A girl in Armenia carried my bag.
I met her after work and had my back pack with me at the bar.
When she walked me home—and she did walk me home— she hooked her finger in the loop and pulled, testing its weight on my shoulders.
“It’s heavy,” she said.
It wasn’t, but she pried it off my back anyway.
I wanted to protest. I’ve always been one to protest, but that was before. I used to protest a lot and I wonder if things would be different now if I hadn’t. I don’t know. And I don’t protest.
She takes the bag on her back and smiles at me from the corner of her eyes. I’m wearing heels and a skirt that my hands pin down against the wind. It’s a Marilyn Monroe situation, except she’s the one with the bright blonde hair. She finds this endlessly funny.
The bag suits her, and I wonder if the life inside would suit her too. If she asked, I would offer it, but she won’t ask. The good ones never ask. I settle for the laughter, it suits her just as well.
I feel like a child when she tells me I’m pretty. I say it back, but it sounds like I’m lying. It always sounds like you’re lying when you don’t say it first. She doesn’t know that I sent my friends a link to her Facebook page, that I raved about how lovely she’d grown since the last time I saw her. Not that she wasn’t lovely then; I was just too young to notice.
But I can’t tell her this. Odds are we’ll never share a bed and such words can only be said under the safety of a three-sheet minimum. They sound too much like another sentiment, the dangers of that three-word maximum. She has already swallowed reality, just so she won’t have to face it anymore. I want to ask how it tastes. She asks if Canada has a basketball team. I know as much about basketball as I do about reality. Her guess is as good as mine. It’s better than mine. I’m ready to believe anything she says, bedsheets or not, basketball or not.
I want to go to her games like it’s something I’ve always done. I want it to become reality, so maybe she’ll swallow me, too. Maybe I’ll taste better than truth on her tongue. I’m not trying to save her. She’s already done that. I don’t know how she did it. I don’t know how the sword on her back glistens clean. I don’t know how she went to war and didn’t fight. I don’t know how she won without fighting.
They stare at us in the street. They know the bag is not hers. She asks me if Canada has a basketball team and I feel like I won a little bit too.
Tvine Donabedian is a queer Canadian-Armenian writer from Montreal, currently living in Vancouver and completing a graduate degree at Simon Fraser University. As a new voice in the industry, her aim is to capture the intersectionality of the Canadian identity through musings on sexuality and diasporic struggle.
