Georges never called back she said as we watched the waterfowl send ripples across the pond water. Ola only slept with French men, at least those were the ones she told me about. It was this sort of tale I’d heard from her before––always French, often younger, and the stories never ended the way she wanted them to. But that’s the last time Georges will come into this story. You can forget him now if you want. 

Ola and I had been neighbors once, before I moved from the southside. We liked to take walks or have movie nights, but nothing more than friendship ever came of us. The laughter was easy, most everything else between us wasn’t. It’d been months since I’d seen her, and in fact, I thought I might never see her again. She got sick of me easily. I’d usually say something she didn’t like, we’d have a small fight and not talk for a few weeks, then we’d get over it. This time not talking had gone on longer than usual. 

That’s how our friendship was though: see each other, laugh, kiss if the night was right, then say goodbye. I needed lots of space after a kiss back then, but once I’d had it, I’d think of her and when I did I had to see her. Though things were complicated between us, they never ended our friendship. That’s why we avoided sleeping together. So we wouldn’t lose the easy part. 

We walked towards the tree-rich park center where there was a fenced area with deer inside. They were pale animals, sandy and cream. The grass they nibbled at was especially green for late October—vibrant even for summer. Like turf. I snapped a photo to post later and we went on. 

My train was one way and her place was the other. Her roommate was out of town for a few weeks and she asked me to come back for a movie night. I could sleep on the couch. 

Another time, I said.

There’s another thing I wanted to tell you Ola said. I’m moving home soon, for work. As long as they transfer me like I requested. So we can’t fight this time.”

***

On my side of town, I searched for a love/drama movie from the nineties that I liked. Something like Don Juan DeMarco or Inventing the Abbotts. The nineties were a great time for these stories. But I fell asleep to that Bruce Lee film with the fight scene in Rome instead. Oh, and I won’t mention Bruce again. Actually, forget I mentioned him at all. 

I dreamt of my home that night. Not my place in the city, but my childhood house a thousand and one miles away. In the dream, I was in the hallway of the den. It was midafternoon and sunny, and the room where I’d grown up was at the end of that hall. I moved towards it. There was a warmth to this house I hadn’t felt in a decade and most likely never would again. 

In the dream, the house felt empty. I couldn’t hear anyone upstairs. As I approached the room, the lights brightened and colors deepened like a bad Instagram filter. Especially when I turned the corner and saw the neon wonders inside.

They were small creatures on four legs. Light brown with white spots that were blinding like snow reflecting the sun. Through the windows, I could only see blue skies. No grass, or earth at all, as if the house were sailing through the sky. The animals had bowed legs like they were learning to walk, and judging by their size, they were fawns. Some were jumping on my bed, others were sliding on the wooden floor or tangled in wires under the desk. Two bounced in my dresser drawers where I kept my winter sweaters, and one stuck its head from under my bed with an old skateboard wheel in its mouth. Their eyes were marble buttons like a stuffed animal—dead and black, yet safe. Their shapes, though mammal in nature, were composed of assorted carpentries. Their limbs were shaped like the legs of a chair; their bodies fat barrels of baseball bats. I’m using hard objects to describe them but I promise you they were most certainly soft. I didn’t need to touch them to know. 

But I didn’t enter the room. I stayed at the door frame because something kept me there. I swore to myself that I’d seen the same scene before, colors and all. Déjà vu du Dreamworld. I can tell you now from awakeland that I hadn’t, but you couldn’t have convinced me then. Though these fawns were unthreatening––their natures, tones, even how they played about in the room––I felt dread. Because all I wanted was for someone else to know that these animals were there but I couldn’t picture who it was that I wanted to tell. I couldn’t see or think of a single person I knew in the whole world. Not a face, or an existence. That’s what kept me from entering. I didn’t need to go upstairs to search for someone either. This house in the sky was empty. 

By morning I’d forgotten the dream, at least then, though now it’s one I’ll never ever forget. I have three dreams like that—permanent ones branded in. Each of them has its own story like this. Dreams that were really there. Touch, taste, feel––all of that. 

I went back to Ola’s after breakfast. It wasn’t planned but she let me come in while she moved through the house. I took a seat in her big room. It was a bohemian harem of soft things and warm light. The seats were angled and shaped like peanut shells. She told me about a date she’d had after I’d left the day before. It was last-minute, she said, but felt right. His name was Francois. 

He’s French and has his shit together she said. Really this time.

I thought you were moving I said.

I am.

But I knew why she told me these things, but anything more with her wasn’t for me. 

Do you want to take another walk I asked. I don’t want to go back to the park though.”

I’ll put on a layer. We could go to the cafe by the canal she said from the bathroom where the door was cracked open.  

I mumbled oui. 

The hill down towards the canal overlooked the southside. I thought of why I’d moved from that part of town and pushed the thought into my gut. That always took a huge amount of energy but it’s all that I could do to get by. 

We ate and drank and talked about how we should get back to work. I stayed at Ola’s place that night. On the couch. We had that movie night.  

Early the next morning, when the light was blue and barely there, she came quietly from her room and stood over me. She touched my face as if to check if I were actually there, then she got under the wool blanket that I’d pulled over me from the back of the couch. We laughed and talked softly but mainly we just held each other and weaved in and out of sleep. At some point, I remembered the dream with the little wooden deer. I wanted to tell her about it but didn’t, I let her tell me about the matches she got on apps instead. 

When she went to work I stayed on the southside, hopping from coffee spot to park to bar until it was late and cold. The last train north was forty-five minutes away and my side of town felt far. I didn’t want to go. 

