My dinner with Anais

editorial note: i wrote this entire story in the notes app on my phone while coming back from the dinner that this story is based on. (you can decide how much of it is true.) i have read it through half a dozen times rewriting, correcting, ensuring it works. i ultimately decided that the reader is the judge of whether the story works or not. i hope you like it.

---

I.
I pick up a taco and globs of ketchup spill onto my pleated leather skirt.

“I don’t know how to do this gracefully,” I say.

“Does anyone?” she asks. 

I eat the taco. It isn’t difficult. It’s better when I take the cabbage off.

II.
The waitress asks me for my ID. She wishes me a happy belated birthday; it was two weeks ago. Anais tells me it’s a rite of passage to get carded your first time at the bar. 

The drink comes and it’s blue and it has, inexplicably, dry ice inside. I drink it very quickly. I can’t remember what media Romulan hails from, I’m not brave enough to ask. I don’t want to seem as if there’s something I don’t know. It seems after losing everything I’m still afraid of being found out for something.

I ask Anais whether the boy I used to love and the girl he left me for are still together. 

She says she doesn’t know.

Then she goes on a diatribe against gossip and how nothing matters to her unless it directly concerns someone she cares about. She tells me that she thinks there are people stuck in a high school mindset and she’s heard bits and pieces of drama, beef, fallout—I know she means the people who have fallen out with me. It’s not vanity. I just know. 

We used to run in the same circles.

Nowadays I don’t think I run in anyone’s circle, I just sit and think, I have too much time to think, I tell this to Anais. She nods in the way that people do when they don’t want to tell you you’re being stupid. 

I wish everyone would stop using kid gloves with me, but I don’t say anything. 

I eat my taco. 

There really is no graceful way to do it.

III. 

The waitress says, no pressure, but she asks if I want a second drink. We have been talking about frat parties and our capacities to shotgun beer and so I ask the waitress whether there’s a beer she would recommend. 

She tells me she doesn’t drink beer.

I tell her neither do I, really, that’s why I’m asking. I don’t tell her that the first and last time I had beer was with the man who would become my ex-boyfriend. I don’t tell her I sipped from his bottle and asked all my older friends whether it meant anything and secretly desperately painfully wanted it to mean nothing at all. I don’t tell her what I tell Anais, which is that my ex-boyfriend took advantage of my sadness and because of him I will never get back the love of my life.

Well, I don’t tell Anais the last part. 

I don’t tell Anais who I think the love of my life is, because I think she already knows. I think she feels sorry for me, and I don’t need anyone else to feel sorry for me, I feel sorry enough for myself. 

The waitress recommends a beer and I tell her I would like that one please.

Anais tells me she’s sorry about my ex-boyfriend and I tell her at least it can’t get worse. 

IV. 

I ask one of the other waiters whether they have a bathroom. 

It seems impossible to me that an establishment that serves drinks wouldn’t have a bathroom but I’ve seen crazier things—like a bathroom at a bar in Munich that had a full-size, lit-up picture of a smiling German man on the back of the stall door—and besides I’m enough of a lightweight that the cocktail went right to my head. 

It was blue and I drank it quickly. It had peach schnapps among other things and I’ve always wanted to try peach schnapps, but I don’t know whether I could describe what they tasted like. I do this to myself sometimes. I want something and then I can’t even enjoy it once I get it because it’s tangled with so much else.

The waiter tells me where the bathroom is.

I thank him. 

V. 

The bathroom is covered in comic strips and there isn’t any lip gloss on my lips anymore. I’ve been eating. I wish it were gone for other reasons. I wish the lip gloss had cost less than sixty dollars.

I must remember to pay my credit card bill. 

Anais is waiting. 

I bite a little dent in my nail. 

When I finish with the bathroom I begin to dial numbers. I still have the door locked despite the amount of effort it took to lock the door and my limited dexterity while inebriated. The people I am calling  have been gone from my phone for months on end and gone from my life longer than that but I still remember their numbers. 

I’m pathetic.

My first call goes straight to voicemail. Here’s what I said: I know you don’t want to talk to me. I’m sorry. I’m drunk and I know this is stupid. I’m so sorry. I’ve always loved you and I’m sorry you never knew that. 

My second call goes through. I don’t recognize the voice. He says who is this and I say who are you and he says you called me. I say that’s true. He sounds like he has a beard. I ask whether it’s the person I dialed for and he hangs up as I’m explaining who I am. I wouldn’t want to talk to me either. 

My third call is probably the correct number. I try to take solace in the fact that it took me a few tries to get there. It goes straight to voicemail. I say, miserable: Are you already dating someone else? Was four more months of a relationship we both knew was never going to work out worth throwing away a four year friendship? I miss my friend. You owe me more than one message. 

I am not going to get anything out of this and I don’t know why I keep calling and I will be ashamed of this in the morning or maybe later in the night and I still need to go to the bathroom. 

I delete the numbers from my recently called. I will regret this. I was doing so well. 

