Ink & Secrets

CHAPTER TWO:

"He was there again last Thursday," Nora said, before I took my coat off.

I paused outside her door. "You went back?"

"I was in the hood."

"Nora!."

"I asked the bartender." She is utterly unapologetic. "He's a regular. Thursdays, sometimes Fridays. Same end of the bar.

I took off my coat. I went to her kitchen. I poured myself the coffee she made. She knew I was coming because it's Tuesday.

"I'm not going back," I said.

"He was a stranger I had a nice conversation with." I said it slowly. "That's all it was."

"You said it was the first time in three years your brain was really working." She folded her arms. "You don't get that kind of normal bar talk, Elena. "

"It was one night."

"Elena, you’ve thought about it every day since."

She's not asking. She doesn't need to. She already knew.

"I don't even know his name," I said.

"So find out." She said it like it's obvious. Like wanting something and going after it is still that simple for me. Like the last four years didn't install something in my chest that makes hope feel structurally unsound.

I drank my coffee.

"I'm not saying go back to marry him. I'm saying go back to see whether what you've been through that night was real or a rejection mail was just a matter of mind."

"And if it was real?"

A pause. "Then at least you'd know."

I think about the bar. The city below. A voice saying: the parts that break are usually the parts that were real.

"I'll think about it," I said.

Nora recognized this as a soft refusal and accepted it with the grace of someone who has been managing me for six years.

She pivoted to the pastries she'd bought, to the work thing she had yesterday, to a friend of hers who just got engaged and cannot stop talking about venues.

I let the subject go.

I spent the walk home thinking about nothing else.

The apartment after my parents' deaths was the part nobody prepared me for.

My mother's cardigan on the back of the kitchen chair. Not dramatically placed. Just folded over the back the way she always left it, casual, ordinary, permanent. Her handwriting on the shopping list pad on the fridge: milk, good bread, the fancy crackers Elena likes

An entry that assumed a future where she would be in the shop, choosing crackers for me.

My father had two pairs of reading glasses.

The couch ones he took off when he was thinking. The breast pocket ones he kept so long they bent to the curve of the fabric. Whenever I move the couch ones as a child he always said: "I know it was you."

He never got mad. He just found them and put them back.

He was the first person who read me. I was eleven.

I slipped a two page story under his door in the middle of the night because I could not look at his face while he read me.

In the morning he found me at breakfast and put the pages on the table and said: "This sentence here." He tapped the second paragraph.

"This one is going somewhere. The rest of it is trying to catch up."

I have been chasing that sentence ever since.

His glasses are in a shoebox in my closet now. I've moved apartments twice. The shoebox came both times.

Three years after the collapse, I am twenty-five and the manuscript is in a drawer and the shoebox is on a shelf and I have made myself into someone who functions.

I work. I pay rent. I see Nora on Tuesdays. I have routines that hold the shape of a day when everything underneath the shape wants to go flat.

Writing simply ceased when they passed. Not as a finish line, not as a choice. As if a tongue I'd used all my life was lost upon waking up one day. Every idea I ever had was voiced in a place where my father happened to be the one to tell me which sentences were living.

That world was gone.

The sentences had nowhere to go.

And last Thursday, in a bar I can't afford, a stranger told me the parts that break are usually the parts that were real.

I have been writing about it since.

I still don't know his name.

I think about going back.

I think about going back more than I'm willing to admit to Nora, and more than I'm willing to put in my journal, and in the gap between those two measures of what I'll acknowledge is the actual truth.

I want to go back because for the first time in four years, something felt real enough to break.

And the wanting scares me. Because wanting means hoping. And hoping means risk. And risk means I would be handing something fragile to a world that has already proved it can drop things.

But I sit at my kitchen table at midnight with the manuscript open and one sentence in progress and I think: he said the parts that break are the parts that were real.

And maybe he was talking about me.

Or maybe he was talking about himself.

And maybe, in a bar on a Thursday, with the city below and the wine mediocre and both of us carrying things we hadn't named, those were the same thing.