The Labyrinth
by Lena Levey
“Tell me what you can’t forget, and I’ll tell you who you are.” – Julie Buntin, Marlena
I wrote that line in lavender on the first page of my notebook when I was in sixth grade under a heading that said “Book Quotes I Like.” I had bought the notebook to match with Mara, my science partner and new best friend. I was witnessing my sister enter the enticing world of urban adolescence, and I was fascinated with the idea of reckless youth, which is why I picked up the book from the high school library about a young woman and the teenaged mistakes that haunted her adult life. It was the sort of tragedy I thought I could handle: to be haunted by something beautiful. I could say that sort of thing before I knew any better, when we were still standing anxiously at adulthood’s starting line, where life was school and Mara’s kitchen, and bipolar was nothing more than a hyperbolic criticism of our chemistry teacher.
Seven years later, as I packed up my books to escape the city forever, I found my old notebook again, and I thought of Mara with a twist of regret in my chest.
How can I explain the Mara I can’t forget? I’ve written down the story about a hundred times, and I still don’t know what kind of person it makes me. The problem is Mara is the sort of person that evades description. She slips between adjectives like an escape artist and leaves me with half-truths that desperately attempt to weave into a world that resembles my memory.
I can call her a force, which is both a cliché and an understatement. She is impossible to forget, with dark red lipstick, six-inch white heeled boots, a frightening knowledge of Greek mythology, and a sharp British accent that cuts through every doubt that creeps into my mind. She is maybe the only person on Earth more stubborn than I am, and if she declares something, it will happen. No one can stop her.
No one can stop her. These words echo in my mind when I discovered I could also describe Mara as manic. There’s a painful irony in this particular Achilles heel. Her energy is what makes her the only person I can never release, but it also is the reason I have to hold on so tightly.
I’ve never called her an addict. Not to her face, anyway. Maybe if I had, her image wouldn’t linger in my thoughts, and my memories wouldn’t be wrapped in secondhand smoke. I think back to a rooftop in April, at a party so disgustingly gaudy it has since become my mascot for the materialism I left London to escape. Mara used to joke that our classmates were the best argument against legacy admissions since the generation that came before them. She stopped saying that after she started buying from the boy who was throwing up in the corner of one of the most exclusive clubs in the city. “I need some air,” I had told her, and we weaved our way through the sweaty fifteen-year-olds who were still as enthralled as we used to be by this whole spectacle.
On that rooftop, at the party that I would only enjoy in my memories, Mara lit a cigarette, and I became haunted. The smoke moved through my consciousness, blowing through her phone calls and the one time—I pretended to believe her when she promised that it was the first—I saw blood dripping down her arm, through every drug that she started and would not stop, right back to the first time she called me her soulmate. The Nat Sherman ghost rested in my notebook and danced its way through each line of purple cursive.
“Tell me what you can’t forget, and I’ll tell you who you are.” Nat Sherman reads the line in a mocking tone. With a paintbrush of thick smoke, it draws me a picture of the girl who wrote it and her best friend. They had bushy hair and bad skin and baby fat on their cheeks, and they could only dream of the life that I would run away from. It waves the cigarette, and I watch us grow. Only this time do I see how fast it is. By fifteen I could be mistaken for twenty-five, an Achilles heel that I wore as a feminine badge of honor. My ascension felt endless. I finally stopped glancing at my own reflection, but I started to sneak glances over my shoulder as I walked home. Only this time do I see how my weakness, too, was the price that I paid for my strengths.
I watch Mara on a park bench in ninth grade, as she washes down her Seroquel with Bacardi. It’s 10 am. I watch myself laugh because I did not yet know that I shouldn’t, and because Mara managed to make even her descent into something mesmerizing. Nat Sherman puts a hand around my waist, and I am locked in. I wonder if I just missed my last chance to get away.
