About a girl

Hi, ***
Welcome to able2know.

Yes, welcome! I really like how much information and storytelling you've crammed into a very short piece.

Hey stars! :-D

Welcome!

Welcome :-)

thank you all for the welcome. I'll be mostly in this thread, jotting down notes. thanks again.

"I am afraid of loving you sometimes ...", she says, in that childlike wondersome voice. I ask why. "Because sometimes I don't know whether I love you because I need you or that I love you because I love you", she nods, again with the expression of a five-year-old's wisdom, when confirming a newly learned thing to itself. "I think I mostly love you because I love you", she continues, "and that I need you because I love you. That's OK." I nod, confirming slash reassuring her, and we sit on a bit more, she on my lap, while the Indian singer on Media Jukebox 8.0.320 works himself into a trance over Eryka Badu, or so it seems to us, tadida dadarika Baduuu, and we mimic him dancing with our faces, and smile. For now.

Welcome, stars. Your narrative captures the character's voices and personalities very well. As Sozobe said, you fit a lot of information in a few sentences, which is what makes a good short story.

I look forward to more.

She can be furious. Articulately so. She'll be so angry - stomping in on rigid limbs, every move a jerk of hand or head. It's up to me to ask what is up now. Sometimes I do. Whatever is up, it'll always be about me. I don't know why. Or perhaps I do. She works on relationships. It is one thing she considers herself good at. She can talk, discuss, and argue her point - always arriving at new revelations about who she is and what her relationship lacks or needs through her proudly concentric circles of thought. To her boyfriend, she can explain exactly what the problems are she has, where they come from and what can be done about them - what he can do about them. Her boyfriend is the one person she feels able to call on something. I suspect she projects anything that feels wrong inside on her relationship, because traditionally, it is the one thing she can control.

When she does get angry, she scares me. She yells. Her reality is that of whatever fear, apprehension or upset she is feeling right then. There's no tearing away from it. Though she tries. And failing, she'll yell again. Frustration, I know. But it scares me. I don't like fighting. In the least. My instinct is to walk away. I walk away from my own innate urge to argue, to debate, dispute - fight. I shut myself off from it, and walk. Hurt has added to it. Anyone hurts me, I cut them off. Instantly. For the moment, anyway. It's an instinct of self-defense that mixes badly with her cardinal need to exorcise her furies - through me. Deadlock.

If we do it wrong, there is always the chance this will go on like that, for days on end. Day after day of explosions that leave us, exhausted, with the scant consolation of having found out something new - only to fall asleep into restless, fearful dreams. It happened once before. It might happen again, even as we speak. The trick is to keep on living. To keep that grip on day-to-day life. That is my firm belief. We are both very bad at it. All the firmer my belief. Eat. Work. Go outside. Sleep. Sometimes it doesn't work. At all. Obsessive as we are. But we gotta keep on trying. What else can one do, but leave?

Longer post, this time. Please realise I am not a native speaker. If what I write is plain wrong rather than just creative, do let me know.

Sometimes I feel very little. Like, five. I don't actually remember what it was like being five. But I know how she is when she's five. She actually becomes five, sometimes. Or three. So I know what five year olds are like.

When I feel five, I hold my face turned at an angle a bit, always, downwards. My eyes lowered, shy. Or I blink at the world around me, the room around me, like into a bright light. I don't like walking around the room when I feel little, it confuses me. Rather I sit underneath somewhere, or with my head leaned against something, as if sheltering from the rain under an awning or canopy. I can almost hear the tap of the raindrops. I like to listen to these songs from the 40s, those 'Singing Detective' songs. Billie Holiday, "Pennies from Heaven". "Everytime it rains, it rains/pennies from heaven/So when you hear it thunder/don't run under a tree/for there'll be pennies from heaven/for you and me." It comforts me, always. Like it's something velvety to wrap around yourself.

