I have never been a fan of DJ’s, even less so a fan of the amateur artist atop the dingy stage over at Milo’s Club/Bar/Hotel/Probable Brothel, and it is for this dislike that I cannot reason why I find myself there on a tired Thursday night.
The slogan for the club is 'where the heart goes to beat'. From the head-pounding way repetitive off-beats pound over otherwise treasured 2000’s classics, I figure a more accurate slogan may be 'where the liver goes to die'. Or perhaps, 'where the stomach goes to empty'.
My friends wink at old men for margaritas and other concoctions of sugar and fairy floss and salt (to emphasise the sweetness). They don’t care about the DJ, and I am mortified that I have befriended such heretics.
I find her nursing a gin martini, spinning an olive on a toothpick, looking thoroughly unamused. I relate, and this is my reason for why I choose to sit down opposite her. My first words to her are my correction to the bar slogan. I don't think she finds me funny. I introduce myself. I only tell her the important things: my name, my age, and how much I'd like to get to know her. To my outstanding relief, she feeds me a smile, and I gnaw at it with a warm heart. From that gorgeous, stoic face, I guess that she is a nurse, and she lets a laugh loose, asking me how I knew, telling me nobody's ever guessed that before.
It is here, under purple lights and the dreary watch of a novice DJ, that I decide that she is going to be my next biggest problem.
I am slow to shuffle closer, pressing my face in her direction, tilting my head to the side, asking a question that she answers by pressing her lips over mine, sealing the deal.
The kiss tastes of dry gin.
___
And thus begins my quest for love, starting in Milo's and continuing back to a cafe the next morning, ordering overpriced avocado toasts with hummus.
I wonder aloud how many pastes and spreads they can put on one piece of toast. She raises an eyebrow at me and takes a large bite. I wonder if the reason she is so quiet is because the waitress appears seconds later from behind me, close enough and quick enough to have easily heard me. I am embarrassed as I wave her away. I wonder if she would have agreed with me had the waitress not been there.
The café is in an older mood today, playing 40 year old songs I don’t know the titles of, reflected by its 50-something demographic: the shaky-handed barista with a thumb an inch shorter than that of an average thumb, a businessman with a large belly and a larger forehead rubbing his temples over a laptop, two old ladies fiddling idly with knitting needles and gossiping, a third so deeply invested she’s left her needles to one side.
I wonder if she knows these songs too: knows that they’re the introductory music to what we are about to be. I wonder if she doesn't remember the titles either, but she can remember every lyric just as the women sing them, mouthing each word a beat too late.
Across from me, she smiles into a second bite, and I forget myself.
___
On my quest, I find we are like a musical: dramatic, and volatile, and never-ending.
Our interactions are few: she is a nurse, after all, but they are fruitful.
She invites me to her house within the week, showing me where she keeps her spare key: under 5 specific pebbles in one of several potted plants on her front porch. I tell her there's no point having such a good hiding place for a spare key if she's going to go around telling everyone she meets where it is.
She gets a small frown on her face, and I pause, furrowing my brow: Did I say something wrong?
And then she gives that sweet little laugh again, and I fall in love once more, all forgotten.
She tells me she trusts me, that I’m not just ‘everyone’. I don't understand, but I nod with a solemn face, like people do. Like when people say meaningful things, and other people nod with a solemn face.
I meet her dog and her cat, and she eventually meets my roommate, who is rather like a cat herself. Initially, she doesn't look thrilled that I live with another girl, but after meeting her and her avoidant, cat-like tendencies, she understands why it doesn't matter.
A second reason why it doesn't matter who I live with: I end up spending all my time at her place. She has (functional) air conditioners and a spacious apartment, which is empty for half the week anyway when she's off at work, so I have plenty of reason to spread out my study notes on her floors, batting away her dog from slobbering all over them, and pretending to work.
There is, however, no reason for me to explore her bedroom hours later.
It’s nice to meet you, I think to collages of printed selfies and collages of greens and yellows and reds and time passing like trees falling.
It’s nice to have you, I greet a quiet alarm clock by flicking through every radio channel, almost flinching at static before I lower the volume, frightening away her cat in the meantime.
It’s nice to know you, she has a record player, just like me, and I keep it in the far back of my mind until she comes home, and I lose all memory of ever meeting, having, knowing, loving her room.
__
On my quest, I find that she has strange, unreasonable habits.
She gives me a weak smile when I come to greet her after a long shift, even as the rest of her sags. She turns away with heavy eyes, and I wonder if she is soliloquising to an audience I cannot see. I wonder if she’s singing a solo, and I wonder if I should take her out to karaoke sometime.
