I SO WANTED TO MEAN SOMETHING TO HER
The blank page paralyzes me.
I sat in my kitchen sipping a Keurig brewed cup of watery coffee wearing nothing but the oversized shirt I had slept in. It was a Tuesday morning in August. LA summertime began as a sultry affair in which I wore flowing skirts and found comfort within the warm, black nights and the strange, inevitable seduction that the City of Angels seems to impose in its inhabitants. Over time this had passed as the freeways and open deserted space melted into one canvas of nothingness, leaving me in an agitated state of solitude.
I stretched my arms up above my head, acknowledging my sleepy state and the heat on my body due to the lack of air conditioning within my apartment. That morning I had left Ben –a boy I had met at a coffee shop in North Hollywood about two weeks prior- sleeping in my bed. The night before I had shoved maybe three glasses of wine down his throat to try and make him stop referring to me as his girlfriend.
“Esther, my Esther.” He said to me as he saw me crack open my orange pill bottle to take my mood stabilizer before my bed. I hated the gesture, as though he assumed I had to seek comfort for my bi-polarity.
And still I looked at the blank page. I stared at it mounted on my 1960’s typewriter until it blurred. I squeezed my eyes shut and reopened them, colors danced momentarily against the painful whiteness of the paper before they faded and I was alone with the emptiness.
Emptiness. Emptiness.
It seemed to be an ongoing theme in my current situation. Emptiness. The emptiness of my surroundings in the open California landscapes. The empty void within my body and the fact that I used men and sex in attempt to fill that void of emptiness because at least in a way I am not alone in the open blank page of my situation.
I heard the sound of a door creak open, my roommate Scarlett emerged from her room, her red hair tangled around her face and her make up from the night before clouding under her eyes.
“Where’s weird boy?” Was the first thing she said to me.
“If you mean Ben, he’s sleeping.” Was my response.
She walked into the kitchen wearing only a peach colored thong and a Rolling Stones T-Shirt that she had cut to show off her flat stomach and the outline of her ribs. I don’t think Scarlett has ever listened to The Stones.
“When are you going to get tired of sucking on his crooked little dick?” She smirked as she put a Marlboro Gold between her teeth and hiked herself onto the kitchen counter.
“This place is fucking disgusting by the way.” She motioned around to our grimy kitchen. I wasn’t going to comment back that most of the mess was from her lifestyle of bottles of Skinny Girl rose, cigarette packets and Thai food orders.
I began to type.
She sits on the grimy kitchen counter, skinny legs swinging. I wear thick rimmed glasses and look for inspiration in cups of black coffee.
I so wanted to mean something to her.
Scarlett and I went through college together. We began freshman year as roommates in dorms, which was the year that she yanked me out of my trembling shell and dragged me to punk shows and parties. She taught me how to properly apply eyeliner and give the perfect blowjob. She was the big sister I never had, the Barbie doll I had always wanted, with her skinny limbs and smooth perfect skin, the red hair that glowed in the sunlight, huge green eyes. She was beautiful. And she wanted me as a friend.
It was our junior year that things became complicated. We had moved into our first apartment together and both enjoyed the new sense of liberty that it provided us with. I decorated my room with Sylvia Plath quotes cut out onto lined paper; Scarlett used her fake ID to keep the apartment stocked with liquor for any abrupt occasion. We dressed up in black leather and lace and hung out in Downtown LA with older men, smoking menthols and truly believing we were grown up and that this was the life we could lead together forever.
Three months into our new lifestyle Scarlett relapsed on coke and had to be admitted into rehab for the first time since she was 15. This was also when she had begun partying every night, waking up in abstract parts of LA leaving me staying up late panicking about my GPA. I had always blamed myself for her downfall, as though had I been with her through those dark nights I could’ve stopped her from being with the wrong people and falling into the seduction of youth.
But, of course, I was a victim to that too.
She brought that to me, she taught me to seek pleasure within my youth and my body beyond the scars that inhibit it. And I wanted that, at the turning point in my life as I entered my twenties all I wanted was to be filled with passion and excitement to exist within my body and my surroundings.
I promised her it would all be okay.
When she returned from medical leave I stayed up nights with her pouring her glasses of water and keeping her mind occupied. It was when she turned to sex for comfort that I could no longer be of use to her. She became uninterested in me and barely spent the night at our apartment. I started wearing long skirts and glasses and twisting my hair up into a high bun (she laughed the first time she saw me in this get up, told me that no man would ever want to fuck me unless he had a fetish for 21-year-old librarians) I started hanging out alone in coffee shops, carrying a black journal wherever I went, noting down the way the light bends in a certain way through a window or the lack of interaction between couples who tap on their phones together at dinner. It was when my first short story was published in local LA magazine that I told my parents that I wanted to be a writer and asked for money towards my own working typewriter.
And there I sat, staring at the page in front of me with Scarlett’s silhouette ahead of me in the hazy morning. I felt like an artist painting a muse without a clue where to begin, how to mount that first paintbrush stroke. She wasn’t poetry she was something darker. How could I possibly write out the most beautiful thing in the world as it began to destroy itself?
She stubbed out her cigarette in the sink as my eyes welled with tears. I don’t think she noticed. I stared and stared at the page, my eyes scanning every crease, wrinkle and fold within the paper and my mind returned to the thought of emptiness; I could never fill the emptiness within Scarlett because I was not even enough to fill the emptiness within myself.
I so wanted to mean something to her.
But I would never be able to give her what she needed.
Because what she needed was the ability to accept the love that she deserved.
