Love and Seams

I wrote this two years before moving to New York. It is a very powerful and personal piece, but I wanted to share it. I changed all the names so to honor the privacy of those involved. Here it is:

The city is full. I can’t take the unbalance of ripping seams everywhere you go. It’s full of the obvious: trash bags of half-eaten dinners of the New Yorkers and tourists, twenty-something-year-old businessmen with thick-rimmed Prada eyeglasses and well-defined crows’ feet from faking laughs at executive meetings, fading fashion trends and shoes unfit to be walking these city streets. But it’s the jealously that rips the seams and overflows into the street, mixing with the miasma of the subways and half-eaten dinners. You feel it the city when you step out of Penn Station. It enters through your ears and it stays with you for the duration of your stay, like a guided tour of I want, I need, and I wish.

The women here have the men I want, the job I should have, the shoes that I could never wear. I could never walk like they walk in those shoes: so quickly with their necks fully erect, weaving in between the rest of us like we’re fire hydrants or orange construction cones.

A woman in her late fifties dressed all in black smiles proudly as she stands at the corner with her well-groomed, well-behaved Doberman pinscher. He’s beautiful, shiny fur and impeccable posture. We all want her dog and she smiles because she knows it.

When Dad and I reached the AMC Theater at 68^th and Broadway my cousin, Jacob, my sister, Sonya, and her ex-boyfriend, Haleel, are waiting outside for us. She’s so pretty as she glides her way across the pavement in a pair of those shoes. She introduces us to some of the cast and crew of the movie we are about to see, directed and produced by Haleel’s brother, Umit, and co-written by Jacob. It is premiering tonight at Tribeca film festival. I hug Jacob and I want to be in the movie, I wish I had been a part of it.

We take our seats and Sonya sits across the isle from us with Haleel and the other members of the cast and crew in one of the fifteen seats allotted for them. The lights go down and Sonya is close to Haleel, like she never left him. The faces in the dark stare as the narrative comes in and for an hour and a half, I wish.

When the credits roll, we look for the names we know: Sonya is up there, my other cousin Tasha, aunts and uncles and their children. My dad says, “That was my car they used in that scene. Why isn’t my name up there?” My name isn’t up there either.

We head to the afterparty. My sister is already there at the bar with a vodka pineapple and Haleel. I feel so out-of-place but I don’t let her order me a drink. I hang out by the bar with them until I can no longer stand my surroundings, the forced laughter and men grabbing my waist as they pass behind me. I leave them looking like they’re in love.

On the street, Dad walks ahead because my black flats hurt my feet and all this wanting has worn me out. I want the train to take me home.

In the morning she calls me saying, “Haleel hit me. I have bruises on my back and arms.” A friend kissed her on the cheek and Haleel slid his arm around her neck in a headlock and brought her ear to his mouth. “Don’t ever fucking do that again. My girl doesn’t do that shit. She got up to leave and he chased her. He backed her into a corner and punched her in the ribs. “You’re not going anywhere.” When she got onto the sidewalk, he chased her down again and grabbed her arm so hard he left bruises in the shape of fingers. He dug his nails into her back and she slapped him in the face, “Don’t ever touch me again!”

In the cab he said he wasn’t sane. He yelled, “Do you think I care about this life?” It continued through the cab ride, into the elevator and up to the loft apartment. He wouldn’t get his hands off of her, grabbing at her arms and ripping the seam of her jacket. “If you want me to disappear, I’ll disappear. You’ll never hear from me again.” When Haleel’s father and brother arrived at the apartment and saw what he had done to Sonya, the woman he supposedly loved, they demanded that he leave. Sonya stood there in her ripped jacket, watching him disappear.

She called me later crying. Her life is ruined, everything has changed, she will never forget this, how could this happen to her? She’s so confused. What happened to love? It was overruled by a greater force that entered through the ears. It ripped with the seam.