how we became human

she was in love with a man who left her. it was simple really, nothing that hadnt happened before, except that this man left her over and over again, so many times that she began to think it a trick. they had met late one night in a bus station outside of surrey, and the moment they began to talk she knew without any major tumult within her heart that she was in love with him, and probably always would be. they talked until dawn that night, and every other night before he was off to build cabinets for a man who lived in east london. they didnt kiss, not until the last night, but they talked of it constantly. she lay in his lap and traced the stern outline of his jawbone. he held her hands and kissed every wrinkle, every knuckle, and talked of her mind and how he had never met a more thrilling person, a person more familiar. the first time they kissed was the first time she had ever forgotten about the future. it was the first moment she had ever really, truly lived inside of. and then he left.
trevor said he would call but he didnt for days, and there was an equal measure of utter tragic hurt in her as their had been utter tragic ecstasy while they were together. and then the phone rang one day and she picked it up after 8 rings, and heard his breathing on the other line and cried without any muscles moving at all. he said he was so sorry, that he could not find a phone and that for days he was stranded in the basement of an artist he used to know in san francisco, and that things had gotten very strange and the only way he stayed OK was by thinking of her tiny sparkling hairs that framed her face and her bloody bitten nails and the way she was curious and searching always. he said he was coming back soon and they would be together for good, but after that call he left again.
he was gone for months this time, and there were days then when she felt nothingness so intensely that she forgot to eat. the sun would start to rise and she would realize she had never fallen asleep, that she hadnt even tried. there was nothing like sadness really, only the heart stabbing realization that things like this can happen. that someone can come along and color in all the shapes, and give meaning to a whole world of feelings that you never even knew existed, and which sometimes you believed didnt exist for anyone but the two of you, and then within weeks be able to wonder if you made it all up just to feel something, anything at all. if he was just a figment of your imagination, of what you had never known you always wanted.
one day she got a letter with drawings and letters and the most interesting pieces of things she had ever seen, playing cards with pin up girls from fifty years ago, a penny with a star punched through the middle. he said "i will color your dreams with thoughts so beautiful few throughout history have ever known the taste of them." and he did.
this went on and on. she began to date other people, laying quietly beside them crying as they slept, feeling trevor creep undeniably up her legs, through the soles of her feet and into her like a chill. she never told anyone of him, but was often struck silent when a memory came violently heaving past her like a subway car, leaving her reeling and more alone than ever.
time went on and went on and she heard from him less and less. she still thought of him, she still thought she knew that nothing could ever compare. she thought she knew that in her heart, that she was destined to live a life secondary to the life and the love she could have had with him.
she began dating someone and they dated for years. his name was charles and he was an adult, a type of man she had never known before, let alone love. there werent any excuses, there werent any fears. she did love him, passionately, and they had a happy life together. she hadnt heard from trevor in almost a year, and though she knew she should be glad of that, glad of how she had moved on and past him, secretly she hoped he would track her down. to prove this normalcy wrong, to prove the love she had so desparately believed in for so long.

one day charles came home from his job at the university. the second he walked through the door she knew there was something different about him, something scary almost. she looked at him from her place at the breakfast table.
hello she said.
its me, he said. but it wasnt his voice.
her heart was beating so hard that for a second she did worry that she was dying, hallucinating, that this was a heart attack or a true mental breakdown. she couldnt speak.
you know who i am, dont you? he said, moving closer to her, his step terrifyingly, queasily, incongruous with his clothes, his body.
she tried to catch her breath.
charles, she whispered. charles...
he pressed his lips together and shook his head slowly. no, he said. you know it isnt charles.
and it wasnt, that much was certain. they werent charles's eyes, it wasnt his voice, it wasnt even his body somehow, though it was. they were charles's clothes, the ones that hung in the same closet as hers. it was his hair, his skin, his bones. but it wasnt charles.
she still couldnt move. her heart was throbbing in her ears, the heat of it burning her face to the point of pain.
please tell me, she said, her voice still unable to rise above a whisper. please tell me what...
she let him come closer and closer until he was right in front of her. he knelt and put his hand, the hand that looked like charles's but didnt feel like charles's at all, on the side of her face.
ive tried, he said. ive tried to come back to you. this is the only way.
ive died, she said out loud. ive died, oh god. and she began to cry heavy dry sobs of panic and terror and joy and everything else she had always assumed death was like.
no, no. youre very much alive. how can i convince you, he said. how can i convince you that its me, that its ok now, that we are together again?
she shook her head. it isnt you. it cant be you.
he picked up her hand and began kissing each crease, each knuckle.
she closed her eyes and sobbed. it cant be you.
he put both of his hands on either side of her head and said, ive missed this. there hasnt been a moment without you, but things were complicated. they arent anymore, everythings worked itself out and thats how i can be here. i know its scary. i know you must be angry. i have to convince you though, that its ok now.
still, she wasnt sure if she was still alive. this couldnt be happening. she could feel him. her body was reacting to him the same way it did years ago, there was no denying it. it was trevor.
are you staying here, like this? i mean...are you going to be like this....in him...forever?
he shook his head slowly again and stroked her hair.he looked as happy as he was the night they met, the first time he ever did that. he had stroked her hair that night and shook his head, and said, this feels like something ive known all my life.
i just came back to tell you that it was real.
but this isnt? she sobbed
this is too. its all been real.
he led her by the hand into her and charles's bedroom. they lay down together on the bed and he told her the story of the time they spent together, as if it were a common fairy tale.
do you know what i call that story, he asked her.
no, she said, her face sticky with tears.
how we became human, he said.
if you leave me again, she said.
youre supposed to have gotten this by now: i cant. i wont because i cant. i never have.
and they fell asleep.

