Jasmine Peteran

Jasmine Peteran is an emerging writer from Toronto, currently pursuing a BA in Creative Writing & Publishing. Peteran writes poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction while working as a freelance editor.

Now

I was a different person back then. I didn’t have teacups or house plants. Nor did I have an incessant desire to vacuum. It was an era of recklessness. I worked nights. It’s a different world when you work through the other side of the clock. No rush hour, just happy hour. All your co-workers are insomniacs, so you think you might be one too. I'd take my time getting home, weaving in and out of musky dive bars in the small hours of morning. Buying bottom-shelf whiskey, eavesdropping on strangers. It was an era of sunrises.

      In the Spring, I’d quit. Always with the promise to come back eventually but never really being sure I would. It was an era of possibilities. 

      I once met a man in an old Victorian train station. He wore a silver earring and told me of his lonesome little hometown in County Clare. It sounded so desolate and sad. I couldn’t resist. 

      I was dropped off at the post office. A single-story stone building that stood alone about ten kilometers from the village of Doolin. I walked from there—gravel the whole way.  I passed herds of cattle but no barns. I passed fields of grass but no crops. The wind was fierce and the sky was grey. I dragged my suitcase, wheels whirring in mid-air. 

      It was hauntingly quiet. I stayed a week. 

      As the months grew warmer, my stays got shorter. I always felt at ease as a stranger. New places meant new people and new stories. Nothing could give me away.

      I once told a group of fishermen, as we sipped dessert wine on a tattered pier at sunset, that a man had bought me out of a human trafficking ring, only to abandon me in a motel room three days later. That was six months ago. These people had no reason to doubt me. It was always the same thing. They would pat my shoulders and buy me drinks, then send me away in a taxi. There was never anywhere to go back to. Only another life in another stranger’s hometown.

      I was a different person back then. You can trust me now. I’m yours. I’m all yours. You can trust me now. 

      Now, I’m a white-picket-fence kind of woman. I’m a housewife. I water the plants and fold your laundry. Friends come over and I serve them tea in yellow china with matching saucers and store-bought biscuits. I ask if they take milk or sugar. In the evenings, I ask if they prefer red or white. They always leave by nine. We stand on our porch waving goodnight. You always kiss me. You kiss me the way you’ve always kissed me. I was different back then. We both were. 

      You do the dishes and I tidy up. “Tidying up” is my polite way of saying I do everything else. I wipe down the placemats and return them to the cupboard. I put the salt and pepper shakers away. I scour the dining room table and the matching chairs and the coffee table and the countertops. I bang out the carpet in the foyer and vacuum the hall. I lay your freshly pressed pajamas out on the bed and fluff our pillows. I turn out the lights in the lounge room and the dining room and the kitchen and the pantry. I shave my legs and sneak into bed.

      When the dishes are dry and put away, you pad upstairs in your socks. You’re asleep not five minutes after your head hits the pillow. I whisper but you never wake up. So I sneak back downstairs and rearrange the cupboards. I pour myself the last glass of wine and turn the last lamp off. 

      Sitting on our stark white couch in the dark, I think back in time. I remember the live bands and the tour guides. The laser light shows and pink silk toga parties. Have you ever been to that five-story club in Prague? The one where every floor is a different kind of music, but if you sneak away behind the curtains, there’s this room. There’s this room where every surface is mirrored. The ceilings, the walls and the floors, on all sides. It’s closed off, but if you’re skinny like me, you can squeeze between the railings and sit in the middle of this room. It’s hypnotizing. Hypnotized by your own (in)sanity. Where the pulse of the nightclub feels worlds away and you’re sitting there, in this tiny mirrored room that seems to go on forever, nothing but a spec of life in a gyrating world. The music fades into background noise, practically silent, and you’ve never felt so alone.