if we were different people (if i was someone without you)
Jane wakes up at 11am. It's Sunday. Yesterday it was Saturday and she'd gone out with Mike and Sarah. The bar was loud and they'd had to shout in each other's ears to be heard over the heavy, vibrating bass. Jane wished they'd gone somewhere else, but then she drank some more and didn't mind so much. Jane wished they'd not gone out at all, but she likes Mike and she likes Sarah, and she wants them to keep liking her too.
Jane wakes up and it's 11am and it's Sunday. She lies in bed, cocooned in her comforter and thinking of nothing but the way she sinks so comfortably into the mattress, until her cat meows outside her bedroom door. Her cat's name is Pete and she can't remember if she fed him when she got in last night. Probably she did, but she gets up anyway.
Jane gets up and pads on bare feet into the kitchen, Pete making figure-eights between her legs as she walks. Pete meows as she opens the cabinet where she keeps his food, and Jane tsks at him, but she pulls the bag down from the shelf. Pete's vet told her that a healthy cat eats healthy food, so Jane makes sure Pete's kibble is no less than 30% crude protein. She checks the ingredients standing in the pet aisle of the grocery story, thinking probably the vet is full of shit. She buys the expensive stuff anyway, and Pete let's out another meow as she pours it into his bowl. Pete is black and grey and brown, and Jane pats his head before leaving the kitchen.
Jane leaves the kitchen and heads to the bathroom. In the bathroom she pulls down her shorts and her underwear and sits on the toilet. She reflects that she is not particularly hung over. She pees and wipes and washes her hands. In the mirror, she sees her reflection. Jane's hair is the color of straw and her eyes are the color of bark. There is a patch of dry skin above the bridge of her nose, and Jane wets her ring finger on her tongue and rubs at it. The dry skin flakes off and sticks to her finger. She looks at it for a second, then wipes her finger against her shorts. In two hours she is supposed to meet Mallory and Karen for brunch.
Jane is supposed to meet her friends for brunch, but she doesn't particularly want to. She doesn't want to leave her house. Jane peels off her clothes and gets into the shower. She likes Mallory and she likes Karen, and she likes the omelettes at the place they're supposed to meet. She thinks probably she'll go, even though she doesn't want to. She washes her hair with pomegranate shampoo and wonders what they'll say to each other. She saw them on Thursday, and nothing has happened to her since then. She went out last night with Mike and Sarah, but Mallory and Karen don't know Mike and Sarah, not really, only in passing. Jane turns off the water and towels down her wet skin, and she thinks that probably she could let Mallory and Karen talk, and listening to them talk would help her think of something to say.
Jane dries herself off as she walks back to her bedroom. She drops the damp towel on the bed, puts on clean underwear and the bra she wore yesterday (and the day before, and the day before), and takes a t-shirt out of her closet. The t-shirt is clean and blue, the name of a band written across the chest in yellow, and she pulls it on over her head. The material is thin, and you can faintly see her bra beneath it, can tell the color (green) of it if you look carefully. Jane has on a t-shirt and no pants and she stands in front of the mirror. She is 5' 6" and weighs 132lbs. Her body is average. Her face is attractive, but not beautiful. On most days, she is okay with this. She looks at herself in the mirror and frowns, putting a hand over her stomach. She left her pajamas on the floor of the bathroom so that she wouldn't put them back on. She wants to pull on the soft flannel pajama bottoms, but they are in the other room and her jeans are right here, at the foot of her bed. If she puts on her jeans, she'll go to brunch; if she puts on her pajamas, she will text Mallory and Karen and say that she is hung over and doesn't feel up to coming out. This would be a lie, but some of it is true.
Jane puts on her jeans and doesn't look in the mirror. She reaches over her bed to her nightstand and picks up her phone. Her phone is blinking; she has a message. The message is an email from work, which she doesn't read. She was at work until eight on Friday, and she doesn't want to think any more about it until Monday, even though the email could maybe be important. If the email is important, someone will call her, so she doesn't read it. She slides the phone into her back pocket. She has forty-nine minutes before she needs to leave, if she's going to meet Mallory and Karen at The Vanderbilt by 1pm. She wishes she hadn't gotten ready so quickly. She wishes she had put her pajamas on instead. She wants to crawl back into bed, but instead she goes into the living room.
