Читать книгу What We Lose - Zinzi Clemmons - Страница 29

My first love was Dean, a philosophy student who played guitar with a band from the local art school on the weekends. He was half Spanish, with pouty pink lips and freckles, impossibly. We met at a concert downtown, and at the end of the night he stroked my face and asked me out for coffee the next week. We went, and halfway into my coffee, I felt myself sinking into the vinyl booth. I knew that whatever happened after this point would be irrevocably different. Before long I was spending whole weekends at his apartment downtown, mornings fucking on his dirty red sheets, afternoons sleepily plodding through our reading assignments. He gave me Sartre and Proust and the Velvet Underground and Bobby “Blue” Bland. He taught me how to blow smoke rings from his Marlboro Reds.

Early on I felt I had nothing to offer Dean except my body. He was a full person and I knew that I wasn’t yet, that I was still growing, that he and our relationship were shunting me into being. I made myself available to him all the time, and it wasn’t long before he’d used me all up, grown bored, decided he needed more.

I grew restless. I could barely focus in class, so I spent most of the day catching up on lessons, and then I stayed up through the night completing my assignments. I saw Dean at the library, smoking his Marlboros on the steps. At first he nodded hello to me with a manner that could be mistaken as warm, but the enthusiasm of those acknowledgments waned as the months went by, and eventually he didn’t acknowledge me at all. He just let his eyes flit over me like I was a piece of stone in the library wall or some other student he hadn’t known, like he hadn’t once breathed, I could love you, you know, on my neck.

Then one day there was a girl—a thin girl whom I’d seen studying in the visual arts library. She had papery skin and a severe brown bob that framed cheekbones like snow-capped hills. She wore vintage dresses that I never could have squeezed into and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes. She looked designed to attract men like Dean, and it sunk in when I saw them together on the steps of the library that this was who he should be with, not me. It was never me.

I had no reference point for heartbreak. My insides felt emptied out, and there was no need for food, no need for sleep. At first I couldn’t work—couldn’t even focus enough to read a chapter without dissolving into tears. Later, work was all I could do to keep the swirling thoughts from coming in, the images of her in my spot on his bed, her eating oatmeal across from him at his kitchen table.