A featured submitted story, written by Nene Nwachukwu-Peters
Illustrated by Laura Gonima
"He liked feeling meaningless, a fish in a boundless universe."
“But what’s crazy is that, like, every single person believes that the world essentially revolves around them. We believe we’re so advanced and this and that, yet human beings still find it difficult to grasp that a person across the world has a completely, completely different story than them and they have nothing to do with it. Like, actually, think about this shit, Eddy. The stranger you bump shoulders with on the sidewalk doesn’t know you exist; they don’t know who you are! They see your face, acknowledge it, but then what? Most of the time: nothing.” My voice raises to hover over the musical chatter dancing through the restaurant. “And we trick ourselves into thinking we’re significant or important or some bullshit like that when, in reality, the people who lived during the Great Depression thought their lives were the pinnacle of existence just like we do with our world.”
A contemplative smile plays onto Eddy’s lips as if he’s just decided I have a decent enough personality to continue the date. I note how his gray turtleneck invades into the space his chin is supposed to be, a continuous struggle of adjusting the collar and engaging in the already dying conversation. He sits with a posture up to par with his bland but refined personality, reminding me of a tense leg cramp. I won’t remember his face or his mannerisms or even how he made me feel during this. But I will recall the way the rhythmic, incessant bouncing of his knee repeatedly creases into the white cloth overlaying the sun-shaped table. The bouncing began right when he sat down and introduced himself as ‘the creepy dating app guy’, earning nothing more than a slight twitch of my lips. In that moment, I knew this one wouldn’t work out.
I sit back into my chair, listening to Eddy say something about something. My focus drags to the other couples surrounding us, all optimistically insistent about the same imperceptible thing. A few people have to consciously restrain from revealing just how sanguine they are about the person sitting opposite them. The majority of the restaurant wears a false smile that can easily be mistaken for dulled pain from the eyes up. I throw back the expensive red wine, returning my attention to a man who is expecting a response.
“This is my third date tonight,” I disclose, more for the sake of understanding a timeline rather than pacifying any suspicions he probably never had. Eddy’s eyebrows raise as his eyes slowly lose interest.
“A serial dater then, huh?” His snort is followed by uncomfortable laughter.
“Yeah, Edward. Yes, exactly,” I reply. I scan his surprise. This isn’t going how he suspected it would. He’s ignoring the slight unease of sitting across from somebody who has greater things on her mind. He must know I was practically conversing with myself up until now, him being the supporting actor for a role with no lines.
Eddy reaches across the table to pick something out of my braids, breaking the one barrier that matters in all this. “I like your hair,” he says in a way that makes me believe his interest in me is a result of a bigger fetish.
“We don’t have to do this,” I declare. “Force this, I mean.”
“I’m not—do you really feel like I’m forcing this, Sade?”
I want to tell him that just as he ignored the correct pronunciation of my name because of how deeply he does not care, none of this is about him. “I’m gonna go,” I say, feigning remorse.
He chuckles. “You’re delusional if you think I’m going to pay then,” he says, proudly. I look down at the two glasses of wine and free platter of buttered bread before placing down enough cash to satisfy his baseless ego.
The skies of a big city at night feel smaller than they would anyplace else. There’s something about standing amidst chaos, looking up, and finding not enough. Stars are more of an appreciated concept than a reality, and the moon feels like more of a necessity than how romantics like to describe its nostalgic white glow.
A large man shoulders past me, bumping me back to the busied sidewalk. It’s already ten p.m. and the impending disappointment of tomorrow feels closer than it had just a minute ago. I breathe in an air mixed of cigarette smoke and name-brand perfumes before continuing on.
I watch my finger swipe through the myriad of dating apps as if it holds a mind of its own, my legs moving with haste in my peripheral. I would laugh at the irony. 24-years-old in a new city feeling like my days are numbered. But then I find someone who looks enough like him, and I stop. A smile white enough to distract, eyes that crinkle at their ends, dark skin that can only be deemed as regal. As if exhausted from being held, a breath of relief escapes between my lips.
You remind me of my dad, kind of.
My chest jumps with anxiety as I wait for him to respond or ignore me altogether. It’ll be the smile that I remember. Or the eyes. But, either way, a 27-year-old man named Francis is the most confident I’ve felt since I started.
