it’s super important to me that i get some feedback…
by jessa_lynne
Posted to Stories on 2004-03-29 04:07:00
Justine’s small hands arranged her light brown hair tentatively while her cool, green eyes scanned her reflection for flaws. Ironed into unfaltering smoothness, her gray skirt and faded blue shirt hung limply over the delicate curves of her body. Her pale skin looked bleak from a lack of sleep; they reflected the lovers in last night’s movie, small bodies being ripped apart and at once thrown back together by the cruel forces of human nature. Her arms mimicked the motions of the helpless girl in the movie, struggling pointlessly against how her hair had chosen to arrange itself. Eventually she allowed her hands to fall to her side with defeat, accepting that her curls would not fall how she wished, grimly acknowledging the body in the mirror as her own; the small, powerless body, hung with long, loose curls and indistinctive, ill-fitting clothing, all of it was indeed hers. Her eyes detached from this image as she left her apartment, leaving it in a state of small disarray, movies strewn on the floor and a half eaten bowl of stale popcorn left on the coffee table.
Outside the cheap pine door to her apartment there was an entire hallway full of identical doorways, identical pieces of evidence that were other people in this empty place. Justine watched newspapers disappear from these doorsteps, some decorated with dismal welcome mats and others left as empty as the beige carpeting implied all was in this building, with the regularity and disconnection with which she watched heartbreak and triumph in the hundreds of movies that tried desperately to reinforce that, indeed, we are not alone in our quiet and in our miseries. She walked, clumsily buttoning her plain black coat and trying to tame a rebellious hair, past these reminders of the existence of a world outside of her frail body when a man walked past her.
The stranger grabbed Justine’s attention and as he walked slowly down the hall she soaked in the details of his body and its fluid movements. Black pants that looked almost sparkling like the sky at the most bleak midnight and a starch white shirt that was undone at the top button, reveling his long pale neck, covered his long limbs that moved lightly and simply under her stare. Perhaps sensing her eyes on his back, he turned around and looked at her momentarily, showing her his bright, black eyes and his clam face. His lips formed a lazy smile, spreading across his white teeth and resting on the sharp dimples of his checks, only to slowly relax as he turned his head forward once again. With ease and slight grace he walked out of Justine’s sight as his hands ran through his thick and overgrown dark-brown hair.
Her mind wandered back to the image of the man in the hallway while she worked that day. She saw his movements in the papers on her desk as they swayed slightly under her paperweight with the breeze caused by the traffic of the walkway between two rows of cubicles. She imagined him walking through the rows of crowed, small, identical gray cubicles, his beautiful body and movements completely out of place in this office’s bleak setting. He was not the kind of person who she saw here often. Mostly there were whitewashed men in gray who brought her papers to copy, file, or complete. There also were the occasional employees who had not yet given up the fight against the dreary atmosphere after moving up from their local branch to the corporate offices. They had yet to be disillusioned by the sudden change of objective the move up in their career had brought; instead of handing out loans for people to buy their first houses with, they now took the homes back when the payments ceased. Instead of heroes, they were greedy and cruel, as dictated by new job descriptions. Justine could feel from her first glance at the man in the hallways that he was not from this world.
She mindlessly made copies and entered data as this vision of a man walked aimlessly in and out of her cubicle, eventually stopping behind her, clumsily and gently placing his hand on her shoulder as she jumped slightly by the surprise that he had materialized into a solid human being.
“Justine?” She turned away from her computer’s screen, which was crowded with spreadsheets and numbers that meant nothing to her, to see a humbly attractive and honest face, furrowed into a look of concern. “Are you okay?”
“Oh, I’m fine, David. You just surprised me. What do you want?”
“I need two copies of the Greer file. They are waiting in my office.” David’s eyes searched Justine for some hidden source of her clam demeanor as he always did when he looked into her slight face. He was usually distracted from his search by the understated movements of her lips that were always impeccably covered with almost unnoticeable pink lipstick or by the soft sent that lingered in the air around her. He realized now that his hand still rested on her small shoulder and that greatened his urge to touch her face or to sweep a stray curl out of the way of her green eyes. He moved his hand reluctantly, laughing it off nervously.
