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Being Different … The Right Way
In a capitalist sea of competition in every field, we develop a desire to stand out. Difference is a survival technique, and, if it’s done right, a game-changer. But we have to be conscious of both sides of the coin, being a producer and a consumer simultaneously, to form an objective opinion of our own marketing decisions.
Put yourself in your customer’s shoes.
Neuroscientists refer to our pension for noticing the unique as Selective Attention. It’s a residual instinct left over from our more survivalist days when early humans had to keep note of things like which berries were poisonous or which soil was growing the best plants. Selective attention has two primary functions:
Highlighting important parts of high information flow (i.e. conversations, written documents, etc)
Holding on to those parts in our minds so we can learn from them and compound our findings
This is our minds’ way of filtering information so that we don’t get easily overwhelmed or miss context and patterns. The trick for those seeking the selective attention of others is being the good kind of different.
Don’t be the poisonous berries.
There are two major ways to stand out: being different in who you are and being different in what you do.
In the past few years, a new trend dubbed Corporate Twitter has emerged on social media. Brands have begun using their Twitter accounts for more than just basic promotion and announcements - they’re now joining subsects of a-political discourse on the platform, often joking with competitors or adding their take on the meme of the week. While this can be done effectively, there’s also a very thin line that brands toe when they try to immerse themselves in the zeitgeist and language of such an unpredictable landscape as Twitter.
Brands fall off the tightrope when they don’t take into account the perspective of the one tweeting on their behalf. When the PR employee who has always tweeted the website links and the newsletter pull-quotes suddenly proclaims a new product to be “on fleek” or “lit,” they leave a weird taste in the mouth of the company’s followers. Corporations are not human, and they shouldn’t have to be, but without a sort of tongue-in-cheek humanity in an online presence, human followers will feel like they’re being joked at by a robot, and that’s hard to laugh along with.
It can also be all too easy to misstep on something like a rebrand or a new product if the only innovation being made is for the purpose of standing out rather than actually improving what the company has done in the past. People are attracted to authenticity, and it’s so important to keep authentic intention at the heart of every move you make. Authenticity is your guiding light when creating something new, and without it, you get something like green Heinz Ketchup.
Back in 2000, Heinz began its foray into colored ketchup with its green iteration, originally intended to promote the movie Shrek. From there, Heinz released purple, blue, and, quite ironically, red ketchups. If you don’t remember this infamous flub of marketing, the new ketchup lined shelves for a shocking six years in bottles more reminiscent of Elmer’s Glue than a condiment before being pulled for declining sales.
But it worked at first. The green ketchup had something of an authentic ambition. It was intended to promote Shrek, which did become a major success, and tomatoes are naturally green before fully ripening to red. Green ketchup is not an unreasonable stretch of the imagination. The problems began when Heinz ran with this and created unnatural colors for its ketchup, falling away from the authentic ambition of a Shrek promotion and stumbling into something reminiscent of coulrophobia, or the fear of clowns.
People fear clowns because they are a perversion of the recognizable. Clowns are almost human, they are almost in the realm of the familiar - their features are exaggerated to just outside of familiarity, but not far enough that they are clearly unfamiliar. This phenomenon is called the Uncanny Valley, the gap between the believable and the unbelievable where things become inherently uncomfortable to behold. Purple ketchup isn’t unsettling on paper. We are familiar with the color purple and the flavor of ketchup. But mentally and emotionally, we know those things don’t go together, and when you put purple ketchup in an unorthodox bottle, it drops into the Uncanny Valley. No one wants to eat the berries that grow in the Uncanny Valley.
Be the good soil.
Corporate Twitter really took off when MoonPie’s account threw all convention out the window and someone well versed in Twitter’s dialect combined the meme discourse with product promotion. One of MoonPie’s great tweets reads, “Mouths are referred to as pie holes for a reason don’t @ me or do what you want twitter likely won’t be policing this particular issue.” Here, MoonPie takes a great deal of agency by proclaiming its product is meant to be eaten, it flawlessly incorporates the popular “don’t @ me” meme, and it subverts its platform, Twitter. This is that tongue-in-cheek humanity to which consumers are attracted.
Lays released their first line of barbeque potato chips in 1965. This is a simple innovation: people love potato chips at their barbeques. Why not bring the barbeque to the chip? The ambition is authentic, the execution is straight-forward, and there’s nothing uncanny about it.
Being better is temporary. Be refreshing instead.
Status is so fragile and so fickle. Even if you’re on top today, someone else is going to usurp you tomorrow - or, more likely, this afternoon. You can subvert status, however, but stepping outside a hierarchy mindset and altering your brand holistically instead. To be refreshing is to be desirable in a way that doesn’t depend on others being undesirable. Being refreshing isn’t a competition, and it’s not a finite status.
Do you know what’s refreshing? Honesty. Authenticity. It all comes back together. Consumers want to feel as though they can connect to the brand, that the brand has their best interests at heart. It’s easy to be sleazy, to cut costs and raise prices, but there’s a greater rate of return for honesty. AMS knows that the producer/consumer relationship is just that - a relationship. AMS will help you be a better partner for the relationship, making you different, better, and refreshing.
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How to be a Male Ally in the Workplace
With the revolutionary social changes brought into society by the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, workplace ecosystems are evolving more rapidly than ever before. Julie Kritz, owner of Pivot Point is helping us navigate these changes on the Showrunner Podcast: Live from Orlando. Kritz’s work as a gender equality advocate throughout her career has allowed women to create their own career “game plans” and helped office leadership to understand how to be an ally for their employees of any and all genders. Kritz’s strategy is not a matter of men vs. women - it’s a call for unity in the workplace and an understanding of the strength that comes from mutual comfort and potential to succeed.
How can women identify their male allies in the office?
Unsurprisingly, it is not that difficult for male coworkers to be aware and respectful of their female peers. A man becomes an ally when he uses his advantage to lift up the women around him. Kritz has narrowed down four signs of a strong, male ally.
1. Men who have succeeded thanks to powerful women.
These men grew up with strong female role models, began their careers with female mentors, or look up to the women around them for their merit. They often want to pay forward the help they’ve received, and know they are in a position to do so.
2. Men who listen to women’s stories.
Women are four times more likely to be interrupted than men because we as a society do not value a woman’s stories or opinions as much as a man’s. Male allies will check that bias and make sure women in their workplace can be heard. And more than that, these men will use what they learn from women to speak up for their female coworkers and advocate for them when the need arises.
3. Men who let women be confident without feeling threatened.
These men understand that they are not inherently better than the women around them, and therefore are not worried about the women around them succeeding. Success isn’t a limited resource - a woman’s success is not a threat to a man’s success. If a man is threatened by a woman being confident and speaking up for herself but not by another man doing the same thing, he has a deeper issue with how he views women relative to himself.
4. Men who understand that work/life integration looks different for men and women.
Women spend an average of 6 hours a week more than men on domestic work around the home. Men being conscious of this means they don’t make comments on how tired their female coworkers look or ask them who’s watching the kids while they're in the office.
How can men become those allies?
Start by breaking down the perception of unpaid labors - things like housework, childcare, etc - that are seen as being of less value because they are traditionally done by women. Showing respect to these things even when they come up in daily conversation can go a long way.
Understand the difference between sympathy and empathy. Sympathy is all “woe is you, bless your heart,” and it’s entirely unhelpful. Empathy is a connection with another person, and it says you’re there to help if needed. That’s what your female coworkers need.
Stop explaining things to women who didn’t ask for an explanation. There’s a pretty good chance that if a woman was hired for her job, or is doing something that pertains to her area of expertise, she’s competent. She doesn’t need men to stand over her and tell her how to do her job. If she needs help, she will ask for it. When you assume that women need your input, you’re telling them they are unskilled in their field and unwelcome in their workplace. “Mansplaining” a woman’s own job to her and “bro-propriating” her space isn’t cool.
