I Don’t Know Why I’m Telling You This

a short story by Liz Ayre

Polly and I used to get homeless people to buy us packs of cigarettes when we were fifteen, oftentimes in our school uniforms, kilts with knee socks and blue blazers. We liked to take a bus to a coffee shop afterwards where people in their twenties hung out and smoke a whole pack of Canadian cigarettes between the two of us, which we could easily do because we didn’t know how to inhale them. Waiting for the bus back one time I told her that I thought we might be doing it wrong. 

“Try taking some smoke into your mouth and then taking a sip of air afterwards so you inhale both of them,” I said to her. 

When she did it, she started coughing. 

“Wait, that’s what people are doing?” she said when she could breathe normally again. 

“I think so,” I said. “I’m not sure, but I’m pretty sure that’s what smoking is.” 

After that we did it that way, and sometimes it made me throw up, but it also made me feel dizzy in a fun way, as though I was poisoning myself for a thrill. 

When I was little I developed a horrible phobia that no one took seriously. I suppose it started when my third grade teacher gave us a speech about how there were poisonous red berries near the edge of the schoolyard, and that we shouldn’t eat them because it would make us very sick and could even kill us. She said the birds could eat them because they ate around the center part, but that they could only do that because they had beaks. There was no way we could do that, so we shouldn’t eat them or even go near them at all. After that I became fixated on them. We had a bush of the same red berries in our yard near the hammock and I’d see myself in my mind’s eye walking over to the bush, eating them, and lying down in the hammock to die. I’d watch myself sleepwalk over to them as though watching a nightmare through a mirrored wall, and I was powerless to stop myself from eating them and dying. It was a long time before I figured out why I couldn’t stop thinking about them. I used to fantasize, against my will, that they were appearing in my food. I remember my mother scolding me for picking apart a dinner roll. I had to tear everything up into little pieces so that I could see there weren’t any berries hiding in it. Was my mother putting them in my food? No. They seemed to materialize out of thin air. 

I had this boyfriend in highschool, Sean Delaney. An awful name, too many vowels. We met when we were seniors. I didn’t really have any friends because I’d transferred sophomore year and never really fit in. I was sickly and jaded, focused on not eating and getting good grades so that I could move to New York City and start properly living, which to me meant modeling and doing cocaine. He wore boat shoes and vineyard vines, but we had drugs in common. He put me through hell. I remember him jumping out of a half-moving car he was still driving slowly with me in the passenger seat, both of us crying, screaming about how he was going to kill himself if I broke up with him. He almost killed me, then and other times, but nobody seemed to notice. When I finally got free of him, I saw years later online that he’d covered his arms in bad tattoos that were all from album art by The Velvet Underground. They were my favorite band when we dated, and he always made fun of me for my taste in music. I remember he liked listening to Dave Matthews Band. The music made me sick like his vowel-heavy name. Last I heard he moved to Australia where he was managing a strip club. 

My best friend in middle school, Claire Henson, went to Australia once with her family. They were always going on all sorts of trips. Her dad was an orthodontist. My mother was jealous of her mother because their house always looked like it came out of the Martha Stewart catalog. Her older sister used to sit in the family room with her thong showing out the top of her sweatpants. Later she became a doctor, but it turned out she had a bad eating disorder. When they got back from Australia, Claire had brought with her a huge lollipop the size of her head. I forget the brand but it had a big shiny pink wrapper she’d take off and put back on again. We used to lie in her bed and take turns licking it. You kind of had to suck on it like it was somebody’s arm or something. I remember running my tongue back and forth along it quickly to try to get more flavor. Then at some point she’d tell me that was enough and put the wrapper back on and put it on her shelf. I don’t think her mom knew we were eating it in Claire’s bedroom whenever I came over to the house because she probably would have thought that was a gross thing to do and taken it away from us. I remember one time I used her sister’s razor in the shower to shave my legs, and even though I was extra careful about not leaving any traces, she still knew and told Claire to tell me not to do it again. 

That was all in British Columbia, where I grew up. The place that feels the most like home, though I’ve never been back since we left at the end of ninth grade for me. A friend visited and told me he couldn’t get over the quality of the air there, all green and ocean. So full of oxygen and positive ions. I guess I remember that, I told him, though I’m not sure I do. 

There were lots of little islands off the coast of Vancouver Island, where we lived. One time my parents sent me to a film camp there, on Saltspring Island, where we ran around with video cameras and made a movie about a girl getting run over by a car. I remember the counselor talking to us about gay marriage, which wasn’t legal at the time. 

“Do you think gay people should be able to get married?” She asked us, and all the kids said 

“Yes.” 

