Once upon a time laying awake, laying together, the chance is there, the thought, the idea. She leans over, up on one elbow, any audience would understand this gesture. Next is the kiss, the closed eyes, the heavier heartbeat. Instead, the moment, ready, pared of seconds, is interrupted. “Did I ever tell you about my screenplays?” She falls back down on the bed, body convulsing with laughter. He looks offended. She gasps, catching her voice in tiny snatches, “You have to be kidding!”
Another time, another story. She sits in the bleachers of a damp arena. One of her favourite bands is on stage, “We’re half awake in a fake empire.” Everyone sings along. Earlier she recorded a video of their best love song on her phone. She ended by turning the camera around and blowing a kiss. She would send it to someone but it’s too big for a text and she doesn’t have his e-mail address.
Another man, a different story. “I never got to finish the story about how I lost my virginity! So there I was in those chunky heels and I blew a guy. Didn’t do it for me. That’s when I figured, there’s something missing. This isn’t what I’m into. Definitely need to have a vagina involved. But anyway, that’s how Anne Rice made me think I might be gay.”
The music continues, beautiful, deeply melodic, rushing in bursts if drum roll and guitar solos, the singers voice woven like brocade into the horn section. She admires their lighting, their glitchy graphic video accompaniment, their stagecraft, their everything. The compositions are flawless and they choose excellent designers for everything else. A mental note: to find out who later. Every good artist is worth following up.
None of this is linear. This story only holds together by one thread. They sit in a restaurant in Whistler, exquisite, bracketed by alcohol and discussions about religion. His eyes are strikingly beautiful, huge and blue. “I saved up all year for this dinner,” he confesses. Unsaid, to keep it off the books of his government. In his wallet are a collection of commemorative prayer tracts from the annual pilgrimages his family arranges and attends.
Later, the same week as the concert, she’s upstairs in a velvet and brass lined restaurant in Yaletown at a Women in Communications networking event. Tucked near the back, typing again on the phone, she hasn’t been in a room of this many women since grade school gym class. It feels odd, but sweet. Another mental note: She should have more business cards made.
They hold hands as he walks her home in the rain. “Who are you?” He asks, baffled. She explains about the social event horizon. She explains about similar orbits on opposite sides of the same metaphorical sun. Her free hand traces ideas in the air. Socioeconomics. She is already wearing both his sweater and his coat. Something here feels destined but she hasn’t yet pinned down what. He asks again, ablaze with wonder, “All of that is brilliant, but who are you really?”
The woman on the panel up front is explaining how to use social media. The specific key seems to be making it easy to make people to help you. Know what you want, learn what you can, and remember you don’t know what you don’t know. All of the advice seems sound. The only moment she’s uncomfortable is when she notices a peculiar detail: how the women present unconsciously arranged themselves when they sat. Except for the latecomers, everyone is grouped by the colour of their hair.
Those eyes, those hands, the catch in his body that’s blessedly shaped like her name. Inside the moment, can you know? Can it be identified? Or is your perspective too close? I cannot remember. It might be artifice. Is it unreal, a fiction built into solidity by narrative later? Retconned into the shape of relationship. Perhaps it is only in hindsight we think – that might have been it, in another universe of possibility, if things had gone differently, if he had, if she had, if the, if: that’s when I first fell in love, that’s when I knew.