Tasha Coryell

The Ubiquitous Boy

He made his appearances most often when I was alone. The nights that I spent in front of the television until I felt panic wrap itself around my neck like a scarf, choking me. These nights he would join me as I pulled my shoes on and slipped out the door. I could feel the weight of his presence settle around my shoulders and press down on my hands like humidity. He would take my hand and we would walk in silence for awhile, listening only to the sounds of the city at night: the passing cars, an occasional police siren, the crickets chirping, and my panicked night time breathing. He would look at me. Watch my chest rise and fall, watch my feet move across the sidewalk. Watch my eyes flit from one side to the other. He would see these things and understand that it was anxiety flourishing before him.

I walked to the swing set of my elementary school playground, took my shoes off and let the pebbles slide between my toes. I sat down on one of the blue swings and he would sit down on the one next to me and we would hold hands as we slowly moved back and forth. Next to us was a yellow brick senior apartment building and I liked to imagine that a woman was peering outside through her blinds and watching us. Sometimes she saw a thin girl who swung back and forth, slowly, calmly, a frown frozen on her face. Other times it was a chubby girl that she saw. Someone who pumped her legs back and forth frantically, tears streaming down her cheeks. I wished that she would see a pretty girl, holding hands with a handsome boy. The heavy breaths coming from my mouth would not be ones of distress, but ones of longing as he ran his finger up and down my arm. My feet would drag on the ground, stop the swing from moving. My heels covered in dirt. We would laugh as he almost fell over trying to stand up. I would kiss him, under the impression that no one could see, that there was not a woman spying through the glass. I would take his hand, lead him into the gap in the bushes that circled the school building. I would not have lumps of fat around my hips and the black eyeliner smudged across my face from crying would be gone. I would be pushed against the Earth, dirt and broken bottles against my skin and I would be ambivalent to them. The woman looking through her blinds would watch us disappear and then she would go back to her life.
After those nights on the playground, walking along the edge of the park, along the busy streets of St. Paul, life always came back to me upon entering the thick dark wooden door of my house. Life came back to me sitting on the couch with him. I always sat on the right side and he always sat on the left. The third couch cushion served as a void. He sat, slouched down with his legs parted or with his feet resting on the coffee table. I sat, my body angled towards his body, my legs crossed with my foot curling around my ankle for a second cross. In between us sat the couch cushion. I had never paid particular attention to a couch cushion before. The interwoven scratchy threads with particles of crumbs that held on with decisiveness.
We talked about the movies, the weather, how raspberries were delicious, and how he liked to wear socks to bed. The couch cushion, it too had a voice. When I looked at it, a wide expanse stared back at me. “I am the space between you,” it said. “I am what is keeping you apart.” It collected the army of what ifs that marched through my head, catching them on the tortilla chip crumbs and the chocolate chip cookies pieces embedded within its fabric.

We watched movies together, tentatively passing the popcorn over the gap, making sure that our fingers didn’t touch. There was always a tense moment as our hands neared each other, my breath would stop for a second, caught in my throat. When the moment passed my heart felt as if it were pounding throughout my entire body from the ever so brief stimulation of an almost touch.

“I love that scene,” I said.

“What scene?”

“The one where he meets her at the top of the escalator. I think it is one of the most romantic scenes in any movie.”

“Someday, I will meet you at the top of the escalator.”

“But you aren’t in love with me, there’s a difference. We wouldn’t go back to your room and make love afterwards.”

“True,” he agreed.

True, he agreed, and it lay in the space over the couch cushion until it slipped down my throat and began the voyage down my body finally stopping to wrap itself so tightly around my ribcage that I could no longer breathe. At times like this the foot and a half distance between us raged like a storm over the ocean. I sat and watched the chaos that ensued in the middle of us and he sat staring straight forward. Eyes on the television, eyes on my cat in the corner. I counted down the distance, a foot and a half, 18 inches, my voice got smaller carried over that vast distance, making him turn to me and say, “what?”

I did not want him to know about our night spent in the park. The way that he would try to wipe away my panicked tears with his thumb, getting eye liner on the tip. How the old woman in the apartment building would watch us as I took my shirt off and he fumbled with the back of my bra.

“You don’t have to do this,” he would say.

“I know, that’s why it’s better,” I said. “Because I want to. Every part of me wants to, wholly and completely.”

I could not tell him how we would say those things.

“Nothing,” was all I could say, after he turned to me to say, “what?”

That ocean that floated over my middle coach cushion, that splashed about the rocky crevices of fabric. It evaporated at night. As I stared at my reflection in the window next to my bed, my skin swollen from my compulsive picking, my eyes bloodshot from exhaustion, he would come in. He would come not as a monster from the closet, but as sleeping pill. He would wash over me, curling his body around mine, whispering “its okay.” He was like the teddy bears that inhabited my bed when I was younger. They lay with me, making sure that no monsters were crawling out from beneath the bed and he would lay with me until my tears subsided. He would not ask why I was crying.