when she woke up she was lying in her clothes on the bed alone and charles was opening the front door. she peered around the doorway to see if it was him, and it was, wearing the same clothes trevor had worn hours before.
hello she said.
its me, he said.
and it was.

the corn cob closet

it was the summer she starved herself to death. we went to her parents lake house in hiawassee, georgia in june, when she was still being held together by the tenuous threads of her bones and sinews. she had been my best friend since kindergarden, and the last time i had seen her, when we were back from college during christmas break, her broad swimmers shoulders had been replaced by lacy collarbones, the muscles above her knees that clicked every time she took a step were smoothed out and all that remained was a shapeless thigh, a prosthesis. her face had changed, it had a structure to it, parts. the most unsettling feeling was the jealous one-- she looked better than she ever had before, and had she not been killing herself, i would have told her so. but i knew, in the way she looked at food set before her, in the sad way she carried herself, as if every step and every breath were more and more bricks of shame being stacked on top of each other, walling her into her own early death.
over that christmas break i watched the way people looked at her- men in cars passing us as we waited at the corner for the light to change; women in retail shops, eyeing her up and down over the cashmere turtleneck they were holding up to examine; boys we had known from high school, delighted in her new shape, the way her hipbones peeked out from above the beltloops of her jeans, the way her body resembled the very ideal they were prodded into admiring. i watched them watch her, and though i wondered if it was all part of a vain farce, i noticed how indifferent she was to it. all of our lives we had complained about our bodies, even in 7th grade when they were nothing more than awkward molecules colliding. in tenth grade we stood in front of my bathroom mirror and pinched the soft fat that cushioned the place where our torsos met our hips, our senior year we went on liquid diets before the prom. we said "at least your legs arent so big that..." and "i would give anything to trade stomachs with you." we competed in a complteley silent way-- if one of us did start to lose weight, the phone calls would decrease and it would suddenly be less fun to hang out. what was there to talk about, really, now that one of us assumed the other one felt prettier. the dynamic of the relationship rested on the fact that we were incessantly giving the other compliments, because we werent intimidated, because we could stand to receive some ourselves. but that christmas it became clear that just as i did not want to admit how good and thin she looked, neither did she. it didnt make her happy like we always thought it would, it wasnt something she wanted to brag about or even show off. we never mentioned it over those two weeks, and any time someone else complimented her i acted like i hadnt heard and she looked down at her new body and shrugged.
the moment i saw her as i stepped off the shuttle bus in hiawassee, i knew that she was nearly dead. her parents, two professors who were teaching summer courses at emory, hadnt seen her in weeks, and werent the type to worry anyway. they had called to warn me, saying "we think shes going through a hard time, and you can definitely see that in her physically." standing by the black suburban, wearing jeans and a tank top, she looked obscene. her elbow looked like a bolt, jutting out on either side of the tiny wire that was her arm. the jeans didnt touch any part of her leg, the shirt, meant to cling, hung from her collarbones as if displayed on a hanger. her lips took up half of her face and her eyes the other half. she was a house that had just been destroyed by a tornado, the only peices remaining were the essential parts, the ones that didnt really matter.

in the car i told her how shocked i was, i asked if she was alright, how she was feeling, if she was getting help. she said it was fine, that she was working on it and that it had definitely gotten better since school. this was a lie, clearly, for she was as disentegrated as a human body could be without collapse, without starvation. she said she was eating but had to slowly regain her strength, it couldnt happen overnight. she asked me questions, she tried to sound animated. at one point she even turned on the radio and made a lassoing motion with her right arm to a country song. not even the skin shook as she did it.
the house was pristine and the refrigerator was, strangely, stocked. there were no dishes in the sink, no trash in any of the cans. there was one dying plant, a geranium that used to be pink but whose petals had become rusty and weak.
you need to water that thing, i said after i had unpacked and we were sitting in the living room, me drinking a beer and her picking at the label. she put the sweating beer down on the glass table and said as she walked to the back bedroom,
its more interesting to watch it die.

the next day she suggested we ride bikes, despite my disbelief that she could even pedal. she told me she had been doing it every day for weeks, and that there was one place she really needed to show me. so we biked off into the winding, green hills that bordered lake hiawassee, her, as always, going faster and harder than me. we biked for almost an hour, not saying anything to each other, hardly looking at all the healthiness around us, the round hills and the colors that screamed. finally she pulled over in front of a dilapadated old barn surrounded by knee high grass and a smattering of yellow wildflowers. there was no front door, and there were entire walls that had been eaten away by the passing of time. inside were carpets of dead grass that had grown up from the old weathered floor, bits of wood and the remains of old furniture.
this is stunning, i said, catching my breath as we stood just inside the door.
just wait, she said, and walked to a tiny door i wouldnt have even seen, embedded in the side wall. i followed her and, peering over her hollow shoulder, watched as she pushed it open.
inside were hundreds and hundreds of corn cobs. all of them had been completely ravaged, every last kernel devoured. in places they were piled to the cieling of the small room, which could have been a large closet or pantry or maybe a childs nursery. there was one window across from where we looked, and through it streamed the yolky afternoon sun. the corn cobs looked two dimensional, like this room and everything in it were a photograph hanging in a well air conditioned gallery, or a painting on someones kitchen wall.
"why?" i whispered, meaning why here, why all of them, who, how?
"i dont know," she whispered back, her mouth forming one of the few smiles i had seen in days. "but isnt it delicious?"