Sean is not you. Sean doesn’t drag me from bed at three in the morning, mouth pasty, eyes red, to marvel from my window at the homeless couple traipsing through the snow. Sean isn’t awed, doesn’t say it’s beautiful, these two people battling the elements wrapped in a dingy blanket, holding hands. Sean doesn’t sit cross-legged in my bed eating beef with broccoli from the carton. He doesn’t read his horoscope aloud from the astrology app on his phone while trying to brush his teeth, his words garbled, foam covering his bottom lip. I am not upset. Sean is not you, but I am not Sean’s Dominican ex-girlfriend Elena. I can’t cook arroz con habichuelas, sancocho, or revert to a native tongue when I’m angry or having an orgasm.
Sean lives in the apartment across the street, the one with the Christmas lights still dangling from the fire escape in June, Salsa blasting from speakers positioned in the window. Well, the Salsa is gone now. Elena cheated on Sean and left him, taking the radio and the music with her. Sean claims the only things he learned from Elena were some vulgar Spanish words. Sean is not as tall as you and there’s a gracelessness to his movements. His knuckles bear the evidence of his past, the rough indentations of violence. Your hands were slender, your gait athletic.
A few nights ago, he was moving on top of me, but something made him stop. He put all his weight on his palms and held himself above me. There was sweat on my stomach from where our skin had been touching. The breeze coming through the window made me shiver. His belly is round, a slightly protruding pudginess. He has a scar above his belly button from when he was stabbed on Riker’s Island. I like to trace this scar with my tongue, like to feel this rough, disfigured skin. You had no scars.
“What?” I asked, staring up at him in the semi-darkness of my bedroom, my legs wrapped tightly around his waist.
“Nothing,” he said. He closed his eyes and settled his weight on me.
It wasn’t ‘nothing’ though. It was a moment, our moment, our chance to exorcise demons, pour holy water on our terrors, melt the silver bullets and make jewelry, remove the garlic that hung heavily around our necks. We lost our chance. I was lost in thoughts of your taut, Black skin, and the way it stretched lean across your shoulder blades. Sean couldn’t escape memories of Elena’s silky, red hair spread across his pillow. You and Elena are disfiguring scars, red and inflamed. You and Elena are amputated limbs; long gone, yet we still feel the itch, although our arms now end at the elbow.
#
I had to get a roommate. I posted an ad on Craigslist. Specified a female, non-smoker, no pets, consistently working. The lucky girl was getting your room. I had nineteen responses within four hours. I planned to tear down your poster of Dr. Umar Johnson, paint over the green you’d chosen for the walls. Every time I walked past the threshold, I hyperventilated. I saw you stretched across the futon watching football. I saw you taking a swig from a Corona I’d just passed you.
I set up interviews. The first girl arrived fifteen minutes early and sat on the arm of the couch. She was petite, with small lips and an accent I couldn’t place. She told me she was originally from Russia and had studied ballet in her country. When I asked her if she was currently in school she said, “Stupidity in a woman is unfeminine. Nietzsche.” I couldn’t imagine sharing an apartment in Harlem with a Russian girl who quoted Nietzsche. I thanked her for her time and said I would text her.
The rest of the afternoon went slowly. I rejected one woman after another—for being late, for being early, for being ugly. The eleventh girl seemed like a match. She was a bubbly Cuban with nice manners. She inspected the room, her eyes traveling from the futon, to the poster, to the broken nightstand in the right-hand corner.
“You can throw everything away,” I blurted. “I used to share this apartment with my boyfriend, this was his room, his sort of man cave. For when he had friends over or wanted to watch TV or something.”
“Wow. You were a nice girlfriend.”
Was I a nice girlfriend? If you were here I would ask you. Am I the type that plays house with a man, gives him the extra bedroom even though I need an office to write? Am I the type that allows myself to be interrupted while typing in the cramped corner of the living room, a small area with an even smaller desk, just so I can bring you a beer? These didn’t feel like sacrifices at the time. I would curl up in front of you on the futon, the metal bar jabbing me in my hip, aching for you to put your arms around me.
#
I asked Sean if he could be an animal, which one would he be?
“A turtle,” he said.
“Why a turtle?”
