by Stephanie Parent
You didn’t look like your profile picture. You didn’t sound like your texts. Online you seemed sophisticated, experienced, telling me about your lingerie photo shoots, the erotic articles you were writing for online magazines. I thought maybe you were full of shit, but I was full of shit too. I wasn’t the girl excited about life and books and movies and long walks and opportunities, the one I pretended to be on the web. I was the girl with worries racing like bumblebees through my mind. I was the girl who forgot how to breathe, sometimes, I was the girl who thought maybe, maybe, if I remembered what it felt like to be held—
You couldn’t take me back to your apartment. That was the first sign you weren’t what you claimed to be. It came out gradually, over the course of the hour and a half we spent together: roommates turned into a family you were renting a room from, a family with kids, one of the conditions was no guests. I understood. But I also understood you were a boy, fumbling your way along in a city where success was hard to find. I couldn’t fault you. I was doing the same, sleepwalking through my thirties, some secret apnea keeping me struggling, slipping, sometimes paralyzed. My dog my only child, her affection so possessive I would never invite men to my place so—
Where would we go? Why didn’t I just walk away, write off another wasted night? I had constructed a moment in my mind, a different kind of fumble, a tangle, a spark, the thing I’d avoided since my last boyfriend, the thing I thought might bring me back to life. Like a breath of clean air off an ocean or a mountain or anywhere but here. So I suggested a park, in the twilight, a view of city lights from the hill, a bench, like we were teenagers, but when I was a teenager I never did this, I hid behind books, behind worries, maybe if I’d done this then, now I’d be living a different life, but—
We sat on the concrete and I rested my head on your shoulder, and you wrapped your arm around mine, and we looked out at the city, the towers twinkling like stars. A city that was out of reach for the graspers like us. And you weren’t him, you weren’t him as reached inside my dress and held my breast, as your other hand squeezed my ass, and I struggled to breathe. You weren’t the boy I once loved, who held me so softly with his body, and bruised me so badly within my mind. You weren’t the man you said you were, photographer, actor, auteur. You weren’t the way I still imagine living—not sleepwalking, not working and grasping and striving, but living—in that twinkling city before us, where I’d believed I could walk among stars—
Your hand was too heavy, too fleshlike, not starlike, and I told you to take me home. Your embrace was flint, but not fire, a sting, but no sweetness, no slow drip of honey to soothe my aching throat, my grasping mind.
You dropped me off at the bottom of the hill, and I walked, alone, where there was no view, no shining city, just a low gray sky without stars. The warm breeze—too warm for October after dark, the end of the year coming—settled around me like a kindness unseen.
I put one foot in front of the other, and I walked, and I breathed.
Stephanie Parent is a graduate of the Master of Professional Writing program at USC and has worked as an editor, copy editor, and proofreader for both publishing companies and individual clients. Her work has been published in the HuffPost, Entropy, For Women Who Roar, and Goblin Fruit. Follow her online @SCLanggle.
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