I wonder if she's singing about me.
__
Just like a musical: she captures me with her song, her smile, her speech, and I am blinded when the lights come back on.
__
One of her few paid annual leave periods is coming up, and I pitch the idea for a road trip over a B-52's record spinning quietly on my record player: I'd never remembered to bring my records over to her place, but by coincidence today we'd ended up back at my place.
She beams at me, and all checkpoints of my quest for love flash through my mind, the last few months building to whatever we are.
I've been lingering at rings. I've been looking at real-estate websites. I've been looking at how to adopt kids, what apartments will or won't allow a pet. Or four.
I've been looking at dropping out of my classes.
There is no reason for this.
__
My quest, her paid leave, our road trip takes us rural: places I've never been, but places she seems to recognise from childhood road trips. She insists we go to at least three wineries. I am surprised at this, since she'd been drinking gin the night I met her, but I shrug it off, teasing her for being old and wasting our budget, but pulling up the best reviewed one on Google Maps anyway. She laughs me off, placing her hand over where mine rests on my thigh.
__
My quest is fuelled by petrol station ice-creams, licking tangy mango from her lips. By hiding from the siren songs of the outside world in overheating cars with her hands over my ears, fingers tracing my earlobes, her breath tight against mine, and I am enraptured.
__
What we have is like a musical. And, in its most detailed renditions, it is like a song. These are the interesting parts: when we are together, laughing, melting into each other under the sun. There are the lonely parts: when we are apart. And then there are the parts in between: the large gaps of silence, when we are together, just existing. She smiles in these parts, eyes creasing in that conventionally unattractive manner I have been brushing off for several weeks. I cannot stop myself from feeling purely awkward.
Do I smile back? If I do, do I ensure it is equally unattractive? Do I lean in, like that first night?
I am unsure. I am insecure. I ask her for the reason she loves me. She smiles again, a little confused.
"You just know me," she explains. I raise an eyebrow, trying to ask for a more detailed reason, but she leaves it at that. I think I see a look in her eyes that tells me something more. One song ends, and one starts anew: a quiet song, falling into something unfamiliar, and unstable, and I reason this moment as the start of whatever happens next.
__
We bump into a cute, hole-in-the-wall jewellery shop.
She ogles at a particular gold ring, with a green gem. I figure it is like the sun on grass.
I surpass my budget buying it.
__
I've been stuck in La-La Land lately, more-so than usual, and she tells me so with a flick of a nail against my head.
I blink instinctively, keeping my eyes on the road ahead. This is a rented car, hers being at the mechanic, and I have no plans of crashing it before we get home.
She sighs over the radio crackling, tedious podcast hosts laughing, her disappointment building into that song, like lonely night creatures whimpering amidst themselves, voices torn, or ghosts murmuring about the lives of others, or men gossiping over dented wooden bar tables. She doesn’t talk for the rest of the ride, and I know what is to come.
__
"I don't know what you expect from me," she confesses over our entrees.
Nobody knows the name of the brown-bricked restaurant we’re in, just that it's the closest thing to the fancy, rich lifestyle any underpaid university student could muster. I'm paying for this meal: not that she ever seems to care about that. She’s a nurse, so obviously she doesn’t care, but every time I hear her say it, I recoil. She makes poor financial decisions.
I have every reason to break up with her. What is left of my memory, my emotions have been skinned and laid bare on our dinner plates.
I do not care about this when I reach into my pocket, feeling the outline of a ring box in my pocket.
"-completely disconnected," She finishes her sentence with a bitterness that hadn't been there moments prior, and I sit up a little straighter, retracting my hand from my pocket. Her eyes seem to flicker downwards, her mouth opening to ask a question, before shutting abruptly, stopping herself.
Ask me what I was about to do, I think to her, hoping for telepathy. Ask me.
I lean forward to hover my hand over her arm, and goosebumps claw from lonely skin sockets to meet what warmth I have to offer. They cry for me, louder than her words ever could, singing, and something is going wrong. I want her to talk to me.
She gets up from the table and leaves. I eat my words for dessert.
__
I do not waste my funds texting her back after that night. I do not text the friends I do not have anymore.
I wither.
__
I clean my room out feeling hollow. A pair of tattered jeans I tear a small, spiteful hole in before I fold it neatly and place it in a bin. A half-drunk bottle of Japanese gin I pour out my window. A gold necklace with a locked pendant. I do not have the key.
I lay my records to rest, and I will never hear these songs the same again.
