Someone Else's Year

The resolutions started because I didn’t want to be myself that year. I had done it forty times already and it was getting old. So was I. 
          The first was to drink more water. I usually avoided it. There was already so much of it inside me, rising wet from between my legs and under my arms when I ran. I went to the sink and put a mug under the tap. Unrinsed remnants of cold coffee sulked in its porcelain barrel; it didn’t matter. All things coalesce in the clutch of the stomach. The faucet spit up something that slid down my throat like oil. I was an engine. I was a firetruck.
          I went back to the table where the computer was and refreshed the page to check for new comments. There was still just the one. Okay, I would wait. I kept on looking at the screen. It was open to the posting I had made in forums.craigslist.org/deathanddying:
          I would like to be a new person this year. Please send New Year’s resolutions. 
‍The first comment, underneath:
          Drink more water. You are probably depressed. Depression is a form of liquid deficiency in the brain which occurs from prolonged dehydration. Other treatments include meditation, psilocybin mushrooms, and shoegaze.
          When people give advice, they are pretty much always just talking to themselves. I liked the online forums because there they barely even kept up the pretense of talking to one another. 
          I refreshed the page again. Nothing. I did not have all the time that was in the world. I had only a very small fraction of it. I closed the computer.

The second was to read more. Okay, I read more. First I read the online directory to locate the nearest library. It was made of old red brick and new faux-wood panelling which looked like Sims flooring; it moved in the corner of my eye when I turned away, rendering. 
          Inside there were rows of computers and DVDs and CD audiobooks. There were real books too, farther in the back. I sat down at a computer, took a needle from my purse and scratched out the letter S on the keyboard. There would be no plurals now, only lonely nouns. I got up and went over to the books. 
          I was in the non-fiction section. Good, I didn’t want to pretend to believe in something I didn’t. I picked up a book and went back to the front desk. The librarian squinted at the picture of me on my ID, so I tried to make the same face I had made when the picture was taken. My mouth was an arrow. My mouth was a sharp object. The librarian looked uneasily between us, me and my other. 
          Okay, she said. Here you go. She pushed the book toward me. 

The third was to learn a language. I thought about how a name could be the same in any language. I said my name in the mirror, watching the many lines around my mouth grow and contract. Sophie. sOphie. The O was a foreboding shape. I was a foreboding woman.
          I went back to the computer and logged on to Craigslist and searched French language tutor. A man named Ilas was 1.8 kilometres away. His phone number was listed. 
          Hi Ilas, I said. I’m Sophie. I would like to learn French. 
          Oui, bien sûr, he said.
          I don’t know what that means, I said.

Ilas arrived at my apartment the next day. He opened the door like the mouse emerges from under the radiator, soft but alert. 
          Sophie? he called. It sounded better when he said it. We sat at the table and started with verb conjugations. I told him I was hoping to die and to be new. 
          Je meurs, tu meurs, he said. 
          Je meurs, tu meurs, I said back. 
          His hands were thick and dusted with dark hair. I watched them move as he spoke and still when he waited for me to repeat back to him. I wanted to put one of his fingers in my mouth, just to hold it there, just to see what he would do. When I was younger I would have done it. I moved my hair behind my ear and back in front of it again. He had wide eyebrows and a round, brown face. His t-shirt was torn around the collar. He said his visa was up at the end of the year; I said maybe we should get married. 
          J’épouse, tu épouses, he said. When he laughed his eyes crinkled like torn wrapping paper. I thought he was very beautiful. 
          Ilas gave me homework. I completed it. I was growing; I was becoming new. It was good to be with him because we were like infants together. He did not let us speak English. My vocabulary was so limited that some strangeness inside me, some frenzy, was suppressed, untranslatable. I loved how he said my name: Sophie; how he exhaled the final syllable like smoke from a cigarette. Ilas knew I hated the S. In French, he said, sometimes a plural was aux. I liked that. A foreboding plural. 

