind people in this city later as a bit of small talk. I could have an interesting life, manifested in the passing conversations I hold with the strangers here. I could have an interesting past. I could be like him. But I'd still know it to be a lie. I'd still know that, to the age of 23, my greatest thrill in life was improving my GPA and making my own baked goods. The silence is so thick I jump a little when he shifts in his seat and clears his throat. Going out for a smoke, he says, and with a rattle he pushes the chair out, kisses me sweetly on the mouth. He stretches his back, and walks away with that tall man's gait of his, reaching into the side pocket of his army pants for his cigarettes. I love that walk. He walks like he knows everyone in the room. It is so strange to be so beloved by someone so different than me. Where I am loud, he is silent. Where I am tidy, he's a mess. Where he is bitter, I am forgiving. His life has been unhappy. Mine has just been conventional. There is something inside me that makes me want to open him up, learn everything there is to find out about him, about his failures, about his fears. His silence makes me want it all the more. What was it like when he first learned that he could hurt someone? When he first disappointed his parents? When he first caught a lover in a lie? I think of these things while he leaves me alone. My imagination is strong and is fueled by the emptiness, the gaps in what I do know about him. Alcoholism, abuse, growing up too fast. A lifetime of struggle and a few recent years of strained, yet relatively successful attempts at reconciliation. His father is dying. And as I fall harder and harder for him, I realize how painful this is. So much unforgiven, and so much to be done. The silence is indicative of the many things churning beneath. An urgency as each day brings so much pain a little closer, a little more palpable. Cancer is, essentially, a fatal chaos, overgrowth of what was once so carefully held in check. And as the very cells in his father's bones grow ever more deadly in their uncontrolled mutations, control in other parts of life become all the more important. He comes back to me. I can hear his distinctive footsteps and know its him even before he is visible. I look up and his eyes catch mine. He smiles and does his "funny" face, wide eyes, silly awkward smile, the one he always makes when I look him in the eyes. It's a little mask he wears when I'm being more direct than usual. I smile back. He settles back into the chair, and as he picks up where he left off in the sports pages, he absentmindedly puts his hand on my knee. His hands are scarred and burnt, years of cooking show on the cracked skin. His neat, square fingernails are always clean, though, a quality I happened to notice and admire long ago when we were still only friends and when this was among the tiny scattered constellation of facts I knew about him. I knew he ate grilled cheese sandwiches with astonishing speed. I knew he did a great impression of Grover from Sesame Street. I knew he was a gentleman who gave me his coat when I was cold one night, at a friend's birthday party, at which we chain smoked and told stories. Well, others told stories. I listened, trying to contain the awe I usually show in my face when people my age talk about their escapades. It is not good, in these situations, to be the innocent one. It is much better to be the quiet one. And so I stayed quiet, throwing in witticisms when I can. Being the funny one can be good. Almost as good as being interesting. I didn't know how he felt about me at that point, two years ago. It turns out he didn't care for the boy I was with, the one who introduced us. He wanted me, he had liked me for some time, and in my usual way, I was oblivious to his feelings while becoming ever-more consumed by my interest in him. And we kept circling each other like this... me furtively going to his restaurant to read Camus and spy on him, him watching me as I'd return to the same neighborhood bar as he did every evening, with the boy I was with. That boy cheated. I walked out on that boy and, as the cliche goes, never looked back. Mere months later, I fell into bed with the tall one, after a long night of playing pool and drinking cheap beer. It was a spectacular collision of stifled needs and suppressed curiosity. All the complications that could be presented between a high school dropout and the girl who strove so hard to graduate magna that she forgot to be young. Looking back, I can see that there was a germinal moment there, where a stem cell was planted, something that could have grown into any number of mutations. A fling. A one-night-stand. Friends with benefits. A far-off fiftieth wedding anniversary with our best friends. There was a time when I lived for that moment. I would seek it out, those raw mornings where I'd be dressed in nothing but one of the shirts I'd found on the floor of whichever apartment I'd woken up in, to begin the process. The tricky proposition of forcing our minds to get to know one another the way our bodies had the night before. Waking up to unfamiliar ceilings, and a list of questions. Are you the one I should love? Should I even try? Who did I let take me home last night? I wanted to live forever in that static moment where everything is a question, a possibility, an opportunity. When a foundation began to build itself out of answers, facts, limitations and disappointments I would become despondent and bored. As we all do when we are very young, I struggled with the sad, unromantic process of truly getting to know people. And yet here I am. Sitting across from the first man I couldn't run away from, and not for lack of trying. The first man to meet none of my established expectations yet surpass the ones I never knew I had. The last man on earth I ever expected to be sitting across from in a rainy coffeehouse in Seattle after nearly two years. Visiting his past. So much about the past. The way we wear our past says so much about us. His is heavy, a damp, heavy raincoat that nevertheless makes him stronger for its burden. Mine barely keeps me warm. But there is much we bear together now, and it is beginning to slowly equalize. He asks if I'm ready to go, and in true restaurant style he buses our table and stacks our glasses. I carefully fold the newspaper pages I've drawn little pictures on. I put them in my messenger bag and we walk down the stairs together. As we walk out into the spitting rain, I slip my arm around his and try to match his gait so we walk in rhythm. I ask him where we're going. He says he doesn't know yet. He says it's good just to walk together. |
