Pathètique

Pathètique

Dear Rachel,

I hope this letter finds you well and that all your various things are going according to your plans. Nothing has been going well or according to my plans. In advance, I apologize for the catharsis that is about to be unloaded onto your conscience. It is neither fair nor wise for me to send you this record, but I feel I no longer have a choice. I held all of this inside too long and lost touch with everything. My perspective is distorted and warped. I need you to know everything exactly as it happened to me so I can stop telling the story.

Enclosed is a volume written to alleviate my self-induced suffering and inform you about my recent squalor. The words are dedicated to you. Read it and write back as soon as you can.

Please just understand.

                   J.P.

=====================================================

These words are dedicated to Rachel.

         It is the eleventh of January or something like that and I’m sitting at a desk in a room alone. I’ve finally decided to write.

**Disclaimer**

All events portrayed in this omnibus of emotional turmoil are either entirely fabricated or at least mostly made up. All emotions and thoughts recorded here should be ingested by the reader in the context that it is the eleventh day of January at about noon. All events, emotions, and thoughts are subject to change.

**Disclaimer**

I want to preface this story with the following claim: It was not part of the plan to fall in love. The plan was to have fun and meet new people. I don’t even like having feelings. They are painful and cumbersome and uncontrollable.

         I met her during freshman orientation. She lived on the second floor of Wright in room 235, five doors down the hall from me. The first time we talked, the two of us were walking back from some seminar on how to open our mailboxes and not get locked into our room. I recognized her from moving in the day before and started a conversation just to be a little bit more than friendly. We unloaded all the typical bullshit you tell someone you’ve just met. The stuff you can tell someone without saying anything. She was from some suburb of D.C., I don’t remember which and it doesn’t matter as it was so far away and still is.

         She spoke Spanish and was interested in history. I don’t know why she was interested in history and I don’t think she did either.

         It was a sultry day and the sun beat down roasting my neck. She didn’t have much to say, or at least not much to say to me, as we waded through the humidity. She became more laconic and her large nose began to tilt to the cloudless cyan sky. She was pretty in a sense and when we separated on the second floor of Wright, she looked at me one last time to say goodbye. Her skin was pale and so were her eyes.

         We enrolled in the same Math class that semester. It was some calculus class that I will never remember anything from except that she was in it. The lecture was in Severance 231 on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, at nine AM. I was excited. It’s always fun to do things with pretty people.

         Wright hall was exclusively for freshmen and it is a great place to make friends because everyone is dedicated to being happy and agreeable at all times and no matter what.  This is when I became friends with James, Jenny, and She.

         James lived close by and we had all our classes together except for math. We became each other’s default company. He is sardonic and blunt, but I like him anyway. We always ate together and talked about things. He was the logician and devils advocate of these conversations.

         The two of them are roommates and became the best of friends after arriving at school. The four of us became acquainted because we were always running into one another.

         She and I spent a couple late nights together, working on problem sets. We talked more and more and she became the person I talked to in my head about things when I was alone. When I was trying to go to sleep, I pretended she was next to me and we would talk until I was finally able to sleep.

         I remember one night when we were up until almost two in the morning on a battered old couch, finishing a problem set for the next morning. Everything becomes hushed and gentle that late, like the muffled landscape after snow. Jenny calls it snowhush. Everything was velvet. Bumping shoulders and elbows and hands were all so soft. So were the whispers. Everything was fresh pale powder, covering the frozen dirt.

         

         At this point in the story, I’m in love. I didn’t know this at the time though. I thought I just liked her a lot. Love can be like cancer and I was riddled with it and didn’t even know.

         One weekend in early November, James was in Cleveland on a fieldtrip or whatever engagement I’m remembering to make him unavailable. Jenny and she invited me to accompany them on a private adventure to the conservancy. We took shots of vodka in their room before leaving so we were at least a little tight for the trip to the conservancy.

         I wasn’t drunk when we started walking and the three of us buried our hands in our pockets in between sips of vodka to keep warm. It was unpleasant to extract the cheap alcohol from the spout of the bicycle water bottle because it sprayed the fiery liquid all over my lips, cheek, and tongue, all the way down the gullet.          

         They were drunk or acting drunk about five minutes into our journey but I was still cold. We passed the bottle between the three of us while we talked and skipped down the residential sidewalks. According to her, some of our professors lived in those houses. She was adamant that we be quiet. Jenny’s eyes were deep and glassy. They were black in the dusk. Jenny skipped ahead of us and she told me to drink the rest of the bottle. She shoved the water bottle into my hands and caught up to Jenny. I took a long draw from the bottle and coughed the burn away. I wasn’t drunk enough to drink like that.

