The Air Before the Train
My eighteenth birthday. Bar 25. The photographer and I pressed close together, both of us properly wrecked, moving inside the endless thud of the music. When I opened my eyes she was heading toward the bathrooms. Two men from the terrace followed her a moment later—tan, loose-limbed, exactly the kind she always claimed to despise. I felt it before I understood it, and I followed.
I pushed the door open a crack. I saw her face—that particular strained expression I knew from other contexts—and her open jeans, and the hands on her. I let the door fall shut. Back on the dance floor she appeared beside me like nothing had happened, flushed and half-smiling. I looked at her for a long time. "Can we go home," I said. "I’m tired."
When we got there I couldn’t stop crying. "Why do I even put myself through this?" I was already shouting, grabbing things from the nearest surface and throwing them. "I love you, you asshole, but you’re a coward. A freeloader. A hypocrite. You hate this world but you exploit it. You hate these people but you fuck them. You hate these drugs but you do line after fucking line."
I threw the packet too hard. It hit the wall and suddenly the room was full of white. She sat on the bed and stared at me in silence.
"You don’t care about this world. You don’t care about me. You don’t care about love. How does anyone open themselves to a person who doesn’t care about love? Explain that to me." "I’m not going to answer a trap question." The rage in me went somewhere past language.
I went to the kitchen and took the biggest knife I could find quickly. Back in the bedroom I began driving it into the pillows, screaming while I did it, both hands on the handle. She stood against the wall with a cigarette, watching, occasionally smiling between drags. Feathers went everywhere, covering me in a slow white explosion. Then I heard myself say "I have to get out of here," and I dropped the knife. I packed whatever was nearest into my bag, looked at her one last time, and walked out.
Furious, screaming, crying—I half-fell down the stairwell and hit the front door at a run. Outside I headed straight for the nearest U-Bahn station. From somewhere above, a voice called down through the dark. I didn’t turn around. I was done with her. Underground, the quiet released something in me. I could feel a small heartbeat.
When we fought she always wanted to end it on my body—not from desire but as an argument she made through contact. I had stood for that. I had closed my eyes and stood for it, and behind my eyelids the chaos had been vivid and strange. Effort. Memory. Time. How had I arrived at this place? Love and suffering wore the same dark robes, and they had been burying whatever was left of me in the wreckage of everything I’d once believed. She had gotten inside me with a clear night’s worth of beautiful words and the authentic gift of a genuine wreck, and she was destroying all of it—not from cruelty, exactly, but from cowardice and appetite and fear.
Nothing in my adolescence hit as hard as understanding I couldn’t ease the suffering she’d manufactured and moved into like a home. Not with love. Not with anything I had.
I’d been telling myself my whole life: you are something. The balance will come. The life ahead is worth wanting. I went on believing it even when the belief tasted like nothing. When I felt the air from the approaching train move across my face, I opened my eyes, and let myself fall onto the tracks.