andromeda

I met Seth for the first time when my mother married his father. He was older and had a life so he had not been able to visit until the wedding. 

“You must be the famous Mia,” he said, which pleased me because of how untrue the statement was. He had his hands in his pockets, and I was in a dress my mother had selected that cut me the wrong way.

“I hope it's alright that I took over your old room,” I told him. “Don’t worry. I won’t move any of your posters.”

“Be my guest,” he said. “Make it yours.”

“What if you move back one day?”

“Then I’ll think of you and how nice you made my ugly childhood bedroom.”

“I’ll leave the one of Micheal Jordan up, okay? It’s too iconic to take down.”

This made him laugh. He told me he was happy to have me in his life now, and we stood there staring telepathically at each other underneath the pretty lights of the venue.

The ceremony took place on the blazing green of an 18-hole golf course, and then the reception commenced in a large room with a polished dance floor. My mother was a beautiful but demanding bride. She kept sending family members off on frivolous missions and then chastising them when they returned without whatever it was she so desperately needed. Once, she clasped my hand and whispered she was nervous. I thought that was kind of sweet. I knew her first marriage hadn’t been ideal. My father had been critical of my mother, cruel at points, but to me he was affectionate, to a degree that made me feel ill when I recalled my youth.

At the time, Seth was twenty-five and I was seventeen. His mother had gotten pregnant when she was my age and apparently the whole thing was a big scandal back in the day, but now no one cared. I heard rumors about Seth having gone through something difficult when he was younger but I was never privy to the details. I imagined all sorts of traumatic events, weighing the scenarios up against my own experiences, as if to determine what would cause more pain and therefore warrant more love. 

Seth was handsome like a snowboarder. He had a very warm, chivalrous personality and guided me through doors and compact corners with the ghostly touch of his hand. We spent the evening drinking Champagne at our special reserved table and asking each other questions about our musical tastes. He had good taste. I told him I was impressed. 

Although we were glad for the union of our parents, we both agreed that marriage was a delusion founded upon arbitrary religious and cultural traditions that had become, in modern times, simply profit-driven. We Googled: what is the yearly revenue of the wedding industry? A flummoxing $57.9 billion. I couldn’t help pointing out that despite these facts, Jane Austen used marriage in her novels to express female eroticism and true love, and so I had a soft spot.

“Ah,” Seth said, kicking the tablecloth playfully with his patent shoe. “I see what my dad meant when he said when you were smart for your age.” 

“I’m not,” I said. “I’m average.”

“That’s what all the smartest ones say.”

Later, after all the speeches and dancing, we hollered after the newlyweds as they escaped into the night. I got a little too drunk and Seth held my hair in the gilded hotel bathroom. I shivered from sickness, and he put his arms around me.

***

When I was in my freshman year of college at UC Davis, Seth came up from LA to visit and we walked around the quad in the cold. It was winter break and the grass was hoary with frost. The leaves laid like dead souls beneath the gnarled trees. I had worn a big sweatshirt with my hands tucked into the sleeves and pointed with my fists at buildings where I had classes like: Topics in Diasporic Literatures and Migration. I had no interest in my life at present and lived for the slim possibility of happiness in my future.

In my little dorm room bed, Seth pressed his body up against mine and kissed me for the first time. I had had sex before but only as a means to succumb to external social pressures, never because I wanted to. He was very attuned to my sexual proclivities. He told me he wanted to make me feel good and I told him I wanted him to do whatever it was he fantasized about doing to me.

“Do you fantasize about me?” I asked him. 

“Yeah,” he said, sheepishly. “Of course.”

I hated when the sex was over and I had to return to my own emptiness. My body felt useless without Seth inside of me, like a piece of clothing waiting to be worn. I thought about asking if I could go home with him but I figured the answer would be no so instead I just hugged Seth with my entire body and saw him out to the curb, waving to him from the sidewalk even though the windows of the Uber were dark and he couldn’t see me.

After this we talked regularly, through various modes of communication. Almost daily I would receive some sort of message from him, a response to an existential quandary I had posed, or just a link to a sad song. Sometimes, after I got home drunk from a party, I would send him a photograph of myself without my clothes on and he would call me. He was generous with his compliments and made me feel good about myself, despite how much I hated myself. 