Sometimes when I am alone at the house, and I feel little like that, hiding in a blanket, I even hold one of the cuddly animals we have collected. I know guys aren't supposed to do that. But it's ok, I think. It's just for the moment. The animals are not really mine - they're mostly hers. I bought them for her. Only one I got as a present once, when something very bad had happened, and when later something very bad happened to her, I sent it to her as a gift. It's a monkey - her favourite animal. (There's also a collection of smaller soft toys that girl friends kept on giving me in some phase of my life, but that's another story, altogether. They reside in the windowsill.)

One time, when we'd had a really big fight, and I'd come home alone, I felt really bad, and very little. Instead of standing around despairingly clutching my coat, wondering, unsuccessfully, where I could go to, I decided to make a little home at home, for me-as-little-kid to hide in. A kind of hut. I'm sure I haven't done that since I was five years old. It was kinda cool, if you think about it. I moved the sofa out a bit, so it was at a diagonal angle; then draped the duvet from couch to bookcase, making a tiny triangular covered space. I lit two small candles, and I brought a book there, and drawing paper with pencils, and I sat in there and wrote for a bit, then drew something and then fell asleep, curled up in the other duvet.

I can't draw, at all. Never been good at it. I don't know why I chose to get those pencils, too. Sometimes I think I imitate her ways of being, her mannerisms. Not all - some I will never go near. But she has ways of taking care of herself. Long experience - she found ways to do it. To comfort herself, for example. She makes drawings.

She went into these spells, when things were really bad, when they started getting really bad for her, where it was like she fled into a space of her own, an absence from this world. Perhaps it was her hut. I mean, it was, that's where I got it from. She would sit at the table, in this intense self-contained concentration, and carefully make these beautiful drawings. Sometimes sad drawings, but sometimes just - beautiful ones. Perhaps that's why. Confronted with problems I never had, I subconsciously imitate her solutions. Sometimes they work. Sometimes I'm afraid I imitate her problems too, at some subconscious level. I never used to be five.

She loved colouring books, too, that is, when she became five. They would end up in our shopping basket at the supermarket, surreptitiously, like the chewy candy. Of princes and princesses. Or just grass and flowers and other pretty pictures. One day she called me up at work, asking, in that slightly impatient, out-of-breath childlike voice, if I could bring colourpens. I didnt realise she was five, she can sound childlike, excited, or impatient in that serious way - where you know it's only serious within the strictly confined reality of that moment - at other times too. I said I only had markers, were they OK? Yes. OK. Thank you. Will you be home soon? OK. When I came home, I gave her the markers - I remember that I'd found only three or four colours in the office, so I apologised. She looked a bit surprised. Later she was drawing, in absent-minded, but happy concentration, that wide-eyed, lips pursed concentration of what shall I draw next. Only in the late evening did I tell her how come I brought the pens. She didnt remember having called. We were amused at the boldness of the five-year old.

She doesn't become five anymore, now. But in her day-to-day behavior it's all still there. She switches age-like behaviors like a cameleon switches colours. She'll still meet me at the door, giving me a quick hug before excitedly breaking into stories, hopping up and down on her toes telling me about the boat sightseeing tour they'd gone on. "It was cool!". She still does the colouring books, too, making the nicest, sweetest of pictures from their motifs of fairies and angels and flowers and skies. It's not disconcerting, it's cute. Life goes on, regardless.

Very simple. I like the way you get your point across without "flowering up" your words. It's sort of warm, comfortable, familiar.......nice.

Thanks Terry. I'm glad you like it <smiles>.

Just the other night, we were sitting on the couch, in typical evening ritual. She was asleep, in my lap; I was watching TV. She woke - kinda - twice.

The first time, she spoke softly. "Don't let the fish out", she said - "or their feet will get cold". I started, then grinned, caressing her hair. "Are you dreaming?", I asked. "Maybe I'm asleep", she confirmed, nodding - and was again so, in fact.

The second time, she spoke up clearly, in a distinct Southern accent. "Pork 'n' beans!". She paused. "We got to get some". This time I was caught off guard a bit, my attention focused on a particularly suspenseful moment in the English TV cop's life. But repeated nevertheless, to make sure: Pork and beans? "Yes. Gotta get some." I said OK, of course. Why not - never had pork 'n' beans.