Trust your female coworkers. Since the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements have gained momentum, 63% of men are reported to feel uncomfortable working alone with a woman, for fear of being reported for inappropriate conduct. But the thing is, if you don’t act inappropriately, you won’t get reported. It’s so simple. Women don’t just make stuff up to get men in trouble. They have nothing to gain from that. You have nothing to fear if you don’t do anything weird. Trust that your coworkers aren’t out to ruin your career, and keep your behavior professional.
How can leadership set an example?
If you find yourself at the head of a workforce, there are some things to keep in mind.
Diverse/inclusive teams perform better than homogenous groups. The greater the expanse of backgrounds, cultures, and gender experiences you can gather for your team, the greater the outcome will be. Having all those perspectives to analyze your work is priceless. Refining your products through the reviews of people who represent your entire customer base is priceless.
If you’re looking to promote from within, don’t be afraid to look at your female or POC employees. If the merit is equal, you only stand to gain from having a diverse group of leaders represent your company. It makes the diverse employees feel welcome and inspired, and it will keep all of those great perspectives at the heart of your business.
Work to uncover and combat your own biases and stereotypes. There’s a great technique to make sure your products or advertisements aren’t going to come across as tone-deaf to your audience: flip it to test it. Replace the subject of your ad or product demographic with someone else, and see if it’s weird. Picture this: you’re selling dish soap and your commercial features a man washing dishes. His wife comes up and praises him for being such a good and helpful husband. Now flip it. It’s a woman washing dishes with your dish soap and her husband comes up and praises her for being such a good and helpful wife. Now it seems weird, the man complimenting his wife, because we expect women to do the dishes. That’s our bias, uncovered.
Do women need to change, too?
Yes. Stop putting down your fellow women. Stop judging whether they’re married or unmarried, whether or not they have children, if they go out to bars on weeknights, their choice of jewelry, etc. Women are your allies, they’re on your team, and we can’t afford to turn against one another. Advocate for your fellow women at work. Offer emotional support. You know how hard it is to be in their position, so don’t let them deal with everything alone.
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Why YouTube is Your Next Marketing Frontier
Get to know your new home.
Youtube has nearly 2 billion monthly users, second only to Facebook on the social media landscape. Users spend an average of 40 minutes on the site with each visit, compared to Facebook’s 20 minutes. And most of those users are between the ages of 18-49. If you’re looking to capture that demographic’s attention, YouTube is your way in.
YouTube is a discovery machine. It’s the second largest search engine after Google, and because Google is also its parent company, YouTube has total search engine optimization (SEO) on video results for Google searches. Basically, if you have video content, and you should, there’s one home for it.
Learn from the pros.
By now, you’ve probably heard from your kids or your coworkers about YouTubers, the new wave of celebrity. These young entrepreneurs have mastered their art, becoming experts in production, editing, and performance to create an online brand out of their personalities and lifestyles. Over 2400 channels have amassed at least one million subscribers, with the most successful channel, entitled Pewdiepie, about to break 100 million. That’s the population of Egypt. Forbes estimated Felix Kjellberg, the 29-year-old Swedish man behind the channel, made $12 million in 2017 alone.
How do YouTubers get a following? Authenticity. People are attracted to it. Whether they follow a personality, a how-to channel, or a gamer, audiences can tell when a YouTuber is passionate about what they are posting. Once an emotional bond forms between the YouTuber and the viewer, trust and loyalty follow.
Consistent posting is the next key. Your view return rate is going to directly correlate to how often they can expect something to return to. YouTubers lose subscribers when their posting schedules fall behind, so make video content a consistent priority, and get into a posting routine. It doesn’t have to be weekly. You can post once every two weeks, or once a month, as long as you’re consistent and the gap between videos doesn’t grow unexpectedly.
Let’s get started.
Launching a new YouTube channel is just as important as any other product launch. Make sure your channel reflects your brand with the channel art at the top of the page and the icon next to your name - those are like your Facebook cover photo and profile picture, respectively, and they set the tone for your channel. Then, upload your first video. Email the link to your employees and your clients. Invite people over from your other social media channels to get the party started.
Creating and posting videos may seem like a daunting task, but there are a few easy guidelines that can make the process easier.
1. Refine your content.
This should go without saying, but make sure your videos are fact-checked and on-brand for your company. Everything they say will reflect on your organization as a whole, and video content is something to be proud of.
Open with the broad strokes to keep more viewers interested longer. If you begin with specifics, you may lose viewers before you get to the topics they want to hear about.
2. Tag your videos.
When you upload, you’ll see an opportunity to tag your videos. Think about what your target demographic is searching for. Start with broad strokes. If your video is about a new product, say, a toothbrush, start by tagging “hygiene,” “morning routine,” “healthcare,” etc. Then, get specific. Tag “electric toothbrush,” “crest white strips,” “dental care,” etc. For a full guide on tagging, click here.
3. Let your titles and thumbnails do the talking.
Your title has to engage the potential viewer, but it can’t look like it’s trying too hard. That will take away your authenticity. Give people a reason to click by letting them know you have something to say that they want to hear. “How to…,” “Newest innovation in…,” and “Ever wonder why…?,” are all great ways to begin a snappy title.
Your thumbnail is your title’s partner in crime. Highlight the subject of your video with an image of your product, an icon for a social media platform you plan to discuss, or a graph/statistic proving a strategy you’re here to share. Using three to four words on your thumbnail can also capture interest, just don’t repeat the words in your title. If you’re unsure about your thumbnail, make a few versions and send it out to your workforce, ask them to vote on one. Even better, put them out on Twitter and conduct a poll asking which one your followers would rather click on. Asking for help is proof of authenticity.
4. Don’t forget about the description.
In your YouTube Studio, you can set up an automatic description that will be placed under every video. Then, you can add a unique sentence or two to each individual video. In your uniform description, you’ll want:
A link to your website
Links to any social media for your company
Links to related videos, or any videos you reference in your video - Give credit where credit is due
A bullet list of topics the video covers so even if you don’t open with what a viewer came to see, they’ll know you’ll get there eventually and it will come up in their searches
Make sure your video gets suggested.
YouTube has a very complex algorithm, but there are ways to play the system. Turn on the “Related Channels” functionality in your YouTube Studio. This will allow your channels to be advertised on established ones. Identify channels like yours and check out their videos. You can search their videos by most successful, and get title and thumbnail ideas from those. If one of their videos piques your interest, make a video of your own reacting to it, joining their conversation, and tag them in it. You can network on YouTube.
1. Make your videos accessible.
Closed Captioning is a vastly underused resource. Add subtitles to your videos. YouTube has a tool that will do it for you, all you have to do is give them a quick proofread. Not only will this boost your SEO, but it will also likely be one of the only videos like it that will be accessible to hearing-impaired consumers because not nearly enough people caption their videos.
2. End your videos with a call to action.
Start by giving viewers some value for their click. Link something useful in your bio, suggest other videos they could be interested in. In return, ask for a like on the video. Get your friends and coworkers to like the video, too. This will boost SEO and get your video suggested as a related video to others like it.
What else is YouTube good for?
Youtube Studio lets you watch your analytics, so you can see your channel grow in real-time. You can see the demographics your reaching, and the ones you could be reaching better. If your videos are monetized, you can see how much money you’re making, even though it may not be a significant amount. Videos that are longer than ten minutes get SEO and can be advertised on themselves.
