CHARLIE.DOCX

When I meet her, she’s leaving. An hourglass flips the second we make eye contact. This is the first reading she’s ever attended. I don’t know this yet. She looks at home leaning against the stacks in that Park Slope bookstore, wearing those almost-overalls with her arms loosely crossed. Her nails are short, their black polish chipping. She stands alone, which I like. I tell myself she’s not my type – I’m not supposed to be dating right now. I’m especially not supposed to be dating white right now, but I can’t stop looking at her. When I crack a joke meant for my friends, she turns and laughs along. I find excuses to tilt my face away, to give her a chance to watch unnoticed. Subtle enough so if she’s straight, she won’t pick up on it.

She does.

After the reading I head for the drinks table, where she sits holding out a corkscrew: You know how to use this thing?

Before I know it an hour’s gone by and we have plans to get lunch on Monday. She types her number into my phone:

charlie

+1 (XXX) XXX-XXXX

Notes: She was at a reading, is leaving to LA. Gotta move quick. Overalls? Ish.

Her confidence is sexy. I glance up at her. You’re moving to LA?

In ten days.

A strange peace settles over me. A perfect summer fling. No time for strings. We text late into the night and decide to hang out tomorrow, too. We’re both free. Why not?

Charlie evokes a teenage skater boy – eager, carefree, yet controlled. Certain. I’ve always been attracted to people who inhabit every part of their body without trying. Beside her I feel dark. Overcomplicated. I could never be with Charlie in a real way, even if she weren’t moving. She’s white – as much as I may want to, I can never be myself around her. Not fully, not without explanation. She’s vegetarian – I have low iron and am weak of will. She vapes nicotine – my grandparents died from lung cancer, and it’s hard to watch.

I sit on her mattress while she feeds her cat. All her decorations are down except two photobooth strips taped to the thin slice of wall across from me, where Charlie’s wearing a bucket hat and kissing someone else.

So, she says from the other room, I don’t know why I didn’t mention this before, but… I’m in an open relationship. My partner lives in LA. Is that okay?

I have a rule against sleeping with partnered people, but it’s just one night. That said, I’m familiar with my own romantic myopia. This has the potential to get messy if I let it. I usually let it.

When I don’t reply, she pokes her head through the door expectantly.

Well, you’re moving, so. I shrug. It’s not like I thought this would be forever.

As she pushes me onto the bed, I feel her partner watching over us from the wall like a perverted guardian angel. Her long, callused fingers press gently into my waist. I ache. When she hovers over my mouth in the soft yellow light, wringing out the moment before the kiss, I find myself on the verge of begging for the first time.

The second time Charlie and I sleep together, we don’t act like we’re never going to see each other again – staring into each other’s eyes, asking questions about our parents. When we run out of things to talk about, we luxuriate on my bed and watch each other.

I used to think there were two kinds of silences, she says. One that’s okay, because you know one of you will eventually start talking again, and one that’s anxiety-inducing because you don’t know what the other person is thinking. But with you, there’s a third kind of silence.

Can you describe it?

I think what’s good about this kind of silence is it doesn’t need to be explained.

I want to tell her to fuck off – she can’t say this to me when she has a partner, when she’s leaving. But I can tell she thinks she means it.

You’re too far away. She reaches for me. Come.

I do. 

For the next four days, I kiss her and kiss her and kiss her. In her bed, on her couch, on her roof, on the sidewalk, against the wall of her roomate’s bedroom with her thigh between my legs.

Twelve hours before her flight. She sprawls on the mattress in her bare bedroom, boyish and sweet in a ribbed white tank and gym shorts. I left the fitted sheet on for you.

How chivalrous. Then I crash into her.

As she’s fucking me for the last time, I tilt my head back and stare out her window. The daylong rain has stopped, but the sky’s still heavy with clouds. Bare black branches crisscross the powder grey like telephone wires.

After, I ask the questions I’ve been too afraid to ask: how long has she been with her partner? (Two years.) How long has her partner lived in LA? (A year.) How long have they been open? (Always.)

Until now, I’ve never met someone I wanted to see again. You’re the first person I’ve slept with aside from my partner in over a year.

Oh.

Yeah, she says, heavily.

So if you weren’t leaving…

I’d have to have a conversation with my partner, and if things kept going this way… I’d probably have to end it. Her tone lightens. But I am leaving. So we don’t have to worry about that.

My hands go numb. I look past her through the window to the tree again, now right side up. What kind of tree is that?

It’s dead, she says simply, and I feel a sharp crack in my chest at the idea that dead is enough of a definition for anything.

That’s not what I asked.

I don’t know. Why?

I want to be able to name it when I write about this moment.

She laughs. I wondered if you were going to. I like your writing. It makes me want to pay more attention… to notice how it feels to fall in love.

I smile down at my hands. What name do you want me to use for you?

She’s quiet. Then, decisively, Charlie.

Charlie. I roll it around on my tongue. Done.

We look at each other, then away. The room’s steeped in a thin twilight blue. I look down at the mattress with only its white fitted sheet and think it might be the saddest thing I’ve ever seen. 

Four days after she lands, we have our final phone call. When I answer I somehow still think she might surprise me.

In a way, she does: I need to figure out what to do about my relationship, and I can’t do that if I’m still thinking about you. But if we keep talking, I won’t be able to stop thinking about you.