She likes it when I say "OK", especially if I stroke her hair for a moment, too. She says "OK" a lot, herself, as if to confirm every observation she makes, and every reality she's faced with, whether understood or not. "OK" - nod.

Almost the same moment, as if in an afterthought, she stirred again. "I got to get up!", she said, hurried, moving to get up. "Are you sure?", I ask - she pauses, the one beat, then concludes - "No". And lays down immediately again, asleep in a moment.

She still sometimes wakes out of bad dreams, though not half as much as she used to anymore. She told me of how, when she first got together with her previous boyfriend, she would wake up every single night, screaming. He would always calm her, soothe her, until she slept again. Hours and hours she laid in his lap, and he caressed her head, hours and hours on end, to make the bogeyman go.

When she first moved in here, it was something of a ritual occurrence. Evening time, I would be typing, she, in bed.

(She slept so much, back then. Entire evenings, long swathes of daytime, too. In bed, sometimes on the couch. Then again, there were the many joints a day she had come to smoke - weed goes with sleep. Just how many, I will probably never know. She was good in hiding how many. I was not good - yet - in keeping track of exact amounts of money.

I tolerated it at first, then got exasperated. She fiercely argued the case why it was crucially important for her at that time. I accepted the argument, yielding to her proven expertise on the requirements of her self-preservation. We agreed on a quota, which she never kept. I suspected, though never to what extent, and quietly decided to grant a reprieve. Later she would blame me for 'keeping her on weed'.)

Evening time and she slept. But every two or three hours, she'd start moving, mumbling, muttering, things that often included "no". I would get up and sit by her. Caressing her head, her neck.

I never could believe the miracles it worked. It's gotten to have near-instant effect. I touch her, she becomes silent; her limbs relax, the panic sweeps from her face; it's OK. This is how those hand-laying healers must feel, I suspect: the sense of power they must absorb from their work of fraud. Except there was no fraud here - just her dreams or night-time thoughts, my wish to make things right - and the force of some bond of trust making me able to, for the moment. Only the frown would stay sometimes, a determined, apprehensive frown, bootcamping just above her nose.

Sometimes there was no phasing in of mutters at all; she would scream herself awake out of the blue, sitting up straight in one terrified instant. Bad, bad dream. You do get used to it, though I'm sure she never does. I'd come, hold her, she'd tell about her dream, eventually fall asleep again. I would return to my book or screen. This was our life. I am typing, reading, with always one ear tuned to what's out left field.

In a way, it was a peaceful time. Life was quiet - she slept, I worked. Mostly in a depleted kind of harmony. Trouble would come in a familiar way, at regular intervals - the solution straightforward and instantaneous. The experience was intense - back outside, in the real world, you'd feel just how emotionally drained you were - but within its own dimension it was fully coherent and complete. Much like with the becoming five - each move a surprise, within a dimension as intense as it was easily accepted, and easily improvised on. A dimension of hers. Days were different.

Entire experiences slip from my mind. Just disappear, it seems, safely away into other realms, outside the fragile frame of my life. It is with a start that I remember individual bits and pieces, when a shard of evidence scatters itself in my way. Oh god. I remember this. Can it really have been true? Can it really all have happened like that? And I look at the cup in my hand, at the cupboard in the corner, at the note that fell from the windowsill, curled up in dryness, and I know it was really like that. We went through that, too. It is sad, and at the same time I hope, instantly, that one day I will have the chance to open up again this little crate of grief, and find these memories intact, and write the story down. The story of a girl, who was mine. Whom I loved. Who was sad, and will always be sad. The story of a happier, more blissful dream than that of pulling through. She had such dreams, too. Heartbreakingly unexpected snippets of naive little girl dreams, the eyes wide open suddenly while whispering plans and visions, of what she could still become, of what she's going to do in life. But her life is already halfway through, and so is mine. She deserved so much better than what she got - anyone would. May those who stood at the cradle of this story of shattered glass, wearing contorted masks of anger and meanness, rot in graves of their own. She's survived, with tremendous inventions of living, each worth their own biography. The biography of each of the persons she invented, the persons she had living in her place, when she couldn't, for example, who have now all gone, withdrawn into the shadows of her mind. The biography of the child girl they left alone, scared fitless, blinking into a life suddenly bequeathed to her, without a clue, without a guide. The biography of the angry woman, frustrated, impotent, agressive, vengeful - darting here and there to find a way to fight, and finding nothing but hapless improvisation. The biography of the teenage girl who just wanted to love - to be saved one final time by the power of one perfect love affair - and now must feel so betrayed, faced with nothing but a daily grind's muddle. I am complicit, in the fates they all face. I did my best. That is never an excuse.

