Starry Eyed

i love this story, and i don't know why. i think it's only saving grace is the nearly suffocating onslaught of visual imagery. yea, that's probably what it is. stories that i enjoy the most i usually leave with really distinctive images in my mind, that i can call up years later and fully understand an emotion, an idea. it's based on chicago. and the adler planetarium. and people who want to be unhappy because it's easiest for them, and they hate themselves because of it. actually, i should probably develop that more. i'll get that in the edit. and it's also about people who enjoy everything, who are constantly turned to a setting just below manic. the days when i feel like that are the best days i've ever had. you can laugh at yourself when you stumble on a step. you can get excited by the formation of fog right outside your mouth. you giggle just because of the way someone says "water". east coasters are ridiculous. that's why this story is about a city like chicago. whenever i'm in chicago--i feel a little manic.

As a star was collapsing into nonexistence, he was taking a bite out of a chicken salad sandwich, observant of how the celery crunched in between his teeth. This was the best chicken salad sandwich he’d had in a long time, recalling childhood family picnics under linden trees. This dissipated his feelings of worthlessness for not being on the granite steps of the planetarium, waiting for Lauren. Would she understand? He didn’t either. But years later this day would hold only a memory of discovering a café with forest green vinyl booth seats and dollar-ninety-nine milkshakes, a heaven onto the misery that was midtown, dense with people while simultaneously lacking anything enjoyable.

The planetarium was light years away, so to speak, forcing explorers through a series of highways, parking garages, subways, and city buses. Lauren had suggested it as a date option, after hearing his non-directed disgust of everything, with great excitement. She had been pensive about their relationship for days and decided, for his sake, not to be seen as a dull person, someone who is content with dates that consist of eating, watching movies, and walking around. Even though she was.

It was just the way he alluded to his life during forgettable conversations was unforgettable. To paraphrase, he was unhappy. Maybe he didn’t even say anything like that. He didn’t seem like a depressed person. He smiled a normal amount, if she had to quantify it. Maybe she was just reading too much into him, coming to unrealistic conclusions. But still… so she offered the planetarium, full of potential. She had been a frequent visitor and was hoping to regale him with her knowledge of all the exhibits and the funny back-stories you can get out of the tour guides with an overwhelming smile if they aren’t particularly cynical that day.
Sitting on one of the wooden benches near the entrance, she intermittently looked through the visitor’s map, visualizing the order in which to see things, catch the IMAX at 5:30 before it closes, and out past the glass doors to the granite steps and further out to the roundabout and the caravan of taxis and mini-vans and the slate sky sinking down on the city.
Lauren was an excitable person. She tried to subdue herself with dark clothing and calming tea mixes that made her apartment smell like a flower shop, wanting to be very much like the collected, powerful women on television shows that come on at 8 PM everyday save Friday. But she couldn’t be. Everything vivified her, from the sound of rush hour in the morning to the flashes of winter lights hanging on every dead branch of every downtown tree at night.
She was a red head and she grew it out, long and messy. Her green eyes made her face an experimental palette. The complete lack of pigment in her skin only highlighted this. Under the cities faltering fluorescent lamps she glowed at night—painfully pale. He was frightened by the look of her sometimes, so he tried to minimize their interaction to hours when the sun was up or inside locales with warm lighting. They hadn’t been dating long, a couple of weeks. Assuming this fear would wear off in a few days, he had only been more terrified when it didn’t.

He wondered if this made him shallow. Looking out the window on his right he visually dissected the trudging masses. He took apart their outfits—hats, scarves, earmuffs, gloves, overcoats, then analyzed their make-up or facial hair. Then he’d let them walk away, observing how they walked so straight, avoiding eye contact, maintaining expressionless looks of suppressed dread caused by another cold mid-winter day.
Decidedly none of the hundreds he’d examined over lunch were frightening in the same way as her, not one. Therefore, he concluded, finishing up the last bite of his lunch, leaving an inch of wheat crust, a shower of crumbs, and a renegade piece of wavy lettuce on his white oval plate, there was something else wrong with Lauren.
Check paid, three crinkled, soft dollar bills distributed on the lime green laminate table top, he walked out of the restaurant into the gentle onslaught of a windy day. The neon clock above the door said it was 2:30. He felt uncomfortable. His left hand shook slightly. His phone was in his left pocket. He knew she’d call, felt like every second his phone would ring and he wouldn’t know whether to pick it up or let it ring, muffled in his pants’ pocket. A few more steps north, look both ways, cross the street, on a new block he realized he wouldn’t answer, but he didn’t like that it had to come to that. He’d always thought of himself as respectable. Reliable.

Maybe when she called he’d lie. Traffic was horrible. I couldn’t leave work. Maggie was having an emergency—no, he’d have to pick someone she didn’t know, even though his friends were mostly her friends. He shouldn’t have said he’d date her. He never should have said yes to a friend.
It was freezing. He was angry because he had forgotten to bring his mittens to work. Maybe he hadn’t forgotten. Maybe he’d learned to hate them after Joel wouldn’t get off the subject, that “adults shouldn’t wear mittens” crap, successfully making him hate himself for listening, along with the only things that he had trusted to keep his hands warm. He reached into his jeans like a kid reaching for the first time into the garbage disposal after losing a spoon down the drain. He felt febrile. Maybe when she called he’d say he was sick.
She might spurn him, he knew. She’d corrupt all his friends, too. They all loved her. Then why don’t you marry her? He’d be shunned. They all loved the way she smiled and the way she could settle unimportant arguments like who should foot the bill, logically, and then laugh until everyone else was laughing too, ignoring the drudgery that was important, at least to him. Maybe when she called, but it was too late, it was five. He’d been stood up a couple of times, by girls he had felt comfortable around, and he hadn’t been forgiving.

Maybe when she called he’d tell her the truth. The wind was speeding up, funneling through the column of tiny skyscrapers that lined the avenue. He pulled the collar up on his black felt jacket. Not about him being scared of her, but that he couldn’t find a good reason to go. And he’d apologize. He genuinely felt sorry. Inspired, he began gesturing to himself with his right hand, the other hand clammy from clenching his cell phone. He caught a throng of teenagers across the street staring at him, bored by the heavy viscosity of a soon to be wasted Friday. He removed his right hand from the air, but this move was only transient. When he no longer felt their judgmental eyes he returned to plotting in the air what he could say and how to say it in a manner that didn’t make him sound like the horrible person he kept telling himself he was.
The rest of his walk home, twelve blocks consumed in half an hour, tacking back and forth in the wind, disgust rose exponentially, to a point where—half a block away, he broke into a sprint, up the steps, and with shaking hands unlocked the first door, barreled into the second one, tossed his phone across the living room, missing the couch and colliding with the wall behind it, and dove into his bed, hyperventilating for a time until he realized he knew nothing about why he did anything anymore.
She’d forgive him. He knew. She liked him. And when she talked to him she seemed happy. And he’d apologize. This was a disaster, she liked him too much.

Maybe when she called he’d just tell her he could never be with someone who got more out of life than the meager joy of a chicken salad sandwich. But she never did. It was 5:30, a show was starting, silence your cell phones, and digitized stars were flaring onto a wraparound screen. She giggled. It was lovely.