Hope that’s a good thing.
We meet up thirty minutes later in a small park illuminated only by the dimming street lamps that sparsely circle the grounds. It’s a bad idea. I know that. Sitting with a stranger on a chipped bench watching the night continue on without us. A whiff of something between pine and cinnamon trails into my nose when he irons out the folds in his tight, black pants. The airy laugh comes out before I can help it.
“What’s funny?” he asks, the smile heard in his voice.
“I don’t know,” I lie. “I guess I was just thinking about how you probably ran out of your house at the thought of having sex with me.”
The air around us somehow becomes more silent than it already is, even the insects pausing their discord. He begins stuttering a denial or an excuse or both, but I finally turn to him, cutting off his disarray. I study him carefully, wondering how I managed to convince myself for a fourth time tonight that this stranger held a semblance of my father.
Francis clears his throat. “Do you want to maybe grab some food or something? We can go indoors--.”
“No,” I say too quickly. “I mean, can we just, like, talk here for a little while?” My voice sounds small for the first time tonight.
“Yeah, sure,” he says, albeit reluctantly. I can’t imagine how I seem. Expecting things that I never voice. Grasping at something far beyond a human connection. Convincing myself the pain that lay in my wake is worth something important even though the night has told me otherwise. “What do you want to talk about?”
I fully turn to him, propping my legs up onto the bench and holding my knees to my chest like a child. He mirrors my body language, a glint of hope unmistakable in his eyes. I can tell he doesn’t deserve this.
“Have you ever lost someone you loved?” I ask.
His eyes widen before crinkling into thought. “Sure,” he answers. Sure.
“Who?”
Francis pulls his coat tighter across his torso, reminding me that we’re sitting in forty-degree weather as a gust of wind runs between us. “My grandpa about a year ago,” he says. “Heart attack. We were really close.” The confusion is still heard in his voice as if waiting for the bigger picture of the conversation.
“Death, huh?” I mutter.
“What was that?”
I ignore his question. “What do you think about parents who spank their kids?”
“I’m—I don’t know. Pretty heavy first date topics, don’t you think?” He laughs, nicely. He looks into me, searching for an answer not even I have. Francis continues, “Maybe we should grab some coffee? Warm you up, a little.” The triple entendre doesn’t pass me.
I ignore him again. “Because I never really had an opinion about that. Or I guess I did. I’m Nigerian, so it’s kind of just what happens. But not in a bad way. It’s not like we just go around slapping children or anything.”
“…Sure,” Francis says in an obligatory tone. I look at him once more, wondering about all the thoughts and emotions he must be having compared to the one considerable feeling of nothing pulsating through me. It must look like an absurd disparity - our two minds sat next to one another.
Another, stronger wind stretches through the park, carrying two swings with it. The creaking of their rusted links draws my attention, and they seem to groan and grind like that for hours, settling only when they’ve exhausted themselves. A woman dressed in tight workout gear jogs by, periodically looking in our direction to reassure whatever fear she had in mind at the sight of us. The moving parts of the park become seen but not felt, each piece an entity of something I can’t quite identify. I watch myself occupy the bench with Francis, a man I’ll forget about tomorrow, the haunted playground set as a backdrop for our scene.
He would have liked this. A lot. My father was the only person I knew who appreciated the things he couldn’t control. The vagueness of everything around him was a source of contentment and comfort; he liked being small and insignificant in the grand scheme of things. He liked feeling meaningless, a fish in a boundless universe.
Francis looks at me, expectantly, so I continue. “My dad hit me twice. It was discipline, but I remember thinking that I hated him. Not because it hurt or because I was mad at myself for getting in trouble; I just didn’t like the thought of being that kid. It made me feel foreign in comparison to everyone else, and I didn’t like feeling foreign. Or different, I guess.”
“A lot of kids were spanked and stuff,” Francis contributes to the conversation he’s hardly a part of, but I appreciate it anyway.
I laugh, a sound that sounds out of place. “I wanted to be like the white kids on TV, and I could have gotten away with it, you know. I came here when I was young, so I had it all down. Everything was on lock, Francis. Everything. Except the skin and the dad with the accent, and I knew I had to choose which one to hate.”
A loud silence navigates its way between us until Francis finally replies with “oh”.
