{"id":1080,"date":"2023-08-02T14:28:40","date_gmt":"2023-08-02T21:28:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/scrippsjournal\/?p=1080"},"modified":"2023-08-02T15:39:26","modified_gmt":"2023-08-02T22:39:26","slug":"this-night-has-opened-my-eyes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/scrippsjournal\/this-night-has-opened-my-eyes\/","title":{"rendered":"This Night Has Opened My Eyes by Mirabella Miller"},"content":{"rendered":"

Esme stood perfectly still with her back against the wall, breathing in the childhood-home scent which smelled like nothing only to her. She counted her inhales and exhales rhythmically, preparing to apply a meditative clarity to her outfit choice. She knew from previous experience that the dress she had chosen would ride up as soon as they started walking to the bar and that this would mean sentencing herself to the awkwardness of tugging it down at a rate of once or twice per block. She regarded this tugging as immature, reminiscent of a teenage girl still unsure how to handle her newfound body in front of men. A grown woman, Esme thought, would just wear a dress that fits.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But Esme loved this black bodycon mini dress; she couldn\u2019t help herself. Despite its faults, it was the perfect dress for dates, where she didn\u2019t know what she would be like until she got there. It had no distinguishing characteristics, just a void of fabric: one color, one layer, one piece, one size. She had grown attached to this chameleonic thing. On dates, it became a part of her, accommodating her every studied-as-to-look spontaneous movement: throwing her head back and laughing, sipping her drink.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

There wasn\u2019t time to change anyway. As she felt her heart pound at the thought of his impending arrival, she laughed a bit at herself, at the fact that she was having her typical date anxiety over Finn. Finn, who she had known since she was four. This wasn\u2019t a typical date, she told herself, and it actually might not even be a date at all. She waited for the text that would summon her to the door to meet him for the first time again. When her phone lit up, she felt her feet move. She wondered what happened to just knocking and why everything had to be so watered-down and evasive these days. A knock was decisive and purposeful. You would never have to ask a knock \u201cwhat are we?\u201d she thought. An \u201cI\u2019m here\u201d text was so much murkier. You could do whatever you wanted with that.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHi,\u201d Esme said when she saw him. She stepped out onto her front porch and felt the warm summer night air envelop her.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHi,\u201d he responded with a familiar smirk. She relaxed with the realization that whatever she had built him up to be in her head in the few years since they had seen each other, he was just Finn. They studied each other for a split second, sizing each other up quickly enough to pretend the other didn\u2019t see.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhen did you start wearing glasses?\u201d she asked. They were new yet looked so natural on his face that she wondered if she was somehow mistaken and he had always worn them. The round clear frames softened his perpetually intense gaze. The pieces of blond that fell onto his forehead brushed the top of the lenses.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOh, these?\u201d he said with mock uncertainty, as if she would be referring to any other glasses. He took them off and studied them. \u201cThey actually gave them to me for free as soon as I declared my philosophy major. Thoughts?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

She smiled, not thinking the joke was quite worth a laugh, although it had been a good way to break whatever ice had formed between them.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThey look nice,\u201d she said in the most neutral voice she could muster. She wanted to keep her cards close until she knew if this was a date or not. But the glasses did look nice, in the sense that they made him look like the type of guy who, after she brought him home from some party, spent a lot of time admiring her bookshelf. Picking up titles, asking her questions. Why not just get to the point? she always thought. You don\u2019t need to create some hurried last-minute interest in my intellectual pursuits to justify what we are about to do, she wanted to tell them. When men did this, looked around her room for clues, stalling, it always seemed like some sort of apology. She never knew what they were trying to say sorry for.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

She wondered how many girl-bedroom bookshelves Finn had studied at school. She wondered what books they were reading and if they had liked them.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As they walked through her neighborhood to the nearest bar she knew, she took him in through stolen glances. She had to look pretty far up to see his face because he was 6\u20195\u201d. She loved walking with tall guys because she couldn\u2019t look at them and also see where she was going. It was a pretty good litmus test of her attraction to them: how willing was she to not look where she was going if it meant she could look at them? For Finn, she almost tripped a couple of times.<\/span><\/p>\n