Janes goes into the living room and sits on her couch. Her laptop is on the cushion next to her. Pete jumps into her lap just as she’s reaching for the computer. She stops reaching for the computer and hugs Pete close to her chest. Pete is purring and she can feel the vibrations of the sound throughout her torso. Jane bends her head down and Pete reaches his head up to push against the bottom of her chin. Sometimes Pete likes to be held and sometimes he doesn’t, but usually he does. She holds him until he gets tired of it and wriggles out of her arms. He rubs against her thigh, purring, and then jumps down from the couch.
Jane reaches for her laptop, and this time Pete stays out of her lap. She rests the computer on her thighs. She reads a news story about the upcoming election and a gossip article about an actress she sort of remembers from a movie she watched last the summer. She cares about these articles equally, which is to say, not at all. If she wants to make it to the restaurant on time, she has to leave in five minutes. If she want to be early, she could leave now. She thinks maybe she could still call and cancel; Mallory and Karen could still meet, so it wouldn’t be as though they went out for nothing. Jane closes the lid of her laptop without turning it off and puts it down on the cushion next to her.
Jane puts down the laptop and pulls on her shoes. She’s going to be early, but that’s okay. If she’s going to be waiting, better there than here. She goes downstairs and outside and she could take the train two stops, or she could walk. If she walks, she will probably be late instead of early, but not terribly late. The weather is nice and if she’s going to leave her house, she might as well enjoy it, so she walks.
Jane is ten minutes late, but her friends don’t mind. They were both five minutes late, and they got a table while they waited for Jane. Jane sits down and the waitress brings her a mimosa--part of their brunch special. Mallory orders eggs florentine and Karen orders a hamburger. Jane orders an omelette with mushrooms and swiss cheese. Mallory and Karen went to see a movie last night. It wasn’t very good, they say, and then tell her all about it since they don’t think she’d like it anyway. When they’re done telling her about it, Jane thinks they’re right, she probably wouldn’t have liked it. Jane tells them she went out with Mike and Sarah, and Karen waggles her eyebrows. Mallory laughs and Jane says no, it wasn’t like that, Sarah was with them and it was the three of them. Jane says she thinks Mike maybe likes Sarah, even though she doesn’t really think that. Jane likes the way Mike looks and that he’s a feminist and that sometimes he IMs her in the middle of meetings and she has to hide her laughter under a fairly unconvincing cough, but she doesn’t want to date him. She can imagine kissing him and having sex with him, but she can’t imagine what they would talk about afterward, when they were alone and she was expected to have something to say.
Jane eats her omelette and Karen eats her hamburger and Mallory eats her eggs. The food is good and for a while their table is quiet. Jane likes when the food comes and for a while she doesn’t have to say anything. She eats slowly and sips constantly at her mimosa, drinking faster that Mallory or Karen. She gets a second mimosa and thinks that by the time she is done eating, Mallory and Karen will be ready to leave, having finished their mimosas while waiting for Jane to clear her plate. She likes Mallory and Karen, and she doesn’t quite want to leave yet, but if the food is gone and the drinks are gone, there doesn’t seem much else to do.
Jane finishes her omelette as Mallory and Karen finish their mimosas. Jane’s second mimosa is still half full, and she’s not quite ready to leave yet, but Mallory has asked the waitress for the check, when she gets a chance. It’s not that Mallory is impatient, but one time in Italy she spent forty minutes waiting for a check because she didn’t realize she was supposed to ask for it, and she will never make that mistake again. Jane has heard that story more than once, has heard Mallory to tell it to friends and strangers in bars, so she knows it isn’t anything to take personally. Jane finishes her second mimosa in one large gulp.
Jane finishes her second mimosa and Mallory stands. Jane and Karen stand too, and Jane sort of wishes she’d had just one drink, or maybe one drink more. She can’t tell if she feels relaxed because she’s a little tipsy, or if she’s actually just relaxed. Mallory suggests that they walk over to the farmer’s market, because it’s so nice out. Outside, they stand together on the sidewalk, figuring out what to do. Karen says sure, she’ll walk over to the market. If Karen had said no, Jane would have walked over with Mallory, but Karen said yes so now she doesn’t have to. Jane says she has some work to do at home, and Mallory frowns and says Jane needs to find a job that sucks less, or at least doesn’t involve working on the weekend. Jane shrugs and says maybe and doesn’t mean it. Sometimes she hates her job, but she’s comfortable there so she isn’t going to leave. She’s not going to leave unless something opens up at Karen’s agency; she likes Karen and she’s been to her office and she thinks she could probably be comfortable there, too. Karen’s job also sometimes sucks, so she rolls her eyes at Mallory and gives Jane a peck on the cheek before she and Mallory walk one way and Jane walks another.
