Kelsey Myers

Blue Roses

Excerpt

She was still driving the same big black van, though its condition was more rundown by now. I didn’t know what to expect as I climbed into the passenger side of the van, but it certainly wasn’t a beige-colored cat sitting in my spot. “Hold on,” Mel said. “Gunther, come on, you can sit in the armrest.”

As she drove us to Buffalo, we didn’t say a single word about the confession of love I’d sent. I’d started fiddling around with writing again, had half a draft of a novel, so we talked a little about that while listening to Modest Mouse. There was a podcast about Zelda Fitzgerald that she was eager for me to hear, so she hooked up her iPhone to the aux cord and we learned exactly how much scorn we should feel toward Scott. The wide windshield kept fogging up; the windshield wipers weren’t working. Every so often, Mel would open her window, take her water bottle, and toss some of its contents onto the windshield so that she could see clearly.

“Did it ever scare you, road-tripping around the country like that?” I asked her. “You’re so much braver than I could ever be.”

Her eyes were on the road. “I don’t think that’s true.”

I didn’t want to ask her to elaborate. I wasn’t in the mood to hear kind things about myself. There was still too much up in the air. Mel is one of the people I had trouble reading. Every time I imagine her face, it’s either in the bizarre, goofy, twisted expression she uses for selfies or a calm, blank, neutral one. I had a brain that overanalyzes. Everything she gave me, everything she said, I would try to interpret, use to try to figure out how she felt about me. It was an unusual feeling around Mel, who usually dropped the rolling boil of my brain back to a simmer.

“I feel like my thoughts won’t stop,” I said, once we’d walked up the stairs to her attic apartment. She was living in a house with an eclectic landlady named Ruth, a one-room apartment with the toilet sitting right there in the bedroom behind a screen. There was a mattress on the floor, room for a little sofa and end table, and that was about it.

But that doesn’t do enough to describe the room. The paint was carnation pink. Whoever had lived here before had been an artist, and they’d papered almost every inch of the walls, ceiling to floor, with their drawings. Mel hadn’t told me about this, so I spent the first few minutes wandering the room, taking in the landscapes, maps, and portraits. Whoever did it must have been a writer, too, because amongst all the art was the occasional letter with references to magical artifacts and fantasy lore.

It was dizzying, fantastic, but a little overwhelming. Mel walked over to the end table, near a collection of tiny jars filled with all sorts of paraphernalia. That was her Tiny Jar Project—she would make them and leave them around town. She picked up a pipe. “This might help.”

She walked me through the process of packing a bowl, how to light it, how to keep your thumb on the carb, how to breathe it into your lungs. Much later I would realize I was doing that last part wrong, because after a few hours of talking about nothing and trading the pipe back and forth, she said, “You seem remarkably lucid. The amount you’ve done, you should be flying.”

It was because I wasn’t taking the smoke deep enough into my lungs, but I didn’t know that yet. “Maybe weed doesn’t work on me,” I said. It affected me at least a little, because I definitely had the munchies, and the curry stew we made together in her crock pot was the best thing I’d ever tasted.

We talked a while more, played some board games with her landlady. I curled up on her sofa underneath an afghan, tried to fall asleep. It was useless, my legs wouldn’t stop twitching, my mind hadn’t stopped thinking even after all that weed. A couple of times during the night, I would switch on the desk lamp by the bed and stare at the drawings on the wall, tracing them with my eyes.

“I can’t give you what you need,” Mel said in the morning.

She had made coffee using her French press. I was used to taking it with milk or cream, but she didn’t have any. I needed something to take my medication with, though, so I let her pour me a mug and swallowed the pills down black.

We were sitting opposite each other on the tiny sofa, our legs folded under us. I was quiet, but not ashamed—why do I always associate being quiet with being ashamed? Maybe because I also associate being loud with being exuberant and confident. I waited for her to say more.

“Because of my history,” she said. “And because of who I am.” She couldn’t give herself away, which, she said, is what I needed. More than that, I needed someone who I could count on, someone who would be there for me, someone to comfort me. I didn’t like thinking about myself as fragile, like a little baby that needed to be nursed and rocked, but she was right. I was needy. I liked to talk to the people I liked to talk to at least once a day, preferably over the course of a whole day. I wanted attention; I wanted to know I was on the other person’s mind.

I would never have that with Mel. There was a reason we only talked every few weeks at best. I knew, intuitively, not to crowd her. And I wanted to fall in love with someone who wanted to be crowded, because I wanted to be crowded. 

It didn’t occur to me until years later that she might have been as nervous in that moment as I was. It’s hard for me to imagine Mel as nervous, or anything other than brave. It didn’t occur to me that after she said what she said, she might have been anticipating a response, and might have been afraid of what that response would be.

But the truth was that Mel’s mind and my mind would never meld, because human brains didn’t work like that. The truth is that just like everyone else in the world, even though we have this bond, I will never be able to know what she’s thinking. That no matter how intimate I have been with her in sharing my writing, and my feelings, and my life, she will never know the whole of me, and I will never know the whole of her. I can call her my soulmate inside my head—and I do believe there is some strand of fate between us that I haven’t figured out yet, the tarot cards, the mirrored souls, the ever-revolving portrait gallery she keeps seeing my face in—but there is part of her that is separate from me.

I want to crawl around inside someone’s veins until I know what their blood tastes like. I want to crack through a lover’s skull so that I can touch their brain, as if, by touching it, I will understand their thoughts. I want to scoop someone’s eyeball out with a spoon and cup it in my palms and hold it to my ear as if it will whisper to me what it sees. 

I want all this because I want to be known. I want someone to want that from me. I want someone to know me.

About the Author

Kelsey Myers is a second-year creative Nonfiction student in Columbia University's MFA Writing Program.