They sped through their respective reasons for existing here and now. Esme was home from college after her junior year, working on a funded research project with a beautiful young English professor she\u2019d projected onto. It was mostly a passion project, an exploration of the recent rise in female autofiction and how the blurring of fact and fiction on the page has different implications for women.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThat was my pitch anyway,\u201d she told him. \u201cI\u2019m not exactly sure what those implications are yet.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

He nodded. \u201cThat sounds really cool,\u201d he said, and proceeded to tell her how he was just home for a week because he was working as a research assistant for a philosophy professor this summer. These were all things she already knew from her mom, who had heard from his mom that he was going to be home and encouraged her to send the text that brought them here.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

They sat at a small table outside the bar. Inside was too loud, and they couldn\u2019t hear each other. After two drinks, they were talking about profile pictures. They discussed how, since they hadn\u2019t seen each other in three years, their ideas of each other had become a strange amalgamation of their childhood perceptions of one another and their current profile pictures. The conversation turned to hers, a pensive portrait taken in a museum exhibit that featured psychedelic-looking light projections.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI think the lighting was so cool that anyone would have looked pretty,\u201d she joked about the picture.<\/span><\/p>\n

He frowned. \u201cWhy would you say it like that?\u201d he asked.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cSay it like what?\u201d she countered.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cLike that anyone would look pretty in that situation,\u201d he said. \u201cLike it\u2019s the lighting and not you.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

He continued before she could protest.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIs that what you want to hear from me, Esme? That I think you\u2019re pretty? Because I do. You are.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

She didn\u2019t know what to say. She felt the alcohol slowing her wit, making her less articulate. Since she felt unprepared to construct a sarcastic response, she decided to tell the truth.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t know if this was a real date. But now I feel like it is,\u201d she said, looking into her drink.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOh,\u201d he responded. \u201cI kind of thought it was a date.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

She smiled at her drink, feeling a girlish pride in her own perception. But when she met Finn\u2019s gaze, the weight of his words set in. The declaration of his feelings for her should have opened up the possibilities for what they could do together. But instead, it seemed to foreclose them. The fact that they would have sex that night suddenly felt fated to Esme, not by any sort of force but by her own inability to deprive herself of experience. Having sex with Finn, something she had considered with varying levels of interest for so much of her life, was now on the table and within her reach. It was going to happen because it had to. Wanting to seemed beside the point.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Since she knew exactly what was coming, she finished his sentence for him.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cDo you want to\u2014\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHang out after this?\u201d she said. \u201cYeah.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

She felt well-versed in the avoidant language of hooking up and regarded with pride and disgust in equal measure the experience that yielded this fluency.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOkay, well we can\u2019t go to mine,\u201d he said. She knew it was because his parents and sisters were home. She guessed his sister Lila, two years his junior, had colonized his bedroom when he left for college. \u201cMy parents and sisters are home, and Lila has kind of taken over my bedroom, so I sleep on the couch when I visit.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

She regarded this information coolly, cognizant of her ability to see where he was going before he did. She started to feel as if she was following a script, and it gave her a sense of clairvoyance.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAre your parents home?\u201d he asked after a pause.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re at the cabin,\u201d she replied perfunctorily.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOh,\u201d he said.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe could go to mine,\u201d she said.<\/span><\/p>\n

.\u00a0 .\u00a0 .<\/span><\/p>\n

Esme\u2019s front door opened with a turn of the knob and a slight push.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cYou didn\u2019t lock it?\u201d Finn asked.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cNo,\u201d she replied. \u201cI never really do.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Unbeknownst to him this was the subject of her main argument with her parents since she had returned home this summer. She had gotten used to the security of her suburban campus, where one could mindlessly leave a laptop unattended in the coffee shop or leave their room unlocked with no fear of theft. This attitude was completely foreign to her parents, who seemed to be suffering from what she diagnosed as a uniquely Gen-X coping mechanism in a world decreasingly legible to them. It would go like this: she would forget to lock the door. They would accuse her of not caring about her personal safety. She would tell them that cable news was rotting their brains and their wealthy neighborhood wasn\u2019t half as dangerous as the Ring doorbell industrial complex wanted them to believe. No one had ever broken in, a fact that both sides used to their argumentative advantage. To her, it proved her point that there was nothing to fear. To them, it meant that their security measures were working.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0Finn stepped first into the entryway, wordlessly sitting down on a bench and taking his shoes off. She joined him in the same task, not bothering to turn the light on. She was done first and waited for him to meet her gaze.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cDo you want something to drink?\u201d she asked. She watched him weigh the pros and cons: it would seem polite to accept, yes, but it would also suspend the anticipation of the task at hand. Declining might seem rude, and she might perceive it as too forward unless she was as into this as he was.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