Okay. So…

So… maybe we stop. And maybe every day it’ll hurt less and less until eventually we just… fade from each other’s minds.

Yeah, sounds good. I feel like I need to give her permission. I know it was only ten days. I don’t want you to blow up your whole life for me—

It’s not like that, she cuts me off, and I feel sick. I wouldn’t do that for anyone.

Silence.

Look… regardless of my partner—she’s gentler now—if we go on this way, we will end up in a long-distance relationship. And nobody wants that.

She’s right. I don’t want that. It’s the only line I have left that I won’t cross. After two years I’ve just started to feel like I have a foothold in New York. If I want to stay present, build a life, I can’t send half my heart across the country.

Definitely not, I reply.

Silence.

I’m trying to think of something to say to keep this conversation going, she says, even though I know I shouldn’t.Because I enjoy talking to you even more than I enjoy having sex with you.

I press my palm hard against my mouth. Bite down.

I need to go, I choke out.

I don’t go. Neither does she. Our silence is a suffocating mist I can almost touch.

Bye, Mia, she finally says, so softly. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard her say my name aloud.

When we hang up, I collapse. 

Six weeks pass.

I live my life.

Then, in the last gasp of October, I get an Instagram notification:

@[Charlie] liked your photo.

We don’t follow each other. It was one of my rules. For twenty-four hours, I have a panic attack.

Then, I text:

are you back in my time zone?

She replies:

i’m so pleased u picked up on that

We meet in Greenpoint. Coffee turns into a three-hour walk by the water turns into her lips on mine as the setting sun turns us gold in McCarren Park. She asks if we can hold hands. I feel a teenage giddiness I thought was long dead.

We attend her friend’s Halloween party together. I go as a flapper – she goes as “Mike’s Bitch,” according to the words plastered in impact font across the ass of her tiny shorts. In front of her friends, she claims me. Shows me off. After my second glass of wine, I start to imagine this as my life. When partygoers try to leave and see us making out on the landing, they retreat back inside.

Then we’re on the sidewalk. She won’t go home with me and I break down. I clutch her denim vest and sob against her heart. I’m sorry. I just… don’t know when I’m going to see you again.

I really care about you, she replies.

I really care about you too. I swallow, force the tears to stop. And that’s hard for me to say.

She pulls me in so tight I’m breathless. She kisses my face, my lips, murmurs sweetness: in the six weeks we didn’t talk she wrote me multiple letters she never sent; she wants to see me the next time she’s in New York. I don’t understand what’s happening, why she’d say what she’s saying, but I inhale it.

HEY!

We pull apart to see a drunk woman in a platinum blonde wig hanging out of a lime-green taxi.

ITOOKAREALLYCUTEPHOTOOFYOUGUYS, she slurs.

Before she can say anything else, the taxi’s gone. Charlie and I look at each other. A smile splits my face so wide it stings.

Only in New York. You miss it yet?

Instead of answering, she kisses me until my knees go weak.

Later, when I doubt she ever happened to me, I remember that somewhere in New York, there’s a white woman who wore a blonde wig for Halloweekend and got drunk on October 28, 20XX with a picture in her phone of me in a beaded cocktail dress and dissolving curls, in the arms of a girl in fluorescent shorts and fishnets, kissing on the corner of Grand and Lorimer like it was our last day on earth. Someone exists in the world who can prove it was real.

Charlie flies home. We know what we mean to each other. We don’t know about a future, but we agree we don’t want to return to that brutal silence.

I’ve never been good at living in the moment, but I try. I write her the letter we talked about. It’s long, but simple. I tell her about my favorite tree in my backyard growing up, a tall ginkgo that sheds all its golden leaves at once overnight. I tell her about a fight I saw on the subway. I ask about LA and her art. I tell her I want to know it all, and I mean it.

I include a ginkgo leaf from the park near my apartment. It’s not the right color, but I take it anyway. At the last second, against my better judgment, I spray the leaf with my perfume. Charlie loved my perfume. She’d told me so before, against my neck, against my thigh, over text just days prior.

I text her a photo of me putting the envelope in the mail. She writes back:

your hand is so beautiful

it’s really something to see my name written in your pen

i will write to u

But after three weeks of silence, I lose hope. So I text – hey, it’s been a minute. did my letter ever reach u?

Three days pass.

Read 5:58 AM [2:58 AM PST]

It’s not exactly a response, but it is, in a way. When I see it, I’ve just woken up in the city where I went to college. I walk out into the sputtering November sun and think it’s some kind of cosmic joke that I am twenty-three and I walked these same streets in this same sun when I was nineteen and everything, even the air, stings like a seeping wound and nothing, not one thing, has changed. I am still myself. I am still wanting. I am still alone.

-Mia Arias Tsang

Mia Arias Tsang is a writer and freelance editor based in New York City. Her work explores themes of queer desire, intimacy, and disconnect. A Tin House alum, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Autostraddle, Business Insider, Copy, Half Mystic Press, Fatal Flaw Magazine, and Broad Recognition Magazine, among others. She is a copy editor for the literary magazine Identity Theory and program manager at the literary nonprofit House of SpeakEasy, and writes a newsletter called Overripe Peach. Her first book, FRAGMENTS OF WASTED DEVOTION, is forthcoming in February 2025 from Quilted Press. She lives in Queens with her cat, Peanut, and is currently working on a novel.