The fourth was to go vegan. My usual diet was regimented, singular. I usually chose something out of a can, cranking the mechanical beak of the opener, wrenching the lid and eating Spaghetti-Os or skinned peaches over the mouth of the sink. I had decided not to work the year I became someone else. This meant funds were tight. 
          I didn’t know what vegans ate. In the grocery store I stood in front of the produce. I pictured it: the sipid acid of a bursting tomato, the velvety give of a nectarine, the sweet waters released by a crunchy head of iceberg lettuce. Drink more water, right. I was always forgetting. I picked up a head of lettuce. I followed women in stainless beige dresses down the health food aisle and put things in my cart until it looked like theirs: eclectic composites of grain and green. I didn’t want anything alive inside of me. I didn’t like the way sardines looked at me from the corners of their eyes. 
          Ilas came and I fed him dried apricots, their sticky middles, slabs of tomato dressed in cracked pepper, strips of seaweed that melted at the back of his tongue. 
          Merci, he said, as I slipped a single olive into his waiting mouth. 
          De rien.  
          Soon it was turning spring. I watched the tulips grow out from under the snow, broken toys and lost keys emerging from underneath winter’s blanket like fossils of fall. I devoured hundreds of sunflower seeds, imagined them sprouting in my stomach, blooming up through the bottleneck of my throat. I was only a vase. I twisted my hair and clipped it back, let the sun shine on my face and the rain fall directly in my eyes. I stopped wearing my glasses. I stopped tying my shoes. 
          I read books from the library, mostly from the For Dummies series. I learned about electric cars, bartending, chair-yoga, arthritis. I tentatively reconciled with the S. The plurality of life was becoming kinder. I plucked a long, grey hair from my bikini line. 
          I went on long walks through the city. I passed boutiques, banks, townhouses, run-down churches with tired spires, Italian restaurants where the chefs hand-made pasta dough in the early afternoon, kneading it firm with tattooed knuckles. In the hardware store men much younger than I wore dusty aprons and wrapped long coils of rope around a multitude of spools. People with small dogs walked them in the park, every day. There were so many people in the world I could be. I lay awake at night sometimes, thinking of all the lives I had discovered that thrummed behind closed doors, like ants erupting from a crushed hill. 

The fifth was to have sex. I looked at the little pixels on the screen that made up the thing I had to do. If I zoomed in I could see them in the curves of the S: granular, crude. I hadn’t had sex in eight years. A lot of people settled when they got old but I had unsettled. I had shifted mutated grown-down disturbed distorted divorced. The last time I had sex was with Adam. He twisted inside me like an animal with a limb stuck in the teeth of a trap. He cried and said he was sorry. I didn’t know what he was apologizing for. I didn’t know yet how you could know someone your whole life and suddenly not know them at all. 
          I decided I would have sex with Ilas. There was a distinct intimacy between us born by the fragility of a new language, despite not really knowing anything about each other. Here are the things I knew about Ilas.
         1.    He was a French language tutor.
         2.   He was twenty-four.
         3.   His favourite colour was orange.
         4.   When he was six, he had thrown a ball at his little brother, too hard, and it had hit his brother in the left eye, and blinded him there, permanently.
         5.   He had always felt guilty about this. He would sometimes walk around with his left eye closed for hours at a time. He did this especially in his most precious moments, he said, when only half of life was still too much. He watched his sister get married with one eye closed.
          Anything else I knew about him was about what he liked to eat. Or how his hands moved when he spoke, fingers dancing.

Our next session was on a Wednesday. I stood in front of the mirror and looked at my body. When I was younger I had been attractive in an unfriendly kind of way. I had been obsessed with my body, exercising daily, carbs in moderation, watching into my thirties as my friends grew happy and round, stomachs inflating and deflating in the punishing pursuit of family. Now I was thin and alone and my body was melting away anyway, shapeless and soft. But I was still pretty enough for Ilas, I thought.
          He opened the door in the usual way, like a very gentlemanly thief. He never knocked. 
          Sophie? he called. I came out from the bedroom wearing pajama shorts and a ratty t-shirt. You forgot I was coming? he asked, looking quizzically down my body. I wanted to answer all of his questions. 
          Ilas, I said. Es-tu attiré par moi?
          He laughed hesitantly, like I was administering an oral exam and he didn’t know the correct answer. 
          Oui, Sophie, he said. Bien sûr. Vous êtes une belle femme.
          I went over and touched the mole on the side of his nose, traced a line to the next one, at the crest of his lip. He smiled down at me, uncertain. I moved his hands away from his chest and kissed him. I kissed him. He kissed me. I pulled away and breathed into his mouth—I could still taste the inside of it, gummy and sour. 
          This is okay? I asked. 
          Oui, he said. Oui, and moved his fingers along my collarbone like he was writing a poem.
          While he was fucking me, I noticed I had left my laptop open on the bedside table. I had been looking at the Craigslist page again: there was a new comment. I tried to move closer to see what it was, but Ilas was on top of me like a shiver, like a wave, something powerful and transient. I let him wash over me until he was done, the tide of his body retreating, lying down and falling asleep on the other side of the bed. Then I turned back to the screen.