Jane doesn’t have any work to do when she gets home, so she walks back to her apartment. She takes the elevator up to the third floor and undoes her belt as soon as she’s through the front door. She kicks off her shoes and lets her pants pool at her feet before stepping out of them. She unhooks her bra and pulls it off through the right sleeve of her t-shirt as she walks to the bathroom. She drapes the bra over the doorknob and then puts on her pajama bottoms. She’s never going to leave her house again. She has to leave her house again tomorrow, to go to work.
Jane has to work tomorrow but she doesn’t have to work now. She takes a blanket from the floor at the foot of her bed and then sits on the couch, her legs pulled up beneath her. Pete likes her lap best when there’s a blanket over it, so he immediately jumps into it. Jane stretches to reach the remote on the coffee table, trying not to disturb the cat purring in her lap. She turns on the TV, can’t think of anything she’d like to watch, and watches British comedies until she starts thinking about how she has to go to work tomorrow. It’s almost 8pm, she should probably have something for dinner. Pete lets out a huff of displeasure as she stands and he has to scramble out of her lap.
Jane goes into the kitchen to make dinner. She doesn’t want to cook. She could make spaghetti, that wouldn’t take too long. The pot just needs a quick rinse. Jane opens the freezer and considers the Lean Cuisines. The frozen dinner would be faster than the spaghetti, but the spaghetti would taste better. She rinses the pot and makes the spaghetti.
Jane eats spaghetti and watches more British comedies. There isn’t anything she wants to do. If she goes to bed, then she won’t have to do anything. If she goes to bed, then it will be morning and she’ll have to wake up and go to work and do the whole thing over again.
Jane goes to bed. It’s 10:17pm. She should wash her face and brush her teeth, maybe. She feeds Pete and pats his head and then goes to bed. She pulls the comforter around her body like a cocoon and wishes that when she closed her eyes, she could sink into the mattress, through the mattress. Instead when she closes her eyes, she just goes to sleep.
Jane wakes up and it's 11am and it's Sunday. She lies in bed, cocooned in her comforter and thinking of nothing but the way she sinks so comfortably into the mattress, until her cat meows outside her bedroom door. Her cat's name is Pete and she can't remember if she fed him when she got in last night. Probably she did, but she gets up anyway.
Jane gets up and pads on bare feet into the kitchen, Pete making figure-eights between her legs as she walks. Pete meows as she opens the cabinet where she keeps his food, and Jane tsks at him, but she pulls the bag down from the shelf. Pete's vet told her that a healthy cat eats healthy food, so Jane makes sure Pete's kibble is no less than 30% crude protein. She checks the ingredients standing in the pet aisle of the grocery story, thinking probably the vet is full of shit. She buys the expensive stuff anyway, and Pete let's out another meow as she pours it into his bowl. Pete is black and grey and brown, and Jane pats his head before leaving the kitchen.
Jane leaves the kitchen and heads to the bathroom. In the bathroom she pulls down her shorts and her underwear and sits on the toilet. She reflects that she is not particularly hung over. She pees and wipes and washes her hands. In the mirror, she sees her reflection. Jane's hair is the color of straw and her eyes are the color of bark. There is a patch of dry skin above the bridge of her nose, and Jane wets her ring finger on her tongue and rubs at it. The dry skin flakes off and sticks to her finger. She looks at it for a second, then wipes her finger against her shorts. In two hours she is supposed to meet Mallory and Karen for brunch.
Jane is supposed to meet her friends for brunch, but she doesn't particularly want to. She doesn't want to leave her house. Jane peels off her clothes and gets into the shower. She likes Mallory and she likes Karen, and she likes the omelettes at the place they're supposed to meet. She thinks probably she'll go, even though she doesn't want to. She washes her hair with pomegranate shampoo and wonders what they'll say to each other. She saw them on Thursday, and nothing has happened to her since then. She went out last night with Mike and Sarah, but Mallory and Karen don't know Mike and Sarah, not really, only in passing. Jane turns off the water and towels down her wet skin, and she thinks that probably she could let Mallory and Karen talk, and listening to them talk would help her think of something to say.
