I am going to finish this. So have faith in me, and throw a shoe at me if you don't see me submit anything else of this for a bit - though I will! o_o Needs a lot of work. Title from a Stars song.
The night kisses our old fears and desires, welcoming them home.
The radio on the bed played Top 40 and Danae sang along, though she didn’t know the words. She hummed and “ya-da-da”ed, walking around her apartment and sprucing up for the lovely little evening her neighbor Lisa had promised her.
She had been living in the city for a year now, and her company on the weekends usually consisted of her flippant and chemically blonde next-door companion, and the motley collection of friends the two of them picked up here and there. Being an extroverted youth in the urban world called for active weekends, which were also deserved for five days of eight-to-four work hours.
Her makeup table was littered with hand-mirrors, brushes and circlets of eyeshadow hues. Danae cleared them all away and pulled her purse out from under the table as she reached over with her other hand and flipped the radio off. She was out the door in the next instant, her keys chiming in her hand as she danced to the foyer.
Lisa had left earlier to pick up some friends from Batavia and someone from further east who had come in on a train, someone Lisa knew from her college days and whom she had been writing letters. Danae was supposed to meet all of them at the Comfort Zone coffeehouse and then they would hail a taxi.
Her heels clicked on the sidewalk and she swung her arms as she strolled, feeling generally light-hearted. There was nothing like a night out. The streets were busy, and dusk was breaking as shops turned on their lights and people slunk inside the bars and restaurant verandas.
The humidity clung to Danae’s skin, sucking her into the air and leaving her feeling exasperated and excited as she trailed the blocks to the Comfort Zone. The thick atmosphere made the city streets smell pungent, and cars that zipped by brushing a thin and cool breeze against her cheek.
She spotted Lisa before she arrived. She was wearing a buttoned down brown jacket and a little black skirt, her blonde hair alight around her face as she turned and waved at her down the walkway. Her and her three companions were sitting at a table outside, and they all turned as they saw her approaching.
“Hey, Danny!” Lisa stood up and gave her a brisk embrace as she reached them; the three strangers watched, sipping at their drinks. Smiling, her blonde neighbor angled toward them. “Danae, these are our three dining companions for the night: Alan, from the ‘Cuse, here,” her hand gestured to a portly, mousy haired man who still retained youthful freckles sprayed all across his face, both appealing and a put-off. Her hand moved over to indicate the black haired man next to him, wearing a suit and looking quite busy amongst them all, though he sat still just like the rest of them: “Damien, here; he deals at a casino.”
Lisa raised her eyebrows and gave Danae a brief glance before flicking her hand toward the last man: “And here’s Owen. We used to work together part-time at the radio station; you know about my stint there.”
Danae nodded her head politely to all of them, but the last man, the last face and his name vengefully attached to it, had dealt a fierce kick to her stomach.
Owen. The second the name had hit the air and sparked their surroundings electric she knew she couldn’t look at him, but she had to; she let her eyes slide awkwardly over him twice, before she averted them to the row of grande coffees with their cardboard holders on the table.
She was surprised, furious, comforted, by the fact that he looked more-or-less the same: styled dark hair, his eyes little almond bits that flashed an ink-blue. The only thing new was the small amount of facial hair on his chin; what she believed others called a “soul patch”.
He didn’t let the moment settle, but grinned in a strange way and held onto it. To Lisa, he said: “Yes, Danae and I know each other, actually.”
She wanted to slink down into the cracks of the sidewalk and hide.
“You do?” Her neighbor perked up, smiling like a little girl and laughing. “How do you know each other?”
“College.” Danae murmured, and then suggested they hail a taxi - before it was too dark out and the sidewalks were more crowded…
In which halos are slung.
Lisa sat upfront in the taxi, and everyone else crammed into the back. Owen thanked some sort of higher power that Alan and Damien were wedged in the middle; Danae sat at the far end, her face pressed against the window. She stared outside at the passing lights, pointedly keeping every speck of her focus off him.
On the other hand, he found himself unable to keep from repeatedly looking over at her. After all, it had been almost three years since they had last seen each other. And this sudden reunion, if you could call it that, was unsettling, intriguing and awakened a fountain of other bizarre feelings in him. What he had forecasted as a dull evening was suddenly fascinating and awkward; he felt like an adolescent.
She seemed to think otherwise, her nose up against the taxi window.
Lisa chattered on in the front, Damien sometimes answering her, Danae giving unintelligible responses. He leaned back, his thoughts a flood.
She had grown her hair out. When they had dated in college, her hair had been cropped short to form a thin honey-brown halo. She had looked like a cherub, her brow porcelain smooth. Now her hair fell down to her shoulders, ringlets curling around her face, hairpins holding them at bay. He had never once imagined that her hair would give way to free-spirited curls if she didn’t hack it short once a month like she once did.
In the front seat, Lisa twisted her body around and looked over at him. “So, how did you and Danae meet in college?” She was searching for saccharine conversation for their small group and beamed back at all of them.
He saw Danae’s lips twist subtely into an obvious expression of distaste. She didn’t want to mention a thing that would somehow transform them into an item in the others’ eyes. But still, for the first time she looked over at him willingly.
“We met in the dorms. We…” Owen answered first, stalling then as he watched her suddenly neutral expression. She was still attractive in that innocent, unbeknownst-to-her sort of way and he pondered their past. She finished the reply for him.