YouTubers, the really successful ones, often take brand deals and plug products they believe in, so if you’d like to reach 24-36-year-old women with your product or service, consider approaching a YouTuber who has that demographic in his/her pocket about plugging your company in his/her next video.
At the end of the day, YouTube is a lot of fun. Making content, promoting it, and consuming it are great creative outlets and a great way to engage your consumer base.
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Marketing A Credit Union - How to Do it Right
At Advanced Marketing Strategies, we know credit unions, having worked with the biggest and best to uncover opportunities that stretch media budgets and build brands that helped to double local assets. And just like any other business or business model, credit unions need the right marketing strategies to stand out in their industry and win customers over from the big banks against whom they compete.
An Inside Look at a Credit Union
Billie Cardenas, SVP and COO of Sun Community Federal Credit Union, has seen both the bank and credit union side of the personal finance world, and applauds credit unions for their work-life balance in Ep. 24 of The Showrunner Podcast. Coming from a career at the bank, Cardenas had not been exposed to many positive opinions about credit unions. The perception was that credit unions “take it easy” all day, their work not comparable to the work of banks. But when Cardenas made the switch to Sun Community Federal Credit Union, she discovered and intelligent group of hard-working people who didn’t take themselves as seriously as bankers, allowing for a much better work environment for her.
Money is a huge part of the public’s daily life, and a primary stressor for many. Banks and credit unions are there to help people maintain some control over their money, and, according to Cardenas, they don’t do that nearly enough. However, when you take a closer look at credit unions versus banks, the foundations of each suggest different values that affect how customers are taken care of.
Credit Unions vs. Banks
Credit unions are not-for-profit organizations. They are member-owned and provide their members with competitive rates and services. Because of this decentralized approach to governance, credit unions can course-correct when things aren’t working for the good of the many. Credit unions had 1/5th the failure rate of banks during the 2008 recession in the states, and public trust in credit unions is double that of banks. They routinely boast better customer service than big banks, emphasizing personal and community engagement.
That is not to say banks can’t compete. Banks have lower interest rates and are more technologically adept, quick to update apps and adapt to new tech to improve the user experience.
What AMS Brings to the Table for Credit Unions
By providing a mix of general marketing must-haves with the specific needs of the unions, AMS optimizes the potential of its clients.
We performed a deep-dive analysis of the Point Loma Credit Union’s digital media strategy and evaluated it for effectiveness. AMS found deficiencies with the Google Search campaigns which were formerly managed in-house by PLCU.
The primary findings were as follows:
Limited number of search ads / not enough ad copy in rotation.
Ads did not include sitelinks
Most clicked on keyword was “auto loan calculator” - there was not a calculator on PLCU’s website
Campaigns had limited keywords for Auto and HELOC loans - limited number of keywords led to limited traffic
PLCU was targeting Riverside, where there was no brick and mortar location, resulting in a loss of $650 per month, 75% of the monthly budget
The solutions AMS provided were these:
Upon agency recommendation, PLCU’s budgets and search ads were restructured to more efficiently reach the target audience and geographic areas that had the most potential to increase memberships of Auto and HELOC loans
After thoroughly scrubbing the campaigns, AMS doubled impressions and lead conversions at half the cost per click
PLCU’s website received 5,846 clicks to the website, a 40% increase in traffic within one month of AMS taking over
PLCU leads and memberships grew by 11% month over month since AMS’s initial hire
Bottom Line
Credit unions have a lot to offer when it comes to the customer’s personal attractions and the wider emotional component of a person’s commitment to a financial strategy, but, on paper, credit unions could use a boost when sitting next to banks. AMS can provide that boost and then some, and secure potential customers who are on the fence.
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How Facebook Can Change Your Marketing Game
With over 1.5 billion daily users on its primary site and over half a billion daily users on its subsidiaries, Facebook has cemented itself as one of the most used websites of the past fifteen years. While Facebook’s reputation has had its blows between lawsuits, its user base is loyal and consistent, its ad system is efficient, and the site as a whole defies demographics.
After attending a recent marketing conference with Gary Vaynerchuk, SVP, COO of Sun Community Federal Credit Union, Billie Cardenas, has a renewed enthusiasm for Facebook’s potential as an advertising platform, citing the site’s unique ability to target people in Ep. 24 of the Showrunner Podcast.
Why use Facebook over traditional advertising?
Facebook is in a unique position as the premier modern social media platform. It has preceded and watched the rise of Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr, Reddit, and Youtube, and has stayed relevant through it all. Facebook has cut its teeth against all of its competitors and adapted to their innovations - by the laws of the free market, that means it has the best focus on consumers when it comes to user retention.
Facebook connects every consumer demographic in one place, with a special ability to connect generations of consumers. 83% of Facebook’s users who have children are ‘Friends’ with their children on the site. If a woman in the Midwest aged 50-65 ‘likes’ a post about home security, her 18-to-24-year-old daughter on the East Coast is going to see it. The audience these posts reach is much broader than they were originally targeting, and they get spread with a personal referral attached.
Facebook was an important part of our digital media mix for the LPGA Kia Classic - coupled with engaging content and strategic click through and conversion tactics, we increased attendance by 20% year over year.
How should you advertise on Facebook?
Facebook ads come in many forms. Most brands will begin with their own Facebook page. This allows consumers to keep up with new products from that brand, and those posts show up in the consumer’s timeline if they ‘Like’ the page in question.
40% of Facebook users don’t ‘Like’ brand pages at all, but they can still be reached through paid adverts by brands, posted on news feeds directly rather than just to the brand’s personal page. Organic performs differently than paid, and both play important roles in delivering the spectrum of results required to move the needle.
Videos earn the highest engagement on the platform, and only a small number of ads on the site come in video format, so they stand out. In a recent campaign, AMS noticed that organic (unpaid) Facebook ads performed well with click-through rates, but video ads got many more impressions. Each platform and each tactic within the platform must be managed and evaluated judiciously and with a trained eye.
So when should you post on Facebook?
This is a question that concerns Millennials and Gen Z, but may not occur to Baby Boomers and Gen X, because the younger demographics have been trained to post for ‘Likes.’ Social media, unlike traditional news outlets, is constantly being fed new information in real-time by as many sources as the user is ‘friends’ with, and some posts will inevitably get lost in the fold, so timing is crucial - you need to get eyes on your posts while those eyes are actively on the site. Studies show that, excluding weekends, daily engagement on Facebook is highest on Thursdays and Fridays, with user activity peaking on weekdays at 3:00pm. It makes sense when you think about it - it’s the end of the week, people don’t want to be at work, so they’re distracting themselves with social media. It’s mid-afternoon, that long stretch between lunch and 5:00pm when people make their last cup of coffee and scroll on their phones for a few minutes between emails.
AMS is a thought leader when it comes to social media strategies - it’s part of our full-service media mix of both traditional and digital. We audit performance daily, always watching, analyzing, and tweaking for optimum results. Facebook is a crucial tool in today’s market. Everybody is on it every day - that is an unprecedented amount of traffic, and you have the ability to put up a billboard. The average Facebook user clicks on 2 ads a week. Make sure one of those ads is yours.
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Crafting Your Marketing Narrative
Story-telling is the foundation of how we identify ourselves relative to one another. Stories of gods and warriors inspire our worldviews. Stories of our ancestors and our land dictate our culture. Stories of dumb things our friends do on the weekends connect us to our coworkers at the water-cooler. Everything we are is owed to how we craft a story, and the best stories make history.
The importance of story is not lost on Billie Cardenas, SVP and COO of Sun Community Federal Credit Union and featured guest on Episode 24 of the Show Runner Podcast. Cardenas believes that when it comes to the credit union game, communicating vision and values has a higher return than talking exclusively about rates. Rates can be beat, but the connection made with clients through shared values and vision can’t. AMS makes these connections by combining strategy, creativity, innovation, and cultural intelligence, to tell authentic stories audiences care about.
