{ history } anxiety is love's greatest killer
Donna was born in Texas, and after that everything started dying, like things do. The photographs remember her in kneesocks and blonde dye, small and skewing out of frame and smiling so hard it has to hurt and probably did, but these days she lights cigarettes and takes her glasses off so she can't see through the smoke to recollect. It's childish and stupid and a thousand people have problems more significant than hers, this is what she tells herself about the pictures that are only in her mind and nobody's photo album, the mirror where she sees bruises and somebody else's idea of madness. She paints her nails purple and blue and thinks about growing up and growing old and somebody who didn't grow at all, which is just another cliché, she keeps a list which is not on the fridge even though she put it there for ten whole minutes before she thought about somebody seeing and shoved it in a drawer that comes with a lock.
Sense-memory is something that she understands well enough to run away from, so she leaves her boyfriend and her mistakes behind (on her list of clichés), broke and hanging onto the remnants of someone else's life to see if she can find a friend there. His name is Peter, who calls himself Piotr, and she tells him he ain't fooling anybody but he doesn't care and it doesn't matter. He can be anything he wants to be, just as long as she can, too, even if she sometimes thinks he must be getting tired of being everything but himself by his age. Not that she doesn't understand; anything she wants to be is anything but that girl, which isn't a lot of trouble because every day it gets so much harder to remember who she was, anyway. She can't have been anything special.
History is a thing that must have happened to her, sometime, but it's about as tangible as the smoke she doesn't give a fuck about blowing in Peter's face when he tells her to be more careful. She carries her history around in the way she moves her hips and the things she says that run counterpoint to the way she thinks and the buttons she pushes. Her history is never, ever fucking up the birth control and a string of boyfriends she lies about, all the girls she watches afraid to put her hands on. It's in the cheap, gold-plated cross that hangs on her mirror and the way she walks down to church every Sunday and keeps walking all the way past it.
Peter - Piotr, whatever, she starts calling him Mr Bartokomous because it makes about as much sense as anything else does - introduces her to Sasha, who is tall and blond and annoying. He helps her work on her Russian accent (it's shit, she tells him, and he says he noticed, which isn't what she was expecting), and doesn't pay her the compliments she's used to. He tells her what to do, mostly, and she calls him a jerk and a stone cold asshole and goes home to his apartment most nights anyway, just because the oven works better over there and since she has a key she might as well use it. Sometimes he picks her up from the bar after her shift, but most nights she's smoking out the driver's window of her own car. She's tired of boyfriends, so that's not what this is, even when she crawls into bed next to him and presses her cold feet to his legs until he swears, muzzily, and rolls over to keep her warm.
She turned thirty-two a few months ago, and sometimes she wonders who it was that decided she would get to be an adult (instead of him), since she's so fucking bad at it.