NOT WITH PEOPLE
This is a story about the time I left the house to be around people but not with people. People when they’re looking at the newspaper or at each other are comforting bean bags and people when they ask you to explain yourself are that bed you bought from a cheap website that time. The one that doesn’t feel quite right and your back hurts and you wonder if you’ll ever get used to it.
People when they’re holding each other at bus stops and on each others shoulders across the bridge and wishing the movie was over so they can look at each other again. Those people. They’re the first coffee in the morning after your senses have come back after a head cold and you open the curtains and the sun feels like the sun and you are a frozen flower. People when they make you feel small and then say it was just a joke are that bed you bought once from that cheap website that bursts into flames and burns your house down.
So I left the house to be around people but not with people.
Between the car park and the coffee shop there’s a department store and the department store has a fake cul-de-sac with wooden house fronts and upsell gardens and a walk-in catalogue of living rooms one after the other.
You can only see the first one through a fake window. You walk under the flimsy cardboard streetlight and over the plastic grass and there it is. A wooden portal into modern family life. You can breathe deep and smell the flowers from the vase on the coffee table reminding you that family can be slow and calm and you see the broken banisters from curious customers wondering what is upstairs reminding you that family can be chaos. The flowers are lilies today and they are replaced every day and that makes me smile and I wonder who does that. This is the room of flowers because there are flowers on the mantlepiece too. Under that, a flat screen TV and games console and pretend homework out on the dinner table with pens and exercise books and a fake spilled glass of water.
Past the room of flowers is the ice cream room. I call it that because it reminds me of every summer the ice cream van jingled to our house like an old cartoon where even the trees danced and the man inside was a 99 flake with sprinkles. He would have lived in a house like this. Polka dot curtains and colourful lampshades with see-through plastic stands and I don’t really know what jive music is but they had music playing that was as colourful and angular as the ice cream room.
I like the next room because it reminds me I’m nearly at my favourite room. This room is Julie Garland’s kitchen and it smells of freshly baked cookies in a way that almost smells of freshly baked cookies but reminds you of the early 90’s when they tried to make scratch and sniff TV a thing. Anyway it’s the only room with a mannequin and she’s dressed in a white blouse with a blue apron that makes her look like Dorothy and when I told my friend she looks like Julie Garland she laughed and told me that’s not her name it’s Judy but that’s now the name of this fake housewife offering up a homely kitchen for just $999 plus installation.
That’s my journey. Every day I’m not working. I drive to the car park by Madison and Cooper and make the short walk to the coffee shop past the cul-de-sac of rooms for sale. The room of flowers, the ice cream room, Julie Garland’s kitchen, and then my favourite room. The final room. The final room before the exit to the coffee shop and it’s the only room not for sale. This is the anxiety room. A chair with no purpose and a table with no placemats. A fireplace with no mantlepiece. A vase with no flowers and a door that leads to nowhere. The room is roped off with signs on every surface reading This is an arrangement area and not for customer use. In a store full of sink-in sofas and deep oak dining rooms and lavender diffusers, here is a room so unsettlingly lifeless and an off-grey that can’t even commit to being brown and the only room that tells you off for even looking at it. The anxiety room is my favourite room because it’s the only room that changes. Sometimes a clothes rail with curtain patterns against whiteboards and wallpaper samples and other days old coffee cups and someone left behind a walkie talkie after a staff meeting. That room can never really be anything it has to be all things to everyone and we are soul mates me and the anxiety room.
After the anxiety room it was a jumble of sale rails and end of line items. Out of season overcoats, last year’s technology and then the exit. Across the street, past the fountain and into my people watching spot.
• • •
And it was in my favourite people watching spot that our story begins. Because it was in that spot that I first saw Archer Lavallière. Picture a hat rack in the most expensive bar in town. A tower of dark fabric. Not the dark of cheap whiteboard marker maths, the dusty dark of a hundred history lessons rubbed into old chalkboards. I guessed his age in a heartbeat. If he wasn’t 43 he was 42 and if he wasn’t a summer July August baby he was definitely a cosy winter jumper December Christmas tree and nothing in between. This wasn’t a maybe there will be flowers soon person this was there are flowers right now see how I bloom person.
Right in front of me in the queue, ordering what I would then hear him order every day.
Hello yes thank you.
I will have the Sumatra, extra hot, very little milk thank you, can I pay with cash.
Always with cash, always with permission. I was in love years before his coins hit the counter.