I once told him about how my dad and I had stopped communicating after my parents’ divorce and how I didn’t feel sad about not having a father, how I felt relieved. I explained that my father liked to buy me gym memberships as a young girl and advise what I wear to pool parties to play up my physical attributes. Jokingly, I told him about the things I used to do to myself to make me feel better, the compulsive, occasionally violent, rituals I would perform in my room, until I was left exhausted and defenseless, like an animal that ran too fast too quickly. Seth made a noise like he was in pain. I felt the prick of tears in my eyes but I didn’t cry. I told him I often worried I had actually enjoyed the attention my father gave to me, and that my mother was right and I was a sick person. 

Seth cleared his throat. I was worried about what he was going to say. I feared I had revealed too much and he would no longer want anything to do with me. Briefly, in the moment that passed between my confession and his response, I considered killing myself, and frantically tried to come up with a way that wouldn’t hurt but everything seemed too complicated and I resolved I would live the rest of my life alone and sick. I came rapidly to peace with the scenario. Then he said:

“If I ever meet your dad I will kill him.”

That made me feel better. I said: “Don’t worry. I think he’s dying actually. I heard he has gotten cancer. Stage four.”

“Good. I hope it's a slow, painful death.”

I could hear Seth moving about his house, putting a dish in the sink. He turned on the shower. I was sitting on my bed picking pills from my pajama pants and my roommates were out in the living room watching reality TV. My cellphone was hot against my ear. I thought of Seth naked then, his glorious torso and the canals of muscles that led to his groin. 

“Can I stay on the phone while you shower?” I asked him. 

“Sure,” he said. “I won’t be long.”

He set me down on the counter. I closed my eyes and listened to him wash up, slowly lowering my hand down into the elastic of my underwear.

***

Over Thanksgiving break my senior year, I stayed with my mother and Seth’s father in Sacramento for a few days, sleeping in and waiting for Seth to arrive but when he got there he was not alone. He had a new girlfriend named Charlie who had big white teeth and clothes that looked expensive. She had the gall to hug me and ask me how school was going. 

My mother loved her, she thought Charlie was just the right type of woman Seth could settle down with. Someone put together. In the hallway, Seth and I stood alone briefly, looking at each other. He was carrying her luggage and he smiled at me, a horrible smile that split through me like a knife. I went upstairs and slapped myself hard three or four times, watching the way my face turned red and blotchy in the mirror. Then I dressed for dinner in a low-cut peasant dress and wine-colored lipstick, leaving my hair down.

I doted on Charlie, complimenting her style, her personality, all the while flashing Seth seductive glances over my shoulder. He spent the evening sipping beer on a kitchen barstool, half watching the football game on the flatscreen television, and half trying not to watch me but inevitably watching me. When I was lying in his old bed that night, I thought I could hear him fucking Charlie in the guestroom, but I wasn’t sure. I remembered what I used to do and considered doing it again. Poking my stomach with the tip of a safety pin or setting my finger in the hot fold of a flatiron and counting until ten. But in the end, I decided I felt too tired to do anything self-destructive, so I just imagined my death instead, and Seth at my funeral, regretting never loving me back. 

In the morning, I could tell Charlie had been crying. Her eyes were all puffy and she would walk the long way around the island to the coffee pot to avoid interacting with Seth. I gave him a bewildered look and he rolled his eyes and reached over to try and grab the hem of my shirt, but I ran away, giggling. 

In my most elaborate fantasies, I imagined that Seth and I were together in the real world. The idea soothed me better than any coping mechanism ever had. I liked to imagine us showing up at family gatherings where he would surreptitiously hold my hand during dull conversations and at the end of the night, he’d help me into my coat and drive me home. I liked to think of my mother’s reaction, her shock, her disbelief. Someone as wholesome as Seth could love someone as fucked up as myself. When I felt really awful about myself, the fantasy became so wild, so outlandish I would laugh out loud ruefully, but other times, times like these, it felt possible, even if it was never going to happen.  

***

That spring, my father left me a voicemail that I listened to only after I heard he had died. His voice was gritty like sand and he was coughing a lot. He told me that he loved me. Seth tried calling but I didn’t pick up. There was nothing to discuss. I could relax now, my father was no longer a threat to my happiness and yet I wasn’t happy. I felt sad for him, for whatever it was that made him incapable of being a good person. In another world, I reasoned, he was a good person. Just the way I was.

