Features

Three of us were sitting around what could be barely called a dining table in the makeshift kitchen. I watched the sunlight silhouette the red undertones in Janet’s hairs as she had her back to the sun leaking in through the window. She sat across from Amy who sat on the square couch under the coat hangers by the front door. 

Amy created her own schedule as an artist, which allowed her to have guests over in the late afternoon. She was a shorter woman, the kind who’s petite with a strong build. She had blonde beach hair, that looked sun-kissed even in the early spring that reached her mid-back. Her pale blue eyes gave her an intensity when she wasn’t talking, her words would also reveal the same trait. 

She carried her stories well. We both humored ourselves about how our collective stories being so unusual that many would think they were fictional. She was meeting Janet for the first time, we were creating a form of art project together. I had only met Janet once myself, but we had bonded the way women bond over unique experiences and over the extreme mundane traumatic ones. 

We all had a mandarin in our hand, not daring to unpeel it first. Not out of female competitive nature, but from our strife with food, and fear of not wanting to give ourselves permission to consume. We all had this in common, an unhealthy relationship with food. 

I cleared my throat, adjusting myself on the backless chair, trying to find the appropriate words to start the conversation. But I changed my mind, instead of asking Amy about her boyfriend, Tyler. 

“Oh---yeah, he’s really great. He is visiting me next month, again.” A part of her always relaxed more when talking about him, her shoulder would loosen as her lips up curl upwards, and in her eyes, you could almost sense her, watching him in memory. I put a little smirk, because I wanted her happiness to be permanent. She deserved happiness. 

In some way, her happiness gave me hope, as we often joked that her 5 years my senior was purely just a road map for my future as we shared similar traits. Despite being outgoing talkative people we shared some of the same anxiety. 

“How long have you been seeing him?” Janet asked, her nail digging into the mandarin without peeling it, just leaving shallow imprints. 

“Well, we used to be together, not officially but for a while a couple of years ago when I was off the rails. I used to be addicted to heroin, and I guess anything I could get my hands on. Tyler, well, he ended things, because of it. But now that I’m clean and mentally in a better place, we are trying again.” 

I sat back, nodding, I knew about her former affliction and sobriety, but some of it always seemed so foreign to me as I had only known her healthy. I tended to marvel at her sometimes, her strength to get clean, she had started drugs with her brother when they were barely teenagers, lack of supervision for both of them. Her brother yet to be on the straight and narrow. 

“I had- come out of a really terrible and rotten relationship and hadn’t healed when I first knew Tyler-” she chose and held her words carefully. “I didn’t know how to heal from what I had been through.” 

Janet nodded. She was also uniquely gorgeous as she looked like a woman dressed from a different time, her waist cinched in a corset while her braless nipples were visible from her thin dress. She always dressed as an example of a liberated woman. 

“Laney and I have talked about our relationships like that.” Janet referred to a long conversation about ex-boyfriends who gone mad, with something like rage and love and the corrupt government system that doesn’t protect women. “She’s the first person I got to talk to that had similar nightmarish experiences with restraining orders. Did you have to get one as well?” 

“I received one from the courts when he went to jail.”

“Oh God-,” Janet raised her hand to her chest. “Mine put me in jail for the night.”

I swallowed hard, knowing the story as well. It brought us a strange sense of camaraderie, sharing these types of stories.

“What! How?” Amy returning the shocked tone.

She shrugged off the weight on her shoulders. “From a court, they don’t notify you when you no longer have a valid order of protection, that’s the official name. And well, he had a mutual order on me and his attorney notified him of mine expiring. HE showed up to brunch causing a scene. Police were called and the one with the order was the one who was protected. I spent the night in jail, my friends couldn’t get me out since it was the weekend and judge’s weren’t available. It was one horrible night.” 

Janet reached to her purse on the floor her ankles. “Do you mind if I smoke out the window?” 

It was rare to find someone as hoped on nicotine from cigarettes as Janet was, especially today. Amy nodded, walking past her to open the large window, a gust of wind came in, not exactly much colder than the room, but it still gave us a chill. Janet hooked one leg out the window sill onto the fire escape and the other still in the kitchen. Her body looked beautiful as the sun golden light on her face and was reinforced by the lighter lighting the cig in her hand. Her blue eyes looked up again. 

“I tried to put my ex in jail, for my restraining order,” I said, thinking about my own situation. “When I went to university, I had told myself I would be able to get away from him. I was tortured by him in my hometown, and his family, equally crazy, but I got through it thinking I would graduate and leave all of them. With people like that they can’t give up control of you,” I looked up to see their nodding heads.