The next day. I got there a little later but I could still hear him order.
I will have the Sumatra, extra hot, very little milk thank you can I pay with cash.
The quiet way he said
Hello yes thank you
meant
if I was the only one here I would want to know about your day, tell me everything.
and the way he said
can I pay with cash
really meant
I know I can, I just really don’t want to bother you with any of this I wish you were rich beyond your wildest dreams.
Dear Archer,
You remind me of, you make me feel like, there’s something. Some feeling I can’t grasp. Like waking up from a dream and the dream fades like a photograph you threw from a ferryboat and it’s gone into the cold water forever. Archer you’re that picture somehow. Standing by a -
It’s gone.
I nearly wrote you a note a hundred times and nearly slipped it into your blazer pocket a hundred times. I used to sit in that spot in that cafe writing you nearly notes over and over again until the ink in my pen faded away.
• • •
This is a story about the time I left the house to be around people but not with people. People when the stars come out and they stop and stare and dream are movies you never want to end. They are movies you never ever want to end. People who no longer gaze at passing airplanes, those people are the unskippable ads.
People who leave the curtains open just in case they catch a shooting star in the corner of their sleepy eyes are big beautiful dreams of green fields and purple paintbrush galaxies stirred into hot ginger tea. People who never think about the sky are cold callers who call again and again and again and Archer you were the love of my life. You were deep blue clouds of stars and airplanes and sad movies beyond melancholy and you wrapped me in your infinite arms around and around until I could no longer see the ground.
Between the car park and the coffee shop there’s a department store and the department store has a fake cul-de-sac with wooden house fronts and upsell gardens and a walk-in catalogue of living rooms one after the other.
That day, the window into the room of flowers had gone. Not boarded up, not moved somewhere else. Gone. The window into the world of family chaos was gone. Gone like the way you know the summer has gone when the leaves turn to rust and you know that summer is still there behind all that is hidden and maybe it will return, or maybe it won’t. I’ll never forget that feeling. When the first room faded.
The ice cream room still jangled and chattered like a happy dog. Still yapped in bright colours and pulled on the lead. Like it was restrained by earthly colours and wanted to take you somewhere more exciting. Nothing missing there. Polka dots, one two three, yes probably all still there. Red see through plastic all still there. I looked back, wondering if it was all in my head but the window to the room of flowers was still gone. It sat in my mind. Quiet and uneasy.
That morning I walked with my head down through Julie Garland’s Kitchen and the nearly smell of nearly freshly baked cookies made me feel better. Today the anxiety room was hard to see through the layers of dresses hung up on wardrobes on wheels, arranged around a meeting table with big sketches on paper and then pencils and some plates with pastry crumbs and very important work it looked like.
Then across the street, past the fountain and into my people watching spot. The cafe was a local cafe called The History Of Coffee where the walls were covered in a winding timeline drawn probably drawn by the runner up of some school contest why was the window in the room of flowers gone.
It didn’t make sense.
But that would have to wait because he was right on time as always. The expensive watch of a man called Archer Lavallière. Every inch of his tailored suit looked to me like the meticulous spinning cogs and hands striking magical midnight even in the middle of the day. In the middle of a coffee shop. A midnight full of moons like five moons and even more stars in one inch of his blazer pocket than in an entire night sky.
Hello yes thank you.
And the air in my lungs where was the air in my lungs.
I will have the Sumatra, extra hot, very little milk thank you, can I pay with cash.
The quiet way he said
very little milk thank you
meant
if I could ask less of you I would ask less of you.
and the way he said
can I pay with cash
meant
If I could give you everything I would give you everything. Come away with me to the graveyard of stars, to the stations where everything new is born and we’ll start everything all over again.
Dear Archer.
Were you once my world? Did we once dance together? One, two, three, step. I know it. I feel it. There was a dance and there was a crowd and we were the stage and -
And then he looked at me. Right over from the counter with his coffee in his ringless hand. He looked at me the way you look up at the departure board when you’re not looking at the departure board your mind is still in your book.
Archer there’s something. Something I can’t. Quite. Something beyond sadness in your eyes.
And in the corners of your smile.
Like a field trying to be green. Trying so hard to be green after a war but the landscape underneath has changed forever and is never going back.
I saw you trying, Archer, and I saw the old war underneath everything.
• • •
Between the car park and the coffee shop there’s a department store and the department store has a fake cul-de-sac with wooden house fronts and upsell gardens and a walk-in catalogue of living rooms one after the other.