I said no to be different, and when she asked me why I scrambled to come up with an idea.

“Because being gay is special,” I said, “It’s against the norm. Gay people should want to stay that way. Being able to get married would make their relationships less unique, less against the grain. They don’t need to be incorporated. It’s better that way.” 

I remember her frowning at me in a way that conveyed she thought I’d said something wrong. She didn’t like me after that, and I wanted to clarify I wasn’t hateful, I was just trying to say something special. For years I thought I’d made a mistake, but now, I think I was actually weirdly right and my stance was a sophisticated one for someone my age then, which was probably around thirteen.

I made out with a woman for the first time in a long while the other night. I met her on Tinder, and told her all sorts of things about my life. We’d matched before. She liked a photo I’d posted of my legs in the bath with a copy of Carl Jung’s “Psychology and Alchemy” on my knees in water that was blue from this Kneipp bath oil my mother used to use when I was a child that smells like valerian and hops. It’s one of those smells that takes me back in time to being small and old sense memories of feeling safe in water. “Jung in the tub,” Ariel wrote to me at first and I ignored it, deleted the app. Then I saw her on there again, months later, during mercury retrograde, a time when things from the past return for reevaluation. A picture of her walking down the street smoking, another of her lying face down in the desert sand. The last one got me. I asked her for coffee, and we kept rescheduling, “because of mercury retrograde” we said. I finally met her at Cafe Reggio. 

She was late, and I had nothing to do so I asked the waiter for a piece of paper. He handed me a blank ticket from a receipt book, and I started writing down visions for my future while I waited for her. It was raining outside. I was doing this “21 day vision quest challenge” with a few of my girlfriends. Everyday we wrote down things we envisioned for ourselves in the future in the categories of spirituality, material wealth, health, emotional wellbeing, and mental development. The point was to exercise our creative muscles, to let ourselves dream big. You couldn’t repeat things each day, you had to keep reaching. I was on day five. I wrote things down on the Guest Check Ticket as though I were placing an order: “ridiculously hot boyfriend” “swamp house in Florida” “photoshoot with snake wranglers” “best selling novel” “vintage tile bathroom with a shell lamp” “old house with a sunroom” “trip to Croatia” “direct a movie about a death metal band in the 90s played by all female cast in drag” “a garden” “article in Vogue” “friends with June, Maggie, and Sebastian” “Doen dress” “red light electrolysis wand.” 

At one point a pretty girl who looked like pictures of Ariel walked in and smiled at me and then went into the bathroom. 

“Maybe that’s her?” I thought. 

When she came out, I smiled at her again more directly and she stood and smiled back at me for a moment, and then she walked out the door. I laughed about the encounter and texted Ariel about it. 

“lolololol my doppelganger entering to survey the scene before my arrival,” she texted back. “Be there in ten just looking for parking.”

When she walked up to the table I was surprised to see she didn’t look like the other woman at all. She was larger and mousier, and for a moment it seemed like she could see me registering that on my face. She looked momentarily saddened by my perceived disappointment. I smiled and leaned towards her when she sat at the table to try to convey that I was happy she’d made it, that I was happy to meet her, and that I wanted to get to know her. She told me many things that could have been red flags over the course of the three hours we spent talking. She told me she’d spent covid between Sedona and New Mexico, that her best friend was a poet and a scorpio, like me, that she went to analysis four days a week in the morning as part of her training to become a psychoanalyst, that she took after her grandmother, who was a Holocaust survivor, that she’d been institutionalized for ten days after having a psychotic break brought on by taking too much acid a year and a half ago, that she was a heroin addict when she was nineteen, that she was back in Narcotics Anonymous now and loving it, that she felt burdened by her suffering but also valued it because she saw it as her pathway to God, that she was Jewish but loved Catholicism, that she’d also spent a large part of her life sleeping with men, but that her last love had been with a woman, a pisces, and that she’d never date a pisces again. I spelled out my trauma history too, surprised to feel like crying when I said certain things that I thought I was over, mainly because of the way she looked at me and made such empathetic noises and gestures when I told her about the parts that had hurt the most. We told each other lots of things. I could feel our wounds matching up already and how nice it would be to give in and fall into some codependent relationship over the course of a few weeks, and how I’d better not. 

She was clutching her juul the whole time and vaping covertly. I asked her if I could hit it, and from then on she put it down in the center of the table and the two of us took turns vaping out of the eyesight of our waiter then placing the device back down between us.

When it was time to go because the restaurant was closing I asked if she was smoking cigarettes still, and she said she was on and off but she tried not to because she didn’t like to smell like it. 

“I’d have one with you though,” she said and smiled at me. 