         When we got to the conservancy I was finally drunk. Gray clouds dulled the night. It wasn’t totally dark because of light pollution from the nearby city and everything seemed covered in a thin ashen blanket except for the ripples of the pond, which were a deep black like Jenny’s eyes. Together we walked on the path that circumvented the water. There is a wooded area on a hill in the back of the conservancy and at the top of that hill there is a bench to view the whole enclosure. It is a wonderful spot for scintillating conversation.

         Jenny led the way up the hiking trail and I took up the rear. They talked, but I had nothing to say so I was a silent compatriot for our ascent. After we reached the top, all three of us sat on the bench and stared down the path from which we had just came. I was in the middle, Jenny on my right, and she on my left. The pond was much smaller up there and you could only see it through the vertical bars of the trees. The sky was patched with large looming clouds and the night air was chilling, though none of us could feel it anymore.

         We talked drunken mindless talking for a long time and I don’t remember any of it. I’m sure it was about people and things. Anything else is too heavy on a diet of strait vodka.

         At some point, someone got started on things before we left for school, which is always a nostalgic topic even for such young blood. Jenny told me about a boy she dated before coming here. The story seemed a little truncated and that was probably because she had already heard the long version or because there wasn’t much more to say. Apparently, they weren’t serious so it just ended when she left. I didn’t care to hear anymore about it. Her face was quite ambivalent too.

         It was my turn.

         Jenny asked me about Isabel who I dated in high school. It was over now and I didn’t care about it anymore because I had found someone new. To appease them, I offered the brief history of Isabel and I and talked about my feelings. It made them both happy enough. They liked to hear about feelings.

         It was her turn.

         She said that she didn’t leave anyone when school started, that there was no one to go back home to during the fall and winter recesses.

         Her turn had been too short for Jenny: “What about Steve?”

         Jenny knew more than me. She grinned ear to ear, giggling while she watched her squirm. She was bright red. I couldn’t see it, but I could feel it in the night that she was warm all over.

         “Yeah, what about Steve?”

         “He was a nice guy. It just didn’t work out.”

         Jenny laughed.

         Her hands covered her face and she sighed: “This is so embarrassing.” Her hands fell from her face, she turned to me and spoke both comically and matter-of-factly: “I don’t like boys.”

         Her skin was pale and so were her eyes, as I remember.

         The rest of the night isn’t important. We changed subjects and that was that.

         I was disappointed and confused and surprised.

         It was a loaded night.

         The mood on our return was somber as I tried to hide something that must have been evident. We were all becoming less drunk and the cold was cutting on the trip back. No one spoke to save our teeth from the wind. I whistled the first few bars of Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings to fill the void. It was one of Tchaikovsky’s favorite pieces. His music is one of the few things in this world that has wrenched tears from my eyes.

         He was gay too, you know.

         In the score of the serenade he wrote: “The larger number of players in the string orchestra the more this shall be in accordance with the author’s wishes.” I used to daydream when I was a few years younger about the whole world performing the serenade, actualizing the authors wishes. The earth would resonate with the sounds of heart-wrecking nostalgia and every resident of this large and often desolate planet would have tears streaming down their cheeks before the sempre marcatissimo was finished.

         The three of us split up after getting back to Wright.

         

         The couple weeks following her announcement were difficult. We never talked about that night again. My insides were twisting up into many tiny little knots. I went on a lot of long cold walks and took a lot of long hot showers because those things help drain the blood from your chest. I wanted to forget she told me. It ruined everything I had planned in my head and I had to be okay with it. All this needed to be secret too. I couldn’t talk to anyone else about it, not even James.

         I had no right to dissent. I should have been perfectly fine.

         I hadn’t felt so many feelings in a long time. I was out of shape.

**Disclaimer**

This sounds selfish. It is selfish. I’m sorry.

         At about this time, I started the first draft of this story, trying to unknot everything in my chest. The draft was in third person. It was melodramatic. It was even more melodramatic than this. Rachel, I hope you can understand.

         I was listening to Tchaikovsky’s final movement of the Sixth Symphony, Adagio Lamentoso, on the daily. The piece is thought to be a suicide note or a requiem written for Tchaikovsky’s own funeral. The whole thing was going to be called Symphony Programme because there is a secret story behind the tune. Tchaikovsky was in love with his nephew, Vladimir Davydov, to whom the work is dedicated. Since it is illegal to be gay in Russia and he didn’t want to deal with all that bullshit, he didn’t call it Symphony Programme. Instead, Tchaikovsky called it Symphony Pathètique. Pathètique is French for emotional.

