The Rush

            The Rush

                                                                                   By Jennifer Tem

There were only two hours between our births. Our mothers were born a month apart. Both of our fathers had died in the war and both of us were the first child born. Both of us were females with a rare birth disorder that left us struggling in the ICU in the first hours of our lives.  We both had names that started with K and ended with IE. How much more of this can I tell before you start to writhe with disbelief? Perhaps I could have gone on for another few sentences, about our matching birthmarks and yellow-gray eyes. But eventually I’m sure you’d call bullshit. And you would be right.

Maddy and I were not born two hours apart. Our mothers were not born a month apart and although both our fathers were dead, Maddy’s was dead from an overdose and mine was just dead to me.  I grew up in the lower Bronx and Maddy grew up in Ohio. It wasn’t until a dim night as an undergraduate that I met her in a dark bar in New Orleans. Somehow the same country loneliness ran through us both, regardless of our different upbringings. Both of us wanted a father we didn’t have, and looked for him in every man. Both of us hated ourselves and the world and only were happy when spinning into a downward spiral, and we weren’t even happy then. Not truly. It’s what brought us together. We needed the company of another failure.

The first time we made love was in a rainstorm in Peru. No, it wasn’t. This isn’t a romance tale. The only time we fucked was a night when both of us were drunk, and I was crying. Maddy was high on coke and so was I but at some point my drunkenness outweighed everything.  I took her home where I lived with my sister and her husband and she held my hand while I cried over the shit pile that was my life.  She left me after a time and came back with bourbon and we took shots and kissed. Her fingers seemed to know exactly where to touch me. I remembered at that moment what a friend had told me about making love to another woman was like making love to yourself. But it wasn’t romantic and it wasn’t love. It was loneliness amplified by the knowledge that we were already two very fucked people. 

We woke up next to each other with the smelliest breath and hangovers from hell. I had to leave; I left her there on my bed like that and called a friend of mine and we had sex, normal sex that you have between a man and a woman. I tried to not think about her but my mind kept wandering back to her lips and her fingers and our deep friendship. When I returned Maddy had left a poem on my pillow from Pablo Neruda.  I held it and thought about her and wondered why everything that happened seemed so far beyond my control.  Later that night she was at the bar. I was already drunk and she was already high. We came together like continents crashing in rushed time.

“You left me”

“I’m sorry..”

“What are you scared of? Don’t we deserve some happiness?”

“Maddy...”

I looked into her eyes and saw everything I was afraid of becoming and at the same time already was. She ran her hands through my hair and I reached up and kissed her deeply, forgetting all my preconceived notions and faults. She could be my PERSON. I WISH I could tell you this story, but I was a coward and I left her at the bar. I didn’t go back the next day, or the next, or the next after that.

Maddy disappeared from my life.  I don’t know what happened to her. Later on I did some traveling,  had my heart broken a few times and  looked for love still. Then I thought about Maddy and how I had left a girl cool enough to leave me Neruda poetry on my pillowcase; a girl who understood me.  I wish I still had that poem but nothing is sacred enough for me not to destroy. There is no happy ending…I’m alone now only without Maddy. Wherever she is, I hope her hell is more forgiving.