“Why you of course,” the answer would be. “I am crying because I see you glancing lustfully at other girls, but never at me. I want you so badly.”

In my bed he would kiss my lips, my nose, my eyelids. He would wrap his arms around my waist until I fell asleep. I was the little spoon, to his big spoon. I would be encased with him, amongst the blue and yellow stars of my comforter. Be held together by down feathers and fabric. Waking was the problem. Waking to find him reduced to a cell phone clutched in my right hand on the off chance that he would call me. Waking to find my face still swollen and trying to cover my baggy eyes with make up. I hated seeing him like that, reduced to the phone in my hand or a voice in my head.

He called me one night to tell me about his new girlfriend. Called to say that he wouldn’t be able to come over the next day because his girlfriend asked him to do something and he couldn’t say no to her.

“You’re a sissy,” I said.

“I know, but I love her,” he replied. “I can’t help it.”

I had a frozen moment when he started telling me about her. The clock seemed to stop ticking, my muscles stopped working. I thought the phone was going to fall to the floor.

“I’m very happy for you,” I said.

“Thanks.”

He called me one night to tell me about his new girlfriend. The girl with blond hair and blue eyes. I threw the phone when we hung up. I didn’t want to look at it anymore. I went into the bathroom and stared at myself in the mirror. I started frantically picking up my skin. Finding every little blemish and blackhead, pulling at them until it hurt. I took my tweezers and plucked my eyebrows until they looked like nothing more than raised red bumps. I collapsed in the corner between the wall and the bathtub. I cried. These were not the tears of anxiety, tears that existed only as a physical marker of the panic I felt inside, but tears of realization. He did not walk with me late at night when I had panic attacks and he had never seen me cry. When I curled up in my bed late at night the best I could do was hug my pillow, a pillow that had been hugged so many times that it had black eyeliner stains on it from my tears. He did not share these thoughts of mine, they were my thoughts, nothing more. The thoughts that I had and their realities did not belong to me, but to his girlfriend. Even as I sat there crying I felt that he would appear next to me. He would hug me and tell me that it had all been a terrible mistake. It had been a joke. A prank pulled to fool me. The trouble was, he wasn’t there, and I had no right to picture him there. I picked up a bottle of shampoo next to me and threw it against the wall. It landed with a bang and then slid to the floor.

“Tasha,” my dad was knocking on the door. “Are you alright?”

“I’m fine.”

I sat with him next to me, even though I knew I shouldn’t have him there. He sat perched amongst the long row of earrings that lined my ears and listened to me tell him how we were supposed to be together. He was supposed to pull the anxiety out of me and hold me until I was better. We were supposed to whisper vast statements of love to one another as we lay down to go to sleep. Before we slept we would have made love. I explained all of this to him, the shadow boy who rested on my shoulder. He nodded and smiled, but he never said anything. There were no statements of agreements or surprise. Even this shadow knew that he had a girlfriend and I was insignificant compared to that.

I still talked to him. Even in the lapse of our conversations, the afternoons we watched movies together, he would still come and slept beside me at night. He would make me uncomfortable by doing this rather than blissful as I had been before. He would kiss my nose and my eyelids before I fell asleep, but not my lips. He would no longer whisper I love you, but would order me around instead, telling me how I should get better rather than just being the comfort that wrapped around me.
I tried to purge myself of him. I stopped going for walks late at night. I called other friends so that there would not be a chance for me to be alone to think about him. I deleted his number in my phone and I started going to parties and messing around with guys.

“Look at what I’m doing without you,” I would tell him on my way home from these parties. “Look at all the people that want me.”

I reached my fingers down my throat and tried to pull out the pieces. A certain percentage of my body had become composed of the shadow boy and the curling boy. Just like a certain percentage had become composed of the real boy. I took these parts out of me and tried to separate them, clawing my way through the pieces with my bitten down nails. The shadow boy lived in one ear. Perched on cartilage and flesh, I would talk to him and he would always reply. Curling boy lived in my belly button. He was centered around my waist. That’s where his arms wrapped around me, where our bodies met as we curled up in bed. The real boy lived in my rib cage. He liked to stand on my ribs, putting pressure on them until I couldn’t breathe anymore.