“Okay, I’ll bring them right over.”
“Great. And, um, Friday at seven, right?”
“Yeah,” Justine mumbled as she turned around again, reemerging herself into her world of numbers and unnamed entities that walked uninvited in and out of her cubicle not making a sound.
Time crept by slower than Justine would have liked it to, as she filled her days with movies and numbers. She walked through the halls of her apartment building slower now, hoping to see the beautiful stranger again. She put more effort into her appearance than ever, killing the will of the disobedient strands of hair by chocking them with hair products and unceasing brushing. But the workweek went by without another sight of the man, although every time something moved in her peripheral vision, she imagined it was him, moving slowly towards her, about to calmly introduce himself. She began knowing this creature that loomed forever out of sight. She could feel somehow that he knew what it was like to be her, and she could only imagine this awareness running through his veins when he would one day finally approach her, as she knew that he was destined to do. He was no longer a stranger, but a familiar presence in her life that she had not yet had the pleasure of meeting.
As she walked to her apartment that Friday with her mail in her hands after work, she finally saw him again. Rifling through her mail, she pretended not to watch him unlock the door directly across the hall from her own. She pretended to be engrossed in the small pile of bills and junk mail that lay in her hand while she watched out of the corner of her eye as he opened his door. She inadvertently looked up and found herself unable to look away. His apartment overflowed with some melodic and joyful song and it was filled with bright cheerful furniture. On his couch sat a well groomed blonde who looked at home, absently reading a book which she quickly placed on her lap as she jumped up to greet him.
“Michael,” the blonde chirruped as the door shut, leaving Justine absently staring at blank pine as her hand limply held her mail and her purse. She turned and unlocked her door, muttering to herself, “Michael. His name is Michael.” She went inside and absently dressed for her date with David, the name never allowing silence for long.
When she had finished, she found herself impeccably dressed, her hair and clothes formed in the likeness of Michael’s expectant blonde, sitting quietly across from David at dinner. He had prepared their orders ahead of time, carefully trying to find the perfect balance between a meal that would both please her taste buds and impress her. Her mind was still wandering the halls with Michael, boldly touching his hand and looking directly into his eyes without shying away. She ate her food quietly while David watched her in expectant awe, asking her concerned questions, trying to get beneath her surface.
They walked the few blocks back to her apartment after the dinner was finished, both sufficiently full and blissful, Justine heavy with thoughts of Michael and David swelling with his admiration for Justine. When he looked at her he was overwhelmed by her quiet and her calm. He even felt a hint of a deeper person underneath in her eyes, in that sparkling green that always felt far away and dreamy despite his many attempts to catch them with his earnest brown eyes.
Outside her door Justine overwhelmed David’s polite, timid demeanor when finally the events inside her head made their way out. He wasn’t aware that the person underneath the curls and the scent that he recreated in his mind so many times before at night, longing to see her just one more time, to make sure the details were right before he fell asleep, was franticly embracing a man that she had begun to love in her mind and he was simply standing in the spot he was supposed to be in. Her lips that lingered softly on his lips and her small, powerless arms that wrapped around him, spreading comfort, confirmed his lingering suspicions about her; as she led him hastily into her apartment he was convinced that he had, after so many attempts at forcing small talk that would reveal her soul to him and his carefully laid plans of infiltrating her life, found the humanity of Justine in her sudden affection. When the door shut behind them their faces momentarily detached and their eyes met for the first time that night. Justine’s eyes were intensely superimposing thick black hair, pale skin, and shinny and intelligent black eyes over David’s anonymously attractive features. He mistook her look for one of passion and love, and he allowed her to mould his image with her hands and mind while he passively observed from his strange vantage point the first intimate embraces between Justine and her deity.
