By Marina Sage Carlstroem
I pulled back my curtain, trying to escape from the blank, bright screen in front of me. Outside the window, I found only more whiteness: smooth blankets of powder coated the steps on fire escape ladders, cars sloshed through puddles of sleet. The grating rhythm of a metal shovel meeting concrete sidewalk only distracted me further from the work at hand. Try as I might to blame the gathering storm for my avoidance, I hadn’t gotten much of anything done since I’d moved just a few blocks from Oliver.
Almost a year earlier, we’d found ourselves nestled into the corner of the dining hall after our freshman seminar, arguing about Plato over plates of waffle fries. He’d left the table and come back with coffees in both hands—black for him, ice and oat milk for me— I tried to hide my grin behind my cup, surprised that he’d recalled my usual from a hum-drum class ice-breaker. I joked about delegating people into factions based on La Croix flavor preferences, but he’d never heard of them. His lack of a clear British accent masked his ignorance of American culture, but its cadence lingered in his speech, soothing and playful. He spoke softly but not without confidence, like every phrase was an important secret; eyes widening and narrowing like someone trying to get the perfect focus through a camera lens, never leaving my own. Our plates lay stacked and bare on the table as the lunch rush turned to dinner, and we traded playlists, childhood photos, and google map renditions of our homes. I woke up 10 minutes earlier the next Tuesday morning, unsure if I was embarrassed to be putting on mascara for class or excited to have a reason to.
As the February snow turned to March slush, I sat hunched over my computer one night clicking around a midterm. I looked to my class notes for some help but they’d been sparse the past few weeks. He messaged me to ask if I’d be free for a walk that night. I was immensely grateful for the invention of text messages, so he only saw the “yes! would love to” and not the color that rushed to my face. We walked east of 12th street, pointing out strange molding on one building, the ornate doorknob on another. Places I had passed dozens of times on the way to the pharmacy or the grocery store became new through Oliver’s eyes, as though they were suddenly marked in the moment as well as in place. We were so wrapped up in discussion we hadn’t realized we’d reached the river. Eventually falling victim to the windchill of the water and a bout of hunger, we retreated to my dorm.
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I said that I’d been planning to stay in the city for spring break and slightly dreading it; when Oliver replied that he’d be staying too, I felt the dread morph into anticipation. Before I had the chance to build the fantasy of the week up in my head, my phone buzzed repeatedly with a flurry of all-caps texts from different friends warning that De Blasio planned to shut down the city that night. I called my parents, teary eyed outside of Veselka, and booked the first flight back to California the next day. I felt silly for my self-pity when the whole city was in a panic, but I wasn’t ready to go home and leave things unstarted. That night I sat on his plastic dorm mattress, trying to sort all of this out, but the drinks I’d had weren’t helping and neither was Lorde’s voice from the speaker, or Oliver’s fingers rubbing circles on my knee. His hand on my face pulled me out of my anxious reverie and towards the smile that pulled at his lips, which blossomed as I tangled my fingers in his hair.
We didn’t know then how long it would be before we’d see each other again, how campus would be empty for months and that things would never be the same, but when I think back on that kiss, it sure seems like we knew. Like we knew we had to fit all those months into that moment, to give all the missing days and uncertainty to come something to contend with. We woke up to rain on his window, and groggily made our way back to my dorm to pack up a few of my things. He put my duffel in the back of the Uber and kissed my cheek. I thought I’d only be gone a week. As that week turned to a month, and then to a never-ending crisis, I drowned my sorrows in Oliver. Movie length Facetimes, screenshots of each other in zoom class and shared reading lists brought comfort and excitement to the otherwise monotonous and terrifying days. But I couldn’t bear to go another 6 months only seeing him through a screen. As soon as the travel bans had lifted, I got on a plane to London. After 3 weeks of bliss, I headed back to the city for school, he followed shortly after, and we began the new challenge of being real people with lives trying to have a relationship. It proved to be more difficult than I had thought.
