Call Me When the Mountains Tremble

CW: Sexual content

No sound from anywhere, just the flat holding its breath like expecting something to return. Pale squares on the walls in place of photographs, an unpacked cardboard box sitting by the door. In the bathroom, no smell of vanilla and coconut. A strand of brown hair still stuck on the cool side of the pillow.

The curtains are closed but the smallest ray of streetlight finds a gap, and it cuts across the bedsheets, a divider between one side and the other, impossible to cross.

He lays awake, staring at the light.

Prague, a time ago

In Prague, there is a famous graffiti under Charles Bridge of a man and a woman kissing. His back is pressed against the stone, her shoe peeling off at the heel as she reaches up to his mouth. Even in stationary paint, they look lively enough to fall right off the wall: young, crazy, and in love, like belonging to each other was the most important thing they would ever do.

He kissed her for the first time by that bridge. They had been looking at the light reflecting off the Vltava River when he gathered his tattered nerves and pressed his mouth to hers. To his relief, she kissed him back.

‘Quite a romantic spot to be kissing,’ he pointed out.

Little did he know that she had been leading him the whole night, orchestrating every move like a mastermind architect. She had suggested that pub by the river; she had lightly touched his shoulder when she stood to get them another round; she had stolen him away from the crowd to the quiet banks of the Vltava. She had been guiding him all night, nipping at his heels, driving him - to a point where a story could start, the kind of story that starts with: “They kissed for the first time with the lights reflecting off the river behind them.”

They made their way through lamp-lit streets, stumbling over cobblestones and each other until the road led to his door. There he couldn’t wait anymore and pushed her against the door, hand inside her skirt, hers making a mess of his short hair. She moved to him eagerly. When he bit her neck, a bit of saliva traced down her skin which had become delicate with goosebumps. Her world was full of him, her tongue an object of pleasure that didn’t quite seem to fit in her anymore. It felt like her whole being was becoming too big for her skin. Just underneath, something bubbled and boiled, screaming to explode in all directions at once.

On the opposite side of the hallway, a door rattled. They fell into each other giggling, almost hysterical, and finally he managed to produce a key and unlock the door before the prying eyes of the neighbour could reach them.

Afterwards, they lay in the dark whispering questions that every young lover has, at a point, considered unique ways to probe their partner. What are you afraid of? and when he told her, she nestled closer. How did you get this scar? running a finger along a pale line on the other’s skin. Tell me something you’ve never told anyone else.

Dawn was a headstrong girl, determined to be in love but suspicious of every romantic partner that came her way. She had never forgiven any lover that had left her. Sometimes their faded faces haunted her sleep, and she’d wake up in the morning feeling painfully nostalgic for imaginary things that faded fast in daylight until her yearning had no shape or object and all that remained was a dull ache in her chest.

Ronan was quiet at inappropriate times, sometimes forgot to listen when spoken to, sometimes forgot to speak when someone offered to listen. Wrapped in his own world, he thought it was sensible to build a small life and never get on anybody’s nerves, refusing to believe that his craving for comfort was just fear of the unknown. He was a modest man with modest dreams, and he knew just two things:

One, this woman did get on his nerves. And two, he had loved her even before he knew her.

He used to put his arm around her when they were with friends even though it embarrassed her. Dawn saved her own tenderness for the privacy of closed doors, but in the dim light she’d caress and care, gliding her fingers on the backs and necks and thighs of her lovers, drawing figure eights on their skins like spells to attach them to her: please, let me keep this one, even a little bit of him, even a little while.

If they woke up untangled, he pulled her close as soon as he awoke. The smell of her unwashed hair was musky and comfortable, like the smell of childhood evenings after a long day playing outside, laying tucked into blankets.

She had a beautiful voice for singing in the shower or the kitchen. As he sipped his coffee, he listened to her hum The Girl from Ipanema while she cooked eggs and bacon. Last week she had been a vegetarian; it was annoying how quickly she could change her mind.

When she felt him wrap his arms around her, she pressed herself against him.

‘I love you,’ he muttered. ‘I love you.’

They had come to Prague for a semester of cheap beer in a Medieval environment and a couple of haphazard study credits. Later, they would barely remember any detail of the city which did not link to their love affair.

Dawn studied biology but she dreamed of publishing books. At twenty, everyone thinks they’re a writer. Ronan didn’t think she was very good but he faithfully read every poem she showed him. A little white lie can make or break a love; so he lied his ears off and praised the sharpness of her wit.

