“4 Stories Down, 4 Stories Up”

By Sara Elizabeth

Copyright 2010 by  Sara Elizabeth and Untreed Reads Publishing

Cover Copyright 2010 by Dara England and Untreed Reads Publishing

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This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to the living or dead is entirely coincidental.

4 Stories Down, 4 Stories Up

by Sara Elizabeth

The 4th Story

The first time we ever kissed was on the fourth story of a building. I wish it had been more romantic—like, maybe the eleventh story or maybe the fifty-ninth. But it wasn’t. It, in fact, was my room and it could have probably been better. Several weeks down the line, maybe a month or two later, we practiced what we thought would be great first kisses. It was something cute and funny and I liked it about her. We never took it too seriously, which was the best part, because from the beginning, it was already too serious.

It was over chips with guacamole and margaritas (our second date) that I knew we would be perfect together. After the first round, we were already buzzed, and she was mixing her drink with a straw and a spoon. She pulled the spoon out and the straw was stuck to it. She smiled at me and said, “Look. A party trick!” We both started laughing and then somehow, my new white watch ended up in the salsa bowl. I didn’t care. I didn’t care about the watch or the fact that she and I went to high school together, which should have made things weird. It didn’t. It made things more interesting—somehow more familiar and special. Like maybe it was fate. I didn’t care that she was a stoner even though I hated drugs. I didn’t even care that she was a Republican for all the wrong reasons. I cared about the party trick. And I cared about the way her eyes lit up when she smiled at me. And the way she hid her thumb in between our palms when we held hands because she had “club thumbs” and was always self-conscious about them.

In the Elevator, Going Down

Alone tonight. Every song I listen to reminds me of her. I feel quixotic and I look up at the reflection of myself on the ceiling and smile as I hear the words flowing through my headphones: “The thing about love, is I never saw it coming...”

The 3rd Story

The third story is about Sundays. And the progression. It’s about how Sundays (there have been exactly thirteen) are my new favorite day of the week, and all of the activities that take place with the waking up together and fresh air and sometimes making pancakes. It’s about lying in bed and laughing about things that had happened the night before, about people who we know. It’s about why the people we don’t know are walking down the street with inappropriate dogs, according to her, “unmatching to their demographic and more expensive than their rent.” It’s about why the people who live across the street from me have a dirty balcony. I don’t have the answers, but I do know this: I was there. And I loved every minute of it.

Walking down the street on the second Sunday, she holds my hand. Up until that moment, I had been uneasy about being affectionate in public with anyone. I don’t mind this time. I also don’t mind later that evening when she pulls me around a corner and kisses me against a building.

The third story is about the most recent Sunday—with Liz sticking out her tongue at me while she takes pictures of herself with her cell phone. It’s her long brown hair that she just had to tell me was “thick and soft,” one night when she was drunk, before we started dating. It’s her big brown eyes that completely consume me with every last glance. It’s the way she bites her nails to the quick and scrunches her nose when I say something cheesy. It’s the way she nods her head when she eats something she likes or when she says the word “perfect” with the greatest of fervor. It’s her freckles and the way she always has to say my name before telling me she loves me. I hold my breath when I know it’s coming.

We do nothing together, she and I, but it’s everything to me.

In the Elevator, Going Up

Coming home from the movies. She holds my face to warm it from the cool Autumn breeze and kisses me in the elevator. We both get shocked. My lips start to tingle. She tells me she is walking on sunshine and I start to sing: “It’s electric, boogie woogie woogie...”

The 2nd Story

I try to ignore her when she starts talking about the church she wants to get married in. I try to ignore her when she sometimes talks about “when she has a husband to support her.” And something about her kids and picket fence probably. I think about how I am too much of a coward to ever tell her how deeply it truly hurts.

I want to tell her she is insane because she would be miserable if her life ever ended up that way and that she would only be doing it to please her mother, but instead I try to ignore it. I think maybe it will just go away. I think maybe if I just continue to show her how much I love her and if we just spend time with people who are accepting and wonderful, it will all just go away. And this isn’t to say that I was envisioning a wedding dress, because I certainly wasn’t, but there is always a tinge of wonderment surrounding a relationship. I mean, what’s the point of being with someone if there is no future? We weren’t even official yet.

Anyway, I tried to ignore her because we were at her house on Long Island and we were supposed to have a good weekend. We went to a cornfield and shot a potato gun. I hit the target twice and won two mini pumpkins. Oh, the Fall.