She snapped out of imagining what he was going to say to hear what he was actually saying.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cYeah,\u201d he said. \u201cDo you have water?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOf course I have water,\u201d she said, trying to infuse the statement with just the right amount of sarcasm so he would be charmed by her wit but not actually feel stupid.<\/span><\/p>\n

He laughed. \u201cThat was stupid,\u201d he said.<\/span><\/p>\n

Fuck. She had overstepped. \u201cNo it wasn\u2019t,\u201d she backtracked. \u201cI was being kind of rude. I\u2019m kind of like, I don\u2019t know, nervous?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

As she walked to the kitchen, she immediately chastised herself for doing that end-every-sentence-with-a-question thing that gave her away as a woman. He followed her there as she filled a glass.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI kind of am too,\u201d he said, leaning awkwardly against the counter. \u201cI feel like I know you so much but also don\u2019t know you at all.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

She marveled at the way they were still skirting around each other. They could do this for so long, she thought. But her impatience got the better of her. She handed him the glass and he took a few sips.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cDo you want to go upstairs? she asked.<\/span><\/p>\n

He looked around for someone who wasn\u2019t there.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cYeah,\u201d he said, putting the glass down.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

Finn\u2019s presence cast the bedroom she\u2019d lived in for twenty-one years in a strange new light. She felt out of place, like a stranger, or maybe a tourist who had looked up pictures before they got there. She was painfully aware of how young her room looked since she had already brought all her more elevated and adult possessions to college. It was a child\u2019s room with no hope of accommodating her adult self.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As he kissed her, Esme felt like she was pushing the brakes and the accelerator at the same time, and the car of her body was spinning out under her. The chance to show a new sexually confident version of herself to Finn was enticing, but she couldn\u2019t shake a sense of impending permanence that scared her. A lot of things in her life felt transient and inconsequential: which classes she took or didn\u2019t take, which dining hall she ate lunch at, if she ate lunch at all. As soon as Finn entered her, she felt an unfamiliar decisiveness.<\/span><\/p>\n

She remembered how in chemistry class, her sophomore year, the teacher had put her on the spot in front of the whole class and asked her if cooking an egg was a physical or a chemical change. \u201cPhysical,\u201d she had said, panicking, remembering how water turned solid when it froze, and an egg also turned from a liquid to solid when it cooked. The teacher, a clean-shaven man with kind eyes, had shaken his head. <\/span>
\n<\/span> \u201cIt\u2019s chemical,\u201d he said, \u201cbecause you can\u2019t undo it. You can\u2019t uncook an egg.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

She knew that, in doing this with Finn, she had crossed some sort of threshold that she couldn\u2019t come back from. But it was an exploration thwarted from the beginning by circumstance. He was leaving in a week, Esme thought. We could never be together in any real way because it would be too weird with our families. What they were doing had immense emotional gravity both because of who he was to her and who he could never be.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As he strained over her, Esme stared through Finn\u2019s face into the ceiling. The white plaster was pockmarked with glow-in-the-dark stars, like the pimple patches she bought off an Instagram ad. She gripped the lavender sheets, worn soft by a decade of her anxious tossing and turning. She focused on his<\/span> The Smiths<\/span><\/i> t-shirt crumpled on the floor. Morrisey stared back at her. If there are some stones best left unturned, she thought, adulthood seemed kind of about picking the right stones. She hadn\u2019t known this was going to be the wrong one until she picked it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Esme stood perfectly still with her back against the wall, breathing in the childhood-home scent which smelled like nothing only to her. She counted her …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":35,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,55],"tags":[77],"class_list":["post-1080","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-short-stories","category-volume-22-spring-2023","tag-mirabella-miller"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/scrippsjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1080","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/scrippsjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/scrippsjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/scrippsjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/35"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/scrippsjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1080"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/scrippsjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1080\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/scrippsjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/scrippsjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/scrippsjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}