Ronan’s goal in life was happily vague, and he knew he would probably end up in an office somewhere, moving papers about and taking endless photocopies. Dawn started many fights scolding him for his lack of ambition but in truth, he didn’t see the point of promotions and boot-licking.

One morning, about three months in, Dawn was in his shoddy flat on the outskirts of downtown, sipping coffee for the sleep in her eyes and wearing his shirt from the night before and no underwear. The ornamental roofs of nearby residentials rose to view behind the kitchen window, and the sky was a pale blue, that kind of morning bright that drains colour and turns everything into light and contrast.

When he looked at her, it seemed like scenes from their past months just like this one came rushing to overlap, and similar scenes that were yet to happen came together, too, until he thought he was watching Dawn sipping coffee in his shirt in past, present and future, and he thought that a moment like this should always exist.

‘It’s strange,’ he mused, as he wrapped his arms around her from behind, ‘it almost feels like I’ve known you forever.’

Dawn raised her smiling eyes. ‘You have, but those were different lifetimes. Don’t you remember?’

‘I think I do remember now, you were a princess and I was a knight?’

‘You were the strongman in the circus and I the bearded lady?’

‘You were a horse and I was also a horse?’

She laughed, and they kissed, secure in the knowledge that they had always loved each other.

‘Hey.’

His voice on the phone felt far away. Dawn wanted to cry.

It was just a long weekend and still the longest time they’d been apart since that night under Charles Bridge. They’d only parted a few hours before, so soon they ran out of small things to say.

‘Anyway.’ Ronan sounded embarrassed. ‘Maybe it’s silly to be calling you already.’

‘You can call me anytime,’ she said like velvet on the phone. ‘Call me if the mountains tremble or the Earth starts to shake.’

He laughed. ‘Who taught you to talk like that?’

‘I think it’s a poem,’ she defended, ‘some great poem about love…’

‘Did you write it?’

Laughter. ‘God, no.’

‘If the end of the world comes, you’ll be the first to hear,’ he promised, ‘and I will hold your hand through it.’

Home

They had been breaking up for weeks.

Little by little, like a sculptor chipping off pieces of a marble slab. They would come together for the smallest offering of peace, then break apart at the earliest convenience. Was it real life that had finally torn the pages off their fairytale, or just bad timing?

She clung onto the pieces with growing desperation. What about the time they’d snuck a picnic into the park, well, it wasn’t as much a picnic as a bottle of red wine and some chocolate chip cookies, and they’d got caught in a furious downpour but the bottle had already been half empty and they’d lain on the grass soaking, rain falling into mouths open from laughing and kissing? Did he remember that?

What about that time on the pier, at the zoo, on that Sunday morning, that time in Greece, what about the first time they’d said I love you, what about all the I love yous that came after?

Aren’t these anchors that tie love down even in times when everything seems lost and loveless? Aren’t these memories proof that we belong together?

‘I think,’ Ronan said slowly, ‘that I only belong to you, but not the other way around.’

Stockholm, a time later

When he saw the head of brown hair in the metro, he thought it was just another vision. Once, he would have run after it, startle whichever clueless woman he’d spin around. If they could come together in a foreign place once, then why not again? Why should it be so strange that they’d meet again at a souvenir market in Riga, in a hotel lobby in Tenerife, under another bridge in Poland?

The last time he’d rushed after a woman on the street had been just after the birth of his first child, and there he’d stopped himself short, holding himself rigid and walking strictly away. What good are imaginations if there is real life to live?

He had been erasing her from his history, saying I instead of we when retelling past stories to new acquaintances. And he was happy. A modest life for a modest man: some money every month, wood anniversary, a cat sleeping on the headrest of the sofa. He had married a woman who looked nothing like Dawn and who never wanted to argue – she’d only discuss. For her, Ronan had even learned to speak Swedish.

He was happy. He was happy.

Why should the Universe then take it upon itself to rudely interrupt the bliss he had worked so hard to build?

‘Oh my god.’ He saw her form the words but couldn’t hear them. They moved to each other, stiffly and awkwardly until she put her hand against the plexiglass between the train cars and he realised they were standing on separate sides of it.

In a second, the world around came to life again: the click-clacking and whooshing of the subway car as it flew through the underground tunnels, the distant crying of a baby, the strong smell of spilled alcohol. He hadn’t even realised the world had become quiet the moment he saw her but now the noise was overwhelming.

The train came to a stop after a short eternity and they rushed out.

‘Ronan!’