Jane dries herself off as she walks back to her bedroom. She drops the damp towel on the bed, puts on clean underwear and the bra she wore yesterday (and the day before, and the day before), and takes a t-shirt out of her closet. The t-shirt is clean and blue, the name of a band written across the chest in yellow, and she pulls it on over her head. The material is thin, and you can faintly see her bra beneath it, can tell the color (green) of it if you look carefully. Jane has on a t-shirt and no pants and she stands in front of the mirror. She is 5' 6" and weighs 132lbs. Her body is average. Her face is attractive, but not beautiful. On most days, she is okay with this. She looks at herself in the mirror and frowns, putting a hand over her stomach. She left her pajamas on the floor of the bathroom so that she wouldn't put them back on. She wants to pull on the soft flannel pajama bottoms, but they are in the other room and her jeans are right here, at the foot of her bed. If she puts on her jeans, she'll go to brunch; if she puts on her pajamas, she will text Mallory and Karen and say that she is hung over and doesn't feel up to coming out. This would be a lie, but some of it is true.
Jane puts on her jeans and doesn't look in the mirror. She reaches over her bed to her nightstand and picks up her phone. Her phone is blinking; she has a message. The message is an email from work, which she doesn't read. She was at work until eight on Friday, and she doesn't want to think any more about it until Monday, even though the email could maybe be important. If the email is important, someone will call her, so she doesn't read it. She slides the phone into her back pocket. She has forty-nine minutes before she needs to leave, if she's going to meet Mallory and Karen at The Vanderbilt by 1pm. She wishes she hadn't gotten ready so quickly. She wishes she had put her pajamas on instead. She wants to crawl back into bed, but instead she goes into the living room.
Janes goes into the living room and sits on her couch. Her laptop is on the cushion next to her. Pete jumps into her lap just as she’s reaching for the computer. She stops reaching for the computer and hugs Pete close to her chest. Pete is purring and she can feel the vibrations of the sound throughout her torso. Jane bends her head down and Pete reaches his head up to push against the bottom of her chin. Sometimes Pete likes to be held and sometimes he doesn’t, but usually he does. She holds him until he gets tired of it and wriggles out of her arms. He rubs against her thigh, purring, and then jumps down from the couch.
Jane reaches for her laptop, and this time Pete stays out of her lap. She rests the computer on her thighs. She reads a news story about the upcoming election and a gossip article about an actress she sort of remembers from a movie she watched last the summer. She cares about these articles equally, which is to say, not at all. If she wants to make it to the restaurant on time, she has to leave in five minutes. If she want to be early, she could leave now. She thinks maybe she could still call and cancel; Mallory and Karen could still meet, so it wouldn’t be as though they went out for nothing. Jane closes the lid of her laptop without turning it off and puts it down on the cushion next to her.
Jane puts down the laptop and pulls on her shoes. She’s going to be early, but that’s okay. If she’s going to be waiting, better there than here. She goes downstairs and outside and she could take the train two stops, or she could walk. If she walks, she will probably be late instead of early, but not terribly late. The weather is nice and if she’s going to leave her house, she might as well enjoy it, so she walks.
Jane is ten minutes late, but her friends don’t mind. They were both five minutes late, and they got a table while they waited for Jane. Jane sits down and the waitress brings her a mimosa--part of their brunch special. Mallory orders eggs florentine and Karen orders a hamburger. Jane orders an omelette with mushrooms and swiss cheese. Mallory and Karen went to see a movie last night. It wasn’t very good, they say, and then tell her all about it since they don’t think she’d like it anyway. When they’re done telling her about it, Jane thinks they’re right, she probably wouldn’t have liked it. Jane tells them she went out with Mike and Sarah, and Karen waggles her eyebrows. Mallory laughs and Jane says no, it wasn’t like that, Sarah was with them and it was the three of them. Jane says she thinks Mike maybe likes Sarah, even though she doesn’t really think that. Jane likes the way Mike looks and that he’s a feminist and that sometimes he IMs her in the middle of meetings and she has to hide her laughter under a fairly unconvincing cough, but she doesn’t want to date him. She can imagine kissing him and having sex with him, but she can’t imagine what they would talk about afterward, when they were alone and she was expected to have something to say.
