Jenny
Coming home is terrible.
She liked buying things, so bric–a–bracs, candles, and paintings suffocated every room like ivy clinging to old, brick walls. The walls themselves were cluttered with artwork and ripped posters, little scraps of grocery lists, calendars, and blurry polaroids–– there was so much of it that we lost track of it all. We forgot which ones were mine and which were hers. At the time, the thought of ever living separately was a far–away, vague future. We thought there was no need to keep track.
Dark, sketched faces laughed and cringed and cried at us from within their sullen frames. My roommate’s parents, well–known artists in her small, southern hometown, had given us their discarded pieces because we had once been desperate for decoration. We had wanted to make our little, barren apartment a home.
The sparkling, brown beaded curtain that I had loved so much hung from the kitchen door frame like limp tree limbs. It grabbed at your hair and fingers when you walked through; you had to untangle yourself from it. I would get angry and push it out of the way like a battered housewife, but I couldn’t stay mad for long. It was scared. It didn’t want you to leave.
Meanwhile, the crimson candles she had bought for Christmas sat elegantly on my English TV stand. When I wasn’t home, she would light the candles and watch the wax drip onto the glass, turning the transparent surface into its own macabre painting. She was an artist, like her parents. There was an artistry in it, even as I huffed and sighed and scrubbed the glass, creating bright, wet streaks on her canvas.
Now, all these twinkling, shiny tchotchkes just seemed like junk. Everything, all of it–– junk. The mass of it all made me feel claustrophobic. Every room felt tiny and full, and a clawing sense of forebode seized me whenever I came home. The walls elongated into fluorescent hallways, thin and paper–white. Blinding light poured onto every surface from the buzzing overhead bulbs. It was impossible to escape. She used to take blankets and cover my hands and face like a nun, and pray over my hair. Eventually, she bought lamps. We never turned that light on again.
We haven’t been best friends for about three weeks. Sometimes, we are not even friends. Sometimes, we are nothing but roommates. Sometimes, we are nothing at all.
Sometimes, I hate her so much it burns me alive. When we argued, the sound of it reverberated off the eggshell walls and bounced around the room like tiny, fast–flying songbirds. Our neighbors would bang on the front door, knocking down the painted, wooden “Welcome” sign we hung on it, and yell to “keep it down!” We never did.
Sometimes, even after the apologies and the hugs and the laughter, I would remember the things she said and cry in the awful, silent way that leaves your cheeks raw and wet. I take things too personally. I can’t forget anything.
Sometimes, when she is talking, I realize I cannot stand to be around her for another second. In elevators and cars, I would push my forehead against the cold, smooth glass of the window and try to transfer the feeling into my brain.
One winter, the heating in our apartment broke. For a week, every night, she would crawl into my bed and we would huddle together under all the blankets we owned like members of the Donner Party. “It’s like a sleepover,” she whispered, and in the dark I knew she was smiling.
Sometimes, I miss her so much it eats away at my stomach like an ulcer.
This is how I know there is something worse than silence. The sound that is no sound at all, the kind of sound which becomes flesh with your skin like soaking wet swimsuits and sticky, spilled orange juice. There is probably something worse than this deafening nothing, which at least can be distracted from with inner conflict and rotten thoughts.
Worse than this is the twinkling laughter from the other side of the door jamb.
Enter Jennifer.
She is me, in a slightly different form. Younger. Blonder. Taller. Thinner. She makes pasta in my pots and on my stove. She eats off my plates and washes them with my sponges. She sleeps on my couch and in my bed when I am away. She leaves her guitars in my living room among the cacophony of other shit that I trip over. She speaks in the blunt, matter–of–fact way that I do in imitation of my father. She makes jokes with an aggressive bite that needles people in places they don’t like to talk about. She is me in a newer form, if I was baked for just five minutes longer. But, she is me.
She hates being called “Jenny,” I think because she hates the idea of being seen as childish. She did not mind being called selfish, or vain, or any other insulting thing–– she was neutral even about slut and bitch, and she never understood why anyone was offended when she used them in casual conversation. But her maturity was something very dear to her. She would punch and kick over the word naive. Anyway… she tolerated “Jen.”
She used to beg me to draw portraits of her. She longs to know how she looks through other people’s eyes. I always refuse. I know they will come out mean and ugly.
She doesn’t eat most things. She tells people she is vegetarian, but she just hates the taste of ground beef. When I met her for the first time, she insisted we eat somewhere with vegetarian options, and after an hour of debate we resorted to the rinky–dinky ramen shop on 35th street which gave you big, heaping bowls of soup for nine dollars. None of us had jobs at the time, and food was important to no one but Jenny. We preferred to spend our pocket change on Camel Crushes and drug store makeup.
“Are you going to get the Flying Tofu Harvest?” I asked her when we sat down.
“I only like tofu the way my mom makes it.” She seemed bored. She pinched and prodded her cuticles in a way that made my skin crawl. “I’m actually looking at the Wonton Chicken.”
She had big, crooked teeth with a gap between the incisors. She had the most beautiful smile I had ever seen. It was the first thing you noticed about her.
Jenny had known my roommate longer than I had. They had known each other longer than I had ever known anyone. They belonged to each other like a birthright, in utero.
