Sugar Run

by Mesha Maren

Maybe, she thought, she’d been like that since birth, filled up with a backward yearning.

“If we’re here right now, it’s because we were always going to be here now.”

Being wanted by Paula is completely different than being wanted by Jimmy. This is something rare and magnificent. She is afraid it is a mistake somehow and will soon be taken away.

Love with a capital L. She needs to hear those words over and over again. Every time that Paula says them, the hunger-wound inside her ebbs away a little.

If she could just line up the way the world must see their love with the way this all feels, then everything would come into clearer view. If she could push back the words—dyke, queer—then everything would make sense and turn out all right. Sometimes, though, the terror of it grips her, the knowledge that she is not seen at all, or seen only backward and out of focus. It is a feeling she is sure will crush her someday.

She heard her own voice, clawing and begging with those same words. I love you. God, I love you so much. And Paula’s passive face. You’ve got to quit saying that. You know those phrases stop meaning anything when you repeat them like that. But how else to explain that instant, dizzying bond?

She wanted to laugh off Miranda’s gushing “I love yous” and “special connections” but at the same time she wanted desperately to believe in them. Despite herself she liked Miranda’s high-pitched reactions, the way she poured it all out so openly. It reminded her of a painting she had once seen through the window of an art gallery in Dallas, layers of pink and ranges of corals and roses that were globbed onto the canvas in thick streaks, growing darker until, in the middle, they formed a gash of raw-heart red.

From the inside the edges of your own skin seemed so firm and sealed but that’s all it took, a little pressure, and you were open to the world.

“You know,” Miranda whispered, “when I was little I thought the universe had an order that was waiting for me. I thought there was a space, a me-shaped space, and when I found it I’d know it. Like when a key fits into a lock, I’d click into place and move through into a new future. There were hundreds of millions of spaces, I thought, holes in the universe, and you had to find the one that was right.”

I knew if I kept walking long enough, eventually I’d feel it. Something would click and I’d fit.”

She is happier than she ever remembers being. Happy just to be here in the car with someone who wants her beside them. The kind of someone who wakes up in the morning and says let’s go to Mississippi and then puts her hand on the wheel and does it.

She looks over at Paula’s sharp face and the beauty of it hits her like a fist; she’s only known her for one week but already she sees that she won’t ever be able to let Paula go, already she has become the prism through which Jodi wants to experience everything.

“I want to see your first-time ocean face.”

“You know that moment,” Paula says, “when it really, really sinks in and it’s so much more than just the planetary models and all that—that moment when you feel it, how fucking tiny we all are in comparison to the universe, and your stomach drops right out and so do your lungs.”

She watches Paula’s face and wonders how you can possibly protect someone from their own past.

There was something strangely sad about their beauty, there in that rundown house at the end of Murdock Street. Their loveliness, it seemed, had always taunted, promised them something, but nothing came, and oddly, no matter how drunk, how fucked and crooked they went, the beauty stayed.

You couldn’t help but feel that everything you did with her—fixing a macaroni salad or driving to the grocery—was special and exciting.

She had never entirely lost her own accent but over the years it had begun to seem to her like a strange leftover burden, something that only made sense here.

Paula lights a cigarette and in the glow her face appears, soft and beautiful, big eyes and that lush mouth. No amount of shit-life can beat that beauty out.

She ached for someone to enter her life like that and shatter all the simple things that had once satisfied her.

Did you ever think that maybe she wasn’t worth any of it? Your love or your hate? The thought hit Jodi’s stomach with a snare-drum rhythm. If their brief love wasn’t worth everything, then both of their lives had been wasted, shaken out like a sulfur match—that quick—for nothing.

What luck, she thinks, what staggering luck, to have found someone who wants to give her this.

“I imagine that growing up here must really set your way of looking at the world. A little like an island, huh? Safe but probably also stifling.”

“But we’re not so different, I don’t think. I mean, I know I’m just a big tree hugger and this is not my ancestry here but I was cut once, my skin laid open to the bone, and in the time it took them to find me, I saw something there.” Lynn closed her eyes and her face shifted, drew in as tight as a fist. “It’s the same stuff they pull from the earth and it’s inside everything and all of us but we cover it up.”

She was watching it all from outside somewhere, watching herself drift. Utterly aware now of how helpless she was, not just in this moment but in all of it. Out of orbit, untethered, and spinning off into some unknown galaxy.

It was you, she tells the wall where Paula’s shadow hangs even after she is gone. You convinced me I was better than my shitty little past. You convinced me we were part of something brighter than a ten-watt life and I have to believe you.

Paula lifts Jodi up into an embrace and kisses her so deeply that Jodi’s breath goes away and she is all happy and wrung out—emptied—like after a good cry.

She can’t tell if she wants to laugh or cry and she is shaking now with some almost indefinable craving, a loneliness, she realizes; she wishes she had someone to tell this story to—a friend to confide in—someone she could call across all those miles

and tell the truth to. Whatever that might be.

“There’s some magic about you. You’re unalloyed.”

Dots of pollen and dust hung in the light, drifting slowly down toward the water. Fairies, Miranda used to call them. When she was little she would lie on her back and watch the dust motes dancing, watch and watch until she was really seeing nothing but the tiny imperfections in her own vision. Even then, that young, she had been trying to float away from her present reality. She could remember spinning and spinning in the front yard until she fell down in the grass, happy to feel nothing but dizzy, gleefully disconnected from the sick-death smell of her mother’s bedroom and the oppressiveness of her father’s smothering love.

she had never imagined loving a woman outside of the dreams in her head—would

“You know how sometimes your mind is such a big, lonely place?” Miranda said. “I mean, it’s really small, actually, I mean, I think sometimes about the space inside my skull and it’s really small but it gets so lonely.”

She’d lie there in bed with this heavy panic, a feeling like she was on a bus going who the hell knows where and had missed her stop long ago but just gone on pretending everything was okay.

How in the hell did they end up like this? She’d built herself around this hope and it had gone off, so wild and wrong.

She thought of the girl she was before Paula, a girl waiting for happiness to come upon her the way she had seen it happen to other girls when they grew breasts and fell in love. She’d been waiting for change to come marching toward her like a summer storm across an open field but it had not happened like that. It had come up in an unexpected rush from under her feet. And it had all kept building up into the terror and then ebbing out into the everyday gray of prison life and then just as inexplicably she’d been released and left spinning like a broken compass, seeking, with the old plan as the only way to understand anything. Now, though, she felt strangely weightless.

The bruising weight of her body against that hard earth felt satisfying, like it might beat this wild sadness out of her for good.