A Dead Cat and Memphis

I had secretly hoped that coming to college would help dissolve some of the dramatic tendencies that high school had taught me. I thought that it would change my pattern of making decisions simply because I was older, wiser and no longer living at home. This was all in the beginning, back before my story of college was written and I still harbored hope that my theatric personality would die with time. But here we are now.

This is the story of how Memphis made me into Schroedinger’s cat.

People had stacked expectations in my mind, each one coercing me more than the next that college would be better than its predecessor. (It is. Infinitely so.) But no one told me that there are even more soulless people in the world other than those who graduated with me in the Class of 2016, and that seems a bit unfair. I entered my first semester of higher education blinded by the hope that schooling would be better at this level.

Diverse people filled with kindness surrounded me when I arrived. People who could excel past the line of quality I had set for my friends before arriving. They were eager to help in any way that they could. But instead of focusing on those who could help me succeed, I attached myself to the person who I met first. It was my very first mistake I made once getting here and many have closely followed in its suit.

The carpet of my dorm’s lounge, though dirty, was the only space which could accept me with the room filled to capacity such as it was. All the couches overflowed with my fellow dorm residents, the wood within groaning under their weight which was soon to be variable x + 15. The room was pregnant with apprehension during our first floor meeting.

The guise of it all was to fill us in on the rules of residential life. Going over those took all of five minutes: the blue bins are for recycling only, give all complaints to the RA, if you puke in the shower submit a form online so maintenance can clean it up in less than 48 hours. They never told us what to do if we puked in the blue bins which were recycling only, but we figured that out with time. These laws of community-living served as the facade of the university’s real intent: ice breakers.

To avoid the faces of the others in the room, I pulled at a staple which was worked into the worn carpet’s gunky folds. I had already said my majors and my favorite food aloud to the group in accordance with the icebreaker rules, and looking at others as they gave their answers seemed a bit too personal for my taste.

One person tried to ask me in a timid first-day-at-college banter why I pick mashed potatoes as my favorite. Dumbest question I’ve ever heard. I’ve found in my life that I’ve loved things much simpler than a side of starch-filled happiness, however, the question was enough to distract me from my discomfort of feeling completely out of my element.

It was his roommate who caught my eyes first, an attractive boy with curly hair, but they didn’t stay trained on the roommate for long. They found Memphis just as he began to speak.

I didn’t catch much of what he said, but I can describe how he looked perfectly. He was abnormally tall, well over 6-feet with a frame which was pleasantly fit. No outstanding muscles to distract from the thin layer of innocent fat which covered his bones in smooth, doughy ropes, and yet skinny enough to show that he was an athlete of some sort. His face was strikingly strange, a full and undefined jaw offset by sallow cheeks and a sharp nose. A chin jutted slightly forward beneath a foreign pair of lips, the bottom swollen and the top spare and structured with a fierce “M” standing below the long canoe of his cupid’s bow. His hair flipped boyishly around his ears, which seemed abnormally playful compared to his intimidating features.

Karaoke night was when we found ourselves talking for the first time. He waited alone by one of the arcade games while the rest of his team was on stage: I found out that night that he was a left midfielder for the university soccer team and also less than willing to sing in front of a crowd. He drew me in because we wore the same uncomfortable mask, each trying to look like we were having fun when it was obvious that we weren’t.

Small talk bounced between us strangers as his team finished up their rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody. I left that night with a nearly illegible phone number written on the back of my hand as well as a first and last name to prowl stealthily after on social media. He was more forward about wanting to be friends; he requested me not five minutes after I had left the building, the warmth from his hand steadying mine not yet evaporated from my memory.

Only a day passed before he texted me, asking if I could help him with math homework. I made no promises; math wasn’t and never will be one of my strong suits. But I walked down to his room and sat behind him anyway, watching as his long fingers slipped over the yellow shaft of a chewed pencil. Even his smell seemed timid, licking the air as a snake’s tongue flits over the body of a preyed mouse beneath its coils.

His stomach, I came to learn, had a hole in it. That was why he was so skinny; any food which he worked to absorb usually clawed its way up from his esophagus, making him tired from lack of sustenance and pushing him ever more resolutely indoors. He’d stay behind while our friends went to parties and hangouts, and I would stay in with him. We’d lay in his bed together watching movie after movie.We would go out together to get him bland food to stomach, his arm playfully shoving me aside so he could hold open the door to his truck and his mouth smirking with embarrassment as I did the same for him the next time around.