         Tchaikovsky committed suicide nine days after the premier: may his soul rest with all the saints.

         I was being a baby about the whole her thing. As James would later tell me: “You’re being pathetic, not Pathètique. There is a difference.”

         The Saturday before I went home for Thanksgiving, I was in rare form. It was not even thirty minutes after midnight and I was blind. I was in my room and throwing up in a trashcan, quite distressed. James was with me. He comforted me and made sure I didn’t drown in my own vomit. What a class act! The next day he would tell me that I looked very sad. The last thing I remember was my head being engulfed by the tunnel of the trashcan as I muttered the following: I’m in love with her.

         

         Getting blind is always a lot of fun because the next day is like a murder mystery. You have to collaborate witness testimonies and sort through residual artifacts from the night before to find out what you said and did. Apparently, besides confessing the forbidden aloud to James, I sang a nostalgic Irish drinking song, poorly.

         How embarrassing!

         James was a little worried about me, but I was fine. A couple days later he told me I probably shouldn’t drink so much. I told him he was probably right. He didn’t really like that answer.

         The last math homework of the semester was due the next day. She and I had just finished the assignment and were about to go turn it in at the office. I said that I could turn in her paper for her, as I had done in the past, but she insisted on coming with me.

         We walked together to the office in silence, heads down watching the black horizontal seams of the sidewalk slide under our feet. The quiet was only broken by painful small talk and it was like the air was stifling our voices, which I guess meant a lot more than either of us could say. Sometimes silence means more than anything you can say. My quiet said: I’m in love with you and it hurts. Her quiet said: I know.

         We split up after the papers were turned in. I don’t know why she insisted on coming. As I walked back, I again surveyed the gray sidewalk cement. In two weeks it would be Christmas.

         I got drunk that night and I only remember little clips of what happened like a highlight reel. I remember that I drank with friends, then I drank with other friends, then I was back at Wright and I picked up a pen. That is all. I found out the next day what I wrote. It was a long and passionate love letter apologizing for something. It was probably because I thought I knew something I wasn’t supposed to know or felt guilty for having feelings I wasn’t supposed to have.

         The letter was on my desk crumpled up and with the bottom fourth of the page torn off. The recipient was clear but nothing else. The letters were too wavy and I had scribbled over most the words. All I could make out was her name and the words: “I,” “sorry,” “wish” and “over.” It must have been a real tearjerker. Too bad I crossed it all out. 

         The second thing I wrote that night was not found by me. She asked me about it the next day when I was sitting with James in the lounge. I had taken the last quarter page of my letter and scrawled in emotionally unstable cursive the following words:

         It was quite embarrassing. I couldn’t even look her in the eyes. I stared at my shoes while the air was vacuumed from the room. We would talk later I said.

         I hoped she wouldn’t ask me to make good on that promise.

         It was the end of the semester. In two days I would again be on a slow greyhound bus going back to Fairfield, Iowa. James had an early bus the next day. She was leaving the next day too sometime around noon. Jenny was already gone.          

         All homework was done and all tests were taken. We were a group of near-twenty-year-olds who had no responsibilities to uphold. Obviously, the three of us got wasted.

         It was barely eight o’clock when we started drinking in the lounge of our hall and at eleven we were all quite intoxicated or at least James and I were. James and I drank a lot more than she did. I could never tell how drunk she was.

         Around midnight, James was about to head to bed and got up to leave, bidding us goodbye. Neither she nor I would see him before he left that morning in a furious blur to make his bus. It was much lonelier with just two and the depressant component of alcohol was taking effect. I still felt warm but not as light anymore. Things were slowing down and both of us fell silent. I was thinking about everything again. I was in love with her and it was all pathetic. She was five feet in front of me, but may as well have been in that suburb of D.C.

         I was starting to sink into myself again when I was asked to make good on my promise.

         “Should we talk?”

         “Yes.”

         She led the way through Wright hall and to the back parking lot. We did not speak and she did not look over at me as we walked. I was numb all over. I imagine the sensation of walking to the back lot with her is how the walk to the guillotine feels for the condemned: There is solace knowing that it is almost over and closure in knowing that at some level it was your choice, but you also know you’re going to get your head cut off. So there’s that.

         We had reached the exit and entered into the cold. We didn’t feel the chill on account of being drunk.

         It was time so I spoke the first words that entered my mind: “I think I’m in love with you.”

**Disclaimer**

Consuming large amounts of alcohol can degrade memory. At this point in the story, I am experiencing the early phases of becoming blind. I will only remember clips of what happens next. There is no audio.