"When I get home/I'm gonna touch your hair/when I get home .." The song is gentle; it's sweet. But reality may sometimes be less so, though all the more vulnerable, and the touching of hair mostly brings a recalling of memories, triggering random associations, until one loses one's way into them.

One afternoon, recently, I came bicycling home, and as I turned the corner, I passed the house opposite here, the paint of which has long layered off into patchwork, leaving it with a Central European look. We like it; we like it a lot, in its contrast to the clean white slab of the newly renovated owner-occupied apartments next door. We wanted to photograph it, keep it, hold on to it; make sure this bit stays, at least. As I edged my byclicle around and past it, I remembered that random scene from last year, again. She, in panic, acute, heartfelt, sincere panic, about that building, looking at it from our balcony. Scaffolding had been erected, no - it was less: a site hut had been placed to the wall next to it. I was the first to note, and pointed it out to her. She saw it, hesitated, then went blank with fear, probably infected by my own hypersensitivity at the time. We had planned to photograph it, this one piece of view that we developed a common attachment to, a common loyalty - it was something, at least, we both loved - we had planned to photograph it for a long time - but always, film had been missing, money for new film lacking, the camera broken. And now even this was about to be grabbed from underneath us, to be taken away from us, with no recourse to what suddenly felt like it had been one of our very last remaining chances to preserve anything of value, to hold on to something, at least, when all around so many things, great and small, were breaking, sometimes literally, into tiny shards, pieces of a puzzle we would never be able to reassemble.

She gazed, stared, panicked, that moment, as if the carpet was torn from under her very feet, leaving her teetering and helpless. Perhaps I didn't even feel much different, just much less overtly so; yet its the look in her eyes I remember - about to break out in tears-eyes - every time again, at random times; it's a sharply etched image-memory that stubbornly keeps launching itself into my mind's eye view, as a severe reminder, perhaps, of how bad we had it, what depth we are hovering over even now. How very hopeless we felt, how very insecure she must have been.

Just days before, I'd remembered another thought-to-be-lost memory. A memory of another, previous girl, who had different fears, again.

That girl - let's call her N. - would, in the evening, when she was laying with me, feel her heart skip a beat, and no romantic connotations would be involved. Her heart would go so fast, too fast, or skip random beats; and the resulting erratic rhythm would send her into flights of panic, keeping her awake; keeping her asking me if I heard the same. I always checked - at length - and I never felt a thing.

The thing about this memory isn't so much that it was a sad story (which it was), or even that, apparently, my memories of love encompass more memories of women's fears than is reasonable or excusable; it's that I had forgotten it. The memory came back, out of nowhere, and I immediately realised I had blocked it out for years, if not many. Had never thought of it anymore, even though it had been a drastic enough experience at the time. Who knows - perhaps she, too, has forgotten. There is so much grief in this world, too much in each of our lives even, for any one of us to hold in store.

So much in these past few years, too, that I have forgotten. I remember that first year, with the heart-beat-fear girl, after I met her, when she was recovering from a serious accident, grappling with having lost much of her knowledge, memory. She was very depressed then, I remember, but considering how intensely and heartwarmingly joyful and pleasant she'd been in many of the subsequent years, I'd forgotten how depressed exactly. Some times a fragment comes up, however, and I do remember how at one particular time, she was literally in the window, and I had to pull her back.

