What if...
I come back home after looking for her.
At nine PM sharp, I shut myself in our room and dial her number. My heart bangs in my chest as it usually does in the first few seconds but then, my hope dashes when a click sounds, alerting me to the fact that she’s not going to pick up. Again.
I’m getting ready to leave a message when every part of my body stills, freezes. I hear her voice on the other side; her automated outgoing message has been changed.
“Hi, this is Pixie. Leave me a message.”
I found us a new apartment.
It’s not much, only a studio in Chinatown but it’s ours and I’m proud of it. It’s the first thing that I’ve bought for myself, for us.
I don’t know when a woman feels like she’s become a wife, but I guess a man becomes a husband when he knows he’s provided for his woman. I wish I had built a house for her with my own bare hands, and maybe one day I will. But for now, I’m satisfied knowing that I’ve done everything I can to give her something to call her own.
I haven’t said anything to Pixie yet. I wanted to move in first and call her out of our new apartment to tell her the good news. I know she’d be ecstatic. I know that as I know the lines on my palm. I’ve got three big ones and a few smaller ones, broken and scratched.
Pixie loves my hands. When she was with me, she loved fingering those lines that supposedly decide destiny, fate. She used to say that it made her sleep, tracing them over and over, tracing my future, thinking about our stories.
I know she still does. She still thinks about our stories and she’ll come back to me one day.
No, she hasn’t picked up my call yet. But that recorded message was the light I was looking for at the end of the tunnel. It was a sign. I know it. I feel it.
She’d said Pixie.
Hi, this is Pixie.
She took back the name I gave her after she rejected it out of anger, on Nick and Blu’s balcony. That counts for something. That counts for everything.
I didn’t believe Pixie when she told me to stop looking for her. I mapped out the entire city on my legs. I looked for her everywhere. Sometimes I’d run faster than New York and sometimes New York ran faster than me. No matter what, I was always out of sync. My rhythm was off.
It still is. I don’t think I’ll get back my rhythm or my breath until Pixie is with me. But I’m okay now.
I have faith.
Maybe this is why people chase God. They chase something higher, bigger than themselves because it’s peaceful. It’s relieving. It gives them time to live their life in the moment and not in the past or in the future. It’s an act of courage to put your faith in something like that. Maybe that’s what religion is.
I might never get to a stage where I’m comfortable with a higher power, but I believe in Pixie. She asked me to trust her and I am trusting her. I haven’t looked for her in days now.
All I do is go to work in the morning, come home and sketch in the evening because I’ve been commissioned to make a few pieces for the gallery. Yeah, they liked me. They liked my stuff. They said it was a little rough but they liked the character it lent to my art.
My art.
I can’t fucking believe it. Can’t fucking believe that Pixie was right. I can be an artist if I want to. Well, I shouldn’t have been surprised. My Pixie is the smartest of all.
I’m digging out clothes from my backpack — I don’t have many — and stowing them away in the new closet, when my hand closes around the video camera.
After I smashed my other camera, I haven’t had the courage to look at the footage of our camcorder. Sure, I’ve thought about it. I’ve captured Pixie on it. It’s the easiest fucking way to look at her face when she isn’t here. Instead, I’ve chosen to draw her, perfect the lines of her cheeks and curve of her lips.
Something about a camera or rather this camera makes me uneasy. Maybe it’s the lens, the separation from the real world or the coldness of the object. I can’t put my finger on it, but I feel it in my gut.
I want to look at it today, though. I wanna be brave and look at our past, the way I’ve captured it. Well, it’s mostly sex but still. Swallowing, I take the memory card from the camera and put it in my computer. I sit at the newly-purchased bar stool, take a deep breath and play the first clip.