So how do we create narrative?
Oscar-winning films make use of something called the Three Act Structure. When you sit down to watch a movie, that movie has 25 minutes to immerse you in its world and make you care for its characters. Those 25 minutes are Act 1. They are the marketing campaign for the rest of the movie.
In Act 1, the characters are established in their natural habitat, and are then presented with a call to action. In Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, Act 1 consists of Belle wandering around town, the townspeople singing about how she doesn’t fit in, Belle discovering her father has been kidnapped, and sacrificing her own freedom to save him. In Spielberg’s Jaws, Act 1 consists of the first shark attacks, the mayor refusing to shut down the beach, and Quint agreeing to catch the shark for $100,000.
In your Act 1, you establish who you are, your core values, your vision, and why you believe you’re the best option on the market. You hook the consumer and give them a call to action - joining your community of consumers by using your product or service.
Let’s look at an example.
In 2015, the feminine hygiene brand Always released their #LikeAGirl campaign. The television/internet commercial showed a variety of people demonstrating what it means to run and fight like a girl. Adult men and women demonstrated a goofy, awkward run and a weak attempt at a fight. Pre-pubescent girls, however, demonstrated hard and fast running and strong, deliberate punches. The message of the commercial: being told you do something “like a girl” isn’t an insult until we are taught that it is. The ad concludes with a call to action: join Always in changing the narrative around doing something like a girl.
The ad establishes Always’s values as equality, empowerment, and respect. It places Always as a standout in the feminine hygiene market who thinks “like a girl” isn’t an insult. It then hooks the potential consumer with its call to action and ready-made hashtag to promote user-generated content.
Where does AMS come in?
If you give the consumer Act 1 of your product or service, the consumer will write the rest of the movie with you. We at AMS understand the transformational shift of the current marketing landscape and the importance of nurturing the customer’s role in marketing which has evolved to the point where their input, conversations, and experience with the brand shapes the strategy from the outside in. We are storytelling craftsmen. As a full-service creative agency, we will illuminate and amplify YOUR story. Because this is your brand, and it’s worthy of an Academy Award.
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Valentina’s
There was this burrito place called Valentina's. It was a hole-in-the-wall kind of place, nestled in what was essentially an alleyway between an office building and an apartment building on a street a few blocks from the main street in town. It was exactly half the distance between my apartment and my ex’s house, and she’d made me meet her there once, after a fight. I had walked past it in the freezing January night probably four times before I saw it and made it inside. She said we were being stupid, and, to see that, we would have to meet each other in the middle, and her gray eyes said she meant what she said and then she slid me a soggy burrito wrapped up in tin foil and we ate and sweat out jalapeño juice and stayed there at the wobbling plastic table until the guy behind the counter with the neck tattoos kicked us out.
So that was my destination. I always used to get restless around June, presumably because I was still used to being free of responsibility around that time of year, but now that I was a real-life adult, nothing changed in the summer. There was nothing to look forward to and no conceivable goal I was working toward, and that made any free time unbearable, so I began to walk. It was usually around eleven when I toweled off my hair after a too-long shower and put on running shorts and a tank top and went out to feel the pavement on my bare feet. The sidewalk would still be warm from the day but the grass around it would already be cool and I would walk with one foot treading on each. When it got uncomfortable I would switch sides.
I played games with myself, the old ones, the ones I’d promised not to play but they came to the front of my mind that night and I knew they couldn’t be as destructive as I’d been told, and I liked them. Aligning my breath with the turn signals of passing cars, matching colors. The brake light matches the red light matches his hat matches the spots that explode behind my eyelids when I rub my palms into them to keep my eyes in my head for a bit longer. They used to make me wear glasses to stop me from playing that one, told me I was hurting my eyes, but I broke the glasses.
I could see the glow of the Valentina's sign shining on the sidewalk a half block ahead. Between Valentina's and me was one other person, a woman around my age, a few meters ahead of me. She was silhouetted by the oncoming traffic, her skin glowing around the edges, as if emitting visible life. I stopped walking for a moment to watch her, the way her hair strayed off her shoulders, the way her long fingers were curled around her phone in one hand, and for a few moments, I really wished I had put on shoes tonight, or at least a bra.
I was right behind her in the line. It was just the two of us, or us and Neck Tattoos behind the counter. Valentina's menu had a lot of options, but in the way that Chicago has a lot of options: you were just going to ignore them and get deep dish every time. The woman sat at a table on this elevated part that was up two stairs in the corner. I sat below her, not close enough to be weird about it, but close enough that she would notice me if she wanted to. I heard her unlock her phone and tuned the sound of her keyboard clicking into my internal rhythm as my eyes wandered around the place. I looked over my shoulder at the painting of a beach on the wall and smelled my ex’s perfume. I looked across to the table we had sat at after every fight from the first one on and could feel the jalapeños burning a hole in my tongue. I always ordered my burrito without them now. There was a stain on the wall that we had decided was left there from some sort of emergency, projectile childbirth that must have taken place here at some point. I thought to take a picture of it, break the silence with a funny text about it, but I’d left my phone in the apartment.
“Hand me a napkin, ya?”
I reached over to the table next to me, grabbed four napkins, and leaned back the other way to her.
“Thanks.” The woman dabbed the stream of grease that was running down the side of her tortilla. “Join me?”
This was the first invitation she’d extended to me since we’d broken up. I was probably too eager to accept it. I slid out of my chair in a way that looked as though I weighed about a thousand pounds more than I did, like standing up straight was a miracle of nature. I took both stairs at once, which felt like showing off, and slid my chair in too far, which felt eager. The woman, my ex, watched me with those deep, gray eyes that made you a little afraid to talk to her but more afraid to miss the chance.
“Come here often?” Stupid.
“Leave the house often?” She glanced down at my bare feet under the table. “Why are you here?”
“It’s boring.” I waved her off and took a bite. I felt jalapeños burning that hole in my tongue. “I like your dress.” I could feel my eyes watering.
We sat on the floor with our backs against her couch. She poured us each a glass of gin and we sat cross-legged, necks twisted to face one another. From the other room, I heard a deep laugh.
“My roommate,” she said, nodding to the closed door.
Another giggle, this time from a woman. She rolled her eyes. “And my ex.”
I choked on my gin. “Is there a story there?”
“Not one I feel like telling again.”
And we just talked. She told me about her job and her parents and this idiot she used to date, not the one in the other room, but the one who could never sit still, could never focus on anything that wasn’t something destructive. She talked about the way she’d come to see the world, the way she had become obsessed with balance in the last year or so. And when I listened to her, I didn’t look for matching colors: nothing matched the gray in her eyes. When I listened to her, my breaths aligned with hers and she breathed at a normal human pace and I didn’t get dizzy.
There’s a sort of familiarity that you find in your childhood bedroom, or the smell of the laundry detergent you used to use and coincidentally bought again, or in looking through old photos and noticing you’re wearing the same outfit today as you were a day long ago. It sneaks up on you, I think. Not in the way a depressive episode or fit of anxiety do. It’s better than that, the opposite. A balance. The familiarity of looking into her eyes, of feeling the residual burn of the jalapeños and the new burn of the gin, it felt like we were back, like how it always felt after a fight. It was just that this one had lasted a long time.
