Blackout

I never wanted to be someone's everything, rather just what makes their everything so much brighter; but of course, I would never openly admit that to anyone. Oh, I used to be a silly little girl with all those silly fantasies that resemble closely the epitomic romance comedy. My role portrayed by Kirsten Dunst and my love interest cast by Ryan Gosling or perhaps Hugh Grant in his younger years as I have always enjoyed a man with an exotic accent. Our soundtrack done by none other than Auqalung of course.

    We would meet and at first, I would hardly be able to withstand him, I a hard working law student and he an aloof musician or the like. We would meet at a local college bar, the type that smells of sweat and alcohol and full of smoke and post-adolescent hormones only encouraged by the consistent grinding of hips on the dance floor. I would only be there as my friends practically dragged my studious rigid a*s to it, going on some spill as to how these were supposed to be the best years of my life and should not be wasted at a desk with my nose stuck in some book.

     And as these sort of stories go, it would just so happen that he would be playing there that very night. He would spot me in the crowd and slowly make his way towards me, waving to various people as he walked by. As he continued to get closer, I would feel myself close up and fill with contempt. He would smile and ask me my name and tell me how he had never seen me there before. He would continue on, not picking up on my indifference (or not caring one), making some comical attempt to pick me up. My friends would be completely won over by his whimsical nature but I only slightly amused by his persistence but not interested in him in the slightest.

     For weeks after our encounter, we would have all these awkwardly coincidental meetings that would frustrate me not so much because I was annoyed by him, but rather the fact that I could not focus on my copy of The Path of the Law by Oliver Wendell Holmes. Then one night, I would be at a local laundry mat and as I stood over the pea green plastic table of the dingy facility, he would walk in with a black plastic Hefty bag full of his dirty clothes swung over his right shoulder. He would come over and ask me for a quarter.

     From there he would continue his attempts to spark a conversation, spilling some of his mountain dew on his shirt as he popped open the can. I would continue to snub him out the best that I could while secretly stealing fleeting glances while he was looking away and chuckling silently at his childlike but endearing nature.

     Though I would have gotten there long before he did, my perfectionist folding would be no match for the way he would throw his newly laundered clothes back into the same bag that held them while they were dirty. He of course would walk with me to my car and make one last endeavor to ask me out, but I would reply with some caustic comment full with snobbery and insensitivity which would be a marvel to him as he pondered how one could fill something with insensitivity when insensitivity is the lack of sensitivity. Its like filling a womanly shaped glass with nothing at all, but you still drown once you are inside.

     He would go to his car contemplating this phenomenon while I tried again and again to start my car only to be bombarded with a noise that sounded like an old man trying to clear his throat with sandpaper, the sound of Cupid laughing at me.

     And as I sat there beating my fists against the steering wheel thinking that somehow my anger would intimidate my car into starting, I would hear him. Hey you, he would call out of the window of his rusty beat up eighties Volvo; you know the kind those musicians drive. Hey you, you need a ride? I would yell angrily at him as though it was all his fault, telling him how I wouldn't get in his car if I was dying and would only survive by riding with him to the hospital. He would reply calmly about how that was a perfectly illogical statement and that he always thought lawyers were all about logical thinking.

     The screen would then blackout for a fraction of a second, only to reopen with me sitting in the front of his car with a scowl that could frighten even the most ferocious beast, but I would look over to him and he would have this goofy grin of victory sincerely plastered upon his rugged face. It would be in this moment that I would realize that I love him.

    He would catch me gazing at him, and he would tilt his head slightly to the left and laugh. He would reach over gently and cup my face in his hand, but he would not kiss me just yet. My heart would race and I would close my eyes and embrace his warm soft hand with my cheek, allowing my body to become saturated with the ooey-gooey sensations of love, the hairs of my body standing at full alert as if small follicle soldiers preparing for battle, tiny needles roaming clumsily over every curve and plain of my body, no feeling of fluttering butterflies tickling the inside of my stomach but rather a feeling as if I had swallowed the universe and the heat from the sun undulated out to all the chambers of my body in a circular motion as all the planets revolved endlessly upon their axes, entangling all my organs into a fleshy big-bang, the sensation; a paradox, seductively excruciating.

     As we sat there in his car together, listening to Aqualung's, "Strange and Beautiful," I realized it was this moment that had been missing from my career driven life, it was this love that made me complete as a human , and it was this man that had dissolved the cold metal confounds of my being and replaced them with malleable structures no longer unrelenting to the world, but constructed by life.

     Well, like I said, a romance comedy, a frivolous notion, an unobtainable dream. Does it exist? For some reason, I feel that it does; I can savor the faintly sweet taste of nostalgia; I don't know, perhaps of a past life.

    *****

    That morning, Sophia awoke with a start. The bright yellow sun filtered through the white blinds, illuminating the miniscule fibers of dust that floated like dancing sprites around the atmosphere of her lofty apartment. It was telling her that it was well past the time she should have been awake.

"S**t!" she said to the crème colored walls of her college home as she fumbled for the alarm clock upon nightstand. She found it underneath a pile of scattered essays written about various notable court processions of the nation's past.

    The sun had told her right. She had overslept about an hour and now only had thirty minutes to get to the building where she would be taking her LSAT.

    She ran hurriedly about her apartment while thinking of how she could have forgotten to set her alarm; Sophia had never forgotten to set her alarm. She was extremely diligent, procedural, qualities that she had refined over her college career, qualities that she would need as she ascended from law student to practicing prosecutor. She settled on the idea that under all the stress of her upcoming test, she passed out while studying.

    Sophia picked up her bag and her copy of The Path of the Law by Oliver Wendell Holmes, and walked to her door. Upon second thought she turned around; she didn't have time to make a quick review of her book before she had to take her test. She tossed the book onto her hallway table causing her not to notice the small auto parts store laying underneath a quarter. On the wrinkled receipt was a messy note which read:

 

    Dear Sophy,

Thanks for the quarter, but most importantly thank you for making my everything so much brighter.

                                      Love always,

     Subastian

    

     Sophia took one last look about the room and took deep breath. She couldn't shake the feeling that something was different inside her, that something was missing, but she closed the door anyways, stepping out into the day that would determine her future.