The smoke shifts again, and we are in her kitchen. I am curled up next to her oven, desperate for the warmth to reach my bones. I am sobbing from my stomach to tether myself to the ground, as if my tears were heavy enough to keep me from floating away. Mara pours a glass of wine, the same sweet red that we used to cut with Fanta Orange, back before we needed something stronger, and sits down next to me. I tell her everything I think I remember; it’s flashes of light and music that shakes the ground beneath me and a callused hand pressed tightly against my throat. It’s the man in the navy suit telling me to tell everyone that I wanted it, and our handshake that leaves bruises that linger long after the ones on my neck have faded, because I did not yet know that an agreement for quiet was not the same as one for peace. Mara listens to my fragments and holds me tighter than I knew she could. We blend together, a melted pile of blood and tears and bone. That night, she lights a cigarette. It’s the first time.
Smoke swirls again. The images stop on that April rooftop where the two of us reached our stalemate. I am wearing one of her dresses, a silver wrap that I could never afford. Her dress is darker, and it has a cape that makes it look like she has wings. I hear myself cough, and then try to release everything that had been building up in my chest. The pink and blue lights pulsed with the music from inside the door, and Mara leaned against the fence to look over the city skyline.
“I’m going to say something, and if your answer is no, I promise I’ll drop it forever.” I sounded more confident than I was. Getting Mara to listen to anything was no small feat. But some combination of her three martinis and my impending departure made her nod and close her eyes. Nat Sherman and I watched as my words tumbled out of my mouth, and I fiddled with the hem of my dress.
“Is there anything I can do to make you stop?”
Mara stared at me for a minute. She glowed blue from the lights of the party. Finally, she responded.
“No.”
“Is any of this because of me?” My mind is on the kitchen, on my notebook, the three white lines of god-knows-what, and the souls that we had stitched together so tightly that we could never unravel them from each other without tearing every inch of ourselves apart.
“Lena, I promise I don’t regret anything.” It’s the only answer she could have given. It was my answer too.
Mara rested her hand on my shoulder. In this smoky reconstruction, our skin blends together.
As Mara let out a puff of smoke that stung the back of my throat, I could see my breath curl through the air. Were it not for the wings billowing out behind her, Mara and I would have been reflections of each other.
“We can’t really save each other, you know,” she said, softer than I had ever heard her speak. I nodded, but said nothing. It was an agreement, if not an acceptance.
It’s a strange thing, we each think to ourselves, to watch someone dissolve in front of you as you hold their hand in silence, gripping as tight as you can until you discover that you can’t keep them with you, and all you’re left with is sweaty palms and survivor’s guilt.
She lifted her hand from my shoulder and our bodies became distinct again. I watched as my figure of smoke became solid and opaque. Mara’s dress turned back to black satin, and her lips back to the cherry red that had stained her glass. The scene disappears, and I am back in a packed-up apartment with a notebook in my hand. The figure of smoke sits by my side.
When I wrote that line in purple ink, my God, what I would have given to be a woman on a skyscraper at a party that existed only in the legend of middle school gossip. I wish there were a way to warn myself that the sort of beauty I was daydreaming of comes at a price. There are some sacrifices that you don’t understand until you hear the ghost of someone who is still alive ask you if you’ve done enough, and all you can do is hold on to your soulmate as she flies towards the sun, and pray that the wax won’t melt off her wings before she makes it home.
By Self and Violent Hands
by Lena Levey
CONTENT WARNING: DRUG USE
Something sweet sits under my tongue. The lady told me to press it against my gums until it’s gone, but she didn’t say what gone meant. The little grains have dissolved into nothingness, but I can still taste it. Can I lift my tongue now? I need to focus on this. On what’s in front of me. It does no good to let my thoughts roam free.
That’s what she told me, when she gave me the orange bottle, to focus on what’s in front of me until I am soothed. But in front of me is out of order. I can’t be here. I tried to explain to her that it’s a floodgate, that these thoughts don’t belong to me. “I just ride the wave,” I tell her, I don’t make eye contact, I am staring at the hoof of the giant stuffed giraffe.
