It’s 2018, and at the ripe young age of 25, Naina is out of love twice. Her thighs are already sticky against the leather car seats, the air conditioning blasting dry. She takes a swig of lukewarm water, drying her salty hand on her pants. Her makeup has already melted, as the rearview mirror reminds her. Finally, she has arrived at her destination, creatively entitled Bushwick View Apartments. Unfortunately, the elevator music is jazz, which always puts her on edge.
543A is spacious, its rent is split between three obnoxiously rich white guys whose names she could never quite remember. Probably a Ben or a Matt or a Dan—nothing memorable anyway. A man is setting up booze at the kitchen island, lots of it, pushing past partygoers trying to snatch bottles away as soon as they are set down. Juices, vodka, beers, you name it. Jell-O shots, weed. She had once encountered cocaine residue on the bathroom counter, maybe twice.
People show up, slowly at first, then in large groups, the same way that time passes. Soon enough, the apartment is packed. It is, after all, a Brooklyn apartment, and no matter how much money you have, those are never quite big enough. Loud music, laughter and conversations, and the primal scent of flirtation and reduced inhibition diffuse slowly throughout the room like her shitty scent diffuser from freshman year that perpetually made her small dorm room smell like a rose spa. The people feel like the veneer of sweat on her body. They are everywhere, a sensation (albeit, an uncomfortable one) that envelops her. Bodies drenched in company under the same sticky summer night, ants crawling together.
Naina nods here and there, periodically paying attention as she sips on a vodka cranberry. She consumes half an edible that some guy slips her as he stares at her boobs. She looks into the night sky through the window, her head light and cloudy.
Drinks replenish themselves in her right hand, her legs glide her from conversation to conversation, up to five minutes apiece, and soon enough she even catches herself laughing. Not that anything that anyone says is ever particularly funny, but right now, everyone is funny. It gets just a little easier.
“Naina,” a voice says, somewhere in the distance, somewhere in the nucleus of bodies creating their own cacophony under a blanket of music. And then again, “Hey! I’m over here!”—It is Rachel with a glass of straight vodka in her hand, weaving slowly and meekly through the crowd with “excuse me” and “I’m so sorry, if I could just,” making her way towards Naina. Rachel feels as though she should say hello; they would run into each other at the party eventually, so she might as well get the obligatory “how are you” and “I am doing well” out of the way so she would not have to be anxious for the rest of the night in anticipation. It had been a while since everything had soured, and Rachel never had been a bitter person. Rachel would much rather be on good terms than on no terms at all, even if that was not currently the case. She could force it into reality. Rachel is young and in love with Naina, an affliction which nobody should have to experience, at least not at this point in Naina’s life, in 2018.
Naina looks at her in a daze, thinking for a second that she may be hallucinating. But a very real Rachel approaches, which is almost worse, and smiles awkwardly at Naina.
“Hi,” Naina says, unhappy that her intoxicated trance has now been disturbed. She feels the need to say something about the weather, something about how it has been a long time, but it feels wrong to be acquaintances with somebody you once loved so intimately, so fearlessly.
Perhaps because of the booze, definitely because of her affliction, and despite her better self, Rachel says, “Can we talk?” before she has the chance to take the words back into her mouth.
Naina looks at her quietly, and says, “Sure, I guess,” before she has a chance to weigh her options. Drugs and drinks make it easy that way.
“We can go somewhere quiet for a little while, I guess.” Rachel feigns nonchalance.
“So into a room or something for then?” Naina says.
“Sure.”
Hands interlocked so as not to lose each other, they weave their arm rope, bodies attached, through the tight cluster of sweaty bodies and noise. Rachel’s arm feels familiar, somehow, if such a thing were possible. Intimate?
The closest bedroom has clothes strewn all over the floor, empty cans of coke and beer lined up by the windowsill, and an unmade bed. A wall calendar displaying the wrong month: October of 2018. Rachel has never been into the bedroom during one of these parties. Naina has been here once to hook up with a guy with creepy eyes who had convinced her that he could measure up to whomever she was drinking to forget that night. He had been wrong.
They are quiet, and even with the door shut, the noise from the party is booming through the room with conversation and some pop songs. Rachel sips her solo cup of vodka to fill the empty space: the distance between herself, cross-legged on the floor, and Naina, sitting on the bed and looking out of the window.
“I heard you’ve been...missing for a week,” Rachel says, “and…I’m worried.”
