lame indie movie part I (the girl)
- December 22, 2014
- CleanLaundry
- 2 Comments
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a lot of things happened and I’m in an airport terminal trying to shake the rubble from my head and my ears and replace it with alt-j. but oh fuck let’s just journal about it.
finally finished finals and was planning on going comatose for awhile to recover, but there’s always some lame party to be seen at. I mean this one was different, it was for my friend Leila, and there was a facebook invite and everything. things in America are getting a little weird so Leila is deciding to dip and take the next semester off in Ireland. and I like Leila, even if she has a lot of opinions. I made her a playlist... in retrospect think I went a little heavy on the pub songs but c’est la vie. the thing is, Leila was the first person I met here, and since then we’ve split. although our circles still brush up against each other occasionally, I didn’t know a single person at her going away party.
luckily for me, this isn’t usually a problem. often I feel as if my social interactions are all simulations, and the real me goes vacant for awhile while my autopilot takes over my tongue. and I don’t mean to toot my own horn, but my autopilot is very good at what he does. he spins versions of myself people want to see.
I spent most of the time talking to this guy who is one of many ghostwriters for a very famous, very douch-y contemporary novelist. my autopilot wanted to know if ghostwriting felt like selling your soul. shocker, apparently it does. I asked him if he was working on anything of his own, and the expression that flashed across his face was of such deep despondence that I gave him my beer. and decided to..yknow. leave. I was beginning to feel like an asshole and the air was beginning to feel thick with the creased dreams of people I didn’t even know, like some sentient bummer fog.
I turned to find my jacket, and instead found a pair of eyes watching me from the door. they belonged to a girl and my usual reaction when a girl is looking at me is to simultaneously freeze and heat up, especially around the ears. her name was (is) Lex. there were globs of people passing between us, but her gaze was seemingly uninterrupted and honestly, it was one of those kairotic moments that make you dizzy for no reason. I don’t know how to describe the relief I felt, of having someone’s eyes on me – the real me - and not my autopilot, that bastard. I know this because Lex and I went through physical therapy together and those eyes saw me at my most helpless. we never talked in PT, out of some weird unspoken rule of mutual humiliation, but recently, very recently we rewired in an elective class we had together. too recent to be so excited to see her and I was wondering if it was the alcohol frazzling my nerves. but the thing is, I trusted her, her chemistry, her transparency. most especially, I trusted her don’t ask, don’t tell systematic approach to friendship.
anyway, she walked over and I stood with my paws jammed into my pockets and my molars sunk into the inside of my cheek. Lexie is pretty. for sure. but idk, the type of pretty that is unconventional, and not the unconventional that is actually a euphemism for ugly. but there was a real jarring look to her that night, mostly in her eyes. but maybe I just have a real thing for eyes. anyway, she said “howdy” and I said “hi” and then after a beat, “you have no idea how glad I am to see you.” she smiled politely and my autopilot told me to cool it, but I decided to give him the rest of the night off. is it really that bad if someone sees who you are? why is it that humans have a problem with letting someone else see that they are human? I don’t know. I felt like it was a lucky sort of night to be human.
she took over and asked nimble small talk questions and my auto pilot took notes from the backseat. she told me she knew Leila from plenary and that she always admired Lelia’s ability to piss off people for the greater good. I rolled that around my tongue a few times. another thing about Lex is that she’s a bit of a spaz, but a graceful spaz, as in the things she says doesn’t sound exactly right to you at first. but after the words bounce around in your ears for a moment, you realize she’s actually sort of crafty. paradoxically crafty.
finally, (finally!) she asked if I wanted to bail and I practically wagged my tail. we walked the riverbed back to my apartment and talked and talked. it was like a fucking indie movie, except it wasn’t raining or snowing. 20 min later she was in my kitchen eating a frozen burrito and reading me the first page of Slouching Towards Bethlehem. she liked Joan Didion and I thought that was pretty hot. I was fumbling for my ipod and also watching her in my peripherals, wondering what the red herring was. I played Talk is Cheap and she said that Chet Faker’s voice felt like a firm hand between her legs. I was sort of thinking, who says stuff like that? you have to stop saying stuff like that. do you possibly want to fuck? I was also thinking that Joan Didion was the author who made me fall in love with the harsh, unglamourized corners of CA and that her writing made my head spin. Lexie was looking at me again and I still wasn’t entirely sure what she wanted. under her rapid fire surface, I wondered if she was as sickly sentimental as I was, if she felt a mysterious ache on metro busses, if she had an autopilot of her own and if she ever had a hard time fighting it off.
I want to say these were the only things I was wondering. I was trying to ignore the flashing neon on her forehead, the word REBOUND branded onto her earnest, inquisitive cheeks. I squeezed my eyes shut tight, and opened them and the lights were gone. just her face, her flashing eyes. they were green. they were blue. they were gray. and all the colors of sad british singers who don’t make any sense.
I didn’t know what she wanted so I asked if she wanted to smoke. she shook her head, so I asked if she wanted to binge watch Marco Polo. and like that, so easily, she was curled next to me on my couch watching Netflix and I was feeling pretty decent, pretty warm, pretty buzzed. I was buzzing. she was buzzing. but because these things are never perfect, my phone rings. my phone rings before the polos even reach the Silk Road, and my blood turned to ice, where it once warmed like coffee.