Which is a weird thing to have in a doctor’s office. Who is that even for and before I finished the thought, I know the answer, and I feel so old and I think I’m going to be sick again.
Something sweet sits under my tongue, I remind myself. I’m home now. I’m safe.
But I had known him for years before we really met, warm and all at once in a smoky Shoreditch restaurant with people we had, “known for years, but never really met,” either. He said it just like that, in one exhale of Marlboro, and I thought it sounded pretentious, so I asked if he was a poet. He said “songwriter,” which was worse, I thought. But he told me about his guitar and I listened because nobody ever listens to me for real and maybe if I made him feel important he would return the favor. The giraffe lady asked me if I believe in karma and I told her I believe in debt.
The taste is gone now. I should find something in front of me. A dishwasher, clean and full. I can’t breathe. I inhale harder and faster. Thank god I’m alone—when I’m with people they watch this and see pressure and tell me to breathe deep to make it disappear, as if my lungs can push my memories off my chest. And I don’t like the way they look at me when I say that it’s not pressure, it’s a release, it’s proof that something really did happen or else I wouldn’t be shaking like this so Watch me. But not today. Today, I can lie on the floor and count the dishes.
We sat in the back row of The Globe and got to know each other between the acts before he finished his glass—his fourth one—and walked me home. Neither of us really wanted to see that play, but we did want to be the sort of people who would spend their Friday night watching Shakespeare, so we pretended, indulging in our delusions of grandeur. He liked the term enthusiast more than alcoholic.
“Besides, you can’t be an alcoholic before you’re thirty. Or if you drink expensive shit.” We walked in silence for a bit after that.
“I liked Lady Macbeth,” I told him. “I don’t know if I was supposed to, but I did. She used the tools at her disposal.”
“She’s a bitch.” I tensed up. I don’t like when bitch slides off a man’s tongue so easily. But I was being ridiculous. We were talking about a character. He wouldn’t say that about a real woman.
It would be easier if I could remember him as evil. Sometimes I get close to destroying my sympathies so as to hate him purely, the way everyone tells me to. Had he been cruel the whole time, I could breathe normally, remember normally. But we were friends. He walked me to my door and told me I was different than anyone he had ever met before.
I wanted him to fix me back, or at least prove that there is a version of this where I am unscathed. So it didn’t matter when my friends pushed back.
“When’s the last time he even asked you a question?”
“It doesn’t matter. He is there and it’s enough.”
“He’s not nice back.”
“I’m trying to help.”
“You wouldn’t let a girl treat you like that. It’s not right.”
“He’s just depressed.”
“So are you and you don’t do what he does.”
“I know but—”
“He won’t make an exception for you.”
“He cares about me.”
“He cares about what you provide for him.”
“I don’t have the luxury of noting the difference.”
Six rows of white circles, minus one now. The ceramic is still warm—focus on the heat. I close my eyes and I’m holding a sweaty hand, cold and hot on top of each other and it won’t release me. “I know I’m messed up but—” Be in the moment. When does this stuff kick in anyway? It’s been at least I don’t know how long and I can’t stop thinking about that damn car.
Not even the car, really. More his apartment balcony, clammy and gray at daybreak, who knows how many nights in a row telling him that it will be alright. That this isn’t forever and if he just got some help—“I don’t need them. I have you.”
I took that as a compliment. As the drugs and exhaustion dragged him into shallow sleep, I felt safe. I felt powerful. I fixed my gaze on the flag his father had hung from the wall: blue field, white cross. I exhaled. I had something to give that had nothing to do with the way I knew he looked at me.
