//galavant no.2 - believers

An Adult's Dream

I.
A girl wakes up and realizes it is snowing. She wakes up and it is snowing and the first thing she sees when she looks out the window is the snow. She looks at the snowflakes, falling, laying itself in thickets over the ground. Sitting up in bed she is watching the way snow keeps coming and the way light seems to be falling across the courtyard. It is winter and the morning after the girl went to bed thinking I cannot bear another morning again. She had slept for hours. She slept thinking only of growing smaller. But what the snow makes her feel when she wakes up is the small inkling that there is something out there other than herself that she could begin to believe in.

II.
8pm, light leaving the sky.

In apartments across the city there are people who wait for the people they love to come home. There are people who want to come home, despite the snow. Somewhere a man trudges out of winter’s reach saying, “my train was delayed, I’m sorry. Thank you for waiting. Thank you for waiting for me.” He wipes the snow off his shoes. He kisses the woman in the hallway, pulls her close for warmth while outside snowfall grows heavier.

From her flat, the girl watches another man as he sits in the street. He clutches flowers in one hand, squinting up at a lit window. It is still snowing. How long has he been there now, she thinks. With one foot, he draws a circle in the snow. He pulls his coat close, and looks up at the window again. The girl thinks, for every person who comes home in spite of the snow is another person who comes home late, a person who doesn’t come home at all.

III.
In this story the girl wakes up again, this time in a bed next to a boy she does not want to be next to.

Sorry he says, You know, about last night.
It's okay she says, it happens. You drank a lot.
I know, but even then. He pauses and rubs his eyes.
Please don't tell anyone about it.
I won't, she says.

She looks at the tattoo on his arm and wonders what he was like when his skin was pale and unadorned. What he was like then. She touches the cursive text, latin.
What doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger. She laughs, realizing he is just like every other boy she has met before. She leads him out of her flat and they take a smoke on the step outside her front door. The snow comes towards them in small pale drifts. She says see you, thinking that this is the last time she will see him. She is wrong.

In class the girl is imagining a way out of the city when someone drops into the seat next to her. That someone says did you get with the boy you left with  last night. He was cute. I would totally do him.

No, she says, I don’t think there was anything to do.

She looks out through the window, already imagining herself being somewhere else. She thinks, anywhere but here.

IV.
Days later the girl is at a party where the music is loud enough to feel like it’s coming from inside her body. The girl finds herself squatting in a bathroom watching another girl pee. She tries to avert her eyes politely, drunkenly. They are at the point in time in a friendship where both girls can feel comfortable despite their various states of undress. The girl’s friend stands up and zips her skirt, then narrows her eyes saying, okay so maybe
it’s a while back now but everyone knows what you did that night I don’t  know why you lied to me about it. I mean. I thought we were friends. The girl's voice falls into her stomach as her stomach begins to flip, and she forgets how to make words come out of an open mouth. Not sure why the other girl is so angry. Not sure why the other girl believes this has anything to do with her to begin with. She feels the beginnings of fear sharpen its edge and it feels like a noose tightening around her throat. The girl pats her coat pocket for her keys. She leaves the bathroom looking for the exit. Outside the boy is sitting on a couch with another girl she doesn’t know he is the exact shape of her fear. She walks home and in her bed she curls up into the smallest version of herself. She falls asleep, dreamless.

V.
"The Rashomon Effect is a term used to describe the effect of the subjectivity of perception on memory, by which observers of a specific event are able to produce substantially different but equally plausible accounts of it."

The girl closes the Wikipedia page and thinks, otherwise known as there are  always two sides to a story. 

She remembers sitting on the curb after the boy left, watching traffic, waiting for something else to happen. Whether this was over; when she would be able to name its end. She remembers wondering what the boy would recall about that night; and later, how that could have been so different from what she remembered.

And yet, when you have heard both sides of a story, how do you know which to believe in, when both seem equally true? She looks at her hands, thinking that the only way she knows is what she feels. And what she feels is so fleeting, flows through and away from her over and over again.

VI.
In the bathroom of a bar, the girl thinks about this again. It is almost April now and it is still snowing and she is cold from both the onset of a fever and the winter night. She is thinking about the way she can speak to someone and leave with an entirely different impression of the conversation from that which the other person holds. It is frightening to think that the way you feel is exactly that: your own feelings, and not a mutual truth. She sits in the corner before remembering that her friends are waiting for her to order drinks outside.

Here in the bathroom, the emotions experienced while being with them and blowing candles off a cake already seemed like a distant memory, something that could only be accessed again in the memory of the memory. Even then, it would be different, a glossing-over, a revision of the original story. The girl stands up and thinks if only I could uproot what I feel, look at them from  a far away distance. As if by beginning to rationalize, she could understand pain, and by understanding it, something else would begin to dissipate.

At each point in time every person is thinking of the world only in terms of how it relates to him or her. What the girl feels places herself at the centre of her story: she can only be aware of what happens as it happens to her; she can only believe in what already exists for her to know.

But as the girl slips into a seat next to her friends, she imagines that somewhere else another girl is slipping into a seat next to her own friends; elsewhere nameless girls slip and sleep into their own stories. In the haze of the bar, the faces and bodies of her friends begin to disassociate, seeming more like strange actors of a silent film.

The girl walks outside to take a smoke alone, and then she is on the tube, and then she is lying on her bed watching snow fall, falling asleep, thinking that the only belief she wants as an anchor for her world is the one that this world is bigger than she believes it to be.