Toward and Away From Zero
Ruby Odierna
On the night before we broke up, I vomited my share of a $255 meal for two into his toilet. The dish was fried pork belly and a $35 charcuterie board, the contents of which we had feigned familiarity with, nodding our heads and smiling softly as the waiter carefully gestured to each dainty little delicacy and proudly recited their names. My boyfriend had called the outing “our last hoorah," a Freudian slip, though he didn’t know what it meant yet. He clarified the statement. He meant, of course, the last supper before he began working for his father back home. We smiled, wittingly and naive, and looked down at our plates.
I spent the next morning scratching the dead skin off of my scalp and staring at the icicles melt off the tips of the trees. It was almost Valentine’s day. He was going to miss the occasion. He would be in a car with his father somewhere along the East Coast, going South, eventually reaching Florida. The dinner was an early celebration and an atonement for the fighting of the week prior. Looking out of his bedroom window, letting dandruff fall into my lap, I thought of his parents who slept in separate rooms, about complacency and weaknesses.
On the night before we broke up, we watched 20th Century Women and shook our heads when Elle Fanning called love “a fake connection.” It was my fourth time seeing the film. As I sat watching by his side, I considered why it moved me so much, what parts of me it moved, and what direction it moved me in. I wanted to know exactly what it was about the film that held so much significance for me, what it was about the characters, the story itself.
Maybe it was Greta Gerwig’s character, Abbie, her eccentric but authentic and wholly unique blend of strength, weakness, and quiet intensity. Or maybe it was that particular scene in which she insists that the man she is about to have sex with pretends to be a photographer who can’t resist touching her, as he repeatedly tells her, “I’m sorry.” What begins as a simple scenario intended to incite sexual anticipation becomes an intimate exchange of empathy and sorrow, him clutching her chin, her eyes wide, him softly apologizing into them. Maybe it was her desperation to be desired, the tender delicacy between the erotic and the deeply sad that moved me, and it moved me down.
Or maybe it was Elle Fanning’s character, Julie, a bitter, cynical teenager hiding fear of ever really being loved behind a snarky deadpan delivery and anxiously cool demeanor. Though seemingly stereotypical, there was something unique in Julie too, or maybe just something I could relate to. Not a cold exterior necessarily, but a certain decided-upon appearance reserved for those who happen to be looking. Maybe it was that particular scene in which she describes what sex is like for girls, how she regrets it half the time she does it, and how she doesn’t orgasm, but likes the sex anyway. “It’s their bodies, the way they look at you, the way their eyes get a little bit desperate at a certain point…” she says, gazing towards the sky as if warmly receiving images of once being wanted that way. When asked why she still has sex if she regrets it half the time, she simply responds, with perfect cadence, “because half the time I don’t regret it” and the little bells in my head that ring when I feel connected to something start to vibrate. Or maybe they’re in my stomach, and when they ring I’m warm and full again. Or perhaps most accurately, they reside in my chest, and their motion opens up tiny airwaves, making it just a little bit easier to breathe.
On the day we broke up, I observed the small pile of vibrantly colored lingerie on his floor and admired my own good taste, then soured with disgust at my vanity and the pitiful occasion of gathering one’s things for good. Once I had, I left the room.
Only, we didn’t actually break up. We just cried about the prospect of it for a few hours and then had really hot sex. When the intensity died, the return to normalcy was a warm blanket, threatened only by the prospect of another day’s uncertainty. I spent the rest of the day in his apartment with a feeling of static in my bones, the kind of contentment that burrows underneath the skin, like dust settling while the earth still trembles. We decided to watch the Super Bowl, a suitably lighthearted affair for a couple who just escaped death.
Only, the Super Bowl wasn’t on that night. It wasn’t on until the next Sunday. We were a week early, but it didn't matter. It didn't matter at all.
But something else mattered. That feeling of static, the kind of buzz under the skin that sits there to remind you of how alive you are. And maybe I was moved because 20th Century Women was alive with that quality of delicate uncertainty, because it was stuffed with so much love of life, and characters with so much desire but such little understanding of the world and their places in it. Maybe it was that it understood the “unbearable lightness of being.” Not the book, but the notion itself, the completely overwhelming and all-consuming knowledge that our actions have consequences, that no decision can be fixed in time or space, and that in every instant we are determining the rest of our lives. And what do we do with this information? We keep moving.
“When you were born I told you life was very big and unknown. There were animals and cities and music, you'd fall in love, have passions, have meaning, but now it's 1979 and nothing means anything, and I know you less every day.”
-Dorothea Fields (to Jamie), 20th Century Women