As the ball of ice in my glass slowly melted, and the condensation around the outside pooled around my fingertips and soaked into my skin, and the humid haze of the evening saturated us, I remembered that time we’d booked a trip to Vienna just because we were bored and I had some extra money and there was a flight the next day. We landed at midnight and ran around Vienna in the dark to the only bar we could find and got drunk off one glass of wine each, and I told her that Vienna looked good on her and she said that didn’t make sense before writing it on the wall in Sharpie. I thought to bring this up to her but feared she may recall it differently, and some things are left better in memory anyway.
It hurt, being with her, seeing her. I wanted to preserve her the way she was when I had her and she had me but we’d melted like the ice in our drinks and our lives didn’t fit together anymore. And what was heartbreaking about that was the fact that I didn’t care. There was a time when the thought of my indifference would have nearly killed me. Balance.
“Do you think, maybe, we did it wrong?” She asked me.
“I think there were better ways to do it than how we did it,” I said carefully. “But I don’t know that doing it differently would have given us a different result, you know?”
“You never did want to fight too hard for things.”
I resented that. “I fought for us. You made me understand why people fight at all. I told you that.”
“We’re such different people. We didn’t know that in the beginning. We didn’t know each other. I just feel like if we had built any sort of foundation that, maybe, I don’t know, we could have been happy.”
“We were happy.”
“Okay, happier. Don’t you wish we had lasted?”
“Do you think I don’t?” I was getting emotional, most against my own will. “Do you know how much it kills me just to be here right now?” She knew she’d get me. I get confession-y when I have gin. “I want to be with you every second. I want to follow your every move. I want to be the one you tell everything to and the one you can’t wait to see. I want to be so close to you that we become one person. I want you to absorb me. Yes, I wish we had lasted. I wish we had started at the beginning of time and then outlived time just to spite it. Right now, my whole body is aching with frustration that it’s not touching yours, that it could be closer to you but it’s not. It is taking everything I have not to be wrapping you up in me right now. To see you, right now, after all this time, to watch your eyes light up and your lips move when you talk - this is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. And I was stupid enough to think that if we ever did end up craving burritos on the same night, that it would be a pleasant run-in. That we could talk and get drinks and hang out like old friends. But that’s not what’s happening for me right now. Is that how you feel?”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t have.”
“It’s not easy for me.”
“Don’t. Don’t give me that kind of hope.” I wanted to rip out my eyes to keep them from watering. Stupid.
“Why not? Why shouldn’t we have high hopes? Is that not all we have? Look. I loved you. Of course I did. And I wanted a lot more time with you than we got. But we did it wrong, we set ourselves up to fail and all things considered, I think it ended pretty well. We’re here, aren’t we? Of course it hurts. Why shouldn’t a broken heart remember why it’s sore once in a while?”
She reached out a hand to my shoulder. I tensed in anticipation but my body gave me up, relaxing at her touch as it always did, tendrils of her warmth spreading under my skin, outward from where it was in contact with hers, then dripping down my spine like a hot syrup until I, myself, thought I would melt into the floorboards with the remainder of my dignity.
She read my face and I watched as hers took on a look of pity. “Oh, no. You really mean it.”
I nodded, tears on my cheeks. She wiped one thumb across my cheeks.
“Hey. It’s okay. What do you need from me?”
“To forget this. To forgive me for never letting go.”
“You have nothing to be embarrassed about. And I have nothing to forgive you for.”
“You’re right, though. Could’ve fought harder.”
“You’re right. It would’ve ended the same.”
“God, I wish we could have worked. Right?”
“Right. This sucks.”
“Why didn’t we do this months ago?”
“We’re too proud.”
“Which is probably at the heart of why it didn’t work.”
“Cheers.”
We clinked glasses. There was laughter from the bedroom next to us. A dog barked outside. The sounds of a night that had no idea how complex it was.
I wore her slippers on the way home. We didn’t talk about it but I assumed at some point I was supposed to return them. Maybe things would be different this time. Maybe jalapeños have healing powers. It was too late for cars with turn signals and my eyes were secure and there weren’t really any colors that night anyway. My mind strayed. I wondered where Neck Tattoos went after he’d cleared out Valentina's every night. I wondered if the bar in Vienna still had her handwriting on the wall. I wondered how eyes could be gray when the only options were brown, green, and blue. And as I got to my building’s front door, for a moment, like at the end of every night, my restlessness was temporarily eased.
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Between Us and the Sun
The outer planets don’t have phases. The moon has phases, and Venus and Mercury have phases because they sometimes come between us and the sun. To us, they are sometimes made partially of shadows. But the outer planets are too far away. They could care less about us, let alone what lies between us and their sun. They don’t want our perspective of them. They’re immune to our labeling of phases and our view of shadows. It’s worked out for them so far.
That’s the thought that put me to sleep. I’d never thought of the planets much, but for some reason - maybe it was sleeping outside or the edibles we’d stacked on our s’mores - that night the planets were my new obsession. I closed my eyes on the stars, so many more than I’d ever seen in the city, and rolled onto some sharp twigs and let myself feel them for all they were worth through my sleeping bag. Ezra was already snoring, his fingers intertwined with Nicola’s, asleep beside him. Her beanie had slipped halfway off her bald head. I was tempted to pull it back on, but she’d been having insomnia lately and it would’ve been cruel to wake her. Chemo fatigued most people, but it’d just made Nicola nocturnal.
I woke up before the others, those twigs finding new spots on me to prod me in during my restless sleep until I had to give it up. My breath shone like the morning dew I had to shake off with my sleeping bag. Fog rose from the lake, or maybe it was steam, or maybe those two were the same thing, but, either way, I was pulling off my quarter zip and fleece pants and walking down to the water’s edge, naked but for a pair of spandex, the only thing that would dry afterward. I felt a twinge of guilt for disturbing the glassy surface of the water, but, damn, was it warm. Was it warm or was I cold? It didn’t seem to matter as I walked in up to my breasts, goosebumps adding to the imperfections of my skin, crawling across the surgical scars on my neck. I paused to consider the contrast of the temperature above and below the meniscus, the difference in the kind of soft the air was and the kind of soft the water was. As an experiment, I leaned forward and dipped one frozen nipple into the lake. It softened. The lake was warm.
You’d think all the good stories come out of freezing, stormy water that wrecks ships and destroys island nations, but there are stories about calm water too. They just always involve the water getting disturbed in some way. Like, in Greek mythology, there was this guy called Tantalus who was an amazing cook, and the gods made him cook them a feast. Tantalus wanted to put all he could into the meal, so much so that he sacrificed his own son and made him the main course. The gods hated human sacrifice, which you’d think Tantalus would’ve known, and once they realized what they’d been served, they damned Tantalus never to be able to eat or drink again. Tantalus was forced to stand in a pool of fresh, clear water under a tree hanging with ripe fruit, but whenever he reached up or down to eat or drink, the fruit would shrivel and rot or the water would recede from his outstretched hand. Water is an agent of vengeance.
Another myth was about a god called Alpheus who fell in love with Artemis, the goddess of nighttime or something, and to hide from Alpheus, Artemis ran into a river and covered her face with mud so that he wouldn’t be able to distinguish her from the nymphs and dryads. Then Alpheus was turned into a river himself for being a creep and was used by Hercules to clean horseshit out of some stables. Water is a place of refuge (and nature’s poop scoop).
Lifting my knees to my chest, and slipped down under the water. It was murky, but not in a way that made it too dark, and I dug below the rocky bottom to where the sand began and pulled a handful up with me to the surface. I rubbed it into my face, just like Artemis, scrubbing away the oil that had accumulated overnight on my cheeks, my forehead, behind my ears. For how warm the water was, the sand was cool, and it felt as though it drew all the heat from my head.
