Transits (11 page)

She will bore you. She will talk to you about how she made lists of things to do that she carefully dismembered until the day she left, how these carefully constructed lists littered her apartment, were pinned to her walls and filled the face of her empty fridge until the day the car came and picked her up.

You will likely want her to speed up her story, caring little for lists and more about love. Everyone wants to hear about love.

will remember it occurring to her on the first leg of the flight to Russia that she never once considered what her time there would be like, never actually read the guidebook she had purchased and then crossed off one of her many lists. She will tell you that with
her face pressed against the window of seat thirty-two A, she finally realized that it was too late to have expectations, that instead it was for the best that she did not, and that she would simply fall out of her reality and see where she landed when she did.

And when she tells you her story over a couple of martinis, she will recall laughing more than she had ever laughed in her known life, yet will never be able to describe exactly what it was she was laughing at. She will recall the lie—or maybe the truth—they told each other while drinking endless cans of beer in beer gardens over endless hours without sunset, will distinctly remember forgetting her old life until it faded into a pale list of details she would have rather discarded.

Don't be confused by the disparate nature of their drunken dialogues. The fact that he remembers one thing and she remembers another does not necessarily mean that one of them found more meaning; it just means they came from completely different places, used different maps to travel to the point where they met,
where we begin
.

The precarious nature of modern love. Love that involves nausea and euphoria, laughter and lament. Love that involves a Georgian restaurant in a basement in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Their first dinner together, a meal in a Georgian restaurant in a basement in St. Petersburg, Russia. While they are laughing over a thousand nothings, impossible in-jokes between people who barely know each other, the stern-faced waitress never smiles a single time. Not even once during the entirety of the meal. It becomes a game between them, a game that eventually unites them, trying to get waitresses to crack a grin between courses. This particular waitress doesn't, instead takes the empty plates and counts up the cheque, a cheque he requests and reads for in Russian.

Love that feels foreign.

is very far from home. is not very far from home. Take note, reader: from where we begin, the
mathematics of this suggests that their homes are very far apart. Regardless of this, they are both presently refusing to think about home, avoiding the notion entirely. They are instead collaborating, scheming, creating fiction, creating failure.

The mathematics of distance is this: he will meet someone else in Moscow and she will meet someone else in Toronto. Let us, before we begin, remember the precarious nature of modern love. Don't be consumed by the pre-destined nature of this ethereal modern love moment. Don't be fooled. He will make love to another woman and she will make love to another man. Despite the pre-ordained, despite his use of the word “destiny” and talk of “fate,” they will betray each other within weeks.

notices a younger couple seated at a table near them—he is Russian and she is American, both barely out of their teens. The young girl is smiling coyly towards her companion, curling her hair around her finger, and pushing the remainder of her meal around the plate with her fork.

They will all betray each other within weeks. Beauty will beget bile, and bile will beget that which was born to be broken.

“, isn't it beautiful?” says, watching the second couple smile with all their saccharine sweetness and sighs.

“Isn't what beautiful?”

“The way he's suddenly changing her life, the way she's falling in love. You know that she will go back to the States and tell all of her girlfriends that she met a Russian poet and he changed her life.”

“No,” says flatly. She will come to learn that he always speaks this flatly, this matter-of-factly.

“No?”

So let us, before we begin, think about love.

“No that's not beautiful because
this
is beautiful. That—
that
is nothing more than
us for dummies
.”

Her Part One
The Grand Hotel Europe

Some thoughts on “home.”

“There is nothing in the world that can make you feel more at home than actually being at home. This assertion will seem false once you step across the threshold of the Grand Hotel Europe in St. Petersburg. You may be thousands of miles from home, yet will feel as comfortable as if you'd never left.”
–The Grand Hotel Europe Website

has a theory.

Things of any importance have to happen in certain venues, spaces that by their very nature represent transition and change, for better or for worse. Train stations and airports secure an obvious position on this list, as do hospitals and churches, courthouses and funeral homes. Lovers meet, marry, birth, fade and die. Any scene in any film or book of any value involves a venue of this kind of consistent traditional symbolism; a set that will carefully consider the weather and the extras and the poignancy in order to deliver its grand message, however painful or painless.

And at The Grand Hotel Europe, a venue of transition if there ever were one, something shifts for , something changes in an accidental scene where the fiction and the fantasy become real.

is the kind of romantic heroine who places immense value in venues, and when her and enter The Grand Hotel Europe merely to exchange some currency in a kiosk on its sprawling first floor, she is struck by the endless filmic symbolism of
a place seething with other people's transitions. It speaks to changes, people running from and running to countless things, is littered with women on shopping binges and business men making angry phone calls. It is a place reserved for a feeling of “other,” a place housing belonging for those who cannot belong.

She fails to mention this realization to as she watches him line up patiently amongst the internationally recruited extras in the scene. She fails completely in conveying that she is suddenly consumed by the need to cry over a loss she had yet to conceive. She does cry, if only momentarily, the notion of a pending severing finally striking her in a place outside the realm of fiction.

The security guard eyes her sympathetically.

“Miss, are you alright?” he asks.

returns from the kiosk, freshly exchanged funds in hand.

“Let's get a room,” he suggests, hardly joking.

“Let's get a drink,” she replies.

As comfortable as if you'd never left home
.

At The Grand Europe Hotel, at the midpoint of her trip, the very idea of
home
seems a foreign concept. It has somehow been redefined. Home is the contents of her bag. Home is this hotel. Home is this currency kiosk. Home is this security guard who speaks English. Home is this hotel bar and this twelve-dollar cosmopolitan.

