This is me spilling over by Coralie Loon (California, 23)

​2:52 p.m.
            Outside, the fog hides everything. It fills up the neighbors’ yards, turning laundry sour with mold. Out of the breath-stained windows of my uninsulated apartment, a fog-shaped hole reminds me of nothing. No feathered tree-fingers, pointing towards the sunset. No birds swooping for pieces of freeze-dried berries on the grass. Until the wind changes, the fog reveals only absence.
            Inside, I do what I can to distract myself: kettle on, Costco TV playing The Little Mermaid (1989). All of the household blankets, half mine and half Alder’s, cluster around me in a fuzzy heap. I’m eating Grape Nuts because they remind me of Mara (even though they taste like ground-up toenails), because she cares about her digestion the way a normal person might care about their pet Maltese.
            Mara is one of those people you feel the need to explain to people but never can. With Mara, almost everything is a bit. Even gynecology appointments, art school, student debt, inevitably becoming a high school teacher. Grape nuts. It’s all something to laugh about. Mm. Time for my daily sand, she said every morning back in the dorms. It took me two years to realize she just liked the flavor.
            On the TV, the daughters of Triton swirl around a mermaid-sized clam shell. Its lips part to reveal an empty, blue cushion—no Ariel. I fumble with the edge of a seafoam-colored throw, waiting for Mara to call me.

               The kettle starts to squeal.
            I imagine the fuzzy blankets are cats, orange and brown and green ones, kneading their little paws into my thighs. Oh well, can’t get up. I imagine the satisfaction of my phone buzzing with her call right now, fashionably 20 minutes late, and telling the photo of her (holding up a clay vulva she made at the Art Center) to wait a minute, my water is boiling.
            I wait. The call doesn’t come. I send her another text. 2:30 right? call me when ur ready <3
            The high-pitched drone of the kettle slowly morphs into something else. Wind whistling through our college dorm windows. The Metro shooting blindly into the darkness, which I took for the first time last Tuesday. If I forget the warmth of my living room, it could be then, heading home after my first shift for Pool Guys. It was a different kind of loud, the kind of screeching, ghostly woosh that drowns out everyone around you, even yourself. That was the last time I’d sent a text to Jesse from the pool: it was nice to meet you too :) i’d love to get some coffee sometime. The jellyfish emoji by their name had stared back at me as we hit a bump in the track. They hadn’t struck me as someone who would use a jellyfish emoji. At the pool they had their nose turned inside a library copy of Turn of the Screw, their body a beautifully ambiguous pile of black linen, only a sliver of skin showing at each ankle.
            The wound is still fresh from this morning, when I’d set my alarm for 9:30 and got up before hitting snooze. There was something amusing about the idea of getting ready for someone. I disguised myself in orange lip-tint, even though I only had it because it was Mara’s, cursed because
she dropped it on the floor in the church bathroom we only slipped into to piss, giggling between our fingers at the idea of squatting at the same time, our streams of piss becoming one, and the bottle fell and she said keep it, and I did. I had lathered it on anyways, then wiped it off with a toilet
paper square because it was too garish. Five minutes until 10, my phone had buzzed. It was Jesse: something’s come up can we do another time? and yes, I knew there wouldn’t be another time.
            Outside, a motorcycle shoots through the fog, its engine muffled. I can see my own reflection through the TV screen, lips still barely orange, Flounder dancing around my head in a circle. I picture myself, leaning over the pool ledge to skim a net full of rotting leaves and cockroaches from the water. Their disgusting, twitchy legs. The stranger on the pool chair, who wasn’t disgusting and wasn’t twitchy.
            If I was normal, maybe, it would hurt in the right way. I had wanted to go on a date with Jesse. I did want to talk about Turn of the Screw, go swimming, tell them something no one else knew. In the way you’d tell anyone, if they just showed up in front of you.
            At least now I can tell Mara about it, every misstep an opportunity to spill, because she’s one of those people who you talk to and feel like you’re closer to understanding what’s under the surface, even if you can’t quite touch it yet. And what’s underneath is relief, because I don’t have to
wait for the inevitable—whether it’s Jesse from the pool, the guy in Psych 101 I had a crush on, the
ex-pornstar with an inflated cupid’s bow. I don’t have to wait for them to reach for me, acting from the same script I’ve never been given. Their hunger dwarfing me, infantilizing me. When all I can do is turn away, saying sorry, sorry, because something isn’t quite right, I’m in a bad mood, I’m tired, my housemate will be home soon. All while I’m really thinking: I don’t want to fuck you. I don’t.