         The words floated in the air, suspended in gelatin. Everything was even slower. She started talking and we collided together. We moved as a single mass to a curb and sat. We leaned on each other. Our heads tilted together. We turned to face each other, heads bowed together. Her voice was a whisper when it stopped. Everything was very dark and warm and black and gray and yellow and pale in the back parking lot of Wright hall.

*                    *                    *

         The next morning, Iwalked with her to the bus stop. When we got there, she hugged me and slipped a note into my hand as she left. I probably could have kissed her. That would have been hopelessly romantic.          

         I read the note when I got back to my room:

I really like you and I’m sorry to leave like this. I really did mean everything I said last night, but I’m not in a place for a serious relationship right now and I still don’t know what I want. I don’t want to hurt you but I don’t want to push something away that could be really good. I’ll miss you while I’m gone.

         This made me hopeful and happy for several days. We were in love.

         At this point in the story it is the morning after New Years Day. I hadn’t heard from her in a while and I felt uneasy. I recieved this in the mail:

I can’t do this. Everything is so twisted up and I don’t want to drag you into this too. I want someone and I don’t know who that is yet and I feel horrible that I led you on. I’m sorry I waited so long to send this to you. I was pushing away while thinking about it. I’m sorry, I feel I’m being selfish, but I don’t feel the same way anymore.

Goodbye,

Rachel          

I’m sorry too Rachel.

         

         I wrote James to ask for advice. I told him everything in even more emotionally unstable cursive. He responded with the following: “You’re being pathetic not Pathètique. There is a difference.”

         Waves of lovesickness and resentment washed over me. I went on a lot of long cold walks with the dog, so some good came out of the whole situation at least. (That dog loves to be outside.) I also wrote some letters. The first one goes like this:

Dear Rachel,

I don’t like to pretend that I know how you feel, but I am going to anyway because I need to say some things before I let you go. I want you to know that everyone gets scared about being in love and wonders if that other person is the right one or if this feeling is as fleeting as the moment in which it is felt. No one wants to get hurt or hurt other people and there is an element of finality in decisions concerning love that shouldn’t exist. It is all just for now and this moment. It doesn’t mean forever if we go on a date; a dinner or movie is all the commitment I am looking for. I just want it all to mean something even if only for a little while. You can’t control how I feel and you can’t save me from getting hurt and it’s not your job to stop me from getting hurt anyway. By playing the game, I accept the terms and conditions. I don’t regret anything, even though it hurts now and will hurt later and may never stop hurting, like it never stopped hurting for Maria Williams who broke my heart seven years ago when I was just a dumb middle school boy. It’s good to be unhappy for a while, but not for too long. I know you want a woman forever, but I’m fine being a second round draft pick for now. That’s all I needed to say. I know there is no going back for you. I know you have already made your decision. You don’t need to respond to this letter. It was written for me.

         That letter was a little too pathetic for my tastes so I crumpled it up and threw it in the trash. I’m sure James would have agreed. I wrote a more concise version next:

Rachel,

Fuck you.

Sincerely,

Your Mistake

         This one was better but I didn’t send it either. I folded it up and put it in my wallet. It was a good symbol of our relationship and I will carry it with me always to remind me of that quarter hour on that December night when I was very warm and happy, even if only for a little while.

         Now that I’m almost done with the story, I was able to write a good one:

Rachel,

You’re pretty great and you deserve someone who is pretty great too. I hope you find him or her.

Goodbye,

Your Friend

I already sent it in the mail.

         Her name was Rachel and she is dead. Not the actual Rachel just the idea of her. That is why I put her pronoun in italics. Such a magnificent idea can’t have a plebian name. She was quite wonderful before she died. As I remember, she had pale eyes and skin and loved the color periwinkle.

         It is midnight on the eleventh of January. There is snow on the ground, pale in the moonlight.

         The story is over now.

         Goodbye Rachel.

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*                    *                    *

Dear Rachel,

I never heard back from you about my story. Everything is still not okay. I really do need you to write me back to tell me that it’s over. In case I was unclear in the last iteration, I wrote everything out again. It’s a little different so hopefully this time you’ll get it. I really want to stop telling the story.

         Please just understand,

                   J.P.

===============================================================

It is the third of February or something like that and I’m sitting at a desk in a room alone. I have just read this story again and it didn’t quite happen like that.

**Disclaimer**

All events portrayed in this omnibus of emotional turmoil are either entirely fabricated or at least mostly made up. All emotions and thoughts recorded here should be ingested by the reader in the context that it is the third day of March at about two in the afternoon. All events, emotions, and thoughts are subject to change.

And so on.

         

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