Always You

every night, i live and die

I really fucking hate parties. 

I've managed to get through nearly all of my college career without going to one, but now that midterms are over and some of us are starting to get accepted into grad schools already, the tidal wave of freedom is too strong for me to hold out against. I've let Allison drag me downtown and now I am standing in the corner of a room full of swaying, sweating people. Most of them are wearing NYU sweaters, the purple is glaring and a little arrogant. The music is too loud. People are too close. 

"Dance," Allison shouts, sidling up to me and pushing a bottle into my hand. She's already drunk. "C'mon, Jude, it's only fun if you dance." 

"Not drunk enough," I yell over the booming music. 

"So drink, silly!" She clinks her own drink against mine. I tip the beer down my throat. It's lukewarm, as if someone took it out of the fridge too early. Allison tells me she'll be back, that age-old light of lust and possibility is in her eyes, I know she's hoping to end up with me tonight. But she will regret it if she does. She doesn't care for me really, she just likes the idea of me. For what is being human if not cycling through a multitude of facades. I stand, like a silent idiot, drinking shitty beer. So many faces. What tragic creatures we all are, I think. Tormented by our youth, starved for feeling. Igniting our insides to try to prove that living blood runs in our veins. Searching, searching, for a paradise that never exists, trying to find God in the dust on the floor, the burn of liquor, a stranger's tongue. The room is too hot but the chill of loneliness gnaws at me from inside. 

I haven't heard from Cate since I left her apartment two weeks ago. I comb through the moments with a fine toothed comb. Had I said something wrong? Should I never have gone to see her? The thought has occurred to me more than once: she is trying to move on; I am withholding her. She has a child to raise and love. She has a husband who loves her. I am a figment of her past; I am a dream that should have faded into memory but rises like a persistent moon and claws back the waves of time with my angry blood-red light. 

But she had come to see me first. She said soft things to me. The touch of her hand as we waited for the elevator. The memory of it burns on my knuckles, like a tattoo that never stops stinging. 

The clock on the wall reads 10:54 P.M. What is she doing right now, I wonder. Is she asleep? Awake? Is she leaning on the rail of her balcony and watching the same distant moon that rose above us so, so long ago in the library of that old high school, when she first kissed my hair? 

Does she ever think of me? 

/ 

I am too drunk. Time bleeds, and nothing feels real. I am stumbling through the halls of this narrow apartment, dazed as if in a dream. The girl leading me by the hand, confident in her want, is tall and slim as a reed and her palm is slightly sweaty. She pulls me into the bathroom and shuts the door behind us. Her eyes are the same color as the tiles on the walls - a pale, fireless blue. But the light as it catches on her blonde hair...

She pushes my hair out of the way, kisses my neck hungrily. 

"So hot," she mumbles, fevered with intoxication. "You're so hot."

My hand fumbles around her head, tangling my fingers in her straw-colored hair. I find the hair tie and pull her hair loose so that it tumbles down to her shoulders. Between her lips I whisper, "can I call you Cate?"

"I don't give a shit," she groans. Her hands wander over my body, slipping under my shirt. She's kissing me too hard and her tongue tastes of vodka, but I've missed human touch more than I realized, and I'm too drunk to make solid sense of anything. She unzips my pants and her fingers hook under the band of my underwear, and before she's even found my wetness I'm losing breath, my eyes shut tight against the starkness of the bathroom. 

And she thrusts her fingers into me so that my head knocks back against the wall and my vision explodes and my back arches, and I don't realize it but tears are streaming down my face as I cry out helplessly over and over again, "Cate, Cate, Cate."

/

The time is three in the morning when Allison and I stumble back into our apartment. Of the two of us she is more of a lightweight; I found her on a couch near the end of the party curled up with a shady-looking guy I'd never seen before. I had to peel her off him, shouting "you're a fucking lesbian, Allison - a fucking lesbian!" 

Now she tries to resist my efforts to put her in bed. She throws her arms around my neck and begs me to sleep with her. "Don't you know I love you?" she says, her words slurring into each other. She's crying, the dark mascara running down her cheeks. She looks like a pale watercolor painting in the darkness of the room. "Oh Jude I love you I love you I love you Jude..."

"Shut up. You're drunk, and so am I." Finally I manage to wrestle her off me and put her into bed. She falls asleep almost as soon as her head hits the pillow. I pull the blanket over her before going into the kitchen. In the dark I turn on the faucet and drink the water straight from the tap like a stray dog. Then I sink into a chair at the table and sit there with my fists pressed into my burning eyes. 

I should have stayed in Bedford. I should never have left. Even if it killed me, to go back to school and sit there in class and see her at the blackboard pretending to ignore all that has happened, I should have stayed. I should have endured it for her. I should have asked her to wait for me. To remember what we had, every small miracle that happened between us as we lay in each other's arms. 

I'm so drunk. I want suddenly to jump up and go outside right now and run barefoot across fifty blocks to stand under her balcony. I want to fall to my knees and tell her I will die if she lets me, because I would rather let her kill me tenderly than live another day in silence. 

And when she sees me, hopeless and small on that silent dark street, my feet bleeding and eyes blurred with tears, will she forgive me, will she have mercy then? 

She said when I left she knew I had taken her with me. What had she gone through alone, all those years? What hasn't she told me? For months after I first arrived I could not sleep because she wasn't with me. Cate would always fall asleep first; I would lie close to her and listen to the gradual way her breathing slowed, and the sound would lull me to sleep. Did she feel as alone without me? Did she suffocate from the emptiness of the bed as I did? Oh God, Cate, could you ever forgive me? 

And then the face of Ruby swims up at me from the dark. Her daughter, her own blood, the pride and joy of her life. Even if Cate did forgive me, even if she was willing to give me another chance, how could I ever ask her to choose me over her daughter? I would not choose me. I feel my heart shrink into myself, the shame clutches me in dagger-like claws. 

A chasm of time and space seems to open up before me. Across the swirling void I see Cate's tall figure, the cruel beauty of her face, those marble cheekbones and comet-blue eyes I have worshipped for so long. I see her like a vision of an angel, like a monumental prophetess, like a bolt of thunder and lightning. I see her turn away from me.