Thursday: Zara’s Ink Blot: The Postcard

By Zara D. Garcia-Alvarez

I had left his apartment before he returned with breakfast. He had kissed my eyelids while I pretended to sleep, nervous of the delicacy that pervaded everything. We discovered our unnamed loneliness in each other’s mouths, our scars mapping out our pasts. The air was damp after the rain; foggy like tenderness. With my chin in my scarf, hands in my pocket, I made way to the subway line while David, with croissants in one hand and a tray of coffee in the other was on the other side of the street. He didn’t ask me where I was going, understanding that he, too, had his own injuries to protect. I could’ve called out to him, but went down the steps into the belly of the city, an apparition in the dark entering an underpass. We injured each other this way: incredibly, without precision.

On good days, he read poetry to me in his blue-striped robe and plaid pyjamas, his hair uncombed, his hands grey as dusk. The poetry wasn’t any good. I couldn’t listen to any of it. I only paid attention to his eyes, how they escaped detachment, how the ink off the page relieved him of an unspoken grudge. My own detachment was put down to the coldness of my nature. He read his work, nibbling at his fingernail, peeking at me every so often – habits that irked me as irritating. He interpreted my silence as a response to his language, that it had become tiresome. He required a reason that I like his poems. In essence, he wanted me to fall in love.

But, we were bound together from the weight of our private fears eventually replaced by the alternative: eating cheap, frozen dinners alone; plugging into online dates; or worse, being set up by our overly concerned mothers with homely people of latent perversions.

So, we ate together instead, at restaurants we’d pass by on Friday nights, risking bad service, loud music, and an inflated food bill because neither of us were compelled to cook nor refute each other’s religious arguments about the sinfulness of eating pork. We poured over menus, naming the trendiest, most expensive choices, if not the most safe or conservative. He enjoyed ordering the “Marinated duck confit with mandarin peel and seared foie gras,” while I frequented the “Butter-poached lobster with English pea and chantarelle risotto.” I suspected it was more than a matter of taste than it was a desire to say these items out loud.

We also spent hours tilting our heads to read the spines of eroding paperbacks at used book stores with names that had nothing to do with reading like Monkey’s Jaw or Helena’s Teacup. We cultivated ourselves through reverential silences at art galleries where the decorum required both seriousness and inquisitive worship.

Even our friends were ones we could agree on, or pretend to, for the sake of the other. They were mostly artists with peculiar opinions, but we dedicated ourselves to the theatrics of the city. They had exotic names, loud fashion, and even louder bravados that they used words like fabulous. 

“Does he love you?,” Emma asked me once before a double date.

“I keep telling you, it isn’t like that. We sleep together, we eat together, we borrow each other’s toothbrush from time to time, that’s it.”

Yes, the etiquette of dating where I washed my hair, shaved my legs, tried on dresses in front of a mirror, and had a girlfriend over to give me cheerful advice was misinterpreted as romance.

Sometimes I sat without reading, doing nothing, in a room whose one window looked straight into a one-way street. The tears came easily caused by the depressant effect of the pills I had to take. David never questioned this, but accepted it as some kind of female hormone running its wild tangent. He often observed his own behaviour for signs of contagion, but there was none.

Instead, he bought me perfume rather than flowers after I insisted they were a wasteful extravagance, too temporary to be taken seriously, and could only be tolerated in the spring. In return, I bought him postcards. We held hands from time to time: when it was easy, when the moon was out, when one of us felt sad, or agreed to go for a walk without talking, touching each other’s bodies as a recollection, a mapping of sorts, a digression of a long conversation we’ve had once before.

We needed assurances like watching the snow fall, like our names being called out in lovemaking. He often looked down at me and told me I was beautiful. During sex he was less self-conscious and overtly sentimental. We had become scavengers of each other’s bodies, salvaging one another’s flaws and absences.

Yet, we had gotten to that point where I was no longer disciplined, shattering breakable objects during interrogations, contemplating my own death by blade, pill, or hanging. I had become on edge, so wounded that I resigned myself to swear at him to announce my recklessness, cutting my fingertips with a knife to keep count of each offence.

It was pictures of ex-girlfriends with big teeth, curly hair. They were real to me as transient ghosts in alleyways. In one photo, one leaned into him with her head on his shoulder, both hands clawing his forearm, gleeful as a cheerleader. I had to work up to them, each photograph, a horrible treasure, which allowed me to compare facial features, bust sizes, potential IQ levels, and skin complexion.

It wasn’t difficult for me to imagine him overwhelmed with nostalgia over a love song or how many times they had had fantastic, pungent sex. So, I preferred to imagine these women 50 pounds heavier with slight moustaches and strong lisps. If these images failed to encourage me, I imagined them dead. Revealing these photographs to me was David’s way to say we were merely survivors of other people and their failings. The satisfaction of memorized names and petty facts were scarcely worth it for evidence.

He always wanted things to happen sooner than they were supposed to, appealing to the unfamiliar. One incision and he had cut himself loose: unallowable, erased, hung up to dry, sent out to the boon docks. His face would’ve been cut out of photographs and albums burned if we had them. Instead, he left me keys, a note on foolscap paper, a white Gardenia in April – humiliation that said nothing. Somewhere there was an apology. I didn’t know who to ask. I didn’t know who to tell.

As I flip over the last postcard I will ever receive from him of a beach in Yucatán, Mexico, headlights of a passing car show through the window, moving first along one wall, then along the next wall, fading away.

Dear Sara,

The heat here is incredible! If it weren’t for your “Spanglish,” I’d be lost. The locals are somewhat weary of me, but eager to please and bugger off with all my money! How are you? How’s work? I heard from Emma and Alex that they’ll soon be taking the plunge… 

His penmanship is skimpy, thin, exhilarated with small talk and exclamation marks. Slowly, I can feel him leave my body in waves, like a helpless gesture.

He had other things to do, other people to love. I did, too….

We had plans.

(c) Zara D. Garcia-Alvarez