Sometimes Things Change and Sometimes They Don’t
Nadine was always doing something for a guy. She had taken acting classes to get closer to a guy. She had ridden a bus rather than drive for a long time because of an environmentally friendly guy who always spouted pro-ozone rhetoric. Later, when she no longer cared for that guy, she drove all the time, everywhere, and took the long way just to make up for lost time. “I’m destroying your stupid ozone, dickwad!” she’d scream. But now she was doing the biggest, most life-altering thing she had ever done for a guy: moving across the country. On the phone to her friend Erin, she would put it this way: “I’m moving for a guy.” “What are you talking about? There’s going to be a guy moving with you?” “No. I didn’t say I was moving with a guy, I said I was moving for a guy.” “Well what does that mean? To get away from a guy?” “Not really. It’s complicated.” It really wasn’t complicated. Nadine just didn’t want to explain that she was moving to show a guy up, or, more aptly, prove a guy wrong. In fact, she only had the faintest idea that was what she was doing. She’d spent months convincing herself otherwise. “I’m wasting time in this state,” she’d say. Or, “I’ve got to find myself. And myself is not here.” But now, three days before she flies away, she has come to grips with the fact that the only tangible reason for her departure is to prove to a guy that she could make it on her own. She had fallen in the hole of unrequited love and resentment all too often. It was time to pack up and run away from her problems. “Whatever.” Nadine could hear Erin punching the carpet. Erin liked to punch things and the carpet was a perfect fall guy. It gets stepped on, jumped on, bunched up, and spilled on. We drop things on it, lay across it, shuffle our muddy feet atop it. Sometimes, it seems like we treat carpet worse than we treat each other. “So what are you going to do in college?” “What do you mean? There are tons to do. It’s Detroit. There’s plenty to do.” “I mean, what are you going to study? Ambition is just so unlike you.” “I could study lots of things.” Nadine paused to think about it. Her father’s diploma, she remembered, had the word “science” written on it at least a dozen times. Bachelor of Science for the Science of Computer Science with a Concentration on the Science of Analytic Systems and Binary Science. It reminded her of that pseudo-religion Scientology which, translated, means, “the science of science.” “Yeah, like study how to not be so co-dependent.” “Don’t get all feminazi on me just because you have to stay and rot in this town.” Nadine heard the familiar clicking sound of being hung up on. Erin, she thought, was probably punching the carpet. She liked to think of Erin as someone who only talked to her and punched the carpet. To Nadine, those were Erin’s only two activities. The reality was that Erin was a bright student with ambition and affluent parents. She overachieved, gave a great deal to the realm of scholastic effort and, consequently, had little room for a social life. Nadine figured Erin thought it was easier to blame her busy schedule for her loneliness. Nadine, on the other hand, had no one to blame but herself. She moped around the room, phone in hand, sighing loudly at the things laid out to be packed. She thought of her lives, past and future. She wondered silently if her new settlement would be her demise or her rebirth. She needed one of the two. She needed something to feel alive; to feel like she belonged. She had felt abused, downtrodden, ostracized far too long. She picked some things off her desk: pictures of high school friends she never talked to, concert ticket stubs for bands she never really listened to anymore, letters that had meant so much at one time, but now seem like childish scribbles. Why, she wondered, had her life—so completely drained of fluidity—been something she once cherished, she once clung to, without second thoughts, remorselessly, with a childish benevolence that was neither spoken of nor understood. I haven’t lived like this all my life, she thought. I didn’t used to cling to images of people that existed beyond reality. I didn’t use to attach myself to the minor vision of perfection that could only arrive in a world of make-believe. I didn’t—she wanted to cry—obsess over people I barely knew like this. She knew she was right. She had barely known this guy that had inspired her to spite her very nature and move across the continent. She liked to say “continent” rather than “country.” It sounded larger, more foreign—as far away from her current life as she could possibly get. She looked at the phone. Erin hadn’t called back and it had been over six minutes. She was scared. She looked at the plane tickets on her desk. Then back to the phone. Then the tickets again. She had bought into the lie that if you change your surroundings, you somehow change who you are. But environment doesn’t change your nature. In the back of her mind, Nadine knew this well. The phone rang. It was Erin. “Sorry,” she said. “I don’t want you to leave on a sour note. I want you to leave on a hopeful, excited note. Or a regretful, disparaging note. Either one will do. Just not a sour one.” Nadine was moving to get attention. She was moving to wake up all her friends. To say, “Look! I’m gone! Don’t you miss me!? You mother fuckers! Don’t you fucking miss me now!?” But no one was taking the bait. Not this guy, not her friends, not even Erin. Nadine wanted everyone to say, “No. Don’t go. We need you here. We need you around. Your leaving will throw off our whole equilibrium. You are a vital part of us. You can’t possibly go.” But instead, everyone just said “good luck. Write me a postcard or something.” She got off the phone with Erin, ripped the faded pictures from her desk, and threw them to the ground. “These stupid friends! These mother fuckers! These cunts and pricks! I can’t stand them. I can’t stand the people I’ve surrounded myself with!” The pictures lay on the carpet, oblivious to their scolding. The people were all still smiling in their contrived way, lying helpless on the carpet. Nadine began jumping on them and pounding them with her fists and throwing them across the room and bending, wrinkling, destroying them. “Randy and Jared! Where the hell are you now? You aren’t even a-fucking-round any-fucking-more! Ashley, Jessica! Fuck you, you backstabbers!” Then she tore the ticket stubs from their position on the desk. She ripped each into confetti and threw the bits on the pile of bent pictures. There everything was, in the middle of her room, being destroyed, decimated, laid to waste. All in the neat little heaps and ashes of a bon-fire. A pile of her past. She took the plane tickets, crumbled them, and threw them on the pile. She turned and walked outside, feeling the damp, cold air and the damp, cold sidewalk. The wind was swirling around her. It’s the same thing every year, she thought. The same damn thing every year. |