She left home. She is home. She is going home.

Between them they drink four drinks at the bar at The Grand Hotel Europe, St. Petersburg. They eat olives and peanuts and while they do they finally talk about things that are real. They talk about past lovers,
past broken hearts, past failures. Their fantasy bleeds into their reality seamlessly, without stain, just a perfect blending of what is and what is imagined, until the transition leaves with an electric and tragic feeling of possibility. A feeling that he could be possible in this concept of home.

As comfortable as if you'd never left home.
As comfortable as home.
Home.

That he, suddenly, in a hotel bar, is home.

Her Part Two

The edited, abridged climax. A final scene between them in a St. Petersburg train station, described in 55 words, no more and no less.

The last thing he gave her: an American quarter in a Russian train station.

He explained that once flipped it wasn't the head or tail telling your fate, but that feeling of disappointment or elation you got after the telling.

Regardless, she pleaded
the coin was wrong
when he left on a train to Moscow.

Her Part Three

A small collection of short lists she composes after returning home to Toronto, each revealing the truth and misapprehension connected to the cliché of modern love.

Things that are true

1. will never move to Russia, despite the invitation.

2. did actually (if only for a moment) seriously consider staying in Russia when it was requested in a train station, but it was the anxieties of things left behind, boxes of belongings and a bullshit bar job, that overwhelmed her until her head hurt and her heart broke.

3. The moment in the restaurant where the waitress again never smiled, when she spilled red wine in her lap and on her skirt and valiantly blotted it out with his shot of vodka before it set into a stain—she knew in that moment, however foolishly, that she would be haunted by him across oceans and flight paths, forever.

4. Her heart is broken.

Things that are not true

1. intends to be one day re-united with , as discussed.

2. is willing to give up her one-bedroom apartment and ass-grabbing bar job for the good of fate.

3. is not enjoying all of this message-ridden madness and undivided attention daily.

4. Her heart is broken.

Things that can and will be debated

1. Love that is unrequited is a futile endeavor.

2. His other women, past and present, do not bother her.

3. She is happy.

4. Her heart is broken.

Reasons why she fell in love with

1. His unflinching loyalty to his friends. While it was evident that he was accustomed to not having much of a traditional family he felt he could rely on, he instead had a
chosen family
: those people he had collected over the years that spanned the globe, people he would lay down and die for despite the fact that he could only procure brief moments with them over distances and despite daily commitments.

2. The way the city was entirely his own. This ownership revealed in every meal he ordered (for her) and every purchase he made (for her) and every word he said (for her.)

3. The fact that he paid a DJ to play a song she wanted to hear.

4. Her heart is broken.

Perceived reasons why fell in love with her

1. Because, severed from the lists on the face of an empty fridge, lists that consumed her life, she became someone else far more interesting.

Actual reasons why fell in love with her

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Her Part Four

The possibility that she may desert him, his memory, and the memory of a city forever is introduced to the reader, if only to invest you further in the possibility of their future success.

A walk home from work in eight parts.

He says: I don't understand how this happened. I wake up feeling like an asshole because I'm too addicted to you and half the time can't remember what I said. I wake up feeling dizzy realizing I haven't had more than one small meal a day for weeks, I stumble down the sidewalk with my shirt un-tucked, I get to work before everyone else because I can't sleep, I get high on coffee, open the letter you sent me, and feel like everything is perfect once again. Sleep, wake up, repeat.

She says: I don't understand how this happened.

Before this began in a Georgian restaurant in St. Petersburg, Russia her life was perfect in its constant rhythms.

She is angry now, perhaps only for today, that has decided to disrupt that. His long-distance techno-messages are a thing she now craves, and yet she simultaneously despises them, disrupting her day and the beat of her heart and her ability to eat and sleep and talk and try. She is angry now, and perhaps only now, that he has “destroyed everything for her”, from his
.ru
to her
.ca
, and continues to do so daily via his disregarding regard.

Modern technology, like the cliché of modern love, is a bitch that way. It has the ability to make real the unrealistic in real time, so even though she went back to being penciled in for love making with her new back home boyfriend, the consistent buzz of the electronic notifications of new messages received and sent continued on and on in her head. was so determined to rip her out of her ordinary life and make her remember, that she often had to turn the phone off and delete the messages in order to merely get to work, get her teeth brushed, and even to get to the love making.

He says: Stroll home, even if it is raining, go insane.

1.
Leaving Work
: Today, like in every good love cliché, she decides to walk the forty minutes home from work in the pouring rain, her phone in her front left pocket, waiting for the hum to declare itself so she can consciously ignore him. She considers that she could gain satisfaction from deletion and subsequent dismissal.

2.
Post Consideration of Deletion/Dismissal:
She is already soaking wet. Her city, in contrast to his, is kind and light, full of colour. The sort of place where people apologize for things you have done to them, never jaywalk and always throw their change into the cups of the hungry.

3.
Halfway home
: She is soaking wet. She decides she wants to send another, better version of herself to him in the mail in a box
marked
fragile
. Seal the package with ribbon and twine, tape it tight, and be done with it. She wants to do this so there can be two s, one to live out a perfect life with perfect rhythms on this continent, and the other to satiate 's need for her. She wants to send another version of herself, but she knows the package will be torn open by angry men with angry fingers in the borderlands of Russia, that the contents will be deemed contraband, will be rummaged though and inspected, and sent back, rejected.