The sixth was to kill the mouse living in my house. I stared at the comment, heart pinching. I closed my eyes and I thought about rain and the smell of gas and grocery stores and the blooming cracks in the concrete outside on the sidewalk where people carried their bodies around all day. Okay, I could do it. I was here, now. So was the mouse. I lay my head down on the pillow and it gave around my cheek, expanded around the hard line of my jaw. I was new and I drank water and I spoke French and I ate vegetables and I was worthy of Ilas’s body, his love. But I would have to kill something to prove it.
          I read Mousetraps for Dummies. I dodged Ilas’s calls. It rained and rained and I stayed inside, plotting to kill the mouse. I didn’t want to kill something without a name. I cried. I still ate vegetables, but only the dense, starchy ones: a wrinkled sweet potato, a blood-red beet. 
          I grew violent; I grew vicious. My anger filled the container of my apartment, seeping into the cracks in the drywall and the back of the closet. The mouse knew: it hid. I thought about grief, which I had never experienced. I thought about all the children I would never name. I thought about Andrea, Adam’s new girlfriend, who was smart and kind and funny and ugly. It turned out that beauty was different from love.  
          I bought a tub of Kraft peanut butter at the store. The mouse didn’t care if there was added sugar. When I was ready, when I had read, when I had hurt schemed mulled mulling aching stomach spit like vinegar moldy molded mulled made many mousetraps, it was turning summer. I set up the mousetraps all over the house: glue traps I had ordered online, no-kill traps I had read about in the vegan guide, metal traps from the hardware store that young men with thick forearms had picked out for me. I set them up all through the night, on the table and the chairs and the counters, in the fridge, in the shower, under the bed, where I slept and wept and ate. Now there was nothing to do but wait. It was six in the morning and I had been up all night. I called Ilas. 
          Sophie, he said, when he picked up, sounding surprised and sleepy.
          Je suis désolée, Ilas, I said, reading from my web browser. Je suis très désolée. He sighed. 
          C’est pas grave, Sophie.
          Won’t you come over? I asked. 
          En français, he said.

Ilas seemed perturbed by the quantity of mousetraps. He was looking around at them all with a nervous expression.
          I have mice, I told him, trying to pull him toward the bedroom. He hung back and fingered a paper towel roll I had duct-taped to a plastic bucket.
          This is good for mice? he asked, seeming unsure. 
          No, I said. Hopefully it’ll kill them. He laughed uneasily. 
          Tu es une femme étrange, Sophie, he said. 
          I pulled him into the bedroom and undressed. He watched me like you watch a chickadee land on your finger, something to be startled and lost. But I was here, now. Couldn’t he see that? I moved toward him and he put his hands on my hips, pressed his thumbs into the bones there. 
          We had sex. 
          Again, I said. 
          En français, he said. And give me ten minutes. 
          We had sex again. Ilas said he wondered if we could keep having sex in our sleep; I asked him if he wanted to dream of other women while he was having sex with me. He said, no, he was obsessed with me. Obsédé. It was nice to know I could still have that effect on men. It was maybe the only thing I understood about them.
          I was on top of Ilas, later, both of us tired, night pressing up against the window, him reaching up to kiss my temple, me bending down to lick his ear. We were hardly moving but very close, like slow dancing. He placed his hand lightly on my belly and I felt a shock of intimacy, even though he was already inside me. I put my arms around his shoulders, pressed my face into his warm neck. I was present pressing pinky promising silky spine softening slow ribs rocking raw and whole. I pulled back and he looked up at me, my crooked nose, my crow’s feet, my wilting breasts, and he closed his left eye. It knocked the breath out of me, all the air, and I knew that I had never been seen like that before, ever, and began to cry. 
          Then I heard something else start to cry too. It came from under the bed like a siren, tiny tinny screams tearing through us as if straight through the mattress, and Ilas jolted, and pushed me off him, and I knew it came from the glue trap underneath the bed. I scrambled away, over the side of the bed, and crouched to stare below. It was too dark. The screaming continued. Ilas was mumbling expletives in French. He started to get up and pull on his pants. I turned, quickly.
          You can’t go! I told him. Hold on, just give me a moment, I can do this quick, I can handle it. He was shaking his head. 
          Sophie, he said, kind of laughing without laughing at all. There is not enough of me for you. He was buckling his belt with his strong, wide hands, threading the bar delicately through the leather. I began to panic. I needed a flashlight. I needed Ilas to stay. 
          Wait, I said, wait, and started rooting around in the closet. I couldn’t find it. I dumped out a box of junk on the floor and felt around with my hands. Nothing. I turned around to go over to the cabinet and saw Ilas, fully dressed, standing at the door. 
          Wait, I said, and my voice broke.
          He came over and knelt beside me. He kissed my cheek. My face was stone; my face was steel. 
          Good luck with your mouse, Sophie, he said. Then he left and closed the door.
          I went under the bed and lay beside the mouse and cried with it. Its little eyes were bright and so afraid, glinting in the shard of light falling behind the bed frame. We were the same. We were both snared creatures, stuck in the stories of someone else’s life. 
          In the morning, I let it go with a broken leg, hoping there was another mouse to take care of it, somewhere in the walls. 

