In The Beginning

Written by Summer Luyako

Illustration by Sheema Goher

She couldn’t understand why she was here, in their bedroom. Where, in the long life that they were together, had things begun to plunge into murk? And, when amidst this plunging had she unconsciously found peace in it? She buried her face in her palms. Her hair cascaded between her fingertips like a field of hay. She had the troubling feeling that she was stumbling in the dark, arms out, wary of colliding with a wall. Her eyes hardened in thought, trying to see what was unseeable, what could only be felt in that dim bedroom. He held her against his body. 

Once, when they were young and poor, he told her, “I can’t see you being in my life forever”. They were lying beside one another in the old flat, drunk and breathing in the mildew. It was a strange thing to say, though not absurd. Nothing is forever in life. That’s true. She thought that when he told her this, it was a portrayal of pragmatism. Now it felt like a portent. Feeling foolish, she lay there and thought about when they were young. She began to see the signs that had always been there, living in their walls and staring at her through their windows. They lived quietly amongst her, so quietly that she found it easier to look away than face their intrusion. Now, however, she could feel it. She could feel how empty and meaningless her life was, wasted on his endless lies and belittling. The feeling cut deeply through her bones like fangs. She could no longer look away.

He was at his nails again. She hated it when he did that. She hated the sounds of fingernails being torn from where they belonged. In the silence of the bedroom, it was deafening.  It was the characteristic of a child who has gone and pissed the bed. He was far too feminine for her. She once found it endearing. She thought the conventions of masculinity and femininity were unnecessary in their relationship when they had the connection they did. She felt proud of it. His femininity imbued him with a unique self-assurance that many men are terrified of possessing. And in this way, it made her feel like she had a unique self-assurance to her. By being with him, she was beyond convention, but didn’t have to change anything about herself. 

“Will you stop with the nails?”

His eyes glanced up to her, big and thoughtless. He hadn’t shaved that morning and now had mites of black stubble infesting his pale face. He put his hands down against him.

“Is something wrong?” he asked. 

She wanted to ask him what had happened to them, but she knew he wouldn’t have an answer. Not a straightforward one. They could go around for days looking for one, like driving on a roundabout with no exits, but it wouldn’t bring her closer to an understanding. He didn’t even know things were going wrong to begin with. 

Sunday was once their day. On that day, they’d scrap together change and get fish and chips from the chipper under the old flat. The man at the chipper drenched the chips with vinegar until it began seeping through the brown bag. In return, they’d always tip him an extra euro. As they licked the dripping grease from their fingertips, they walked through Dublin with a great feeling of hope. Once the evening ended, they’d go back to the flat. She remembered the rotten meat clogging the drains and the musk of unwashed bodies running through the mouldy walls. Beer bottles and condom packets were always on the countertops. They had two housemates then, a Brazilian and a Moldovan. They were men of little English, but they were always kind to her. 

They’d waste the night drinking and dreaming of their uncertain futures. They all told promising tales of prosperity one day finding itself in their lives. They didn’t know when or how it would happen, but they had hope that it would, one day. She thought to herself, why go on living without hope? Eventually, success did find its way to them. They were here in this beautiful apartment, in this beautiful town, and things were good. She didn’t know why they ended up this good. Often, she felt that her success was a great injustice, like God was distracted when constructing her life’s course. She wanted to turn all this hate, towards herself and him, into something practical, or turn it off completely, but she couldn’t. It was just there, deep inside the burrows of her body, a crucial constituent of her person. Even with the success, the hate was immovable.

Looking back, she could see that she was happiest when they were struggling students. Back then, her life was flowing out of her as an endless sea of unfounded hopes. Things were changing and she was a part of it. All the signs of what was to happen to them were infinitesimal in the explosion of their new, incoming lives. She couldn’t tell if that was a bad thing or not, that her happiest days were when she was poor and living in a filthy flat. She figured that if she was happy, then the source of the happiness didn’t really matter. But now that new life was long gone, and she was old. She didn’t know what growing up would feel like, but she didn’t think it would feel like this. 

What happened to them? She looked at him. He was at his nails again. He used to be different. She grieved that boyish look of innocence he once possessed. When she looked at him now, she saw a pathetic masquerade of a powerful man. Nothing about him was innocent now.

She rose from the bed and sat by the window. 

“Do you remember when we first started dating?” she asked, looking at him closely. She was seeking something in the pores of his cheeks and the wrinkles of his eyelids. An answer, an explanation. Anything to make the writhing inside her go away. All she saw, though, was how aged he was. This made her think of all the time that had passed. Her eyes began to well with tears.  

He laughed at her. 

“That’s what you’re thinking about? Yes, I remember. We were so young and so foolish.”

“I wish we could go back,” she said, swallowing her tears. She hated crying in front of him. 

He looked at her as if she’d committed an unpardonable sin. He looked at her like that often, especially after she said something that she didn’t think deserved a look like that. It made her feel like everything she said was inherently wrong or shameful, and she was too idiotic to see it. He may as well have boxed her in the jaw. Boxing her in the jaw would be less degrading than that look.

He sighed. 

“I don’t understand you sometimes. You really want to go back to when we had no money and I was living with foreigners?”

“Yes,” she said, and her voice went very low, “They were nice to me.” 

She looked out the window at the town under them, still and humming with the life of all its inhabitants. Workers walked along the canal as the sun began to rise. A bright, red car drove down the road before disappearing into the sunlight. She watched it go. They were quiet for a long time.