Jane eats her omelette and Karen eats her hamburger and Mallory eats her eggs. The food is good and for a while their table is quiet. Jane likes when the food comes and for a while she doesn’t have to say anything. She eats slowly and sips constantly at her mimosa, drinking faster that Mallory or Karen. She gets a second mimosa and thinks that by the time she is done eating, Mallory and Karen will be ready to leave, having finished their mimosas while waiting for Jane to clear her plate. She likes Mallory and Karen, and she doesn’t quite want to leave yet, but if the food is gone and the drinks are gone, there doesn’t seem much else to do.
Jane finishes her omelette as Mallory and Karen finish their mimosas. Jane’s second mimosa is still half full, and she’s not quite ready to leave yet, but Mallory has asked the waitress for the check, when she gets a chance. It’s not that Mallory is impatient, but one time in Italy she spent forty minutes waiting for a check because she didn’t realize she was supposed to ask for it, and she will never make that mistake again. Jane has heard that story more than once, has heard Mallory to tell it to friends and strangers in bars, so she knows it isn’t anything to take personally. Jane finishes her second mimosa in one large gulp.
Jane finishes her second mimosa and Mallory stands. Jane and Karen stand too, and Jane sort of wishes she’d had just one drink, or maybe one drink more. She can’t tell if she feels relaxed because she’s a little tipsy, or if she’s actually just relaxed. Mallory suggests that they walk over to the farmer’s market, because it’s so nice out. Outside, they stand together on the sidewalk, figuring out what to do. Karen says sure, she’ll walk over to the market. If Karen had said no, Jane would have walked over with Mallory, but Karen said yes so now she doesn’t have to. Jane says she has some work to do at home, and Mallory frowns and says Jane needs to find a job that sucks less, or at least doesn’t involve working on the weekend. Jane shrugs and says maybe and doesn’t mean it. Sometimes she hates her job, but she’s comfortable there so she isn’t going to leave. She’s not going to leave unless something opens up at Karen’s agency; she likes Karen and she’s been to her office and she thinks she could probably be comfortable there, too. Karen’s job also sometimes sucks, so she rolls her eyes at Mallory and gives Jane a peck on the cheek before she and Mallory walk one way and Jane walks another.
Jane doesn’t have any work to do when she gets home, so she walks back to her apartment. She takes the elevator up to the third floor and undoes her belt as soon as she’s through the front door. She kicks off her shoes and lets her pants pool at her feet before stepping out of them. She unhooks her bra and pulls it off through the right sleeve of her t-shirt as she walks to the bathroom. She drapes the bra over the doorknob and then puts on her pajama bottoms. She’s never going to leave her house again. She has to leave her house again tomorrow, to go to work.
Jane has to work tomorrow but she doesn’t have to work now. She takes a blanket from the floor at the foot of her bed and then sits on the couch, her legs pulled up beneath her. Pete likes her lap best when there’s a blanket over it, so he immediately jumps into it. Jane stretches to reach the remote on the coffee table, trying not to disturb the cat purring in her lap. She turns on the TV, can’t think of anything she’d like to watch, and watches British comedies until she starts thinking about how she has to go to work tomorrow. It’s almost 8pm, she should probably have something for dinner. Pete lets out a huff of displeasure as she stands and he has to scramble out of her lap.
Jane goes into the kitchen to make dinner. She doesn’t want to cook. She could make spaghetti, that wouldn’t take too long. The pot just needs a quick rinse. Jane opens the freezer and considers the Lean Cuisines. The frozen dinner would be faster than the spaghetti, but the spaghetti would taste better. She rinses the pot and makes the spaghetti.
Jane eats spaghetti and watches more British comedies. There isn’t anything she wants to do. If she goes to bed, then she won’t have to do anything. If she goes to bed, then it will be morning and she’ll have to wake up and go to work and do the whole thing over again.
Jane goes to bed. It’s 10:17pm. She should wash her face and brush her teeth, maybe. She feeds Pete and pats his head and then goes to bed. She pulls the comforter around her body like a cocoon and wishes that when she closed her eyes, she could sink into the mattress, through the mattress. Instead when she closes her eyes, she just goes to sleep.