“We got there early to get a table. We always did that for shows.”
I thought of how we’d just sit there all afternoon, melting in the sun, listening to the album we were about to hear live on continuous loop on our respective Discmans. Me sweating profusely in the most Gothic ensemble I could patch together at my size, which was usually fishnet tights worn as a top under one of my mother’s black night slips, Mel fully decked out in one of her Siren ensembles, lipstick black, eye makeup red and three times more elaborate than mine.
“We were cute,” she says now, meaning it.
I want to talk to her more, but she’s spotted the bus in the distance, so I say okay, good-bye, and tell her I’ll text her later, but she’s already out of the car, running toward the stop.
? ? ?
Tonight, as I do my assessment in front of the mirror, it seems there are more truths to come to grips with. Sometimes this happens. How many there are often depends on lighting. Not on how much, but on how it’s hitting me, on how it’s hitting certain parts. Three weeks and three days left until I fly there. He says he loves me right now. He claims he already loved me the moment he first saw me at Underworld. When I first saw him I remember thinking I must have been at least three times his size; he was so thin and pale, he looked like he was barely there, like a ghost, like I’d dreamed him. I remember thinking he was beautiful, but I didn’t look at him very much. In fact, I looked at him so little that first time that when I was away from him, I couldn’t exactly recall his face. In my memory, his features were slippery, vague. His eyes kept changing color, like in the song by New Order. But he claims that he loved me then and that he fell in love with me before that night even, before he even saw me, that he loved me from that night 103 days ago when we switched from online chats about music to phone conversations about music and I would sit here in my studio apartment, my phone crooked in my sweating neck, enumerating the many reasons why I loved this or that band or book or film and then he would enumerate his. From even before that when all I was was a small, snarky post he saw on the Dirty List at three a.m. to which he felt compelled to respond. That was nearly a year ago, and nearly a year ago, I was much further from my goal indeed. Probably I was Mel’s size then. Now I’m almost half that.
After noting my progress, I lie in bed in my studio, thinking of Mel while I eat a bar of 72 percent dark chocolate square by square. I picture her in her mother’s Misery Saga house filled with all those strange breeds of orchid. I picture her walking up the creaking steps toward her blood-colored childhood bedroom, surrounded by walls of obscure fantasy novels and towers of even more obscure dark wave CDs whose precise configuration I used to know by heart. With a hand on my stomach, I imagine her lying on her back in the too-small bed, a bed we slept on together so many nights in my teens, the twin mattress sagging beneath her, a moon through the window silhouetting her, the gentle rise and fall of her immense stomach, her slight snore, until my eyes close.
In the morning, when I step on the scale, I steel myself for the sight of the needle going up (that chocolate), but to my astonishment, it’s tipped down.