Or at least there used to be.
That morning on my walk through the store on my way to the coffee shop the window was still gone and I hate that but now the ice cream room too. And Julie Garland’s kitchen. Gone. Not gone like they ever used to be here but gone like they were never here to begin with and nobody will ever talk about them or help you remember the colourful lights and the sounds of happiness and movement and cosy home life all gone. How often the world whispers its favourite lie and its favourite heartbreak they were never here to begin with.
There were still a few walls left standing around the room of flowers and all four walls of the anxiety room. Walls surrounding wardrobes on wheels and the autumn line. But as I walked I had to stare so deeply at all that was left to keep me from feeling the big wide open space of what was once the thriving department store now a vast empty warehouse with no colours or signposts or clothes or lives for sale.
They were never here to begin with the world utters and you have to point at the only memories left to convince the world that the rooms were really there and they really were as beautiful and alive as you remember.
Archer help me. Everything around me is fading like a drawing on sand and the waves are coming faster than I can draw.
Hello, yes, thank you.
Sigh. Big closed eyes sigh.
I will have the Sumatra, extra hot, very little milk thank you, can I pay with cash.
Archer when the barista passed over his coffee he always sat at at the same table. Small round table by the window, folded pyramid special offer advertisements pushed gently to the side. Far enough from the door that it didn’t cause a draft. A perfect people watching spot.
People when they pass by the window are birds caught in the warm air. They rise and fall and tumble and turn. They are birds caught in the warm air and they chirp happy family chirps and they sometimes laugh like people and cry like people but they are birds caught in warm air.
I used to leave the house to be around people but not with people. With one person. My person. Archer there are two seats at the table is one of them for me? Archer the rooms keep disappearing around me but you are always here at this table. Archer is one of them for me? If I’m here every day will you be here every day?
That morning, I don’t know if the disappearing rooms made me panic that everything I knew and loved was leaving or if he was just particularly tall and summertime but I sat on the chair opposite Archer by that window. He had his coffee in both hands watching the birds with their shopping bags and newspapers and I spoke out loud for the first time.
“Archer if I-“
Something in him shifted the moment I began to speak. He didn’t turn to face me, he didn’t smile, if anything he looked suddenly cold.
“Archer I feel like everything I knew is leaving.“
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a journal. Dark green with two pens clipped to the front cover.
“If I’m still and quiet,” I said, “can I sit with you at this table?”
Archer opened the book to the middle and started to write.
March 10th
“I’ll be so still and quiet.”
Archer wrote silently in his journal. The shadows of his arms on the table were lighter now.
March 10th
He wrote.
I miss you.
I miss our home.
Our home with the lilies, our home with the broken banisters, all of it I miss it and I miss you.
In the same moment I knew he remembered me.
I miss coming home to you, seeing you smile in your blue apron while you conjured up magical cookies and you showed me all your secrets.
He remembered me. And the shadows on the table were lighter still as his arms began to fade in the morning light through the coffee shop window.
When he wrote
I miss you
what he meant was
You aren’t here
And the small way he wrote, in small letters
i miss our home
meant
can I have you back?
Archer you remember me. And now we are at this table and it is the end of everything and you remember me.
I’ll come here every day at the same time. I keep thinking if I do everything right, if I do just everything just the way it was then maybe I’ll see you again.
But I know you’ll never come.
The last corner of his shirt collar and the small silver cufflink of his writing hand lingered in the air as the rest of Archer, my Archer turned to icy morning field smoke and spiralled around his empty coffee cup.
• • •
This is a story about the time I left the house to be around people but not with people. Between the car park and the coffee shop there’s a department store and the department store has a fake cul-de-sac with wooden house fronts and upsell gardens and a walk-in catalogue of living rooms one after the other.
I used to leave the house just to be around you again. To keep you in my mind and my heart and in the soles of my feet and in the tips of my fingers and in the air around my face. But my death came fast and nobody is ever ready and I fought for you and I fought for my memories even as they faded and at the end there you were at your table. For me. Always.
People when they are with each other for the short time they have each other are the beating heart of the universe and nothing else comes close. They are the beating heart of the universe and they are birds in warm air and the true chaos of life and death and the sunshine in the morning. They are the calm moon in the night and the beauty of all things that won’t be here forever.
How often the world whispers its favourite lie and its favourite heartbreak they were never here to begin with.
But we can whisper back.
They were.
Oh they were.