Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER
The first time that Jen walks out of an airplane, she smelled metal in the air. That smell of cold, distant acquaintances trying to size up what you’ve accomplished since they last time they saw you. Everything feels so far removed from the world she left behind. Earthy, grounded and a little bit of rootedness. Everything has its place, everything knows where it’s meant to grow and a sense of comfort that things will fall into place come what may. No matter how much of tornado of a life her last two years have been. She took another swig of the heavy air and slid her glasses on from on top of her head. Game on. She’s ready to roll and get herself a new life. She didn’t fly 1000 kms across the ocean to reminisce on her very first step.
It was difficult to believe that only a day ago she was hiding inside the closet. Literally. And perhaps figuratively, though we’ll come to that part in a bit. In between the posh-named jackets, overcoats and the single fedora hat, she was peeking through the slight gap that the door made. Musky. The closet smelled of rich white men that you meet in clubs and whose names you forgot promptly after they stop buying you drinks. Only this one somehow managed to take Lacie home and never let her leave. Lacie. Now. Didn’t expect we’ll get to Lacie this fast. But you can’t really talk about Jen’s without talking about Lacie really.
Originally, their stories were never even meant to be told in the same breath. There was a moment in time, when Lacie’s world is all about rising up before the rest of the neighborhood wakes, if not only so she can go through their rubbish during her morning dog-walk to see what’s really going on inside, take a shower, do the commute and get her 8 hours contribution as a well-heeled member of the society. She has a savings account that continues to increase each month and a labradoodle who continues to shower her with joy and saliva each day. Life is sorted as she knows it.
At the same moment in time, Jen’s story was all about God. Yes. God. Jen was the proud card-carrying member of WWJD club and she would easily get up on a stage, podium, top of the dining table to preach on how we all should be virgins again and that what matters is what’s inside your heart. It was brilliant. Jen had purpose, conviction and a guaranteed roadmap to the heavenly kingdom of God where wifi is always in abundance and the wine will always be smooth and rich without ever having to consult a million websites. Alas. Life does not subsrice to Lacie’s nor Jen’s grand plans.
It is hard to pinpoint exactly when each of their carriages have started to divert from their respective tracks. It’s not that they were trapped in a way that they had to do something about it. It was more of a series of events that happened one of another. Often without sensibilities or care on the direction that they potentially would hurl its occupants toward. Well. Life. What can I say.
The moment that they crashed head on though, we could write on and on about it. We could see it from the lens of a bystander or we could get deeper into the molecular level, straight to the thick of it. Let’s just say, one minute they were ambling along the universe carrying, tending and grooming their own shit, the next minute, they questioned all their lives choices up to that point. They were done with their respective lives as they know it and a new life emerged. One fully embraced it in its entirety. And the other one. Let’s just say the other one has to work on a job she hates for a few years to afford paying some ‘professional’ to listen and ask the right shit just to get on with life. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s go back to not the beginning, as that is still a mystery even for me, and go straight to the middle. The big bang. Yes. The crash.
Lacie’s eyes are huge. Jen never realised that until that moment. Full real eye lashes and the clearest most reflective white you’ll ever see. A bit of a complex brown pupil. They blink once in a while. Her mouth was moving. They were saying words so foreign. So new to her ears. It’s not that she’s never heard the words coming out of a mouth before. It’s just they never came in such force, and such depth that she began to question her entire life experiences and the validity of those words. And they definitely never came out of the mouth of a woman. Not when it was directed to Jen anyway. The lips are still moving and Jen’s lost in her thought.
What’s new, Lacie thinks. Here she was. Pulling the plug from her heart sinkhole. Letting it all splayed out on the dinner table. That’s’ her pure intention by the bread basket screaming for love. Over to the left, there’s her dignity drowning in the wine glass. Right next to her pinkie finger, all the bile and frustration from the past three months just pools by the soup bowl. And Jen – the all consuming, all encompassing, all mighty judgy, daughter of God, everything is always about Jen – Jen is lost in her own thought. And perhaps that’s the one thing that drew Lacie close at the first place. That liberty to daydream. Wild abandon of reality. And the ability to enter a completely different universe just through a blink of an eye.
Jen blinks. And she reaches out to Lacie’s hand and swept a crumb off her purple coat that she never bothered to remove when she sat down. “Posh coat, I wonder if she’s high maintenance”, Jen wonders.