We were sitting at the kitchen table eating dinner on real plates. He made the spaghetti and I baked the dinner rolls. He refuses to eat in bed, hates Chinese food.
“When I was on the island, whenever there was a fight, they would call in these big dudes, niggas wearing full riot gear and everything. They would be wearing ski masks with helmets and padding all over their bodies. We had to get down on our knees, hands behind our heads. We couldn’t even look at them, wasn’t allowed to. If we did, they hit us with their sticks. Wham!”
His palm slapped the table, making the salt shaker jump.
“They was called turtles,” he continued. “Whenever we saw them niggas coming we would yell ‘turtles!’ to let everyone know to turn their head. I want that power. I want to be a turtle.”
His parole is almost over. He has a job delivering The Daily News. We talk about moving in together, me giving up this apartment and carrying my stuff across the street to his. This is tentative whispering done in bed late at night, when we are both drowsy with sleep, the make-believes and what-ifs, and possibilities. These scenarios are forgotten in the morning, discarded in the light of day. I see you in every corner of every room. I would never move in with him and compete with Elena’s shadow.
“What animal would you be?” he asked.
“A cat,” I replied. “I have experience being a dog. Cats are classy animals, independent thinkers, willful creatures that obey only their own instincts. Cats are catered to and cared for. I will never again exist solely to cater to someone else’s whims and needs. I am a cat.”
He stared at me strangely. “You talk like no girl I ever met, like no other girl from around here.”
“Stupidity in a woman is unfeminine. Nietzsche.”
He looked confused and I knew he didn’t remember my story about the Russian girl. I suddenly wanted to cry because you would’ve gotten it, you would’ve laughed.
#
Your room is still unoccupied. I managed to rip half the poster though, the sound of shredding paper fueling my courage. I don’t feel so alone when I peer up at Sean’s fire escape in the middle of the summer and see Elena’s Christmas lights still draped over the railing.
#
I went to your job a few weeks ago. I pretended to shop, wandered the aisles clutching a red basket, picked up carrots and canned peas and bread. I kept waiting for you to emerge from an aisle, wearing slacks and dress shoes under your smock, barking orders at the check-out girls and front-end supervisors. I walked the entire store, smiling at people who recognized me, looking away quickly before I could see the questions in their eyes. I finally approached a skinny woman with an arm sleeve of tattoos and asked her if you were working. She popped the gum she was chewing loudly and was silent for so long I almost repeated the question.
“Nah,” she said. “He’s on vacation.”
I stumbled out of there, threw the basket on the floor. I took a cab home, crying the entire time, ignoring the driver’s pleas to just answer his questions: Did I need to go the hospital? Was I in pain?
Did you take her with you? Did you enjoy Cancun with her, visit the places we dotted with the permanent red marker, visit the clear, blue beaches and white sand and five-star hotels? Is she as pretty in person as she was on Instagram, as articulate as the text messages I read when you forgot to take your phone with you in the bathroom?
#
I remember my cousin Diane brought her daughter over to visit once. The daughter was no more than two, and she was enthralled with this one particular toy. It was a box with shapes cut out of the sides and she had to figure out how to get her shapes into the box by sticking the correct shapes into their corresponding cutouts. I remember her aggravation, her sitting there on my living room floor, practically in tears, trying to figure out her shapes.
I have to stop trying to squeeze rectangles into squares and circles into triangles.
#
I could never be a cat. I have too much loyalty, too much to prove, a tendency to please. With Sean’s arrest record, he could never be the turtle he imagines.
#
Sean is not you. He doesn’t mind when I don’t shave my legs for a few days or that I soak in the bathtub for hours. He’s good with his hands, finally put together that bench that’s been sitting in the hallway for months. His parole is over. They gave him his own newspaper route. We celebrated by making spaghetti. We sat across from each other at the kitchen table and discussed trying to find an apartment somewhere in Brooklyn, a two-bedroom. He said we could turn the smaller bedroom into an office.
I finally went to his apartment. It was winter by then, but I took those Christmas lights down anyway, shoved them in a bag, and threw them down the garbage chute. I listened to them hitting the walls inside the walls as they fell those few stories, listened until they landed with a thud somewhere below.
It is not as simple as throwing away lights or ripping down posters.
But we will try.
************
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