            “Penny?”
            I lurch from my daydream.
            It’s Alder, one hand on the kitchen counter, Kia keys dangling from the other.
            “What?”
            “The… kettle?”
            It’s screaming, like it was ten minutes ago.
            “Oh my god, sorry!” Quickly, I slither off the couch and rush to the stove, moving it to an unheated burner.
            “Oh my god, sorry,” I say again. “I was just spacing out.”
            He laughs the way you might laugh at your mother with dementia, just to endear her.
            “No worries, I totally get it.”
            ​I don’t want tea anymore, but I shuffle around for a bag of Earl Grey just so he won’t say anything. I tear the lid, waiting for him to do something.
            “Um… how was the date?” he says. He looks into the living room, as if searching for signs of sex.
            “It was good,” I say, because I’m not going to mention being ghosted and make him say sorry even though he doesn’t care.
            When he doesn’t move, I add, “It’s okay. You can play your shower music. No one’s here.”
            He holds up a peace sign and walks away as quietly as he came in. I pick up the kettle and pour water into my mug, the one Mara painted for me at Color Me Mine, one of the days before Alder took her shape and Dakota took mine, and she was so excited when we picked it up she kissed
the top of my hand, and just as easily could’ve kissed all of me.
            Once I pour, I stand and watch the water slowly turn brown. The steam rises from the rim, swirling around me in a warm fog, a breath that says nothing at all.

Last Monday
            Going to Dr. Lee’s office was always like entering a strange purgatory. Everything came in various shades of beige: the black-out curtains, her turtleneck cardigan, even the framed photograph of a labradoodle on the bookshelf. Her hair was clipped on both sides, and that day a strand of baby hair escaped, resting in the empty space between her eyebrows.
            “Your hormones look great.”
            I reached up and scratched between my eyes. My hormones always looked great. They looked great when I was seeing Dr. Filch (who seemed appalled at the idea that a woman would want to want sex). They looked great when my student insurance didn’t go through and I had to pay $200 to get eight vials of blood drawn.
            My exhaustion was easy to read.
            “Look, Penelope,” she leaned forward, tapping the tips of her kitty heels together. “I know you’re looking for an answer. And there is one. It’s just going to take a little longer to find.”
            She kept talking, but my eyes drifted to the photo of the labradoodle, looking up at the camera with eyes more akin to a toy’s than a dog’s. Even its collar was beige.
            “This is actually good news,” if I heard her say that right. She kept going on about hormonal problems being more difficult to treat, which meant whatever my issue was could be more temporary. Fixable. We can work through some of your sex anxieties, do some kegel exercises, strengthen your pelvic floor. Like she was making a cake and there was a missing ingredient. It’s just going to take a little longer to find.
            “Let’s not get bogged down in that right now. How are you doing? Adjusting at all to life here?”
            It had been a month in my new apartment, the apartment that was supposed to be mine and Mara’s. My new roommate, Alder, hadn’t moved in yet, so I was making use of the space. Mara had been over for a week, helping me move the last of my things, go shopping for a sofa and a tea kettle at the flea market. We used the living room floor to organize all my books by category: shit I love, shit I’ve read, shit I’ll probably never read. I got used to drinking tea with her on the porch before the fog burned off, but this morning had been the last one. She got in her green CRV and started the 2 hours drive back to her fiancé, her little yellow house, her pregnant cat. The excitement was gone, and the apartment no longer represented a new chapter. It was just an apartment.
            “It’s okay. It’s quiet,” I said. And then, to my dismay, I felt my eyes sog up. I watched Dr. Lee’s pale mouth open, ready to pounce with a follow-up question, so I beat her to it.
            “I love her,” and then I did the thing I always do, when I have too many thoughts and can’t think of anything at all. “Oh my god, I don’t know what to do.”
            It made my skin crawl to imagine Dr. Lee in her beige turtleneck peering at me, watching me sputter like a broken sprinkler. But I’d gone too far, and now I couldn’t go back.
