Paper Bags & Napkins

He said, “Wear blue. It’ll make it better.”

I knew he was laughing at me, but I actually considered it. I thought about it for a long time, but I did not wear blue to the party. I wore an ugly colour that was not blue or green all the way, but sitting somewhere squeamishly in the middle. I wore it, and maybe it was the sickly colour that made me lose my appetite because I did not eat anything. I think it made me lose my voice too because I hardly said a word to anybody all night. I just watched people move through each other. I watched their heads lean in close to hear or speak over the music. I watched all parts of their bodies move into each other except for their eyes. Nobody’s eyes met all evening. Mine did not dare meet anyone’s either. I watched a boy from the corner of my eye. He bit the edges of his fingernails sitting along the flat tips of his red fingers leading into red hands. Bright red like he had committed a crime. His red hands against the red of his plastic cup seemed almost like a lie because he spoke cool like a sailor, like the waves a sailor watches crashing into his ship, crashing into him. Which do you think was the lie? The red hands a red herring or the words a blue illusion? I could have known if I had looked into his eyes.

“I did not wear blue,” I told him later, but I appreciated the advice because he gave it without expecting me to iron my blue dress.

You must dissolve your love in a container. It can be anything: a vial, a glass, or test tube filled with water (or whatever goes down your throat the easiest). You will have to stir it until no trace of it remains — no visible sign of it, no sensation of its grains mixing along with your stirring stick. You must not mix it too quickly; the trick is gradually letting it disappear so that even you will not remember what it looked like at the initial stage.

It will be difficult because love often forms so solidly. It sits like a dense brick upon the chest and takes a while to break apart. You must break it apart — chip away at it slowly until you have broken it down enough to dust or sprinkle into your container. From there, it becomes easier because the powder will not have as much power over you as the solid did. You can blend it away without feeling remorse or regret.

Once the liquid is transparent, you will be in the clear. You can drink your love now. You can swallow it in large, sweeping, comforting gulps without fear. Your love is no longer dangerous to you. Love is safe when it has been diluted and all of the intensity has dispersed into something less concentrated and more amorphous. This is the only form in which you may handle your love. You may never drink your love straight.

All of this said, there is one scenario of which you must be aware. Although it is unlikely that this will happen to you, in rare cases the love does not act as expected. In these cases there is the formation of a precipitate inside the container. The precipitate grows along the walls of the container and clings to them like an embryo instead of fading away as it should. You may attempt to stir this precipitate away, but do not waste your time. If this is the outcome you face, then it is the final result of your experiment. You may aim to throw your container away, but in cases like these, the lover has always been observed to turn the precipitate into a treasured object — to be stored on a damp shelf in a dark room. The love becomes even more powerful in this form — a form in which you may never have it, but it will always have you.

He wonders how he did not see it in the slant of her shoulders or the hollow of her back. She had always been a slip-through-the-cracks kind of girl, but he never imagined that she would ever sink all the way to the other side. He had seen her walk to the end of numerous corridors, and wondered where each farewell would take her. Nobdy had expected her to evaporate the final time that she looked over her shoulder, but she did.

He wonders whether he had not been reading the postures correctly. She always stood stiff-still in a way that would allow you to read the tightness of the muscles in her back through her clothes. He had assumed that the way she held herself upright meant that she was firmly planted in the ground, like the weeds that grow in between paved stones. He knows now that he missed the fragility in all of that forced erectness. After all, only something hoping to stand so tall can be trampled like a flower pressed into the ground by the heel of a boot.

Everybody asks how she did it because disappearing is not easy. Nothing is ever truly gone, he knows, thinking of the shadow in that Vermeer painting with the sleeping girl. Yet he has looked everywhere to find some stain or imprint of her influence and found nothing. He resigns himself to the belief that if someone knew how to vanish so completely, then it is none of his business, and never was, to have tried and kept her from being erased.