Seth didn’t call again. We ceased communication all together, and our texts grew old and fell to the bottom of my phone. I went back on antidepressants and started hooking up with a boy from my friend group. The sex was bad but I think that was because of the high dosage I had been prescribed. Or maybe not. It was hard to tell what was a side effect and what was real life. I spent most afternoons in my friend’s room while he played video games on his computer, talking foreign gamer speak into his headset while I tried not to think of what Seth was doing while I was doing this. But it was okay. I was often too numb to fantasize.

At first, I liked myself better medicated. I no longer had to assimilate my circumstances and express them through emotion; I could simply exist without caring if I existed. There was something sublimely fake about this way of living, but after a while I began to long for the way I used to feel, even the bad way I used to feel. It was better to feel everything than nothing at all.

In June, I graduated and quit the antidepressant cold turkey. In a moment of self-reinvention, I went to a salon and cut my bangs. Seth had broken up with his girlfriend long before and when we saw each other that summer in Lake Tahoe, he congratulated me on finishing school and told me that I looked French. 

It was mid-August and the clouds over the mountain pass were voluptuous and ate the entire sky. Ralph had rented out a cabin that overlooked the lake. In the mornings I liked to sit out on the deck with my coffee cup hot on my knees and watch the jet skis zip off into the far reaches of the horizon, where sharp light accumulated. Down below, boats of varying size rocked in the dock like babies.

Seth was kind to me. We spoke of the world in the same philosophical way he always had. We spent the afternoons at the beach, as a family, getting our feet wet and then letting them dry in the sun. In the evenings the air got very cold, and people started campfires that crackled in the dark. Inside the cabin it was warm and rustic and my mother would open an expensive bottle of red while Ralph prepared a nice meal. Life was good, I thought, just like this. It would be alright if this was all.

One night after dinner Seth texted me: U awake? 

Yes, I replied. 

Come here, he said. 

When I walked into his room, he greeted me anxiously, as if I were something he wanted but didn’t know if he could have. I pulled off my t-shirt and he kissed the part of my shoulders where I was sunburned, the reddest part bedside where my straps clung. I felt very limp, and my head spun. On the bed, he set me on my belly and opened my legs wide. I put my face down into the comforter and tasted the slightly bitter taste of the fabric.

When we were lying together Seth told me that he was sorry if he had hurt me before, that he had spent a considerable amount of time worrying if he had done so, and felt that he needed to stay away, for my sake. 

“That’s crazy,” I told him. “Don’t ever stay away.”

We laughed happily and then I started to cry, a ceaseless, heavy cry that made me feel redeemed when it was over.   

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m good, I promise.” I rubbed my nose with the palm of my hand. “I’ve been taking antidepressants and a couple weeks ago I gave them up. I think I’m experiencing withdrawals.”

We were lying on our sides, knees bent, like two stacked chairs. The room was cool and blueish in the wee hours, and the rest of the cabin was quiet, our parents were asleep. He sat up to see my face and for some reason I didn’t meet his gaze. 

“Oh yeah?” He said. “Are you doing alright? I’m actually taking Wellbutrin right now myself.”

I looked at him then. His face was a sad shadow in the dim. I had never noticed the sadness before and I felt a new tenderness towards Seth, a tenderness that ran through my body with a force and I suddenly realized it was Seth who was in pain, not me. 

“And how's it working out for you?” I asked him. 

“Sometimes I think it’s doing something,” he said, smiling. “But I don’t really know. Each year that passes by I expect myself to change but I always feel the same.”

“Maybe the change is happening very slowly,” I said. “So slowly that you don’t notice. Like the way our galaxy is inching towards Andromeda and one day the galaxies will collide. Maybe that’s how healing is.”

I heard him snivel and I rolled his big thumb between my small fingers like a piece of clay. 

“Maybe so,” he said. 

“I love you,” I told him. “Can we be together now?”

“I don’t know. I do worry.”

“That's all I want out of this life. Just to be with you.”

“Is that all?”

“Yes.”

He was silent and we lay there not moving, just breathing. I looked out the window where I could no longer see the lake but I could hear it, the eerie clank of buoys and the hard break of the waves upon the shore, rushing up then retreating, over and over again, never stopping. 

Then I felt Seth exhale. He drew me closer to him and into my hair he said: “Okay,” and everything bad that had ever happened was done and over.