“It’s nothing. I’ve been busy,” Naina lies. In reality, she had been too drunk to leave her apartment all week, eating PB&J’s with stale bread for sustenance. “So what did you want to talk about? I’m supposed to meet someone else soon” she lies again.
Just as Rachel opens her mouth to speak, her phone buzzes, and to fill the silence for another minute and figure out what exactly she even wants to say, she checks it. Her hands shake. Her ears ring.
Somehow, during a casual beginning of a conversation, the air sinks very quickly and heavily. Rachel’s hands are shaking. White face, wide eyes. That quickly.
“Something just happened,” Naina figures she should ask. “Are you okay?”
Rachel’s breathing grows hot and heavy, her eyes widening slowly.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s… It’s... “
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.” Naina hopes that Rachel will take the out.
“No, that’s okay. We’re...friends.” Nothing for a minute. “Here, I’ll just… I’ll just show you.”
The phone displays Rachel, except, not really, not as she is now, sitting on the bed. In the image, she is sitting on the floor in a pool of chunky red, red in her hair, glistening, red running down her body, her hands wiping sticky red off her face, her eyes completely blank as she looks down.
“What is that?”
“Cranberry sauce.” Rachel’s response strikes an odd chord. The situation itself seems so innocuous, perhaps even funny, if it were not for her eyes in the photograph, wide and blank. Eerie. “I didn’t... realize... they took a picture.”
“How did you… get like that?” Their pauses are painful, searching for words as though they are learning a new language.
“It was,” Rachel sniffles, wiping tears off her cheek before they have time to make it down her face, “it was Thanksgiving this year.” That explained the cranberry, at least. Her body has crumbled over the course of a minute, like a tissue ready to be tossed into the trash. Rachel had shrunk since 2017. It is 2018 now and Rachel is smaller than ever before.
Rachel could have opened up the picture by herself, somewhere in the crowd, cried in the bathroom, and headed straight home to deal with whatever this was. Now it is a problem for both of them.
“Okay.”
“And… and…” Pause. Rachel breathes out and continues, “You remember my sister’s fiancé, Rick?”
“Vaguely,” Naina says. She remembers very clearly. The only new information here is the engagement. But that was bound to happen anyway, she figures.
“Well… he still doesn’t treat her very well.”
“I’m sorry.”
“The entire family was there that day,” Rachel unleashes the urgency that she was holding tightly in her voice. “Our parents, his parents, aunt Nina and Kev. It was nice, at first. There was food and everyone was eating. Mom’s cranberry sauce. She made a huge bowl of it.”
Rachel pauses for a second, and then picks right back up, her sentences coming out like long words, just that quickly. “So anyway, Ricky, her… fiancé,” Rachel clarifies as though she is convinced that Naina has forgotten everything about her family, “said something to me in the kitchen. I remember I was picking up a plate of rolls to serve and he was grabbing the cranberry sauce saying, like, I heard you don’t like me and told your sister not to marry me because I’m violent or some shit? Or that I’m bad for her? What the fuck gives you the right to get between me and my fiancé? And I remember I got really mad and told him not to talk to me like that. And his face just changed. Like, his eyes got scary. I think I walked in on them arguing once and that’s the only other time I saw him like that.” Rachel stops, waiting for a response.
No response. Rachel continues, “And then he just dumped it on my head, the whole thing, the cranberry sauce. All of it, and I remember it was red and sticky and he pushed me onto the floor on it and everyone walked in to see what was happening. I just remember feeling sticky and red and washing out so much red in the bathroom and crying and smelling sweet. And I think little Kev took a picture, he’s six now, he didn’t know what was happening— I mean, I didn’t realize, but I guess it got around. I think they think that I did that to myself, for attention, because I was against the wedding or whatever, and I’m the immature one. They think I want attention and I’m just upset and needy and I got mad, and I never get mad, and they said I shouldn’t have gotten in the way of her happiness, and don’t I even care about her?”
“I’m… so sorry.”
“I just… I don’t know what to do. They’re getting married in three days. I know I have to go but I don’t want to go. I don’t know what to do,” Rachel collapses further onto the ground somehow, which hadn’t seemed possible until she managed to shrink again, breathing quickly and frantically, her sentences coming out as one long word.
The room was quiet for God knows how long. “And the fucking truth is that I did it, okay? I poured the fucking cranberry sauce on myself. I just wanted to stop this marriage. That’s all I wanted,” Rachel whispers, perhaps to herself.
