Sapphic Voices General Fiction

The Syntax Of Things

Part One

Warning: This Story contains graphic language and sexual situations.

I met Sally in Berlin. Curvy and loud, she laughed and said what she wanted when she wanted, but carried herself with an air of sincerity. One night we talked until 2 am in her flat while everyone else partied in cooler places around the city, and when we both looked at the time and realized how late it had gotten, she said in her droll voice, “Wow, you’re good company.” As I walked towards the bus stop alone, I thought about what the possibilities could be if only I wasn’t dating Jennifer. Jennifer, who had gotten home from whatever party she had gone to that I had been loathe to join hours ago, who called me the next day and asked accusingly, “Where were you?”

Jennifer and I were a marriage of convenience, fuck buddies who could actually carry a conversation and generally enjoyed each other’s company, and that somehow transformed into a strange monogamous co-dependence where we fought to control each other and then made up on her dingy mattress—or mine—after which Jennifer would lie in bed filling her overflowing ash tray with more cigarettes and then turn to kiss me with the ashy taste still in her mouth. Berlin was a time warp, a pause from reality, and it never occurred to me to be embarrassed that our respective renters could hear us scream as we fucked or that our friends were sick of us being all over each other in public, making out whenever and wherever we felt like it, clinging to each other in the middle of the Love Parade like we were each other’s oxygen. Jennifer and I thought we were forever, that all of these problems and differences of personality that defined our relationship would simply disappear, leaving us with great sex, good conversation, and a suffocatingly romantic tale of how we began dating during a trip to Poland that we would relate to our friends over brunch in the years to come, affectionately finishing each other’s sentences as our friends rolled their eyes.

I remember standing on the side of Oranienburger Strasse and lowering my camera distractedly as I watched her at an anti-Bush march, the wind blowing her hair, amazed that someone as poetic and mysterious as Jennifer could ever love me. I even tried to put that amazement into words, clumsily inscribing a poem into a book that, for me, encapsulated our entire experience in Berlin. I gave it to her as a departing gift, for she was leaving before me, and when she opened it, she patted my hand and kissed my cheek. I felt foolish then, for she was the writer and I was the scientist, and I could tell that my efforts were the likes of a child’s. I saw her off at Berlin-Tegel and then I spent a week wandering Berlin alone, visiting all of the nerdy monuments and museums that Jennifer had refused to see with me. When I left, the customs official looked at my American passport, and as he stamped it, asked, “Has no one thrown stones at you yet?” I replied that I was still waiting for them to, and secretly mourned leaving Berlin’s crass humor even as I left for the departure gate pretending to be insulted by the question.

And then Berlin was over. I went back to Seattle and Jennifer went back to Ohio. Sally went to Maine, and everyone else in our program scattered, the pieces of Berlin left abandoned like all the dog shit in Prenzlberg, ignored and insignificant until you stepped in it. Jennifer and I tried to keep it up for a while through sickeningly sweet phone calls and promises to visit. She tried to get me to apply to grad school in the Midwest, while I resisted as best as I was able, all the while falling in love with Morgan, knowing that Jennifer and I were over. Shortly after we broke up, Jennifer met some Scandinavian chick whose name sounded like a four-letter word and got married after a one-night stand, moving to Sweden after she graduated. Berlin had just been some chapter from a shitty romance novel, except that I also remembered the dirty parts, even as I tried to remember Berlin like my East German neighbor dreamt of communism.

And Sally? Sally, who was a lesbian like us, who I would have dated in a heartbeat if it weren’t for her obsession with excessive piercings in sensitive places and the fact that she lived on the other side of the country, well, she turned straight. Well I guess not straight, but straight enough to start dating a guy, and not just any guy, John, her high school sweetheart - of sorts. Sally was his unrequited love, and somehow he caught her.

I couldn’t believe it at first, thinking that it was a waste of a great girl, but she was in love, which is more than I could say for what Jennifer and I had had. It was like a scene out of Chasing Amy or something when she told me her lesbian friends in Maine had stopped talking to her. As much of a waste as it might have been, she was happy and I couldn’t begrudge her that. “So, what are you?” I asked over the phone one day, and I could almost hear her shrugging as she replied, “I’m Sally.”

At least that was better than Sarah, who had magically discovered her sexuality in Berlin and then proceeded to split up our program co-ordinator Kristine and her partner, who had been living together for years. I liked Kristine, who was Norwegian and spoke German with enviable perfection. Her partner, who was ten years older than her, had long silver hair that I thought was beautiful. Jennifer and I had seen them at an Indigo Girls concert in Berlin one night, and I had been mesmerized by the beauty of them together. I resented Sarah for breaking up Kristine and her partner, and I conveniently ignored the fact that they had been having problems, anyway. Kristine moved to Boston after the program was over to live with Sarah, and the two of them are still together. Sarah’s a doctor now and Kristine evidently lost a lot of weight and looks like a model. I thought she was hot before, and I don’t want to think about her with her hipbones jutting out too far and the perfect smile that she had shrunken to painful gauntness. Sally says they’re happy together, and I hope that’s true, for Kristine’s sake, but I can’t help feeling like Sarah, who’s ten years younger than Kristine, might in turn eventually find someone who’s ten years younger once Kristine’s hair turns silver, leaving her in the dust and waltzing off to be with someone with tighter skin and younger eyes.