I blinked open one eye and looked back to our campsite. Elio had woken up and he was standing over at the edge of our clearing, facing the woods, peeing. His nest of curly hair was all flopped over to one side and his scrawny back hunched forward. He finished and turned around. We blinked at each other for a few moments, and Elio raised a hand. I waved back, toward myself - join me. He pulled off his sweater and t-shirt, leaving just his boxers, and dubiously picked his way around the still-sleeping couple down to the water. He waded in slowly as I had, but once the water reached his knees, he dove under. I dipped my face in to wash off the scrub and opened my eyes underwater, watching him swim toward me until he had his hands on my hips and was kissing my waist.
We sat together around the breakfast campfire. Ezra and Nicola looked suspicious through their sleepy eyes but I didn’t address it. Better to let them make their own assumptions. I fried eggs in a little stone pan over the tiny flame while Elio sliced the tops off strawberries with his hunting knife. Ezra unscrewed his water bottle for Nicola while she counted out her pills and swallowed them one by one. Ezra had the types of hands that boys can have, the kind with impossibly long fingers that seem as though they could wrap around an entire basketball or reach across four octaves on a piano and the tiny orange pill canisters were lost in them like a fly trapped in a spider’s web. While the eggs fried, I lay back and rested my head on my rolled-up pants.
Above us, pine needles danced in the morning wind and considered raining down on us, only to send flecks of sap in their place. The sky was gray, nothing but clouds, but the sun was all the brighter for it, diffracting across its entire domain, looking like the mouth of a tunnel that was already behind us.
Nicola scooted toward my side of the fire and rolled down next to me while Ezra took over my egg duty. She laid her head on my chest, facing me, the tip of her nose tickling my chin. I felt her warm breath on my neck, the breath that always seemed to smell like nothing at all. Sterile, like the hospital rooms she’d been in and out of for the past five years warding off a particularly stubborn strain of leukemia. I’d joked before that her breath was due to her never breathing fresh air anymore, and I’m sure she must have only invited me camping to make me watch her take deep breaths. I felt her blow on my neck, then laugh at herself. She reached up and slapped her hand to my forehead, let it slide down my face, pulling my lower lip down my chin. I licked her fingers and she snatched back her hand, wiping it on my sleeve. She rolled her head to face down to my feet. Nicola didn’t like to look up. I think she was afraid of the sky.
It rained during our hike. Like an idiot, I wore a fleece jacket and my fleece pants, and by the time we were halfway up the mountain breaking for lunch, I was soaked through. The others had spare clothing and were all smart enough to wear windbreakers, so I assembled a new outfit and wrapped a tarp from my pack around my shoulders as a sort of rain-resistant cape. Elio picked me up by the waist, Dirty Dancing style, and ran a few paces while I kept my arms stretched out, the Superwoman of the Rockies.
We paused on an overlook, the lake visible a mile or so away from our vantage point. It was sunny over there, the cloudline breaking just over the beach. A strange sort of promised land in the direction whence we’d come. The stretch of damn forest and rock that separated us from that sunny oasis felt impassable, a horizontal expedition equivalent to trying to reach outer space, only with more obstacles standing in the way.
I tossed a rock experimentally off the cliff. It was lost in the fog and made no sound over the din of the rain drumming on the earth. Ezra came up behind me and handed me another rock the size of his fist. I lobbed that one, and we both tracked it with outstretched hands until it was lost in the trees. Ezra swore he heard a thud. I swore I heard my shoulder pop out as I’d thrown that one, but he didn’t believe me, either.
At the summit, the rain stopped. Or maybe we were above the clouds, but that seemed unlikely, given how easily even Nicola could breathe. The air hung with that post-storm tension, unsure whether it could relax, exhale. We padded across a composite of pine needles and dirt and pebbles all glued together with sap in a cross-stitch of browns and greens, absorbing the sound of our footsteps and leaving no tracks. I wondered if animals could still smell we’d been there, whether the damp ground trapped or masked our scent.
Would Nicola be detected at all? Riding on Elio’s back? I’d been hunched over for the past few miles, staring at her dangling ankles to keep on course, watching them swing limply, parentheses around Elio’s scrawny legs doing best not to drag his feet. Ezra led our pack, walking stick in hand, a fallen branch he’d picked up at the base of the mountain. Ezra was easily the strongest of all of us, but was still getting used to balancing on the new leg, a gift from his sarcoma in exchange for the original leg, and he leaned heavily on the stick on his right side. It looked as if he was rowing a gondola. I told him that and he reached back to whack me with the stick.
Four kids (or, I guess, young adults), all who’d been closer to dying than to living lately, unsupervised in the middle of nature with absolutely no means to get help should it be needed, allowed to go off for a week and tempt their odds. Test nature. We were all climbing for a different reason. Ezra to prove he could do it, Nicola to find some sort of absolute silence to forget her world of beeping monitors and whirring generators, Elio because I’d asked him to, and I to shorten the distance between me and the sun. It wasn’t as romantic as it probably could’ve been, but we’d never had great luck with how things could be.
My own story had begun and ended within the course of nine months. I never really counted myself among the others, I hadn’t suffered for it, really. Hodgkin’s lymphoma. I’d felt the swelling in my neck and had a few months of treatments before the doctors went in and pulled out what hurt. Now, I just had gnarly scars that I planned to adorn with tattoos after college and an annual checkup.
It was weird being the lucky type of cancer patient. Everyone gives you sympathy and you have to go through most of the same stuff as the other kids with cancer, but it’s like getting a sample. I did intravenous treatments for three months. I stayed in the hospital for a total of about four weeks. I attended a depressing support group twice. My condition never got bad enough that I went to church or made right with my enemies. There were a few bad nights and one or two real scares when the cancer began to spread, but it was never anything that couldn’t be fixed within the next two or three rounds of treatment. I got to miss a bunch of school and was made prom queen, so, all in all, it wasn’t so bad. The shitty thing is saying all of that; like, “yeah, I had cancer, not too bad, actually.” I was the asshole in the World War 1 camp who’s tummy was a little upset while everyone else around him was dying of dysentery. I was the princess in the castle complaining about a dry pastry at the ball while the peasants tried to outlive the plague. Try and complain that your suffering wasn’t bad enough. To anyone who hasn’t suffered, you’re still someone to be pitied. To anyone who has, you’re worse than you think you are.
I met Elio during those intravenous treatments. What a classic, sick kid love story. I think our medicine bags touched while we complained about the slow internet not letting our Twitter feeds load. Elio was in for non-Hodgkin lymphoma, which means he won the “whose odds are worse” game we’ve all played a hundred times. He was in intensive chemo for a year, though now he’d been in remission for two. He got two checkups a year, and he was pre-med on track to graduate a year early.
The other two were from that support group Elio and I went to those two times. We hated them. Ezra and Nicola were so into it, they were spreading their positivity and making people weep with hope and they lead the prayer at the end and, wow, did Elio and I want to just punch them in their self-righteous faces. Unfortunately, outside of group, Ezra and Nicola were just as hilarious and cynical as the two of us, even if they were a sickeningly cute couple. I’d dared Elio to ask them to do a lunch date with us, assuming they’d say no because they had to go build a house for homeless kittens or something, but they said yes, so the four of us got hotdogs and Diet Cokes and bitched about bad hospital staff for an afternoon.
Nicola was the only one of us who still lived in the hospital. Nicola was also the only one of us with odds less than 40% and the only one of us who’d gotten a Wish from the Make A Wish Foundation. She called it having a “time of departure,” meaning that at some point about three months ago some doctor who thought he knew everything said she had six months to live, which is a fucked up thing to say to somebody. She used her Wish on a cash donation to the hospital which had done hardly anything to extend her life, in exchange for four vacation days hiking with her friends. Enter Elio, Ezra, and Shannon. The hospital trusted Ezra, as did Nicola’s parents, and they collectively tolerated Elio and me, so here we were, with tracker bracelets around our wrists like a band of delinquents and a way-over-the-top mess of camping supplies, chasing sunsets and existential meaning.
