Four mini-stories and an epilogue
by Arshia Eghbali
I was so young. But that wasn’t what I wanted to be.
She was broken. And that, too, wasn’t what she wanted to be.
The desert was mesmerizing. We talked about ourselves and the stars, and how you could see more of them the longer you gazed into the pitch-black sky.
We were lying on the sands. The surface was cold but when we buried our hands, it was warm and nice inside. A faint blend of music and carefree chatters accompanied the silence of the desert. We could see the red-lit dots of the cigarettes that were our friends’ walking in a line on the ridge of a dune. We had snuck away.
… The echo of a distant tide
Comes willowing across the sand…
I placed my arms around her and tried to pick her up. But the sand was too soft and perhaps I wasn’t strong enough. My feet slipped, we fell down on each other and we laughed so hard and freely. I kept blaming the soft sand and she kept making fun of me as we laughed and tried many more times in vain.
… And no one sings me lullabies
And no one makes me close my eyes…
The voices and the music were getting closer. Our friends were almost getting to the ridge above us. We went around the small dune, climbed up, and caught up with them. She went to talk with one of the girls and placed a cigarette on my lips as
I went up to my friend. He lit up mine and his and smiled at me. We dissolved back into our group of friends so effortlessly.
Some years later, as I was trying to impress a girl in a Viennese café, I saw on Instagram that she had gotten married.
****
We were both hurt by the same person.
And we had both probably done some harm too.
We pretended to dance but all we were doing was really to feel each other’s curious bodies. I kissed her on a narrow balcony overlooking a backyard filled with junk. On her taxi ride back home, she texted me to ask if I was her boyfriend. I felt I was someone.
She drove me around in her father’s car and I drove her in my mother’s. We felt so free.
We wrote for magazines that paid very little, and very late. I wouldn’t take her to my band’s rehearsals. She sent me nudes. We had sex in inappropriate places.
We both moved away to different cities to continue being curious. I said it was over and I gave her a jar of memories before she left. She did the same. Months later, when I was lonely and fearful, I flew to her new home. She must have been scared too, but she wouldn’t show it. I slept in her bed. When I went back, I was no longer scared.
The next time I saw her, she was still wearing the little plectrum I had made into a necklace with a nasty piece of string. She wanted to kiss me, but I didn’t. She cried.
Later on, we would still see each other, once in a while, in unexplored cities. But she wouldn’t cry anymore. And the ugly necklace wasn’t around her neck.
****
We were vagabonds.
She told me about her lovers in India and Morocco.
I told her about my home and that it was far away.
We discovered cozy little bars where the windows fogged up in cold autumn nights and we called them our favorites. We ordered soup and dark beer. I wondered within myself about speaking foreign languages and she invited me to touch her.
On a bus rattling along hilly roads, I told her that I had fallen in love with another woman. She told me to put my head on her shoulder and sleep. We wrote stories on the back of cardboard boxes. She took a photo of me in an empty bus stop.
I followed my heart, and she kept my secret. And then slowly but surely, she built herself a life away from me or the thought of me.
****
I thought I was Bob Dylan.
She thought she was Patti Smith—or maybe Bob Dylan; she couldn’t make up her mind.
We thought we were meant to be.
I wrote silly little songs that I sang to our poisoned friends at parties, and they were drunk enough to reward me by singing along to my words. She scribbled poems in her cheap little notebooks and sent them to magazines that often didn’t want them. We lived life as it was really about us.
Summers were long and lazy in Vienna, Greece, Spain, and a sleepy village in Italy. We didn’t have much money, but we had courage. I thought life was easy. She thought the world owed us something.
We thought we were meant to be.
Then we both got our degrees. We said we wouldn’t sell our souls, but we both looked for jobs anyway. I thought about our future, but I talked about the past. I didn’t think life was easy anymore. She thought the world owed her something. So she left me. Moving boxes and suitcases.
We were meant to be—but not for each other.
****
As years pass by and lives slip away, you collect things that don’t exist. Things that could be but aren’t. Lives that you didn’t live. Or to be precise, lives that you didn’t keep on living—a collection of unlived lives. After all, you can only live one life, but what about all the rest? You realize that your dreams are no longer only about the future, but also about all the different lives you could be living. Nostalgia is a tricky thing. Do I really long for easier times and those sweet moments, or do I wonder what could have been if I had lived the rest of those frozen lives beyond their salad days…?
Originally published in Arkore 1: Salad Days.