I'm sure she wouldn't have jumped - but it was a potent enough symbol. Yet I remember nothing of the context - not what had gone before, not what had followed. I can vaguely outline the overall problems of the time - her loneliness, her near-paranoid insecurities about her flatmates, friends - but what had been the issue that evening? I don't remember. Anything. I find that more than disconcerting. It scares the beejesus out of me. What do we live for, if the meaning of what happened, the happenings themselves even, wash away like that, pale out of our memory like colour in the sun?

She found this balloon. We had a thing with balloons - somehow they'd always be all over the place. We had a lot of them in our room one time - I dont recall for what holiday, but I remember the way we kicked them around all the time, for days if not weeks after, playing soccer with the red and white balloons and at one point kicking over a beautiful blue vase we bought. Its still there, with a colourful garland wrapped around it to disguise its sharp, ragged edges on top.

One night, after I'd been following the election campaign in a neighbouring country for too many weeks (sympathising, of course, with the "reds"), and the race was indeed close, I was following the results coming in through the night at my computer. She'd fallen asleep wrapped in a blanket on the couch. She woke up in the middle of the night, and when I rushed to sit by her she, sleepy eyes, only half awake, asked: "did we win?" I answered, I don't know yet. "Because if we win", she whispered, "we need to have balloons ... we need to have red balloons." And with that, she fell asleep again - blissfully -- and Lord, did I search every cupboard in the house, at 5 in the morning, ready to finally go to sleep, to find red balloons, so that, when she'd wake up, she'd smile at the sight!

That's not the story I want to tell this time, though. Although it's only appropriate, then, perhaps, that she found the biggest, red balloon, many months later, on that afternoon's trip out from the house. She came home with it, positively beaming, aglow with as innocent a joy as anyone our age can experience - a guy had given it to her, just some random Arabic guy passing by on the street, pranking around with it but starting to get bored doing so, I guess. It was practically half either of our size, a full meter across at least, the balloon skin thick and sturdy. And it was filled with helium, so it would float right out of your hand as soon as you let it go. And float it did, in our room, or rather, it did the bump and grind against our ceiling as we did upside-down basketball with it, up where it could break no vase.

That week or the next, I was to go on a short work trip, away from the home for three, four days. Those were occasions she dreaded. She feared to be alone, to be left alone. I had accostumed myself to call every night, to bring the cellphone, call and leave a message at some break in the daytime as well (and perhaps I did so as much for myself as for her). But still I suspected that time at home, meanwhile, was one in which the outside world seemed especially scary, and the little world inside, alone. But this time she had her balloon, big and red and right above her. She told me afterwards that it had been her friend, that it had showed her things were OK and kept her company - and when she slept in the bed, behind the bookcase, she had the balloon there with her, floating over her. Perhaps guarding over her, perhaps asleep itself, resting its thick skin on the ceiling.

No fairytale of ours was ever without its grim edge or end, of course. The inevitable happened much later than one could reasonably have assumed: the balloon shrunk. It didnt give out slowly, though - instead, one day, it'd just happened. It had already stopped floating before, had fallen to the ground, but it had still been big, until one morning, I dug it up from underneath some clothes, and it was only half its size, wrinkled and shrunk. That happened to be the morning after we had had a horrible row, one of those wasting fights, that always had the effect of seeming to just consume, at one stroke, all the hope and air that we'd slowly created in our relationship the weeks before. For a girl prone to see the symbolism in everything, the coincidence was a heart-sinking thing, and I must admit, it rattled me too. It was just one more occasion on which she saw all her shiny, wondrous dreams, that she was still, inexplicably, able to dream with all the intact, innocent fervour of a child, deflated - again - as if crashed on the rocks of a reality that just would not give in.

Time has passed since that moment, too, though. Yes, the story with the balloon, it had a sad ending, as so much of our things had. But its end lasted only a day. Whereas it had been on our ceiling for quite a while. It had been there - a piece of magic - one more little pearl of a moment that showed how we both, together, were able to find, experience and share magic, again and again - up against all odds, ever again.

***, your stories are haunting and beautiful and so bittersweet. I can't help thinking of you as a protector, as one who can't help himself from coming to the rescue. I hope that your caring has been returned.