April 12: Tai, Metro

[kinetic_elaboration]

I conceive of this as related to this other scene but I guess it doesn't have to be.

Tai-centric, some past Tai/Van, post-rescue, 700 words, 21 minutes

*

She's staring out the window of the train car, following the pattern of flashes of light, stretches of darkness. There's a trance feeling to it, and to the rock and sway of the car as it moves along the track. She reads the name of each metro station when it stops, and the doors open and then close again. This is partly to remember where she is and to get off at the right time, partly to keep that hypnotic, swaying, drifting, mind-buzz-buzz-buzzing feeling from washing over her too much.

When she first started hooking up with Van, their senior year, she told herself they'd break up by graduation—they didn't have much in common other than soccer, and the relationship wasn't sustainable, because they'd be veering off in different directions soon. Can't be out in Wiskayok anyway. And maybe if there had been a graduation and a summer before college, that's exactly how it would have all panned out.

Sometimes she rubs at her wrists and remembers sleeping with a rope around them. That's symbolism, like they might talk about in her English class, if her professor wasn't always talking about Freud. That's something that really digs into her brain. That's like a wedding ring, or a type of vow. Being tied to someone like that, so literal, it's like even when the knots break you're still bound for life. 

And that should have changed everything, just like being part of that soccer team that got stranded in the woods for a year and a half should have changed everything, but the straight and narrow path is too strong, always pulls her back. So they did break up and they did part ways and she still rubs her wrists like a nervous tic sometimes. Something lightly ironic that she can't untie: she always wanted to leave Van and go somewhere else and be out and be free, somewhere big enough where being gay didn't matter, somewhere that's not New Jersey. And then Van left her instead, because she was too scared to come out to her mom and dad, and she ended up right where she thought she'd be. Out, but far from home, and alone. She's a regular at the gay bar closest to her apartment. Once, flirting with a girl who could have been her girlfriend, if she'd tried a little harder and actually called, she'd almost mentioned her ex-wife. 

As if she weren't too young and too fucking gay for that. Freudian slip. 

Last August, in the space between the end of her internship and the start of the new school year, she'd cut off all her hair again and got a new wardrobe, stuff that makes her feel masculine, stuff she thinks Van would wear. She'll be high femme again in the future. She knows it even now. This is like a costume she's just trying on, because everything is, because everything's just an attempt to take back that lean and powerful and brave persona she had when she cut her hair the first time and started traveling south. Even if it didn't work. She'll bury that part. She only takes what she wants from that past anymore anyway. 

The ripples, echoes, flashes of it. A bad dream she can't even always remember. 

At one time, she thought she'd never leave. God. She thought of this life she has now and there was no freedom in it; she thought she'd be too haunted to go on, and her world too cramped and small; she thought she'd never get to be her truest self in it again. 

That's maybe true. 

The train car stops, and she stares up at the rounded, high, vault of the ceiling, the pattern of square, brown, hollows that climb up the wall. Leans the side of her head against the window while a stream of people flows out, another cluster of people elbows their way in. 

Do you really think the world has changed that much? 

It didn't change at all, she understands now. She changed within it, and then she buried that ugly, feral, free, monstrous part down deep. 

She glances at the sign, the station name, as the doors close again. Two more stops.

.