It does not come as a shock to Naina that Rachel would incite her own shameful incident to save her sister. Perhaps this would have been a shock to anyone else, to Rachel’s own family, to her close friends, but Naina knows better. Naina knows what Rachel can do for the people she loves, how far she would go.
“I’m sorry,” Naina manages.
“She said she’s in love,” Rachel says. “That he treats her well, that he proposed on the beach and he charms everyone and I just… I don’t know what to do. Please… what do you think I should do?”
“Hmmm… it’s a sticky situation.” The two of them cringe. What to say next? “Maybe just… uhhh…. I’m not sure. Whatever you want, I guess.”
“You don’t… I don’t know how to feel. It’s just too much,” Rachel continued.
“You’ll figure it out. I know you will,” Naina says, despite her own need to climb off the bed and hold Rachel in her arms until the tears dry, to tell her it would be okay, and I am there for you. But it is 2018, and in 2018, Rachel and Naina are exes who have had an ugly breakup, so Naina suppresses any love she feels, or once felt, for Rachel. And who could blame her? She had always been that way, and people do not easily change overnight. Or in Naina’s case, over a year.
This must all seem very confusing. Here, let me rewind the tape:
It was 2017 and Naina was young but not yet in love; she will inevitably catch this dual affliction, and it will inevitably lead to destruction, but that is a problem for later.
It was October 31st at 1AM and she was drunk, wandering around a Brooklyn store where Halloween costumes were arranged in arbitrary categories: Thrifted mermaids & pirates, Fairies & Sexy Alice in Wonderland, Nurses & Pocahontas.
And then somehow at 2AM she ended up in a sexy devil get-up at the house party of a stranger; don’t ask her how, because that period of time has been erased by several tequila shots. But in that crowded apartment, by the hand of fate, or booze, she met Rachel for the first time at her very first party at Bushwick View Apartments (not that she knew where she was at the time).
That night, Rachel was wearing a shimmering white angel dress with a fluffy halo headband to top it off. Unlike Naina, Rachel had bought her costume months in advance. Rachel was supposed to be at another friend’s sober Halloween party, but he was off on a bender. She had been lonely, had put on her costume on Halloween night to make herself feel better, only to feel even more stupid and sad as she looked at herself in the mirror, dolled up to go nowhere.
That is why Rachel showed up to the party, which was hosted by some old acquaintances from her alcoholic days; besides, she was confident that nothing could make her relapse. She had come too far for that (but the problem with getting too comfortable is that eventually, perhaps many times later, you forget that you were supposed to be trying, and things do get out of hand; however, that is a problem for later, and tonight she is a sober angel. After all, relapse is every narrator’s Chekhovian gun, and I may not be any exception).
Through this lens of loneliness, Rachel spotted Naina in the crowd, stumbling around across the room in a devil costume. Through this lens of melancholy, Rachel recognized Naina, perhaps in herself half a decade ago, lost and too intoxicated to know who she was anymore, let alone where she was. So Rachel walked over, maybe her biggest mistake, or if you think love is worth it in the end, her best decision. Naina smiled distantly at her.
“It’s a devil. You’re red,” Naina slurred as Rachel approached asking loudly over the crowd, “Are you okay?”
Naina was quiet. Rachel understood what that meant. Naina frowned.
“You’re all red. Your face is bleeding. Are you dying? Are you dead?” Naina said, “So, so red.” She crumbled to the ground. Rachel squatted low and looked into Naina’s eyes, which were wide in terror.
“What did you take?” Rachel asked, simply.
“It was…”
“Hey, it’s okay. What was it? Take your time.”
“I found it on the kitchen counter. A pill. And everyone’s bloody and I am so scared that I’m dying,” Naina’s voice was barely a whisper.
“I am going to take you to the bathroom. We are going to sober you up with some water,” Rachel offered her plastic cup to Naina. Naina sipped suspiciously, as though there were poison in the clear contents.
The women found themselves on the bathroom floor that night, Naina’s head in Rachel’s lap, bodies curled closely. Naina’s bad trip took another two hours or so to wear off. During that time, Rachel protected Naina from demons, yelled back at the intermittently knocking partygoers who needed to take a piss “right now”—“yes, the bathroom is occupied,” “no, we won’t be done anytime soon,” “fuck off, it’s not a sex thing.” By this point, both phones were dead, and Rachel was not about to abandon a quivering, hallucinating Naina (and their white-tiled clorox/vomit safe haven) to go borrow someone’s charger. So their phones were dead, and it was god-knows-when-o-clock, and they fell asleep like that. When Naina stirred and woke up, she looked at Rachel for a while, asleep, dark curls dipping into the edge of the white tub, curled up on the floor with vomit on her white dress. No blood, no red. Rachel roused from her sleep, as though sensing that she was being watched.