“I have you.” I whisper it to the plate, trying to conjure his intonations. Impossibly slow, dragging each word like warm honey. In that awful gray apartment, I was starved for every last drop. If I hadn’t been so naive, if I had escaped him, would I still be in this kitchen? The longer I spend here, the more my presence seems like a forgone conclusion. Right before she gave me the orange bottle, I told her that if a woman is lucky, she chooses her last meal.
I thought he was different no I thought I was different will it always be like this? Why do I want so badly to win a rigged game? I run two fingers along the edge of the plate and imagine all the other ways I could have made it here.
“You make me feel like I matter,” he tells me. I matter to him, I tell myself, even though he never said that, even after he locked the car door and put his arm around my shoulder and I noticed for the first time that he was stronger than me. I stared straight ahead and felt myself fossilize; defeat encased in amber. I open my mouth through sweet glue. “You don’t want to do this,” I warn, as evenly as I can manage. “It’s not worth it.” I feel every inch of his skin digging into mine, a branding iron against my back. It burns, but I don’t move. I can’t.
And then he lets go. He unlocks the car and I leave without saying a word. He needed me more than he wanted to take me.
Women wanted, dead or alive. Better alive, this time, to suit his ambitions. Use the tools at your disposal. So I guess that I win, but I can’t stop crying. I thought he was—no, I thought I was different. I rub my hand faster against the plate but it won’t get clean. God, when does this start working did I lift up my tongue too soon or something?
I shouldn’t care. He didn’t even do anything. It’s happened before. It’s happened worse. But he is the one I can’t forget. Nothing even happened.
But I am left here alone looking like an idiot sobbing with this stupid plate in my hands and he is free. “You owe me,” I imagine saying to him. In return, he unlocks the car.
“Are you mad at me?” He is on my doorstep, sweaty, wild eyed, and reeking sickly sweet of whisky.
“Couldn’t this have waited until tomorrow? It’s late—”
“No, I need to know that you’re not mad at me. I know I’m messed up but I can’t lose you I can’t I can’t.”
“It’s okay. You did nothing wrong. You’re a good person. I promise. I promise.” I wrap my arms and words around him before I even question their validity. He slides his hands down my back and I know he has me. It burns.
How quickly my fear melted into twisted pride as he steadied himself against the doorframe. I could always hold myself together better than he could. Or maybe I just found satisfaction in sparing him from his consequences. If my final responsibility were to disintegrate, away from an audience’s judging eyes, I would have done that too. My last breath: a whisper to no one, choked out with pleasure. “It has been an honor,” I would say, “to have been of service.” I would find peace at last, imagining that he had heard it.
I only make myself unhappy by replaying these near misses over and over. “Ignorance is bliss,” the giraffe lady muses, which I decide is just a nicer way of saying that it is unlucky to be forced to know exactly how lucky you are.
I let it go. No use dragging him down with me, I tell myself as I promise him everything will be alright, I tell people once the floodgates close again and I am constructing justifications that sound better than “I am afraid.” But of course, once you notice that someone is stronger than you, there’s nothing you can do to forget it.
In my memories I set him free, but when the despair hits before the Xanax does I imagine my veins filled with stone. A plate shatters against the wall. That didn’t feel like I thought it would. Throw harder. I dream that I hit him, closed fist into his stomach. He stumbles back, and stares at me in shock for the first time. Too hard. Porcelain flies across the room. I hit again. I fall to my knees and brush pieces of broken plates into my hand. I hit again. I shouldn’t have done that. It makes no difference. I cannot restart time. I hit again. I should have gotten a dustpan. I’m bleeding. I hit again and again until my hands are paralyzed with pain and fatigue. My fists crash against his chest until he is unrecognizable, as much every other man as he is my friend, until I am surrounded by broken glass and fantasies, and I finally stop shaking for long enough to wash the blood off my empty hands.
About the Author
Lena Levey is a recent graduate of Georgetown Day School and will be attending Washington University in St. Louis in the fall. She grew up in London, England, and now lives in Washington D.C. She plans on studying international relations and creative writing at university.