At the beach, I watched her run towards the water after kicking off her shoes once we touched the sand. I imagined what would happen if she never stopped, and then drew a heart in the sand with my foot. The October chill was in the air and I stood shivering until she ran back from the water and hugged me to keep me warm. We took a picture of our shadows. Mine was taller.

As I felt myself falling further, I also felt myself getting high. Hours later, Liz and I were smoking pot in the kitchen and decorating cookies that were already decorated with snowman faces. This was exactly the reason I never wanted to do drugs; I became every stereotype in every stoner movie. After completing my punctuation snowman collection, I looked up as the smoke seemed to dance with the light above us and then disappear into vapor. I took the blue icing and three cookies and wrote BE, MY, GF. I slid them onto the platter of freshly decorated snowman faces, then sat down on the floor because the tile in her house was heated.

She finally saw them and took the question mark that was not part of the collection and circled it sloppily with her red icing tube, then handed it to me on the floor before going on a diatribe about why it couldn’t be official. I was so incredibly zoned out that I cannot recall a thing she said except I remember her comparing herself to Lindsay Lohan in the reasoning why it couldn’t be a definite yes.

I was not present there. There is no way in hell I would ever ask someone out on a cookie, especially in abbreviated text. I looked down on the situation -- I was probably lingering near the light with the smoke -- and watched us kiss. And laughed at myself. Because man, I was an idiot.

And apparently, I had become Samantha Ronson.

The next week was completely sour, followed with statements of, “I don’t know what I want. I need time. I need space. You are frustrating me.” Etc. Ugh.

The Lobby

Maybe it was the alcohol and maybe it was the full moon, but everything went wrong one night, a few weeks later. There are good ideas, there are bad ideas, and there are bad ideas that seem really good at the time. My great idea was to play flip cup at a seedy Western bar with vodka instead of beer.

Wasted, I tried to hug Liz in the bathroom.

She told me that she didn’t want to be blocking people if anyone tried to come in.

I told her she was callous. Not to her face.

As six of our other friends sat and sang our high school fight song, I became belligerent. The rest of the night was a blur, with only bits and pieces from drunken text messages and stories from my roommate to put it back together.

As I waited up for what seemed like hours, I received no phone call and no goodnight. I became the drunken poet and wrote her an email that I never actually sent:

I tried to not allow myself for a few weeks now to think about this, but there was a moment, and part of me thinks it was the only one (even though all of me knows it's a constant,) when we were together and I looked into her eyes and loved her the way I loved things as a child. And maybe letting that moment go is the only thing I can't do in this whole stupid process, and maybe I shouldn't, but I should cultivate it instead, and heavy and heartache as I feel, maybe I should be grateful for that single moment when I realized I could love someone as purely and innocently as I thought I had.

I feel as if I have compromised so much of myself. I feel as if so much has evacuated my body, my spirit. Nothing, so little, is left, and I am bereft and grieving, and I wish that it was okay to talk about these things as much as I want to talk about them, but instead I am shut down and told it is not worth it or inappropriate or not the right time or place or situation, and I sit alone in silence and note how there are uneven spots of paint on my wall because it is a truth and something tactile.

I wonder exactly how this happened. I can tell that she is so scared that this is not how things were supposed to happen. And brushing it off, seeming to be callous, deciding that it is better off as a nothing, is easier than dealing with it.

I was once told by a stripper, no less, that I need to not mold my life into a litany of perfect little lessons. That not everything happens for a reason and coincidence doesn't exist as I believe it so. In this case, unfortunately, I think it fate. I think it reason. I think it is all for a certain purpose.

I cry myself to sleep.

Going Back Up

“Listen, I was thinking in the shower tonight,” she says. We are lying on the bed, facing the one brown wall in my room. My hangover is finally gone and I can engage in normal conversation without crying or feeling death creeping upon me. The closet door is cracked open and I wish I had super powers to make it shut without getting up, because I can see my laundry basket overflowing. It bothers me.

“I never think in the shower, so it’s kind of a big deal. I was scared. I still am scared,” she continues. I lift my head, surprised that she is the one to bring it up. “I could feel myself getting too comfortable and that is when I began to pull away.”

I want to add, “And act like a heinous bitch towards me,” but instead I just sigh.

She tells me that she needs to spend more time alone. And that she needs a hobby.

“Knitting?” I ask, half-joking.

“Too ambitious,” she says. I nod my head. I keep nodding my head. I nod it at everything she says, because I can tell she practiced the speech and everything she was going to say on the way over to my place. I think that sort of effort is commendable and I figure I can let her think she is in control of the whole situation.

As far as I was concerned, things were going back up.