“Hey,” Rachel said, rubbing sleep out of her eyes.
“Hi,” Naina said back, quietly.
In the time that followed, the women could have talked or not talked. They could have connected for the rest of their lives or quietly, awkwardly ended their time together as strangers from a shared anecdote. Unluckily for them, they chose to talk, and it was the honest kind of conversation that one can only have after experiencing a patchy two hours of sleep (and in Naina’s case, a bad trip) in a bathroom together.
Some moments or conversations are not meant to be experienced by listeners (or readers). What they talked about is entirely between them, and to reveal it anywhere else would be to violate something sacred, a promise. All that matters is that whatever they talked about led to them meeting again, and then again, and developing a story together, and then a story apart (which is very much defined based on their story together). The women don’t know how long they talked for, but I can tell you that it was forty-three preciously spent minutes before someone was knocking furiously at the door that the party was over and to “get the fuck out of my apartment now.”
*
It just so happened that in the two weeks following Halloween 2017, two of the guys who typically hosted the Bushwick View Apartments parties had birthdays on consecutive weekends. As renowned partiers in the community, they hosted two more events to celebrate.
Rachel had not stopped thinking about Naina, about her smooth brown skin and soft pink lips as she lay against the stark white bathroom tile. About her soft hands as she held Rachel’s, about her deep, rich, soft honey voice as she spoke. Maybe Rachel was lonely. She had been doing well in her career, in her sobriety, and wanted to add something to her life, to share it with someone. She had not felt a spark in so long, not on any of the Tinder dates she had resigned herself to, but with Naina, in those forty-three minutes, she was hooked. She knew so little about the mysterious devil who took the unknown pill, so there was something dark and sexy about every possibility of who Naina could be as a person.
Naina did not show up to the first party. After all, she had not been invited to the Halloween event and did not know that there was a party in town. Rachel spent that night wandering around aimlessly, swirling the water in her cup, talking to drunk acquaintances awkwardly.
Rachel was not going to go to the second birthday, but she could not shake the feeling that this was the time she would run into Naina. She could not have possibly known that Naina would be there, so maybe it was a coincidence that she felt so strongly about that premonition enough to show up again. Rachel was correct. After weaving through the crowd aimlessly for a while, Rachel spotted Naina in the corner, flirting with some guy as she coyly played with her hair. Immediately, Rachel felt a pang of jealousy; maybe this had all been a bad idea and she should go home. Right then, Naina turned her head sideways to look towards the drinks table and saw Rachel. The guy was forgotten, as was the next drink. Naina beelined towards Rachel, and in an uncharacteristic and probably drunken moment of affection, held her tightly in the crowd.
“My angel!” Naina exclaimed, and Rachel felt breathless. The women spent the night talking. Rachel talked about her career and confided in Naina about her loneliness as they settled down on a miraculously vacant loveseat together. Naina listened enthusiastically, contributing funny stories from her past. Rachel looked at Naina’s lips when she thought Naina would not notice. Naina noticed Rachel’s physique, her own body feeling electric for the first time in a long time. The pair could not stop laughing. Whatever they had talked about in the bathroom had set up this dynamic. Naina had uncharacteristically forgotten to refill her drink several times. They exchanged numbers. This was the beginning of the pair making excuses to see each other. Rachel had asked Naina for coffee, and Naina had said yes.
Then to a bookstore, and then the park, and then a concert, and Naina had said yes and yes and yes. These conversations, this magnetic dynamic, went on for a month. Rachel was beginning to wonder if there was anything there, had started to want something more than a friendship with a funny origin story. She could not believe that even then, in 2017, people would ask the question “who is wearing the pants in the relationship?” but she feared it would have to be her.
Naina could tell that Rachel wanted dates, wanted kisses, a future. But the most that Naina could let herself develop, holding all else back, is an odd obsession with Rachel’s nose. It ended in a small button, which Naina would stare at, wanting to kiss it as Rachel talked. As Rachel developed serious feelings for Naina, Naina wondered what it would be like to spend more time with Rachel, to walk a certain path that she could see into a hypothetical future.