I had some in my purse. It was raining outside so we stood beneath the stone awning of an apartment building. I wanted to sit but it was too wet. 

“We can smoke in the car,” she said, “We just have to roll the windows down.” 

“Of course!” I said, “I would have expected that, though if you hadn’t rolled them down I suppose I would have gone along with that too even though I would have thought it was a bit odd. I’m always down for an adventure.”

She put on Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You” in the car, and I knew she wanted me to kiss her but it was too on the nose. I pulled away from her slightly and started talking more to distract from the way she was looking at me. We were talking more about therapy. 

“I wasn’t going to say it earlier because I didn’t want to go to deep on our first date, but we’ve covered pretty much everything, so I guess I will, but the reason I left AA and don’t identify anymore as an alcoholic was because I figured out through analysis that my mother had always unconsciously really wanted me sick. Her dad was in AA and she grew up in the rooms, her whole life revolved around his alcoholism and dysfunction. I realized that I used to go home sick all the time as a kid because I knew on some level that my mom liked it and it made her happy, so that’s when all the sickness started really. I thought I had to be that way for her to love me. But as I’ve talked about all of it over the course of the last several years, I realized I didn’t need to be sick anymore and that I actually wasn’t an alcoholic. I just thought my whole identity had to be based on being sick or else I was invisible or something, and that manifested in all sorts of psychosomatic stuff, but it’s all pretty much gone now and I drink normally. As I talked about all of it the symptoms disappeared. I don’t even like alcohol anymore. I mean, I guess I have a little trouble with smoking pot, but a manageable amount.”

“That’s amazing,” she said. 

She was driving her parents’ car because hers got stolen on a TikTok challenge, she told me. She said that when the cops called her to tell her about it they started by asking her if she knew what TikTok was. I thought that was probably a bad sign of psychic health. It was never a good sign when someone’s car got stolen. Her parents’ car had heated seats. Rain got onto the car window sills while we smoked, and as soon as we were done, we rolled them up. She was playing indie rock from a premade spotify playlist that I saw her put on. I thought that was sort of sweet and endearing. She knew where I lived because I’d told her earlier and she steered the car in that direction. Her sister used to have an apartment the next avenue over, she told me. She knew the area well. 

“That whole street’s haunted,” she said. 

“Yeah, I was doing a session with my energy healer once and she asked me if I lived across the street from a graveyard. I told her she was close, it was an old hospital, the hospital that was the center of the AIDS epidemic decades ago. Now they’ve remodeled it and turned it into a luxury apartment building. My mother says Michael Kors lives there. I can’t see why. It must be so haunted.”

“I went in that building to use the bathroom once!” Ariel said. 

“That’s right across from where I live.”

“I know,” she said.

We idled in the car outside when we got there. It was still raining and it felt romantic. I undid my seatbelt and leaned towards Ariel to say goodbye and we started kissing.  

In my writing class the other day we read a story where the final image was of children emptying a container of coins into a dryer and then running the machine. I kept thinking about it and wondering what that would sound like. Rain fell on the roof of the car. 

Ariel’s mouth tasted like cigarettes. It was gross, but not in a way that I minded. I was self-conscious about my own mouth tasting bad, which was funny because we were in the same boat.

My father bought the apartment that I live in in the 80s, before I was born. He used to work at the hospital across the street. He got a deal from the landlord because he’d been renting the place initially and only paid $35,000 to buy it. I've been coming here since I was a kid. I remember looking up at the elevator buttons, and racing my brother to press the round, illuminating button for the 4th floor when we were children. I’d lived there on and off in college too. I remember losing my mind on no sleep and adderall trying to write a paper on Hegel in college for a class I later had to drop because I wasn’t functioning well. I remember a dumpy historian I met in the library breaking up with me on the bed after we’d had sex by playing my “It Ain’t Me Babe” by Bob Dylan. I took him seriously and cried and hugged him goodbye. Now I think I probably would have laughed in his face for doing something so heinous. 

Around that same time I went to the movies at IFC alone. I can’t remember what film it was that I went to see. I remember not being able to focus on it because a man who was also alone came in and sat next to me, and over the course of the whole film we inched closer to each other, until he put his hand on my leg and I leaned into his body and eventually kissed his neck. We watched the film after that but the whole thing was so clouded by the intoxicating rush of touching this stranger that it passed by my eyes in a wild blur as though I was sitting in a moving vehicle. I went home with him after that in a taxi, all the way to Brooklyn. We barely spoke and just touched each other in the car until we got to his place. I went to the bathroom and realized I was still bleeding. My period had seemed like it was over but apparently it wasn’t. When I went back to his room and kissed him and told him I was on my period he seemed slightly disgusted, which I found unattractive. I never understood that in men. We slept together anyway. His bookshelves were lined with beautiful old paperbacks. I commented on it afterwards and he told me that his father had run a well known indie press that had shut down now and that these were all of his books. He’d died and left them to him. That was one of the only things I learned about him. I liked the detail, but it didn’t matter. Things would have happened the same way without it. 