I sent her a text asking if I could stay again. 

She replied that she didn’t mind if I didn’t wake her. She had an early morning and was going to sleep, but explained that an extra key was hidden under the third planter from the front door. I found it and tried to go into her place quietly. 

The key barely fit and didn’t turn easily. I wiggled and jiggled that lock, but it needed greasing. It was so loud but I finally got in and pulled the blanket on the couch over me again. 

In the morning, like the morning before, she came quietly from her room and laid with me. I asked if she was mad that I was loud coming in but she pretended to be asleep. 

This pattern repeated for a few more nights. I’d roam the southside, drinking caffeine and beer at places we used to go to, and seeing people around that I used to know but not the ones I wanted to see, secretly hoping to run into the reason I moved. When it was so late that it was depressing to be out, I’d sneak into Ola’s quietly. 

I stopped asking after the third night, and in the early mornings, she’d tiptoe through her place as if she might get caught doing something wrong, and climb in with me. I held her every time, the same way. There was no one waiting for either of us anymore. 

She’d tell me about the new men she matched on the apps and the ways this one made her laugh, or that one she left at the station wanting more. 

He has his shit together, she’d always say. Really. 

They wouldn’t be good for her regardless. I knew what most of the men online wanted, she wanted things that lasted. Investments. Things people don’t always want. But in the end, we all just desire the ones who don’t want us. Everything else is settling in some way. I don’t think it’s conditioning that makes us like that. I think it’s nature, that’s why I moved away from the south: it’s simpler to just go away from these things. To leave a trail of fractures along the way that you don’t have to watch heal. You just hope they’re not so bad that you’re remembered for long. If you’re not careful you’ll have a song written about you. Or worse, a bad poem. 

But Ola was never on any of these French dates when I’d get there late at night. And she never moved the key from its hiding place. The couch felt smaller each morning when she crawled in. I’d rub her back with my fingertips and she’d ask what I was drawing. The light was soft while I listened to her Scheherazade collection of date stories in a city that I wanted to leave, but wasn’t ready to. I’d thought moving would’ve been enough, but I was trapped at that end of the city’s periphery. We’d talk lightly and sleep lighter, holding on to each other until she left for work. I had nowhere to be in those days, so I just followed her out, greasing the key with olive oil when she wasn’t looking to buy me another night of sneaking in without the locks waking her. 

I didn’t love her, but I loved how those mornings were. I tried to convince myself that maybe it was that, but the function felt broken. Surely she felt it too or she might have brought me to her room like she had Georges instead of coming to the couch. 

One night I slept on the couch without any clothes on, just to see. She called me a pervert but got into the blanket anyway. The next day she came that way too. 

We would slip off the small cushions which made us hold tighter. The couch had no room for anything other than holding. But soon, it would shrink too small.

I came in one night after a few too many. It was late, and her room door was open but the lights were off. I called for her to see if she was awake but there was no answer. I sat on the couch and felt uncomfortable making the bed for myself without her there. Maybe it was time to go home. The clock said nearly 2:30 in the morning and she was still out. I thought that she might come in with someone any minute and felt sick, but my head was splitting so I turned off the lights and passed out. I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to know if she brought someone back. 

It could have been another dream I suppose, like the fawns. Another very real one, but when she came through the doorway the next morning she didn’t make a single sound. Not one. It was as if she was gliding. There was not a creak of the room door or the smallest patter of footsteps. I had never even heard her get home. Her hand took mine delicately as if I moved it myself. I walked with her to her bedroom, leaving the blanket on the couch where it belonged. 

After, we held each other the way we always did. I made sure that nothing seemed to change. And for once, she wasn’t telling me about another person. 

There was only silence in the early light. That’s when I finally told her about my dream. 

She listened, carefully. When I was done, she thought about it briefly, then began to take guesses as to what it meant. It was too early. I didn’t like how she tried to decode it so quickly and no longer wanted to be in the bed with her. I wanted to go back to the couch, but not to my side of town. I told her I thought she was wrong, but maybe she was right—we think we know about ourselves but there are two of us, and they both change often.  

She got out of bed right after and was quiet towards me except to ask what time my train was.

I know I promised not to mention him again, Georges too, but you never know when someone might need to come back into a story—maybe characters need to come back when the moment’s right, who knows: but Bruce Lee said to ‘be water’. Be the ease of adjustment. I was good at taking the shape of my environment then, but being amorphous sends ripples further than we can see, and the rewards of change can be so enticing. Bruce died in his mistress’s bed after all. 

On our way out the door that day, I hugged Ola and kissed her forehead. Her face laid against my chest but not very tightly. I asked her why she brought me to her room that morning of all mornings. 

Everyone just does what they want anymore she said. 

I didn’t put olive oil on the key that day and set it under the third planter. Her roommate returned that afternoon. 

When I got back to my side of town my place felt like settling for a lover. I put one of those love/drama films on that I liked from the nineties, but it felt shallow to watch. I wanted something with cloudy skies and subtitles and an ending that no one understood. 

Ola left for California just before winter as she said she would, and hasn’t returned at the time of writing this. Nor have we spoken to each other. I type messages but don’t send them. 

I wasn’t ready for home like Ola––I’m not ready for a lot of things I’ve already had too much of. It’s easier to stay like water in some ways, sending ripples out which become waves that wash onshore as they please, much further than my eyes can see. I hope she still wants the good things. Things that last; the investments. Things that make her feel like what I saw in my dream did for me. 

But that’s the last time I’ll mention Ola. If you’d like, you can forget her now too.