            “It wasn’t supposed to be like this. We were supposed to be together,” oh my god, be together, “we waited forever. I mean, it makes no sense, she’s not a wife. Like, a wife? That was never, that was never even a word we used.”
            Dr. Lee kept peering. “And why is that so hard to imagine?”
I stopped. “Well…” it wasn’t the word. It wasn’t politics. It wasn’t that she ever said let’s die as old spinsters, or pinch me if I ever become a housewife, or dang do I love being single. She never said any of that. It was just as if the whole time we’d known each other, none of that existed. As if the rest of the world rested behind a plexiglass screen—we could see it, but it would never really matter. Not to us.
            “I guess it’s dumb,” I said finally. “I know it’s dumb. Everyone thinks they’re different. They’re special. That you’ll move onto a farm and all the people in your life will live side-by-side.” Yes, I did think that. I imagined us raising chickens, then actual babies, our parents next door, me
and her in two houses that were connected, falling asleep on the floor together, waking up old and gray, still just outside the rest of the world.
            “I kept thinking it was different,” I said, “even though she was always going to do the normal thing.”
            “What’s the normal thing?” As if she of all people didn’t know.
            “Getting married and disappearing?”
            Dr. Lee smiled. “I know it’s an adjustment,” she said. “I remember how hard it was when
my sister got married and moved out, with a dentist. She hated the dentist’s! My god, it was so strange to not be with her. It was hard. I was too young to understand,” her eyes seared into mine and she kept smiling. “But you learn to be happy for them. And then one day you’ll find your
person, and you start all over. We understand each other differently now.”
            I stared at her as she leaned back in her chair. She didn’t get it at all.
            "I… don’t know,” was all I said. I couldn’t imagine finding anyone or marrying anyone. Doing the things married people did. Doing the things girlfriends and boyfriends did.
            Dr. Lee kept peering at me, the clump of hair on her forehead thicker than before. She was thinking.
            Then she tapped her pen on her notebook. “Do you… see yourself with Mara? Or someone like Mara?”
            I knew what she was getting at. She was saying, you’re in love with Mara, and you want to marry her, which means there are people who are your people, and when you get over her it’ll be someone else, and you won’t be lonely forever. Only that wasn’t right either.
            “I don’t know!” I didn’t mean for it to be so sharp. “Sorry. I don’t know. I mean I do, I do
want that. I do want to be with her. But that’s not… not like her and Dakota.” She was waiting for
me to explain. “Her fiancé. Not…”
            “Not the sex?”
            I shook my head. “I couldn’t do that to her,” I said. That wasn’t quite right either. My head blared, drowning the words as I tried to form them. I don’t want to fuck you. I don’t.
            “So you do want to be her friend, you just don’t want to lose her friendship?”
            Yes. No. I didn’t. Didn’t want to lose her. Wanted her. “I don’t know!” And then I realized I
was really crying. I sunk my head into my arms. Thank god I hadn’t put on mascara. Dr. Lee came
over with a box of tissues from her desk.
            “It’s okay. We can move on, if you want.”
            But I knew what would come next. I had done it before, with Dr. Filch. I’m just going to ask
you a few questions. The packet was long, the questions swirled in my head, changing meanings.
            How many hours of sleep do you get a night? How many days a week do you feel stressed or
overwhelmed? Anxious? Depressed?
            How many times a week/day do you masturbate? Do you masturbate? Have you tried sex
toys? How often is sex unsatisfactory? When is it satisfactory? Are you attracted to men or women?
            How would you describe your sex drive? Do you know what I mean? What it means to be
“turned on?” Have you found the right person? Do the people you have sex with make you
uncomfortable? Do you feel insecure about your body? Have you tried eating vegetables? Have you
ever thought that if you just took care of yourself, like everyone else, that you’d be normal? Do you
even know what being normal is? Do you feel, do you desire, do you know?
            Do you feel it? Do you feel anything at all?

3:20 p.m.
            I’m still waiting for her call.
            The grape nuts in my bowl have turned mushy, the texture of canned cat food. The muffled
sound of hot water hums through the wall, pipes creaking. I open my phone and stare at the last text
I sent. Delivered. Just to make sure.
            hello?