Lunch on the summit was a bougie affair. We had peanut butter sandwiches, potato chips, baby carrots, and miniature cheesecakes. Nicola chased the meal with her second round of pills, and I watched my feet while she did this, that feeling of guilt spreading in my stomach. Nicola then pulled a book out of her backpack and held it up.
“Anyone mind spending an hour or two hanging out? Rest up for the way back?”
We agreed. I grabbed a Coke from Ezra’s pack and strung up my hammock between two trees, then hopped in for a nap. A nap, however, I did not have, thanks to Ezra, who climbed into my hammock with me and began pontificating, in a way that only a man with half a metal leg can.
“Shannon, I am not an old man, I am not a young man, I’m am not evenly wholly a man at all.” He indicated his leg. “I do not pretend to be an expert in many things. I have never been to New York City or written a novel. I have not experienced great loss, though that one is coming. And until today, I had never even climbed a mountain. But, that is why we are still here, is it not? We still have too much to do, too many people to meet, and too many stories to tell.”
“Very good,” I told him. “The timing needs a little work.”
He pressed on as if I’d said nothing. “Take the four of us. We are the band of misfits to star in any teen movie for which they need us. We have it all: charm, wit, tragic backstories - one of us even has a pending time of death. Tell me that’s not a compelling group of protagonists.”
“Is there a point coming?”
“Is there ever? I’m just observing. Be an observer, Shan. Don’t think so hard about everything, alright? You’re stressing the rest of us out.”
“I am not.”
“You’re stressing me out.”
“That sounds like your problem.”
“Well, add it to the list.” Ezra hopped out of my hammock and crossed the clearing to join Nicola. When he approached, Nicola began reading out loud so he could hear. She did that a lot, like she was trying to create a firm impression of what her voice sounded like while she could. I wondered if I would have the foresight to do things like that, were it me. Probably not. I just listened.
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Kate
“Dear Ms. Ellis,
You don’t know who I am. I go to Brighton Academy. My name is Sidney, or Sid for short. I have wanted to talk to you for a year. I didn’t think it would be a good idea.
I’ve been reading your blog. I did before you stopped posting. I hope you’re doing okay.
I know you’re probably sick of hearing this. I’m sorry for your loss. Michael sounds like he was a good guy. I never knew him but I’ve seen him at school and he seemed nice.
I think you should know that I look up to you. You have been able to go on a whole year after losing your son. That is not something everyone can do. My mum sure couldn’t.
Anyway, I don’t really know what I wanted to say. Nothing seems like it’s worth saying. I won’t tell you to keep holding on because that seems like a load of bollocks. I guess I’m just saying hello, you are very strong, I hope you are well.
Sincerely,
Sid Hennessy
The paper sat, worn from all the times it’d been folded and unfolded, stained on the edges by coffee and red wine and bourbon, side effects of Ms. Kate Ellis’s attempts to skip the day and stay awake all night. It had come around only a few days ago, and yet it was just scarcely visible under a clutter of other condolences and dying flowers and dishes smeared with the remains of casseroles that’d been pouring into the house since New Year’s. The freezer was now far past full. With the curtains drawn, there was a coolness that surpassed what would be expected in the U.K. in winter, and the whole of the house was blanketed in dust, except for the paths along which Kate drudged every day; those paths were free of anything except the worn carpet and the shade of the curtains. The kitchen surfaces were free of the loneliness suffered by the counters of others, laden with dishes and packaging and spills now long dried and cat hair, a peculiar addition given the absence of any cat living in the house, but attributable to the neighboring cat who often found herself entering any and all open windows in any and all houses within cat distance. The bin in the corner would be full if Kate had been capable of making the trip to it when needed. Given her current state, however, it was tidy and bored and the neighbor to a piece of notebook paper that had slipped off the refrigerator door in the middle of the night, which was nothing of importance now that the date written on it had passed.
The house wasn’t unused to an occasional state of disarray: that’d been happening with increasing frequency for a year and a few days now. Granted, the past four months had passed in relative tidiness, but that tidiness died at the anniversary. Kate’s friends and family had come to call and, of course, had offered help. Her sister, Georgia, went so far as to hire a cleaning service, but she only had so much patience on which to lean her empathy, and letting in the housekeepers would have involved Kate leaving her bed. Why would she bother, when the repeated knocking at the door was so soothing? As if another heartbeat existed in the house again.
The fall had been mild. The rains were light and the sky amicable to negotiation. The general discourse even seemed to let go of some of its usual tensions. The winter had brought wind, and Christmas was a mild affair due to Kate’s unwillingness to travel; her sister had come around on Boxing Day, but the presents she’d brought still lay wrapped at the foot of the loveseat by the fireplace. They’d thought it best not to condemn a tree. And, of course, New Year’s was spent in absolute darkness and isolation, bathed in the lukewarm ambience of out-of-date muscle relaxers and a made-for-TV movie about university students up to no good.
That just about lead up to present, where Kate was lying on her couch, one socked foot sticking out of the blanket, her wrist hanging limply off the edge, eyes closed under askew glasses, bushy brown hair done up in a bun, though mostly falling out. Light made its usual fruitless attempt to strain through the heavy curtains as morning seeped through the seams to no great effect. The title of a David Lean film flashed noncommittally from the television screen across the room, reflecting in Kate’s lenses. A tinny ring of the old aircon unit hummed from the window behind the kitchen, the only thing breaking the silence. The air in the living room settled around piles of magazines, newspapers, and books stacked haphazardly on the thick carpet, sprinkled with used cigarette filters and loose shreds of tobacco. The smell was just as stale, though diluted with incense and scented candles. Essentially everything but fresh air pervaded in the room. Kate had been good. She’d earned this relaxation. A few more days, that’s all. It was easier that way, to lean in to this regression rather than fight back up that hill. Even Sisyphus must take breaks when the gods aren’t watching.
Cards now were coming in the post, a few every day. Evidently, the private messages had circulated on various social media, whispers out the backdoor to remember it had been a year now, a whole year, can you believe it, since Michael had died. Still so tragic, though we never think about it anymore. We should send Kate a card. Have you posted it yet? No, forgot, will tomorrow. Post office is closed, oh well, it can wait until Monday. It’ll get to her soon enough. She’s got a lot on her mind, won’t notice if it shows up late. Then the cakes and sweets, dropped off with a quiet knock that was never meant to be answered. Needless to say they went stale on the stoop. Flowers, not many people sent flowers, they seemed to know no one would see them, let alone water them, before it was much too late for them to be worth watering. Only the flowers carried into the house by Georgia ever saw vases. Voicemails were the one thing Kate couldn’t escape. She’d silenced her phone, but messages get recorded no matter what you do. She didn’t have the stomach to play them nor the heart to delete them, so they were left to be patient. Set a good example.
What was more exhausting, the tsunami of the past year, rocking her tiny boat, threatening to capsize, springing leak after leak that she wasn’t fast enough to plug up, or this post-war battleground, bloody and still, bathed in horrid, ironic sunlight with no one left alive to warm, only the dead to make odoriferous? Was it worse hanging on for dear life or letting go and being suspended, nowhere soft to fall? Kate didn’t have the energy to seek an answer. It was all shit, it would always be shit. No, actually, the worst was that she didn’t even want to die. She sure as hell wasn’t interested in living, but death wouldn’t help anything. She’d had her suicidal phase of grief, the phase nobody talks about, the forgotten sixth phase, but that’d passed.
