Dead Air
The air outside was as stale as the air in the train. I stepped off slowly and screwed my face up against the sunlight. A pair of older strangers stared at me with the particular blank hostility that people reserve for someone who’s arrived from the wrong dimension. Their stupid, ugly little dachshund barked at me. I barked back. At least as ugly.
More than two months since I’d been at this godforsaken station—out in the middle of nowhere, all flat fields and sky. Since I’d decided to cut contact with my best friend. The stupid cunt I’d fallen for. The longer I went without hearing from her, the better I felt. But slowly, the missing had started coming back.
Ana hadn’t changed much. Blonde hair a little shorter, but she hadn’t lost weight—good. I’d heard she had. She walked her bike alongside me through the heat. We fell back into talking like we’d been lying half-naked in bed just yesterday.
I collect photos of women I have some kind of history with. Relationships, one-night stands, the compulsive and the naive and everything in between. They come from different parts of my life, but hanging together they feel like old acquaintances who’ve moved into my bedroom—people who understand the weight and electricity of a moment that got too close. Who know how to get my attention. Who know me as I actually am. I love those faces.
Looking at Ana’s photos—I’d avoided it for days, even though they hung right in front of me. They mocked me. But I wouldn’t take them down. Not out of cowardice, not laziness, not because I wanted to keep anything. It was because the pictures in my head were the real problem. The slow depressive music bleeding through every dark thought. The way she died in my dreams. Other hands on her. My ex having to come collect me because I had tears in my eyes over something Ana had said—that I was a bad person, apparently. But my mind was learning. It started inserting TV static whenever one of those thoughts approached, the way a soap opera cuts to noise at the crucial moment, the scene replaced by hiss. On a rainy afternoon I finally took the photos off the wall. Then Rock im Park happened and Ana became more of a background pressure than a real person.
She was still mostly that when we bought multivitamin juice at Lidl. When we watched 40 Days and 40 Nights in bed without background music. When we sat in the heat on a bench watching a stream catch the light. Even when she told me she’d slept with another guy—my blood didn’t boil, nothing ran off the rails, my pants stayed where they were. Ana was no longer the Ana I’d been so wrecked over. She was mostly what she’d been the summer before, when we’d baked ourselves at the gravel pit lake: a good friend. My good friend.
Her photos still aren’t back on the wall. Out of foresight. Just in case, at the wrong moment, someone forgets to press the static.