Oh god, his name sounded so right in her mouth, and now she was in his arms with late-afternoon commuter traffic pushing past on both sides, and her hair still smelled like coconut and vanilla, and her chin on his shoulder dug painfully into the same spot where it had always rested, and oh god, those were her hands, holding him in a familiar place.

They had to pull apart eventually. He felt delirious and dislodged.

‘It is you!’ Dawn announced, laughing. ‘I can’t believe it! On my subway route!’

‘You are on my subway route,’ he noted and earned a small eye roll from her. ‘What are you doing here? Are you travelling?’

Dawn shook her head. ‘My company transferred me here. It’s a year-long contract. Let’s see if I last that long - the weather is just dreadful!’

She had cut her hair and was older now, he marked, and then with a little start realised that he was older, too. It was almost like the years had not left a mark on him before this moment, and suddenly they all rushed him at once. If he’d look in the mirror, he was convinced he would see an old man, cheeks sagging and a reclining hairline in shades of grey.

They sat down in a gloomy little chain café by platform 3 and ordered stale cups of coffee. Ronan could not quite taste his but he was sure it was bitter.

It felt strange to show her photos of his children. Had they ever thought about having any of their own? In the detailed little futures that they had created, one would think that an issue that important would have come up.

Dawn had a fiancé, though, a beautiful man who liked to play Scrabble on Friday nights and who, Dawn told him with a hesitating pause in her voice, treated her very well.

Her poetry had left with her youth but her fire still burned. She told him she was surprised to find he could still make her laugh. Most men lose their humour with kids, she expertly told him. That was a classic Dawn judgement: baseless and untrue.

God, how he’d missed her.

When she spoke, he barely dared a blink in case she would vanish mysteriously with a flick of her fashionable coat. His eyes had started to ache quite a bit.

“Are you crying?” she asked.

He went to explain that he was just trying not to blink but realised that his cheeks were indeed wet. He ran a coat sleeve over the tears, more surprised than sad. Dawn reached out and pressed a stiff napkin onto his face; he grabbed her hand and held it against his skin.

Memories came rushing at him at such a dizzying speed it felt like they might knock him out. This could have been one of those far-away mornings in a young man’s kitchen in a foreign country, a light-filled moment back when her name for him was “love” and “darling” and “mine”.

She ripped apart from him, and she was running out of the station before he had even got to his feet.

There was a river outside the station and the glint of halogen lights on it, and Dawn and Ronan were unspooling fast.

‘No!’ he shouted. ‘Don’t do this. Don’t walk away. I have been in love with you before and I keep finding myself in love with you again and again. Why shouldn’t the same happen to you?’

She pressed herself against him, not for a kiss but for an embrace. She clung to him so closely he feared she might melt into him – and he had no doubt she could swallow him whole, become one of his body parts or make him part of herself, a beautiful monstrosity of Siamese lovers.

He breathed her in: the soft smell of hopeless dreams.

‘It’s cruel,’ Dawn mumbled into his jacket. ‘You mean to rip our lives into pieces until only you and I are left, and everyone else we love becomes collateral damage….’

‘It is you,’ was all he could think to say. ‘It has always been you.’

‘We were so young…’

‘We can be young again.’

Her eyes met his, full of terror of the fall. He kissed her; the lights of the station reflected off the river behind them.

She snuck away at night with nothing but a backpack of her favourite clothes. She even forgot to pack a toothbrush. She would have taken the suitcase but it was buried in the bedroom cabinet, impossible to dig out without waking up the man that slept in her bed.

Their bed, she reminded herself before slipping away.

He, on the other hand, sat his wife down after the children had gone to sleep. He had been especially tender with them that night, kissing them goodnight thrice and tucking them in like burritos. His wife seemed to have lost her ability to comprehend language. No matter what way he tried to explain it, he could not make her understand. When he found that he was repeating himself, he rose and walked out. He left the key on the kitchen table.

With every step away, he expected to grow lighter, but a pressure in his chest built until he was gasping for air, his feet dragging. He could never die, he thought, because then he would surely go to hell.

Somewhere, later

They made love in the dark without looking each other in the eyes. He clasped her waist where it was soft and rounder than before, and he couldn’t find the spot where he’d always placed his hands before. Her bracelet caught in his hair and yanked painfully. She moved in a different rhythm from him, and he placed his hands on the mattress on both sides of her, giving up on touching.

******

The lights are off but a small sliver of streetlight still slithers into the room through the gap in the curtains. They’re the cheap kind, thick and plain like they use in roadside hotels. The light shines a pathway on the ceiling. It almost looks like an arrow but where it hits the wall it disappears, leading nowhere.

She lays awake, staring at the light.