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The First Part of Something Secondary

by Keeley Young

Second to the door.

            In front of you, she knows more about everything. More about the sound of birds, telling the difference between one and another. More about how to rise in the morning and not be numbed by a sensation of depression, or a sensation of not willing yourself to rise. More about art, and music, because of the birds, and the colour of each individual expression. Terror is a blackened purple, scorched by lightning strikes and her being ahead of you. Forever and always.

            You don’t know how to learn things like she does. In taking a course at university, something extra on the side, it felt strangely pointless. They were attempting to teach you how to write a simple, structured short story, but you felt the initial opening line was complicated, or otherwise distressed. A little woman in a seventh-storey window shouting down below, ‘hello there! I’m here, can’t you send someone up the shaft to rescue me.’ Sitting with words meant thinking about her. How she reached the door before you did. How that made all the difference.

​

In the flat, unpacking one of her boxes for her, you set the items out in an array around your body. Surrounding your toes and your bent-over back. The box is almost empty now and you hear her laugh, distinctly in the background. She said, leave the boxes, I will do them over the weekend, or her constitution of the weekend, which was two consecutive days, wherever they landed. It had sat there, unopened, for five weeks. None of this stuff you recognised. It could have belonged to someone else, some other girl. This picture frame containing the image of a younger version of her, sitting with a couple friends, maybe at the end of her high school years—it didn’t elicit anything for you. No story, no shared past. Your girl still looked the same. Well, different.

            When she comes home from an ordinary shift, she’s lugging two bags of grocery shopping. And

I had to purchase these paper things, she says, raising the two bags like an underwhelmed heavy lifter. At some point in the evening she’s taking a well-deserved shower and you misinterpret a text from an old friend, and it makes you feel idiotic, again. The room is split in silence.

​

‘I don’t get it, how is seeing my family a nuisance? Seeing yours is just fine, and I don’t let a comment from your father bother me, because I’m not supposed to, right?’

            You’re in the car park of a Chinese restaurant almost screaming at one another. Everything she says makes you want to feel belittled, put down, like you’re always the damn problem in the relationship.

            ‘We always talk about what my father says, and whatever, he’s homophobic as fuck and thinks his baby girl should be marrying some man who works in a hospital curing the blind, but his opinion DOES. NOT. MATTER.’

            ‘You haven’t even addressed it. This disdain for my family.’

            People are looking, even if the car park is entirely empty. You think about the box in the flat with a unique point of view on her story. Those girls. The wafting smell of Chinese cuisine, summarised just like that into vagueities. Forgive the absence of people, the absence of dishes of food in the parking lot.

            ‘Fuck, I don’t hate them, but I can’t just negate the fact that you care so much about my opinion on them, and their opinion of me, and you, us, as a union of two women who just want to love each other. I’m not yelling at you in the car park anymore, c’mon.’

​

Second to the door. She pulls things open, lets you be engulfed inside of it. There’s always something with love, you think, trying to hide an exception to how your family is meant to see you. There won’t be trumpets, you think, burying your face briefly in the knit of your mother’s sweater. She wouldn’t notice. Your father looks weary. If it isn’t an overexhaustion from work, he’s getting drunk on ice-cold beer and is maybe the estimation of the type of person to have an affair. Whether he is or not. You don’t know…your brother is noticeably absent. An empty chair to symbolise him, although it becomes crowded by something else. You don’t know. She’s very obviously pretending to fucking love your parents all of the sudden and of course it is another thing she is fucking good at. Polite laughter. Your father leans forward with a menu flapping in his hand and asks whether the group is ready to order. She doesn’t make any noticeable reaction to that, engrossed in the menu like it was something like Wuthering Heights, which she understood better than you did.

            In the bathroom of the Chinese restaurant, you continue the argument.

            ‘Literally just came in here to pee.’

            She looks at you with hatred, maybe—it’d be fucked to end a relationship here.

            ‘Okay, what? We’re supposed to have this, a dialogue, it’s healthy and normal. You’re going to start stuttering again about how I make you feel like you’re with someone terribly more intelligent than you are, and how it’s demeaning to realise, in waves and in moments, that I hold this obsession with being more fulfilling above you.’

            You can tell by the tilt of her mouth she wants to be louder, more aggressive. It doesn’t even matter to her that you’re in a public place, noise bouncing off the tiles.

            This is where you are supposed to speak, but the dialogue box is empty.

            This expression you wear, it is sickly blue, not at all like sadness, actually. Cutting off circulation, maybe. She feels around for the switch, with her words, fearing someone’s turned you off in the night like you always expect they will. Render you pointless. Being around people is getting endlessly pointless.

            ‘Can you stop belittling me?’ You somehow manage, half-convinced to match her pitch soon, make one of the staff become convinced there’s an all-out domestic in the ladies’ bathroom. It’s just two lesbians contemplating their traumas. ‘You had a fit when I unpacked that box, like it once held some secret to your universe, or a secret life where you talk to your coworkers about how inexcusable your girlfriend is. She’s a dumb little baby, caught in her respect for her parents, caught so desperately trying to do better and failing every time. Sorry, instructor, I’ll do it all again. I made a tiny ditch where it shouldn’t have been.’

            They would hear, but no one would come. The calm, sensible staff of this Chinese restaurant must know better than to get involved—they’re only assisting the stereotype of women clawing at each other. Begging each other.

            ‘I know I just see this one version of you,’ you get out, without any shouting.

            ‘We shouldn’t be doing this,’ she says, turning to look at herself in the mirror.

            The both of you are beautiful, but hurting.

            ‘I’m going to go back out to your parents, pretend I don’t notice how weird your dad is, and then we can leave and, I don’t know, yell at each other while we drive back to the apartment.’

            She doesn’t seem that aggravated, although hiding her pure emotions could be just another impressive thing about her. She always manages to leave the apartment in a better mood than when she returns home.

            Your parents notice things, about you but not each other.

            You push the food around your plate.

            hellothereI’mherecan’tyousendsomeoneuptheshafttorescueme.

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