Gravity Works

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“So you’ve met before?”

A little drop of sweat forms at the midpoint of my forehead and runs down the bridge of my nose. 

We’ve met before.

Her name is Katerina, but everyone calls her Kate. I haven’t seen in her four years since she almost killed me. 

*

There are certain things I might still remember about her if you were to ask me years from now. Like how she never looked tired. Where the places under most people’s eyes became violet with the deprivation of sleep, hers stayed vibrant flesh like a vampire’s might. I might remember the way she could not resist pushing the pins in the pincushions all the way through and popping off the tops, so no one could pinch them up again. 

But mostly I’ll remember her eyes. How they looked like an outdoor swimming pool – sterile and chlorinated. As if every time she slept, she had a tiny dream about jumping from the high dive, and woke just before she hit the water. The blue hisses in her eyes with the frozen, far away sound of a light extinguishing into some cold darkness. It’s sinful against Nature; it’s synthetic color.

Her life was both dangerous and pointless when I met her, in that she refused to run the kind of risks that might matter to someone. She was always coy in a backwards unabashed kind of way.

“Please bury me in daylight,” she said to me once, leaning over the Taylor Road bridge and gazing into the waves, “There’s nothing to keep you company in the dark.”

I’ve known her since I was fifteen. She was in my study hall. She used to carve her name into the wooden desks at the back of the classroom with a tiny, metal scissors that she wore around her neck on a silver chain. 

When we were sixteen she convinced me to ditch fourth period and we drove to the Grave. 

It was on an old piece of land outside of town on one of the back highways, hidden at the end of a cul-de-sac overgrown with switch grass and brown eyed susans. You had to move all the brush out of the way to read the name: “Fredericks” and the dates: 1841 - 1865. 

She parked halfway in the ditch and stepped out of the car, an assuming tan Chevy Corsica her parents had gotten cheaply at a police auction. There were cigarette burns all over the seats and none of the windows rolled down, except for the left one in the back which wouldn’t roll up. Kate insisted that it came so cheaply because a dead body had been found in the trunk. She wouldn’t keep anything in the trunk “out of respect for the dead”, so her backseat was almost always filled with an impenetrable pile of random stuff, which was fine because she rarely offered rides to anyone but me and most wouldn’t accept an offer anyway. She always drove like she had just committed a crime. 

“Fredericks”, she said aloud, looking at the grave, although the name was half covered and caked with dirt, and then “Oh!” suddenly as if she were forgetting something. She hopped back through the grass to the car and stuck her top half through the back left window, rummaging around in her pile of crap. 

She was wearing flat, black shoes with little metal studs she had glued on herself and a a small, grey dress and that I could almost see up as she bent further into the car. There was a sloppy tattoo of the letter “K” behind her left knee that she had given herself when she was 15. I always wanted to touch her legs, smooth and pale, and would lay in bed at night thinking about grazing my fingers behind her knees over the “K”. 

“Lighter,” she said, emerging from the car with the a white Bic in her fingers and smiling because she knew I had been staring at her. 

She pulled a joint out the little pocket at the front of her dress and lit it with a quick flick, inhaling deeply. She exhaled the cloud of smoke like a dragon, head tilted skyward, waving from left to right. 

She slid down next to me behind Frederick’s grave and passed the joint to me. 

“What about respect for the dead?” I asked, nodding back to her car. 

“If Fredericks were here, I’d have passed it to him.” 

I nodded and inhaled. 

“I’m glad you came here with me.” She leaned over, our shoulders touching, and kissed me hard and long, and when she pulled away she exhaled the smoke like a dragon into the air. 

*

“So you’ve met before?” The words are repeated, resonating in my mind.

“No,” says Kate, her voice like bells. She offers her hand to me, dangling with all colors of string bracelets. “I’m Katerina.” 

Our eyes meet and I see the swimming pool for a split second, and then what feels like muddy water. A shiver goes up my fingers and she bites her lip. I can see it in her now, a little death. She has been colonized indefinitely by the most insubstantial thoughts, by something leaking and broken and completely generic.

She is
Reconstructing headlines
From trashy magazines
Nothing better to think on
She is

Thinking about
The substratum of hearts
She wishes she could be a part of too

When she sits at a three-way traffic light and takes her emotional pulse she is sad to realize she is dead dead dead.

She is
On the margin of the world
Doesn’t even remember
All the things
She told
All the people
To calm them
Because inside she’s screaming
Over them

And if she doesn’t die soon this will be the feeling she anchors herself in. It was as if she had secretly been engaged in a dress rehearsal for precisely this abandonment and divestiture all her life. The perpetual disappointment that tugs at her heart makes her wonder if it’s possible to be defined by refusal. 

And this is the geography of a life. Everywhere she has been, every boy she has kissed, even me, lives under the ground she constantly paces over. It makes her think it’s best to create methods of walking with your eyes shut and sleeping without giving into the details of your own deterioration.

She has the capacity to absorb these fragments, but she won’t. She wants an intimacy with the world that doesn’t involve a vast underground closet of failures and skeletons, but she can’t.

Here she is in a life that dissolves into impressions she does of herself and secret avenues of air in her veins where there should be blood. 

All she’s ever wanted was for the heavy pulse in her heart to be replaced by the lightness of someone else’s love. Someone who will reach inside her chest and know the terrain without intentions. Someone to chart all the avenues of her disgrace and make a home safely inside. Someone to dispel the enormous subterraneous architecture of all the past loves and lies she keeps with her.

This is the secret structure of the world; she can feel it in her spine. Everyone treading and pacing over their pain and screaming out newspaper headlines over the whispering. Everyone singing lies under their breaths about who they loved and why. Everyone drowning in their own ambivalence. She sleeps inside a machine of her own design. 

*

I remember the night she almost burned down my house. 

We were laying in bed together at almost half past noon with the blinds closed, trying to trick ourselves into ignoring the sunlight pushing through. She was laying on her stomach and peeking between the blinds, thumb and forefinger prying the bottom two apart, ashing her cigarette into a little ceramic dish with an elephant painted in the center that I had made in art class when I was 5-years-old. 

I grazed my hand down her thigh and across the back of her knee, circling my index finger around her tattooed “K”, faded and unrecognizable. 

TBC….

[© 2010 Sophia Nelson]