I don’t want to be alone. 

VI. 

I go back to the table. Anais asks if I’m okay. I don’t know how to explain that I can’t remember the last time I was okay. Instead I explain the story of how was dating two boys at once for the month of May. This amuses her and so it’s a good use of my pain. Comedy, poetry, storytelling. Every awful thing that’s happened to me I’ve turned into art. 

Anais tells me she’s rarely inspired. I wish I could say the same. I think there’s something under my skin that’s clawing its way out. That’s sleeping. That’s humming. 

Seven publications in a year, how does anyone manage that; I want to say I’m scared I can’t make it in mathematics, I got twenty-nine percent on my final exam and I’m afraid it’s not depression or autism or heartbreak but just me, that I’m fundamentally a person who can’t crack it at anything. That despite my skills and accolades and internships, I don’t feel capable of continuing at all. 

My poetry is my last justification for my life. I’m worried it’s not enough. 

I don’t tell Anais any of this. After all, we don’t really know each other. 

We just went to high school together. 

Adolescence is a country I can never return to; I had a passport once, I had a way out that I wanted so much. Now I wish I were fourteen again because five years later it doesn’t feel like the world is in the palm of my hand anymore.

I have lost the thread of what Anais is saying.

Quarter-life crisis, she tells me. 

VII.

The beer isn’t bad. It tastes like lemonade. It appears I’ve written off an entire beverage. I tend to do this. I write anyone and anything off the second they do me wrong. 

The beer cannot leave me in the cold, or send me directly to voicemail, or break my heart. 

The waitress tells me she is glad I am trying new things. 

Anais tells me she still has the drinks from the party she threw in May of 2023. I tell her to bring them to college. I don’t tell her I think about that party all the time, of baby carrots and Hands Down by Dashboard Confessional, of that rare and precious time when it felt like things were going to work out with the love of my life. When so much felt eternal and it was really ephemeral and it’s all my fault. 

There’s a lot I don’t tell her.

I’m thinking, we don’t really know each other. 

VIII. 

The closest I get to telling Anais anything is when we talk about dying.

I don’t remember how it came up. 

I just remember that I said I felt like I was dead from November to May and she said she’d come to my funeral and I put my hand over my heart and thanked her and said for a while I felt like no one would. It was melodramatic and the light was unflattering but I meant it and I don’t mean a lot of the things I say.

She reiterates, I’d come to your funeral.

I say, I’d just guilt trip anyone who didn’t in the will, if they didn’t listen I’d haunt them forever. I take a long sip of my beer. I say, I mean a specific they.

Anais has the decency not to comment. 

IX.

Or maybe she doesn’t want to get involved. 

After all, I’m not someone she cares about. 

X.

Maybe she knows about the letter. 

The letter is still too raw to ask about. I wonder whether they bothered to read it. I wonder whether they tore it up. I wonder whether they still have the first letter I wrote them which I read to them in the court I was waiting for Anais in and it’s a letter I don’t have because I was so scared of what I wanted that I deleted it off my computer.

I was scared of what I wanted the whole time. 

I should have been scared of losing it.

XI. 

Anais and I don’t say much to each other after that. We talk about television and music and the other things which, while they form the pillars of my life, are as good as meaningless.

I go to the bathroom again. I don’t call anyone. 

No one is picking up for me.

It’s Monday night, and I’m out to dinner with a girl I barely know who’s there out of politeness, who used to date my best friend, sorry, she used to date the girl who used to be my best friend. I don’t have friends.

I wonder idly whether my breath smells like beer. 

XII. 

I say, we have to pay the bill.

Anais flags the waitress over. 

The combined cost of my drinks is twenty-one dollars and I tip twenty-five percent anyway, because if I can afford to eat out I can afford to tip. The number still makes me wince. I think I’ll tell my father I paid for Anais’s dinner if he asks about the bill. 

It’s surprising how many people’s fathers Anais has been an affront to. 

The waitress asks if we have further plans for tonight. I think she figured out that we weren’t together. I tell her I am going home.

This was my plan for the night. 

XIII. 

Like so much about this year it hasn’t panned out. 

XIV. 

Anais walks me back to the subway station. She knows where we’re going and I don’t even though she lives here for one-third of the year and I live here three-thirds and hate it all the same.

I can tell she is concerned about me, but concerned like you are for a limping pigeon in a subway station—which is to say, you feel bad for the thing, but you don’t have the wherewithal to help it. Honestly you don’t care all that much.

She tells me, I hope you have a good second year.

I manage to smile. I tell her, this is me, I tell her I’ll talk to her soon. I don’t think this is true. 

Anais leaves. She looked nice; I didn’t remember to tell her.

I feel the exact same amount of lonely I did before. 

We don’t really know each other.

XV. 

There is a man playing the clarinet on the subway. It is the least ridiculous part of my evening.

XVI. 

I don’t know how to do this gracefully.

Does anyone?

I mean my life.