That was my last year of college. I had tried starting in analysis then with a quiet French woman named Odile whose office was right down the street from where I lived, on the same block as Ariel’s sister’s apartment, I’d just learned that evening. I remember leaving her office one time when it was raining and sitting at a restaurant on the corner of 11th street under an awning and writing in my journal when a woman walked up to me and told me she had something she really needed to tell me. She was carrying a purple umbrella and had hypnotizing eyes. She was doing something with coins in her hands, flipping them, using them to divine something. She told me that I was destined to be a writer, and I would write things that would change the world. Perhaps it was an obvious thing for her to say because she’d seen me writing in my journal. My memory of it is so hazy--it was around twelve years ago now--but I remember inviting her up to my apartment. She was so persuasive. She clung to my arm on the walk there. When she came in, she sat on the couch and undid her braids and told me that she held much of her power in her hair. It was impressive when she let it down, as though I could feel its presence in the room. Then she started asking me for money. She was pushy, and I grew scared. I hadn’t been expecting it, though it was obvious that at some point she would ask for something. I had two hundred dollars on me, but she said it wasn’t enough for what she needed to do to clear me of the entities attached to me. She said that she was going to change my life, but to do that she needed at least a thousand dollars. I was hurt by the figure and asked her to leave. She persisted but eventually gave in and swiftly left the apartment, walking quickly down the long, dark hallway to the door. 

“God bless you,” she said before she left, and I said it back to her. I knew then that she was goodhearted, just aggressive about money. Sometimes I wondered what would have happened if I’d gone through with it. 

When I was at coffee with Ariel, both of us with our elbows on the table leaning into each other, she looked in my eyes and said, “I don’t know why I’m telling you this, I never tell people this. I don’t like to talk about it because I feel slightly ashamed, even though it changed my life, but there’s something about you that’s compelling me to tell you this. I had cancer years ago and had to do chemo for treatment. The cancer went away, but the chemo made me lose my period. Then one day I was walking on the street, around here actually, in the Village, and I met this woman, who, I’m not sure how to describe her, but she was basically a Native American healer, and we did this ritual together.”

As soon as she said it, I had the feeling that I knew who it was. That it was the same woman I’d met years before. 

“I gave her a lot of money. I mean, $3000 dollars.” She laughed. 

I smiled at her. 

“I think that’s admirable,” I said. “I love the excess of giving away $3,000 dollars. Everybody should do that at some point.”

“It was $3,333,” she said. 

“Of course.”

“But the crazy thing is that after the ritual, I got my period back for the first time in years. On Yom Kippur. I was thrilled. It was a miracle. And it’s been back ever since.”

“Wow,” I said. “Incredible.”

“She told me,” Ariel said, changing her voice to a more hushed tone, “that the entity that was attached to me was a sort of demonic energy that had attached itself to my grandmother’s womb and then been passed down to me.”

“Oh my god,” I said, and then, after a moment, “I have something I have to tell you too. I’m not even sure how to say it.”

I told her my story, and it was such a synchronicity that it was as though she wasn’t even surprised. It felt too fated for us to be shocked. 

“Well I have to tell you something even more wild,” she said. “My last girlfriend, my pisces ex, she had also met this woman on the street, right around here.”

“Well it’s destiny then,” I said, “Us meeting.”

We laughed, looking at each other as though it was the inevitable beginning of something. I’d had a glimpse of a feeling when I first saw her that I recognized her from before, from the future, or perhaps some other life. It was a feeling I’d had a few times with people who came to be very important to me. That’s what was going on when she’d thought I was disappointed, or caught aback, or whatever it was that she saw on my face. I just couldn’t articulate it at the time. 

“After that encounter, I wasn’t well. I sort of lost it and went into a dark spiral, but eventually I got much better,” Ariel said. “Maybe falling into madness was me working through all of that stuff and ridding it from my system.”

“I wasn’t well when I met her either,” I said. “In fact, after that, I sort of lost my mind too. It was during one of the worst periods of my life, after graduation. What a strange character, that woman. She’s like some figure that stands at a threshold.”

“Yes,” Ariel said. “Some woman you meet before slipping over the edge.”

Liz Ayre is a writer based in New York City. She’s currently completing her MFA in fiction at NYU, and she’s working on a novel about UFOs. @liz.ayre