Alaina Symanovich
If I quiet my mind, I can still feel my chin on his chest that first afternoon, my cheeks feverish from whiskey, my heart a hummingbird caged. He asks where my engagement ring is, and I blush and say I wasn’t going to wear it to do this. My fiancée always said my face was too pointy to rest on her chest, but when I ask—twice, for good measure—if I’m hurting him, he says not at all. Just three words, but they kindle something behind my eyes. I want to string the syllables like Christmas lights around my body, want the world to see me braceleted in color and blinking like a heartbeat and not hurting him, not at all.
But you cheated.
But: the overcast blur in his eyes when he moves to kiss me. The ping of his fitted sheet escaping the tuck of the mattress. The triple-step, clickclack-clack of the ceiling fan overhead. I whisper you feel like a vacation and what I mean is I never want to go home, not at all. My cell phone groans against the hardwood floor, laboring through my fiancée’s sixth missed call, and I could weep because I’d rather cease to exist than return to that life, because these hours with him threaten to be the pinnacle of my existence, because I’m petrified of waking up tomorrow and having tomorrow feel like yesterday and it sinking in viscerally what it means to have peaked, because I don’t want to admit—not at all, not at all—that I was unhappy before him.
But you cheated.
And who wouldn’t have? I see the plastic slat of the blinds on my balcony door, the slat we cracked scrambling outside in the last hours of August. September was suspended overhead, a notion and nothing more, as he slipped his hands down my shorts, as I bit runes of bruises into his neck. He was an affair before a fling before this wild idea of forever. He was the boy in the back of a Mazda, and I was the girl kissing his dick: it was trashy and treacherous, and it sated a desire so deep in me, I cracked up—up and out of myself and into someone new. The way his stubble chafed my face, the butterscotch trace of liquor on his tongue, the velvet miracle of him in my mouth, the fact that I can’t fathom having acted differently, not for all the morality in the world, not at all.
But you cheated.
So what if there’s no absolution? There’s penance—and penance I performed, martyring myself as if it would help my ex. There are skipped meals and vodka dinners and collages of memories intended to devastate. I’d replay the film of my torpedoed relationship, every frame stained with guilt. I’d lift my face to the stars and wonder if my self-flagellation sufficed, wonder if some cosmic casting director were looking down on me approvingly, were dropping a line in God’s ear (hey, this chick really knows her shit), were scripting for me a new role, a better role. (As if I hadn’t already slipped into a new role, a better role, rolling out of his bed every morning, sex-dazed and stamped with the way I whispered I’m yours into his ear as he fucked me, and the way he fucked me harder in return, as if to say I was never not his, not at all.)
But you cheated.
Truth turns fluid, assuming the shape of lies built around it. I’m confused, my head swimming with Medusa’s box and Pandora’s stare, with snakes beneath lids and misery making stones of men. I am new to myself, uncomfortably so, each morning. In the dark, I am a mess of moans, I am hair pulled and hips bruised and hurt me, daddy, and in the light, I remember that girl and wonder whether to feel ashamed or afraid. Mostly I feel awake; sometimes I feel not at all. But I was a person before him (or so I tell my reflection in the mirror). I was a person and now I am more than that. Now I am a snake stitched into skin, an evil itching to escape.
But you cheated.
And so I’m distorted through the lens of everyone who interprets me, my personhood Pangea, cast fragmented in every direction. My ex tells me I’m a weird fucking whore; my friends shelter me, solemn and pitying as the apse of an old church. My parents applaud the jettisoning of my ex; my coworker worries I’ve stopped eating. My best friend’s boyfriend, E., leers over me in a mini-mart and slurs, are you really happy with that guy?, his eyes unfocused, his breath beery, and I’m itchy with panic as E.’s leg crowds mine, and as I stumble backward I wonder about the number of places Pangea cracked, and if it felt like this—like an unbecoming, a tumble from whole to not at all.
But you cheated.
At all times, this wild idea of forever threatens to fold at the center. Cheaters never win, not at all, and backseat blowjobs aren’t prologues to rom-coms, and if I watch the taillights of that Mazda fade for the final time—and I’ll watch those dying embers until I’m salt—the reckoning with myself will begin, and I’ll have no answers, not at all, but I’ll have his lips on my shoulder when he rode me from behind; I’ll have his chipped front teeth, and the tattoo he wants removed, and his skin pink from a shower. I’ll have the time he kissed me mid-sentence to head off a shouting match. I’ll have the pointillist map of blackhead scars on his upper back and the downy hair on the slope of his neck and the naked faces he makes when he’s dreaming. I’ll have the past like a shackle even if I have him not at all.
***
The man who is not my fiancé glides up to the mini mart in his Mazda. His jaw is tight but I ask and he’s not mad, not at all, not at me at least, though he requests that I never see E. again, and I think I’ll happily never see another man ever if I can take up residence in this passenger seat instead. I’ll be the blind man at Bethsaida, I’ll see only men as trees, walking, because nothing my eyes have caught matches the clarity of this moment. Later, in his bedroom, he strokes in me so slowly that tears bud in my eyes, and when he feels them he pauses to gather my face in his hands, and when I whisper I love you it’s a prayer, an incantation; a reckoning. Backwards and miraculous, and mine.
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Alaina Symanovich holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Florida State University and an MA in English from Penn State University. Her work has appeared in Quarter After Eight, Sonora Review, Superstition Review, and more. Find her at alainasymanovich.com.