“We dated briefly. Ended badly.” She laughed it off. Lisa laughed too, recognizing an end to the conversation, and turned back around to spark another with the cabby.
He was amazed at how she had pinned down several months of sublime with such succinct sentences. He wondered if a bad ending made that much of a difference, if it soured every last aspect of the relationship; he had been young, or at least younger, and had made a mistake. He still remembered enjoying his time with her despite that, a sweet memory to call back at certain times.
He tried to remember her last name, and found that he couldn’t.
The Stargazer.
Creative writing class was a bad choice, Owen pined, a fumbling college student back then. He had been trying to bury the artist in him for years now, and he found himself forced to grumble over his poems, blushing an awful red. He remembered then how he had quit the dream upon discovery of his dislike of critiques.
And then there was fact that that girl with the pageboy looks, Danae whats-it, was in his class and recognized him from their dorm building. She was insufferably animated and also happened to be an editor for the campus literary journal, the Stargazer. The second she saw him sauntering to the front of the classroom with his crinkled poem in hand, she recognized his face and proceeded to pester him in the downstairs lobby of their building whenever she saw him with laundry basket in hand.
He would refuse to go down into the lobby with his friends because of this, in fear that because of her they might discover he was some sort of poet.
She would put down her own pile of laundry when she saw him, looking as if she would hop over the washer to succeed in her harassment, grinning from ear to ear.
“We need contributing writers. We need an increase in our submissions.” she would say to him. “Nobody writes anymore. Nobody cares about the journal.”
“I can’t help you.” He tried repeatedly to put his foot down, but she was persistent. And infectious. She cast him encouraging smiles in creative writing, and he began to look forward to them. After all, encouragement was something refreshing.
Eventually he caved. She took him out to dinner to celebrate, smiling brilliantly at him, like no one ever had before.
Back in her dorm room, she carefully unfolded printed out stories, reading them aloud to him and speaking of her dreams.
Duck, duck, goose.
The restaurant was full of people, and the waiter looked exasperated and red in the face as they were guided to their tables.
They sat away from the windows, near the back, an orb-shaped lamp hanging over them, a potted plant spreading it’s foliage over their heads. Alan from the ‘Cuse spent the first five minutes there trying to determine if it was real or not before ever glancing at his menu.
Danae held her unfolded menu up to her face, wanting to hide. She could see from the corners’ of her sight that Owen was casting her frequent surreptitious glances; she could just hear the puzzle pieces grinding around in his head as he tried to sort out his thoughts. She didn’t want to know what he was thinking.
The three men present decided to split Buffalo wings; Lisa and Danae both ordered dolma. As to be expected, they were forced to sit a half hour and chat before receiving their meals.
“How was the train, Alan?” Lisa asked, ever the conversationalist.
He looked up from lining up his forks and knives. “It was as good to expect from a train ride. Full of suits this time. They were all sitting behind me and kept talking, loudly, about the clubs they had visited in N’York. All the margaritas.”
“People brag in big company.” Damien said.
“So, you and Lisa went to college together then, Alan?” Danae asked, watching the waiters scurry like lab mice. “Do you and Damien know each other?”
“Yeah. I met the two of them back when they were in Uni and I was working at the local CVS, going to their parties. Never did do the whole furthering the education thing.”
“But you make more money at the casino than I probably ever will journaling.” Lisa mourned. “That’s why I worked radio for a while. Owen, we know what sort of money that brought us. Can’t make anything decent acting as a substitute DJ.”
“I worked evenings DJing for a short while in Rochester.” Owen reminded, but he didn’t sound particularly excited. “Not like I do that anymore. Good thing I minored in Social Sciences and have my job now at People, Inc.”
“You can’t make money doing what you love.” Lisa sighed, shooting Danae a critical look. “Right, Miss Freelancer?”
She plucked the lemon off the side of her water, frowning. “You live in the same apartment I do. You know I don’t make much, no need to announce it to the masses. But it’s my profession, so I’ll keep trekking onward.”
“You write?” Owen asked then, looking surprised and intrigued. She found herself feeling utterly indifferent to his curiosity, merely nodding in response.
She imagined what he thought. All of the time she had spent dreaming of being a writer, stringing up her sentences to make some sort of linguistic masterpiece. And she was actually living out some watered down, anemic version of all her high aspirations. Yet it didn’t really matter whether he was happy or scoffing at her, because who, in reality, was he? They had been in love once; but love faded away, like old acrylic paints, dusting off the pores of a canvas from another era.
She prodded her memory of him, of their relationship, and felt cold that there was no residue of emotion. There was the strangeness that hung over their table right now, but beyond that - she was removed from the world that she and Owen had once inhabited. She looked back and saw that Danae as something separate from herself, a mythical creature with strange habits and dreams much too big. All of the feelings once felt were now stories of that Danae, things she could ponder about but not feel in the core of her being.
It was disturbing how someone could be everything to you once upon a time, and then dissolve into nothing more than memory as acidic time took its toll. Electric firing of synapses in the brain; science was not romantic. She wondered if she was being human to feel such indifference.
She missed love, but did not feel it.
The food arrived and everyone’s eyes were turned away from each other’s faces, neurons leaving memories alone in that brief moment.
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