I Can't Make You Stay

• Sandra Lynn Lo, Grade 12
• Short Story
• 2009

300 windows along the street. 300 pools of light fanning across our faces. The soft fluorescence fanning across your jaw stretches as you twist your mouth into a smile. But your smile, it’s different. Strange. It doesn’t pour like concrete into the contours around your eyes.

The air is oppressively hot. Everything travels slower, at a lethargic pace. The words leaving my mouth take twice as long to reach your ear. Maybe that’s why we keep speaking at the same time; thinking that there are gaping holes in the stumbling conversation that we have to fill. We flatten ourselves to the pavement; hoping that maybe, just maybe, we might escape the blanket of heat clinging to the city. It’s 4am and we’ve given up looking for a decent meal. Coffee for you and pancakes for me.

Your thumb brushes my hand in circles, but it’s painful. It’s abrasive. Rough. Like you’re frustrated. Like you’re pacing back and forth across my skin.

Taxis flash past, honking and swearing like an army of early birds searching for the worm. Someone’s throwing a party down the road in the 275th window. The music – a hot pot of rave, indie, gangsta, and something else – pounds in our eardrums. College frat boys in ridiculous man cardigans and sorority sisters in the latest ankle boots stained by beer and vomit stumble out in drunken cliques of three and four.

You laugh as you see them. But it’s alien. Distant. As if my ear is pressed to the rim of a plastic cup, listening to you laugh through a piece of string.

I snatch my hand away and you look relieved. And somehow, my hand feels warmer now. But then you put your hand on my cheek and I mould into you. Your fingers move softly across my face, sculpting my cheek into a warm blush. And I’m shaking. Shaking with dehydration, heat, lack of sleep, and fear. It’s the sudden realization of approaching loneliness, and it leaves me cold. Frostbite at 4:27am in a city stinking of steaming open sewers and crammed, sweaty bodies on the subway. Hypothermia in the desert.

We peel ourselves off the pavement like cracked paint peeling off a wall and stand in the light of the 1st window; trying desperately to tattoo the imprint of our skin onto each other, so that we’ll have something. Just something.

And at 4:36am in the city which has no decent coffee or pancakes, which pulses with the nauseous beat of college frat parties, and which is polluted by the verbal diarrhoea of taxi drivers, I let you walk away from me.

I can’t make you stay. 300 windows along the street, and I wish that I could run to each and watch you 300 times. 300 replays of watching you walk away from me. 299 pieces of tape. 300 cracks.