But I had Morgan, who I thought was “the one,” if there is such a thing. She turned me inside out and I was drowning in her even before Jennifer and I called it off awkwardly over the phone. She had long, straight brown hair, and when I skipped lab to go with her to chop it all off, I knew I was a goner. I couldn’t stop staring at her in the mirror as they did it, and the stylist saw me watching and smirked, saying to Morgan, “Your friend there thinks you’re crazy.” I certainly thought she was something, but crazy wasn’t it.

Morgan was also in a long distance relationship, and she broke it off two weeks before I called it quits with Jennifer. When she messaged me online to tell me, I jumped at the chance to console her, telling myself I was concerned about Morgan’s well-being, not that I just couldn’t stand not being around her. If Jennifer and I made good conversation, Morgan and my conversations were orgasmic, and we talked for hours as we both slowly slid out of the comfort of long distance and into each other’s arms not twenty-four hours after my painful telephone conversation with Jennifer. Her perverted neighbor first delighted in but quickly grew tired of the thin walls of Morgan’s apartment complex.

Then, things changed. Morgan got depressed and dropped all of her classes, and I tried to juggle my full load with lab research with taking care of her, although I didn’t call it that to her face, of course. I knew my professors were disappointed in me, but I couldn’t help choosing her over them. This was love, damnit. I should have known that I loved her a hell of a lot more than she did me, but I was blinded. Or something. She whispered terms of endearment to me only half as often as I did to her, and if that wasn’t enough, when she called out her ex’s name during sex and then tried to clumsily play it off as though she hadn’t, I should have at least known then. I had tried to ignore it and continue as though I hadn’t heard, but she might as well have been rubbing my toes for all the good it did me. She finally removed her hand and said, “Maybe we should stop.”

I watched her passive-aggressive tendencies grow as she became more depressed, and as she began to need me more and more, I found that the reverse was also true. I desperately needed to be needed by her, and I was insanely jealous of her friends, who seemed to take precedence at almost any time of the day or night. We stopped having sex after her libido died, and I began to find ways to release my own stress rather than waiting for her to develop any sort of desire. Still, when she finally broke down and checked herself into a hospital, I visited her daily, still as in love as ever, and after I graduated and moved to Korea on a scholarship to conduct lab research, I resolved that this time it would work, that I’d come back and marry her and we’d live happily ever after.

From the very start, Morgan had made my palms sweaty and my heart beat loud and fast—so loud and fast, in fact, that I never noticed that my slow but steady descent into heady, dizzying adoration was not reciprocated. And so it came as a sobering shock when I discovered that not only had she not been interested in continuing our relationship through an inevitable (yet, I insisted, temporary) rough spot, she had quickly become involved in a mutually palm-sweaty-ing, mutually heart-thumpingly reciprocal relationship of love, of happily-ever-after. Her new situation even warranted sickening quotes from e.e. cummings poetry on her MySpace profile—sickening only insofar that I wanted her to quote cummings when she wrote of me, not about some dyke who had stolen her heart away—in addition to the usage of the term “partner,” that dreaded word meaning “serious,” a word meaning “we’d be married if only the US government would stop being bigoted assholes and allow it,” meaning “we’re raising a puppy together like you and I always talked about,” but more than anything, a word meaning “I love her in a way and at a depth that I could never and would never love you, and I scoff at the fact that you ever thought we could experience one another at such a level.” And me? Well, I showed her. I kept the shirt I had bought her at the land mine museum in Cambodia and gave it to my sister instead.

And with that, I began a new descent, this time into self-destructive madness. Everything Morgan had touched turned to shit, and I began to hate things on the basis of her relationship to them. For a time, I couldn’t even look at the Seattle skyline or watch the sun set over Puget Sound without my stomach clenching up with memories of her. Even years later, when my grandmother asked, rightfully oblivious, how that girl who came to visit (wasn’t her name Morgan?) was doing these days, my gut tightened noticeably as I replied, without breathing, that I imagined she was doing just fine. Nightmares woke me on my first few nights back in Seattle, and I would settle uneasily back onto my pillow, willing myself to go back to sleep as my heart beat quickly, panic swirling around me. In spite of everything, however, I couldn’t help it when the urge came to write her of my experiences as I traveled through China—after all, China was her true first love. I wrote her a postcard from my dingy hotel room in Shanghai, sat staring at it, and then stuffed it in my suitcase, finding it again months later. Regardless of how hard I tried to block her from my mind, unable to admit to anyone how much I had loved her or how much she had hurt me, like a virus, it seemed that she would remain in my system forever.

If you have enjoyed rds733's "The Syntax Of Things (Part One)", then please be certain to e-mail her at  rds733[at]gmail.com  and thank her for posting this Story.

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