Weavers
Save for the sports cars zooming down the street it was a pleasant enough afternoon and I was sitting outside a local cafe waiting for a friend, adjusting the tiny, unreasonably wobbly table once in a while to make myself look busy.
"Hey there," Marie said. "I hope you didn't have to wait long."
"It's all good." I smiled and invited her to sit down. The waitress took our orders.
"A crazy thing just happened to me," she said.
Everyone who spent some time around Marie gradually came to the conclusion that she must be embellishing her stories for some kind of dramatic effect. She seemed barely interested in other people's personal lives, commenting on them with passing remarks before returning to the middle of her own tale. I did not mind assuming the role of an engaged listener.
Every time I saw her I was immediately reminded of university days, that nebulous time when we first met each other one city over. I remember one of our early meetings at a pizza place near the campus. It was the first time when I picked up on this storytelling quirk of hers. We were sitting down at a rather greasy table when she told me that her sister had recently been in a car crash.
I could feel my face assuming the conventional expression of worry as I thought back to some earlier conversation during which she had told me she is an only child. Still, I couldn't stop imagining a girl splayed out on the hood of a car, her bare shoulders touching the cold metal, one foot dangling in front of a headlight like a poor man's shadow puppet. The image was so vivid I knew it came from somewhere else. Right after I wrapped up my display of empathy I felt a wave of guilt, as if it was unbecoming of me to keep up the pretense, maybe moreso than of her to create it.
It had always been hard for me to react strongly to any life events. When an inebriated man nearly rammed his car into my legs a month earlier, I barely reacted, staring him down as he stopped in front of me with a dumbfounded look on his rough-shaven, kinda-cute face. I had talked to him twice before. Either way, I seemed to take pride in this approach to life, as if none of it could truly reach me.
At one point during my university days I began to devote a part of my attention to actively predicting events just so none of them would sneak up and surprise me. The downside of that was that it really worked. When a friend would approach me in our dorm crying her heart out about a cheating boyfriend, I could barely force myself to reply, feeling more quiet satisfaction than any kind of empathy. Look, it's not that I didn't have it. I just knew what kinds of things happen in the world. Even if a giant spaceship appeared right in front of me, I would have some frame of reference for how an alien invasion usually goes. Relationship problems did not rank highly on my list of Things Hard To Imagine. My nightmares were filled with incomprehensible shapes devoid of human-made forms.
Most of the people I knew seemed quietly annoyed at this trait of mine, gradually moving away, keeping me at the distance of casual acquaintances. I wasn't someone they felt they could really confide in. At the same time they were becoming wary of Marie's tales. It seemed like we turned to each other for some kind of comfort. This is why as I sat in the pizza place and cringed internally at my own cliche response, she looked half-satisfied, as if it was really working, the most obvious reaction being the right one. Gentle tears landed on her smile as she told me that everything would turn out alright.
At the cafe we were in the middle of our usual monologue when she stopped abruptly, her stare trailing off into the distance. She had mentioned something related to trust, or the lack of it. I thought this time I would finally speak up. I looked her in the eyes and opened my mouth, adamant to get something out, but then I noticed her looking back at me in a way that suddenly struck me as aware, aware of too much, desperately trying to leave some things unsaid. Another car zipped down the street and right after that Marie began another tale and I let myself get swept up in it.
I had become so used to her stories that in a way it was comforting to hear a new version, a clear contradiction here and there. Our friendship was strong enough to allow for those. Come to think of it, back when she had vented to me about Michael, it was the only time I knew she was telling the truth. To an outside observer our conversation must have looked very typical, a sip of coffee here and there, exclamations, dramatic twists, me reacting with shock. It did not really matter that underneath it all we were both using lies to carve out some space for each other out of some common need. They were just different kinds of lies.