            It’s a pointless word. I’m calling into a stone well, comforted by my own echo. I imagine
Mara’s voice rising like a phantom through the fog, searing through the doubt like a torch: hello,
hello…
            There is no response, of course. I tell myself the “of course,” just in case Mara does respond,
just so I’ll feel surprised, just so I’ll learn not to trust myself or that voice, the one that thinks there
will be no response. My text hangs in the white expanse. Delivered.
            The shower in Alder’s room shuts off, enveloping the house in silence. Too much silence. I
get up to scrape my cereal bowl in the trash, leave it in the sink to deal with later, crawl to my room
for a hat and some socks. I used to love the silence and crave it like I craved sleep, but then she
came along.
            Mara, with her mandolin and her chattering mouth. Who always had reggae playing, always
asked questions when it seemed there was nothing to say. Mara, who hated being called Tam but
would laugh at anything, who would go mm when the other person was talking, who left me voice
messages saying things like you’re not gonna believe this dude on the bus and I just made the ugliest thing and should I wear my leather jacket or the jean one, and I’d respond with texts because I hated how my voice sounded.
            Because of her, I’d gotten too used to the sound of things. And there isn’t any sound now.
            I grab my beanie, shove my feet in my boots. My room is stuffy, the sky blank outside of it.
I’ll get out, escape until she calls me and can hear my heavy breathing. Sorry, can I call you back in 10?
The reception’s not great out here. She’ll know where I am, though. She always does. The walk to the marsh is easy—the neighborhoods are flat, unassuming. You pass the same houses every time, the same corner stores, the same park with rusty swings. The marsh is less predictable. The boardwalk warps, eaten by mildew. The tide comes in, out. But the fog always
covers it all.
            I leave the dirt path, my shoes causing the boardwalk to creek. I keep pulling my phone out
every 20 seconds, as if I wouldn’t feel it vibrate.
            I can’t shut her out, so I make her a chant instead. Mara, Mara. Where are you?
            I’m rehearsing what I’ll say when the call comes. Something to test her, even though I don’t
mean it. Do you know where I am?
            The place we drove to almost every day the summer before the last year of school, just far
enough to make walking a hassle. It was the warmest day of the year, that’s what the weather app
said, and she made jokes about her oil paintings melting even though it was only 75 degrees, turning
into smears when she got back—modern art. We brought sunglasses and string cheese, cards we
wouldn’t touch. When we got to the beach the wind started and the fog pooled in instantly, as if it
had always been just over the horizon, waiting for the perfect moment to pounce.
            It was supposed to be ruined. We walked back to the car across the marsh, laughing, because
she’d forgotten her bathing suit anyways. Fate, or God, or something. Mara’s eyes did that weird
thing when she had an idea—they got smaller, and she’d look over your shoulder as if there was
something there. We were skimming the road the rangers used, right where the bridge was, the tide
higher than I’d ever seen it. The water looked clearer than usual. Let’s just go. Right here.
            It was her idea and I could’ve said no, but I wanted to see what would happen. If I
pretended it was just us.
            We left our clothes on a rock and waded into the water shivering, limbs sinking into the
sludge. Its coldness ripped through me. Over and over and over, we’d look at each other and start
cackling. We ate string cheese, peeled oranges with mud on our hands. I stood guard as she squatted
under the bridge, ankles in the swamp, to change her tampon. She held it in her hands after like it
was a frog she’d just pulled from the muck. What do I do with this?
            And then the rumble—the ranger truck, stopping above us. My panicked yell, her hand over
my mouth. We stood like deer under the bridge, waiting. My chest thrummed and I didn’t know if it
was the fear of being found, or her hand, cold and damp and tasting of algae, pressed against my lips. Then, after too long, the stream of water running in front of us into the marsh, slightly yellow.
He had stopped to pee.
            I’ll ask her, when she calls, if she remembers. If she remembers shaking from cold and
laughter, the smell of the marsh on our bare skin. If she remembers sitting afterwards, wrapped in
our muddy towels, talking about all the people we hated. If it was just me who thought that, briefly,
there was nothing missing.
            Suddenly, my phone vibrates. I lift it, but it’s from Jesse.
            sorry…
            want to watch a movie tonight?
            my place is free
            It’s funny, what people think of you. And how I’d reply, if I was honest. If I just said: sorry. I
don’t want to fuck you.
            I don’t.

