I phased in and out of the party the whole night. It was Halloween in june because we needed the make believe. They called me Doe so I went as Shelly Duvall. Nobody understood my costume until I began seizing and shrieking and sliding down the door with my eyes halfway out of my head. They all laughed. My soul felt rickets stricken. I was a month shy of twenty-five.
"How'd you scream like that?" Julia said as she collapsed next to me onto Patrick's green velvet couch.
"I just imagined I was deaf or in space," I mumbled. I wasn't happy. I don't remember why, though. Life and my plans had mercifully harmonized that year. I'd gotten the desk job, the apartment with the cramped bathroom, the bar stool, the loft space, the small fridge that can fit a whole cake but only if it's circular, the oversized houndstooth blazer, the egg yolk brunches, the blue lagoons and metropolitans, the sociolect, the perpetually parched succulents. Julia. Life was good, but I was bad. I was always bad. I'd been bad for so long that asking myself why felt falsely virginal. We're at war because we are. We hate them because we always have. A rose by any other name wouldn't be a rose anymore.
"Deaf or in space, huh?" She chuckled, lighting a cigarette. Patrick didn't like it when smoke hung aloft in his apartment like a convict, but Patrick had gone to bed just as the sun threatened to rise above the horizon with a coworker from the IT department. Some aging surfer who claimed he used to hack into the waves. Which is all to say that what Patrick doesn't know can't hurt him. I took a drag and then another one. I didn't give the cigarette back.
"Is that where we should go on vacation then? To space?" Julia smiled softly, bushy brows furrowed. Crooked tooth. Julia didn't like to sleep. Said it was a waste of time and a time of waste, of shit suddenly deciding to become buoyant and top of mind. Julia did a line. I eyed a half-empty bottle of rosĂŠ on the floor, how the light cut the glass into ribbons like floor-to-ceiling windows.
"I guess," I began, feeling my voice coming out of me. "You can practice belting out operas up there. Croon Sinatra to the moons. Use a pulsar as a metronome. Watch the compass needle run laps. And you just glide, that's all you do. A life free of friction."
She hummed. Sniffled. Wiped her palm down her face like it's an apron. I stood up. She didn't. I picked up my baseball bat, part of my costume. Julia reached for my wrist. "Don't go home yet. Look," she gestured at the hardwood floor under her feet. I looked down. She was missing a sock. She coughed up a laugh. "No, no, not that, look at the wood grain. Looks like Africa."
I squinted my eyes and twisted my head this way and that until the shape decided to unlock itself. Amusement felt like flightless confetti, but at least someone remembered. "Huh, would you look at that, it actually kinda does."
"We can go there, to Africa," Julia decided and dropped my wrist. Then she laughed again in that way only people who don't wanna cry anymore do. "I can take you, I've some money. I can't go to space with you, Jane. I'm down here and it's beautiful if you let it be. But you have to let it be.â
"I'll think about it," I said. I couldn't look at her so I looked out the window. Sunday morning had wedged itself in between buildings. What I wouldn't give to be on a tree-lined street and on my way to somewhere. And In the sky, the moon was fading away.
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