“But he decided to follow me to the same university, so I threatened him when he actually showed up months later halfway across the country. I told him, I would expose who he was to people, what he did to me, I would tell the police. He pretended to not know what I was talking about. Within a week I started to hear the rumors and gossip he started about me, some good some bad, all of them sympathetic towards him. I didn’t do anything but go to my university’s student affairs. They kept files. Nothing was done, not when he hung out with people around my dorm, not when he was seeking around my department buildings at night when I was leaving, not when he vaguely threatened me online.” 

“Until I dyed my hair, in hopes he wouldn’t know about the change, I didn’t post it anywhere, a week later he had the same color, I did. I hadn’t seen him watching me, but he was, that’s the only way he could have known that when I was fed up, I went to the police the next morning. For months, I waited to hear from the SVU department, special victims since stalking wasn’t enough and I had to report the rape for someone to even validate his abuse.

I called to track my case with the police hoping they would have decided to do something before my court date after I filed for a separate order of protection that they recommended I should do if the investigation didn’t lead anywhere. They forgot to forward it. Court dates started, the detectives called me back in, they told me that they couldn’t do anything because the order of protection would have caused too much noise, it looked like revenge. But for the next girl, there would be a record if she came forward. I heard there had already been a next girl and from his former friends, I knew there was a current underage girl but there was nothing I could do.” 

“I had to disappear for a few months from mine,” Janet said. “I couldn’t have done it by myself, the court kept screwing me over, because he was so manipulative.” There was catharsis in this that we couldn’t get in therapy, knowing we weren’t alone. “He never spent the night in jail, he was psychotic and he wasn’t ever punished either.”

Janet took her last drag before rubbing the end on the railing before polluting the cig, letting the wind blow away the evidence of ash and whatever was left in the filter. 

“Mine, well, I didn’t want to tell anyone, not my family not my friends. I felt so shameful going through it that, you of all people, got yourself into this situation.” Amy played with her nails, all of us talked with a flat monotone voice. Like it hadn’t happened to us. We leaked our stories like it was a news article we had seen. Janet’s body still on the sill, I watched her before looking at Amy and her nails.

“We were living in a small beach town and the news of what happened went into the newspaper, my boss had warned me to notify my parents just in case because even though they hadn’t written my name down, they wrote his and everyone knew it was me. 

I was the girl that had broken up with him. I was the girl that checked his location to make sure he was at work when I went to pick up my stuff from his apartment we used to share. I was the one who fell for his trick as he had left his phone at work, snuck into the bathroom, and waited with a gun. When I went to pick up my things in the bathroom, he threatened my life at gunpoint and told me I needed to love him one more time before forever without me. Survival kicked in and after he asked me not to tell. I did and he went to jail, but I was a headline.” 

“Shit dude,” Janet said with a lack of poeticism. 

“It is what it is, I still check the bathroom first every time I come home.” She said, almost attempting to laugh it off. 

“Men,” we half laughed. 

“Yet, we are the temperamental hormonal ones,” I said, still trying to lighten it up. 

I started to actually peel my mandarin which never left my hands. Amy followed suit and there was focus to our peeling. 

Janet from her seat on the sill was now dimly lit as the sun started to disappear completely. It was my favorite time of day of this soft gray-blue light that was so unique to this time of day. She picked up another cigarette. She lifted it again and her face was briefly lit by a complementary color to blue filtered wrap of evening light 

.

She smoked as we slowly ate our slices, We weren’t talking we all sat there thinking. 

“Do you think they actually loved you?” Janet asked as she put out the cigarette on the railing again. 

“Honestly yeah,” Amy said after a few heavy seconds. “But I genuinely think he had psychological problems that outweighed that.” 

I thought about it as well. “Maybe mine did. But that’s not a kind of love I am willing to accept and therefore don’t consider it love anymore. As much as it’s a cliché if you can love something you can let it go. I so desperately wanted him to let go of me. I still do.” 

And there it was. The stillness of the memories. Three women of similar ages, still teenagers when all of the experiences had started. How young we were compared to now. How we aged days within the hours surrounded by men who knew how to hurt us by loving the wrong way. 

Like there was a right way to love, well there had to be something better than what we received. 

“Tyler loves me the right way,” Amy said barely more than a whisper. I couldn’t figure out how much time had passed between whoever last talked until she spoke and how much time had passed since. 

And maybe Tyler was it and Amy had found it. Janet was exclusively dating older men and found her own happiness through it. We had been all holding the short end of the straw and slowly words slipped out of my lips thinking about this one story I had read. 

“I could hear my heart beating. I could everyone’s heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making. Not one of us moving. Not even when the room went dark.” 

Noa Lesche's personal essay, "States of Consciousness" won third prize in the Ninth Annual School of Visual Arts Writing Program Contest. Noa is a junior in the Photography and Video Department at SVA. She spends her time divided between photography, film and writing. As a multiracial woman and LGBTQ+ member she tries to use any platform she has to draw attention to ongoing issues with her communities. She is currently working on editing her first novel in hopes of it getting published soon.