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I tugged another pair of pants over my ankles and cinched them around my waist,
glancing out at the soft flurries drifting down in the waning sunlight. On the windowsill I saw the decaying clusters of blue petals, the blossoms huddled together as if they were seeking the comfortable insulation of another body against theirs. Futilely trying to guard themselves from the unyielding cold through the other’s warmth. He bought them for me a week earlier, and it might have been easier not to take their rapidly deteriorating condition as a sign if
it hadn’t been for the spiral of dread that had replaced my spinal cord the past few weeks. Our pandemic year of laptop Bergman screenings, long phone calls, and piles of dishes felt similarly fated to the flowers. It seemed we’d learned too much from our biopic crusade; my bedroom had turned into the arena for epic-length discussions that spanned every minute emotion and thought that came to consciousness. We performed soliloquies for one another, long past
the point where words had meaning; and yet for all the time we spent shoveling away at the sediment, we never seemed to hit the steady bedrock below the shifting grounds of our attachment. I was growing weary of the fights—in the lack of noticeable difference in the tenor of things –and I was losing faith that there was anything I could do to save whatever this was.
Or could save the flowers.I tried to soak them in warm water and then lay them out fresh. I stood them up dried, imploring myself to admire them wilted, knowing that at this point this was all they could be. I thought about ending things for good. I scoured antique sellers with swedish IP addresses for the perfect christmas gift.
My phone rang expectantly, but instead of picking up to get admonished for my
tardiness, I jammed my feet into my sneakers and set off towards his dorm. After a few seconds of sliding down Third Avenue, I realized my socks were already soaking through in the puddles of sleet. I reached the entrance to his lobby, yanking futilely at the door handle. The wind sealing it shut seemed to warn me again to turn back. I warmed my hands on the heater as I waited for him to exit the dorm elevator, resolving to enjoy our snowy walk without quarreling. I hoped doing so might claw back a sense of shared awe and free us from our cyclical, diametrically opposed dialogues. He emerged in his signature oil-slick black puffer and black cargo pants and we headed east. We looped behind the metal spires of the factories, the silence between us stinging more than the sea spray slapping against my cheek. Yet, we trudged forward. The busses rushed by, splashing me head to toe with muddy slush. I considered telling Oliver that I couldn’t bear it anymore, that the discomfort seeping through my waterlogged aglets, laces and soles made movement near impossible and the icy sludge even more difficult to navigate than it already was. But when t he asked me if I wanted to turn back, I heard myself stubbornly refuse. Half to prove to myself that I could pull through and half because I didn’t want to admit defeat.
The salty water had soaked into the snow, and the resulting icy river had risen above our ankles. Somehow the larger the challenge became, the more determined we grew to make the walk work. He lifted me up to wrap my gloved fingers around the poles of the industrial yard gates, resting my feet on the high concrete ledge of it, in an attempt to avoid my toes being soaked through.
This method of gingerly tip-toeing around the puddles was far too time-consuming to be sustainable, and I feared I’d slip with the snow coming down just as hard. So I stepped down into the slush again, with a new determination and perspective. I’d reached an acceptance of the
freezing burn in my socks. The cold, while arduous, was worth its trouble. And as I looked at him, wind twisting his hair up towards the snow like some character out of Norse mythology, I thought about all the moments like these I’d only been able to brave with his hand steadying my back.
And I knew Oliver was worth the trouble too.
Finally reaching a breakaway beneath an overpass, we stumbled out from the endless path snow-blind and breathless. He scooped me up into his arms and I felt his stomach contract against me as he let out peals of laughter into the dark. He kissed my forehead and wiped the sleet from my hairline, both of us incredulous of the odyssey we’d just been on. There was a
strange pleasure in having survived the difficulty together willingly. We caught our breath as we wove our way back through the powered blocks, cutting through the Stuytown complex. A cluster of families had brought dollar store boogie boards and pool floats up onto the snowy hills, and careened down them, giggling towards the blessedly dry asphalt below. Back home, I tried to warm our socks on the radiators’ steel ribs, and found myself focused, for an instant, on the crumpled and drying flowers in a new light.
I’ve been buying more plants lately. The next morning, when the sunlight poured into the kitchen, I watered each one on the sill while Oliver made coffee. They haven’t flowered yet, but I don’t mind waiting a while to watch them grow.
Marina Carlstroem (she/her) is a sophomore in Gallatin, studying politics, performance and the built environment. She loves sitting on her fire escape, songwriting and experimenting with new recipes. She’s so excited to be a part of Intersections editorial team and all of the UDL’s upcoming projects. You can find more of her work in the Rookie on Love Anthology.
