Adam Venus
After my mom dies, I get an initial payout from her estate (a lawyer is free to release a few thousand dollars immediately) and I do something strange: I stay in Savannah.
It’s not like I have anywhere else to go. I know I can’t go back to St. Marys yet. I wouldn’t know where to even begin. So I just stay. School’s out, anyway. There’s a hotel downtown, a hotel too fancy for me to afford, but I move into it using the extended stay program anyway. For a few days I just lay in bed with the TV blaring, too exhausted to move, too exhausted to sleep, to do anything. I have to wait around for some paperwork to be processed, and then I will be rich. Well, rich for me, anyway.
But then, things change more. I get sick of sitting around and sign up for a gym on a weekly basis, and start working out twice a day. My body starts changing immediately, but the biggest change is a mental one. One day it snows a little, which is fairly rare for the coastal South, and I walk to the gym in a haze of happiness, feeling the flakes melt on my cheeks. I don’t know what I’m doing here, wasting my time away, but I can’t go back to St. Marys yet. I just can’t. Before I return, I want to figure myself out, to explore who I really am, who I really want to be. Who I always was, under the religion and everything else…
I mostly work out and read books during the day, and at night I go down to the hotel bar, which is right on Savannah’s most exciting street. Savannah always had a sort of glamour to it, this weird old-fashioned charm, and I sit for hours and watch women walk in wearing their pea coats and their curled hair, and men in their scarves and hats. In these evenings I order food and I think about God, I think about my future, I think about the fact that my life going forward will never be the same, regardless of what happens. But mostly I think about Fabian.
He changed me. Forever. Just thinking of his name makes me want to choke with grief, but we aren’t speaking. At all. I don’t know what to say yet, and I don’t think he does, either. Maybe he doesn’t even want to speak to me. Our time together was a wild fluorescent stressful rush, and I need some time to think about everything. At least all the exercising is turning me into a different person with a different mood, at least temporarily – when I am this exhausted, I don’t have time or energy to be anxious. For the first time ever, I am just living, moment by moment.
Before too long, Christmas comes and goes. I visit my mom’s stone, which doesn’t yet have her name on it. But I don’t care. It’s still beautiful – and at the price I paid, it’d better be.
I flop down on the closest bench and start crying. And not just about her. I did so many things wrong. I made so many mistakes, took so many wrong turns. Instead of doing the work to figure myself out and process everything, I jumped on the Highway to Love and strapped him in with me while I was still a disaster inside. I can’t even believe I asked him to hang out with me “as a friend” when I knew we were already falling in love, that I expected him to hook up with me while still jerking him around and pushing him away, that I treated his love as some kind of game. And I denied him three times to his face. I am so humiliated.
But at the same time, I’m weirdly grateful. Even through it all. Fabian brought something out of me that I didn’t even know was there. Well, of course I knew it was there, but I’d snuffed it out. He was the spark that lit the match that blew up my whole life, but I don’t want to go back. I couldn’t even if I tried. My life is never, ever going to be the same, in so many ways. The person I thought I was – he was never me. Life has changed forever now, and on some level I mourn that. I liked my life – it wasn’t too bad. Slowly but surely, I am becoming a different person, with a different world.
But where will I go from here? And will Fabian be a part of that world when I get back home? And does he even want to be a part of it?
~
My mental breakdown at the cemetery makes me feel more adrift than ever. Maybe our souls were connected – maybe that’s why I can’t move on, or even think about anything else but Fabian. Maybe I messed it up, and I’m doomed.
On New Year’s Eve, my old friend Tanner comes through Savannah on the way up to his parents’ house on the Outer Banks. I barely know him anymore, but I want to be friendly, so I invite him to the hotel. I order some small plates and then get us a table in the lobby restaurant, looking out on the bustling sidewalk.
“So where the hell have you been?” he asks, eyeing me suspiciously. “Like, all semester? What gives?”
“Some stuff happened,” I sigh. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pull out on everyone like that.”
“I get it. Graduation is coming. Everyone’s about to move on.”
“Move on? Nah. I’ll still be friends with you,” I say. “No matter what.”
“You look like a different person,” he says soon. “You’re bigger and, I don’t know…quieter. More serious. And richer. New clothes?”
“Savannah just opened the biggest H&M within a few hundred miles,” I say as I smile down at my maroon sweater.
“I don’t know what that means, but nice.” He sits back. “So. I had a reason for calling. I want you to know something. I heard through the grapevine about what went down with Kinnan.”
My face goes numb. “Oh, I was-”
“I don’t need to know,” he says, raising a hand. “I just want you to know that whatever was going on this semester, it’s your business, and nobody else’s. He was wrong to stick his nose into your life like that.”
“Really?”
“Of course. All of us sin, all of us live differently. It’s not up to him to decide which sin is worse than another. I will tell you right now, the next time I see him in person, I have a very well-practiced sneer waiting for him.”
I want to cry. This deer-hunting, Bible-carrying seminary student is showing me graciousness, and giving me something I didn’t even know I needed: unconditional acceptance.
“Thank you very much for that,” I say soon, my voice cracking. We can’t say it out loud, but I know he knows.
“Of course. You’re still just Adam to me. It’s not 1954 anymore. Your life is your life. Screw what anybody else says.”
My throat itches. I want to tell him so much more, to confide in him and ask him for advice, but I can’t. I can’t tell him that part of my life is gone forever. I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I’m not going back to Covenant. I can’t. I am different now.
So when I bid him goodbye, I fail to mention that it could very well be the last time I ever see him. I want a new life. I don’t want this one anymore, and I don’t know what to do about it.
That evening I sit in my windowsill, watching Savannah as always, except tonight everyone else has someone with them. It’s The Big Night, after all – the one night of the year that absolutely nobody can stand to be alone. The evening is just starting, and girls in their sparkly dresses and black tights are teetering down the cobblestone streets with their arms hooked through their suited boyfriends (and sometimes girlfriends).
All the couples make me so lonely, and make me long for Fabian more than ever. Even thinking of his name hurts me somewhere deep down. I think of where I’d be now if Kinnan had never done what he’d done, and if I’d never betrayed Fabian. We’d probably be together in my living room, maybe watching TV, doing my favorite thing with him – which was nothing at all. I would give anything to get that state of nothingness back. I want to text him so many things:
Are you thinking of me?
What are you doing now?
What happened with your job situation?
Do you miss me?
Was I enough to you?
Do you still love me?
Did you ever love me?
I always want to say these things, but I never know where to start. I never know how to begin. Or if I even can begin again in the beginning, when the first time was such a debacle…