“And the most ridiculous thing is that he let me hate him. Even after losing his wife, leaving the rest of his family to live in a country that scorned him, and raising a child who wanted to be anything but his daughter, he just let me hate him. He was so okay with meaning nothing to everyone,” I mutter the last part to myself.
Maybe it’s because of the long night searching for answers to open-ended questions or because Francis is becoming more agreeable as the streets clear of disorder, but an invisible force pulls at my chest and all I want now is release.
“And he died last night. He left, and he was probably okay with that.” The break in my voice is replaced with resentment teetering into rage. “But this is the most important thing in the world right now, to ever happen, and no one even cares enough. Not like I do. People are laughing and fucking and living because they don’t realize what happened or what is happening to me. And it’s selfish and evil and I don’t understand why he just left like that.”
My skin radiates with heat, and suddenly I feel the sharp contrast to the cold for the first time. Like pins pointedly searching for the most vulnerable spot to prick, the hair on my arms sting against sharp winds that hurt until they echo into a dull pain. I have to look up at the sky and remember its stretch. I feel Francis frowning into me, and guilt washes over for using him as I did the other men. Using him to make amends with myself.
“I’m sorry,” I apologize.
“You don’t have to—it’s okay.” We sit there, me staring at my hands and him staring at me. “You should keep going.”
When I do look up, I have to swallow back the fact it’s not my dad sitting before me, telling me that I’m valid despite my being wrong. I continue, “I think I’m still in shock. And I’m here, going on dates, ignoring the truth of it. Can you believe that?” I rub my palm with my thumb, wondering if they’re numb from the cold.
“And I’m already forgetting him. It’s funny because they don’t tell you that. That it doesn’t take long to forget how things were before. They don’t tell you that your moving, palpable memories become vague pictures. It’s been a day, and I’m trying so hard to remember the last time I told him I loved him.” I laugh in a more frenzied way this time.
“I’m sorry,” Francis says.
“He could never sit still too. And the guy before this was so twitchy that I almost stayed longer just to remember what being annoyed by that…that twitchiness feels like. Isn’t that sad? Like how shitty do I have to be to go out looking for someone the day after my dad dies? And being furious when no one can amount to him.”
“And there was this time when I was in high school when I really realized how terrible I was. He came to my volleyball game after getting off a 12-hour shift, and I told him that he couldn’t sit with the other parents. Because to me, the two worlds were different. In school, my dad was this idea, but no one ever inquired further, and it was the biggest deal to me that they couldn’t find out who he was. I was scared my dad would talk to someone that day, Francis. Because I didn’t want anyone hearing his accent.”
“But then there was that time when I was in college and he visited campus. And we spent the day together basically doing nothing.” I feel a smile growing across my face. “We went to eat around the city, and he was wearing that ugly striped sweater and khakis that were way too long on him, and his shoes, his shoes, were so ugly. They were like loafers but if they were found in the recycled section of the cheapest thrift store. He kept taking pictures of me and the city. And I remember he told me something I’ll never forget. He made his accent heavier because he used to do that when I was little to get me to laugh. But, yeah, he made his accent heavy and said: now this, this is what I came here for.”
Even the wind seems to still at the memory. My voice is coarse with something that can only be described as painful regret. The thing I’ve been avoiding the most. A reel of that day, what I would describe as the best day of my life, rolls through my head, highlighting the blinding white smile and the crinkles behind his glasses.
I don’t realize that Francis and I are walking until I look up at the small lake beside us. He says something about needing to warm me up again and how he definitely wants to keep seeing me. But the moon reflects off the water like how the romantics would describe, and I can’t think of anything other than my dad. How happy he would be in a moment like this where everything is moving without him, but he’s decided to stay fixed.
Francis’ voice tears through my thoughts. “Um, I don’t mean to be invasive, but how did he die?”
I want to be irritated at him for asking the question that’s probably been plaguing his mind, but I can’t bring myself to be. I imagine the new, better memories my dad and I could have created for ourselves. For our little, inconsequential family. I shove my hands in my coat pockets, finally allowing myself warmth. “He killed himself,” I say, softly. My voice is a stark contrast to the agony and wails of pain I released yesterday upon hearing the news. I’m sure Francis says something supportive enough, and I stare into the reflection, coming to terms with the fact that no one will ever be able to amount to him.
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