BriTtney Uecker
As we’re walking to the bar on the last night we will ever see each other, you gripping the handlebars of your bike next to me, I tell you that you better not throw up. I tell you I can’t watch you puke because it would be too intimate. Too intimate, with a man I’ve seen naked so many times, a man who’s been inside of me, a man who broke apart my marriage and blew up my life, who I can’t possibly watch throw up.
“Why? Why puking?” you ask as you hold back a dangerous burp. I’m thoroughly buzzed, but for you, a man who rarely drinks, I’m afraid of how drunk you may or may not be.
“Because it’s you at your most vulnerable,” I say, “and I don’t think I can handle you vulnerable.”
You laugh at this, but it’s true.
I tell you this quote I heard on a podcast recently — “Vulnerability is the currency we pay for intimacy” — and I don’t think you get it, but truer words were never spoken. You’ve certainly seen me at my lowest, my most shameful, most reckless, most vulnerable, but I don’t want that to be you.
We continue down the hill towards downtown and pass the Broadway Apartments. The place has always intrigued me, this old abandoned tenement building I walk by nearly every day. It’s one of the tallest buildings in town at four stories high, gutted and boarded up and leaning heavily on a shoddy foundation.
“I’ve always wanted to explore this place,” I say, looking up at the crumbling brick, the splatter of black mold.
“Me too.”
“Do you think we could get in?”
You stop walking, your bike still next to you, and look at me. “Are you serious?”
I’m inoculated with the confidence of three beers and the looming finality of our friendship driving the need to do something notable, something momentous. “Yeah, let’s fucking do it,” I say.
I try the main door, which doesn’t budge. I leave you to lean you bike against the wall while I walk around to the back of the building and over a downed fence. There are a few more doors on this side, all locked or boarded up, but when you catch up, you quickly find a body-sized hole that dips beneath the building near the foundation. You slide inside.
“Holy shit, come check this out!” you yell through the darkness. You hold my hand to steady me as I follow you down, an action you surely read into more than I do.
You turn the flashlight on your cell phone onto the expanse of the room. In the center, a giant, ancient boiler dominates the space, caked in rust so thick that even the strength of the two of us isn’t enough to dislodge its door. The floor is muddy silt that splashes up the backs of our legs as we walk around. There isn’t much else to see. We’re about to give up, climb back out and go to the bar down the street like we had intended, when I spy a ladder in the corner, descending from a curious hole in the ceiling above.
“Spot me while I try this!” I shout as I scramble through the mud towards it.
“I got you,” you say calmly from below.
The ladder leans precariously when I put my weight on it, sinking deeper into the mud, so I climb quickly and hoist myself onto the floor above. I shine my cell phone ahead, hear my voice echo, and feel the expanse of hollow space open up around me.
“Holy shit, we’re in!”
You follow me up and we find ourselves on the first floor of the building, where we laugh in disbelief. It’s truly gutted, and seemingly ages ago. The walls are stripped down to studs, to the ribs that once parceled this space off into separate, distinct homes. We can barely make out the skeleton of what this place used to be. We float between the walls like ghosts, catching our sleeves on nails poking out of the wood, waiting for elbows to bloody. The floors are warped, soft and crumbling, and our steps and voices echo. The windows on the perimeter are boarded up but our phones expose the building’s decrepitude in pools of harsh light, illuminating each other’s faces in shadows and sharpened features.
On sketchy ladders and rickety staircases, we ascend to the fourth floor and back down again, each level more of the same. It’s a mixture of eras, a nod to the various phases of the past that this building experienced over its lifetime — 1950’s appliances ripped from their anchor points and stranded throughout, 1970’s wallpaper peeling from the remnants of walls, a decade’s worth of beer cans and sunflower seeds and other detritus, proving that we weren’t the only people with this idea. Cast iron clawfoot bathtubs litter each floor like sunken ships, little Titanics, in stairwells and corners and other places they don’t belong, filled with dust and rust and debris. Old refrigerators stand warm and gaping next to piles of busted toilet bowls. None of it makes sense, abandonment abandoned midabandon.
We climb around it all like giddy children, laughing and swearing and tripping over each other, our eyes and mouths wide with awe. I’m a 34-year-old mom, a teacher, an upstanding citizen, and despite my lapses and indiscretions and ineptitudes, I’m a good girl — what the fuck am I doing breaking into an abandoned building in the middle of the night? It’s the same question I asked myself every time I saw you, every time I brushed up against or gave in completely to the potential to destroy everything. But this place feels like another universe, one without age, without consequence, a dreamlike space where none of these facts matter. I take souvenirs — a rusty door hinge, what I think is a fuse, a strip of peeling wallpaper — and slip them into my pockets where they’ll grow warm against my body while I forget they are there. We try every door, every window, but nothing budges and everything is empty, and I know you’ll keep my secrets because you have before.
As we lean over to examine what was once a light switch, I imagine you leaning over to kiss me and how that could live and die within the walls of this building. I imagine coming around a corner to see a body hanging from the ceiling. I tell you this is the perfect setting for a horror film, what every protagonist sees right before they die. Your shadowed smile is more than I want to see.
When we’re done, when we’ve explored it all, we exit through the boarded-up but unlocked front door. We are spit back out on the sidewalk like this is normal, like we are doing nothing wrong, and I’m relieved that we don’t have to climb back through the muddy hole of the boiler room. You grab your bike from where you left it leaning against the wall.
“Thanks for doing that with me,” I say. My hand graces your back in a feeling of genuine appreciation, having shared this weird, unique experience and circumstance with someone, with you, something I never have and never will with anyone else, and I’ll later wonder if that was my mistake.
We walk a few blocks and I know, we know, this is it. This is the end. Now I’m going to move away, leave this shitty town to live my life fresh and unburdened by the past. It’s becoming completely obvious that you were the interim, the transition, and that is all you are.
At the corner where we will part ways, we both say, “I’ll miss you” and we both mean it, we both have the best of intentions. You go in for a hug, wraps me up in all six feet of you, like I’ve said it so many times before, so many fucking times.
But then you have to go and kiss me.
There’s a disbelieving moment where I let it happen, where my tongue slips against yours and my fingertips gravitate to your neck, because before I can realize what’s happening, I forget who you are, and my body falls into the natural rhythm of being kissed like it’s something I should be doing. But then I snap to reality and realize it’s not, that this is not the life I want, and I pull away. I shove my hands in my pockets to tether myself back to the earth and walk away without a word, because what words are left that you haven’t just said?
I used to be the one chasing you, taking whatever I could get, living off potential and scraps, and now it’s you waiting around for me, full of hopeless hope.
At the last second, I turn around and yell across the parking lot (isn’t it fucked that parking lots have seen so many moments of vulnerability?) — “You can’t do that, you know.” You’re blurry in the late-summer darkness of midnight, just outside of the streetlights’ pool, and you say, terse and serious, “I’m sorry, I understand,” like you’re a child in trouble, and this, this, is you at your most vulnerability, your most shameful. Finally, you’re the one who fucked up.
And now I’m ready. I’m ready to let you go. I don’t turn to watch you wheel your bike back to your apartment and your empty rooms and your loneliness. I’m done feeling sorry for you.
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Brittney Uecker (she/her) is a freshly divorced librarian and it’s all she can write about these days. Her work has been published in HAD, Taco Bell Quarterly, the Daily Drunk, the Bitchin’ K, and others. She is @bonesandbeer on the internet.