A month ago, I bought TD a Peruvian blue opal. Palm-sized, the colour of Neptune, or a luxury hotel pool. She puts it on her chest when we’re watching movies; says she likes to visualise it pouring its outer-space energy into her heart.
‘Hey,’ she says, reaching over to scratch behind my ear with her metallic blue nails. ‘I had a dream we broke up last night.’
We’re sitting on the bedroom floor by the big, square window, looking out at the 7PM sky, drinking brown sugar milk tea from cartons. The opal is on the windowsill, charging in the light from the almost full moon.
‘You broke up with me, right?’ I ask, because there are still five months left on our lease.
She frowns. ‘No, it wasn’t like that. We were at a bar and it was late, the place had pretty much cleared out, but then the guy I was in love with when I was fifteen came over and told you to switch seats with him.’
‘Told me?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And I did it?’
‘Yeah.’ She smooths my hair down where she’s messed it up. ‘You left with his wife and I left with him. It was strange, but in the moment it felt completely natural.’
Whenever she starts talking like this, I feel a slight separation from my body, like I’m wading through snowdrifts on an empty street at night and the ground is slick and my ears are frozen, but I have an immediate task to focus on so I can’t fully grasp every word.
TD has an economics degree and works at a chain bookstore. I met her in June of the summer I spent deciding whether I should work odd jobs forever or try and get into digital marketing; the same summer I spent every night doing push ups in my room until I passed out because it was too hot to fall asleep naturally. On our first date I told her my role model was a character I’d seen in an episode of Law and Order: SVU, the kind and loving father of a schizophrenic murder victim. It was the only answer that came to mind in that moment. Later, TD told me she always asked her dates about their role models because she refused to be with a man who had too much respect for his father, which in hindsight, made me lose some respect for her.
I look at her knuckles, drawing swirls through the condensation on her drink.
‘What was his wife like?’ I ask.
‘She was pretty, you’d like her.’
‘Is he married in real life?’
‘No.’ She says it coolly, no false hesitation, no pretending she has no idea.
I take the opal, move to lie flat on my back and place it on my forehead. My eyes close. I can feel the barely perceptible vibration of the stone. TD is saying something and I’m not really listening to the words, but I don’t need to. The opal is channeling her voice so it feels like she’s putting her emotions directly into my mind. They’re faint, but they exist. I concentrate, trying to separate them, but it’s mostly boredom, so I let my mind drift again.
‘What do you think it means?’ she asks, and the question cuts through the noise.
I blink my eyes open. The sky outside the window glows indigo.
‘The dream?’
‘Yeah.’
I don’t say anything because I can’t. The more she pushes me to say what we both know, the more I freeze up.
‘You know I don’t really think about these things.’
‘I know. But I want to be able to be honest with you. Don’t you want that? We shouldn’t have to hold everything back to the point where we don’t say anything real to each other.’
She’s looking at me with her wide eyes, the skin on her cheeks and forehead shining like plastic in the light from the Himalayan salt lamp. She uses a Korean snail serum. She bleaches her hair with cola and it doesn’t really work. I don’t know if I want honesty with TD.
TD doesn’t have friends because she’s incapable of holding a conversation about anything she’s not personally invested in. She spends 6 hours a day on Instagram, reposting photos of luxury hotel pools in the desert. When she gets home from work, she does her skincare and watches YouTube until we go to bed. She’s always spaced out, thinking about “things”, but I get the sense that she’s just rolling the same three thoughts around in a mind that’s generally empty. When she talks to me, nothing normal comes out of her mouth, but it’s never interesting either. I know I wouldn’t think this way if I’d made some effort to become a better person, but at this point, it’s too late. I’ve come to believe that when you choose a way of living, you need to commit to it like religion or it won’t stick.
I consider her desire for honesty.
‘I don’t think either of us are good enough people to do things that way,’ I say.
She puts her drink down, smiles a little.
‘You know what I mean, though,’ I add.
‘Yeah. Fine.’ She takes my hand, shifts to lie flat on her back next to me.
‘Is it fine?’
She shrugs. ‘Maybe, I don’t know. Let’s see, I guess.’