In my free time, I had become an insomniac. Every night, at 10:30pm, I took five caffeine pills. Around the same time, put the coffee pot on and continuously drank big, black cups of it until the sun rose. When I attempted to sleep, I was constantly interrupted by great, open–mouthed laughter, inadvertently caused by whatever black–and–white silent film Jenny asked to put on that night. When I actually fell asleep, I heard her laughter in my dreams. But, at every psychiatrist appointment, I lied through my teeth. I had stopped taking medication weeks ago, instead dropping the nauseous green pills into our fish tank one–by–one and watching them dissolve while the coffee brewed. One of the side effects was drowsiness.
It was around this same time that I had begun to despise Jenny.
Worse than the silence is if you hear your name within the white noise, a reminder that you are real, you exist, but are never invited, not even if you ask, not even if you don’t. Worse yet, even, than this, is no mention of your name at all. You are not invited. You don’t exist. You are not real, not even in thought.
How do you even begin to talk about it? How do you say anything at all?
Here is how I did it:
“Why are you always in my fucking house?”
At first, she betrayed no physical reaction at all. Her eyes remained fixated on the simmering, bubbling water in my pot, on my stove. The terse silence was permeated only by the quiet sizzling of meatballs nearby. Then, her nose wrinkled in disgust, and she put a lid over the boiling water.
“Frankly, I just think it’s insane that you spend basically every living second on my couch, but somehow we aren’t ‘close enough’ for you to invite me to the Yellow House party.”
“Jesus, that was weeks ago,” she replied in that tired, drawn–out manner that made me flush angry, red splotches on my chest and face.
“Oh my God,” my roommate murmured, and paced around the apartment in little, nervous steps. Unlike Jenny, and unlike me, conflict made her fidgety and upset, and she much preferred to close her eyes and wait for it to go away than ever get involved.
“I just don’t understand what happened. I thought we were all friends,” I whined, and I heard my own voice become unbalanced and watery.
“You have to have separate lives,” she said. “You can’t always just be there.”
“Why not? You’re always here. You’re always here!” I was trying not to shout. I saw her glance shift to the front door momentarily. “You’re pushing me out of my own life.” Her nose wrinkled again at that.
She finally looked at my face, and I saw a complete and total serenity.
“It’s difficult to make friends with you around because everyone you meet finds you insufferable. That’s why you weren’t invited.” A painful ache erupted inside of me and spread outwards until every fingertip and every strand of hair felt it. She spoke with such stoicism that it felt like she wasn’t speaking at all. We held each other’s eye contact with such tension that it felt like you couldn’t blink or look away. When she finally did, it felt like I had been released from a trance. “I don’t know what else you want from me.”
At this point, I had not slept for eight days.
“I want you to act like an adult.”
As quickly as the words were out of my mouth, her knuckles collided with my nose. Sharp, stinging, eye–watering pain radiates from the center of my face to every dark corner of my skull. As I keeled backwards, I was seized by uncontrolled, animal reflex; my hand shot out and haphazardly cuffed her in the chest. I felt the warm, wet drip of blood reach the bow of my lip. She struck me again in retribution, this time in an open–palmed blow to the ear. When she swung back her hand again in preparation, I grabbed at her wrists and held them away in desperation, pushing as hard as I could with my limited, fragile strength. With a free foot, I kicked her squarely in the stomach. Pushed off balance, she tangled a thick wad of my hair in her hand and we crashed to the floor together.
On top of her, I landed hard beats to her throat and the side of her head. I could see her skin becoming red and malleable. I punched her in the eyes and hoped they turned black. As quickly as I had swept her to the ground, she wriggled from beneath my grip and turned me over like a turtle. As she hunched over me, I clawed at her face and neck with clumsy, dull fingernails, leaving chipped, green nail polish in tiny specks on her scratched cheeks. I writhed under her weight and struggled to become free as she pressed my shoulders into the ground and locked my legs beneath her knees. I eventually got the upper hand again, but as much as it was gained it was lost again.
We continued until our movements became jagged and lethargic, and our anger was dissolved into frustrated exhaustion. We heaved great, open–mouthed breaths and laid splayed out on the dingy, un–vacuumed carpet. The air reeked of sweat and stale blood. Our arms and legs were still tangled together in mid–brawl, hands still caught in each other’s hair. As my roommate stood above us and looked down with disappointment, she must have seen something that resembled how we once looked that one winter, shivering under piles of comforters and throw–pillows.
“Is this what you fucking wanted?” Jenny huffed out in between the deep sighs of exhaustion.
Hot, naked tears were sucked straight from my cheeks into the carpet, my wet face smushed against it like a pudgy, raw pancake. The faint smell of burnt meatballs wandered over to us, lazily.
“I just want to go to sleep,” I whimpered. That is all there is left to do.
She moved out not long after that. She had been planning to do so for a while.
Everything that wasn’t put into a cardboard box labeled keep was put into one labeled donate. I scrubbed out all reminders with a thick, pink eraser. The boxes crowded the living room more than the knick–knacks and incense ever had, and I sat up against my bedroom wall while they moved all of them into Jenny’s red pick–up truck, trying to pick out meaningful words in their muted conversations. I hung thick blankets up on the ceilings to try and obscure the fluorescent overhead light. The lamps were in boxes, now.
I have dreams that she is at my wedding. She is not my maid of honor. There is no maid of honor at all.
Now, there is nothing but the sticky, orange juice silence. I remind myself that there are things worse than this.
Coming home is just awful.