Summer passed like a fog. I walked. I wandered. I sat on a bench on the pier, looking at the gulls, who could go anywhere and still came here, to eat soiled fries off the slats of the boardwalk. I thought about love and whether it was real, and if it was, whether people were capable of it, or if it was only animals who were—who couldn’t really speak and so didn’t truly know each other.
          I started to feel invisible again, which I hadn’t thought of as a feeling until I no longer felt it. This time it was worse because I could see everyone else, could see them not seeing me. Eyes that pulled away from mine on the streetcar, magnetically drawn to the everything blur out the window.
          My funds were running low. I realized it was very easy to be vegan if you expanded your definition of edible. On my walks I gathered sap from trees and licked it off my fingers. I stole old bread from the bins behind the bakery and tomatoes from the community garden by the school. I let their juices run down my chin right there in the open, squatting by the wooden plot. They tasted of rich acid and sweet pulp and dirt under my fingernails. The sign said the third-graders had grown this batch. I thought that they were very gifted gardeners. 
          I never knew what time it was. What day it was. I knew it was fall when everything started to die. I thought of Ilas—how he loved orange. I left a voicemail on his machine listing the things that are orange but people say are yellow or red. Hair. Egg yolks. The sun was not yellow but white—empty, unforgiving. 
          Au revoir, I said to the receiver, trying to roll the R. He didn’t call back.
          There weren’t any new comments on my post. I reread one from user mr_tyrannosaur003 that was not a resolution but unsolicited life advice. 
          Instead of a resolution, make it a dream. A dream to drill the surface, to watch the stars, and, eventually, to reach the stars! SMASH THE HALF-ASSED EXCUSES AND MAN-MADE WALLS IN YOUR WAY, DO THE IMPOSSIBLE DAMN IT! SET YOUR OWN GOALS! LIVE YOUR OWN LIFE!
          Mr. Tyrannosaur didn’t get it. All some people wanted to be was themselves.

The seventh came in eventually. It was that whenever life was difficult or painful, to be careful to avoid doing anything that would make things worse. I didn’t know what made things worse. Or better. I tried to be kind but I had no one to be kind to. I was kind to pigeons. I was kind to the mice—I had long thrown out their traps. Sometimes we ate dinner together, on the floor, tiny hunks of potato or individual pinto beans. 
          Half the year went by like that. There was a leak in the window, letting the outside in. I left it. I no longer had urges. I no longer had hunger. 

The eighth was, of course, to swim naked in the harbour. I was so, so tired but I had to become alive again. I gave myself two weeks. 
          I steeled my brain. I turned the numbness into boredom and then into restlessness and then into courage. I watched Jeopardy every night on the little TV in my bedroom. I shouted out the answers over the contestants, and even when I had to make them up I knew I was right. I disposed of plurals. One fork, one pillow, one eye closed. All you needed was one of anything. 
          In the slip of winter, I undressed by the sea. I was naked knotted gnawing body bare barren and brutal. People didn’t know what to do with something like me. They stared in horror or wonder or stood stock-still or else pulled their children away, hurrying elsewhere. But I was here, now. 
          When I jumped in, I went without my skin, without love, without Ilas, without kindness or newness or libraries, without words, without Swimming For Dummies. Under the surface, in that silent second, I remembered the first: to drink more water. I tucked my head and opened my mouth and drank. And drank. When I emerged, I remember floating, light winking on the water like tiny crystals. People were yelling at me to get out. I laughed up at them. 
          I’m just swimming, I said. And smiled up at the empty sun.
          Later, I was sick. I was very sick. I laid in my bed and felt the frozen air roll over my skin from the window, felt the winter sun. I listened to the birds. I listened to the mice move under the bed. I threw up intermittently in the toilet. I didn’t cry. I was new. I knew I could work again. I knew I could talk to cashiers, mailmen, neighbours, and people on the bus. My body was sick, but I was new, naked, alive. What was life but trying. 
          I called Ilas one more time, on January 1st. 
          Happy New Year, I said, to the dial tone. Bonne Année.