Shadow boy was impressed when I did things with other boys. He was the jealous type and he wanted what others got. He watched me drink and get high and the whole time he would be saying, “You know, you don’t have to do this to impress me.” I wouldn’t listen to him. He would, I knew, like me better if I embodied the things that he was. Curling boy kept watch over my diet, my work out plan. He would run his fingers along my rib cage, counting, one, two, three, four. My legs became a source of commentary. How much muscle they had, if they were the right size. Sometimes shadow boy would come in and comment upon whether or not I was attractive enough.
“Her hips are too wide, her boobs are too small. She has zits on her forehead.” Shadow boy was a perfectionist and expected the same ideals in other people as well.
Curling boy would hug me tighter when I was thin. I figured it had to do something with the misogynist view of female frailty. The smaller I was, the easier it appeared that I could be broken and he wanted to protect me. I liked it when he would do that. I felt safe from things that could hurt me, like the real boy who lived on my ribcage.

The real boy and I no longer sat on opposite ends of the couch. It was not a couch cushion that stood between us, but a person. Who, compared to the couch cushion, looked like a giantess. I had never met her, only seen pictures. These pictures appeared as real before me as the presence of shadow boy and curling boy. The pictures of her and the real boy kissing, holding hands. It was a camera act I decided, because I could not imagine that she could possibly be closer to him than I was. It had just been a couch cushion between us. I could have moved over at any moment, but I didn’t. I had gotten stuck, blocked by the crack in the seats. I could conquer a couch cushion, cross that vast expanse of air, but I did not think that I could beat blond hair and blue eyes. I was the opposite of this girl, where she had the body of a teenage boy, I was dark and curvy. I was not what the real boy wanted and so he stopped calling me and when his number disappeared from the back of my throat I stopped calling him as well.

It seemed wrong to me that I hung onto him. That I tucked shadow boy and curling boy into my coat pockets, into my purses, into shopping bags. I carried them everywhere with me. They were the binge to my purge. They were what filled me up after I emptied my insides out yet again. A sweet temptation that stood before me that I could not resist even though I knew it was foolish. I could not let them go, these figments, these strands of the real boy. For these figments, even though that’s all they were, that was all that I could get and when I lay in bed at night with curling boy I hung onto him so tightly I was afraid that I would kill him. Afraid that I would smother the life out of his bones. They filled me up. I could never truly be empty for when I started to cry or panic, they would be there to comfort, to love, to touch. They still never asked what was wrong, for the answer was unchanging.
“You of course. You are what is wrong. I want you so badly, but yet you went for her. We were supposed to be together, don’t you see? I had it all planned out, how you were supposed to rescue me. I wouldn’t have been anxious anymore. It would have been perfect, you and me.”

He had been what was wrong for such a long time. He was the one that caused me to panic at night and he was the only one who could fix it. That empty space between us had bloomed into something much larger. My rib cage hurt, my throat hurt. Nothing but his presence could reduce the throbbing that passed from one arm to the other and then down each leg. Shadow boy had to come in to stop the pain. When my head became filled with images of her, curling boy would wrap himself around me and put a blindfold over my eyes and so I would go to sleep. The real boy had no idea how he had hurt me with space. How the empty air stung my eyes and made the gouges in my fingertips burn. He no longer lived in anything tangible like the telephone, but existed entirely in the concept of air.

One day I woke up and it was raining. The sky was overcast and grey in a way that informed me it would be raining for quite some time. I slid out of bed and into the kitchen to eat my usual morning bowl of cereal. I poured myself a bowl, but when I went to get milk I realized that the carton was empty.

“Shit,” I muttered.

I went into the bathroom to start getting ready and I realized that I had blood all over my underwear. I always forgot when it was that time of the month and the blood often sprung on me as a morning surprise. Due probably to the disproportionately large amount of female hormones in my body I started to cry. There were no thoughts attached to my crying, the tears did not hold the name of a boy or a friend, but they fell empty from my face. I searched for curling boy to come hold me, to wipe away these tears.

I couldn’t find him.

I checked underneath my pillow, under the bed, in the pages of my book. I stuck my finger in my bellybutton to see if he had been caught there. He was nowhere to be found. My chest had begun the ever steady increase of its beat, the pounding that over took my sense of time. I needed curling boy to pull me so tight that my heart would stop beating all together. My heart hurt in a greater sense than when the real boy stood upon it to crush it. I was not longing for a sensual embrace, but the simple act of being held. Someone’s arms supporting me and someone whispering, “Its okay.”

I had expected them to be there, these figments of my imagination. Unlike the real boy they would always be next to me, around me. They would always know what I was thinking. They would know that I had a bad morning and that I needed someone to comfort me and remind me that it was just a bowl of cereal and the rain would leave in a couple of days. They would be there for me.
They didn’t come.

I found myself hugging air. That girl, that girl in the way, she was the one hugging him, being held by him and I was left alone to hug that air that should have been filled by him.

“What wrong?” I asked myself.
I never knew what to say when the answer wasn’t him.