Rachel’s all-time fondest and Naina’s least favorite memory of 2017 was probably the 19th of November at 5pm. Naina thought it was cute when Rachel would hit her Juul and gesticulate as she illustrated memories, which she did at the back of the bookstore, telling a tale of the time she crashed a stranger’s wedding the summer before. Rachel could not stop looking at Naina’s nose, and then her lips, which she had been thinking about for a while. Their first kiss was actually a nose-kiss. From there, Naina’s lips trailed down slowly, their hot breaths blowing slowly and together from grinning mouths until Rachel pressed her lips against Naina’s, hard.
It was in this kiss that Naina tasted Rajiv for the first time since his passing. She tasted the mouth of a dead man, one that she still loved. Caramel coffee, his daily morning flavor. Gentle strokes of tongue, just the way he did it. On the outside, the kiss was as sweet a moment as any, but Naina immediately understood that she could not let go of Rachel, of this kiss. It was actually Naina who then asked the question of ‘will you be my girlfriend?’ and Rachel who said ‘yes, yes, and yes’, taking this as a good sign.
Rachel would always wish she had known the real question to ask, patriarchal pants-wearing bullshit aside: who is wearing the costume in the relationship?
*
It was New Year’s Eve in 2017, the very last day of the year, two months before their breakup. Naina was still in love with a dead man, Rajiv, and Rachel could never measure up to the memory of someone. The idea of someone. But Rachel was hopeful. After all, she was alive, which had to be an advantage, right? She could kiss Naina, hold Naina, and talk to Naina.
But Rajiv and Naina had been high school sweethearts. Naina talked about going to the theater with Rajiv under the strict supervision of her Indian mother, of sneaking out to make love to him in his basement when his father was on another business trip and his mother was out partying with brunch moms again. Of plans for marriage, being engaged someday, of the dog they would get together (Rufus), and the names of their kids (Ishan or Ishani) that they talked about when getting high on his rooftop. Of him applying to New York University to be with her as she matriculated to Columbia.
To Rachel, these stories felt hollow. No fights, no disagreements, selfishness, jealousy, anger, or sadness. She was no longer jealous of Rajiv. Now she resented him for manifesting in the middle of their love story and understood why he wouldn’t leave: Naina wouldn’t love him for the human that he had been. She loved him for the ghost he now was.
Naina and Rachel made love during the New Year’s Eve countdown, which was playing on the radio, in the comfort of Rachel’s apartment. They held each other tightly, and Naina kissed Rachel’s nose six times before bed.
It’s New Year’s Day in 2018 and they went to a theme park. They played a game. The rules went like this: they rode the same rollercoaster over and over again, and at the top, before the huge drop of the Welcome to Hell ride, they took turns telling a secret before everybody started screaming.
Rachel said “I’m in love with you,” and the crowd went wild with the euphoria of falling.
Naina said that she knew she had a drinking problem. Screams ensued.
Rachel said she wished Naina was in love back.
Naina said, “I’m in love with you too,” and the crowd screamed as they descended lower and lower and down and down.
*
It was mid-2018 and all that Rachel wanted was for the relationship to last forever. She wanted this because the relationship had been failing. On the surface, they seemed happy. The couple were in their honeymoon phase, and couldn't keep their hands off each other. But Naina had been drinking too much again, dangerously much.
Their dynamic soured. Rachel ended her relationship with Naina on the 14th of April at 3AM over a text message. Naina sent many paragraph responses but had been blocked. Naina showed up at Rachel’s house, but Rachel turned her away. Rachel and Naina were over. That quickly.
A week later, Rachel’s own cupboard was overflowing with empty bottles and cans, and everything that she built within herself over the past years felt like it had collapsed.
Suddenly she was the same girl she had been the night she thought she had almost died from an overdose. She was the same girl, even as a woman, and progress felt like a pipe dream of the worst kind in mid-2018.
*
Here we are now. We are back where we were. It is presently 2018, but that doesn’t matter. None of what was said and done before matters. What matters is that Naina is now holding Rachel, tightly, wrapping her shaky, crumbled body into a white comforter, wiping her tears, and kissing the salty spaces on her cheek. They don’t end up together; they don’t even try to extend the relationship beyond that night. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that Naina and Rachel kiss under the white ceiling lights—tenderly, softly—and for a moment, they are not two broken drunk women. Just right then, they are together for God knows how long until they fall asleep in each other’s arms. Until somebody knocks on the door that they need the room for sex and the moment’s over.
Naina’s Song
Bookish Quote
“I have heard all of the stories about girls like me, and I am unafraid to make more of them.” ― Carmen Maria Machado | Her Body and Other Parties
Omg!! So pleasantly surprised by this!! What a moving piece.