Two weeks past New Year’s, Kate knew it was time to get back to the routine. She was badly broken, but still disciplined, she knew time would go on, and, however badly she wanted it to do so without her, Kate knew she needed to compromise. She got groceries and take-away. Every other day, she made herself walk all the way to the sea and along the pier. The cold wind felt good on her face, strong. When the weather was exceptionally bad, she took herself to the Lanes for a tea. She taught herself to compliment the young man or woman at the till and to indulge and allow for two sugars. It was a system of give and take, work and reward. Kate wasn’t lonely, though she never engaged anyone else in her goings-on, except Martin.
When they’d begun meeting again in July, Kate hadn’t seen Michael’s father since the funeral, and, before that, for quite a few years, not since the custody had been settled. They’d been civil, always, of course. It was Georgia who didn’t like Martin, who thought he was controlling, manipulative, “emotionally abusive” - everything one can’t ever really concretely persuade a judge of, let alone convince Kate of. After Michael, it didn’t seem as though they had any reason to see one another ever again, even when it simultaneously felt like a reason to collapse back into each other’s arms, a conflict which had reached tenuous resolution in monthly drinks at the pub in Hove, where Martin lived. Drinks had a sentimentality about them that reached back past Michael, much before Michael, to their days at uni. It was strange to remember, it was strange to imagine there’d been time unburdened by what had happened a year ago, a time where they’d been unable even to imagine such a thing, nor to imagine any positive experience they had been so fortunate as to live out together.
The two of them would drink three pints each, broken up by a cigarette or two on the terrace under the fairy lights, sat at picnic tables with a hundred other people, all there for the same thing but for vastly different reasons. Kate could get lost there, in them, in him, in the warmth of cider. It was the closest to relaxation she could get while still looking into eyes so much like her son’s. She often thought she’d quite like to love Martin again, in the old way, but he either refused to take the hint or was missing it entirely.
As she crossed Eaton Road, on the third Tuesday of the month, as usual, Kate went back and forth in her mind between two options. Yes, she thought, she could keep her many promises to move on and not let Martin be her window back - she could make her sister and her brothers happy, respect her mom’s memory by not going back to Martin, not letting herself be pulled into him like a boat into a maelstrom. Or - a sheepish grin played across her face, she could let herself seek comfort and not exist like this alone. After all, who else felt the loss in the same way as the only other person to have called Michael son?
Kate took her seat at their usual table and checked her watch. Martin was always late. The pack of straights in her purse was unexpectedly empty, so she pulled out a pinch of tobacco from the backup bag and rolled, cracking open the window next to her and letting in the crisp, winter air. She could’ve just as easily gone out to the garden with everyone else having a smoke, but the bartenders knew her here and usually bent the rules in solidarity.
The door opened and, in with the gust of wind, came Martin, his tartan scarf draped unevenly around his neck, his tie loose. As he always did, he approached the bar and ordered their first round of drinks, overpaid, and gave a flirty line or two to the poor girl behind the tap with an hour left in her shift. The girl avoided his eyes and poured their ciders and didn’t play along, the sooner may he leave. Kate observed this interaction with compassion.
“Evening, lovely,” he said, sitting down heavily, ducking out of his scarf and jacket. His rapidly thinning hair was damp. “It’s just started to rain. You’re lucky you’re allowed to smoke inside, eh?”
“There’s the silver lining, is it?”
“Bound to be somewhere, wasn’t it?”
“Cheers.”
They drank, they conversed, they did as they did. They never did talk much about Michael if avoidable. These meetings were purely reminiscent of the before, far before, their old life. Before he left the first time, when she got pregnant. He came back a few times over the years from there, but Kate knew she kept too close an eye on him and that he needed his freedom and that is exactly why this new relationship was perfect. Once a month, always plenty to say. Plenty to hear.
A conversation about Kate’s sister and how annoying she always was about their relationship. An inquiry about Martin’s mother’s health. An exchange about the Albion football team’s performance in last weekend’s match. And then -
“Yeah, yeah, I think Chloe’s well pleased - her brother trains them, you know.”
Kate did not, in fact, know. Kate didn’t recognize the name Chloe, not in the context of Martin, not other than the 26-year-old data-analyst or whatever-the-hell who worked in his PR office, currently running a campaign for the new Green Party candidate running on a platform of bin-beautification. That candidate would win, too - that’s how good Martin was. But Chloe, why did Kate feel as though he’d mentioned her before, why did that name pull at her stomach, he must’ve mentioned her before. Kate must hate this girl for a reason. Was she …
“Your girlfriend?” Kate raised her eyes at Martin. No nonsense, no hard feelings. Give it to her straight.
“Yes, about a month now.” Right.
“Good one, Mart. She’s beautiful.” Kate had met her once. No, seen her, through the office window on one of her detours over the summer before the two of them had gotten back in touch.
“Yes, isn’t she. Listen, Kate.…” Martin drained his glass. He looked in her eyes then thought better of it. He gave her some bullshit about taking a holiday next month that would make him miss their drinks. And a conference the following month that would interfere with that month’s meeting. And she took that in as he ducked back into his scarf and jacket and waved over his shoulder and opened the door and let it close. And she let him go as she took it in and wondered how she felt more nothing than before.
It wasn’t until she was buried deep under the blanket of white rum and ginger soda that the din of her echoing mind would tire to the point where all but one thought could drift out of focus. What remained was, not motivation per se, more of the subtle bounce-back one experiences when a car brakes slowly and finally completes its stop. Nothing left to do, all momentum gone, a residual propulsion nudging her back to life, or the next-best thing.
Real life started back up officially the following Monday. Kate’s bills were piled up higher than she was comfortable with and she’d been off work for a full month. Julianne had offered Kate that long, Julianne was kinder and more supportive than she had to be, but Kate had never been one to take advantage of someone like that. Kate envied people like that, so she honored them.
Her office was uptown, an old flat converted into a semi-divided workspace, mostly stuffed with bookshelves and file cabinets, Kate’s desk, Julianne’s desk, Rosie’s desk, and Richard’s corner cubicle, an addition he’d insisted upon - the better to maintain his privacy. Kate and Julianne joked between the two of them that he was planning their downfall from behind the chest-high walls, conspiring to usurp them with Rosie at his side. Kate personally thought she and Julianne were benevolent rulers of their four-person kingdom, one they generously referred to as an agency for local writers who needed their work edited and put in the right hands up in London.
Kate watched her espresso dribble into her chipped mug, delaying her impending confrontation with what would surely be thousands of emails from clients and potentials who had been waiting so long for her to get back to them. She’d never programmed an out-of-office message alerting those trying to reach her to instead try Julianne or Rosie.
Sitting at her desk, she warmed up a lethargic desktop that was even more reluctant than she was to return to the routine. There were the usual emails from the news sites she subscribed to for daily updates; receipts from Netflix and Amazon; a few query letters with 500-word novel introductions attached - she’d get to those after lunch. One, however, caught her eye. The subject line: Hello Again. Kate clicked.
Dear Ms. Ellis,
My name is Sid. I wrote you a letter a few weeks ago - I don’t know if you got it. Anyway, I want to know if maybe we could have tea. I don’t know why. Maybe we could help each other. I want to know how you get through things, and why my mum couldn’t. And maybe I can be helpful for you, too.
Sincerely,
Sid Hennessy
Kate held her last sip of coffee in her mouth, letting it cool under her tongue. She recognized the name, of course - it was the only letter she’d consciously kept, solely because she was so fascinated with the concept of a ten-year-old knowing who she was and caring. She’d been trying to answer for herself if she wanted to know him too, but something about it was wrong…She deleted the letter and closed her laptop, taking her mug to be refilled.
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