Smoky-Teal

           Afraid of the ever-growing-in-numbers strong-like-a-cheap-scotch opinions of others, I began to lay awake at night doing what old women with anxieties do: I was fucking knitting. Yes, with needles. I am indeed being literal. I became morbidly addicted to the noise and comforting pattern, the way that the formula never changed, when I was maybe twenty-two years old.

            At first I wanted this to be productive. I decided that the first thing I really wanted to do was make a scarf for my girlfriend, who slept casually beside me, grunting in her dreams while I laid on my stomach with a ball of yarn held between my boobs and the bed. Her favorite color was “smoky-teal.” She was better about that kind of shit than me, that color shit, so I didn’t really know what that color was. I settled with silver and…some shade of greenish. I couldn’t think of what else she could have possibly meant by “smoky-teal,” but she had a way of making me feel clueless about almost everything. Not in a mean way, really. She was just louder about what she was smart about than I could ever make myself be.

            So anyway, I knit Phoebe this scarf. I wanted her to like it a lot. I wanted her to be happy that I had made her something. I tried to think of her with every careful slide of the needle and wrap of the yarn. I tried to think of how much I loved her. Of her wearing the scarf with her grey wool peacoat in the winter, her long black hair all up in a bun the way I liked, her nose all red and cold, her breath hanging in the air right along with all her complicated words.

            The smoky-teal scarf ended up being too fat for her little neck, a nearly-dilapidated amateur mess. Phoebe still jumped on me when I presented it to her, literally jumped on me. She was a very enthusiastic woman. She wore it every day that winter. We didn’t even argue for a good week after I gave it to her.

            All those ever-growing-in-numbers strong-like-a-cheap-scotch opinions of others kept coming though. So I kept thinking too much. So Phoebe and I never really could stop arguing for long.

            With Phoebe, it always went like this:

            “Why aren’t you talking to me?”

I would stare back at her blankly. “Well…what is there to talk about, baby?” I would ask.

            “Jesus. Never mind then,” she’d say, and get all huffy and snappy, and quiet herself.

            See, when I’m quiet, it means I’m thinking, usually. When Phoebe’s quiet, you’d better bet she’s just trying not to cry.

            As you can imagine, this caused a lot of misunderstanding between the two of us.

            “Well why can’t you just tell me what you’re thinking then?” she would ask, her big blueish eyes completely awash with sincerity. The woman was almost always way too fucking sincere.

            I would stay up at night, unable to sleep. I would think about how my mother was dying of intestinal cancer, but she didn’t want me to visit her, not until I renounced my horrible sin and went to therapy and dumped Phoebe and tried to be friendly with some good men. And I would think about how I was already in therapy, how my ruddy-faced shrink and I were working on my feelings about my alcohol problem, which I couldn’t quite own up to, after all I was still so young and didn’t I have the right to a good few every now and again? And I would think about Phoebe lying there innocently when I came in at three a.m. some nights, sliding under the covers still reeking of vodka and smoke, feeling guilty for just not feeling guilty and then barely looking at her for days afterwards. And I would think about how the money had been low since I got demoted last year, and I would think about Christmas and what would I buy for Phoebe and how horrible is it that I can’t spend the holidays with my whole gay-hating family?, and I would think about how I hadn’t gone to the gym in weeks, god damn it, and how annoyingly needy the woman I loved was and how much less she had cried when we first really fell for each other…then I would look down and realize I’d finished rows and rows on some new awful scarf, and I would feel like maybe my thoughts had accomplished something.

            So really, I couldn’t tell Phoebe what I was thinking. Because it was too long to explain and too awful to go into. I didn’t want to talk about it, is all.

            I forgot, completely, my original plan to think of her with every careful slide of the needle and wrap of the yarn. And the scarves, you would think that they would get better with time, but they progressively got blobbier, uglier, worse.

            Phoebe did cry a lot but still, she wore that ugly first scarf I had made her every day.

            One night I came home, it was later than usual, maybe four a.m., and I went into the kitchen to make myself a bacon sandwich. I was stumbling and muttering. I screamed a little, some exclamation, some “Holy shit!” remark, when I looked up and saw her, this terribly needy woman that I loved, already sitting on the counter, looking at me with reproach, her eyes puffy and exhausted, she had been crying of course.