Yesterday
            It was my last session with Dr. Lee, though I didn’t know it yet, and the photo of her
labradoodle was gone.
            I stared at the empty space on the bookshelf where it used to be as her voice floated around
the room. It’s kind of nice, her voice, I thought. Not high, not low. Slightly raspy. Vaguely like Mara’s mom’s voice, if she was younger. The voice of someone who’s trying her best.
            “Well, Penelope,” she said. Two words I’ve never much cared for. “I’ll admit, sexuality,
whatever you want to call it, it’s not exactly my expertise.” This is also something I hoped I’d never
hear my therapist say.
            She flips through a paper packet on her lap, but her eyes glaze over the text thoughtlessly.
            “I’ve been doing some research since I last saw you, Penelope. I was wondering if you’ve
ever heard of, or thought about… asexuality.”
            When her eyes were seared into mine, trying to avoid them was useless. I couldn’t give her
the satisfaction of having ripped me open, when all she’d done was flicked me on the elbow. So I
stared back.
            “Yeah.”
            I had. It wasn’t an alien word, and I was familiar with what people meant when they said it.
The weird girl in seventh grade who didn’t have friends but did have a steady supply of cystic acne
turned out to be asexual. Socially inept Sheldon Cooper, from the Big Bang Theory.
            My grammar-obsessed English teacher in high school would be proud to know I very much
remembered what the prefix “a” meant: lacking, not, without. Without attraction. Without love.
Without sexuality.
            “Listen, Penelope. I know this part of your life has been hard for you. You’re looking for
answers. That’s good. I’m glad you’re here. I’m gonna be honest with you, okay? I want you to talk
to someone who understands all this. So I’m sending a referral to some, you know, more specialized
therapists. And I would highly encourage you to follow through with that.”
            I stared back at Dr. Lee, realizing that her tights weren’t beige today: they were red. There
were pieces that weren’t adding up.
            “Wait—”
            She looked at me, softly this time. She looked as if she was actually listening. In the galling
breach of sound, I realized I was supposed to fill the silence.
            “What… what happened to the picture of your dog?”
            She smiled. “Oh. That was Pepper. She passed away… god, almost four years ago now? She
helped me out for fifteen years. An angel.”
            When she stopped I knew I wasn’t going to get an answer. I fumbled with the hair tie on my
wrist.
            “Why… do you think I’m asexual?”
            “Honey, I don’t think anything. That’s for you to know, not me.” Then she stopped and put
the packet of paper on the ground. “But I will say… whatever you’ve been told about it, it’s
probably only half true. I think all this—” she waved her hands around, “fuss about labels is tiring,
and reductive. I think you’ll find most human experiences don’t…”
            But I’d already lost her. I was thinking about Mara. Her hair, tied up in the scrunchie I’d
crocheted her last Christmas. Tomorrow we were supposed to talk on the phone. And I had to tell
her how I’ve been feeling. Because, yes, I do know.

4:07 p.m.
            In our second year of college, Mara took a 2-unit coastal biology class. I wanna learn how to be
a fisherman, she said, as a joke, until half of the class ended up being about the catastrophic effects of
overfishing, and the joke wasn’t funny anymore.
            As an art major, it was the only class she had that required a textbook. Western Coastal
Landscapes Today. The cover was a stock photo of a white heron backlit by an orange sunset.
            One evening of studying on the dorm floor when our third roommate was at a frat party, she
spent half of it reading to me. Seabirds are fruity, dude… did you know there’s a ‘well-noted occurrence of same-sex pair formation in seabirds, including ​​the whiskered tern, roseate tern, American herring gull, ring-billed gull, and albatross?’ As we lay on the floor, a fire alarm going off in a neighboring dorm building, she went on to explain that the formation of female-female pairs in seabirds was a chic-rearing tactic, not a sexual or reproductive one.
            Visiting the marsh now, I see a pair of seagulls balanced on a piece of driftwood, preening
their feathers. I imagine they’re two females that left the flock (if that’s what seagulls call it) and took
their eggs with them. That they take turns sitting on them, sleeping under each other’s wings at
night. That their male partners didn’t let them spend time together, so they decided to do it their
own way.
            A creak cuts through the empty space—I realize it’s my foot, hitting a loose beam on the
boardwalk. The seagulls jump, taking to the air. Their white-grey bodies dissolve feather by feather
into the fog, and I’m left alone.