It was fun, and a friendship more perfect to me didn’t seem imaginable. He completed everything that I was and everything that I needed out of college; a person to do homework with, a person to laugh with, a person simply to love. We spent an astonishing amount of time together those first few weeks, so much so that outsiders would ask if we were dating.

I would then have to respond uncomfortably, “No, I have a boyfriend.”

The same one for three years, in fact.

It embarrasses me that all of this happened while my nice boyfriend loved me calmly and fully from a campus a state away, though not far enough to wedge between us and split us apart. My boyfriend, though undeniably smarter than Memphis, was the one person in the world who would do anything for me: the most important person in my life. He straddled the balance between perfect and unassuming, but at his core he was loving and non-judgemental.

If there was someone in this god-forsaken world who made my life worth living back then, it would have been my boyfriend above Memphis. Yet, I was torn between proximity and dependability, between what I knew and loved and what I didn’t know and liked enough to want to pursue.

One I don’t deserve because I love him too much to ever let go, the other because I will never be willing enough to truly give him a chance.

One night, Memphis and I watched a movie together. Nothing out of the ordinary. We in his bed, our calves touching chastely as the film slowly meandered across the screen. It was then that his head found its way to my chest, one of his cheeks pressed gently to my breast as an arm draped over my abdomen, making the muscles beneath his pressure clench as he slowly crossed an invisible, yet understood line. The face of my boyfriend struck through me like an electric shock, jolting me to consciousness and causing me to act a bit more dramatically than I should have. He apologized and said that it wouldn’t happen again, and it didn’t.

Not much of anything ever happened after that.

I told the story to others, saying that I didn’t know I was giving him mixed signals and I only ever wanted to be friends. There was a moment that I almost believed it myself, I had said it so much. My roommate said that he was in the wrong, that I was in the right for setting boundaries between us. For Christ’s sake, I had a boyfriend and he had to understand that. But no boundaries were set that night, no true explanation given. The only information that Memphis got from me was “I can’t do that right now.”

When he asked why, I said that it was because I loved my boyfriend. When he asked why again, I answered because my boyfriend was kind and smart. When he asked if there’d ever be a time that I could choose someone I enjoyed being around over someone who I knew, I didn’t answer. He didn’t ask any more questions after that, though I urged him in my mind to keep going, to get me to say what I needed to.

The disillusion of his affection wasn’t gradual. He didn’t give me time to adjust to the gaping hole which he would leave behind, just as I didn’t give him the chance to fully fill it.

I attempted a cordial relationship with him anyway, actual boyfriend still the background of my phone. He greeted me only with a stiff shoulder and empty conversation, mutual friendships and a large elephant in a small room. Even our friends noticed, and that’s saying something. They don’t notice much of anything. It was impossible not to notice; his hostility creeped through the room like a glacier, cutting through any attempt at conversation I tried to contribute.

Schroedinger was a German theorist who argued that existence is relative to the ability to observe something. He said that you could put a cat in a box and leave it there for a period of time, never being able to truly say whether or not the cat was alive or dead unless you were able to observe it in any certain way. The existence of something hidden became conditional; the cat may not be in the box at all.

The hole in Memphis’s stomach kept growing, making him sicker and sicker as the semester went on, his thin frame withering as I watched from across the campus. It ate him from the inside, taking the fat from his arms, his jaws and between his organs until he was hardly anything at all. I stayed back; he couldn’t tell me to leave him alone if I never let myself get too close. I couldn’t get close to anyone at college after that.

He was simpler than mashed potatoes, the happiness he gave me filling me up and sustaining me until he learned that his mind could never satisfy me. But out of respect for himself and spite for me, he picked me up in agitation and set me, paws and all, in a box, pushing me to the back of a high, forgotten shelf in his closet to either live or die.

He didn’t seem to care much either way. Things were said, other things yelled, and then he was gone.

He transferred to a school closer to home the following semester. Back then, I couldn’t conceive a campus without him on it, forever drawing me in like the dark noise from the basement in a horror film. Simple things vexed me like his bed won’t smell like him anymore, instead of the more important things like it won’t BE his bed anymore.

I wanted nothing more than to sit with him and watch a bad scary movie, our feet touching under the blankets, one of us warm and the other cold. But after he had left, I knew that for me to move on and let him go, I needed to open the box and see what I had become to him over these past few weeks: was I stiff in the top of his closet, or just a very paranoid cat pacing back and forth, spine arching under the prospect of his touch?

The box opened as he drove away in his tattered Ford, and a stale stench flowed forth. I was to him, beyond any conceivable doubt, a dead cat.

The box opened as he drove away in his tattered Ford, and a stale stench flowed forth. I was to him, beyond any conceivable doubt, a dead cat.