            “Why don’t you love me like you used to?” she asked. Blunt and to the point.

            “What the fuck are you talking about?” I asked. Evasive. I had no point. She started to cry in earnest. I felt myself getting hot and uncomfortable. I hated watching her cry.

            “Why are you fucking crying?” I asked. Angry. I listened to my voice sounding angry though I really didn’t want it to, but god damn it Phoebe I didn’t know how to be much else back then, please forgive me, mea culpa, my fucking fault.

            “Because of everything,” she said simply. And I, frustrated, drunk, exhausted, turned off the kitchen light, leaving her in the dark. And I, afraid, stupefied, clueless, fled to the living room, fell onto the sofa, and fell asleep.

            A few days later, I realized she had still been wearing the scarf. Every day. The December cold still made her nose red. She still wore her hair in the bun that I liked. The smoky-teal whatever yarn was becoming wild in a few patches. She still came home from work every day and kissed my forehead with heavy, heavy sadness dripping from her lips.

            I still couldn’t talk to her. And she just stopped trying to talk to me.

            I realized one night, while I was knitting this petrifyingly ugly scarf in some Dorito-puke-orange hue that I would never give to anyone, that Phoebe was right. I didn’t love her like I used to. And the fact that she was right really didn’t surprise me. But the fact that she knew me better than I did made me afraid of her.

            I watched her breathe while the needles moved, I looped the yarn, crossed the needles, looped the yarn again.

            I had made a habit of doing everything I fucking could to never have to explain to her anything about me that she didn’t already know. Because I was afraid.

            I watched her breathe while the needles moved, I looped the fucking yarn, crossed the fucking needles, looped the fucking yarn again.

            The next day, I took all the fucking scarves, the big long messy snakes of garish colors, out to the dumpster by our building. With each individual silly crafty product of my anger being rolled up and thrown into the trash, a thought of how things used to be with the woman I loved would involuntarily come to my mind: The flowers I used to pick for her in good humor from the parks, and the way she used to get when I walked in the door and how I always reciprocated without thought every kiss and smile and hello and squeeze, and the way I used to feel when we made love, the way that she could wake up a fire in me within seconds, the way I always felt so satiated afterwards, like we had both shared ourselves, our whole selves, our very souls and cores and…

            I threw the last fucking scarf in, a pink one, I hated pink, and wondered why I felt like I no longer had a core, why I felt like I no longer had a soul.

            We had been together a little over a year, I guess, on the day that I told her it had to end.

            “You’ve always deserved better than this,” I struggled to say.

            “I know,” she sighed, tearing up a little through some I-know-everything smirk. She looked me dead on and I squirmed under her gaze.

            “But I always wanted you,” she said. Sincerity. She wasn’t really crying.

            I felt guilty for not feeling guilty when she packed her things and drove away.

            I saw her the other day at a café in uptown. She cut her hair in a bob. She probably couldn’t fit it into a bun anymore. I watched her carefully, dismayed at the feeling in my stomach of everything collapsing onto itself, of a hunger that food was never going to quite satisfy, of the ever-growing-in-numbers strong-as-a-cheap-scotch opinions of others fading away in importance, of needing her so badly, of my soul awakening, of my mouth wanting to taste the two uncomfortable cottony syllables of her name. And for the first time in, who knows how long really, I thought for sure that I was going to cry.

            She turned toward me just so, and stopped. She was staring right at me for the first time in nine months. She looked at me with terrifying dignity and silence, staring first into my eyes, then into my hands.

            I was holding a vodka tonic and a cigarette, and it was two in the afternoon a few weeks before Thanksgiving, and she shook her head with her eyes hidden behind exhaustion, and she turned on her heel and walked out the front door of the café with anger about her I had never seen before.

            I thought of that night I turned off the kitchen light on her before realizing, with interest, that Phoebe was wearing her smoky-teal fucking scarf. I guess I was so used to seeing her in it that I hadn’t even noticed. And I didn’t know how else to feel, so I just drank the vodka tonic and sat there at the table with nothing making any sense at all.