            Just as I think about walking down to the beach, my phone rings. Fumbling, I pull it out of
my pocket. Mara. Her picture gleams at me, frozen in a moment far away from this one. I lift the
phone to my ear, my heart kicking.
            “Hi.”
            “Penny! Oh my god, I was scared I was too late. I’m so sorry. I had to help Dakota, his sister
thought she was having a gas leak. I don’t even know. So we had to go over to check, and my phone
died, and—”
            “It’s okay,” I say, and it is okay. Her voice has drained every possible feeling of anger out of
me.
            “Penny, how are you?? It’s so good to hear your voice.”
            “I… I’m good, I think.” I pause.
            “Are you at the beach?”
            I can’t help but laugh. “I knew you’d be able to tell.”
            Her laughter ripples over my skin, or maybe it’s just the wind. “I know. I’m like a dog.”
            “Woof.”
            “Woof. Oh, and Dakota’s sister is fine. I think.”
            “To be honest, I don’t really care.”
            Mara laughs. “No. To be honest, I don’t either. She’s kind of annoying.”
            “Oh?”
            “She always complains about money. Like she pretends to be struggling, like she wants to be
relatable, or she wants people to sympathize with her. Because she’s ‘unemployed’ or whatever. But
she literally has half a million in savings, and Dakota’s always gonna help her out.”
            “Huh. That’s weird.”
            I can imagine her shaking her head—she does it whenever she goes on a tangent and wants
to come back. I can picture her here, next to me, the crackle over her voice just the static of the
ocean.
            “But hey. How was the date this morning?”
            “Oh god.”
            “That bad?”
            A figure is heading down the boardwalk in my direction, and I turn towards the beach. “It
didn’t happen. But honestly, I didn’t want it to happen.”
            “Fuck them,” she says. “If I saw you cleaning my pool, I wouldn’t let you leave.”
            “What, you’d keep me hostage?”
            “Yeah, obviously. But what’d they say? Jesse, right?”
            “Here,” I put my phone on speaker and go to my messages. That’s when I notice the practically empty battery icon staring up at me. “Fuck. Sorry Mara.” And then I start to laugh, because all that pettiness was supposed to be just a fantasy. “My phone’s at 3%. I’m gonna have to
walk home. It’s gonna take a minute.”
            “It’s ok, just call me back.”
            “Okay, okay. In 15?”
          “Hey, I’m not going anywhere,” she says. And I know she’s telling the truth. “Call me when you’re not so close to death.”
            “Okay.”
            I hear a shuffle on the other end.
            “Wait,” I say, afraid it’s too late.
            The shuffle stops. “Yeah?”
            I look down at my left hand. It’s shaking, and my fingers are yellow. I should’ve worn gloves.
            There might only be a few seconds of life left, and I’m wasting them. I want to say that I’ve been wrong, this whole time. That it’s not me who was assembled incorrectly, it’s everything else. And I’m not without, that when I say I don’t want to fuck you, I don’t, what I really mean is I want everything else, that I’m full of so much feeling I can hardly contain it at times. So many things can exist at one time, thrumming inside one body, trying to make themselves known.
            My phone beeps at me: 1%.
            “I miss you,” I say, and close my eyes.
            “Oh, Penny. I miss you too.”
            When we hang up I shove my hands in my pockets and head back down the boardwalk, quickly, so I can call her back sooner. I listen for the sound of the ocean, faint and monotonous. I listen for the seagulls, screeching in their descent back to the driftwood. Maybe their eggs are buried there, as if I know anything about seagulls. A new generation of birds, full of all the affection their old flock was never able to contain. This is it spilling over.
            The stranger I saw earlier must’ve already passed—there’s nothing around but grass, marsh,
fog, fog, fog. I look into it, still seeing nothing, still waiting for it to change, and thinking, I want to
love you. I do.
​


Coralie Loon is a writer, creative, and musician from the San Francisco Bay Area. She graduated from UC Davis with majors in English (creative writing) and sociology, where she worked as a journalist for the California Aggie. She has had poems published in Open Ceilings and worked as an editorial intern for Cleaver Magazine. She has a special fascination with human-animal relationships, gray areas, and stormy weather.