David left early in the morning, full of tired recollections of the beauty of Justine’s quiet smile, her deep fixed gaze, and the geography of her body. When Justine woke a few hours later she once again carefully dressed, recreating herself in the image of all things that she knew that Michael would adore. She patiently smoothed her hair into perfection and adorned herself with sharp black and blindingly bright white, breaking away from her wardrobe of faded staples, dressing to sparkle through the hallways, sure to hold her head upright and look directly into the eyes of Michael. When she left her small apartment, the few rooms that contained her solid, bland furniture and her silence, a ring came from deep within her purse. As she searched for her phone she heard the noise of a door on the other side of the hall opening. She glanced up to see Michael again, this time his eyes focused on her faced and she hunched over her large purse, searching to silence the abrasive noise of the phone. She found the phone and saw the number that blinked on its neon face; it was David, probably calling to ask her questions in his overly cautious voice about the night before and what it meant about their emerging relationship. She peered at Michael through curls that had already found their way out, admiring all the things about him that had been embedded into mind and all the things that out shown her image of him, and she pressed the silence button. She drew her head up, eager for her first opportunity to approach him. Instead of seeing his face waiting for her as expectantly as hers was, she saw him turning away from her once more, this time with a scowl scarring his previously light hearted face. His door shut abruptly on her as she stood with her mouth gaping, the word that had been at the very tip of her tongue now falling off with no more resistance.
“Hello,” she mumbled with disappointment. Her phone rang again. This time she answered it.
“I’m outside your apartment and I just wanted to see you again this morning. Can I give you a ride to work?”
“Um, yeah, of course, that’s fine,” she stumbled over her words as the vision of Michael dissolved from her mind, leaving only this empty hallway and David’s comforting voice, the one that spoke to her with such control and care. She walked slowly down the stairs and out the apartment complex, trying to recreate David in her mind as she had recreated Michael so often, but she failed to do so, the face she juxtaposed with his prevailing in each memory. She could remember the warmth with which he looked at her, the warmth she attributed to Michael. She also vaguely remembered the sensation of his kindness and some sort of love that crept over her the night before in the shape of his reluctant hands.
Justine got into his small gray car, the disappointment plain on her face. Before he even asked what was wrong, she began to tell him the story of Michael thoughtlessly, without even considering how the devotion shown in the deep brown eyes that she had covered with Michael’s just hours ago. Finally she arrived on that morning’s events and shared that she had realized the impossibility of dreams and was now ready for her reality in David’s life. He was, after all, the man that walked into her cubicle and carefully touched her shoulder, the man who spoke to her gently with a voice full of concern, and the man whose phone calls she ignored and face she tried to turn into the face of a vision of perfection that hardly even existed.
He listened quietly to Justine, nodding slightly from time to time, but never trying to catch her gaze. When her words had halted and she awaited his happy reaction to her decision on loving him he pulled his car to the side of the road. He looked at her finally and she saw that his brown eyes were moist and angry.
“Get out of my car, and don’t bother gracing me with your secondhand affection anymore.” His voice had lost its characteristic hesitant concerned quality. She had drained him of that.
Justine stood stunned on the side of the road. Her sharp clothes felt stiff and uncomfortable, cutting into her slight figure and exaggerating her little curves to an almost ridiculous degree. He pulled her car door shut behind her and drove off without giving her a second look. The road was empty and long with nothing but hotels and fast food on all sides of her. She slowly took stock of her life as she walked to the nearest motel to call for a taxi. She imagined her apartment, its dingy, white walls and her solid, plain furniture; the apartment revealed nothing about her at all. It was simply a container that fit its function. The movies were still scattered on her floor and she tried to remember the faces and names of the characters, but they came up as blank as the highway she was walking away from.
She imagined taking a taxi to work and collapsing inside her world of numbers again. Now when the papers on her desk swayed Michael’s movements would no longer come to mind, just the familiar sight of his door shutting on her, expectant and emptier than ever. She would be blown through the rows of cubicles, like a dead flower being pushed by the wind, stiffly and powerlessly trying to drag her feet and protest the death of the gray light and the glow of her computer’s screen, and perpetually unable to do so.
Both home and work had real no life to offer her, just containment and routine. She checked into the hotel, forgetting her original objective, and laid down defeated on a bed that was haunted by a thousand of nights like last night, a thousand bodies that faked strength and love in the very spot where she lay. She drifted into sleep, thinking that at least now she knew that she was nothing more than one of a faceless group of millions of vacant people, and no beautiful strangers could save her from her own empty life. David, she was sure, would be fine.
