Winter 2021 | Occasus | Issue 11.1

The Void

She told me she is afraid of walking to her car in the morning. We start work before sunrise, when the morning is dark and quiet, and I know she is scared there is someone waiting to abduct her as soon as she steps outside. She was afraid to even when I was there, and she would never say anything about her fear at the moment, but I watched her pace quicken; I could tell she was self-conscious about her paranoia but still locked the car from the inside.  Working early in the morning has never bothered me, though. The action of getting out of bed has always been painful, but I run the tap until it’s clear before splashing ice cold water on my face.

We met when I taught her how to steam milk. Lattes and cappuccinos are basically the same thing; you just have to aerate the milk longer and pour the milk sideways for cappuccinos. She never aerated the milk long enough. I watched her use too much milk and not enough foam when she went to pour the pitcher into the espresso. I prefer to drink iced coffee anyway, half-sweet with extra cream. She pulled back the steam wand while I was watching, accidentally aerating the milk for so long that the pitcher overflowed. All she did was stare at the pitcher as the milk flooded, a blankness in her eyes.

“Are you just going to stare at it,” I asked as I turned the wand off and dumped out the burnt milk from the pitcher. “The first time I put whipped cream on a drink, I got it everywhere,” I reassured her.

We used to take the same bus after work before she bought herself a shitty 2008 Honda Accord. When it was dark in the fall, we would sit on the bench across the street while waiting. She had her feet up towards me and loosely hugged her knees when she told me she didn’t believe in love or having children, which surprised me because she had one of the most caring temperaments I had ever encountered.  I told her I didn’t want to believe in those things either. She somehow learned a lot about me during these conversations. I told her I kept my phone on “do not disturb” at all times – having the silencing little moon on the screen helped me breathe. Sometimes I turned it on airplane mode when I wasn’t flying so that I could still use it for music while cutting the rest of the world off.  I told her how I prefer to walk everywhere, but how unfortunate that is since I hate being out in the cold. She could tell I have commitment issues – they came naturally when my mother left me for a pack of cigarettes at a few months old. We sometimes made jokes about how I couldn’t commit to anything more than a few days in advance. I told her how I called my aunt and uncle “Mom and Dad,” but they have four biological kids of their own, are in an unhappy marriage, and I was never given the love I  believed I wasn’t worthy of anyway.  I’m not sure why I told her all these things, yet I still constantly reiterated that I belonged to no one.

She was impatient with herself most of the time, and sometimes with me. Still, I always told her when I was feeling lost and how I sometimes wondered if there was any good inside me at all. She always reassured me that I was growing fast enough, even though she rushed everything, even when she didn’t need to. I could tell she saw good in everyone, and I always worried that she was naïve.

“Lucifer was an angel, too,” I would always remind her.

She knew I was talking about myself, but sometimes I could tell she thought I was talking about her. Though, I knew she didn’t believe in religion. She told me how she was raised going to church every Sunday and not ever remembering having the opportunity to decide what she believed in.

“I like absurdism,” she told me once. “I take comfort in it – thinking that life is purposeless and irrational; it’s much lighter than believing in a bigger purpose, or thinking that the menial decisions we make or moments matter at all. I don’t like feeling like someone is watching me.”

She told me her favorite season was winter, which made sense because of how stubborn she was, but it contradicted the fact that she was as kind as the sun. In the winter, she would offer to drive me home, even though it was out of her way – claiming she liked to look at the Christmas lights and the snow-covered trees.

Her driving always made me nervous. She drove too close to the left side of the road. She never kept a snow brush in her car and would drive to my house with the back windows blanketed in snow. I would make her wait before driving away as I brushed the snow off with my hands. That night we were listening to the new Phoebe Bridger’s Album, Punisher. She told me it was her favorite released that year because of how it bound fantasy and nightmare so seamlessly. She was telling me how romanticizing the world was the closest way to experience free-will.

“It’s getting late,” she would say after a few hours of us sitting in her car on my street.

“Do you want to listen to a few more songs?” I would ask.

She would nod and reach her hand over to lightly rest on my arm. She sat there quietly like that, listening to whatever I put on. We always had background noise, but nothing was said unless it needed to be.

“You can always come to my house if you don’t feel like going home,” she offered after we accidentally listened to another entire album. Whenever I didn’t answer immediately, she would overthink her sentences, and would exert something to clarify her thoughts.

“There’s no pressure, though. I understand wanting to wake up in your own space,” she added.

“I do enjoy spending time with you,” I told her.

So instead of going into my house, I would re-buckle my seatbelt, and we would drive back to her place, sometimes stopping to get coffee. But, we would drive across the city to avoid where we worked and people we knew.

I was familiar with her apartment by now, and I would immediately sit at her desk while she putzed and settled from the day. I was comfortable in her space. Her room was in the basement, so it was naturally a cooler temperature, but she never turned the heat up high enough for it to get warm anyway. She always ended up changing into a baggy sweater and sweatpants while I was in the room. I would try not to look, but her skin was so pale that it glowed and I would catch glimpses in the mirror of her figure, which was much frailer than her baggy sweaters led everyone to believe. I kept my hands busy fiddling with papers on her desk. The shelf above it was lined with books, but all their spines faced the wall. The pages faced outward, and there was no way to tell what they were without picking them up. When I questioned her choice to place them like this, she said it felt humble to store them in such a manner, and she could identify which books were where regardless of their spines.

“What do you want to do?” She asked after changing.

“Do you want to watch a movie?”

“Sure, but you need to pick it. I never know what to choose.”

We were lying down on our stomachs on her bed, and I scrolled through the movies, just as indecisive as her. By the time I settled on a choice, she was half asleep with her head on my shoulder. She was shaking slightly, most likely because of the damp chill the basement had and because we were lying on top of the covers. I instinctively went to wrap my arms around her, and I felt a breath leave her chest and her shoulders slack. I didn’t realize that my shoulders had relaxed too. I kept watching the movie alone and thought maybe it was about time I told her that she is my best friend. I knew to both of us it would be meaningless and futile, but I felt the urge to defy the absurd and tell her I felt love whenever she was around. I knew this wouldn’t persuade her from believing in the inevitable void of meaning, but I took comfort in feeling like I belonged to these menial moments with her. She drove me home the next morning, and before getting out, I made sure to tell her to drive home safely.

Taryn Rollins is a fourth-year student at King’s University College, enrolled in a MOS and English Honors Double Major Program. She has published work at King’s in The Regis student magazine and The MEM Insider Magazine. As well, she has been credited by the Canadian musician Jayde as a lyricist. Taryn is a Barista at Starbucks and spent the majority of 2020 confronting the absurd.