Sociability had gone up, a little. Thatâs how the good doc would put it:Â and how has your social life been this week? from his chair, where Nate could see his socks that never matched quite right. He was trying harder to take some time outside. And, okay, maybe some days that just meant sitting a little closer to the windows, but some days it meant getting the groceries, standing in the sand, taking a cigarette on his deck at night so the smoke obscured the sky. Small-talk with strangers he never initiated. Mikhailâs face at 4pm, pale from the laptop glow.Â
These were conversations that didnât require too much processing speed, even the daily check-ins; his Russian was near-flawless (couldnât call it fluent) but Mikhail was muted now, like Nate was, so they mostly just sat. He was getting used to quiet. He was getting to prefer the sound of his breath over speech.Â
Carolina, the receptionist and appointment coordinator, was too many words between blinks. Torrential. He tried to follow it with his eyes, brows up, leaning a little farther over the hands clasped between knees. You wouldâve thought â you wouldâve thought, from the classical music and the phone call formalities â you wouldâve thought she was muted, too.Â
Nate hadnât really thought about her.
Before.
âLina,â he repeated. Sounded different in his voice, stripped of something, and he swallowed around the self-conscious urge to stop talking. There was a water cooler next to him, nearly full. He looked from his hands to her to it, and all the waxy dixie cups theyâd stacked upside down on the table. He tried to focus on the way her words sputtered like a stubborn engine, âcause at least his were coming through clear. What few there were. âIâm fine. Really. I⌠kind of like waiting.â Was that weird? It was definitely weird. It wasnât â it wasnât the waiting so much as it was the quiet. It wasnât the quiet so much as it was the suspension, knowing he was on time for something, living with the pause button pressed on. There are some places that just feel like when youâre in them you donât exist the way you do everywhere else, and Nate knew that didnât make any sense, but waiting rooms and parking garages and other peopleâs driveways were like pockets where everything else stopped.Â
Talk about stuff you probably shouldnât mention in therapy, Jesus. âI get to listen to the music,â he added, pointing vaguely over her shoulder at wherever the orchestra was coming from. âAnd I get to catch up on whatever⌠Jennifer Aniston is up to.â Seriously, the Us Weeklys were well-stocked. âI only get that when I go grocery shopping.â In the quiet after the joke, a movement ended. Another started. He covered one of his elbows with a palm. âNate. Nathan. Nathan Robert Stahlâ â eye roll at himself, so sheâd know he wasnât making fun of her, just poking fun â âbut just Nate, most of the time. The restâs a mouthful.â
Was everything like riding a bike? Muscle memory, maybe. Steer straight and pedal. Train your entire life, maybe, before the middle passes and makes it a memory in the first place. Do you ever really forget? Fingers on a fret board, moving across strings, forming shapes and creating sound between breaths. Simultaneously reading the subtitles while watching the images span across the tv, or the laptop screen propped by pillows. Driving, like riding a bike-- steering wheel, rearview mirror, windshield wipers. Maybe muscle memory only meant multi-tasking. Funny, how it worked.
Itâs all she thought about, leaning forward against her desk.
Like sheâd lost all sense of posture, all sheâd trained for in elementary school playing the violin. Multi-tasking: thinking, thinking, looking-- talking. Nate.Â
Sheâd trained for this, right? How do you ever forget?
It was foreign, the way he said her name. Lina forgot what that sounded like -- her name on another manâs tongue. Tried to forget it, too, and the way her words bubbled over and out around them. Nate liked waiting. When he talked, it felt heavy-- weighed her shoulders down, made her shift forward to get closer. A desk and a countertop between them. Heavy, âcause it was slower. Visible breaths, yâknow? Heavy, because his voice was deep. Too deep, like it matched the dip between his eyebrows, but not the rest of his face. Nate liked waiting, and Lina couldnât even hold the words in.Â
âAre you sure?â But he was eyeing the water cooler, now, and he wouldnât look at her. Some things were answered without an answer. Forget it. Lina was the kid that shook every present wrapped underneath the Christmas tree-- guessed and guessed what it was until her mother relented. A tip: always hide the torn gift boxes at the back. Never try to one-up your abuela, a worker at a wrapping factory. Patience was near impossible when all Lina wanted was to learn, or to give, or to smile. She tried the hardest stuff first-- Paganiniâs Caprice No. 4 in C minor eight months into training. âI bet youâre used to waiting, though, right? Being an astronaut and all?â When exactly did she cross this line of unprofessionalism? The first time she opened his file, and tried to make out every word-- or now, making small (it wasnât small) talk? Nathan Stahl knew a lot-- knew so much, Lina knew -- and it mustâve been perfect to practice patience when you were only surrounded by the stars.
He sure knew something, âcause he liked the music. This is when Lina remembered: practically perked up, with her spine straightened against the desk chair. âItâs good, right?â  The CDs were on the counter. She had to loop her fingers around a stray elastic band and pull, pull, to keep from waving a copy in his direction.Â
Forget composure when a sad boy makes you laugh. Wide mouth, neck stretched. Loud laughter that blocked out anything beautiful. It was good, but this was even better. âIf you look hard enough, Iâm pretty sure thereâs a 1996 copy with Jen on the cover.â Lina peeked over the counter, hiding a smile with a pen between her teeth. âYou could hawk that for some serious cash-- but, let me guess, here--â like she forgot why Nate was even here in the first place. âYou like Friends, but Heâs Just Not That Into You is your favourite movie.â The official introduction (âNate. Nathan. Nathan Robert Stahlâ) was like an inside joke shared between people that werenât strangers. Confidential, almost, even though Lina had already broken that trust. He wasnât a stranger, with the way he rolled his eyes. The way Lina thumbed through his file every other Wednesday afternoon. You donât care this much about strangers.
âJust Nate,â she tried to breathe it out slow. Really slow. âI like that.â Maybe her reminders werenât meant to be formal phone calls-- maybe this was it.
This was it: just Nate, and Lina multi-tasking.Â
kaledo-art
andulkaphoto
areudirty
pixelskylines
tangentwithtanner
vaporwave
yousharknotpass
