“Up you get.” Stella prods decisively, as Val shakes her head slowly, swallowing the last of the red wine in her glass. Val cannot think of anything worse than getting up on a stage, even when there is nobody here but the owner, Stella, who she has actually become quite fond of in the last few weeks of residence upstairs, despite her abrupt candour.
“Go on, Val. Just tell me a story.” Stella insists, taking Val’s hand tenderly, and lifting it, anticipating that with it will come Val, peeling herself off her chair. Still shaking her head and murmuring a half-hearted protest, Val’s legs betray all the insecurities and hesitations that her mind and her heart are screaming and lift themselves from the rickety chair at the bar.
“Yes, Val!” Stella grins. Stella glides over to the frontmost seat immediate to the small stage.
Val’s uncomfortable expression is at war with the smile that is starting to escape from her lips.
“But I have nothing to say, Stella.” Val laments as she slowly walks over to the front of the stage, which at this early hour of the morning has seen its regular admirers come and go and is plunged in a vast darkness to match the rest of its home. Val hoists herself up and takes a seat on the lip of the black platform, letting her legs dangle gently in front of her. Stella smiles encouragingly at the young woman on the stage, and in return Val cocks her head to one side, smiling back reluctantly, realising perhaps it was more than just that half glass of wine that made her so susceptible to Stella’s invasive intentions.
“Just tell me about you.”
“Well, what do you want to know?” Val asks, gingerly.
Stella’s smile fades and her eyes become intent. Val unintentionally sucks in a deep breath through her nose as an anxious shudder comes over her.
“Why are you here?” Stella challenges, as she wraps her arms around her shoulders as she positions herself comfortably and patiently awaits Val’s conte.
“Why am I here? In Europe?” Val frowns, seeking clarification from Stella, who instead sits silently, without ceding, staring back at her. The air in the bar is thick with anticipation, and Val knows the only way out of here tonight is to answer the question, whichever way she can.
“Oh, I don’t know. I guess I was feeling sorry for myself. Why does anyone do anything this dramatic? Either that or I was trying to prove something to someone. Maybe both, really.
“I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. I thought I’d be a playwright, but I can’t seem to find something worth writing about. I guess that’s also why I’m here.”
Val pauses and looks down at her feet which have stopped dangling and now are static, as if to not take away any attention from the thoughts transpiring in Val’s head. She shifts her weight and sits on both her hands, passively nibbling at the skin on her bottom lip.
“Can I ask you something?” Val says after a beat, looking back up at Stella now, whose cheek is resting on her palm, held up by her other arm crossed at her chest. She doesn’t say anything, but slowly blinks and nods so lightly that an onlooker would not even notice any movement at all.
“Why do you never see people in Europe walking around running errands in their tracksuit pants? Why is everyone always so put together?” Val doesn’t wait for an answer and instead allows her voice to pursue this train of thought.
“Just once I’d like to see around these parts a thirty something year old woman with her hair all messy, wearing a dirty pair of tracksuit pants and a t-shirt too big for her, as she goes and buys herself some chips or ice-cream or something cause her asshole of a fiancé just left her for the third time.”
Stella smiles affectionately at the young woman’s choice of words. She enjoys hearing Val speak, and makes sure to remain entirely quiet so as to not disrupt a delicate stream of consciousness that with any minute disruption could relinquish to its fragility and cease to exist for Stella’s amusement.
“I think that’s part of this whole Europe thing, it’s… it’s an allure. People from where I’m from think of Europeans, Parisians, Italians and the likes, as these mystical beings that all have their lives together and wear dresses and suits into town not because they’re hiding something, but because they have nothing to hide. Maybe if we go to Europe that’s how we’ll feel too. The grass is always greener on the other side. Or rather the cobblestones are always shinier someplace else.
“But people don’t know what happens behind closed doors. Just because a well-dressed woman isn’t weeping on her way to the shops to buy ice cream, it doesn’t mean her insides aren’t burning with the pain of something she has been conditioned to think is reserved for the four walls of her intimate bedroom. Just because she is put together and her hair isn’t messy as she goes to her three-o’clock appointment with the therapist without whom she wouldn’t be able to process the magnitude of her suffering, doesn’t mean she sleeps soundly at night.
“This external portrayal means nothing, if her heart is heavy and broken. Her clean shoes mean nothing if she still wishes she could stop in the middle of the street and just yell, at the top of her lungs, ‘He fucked someone else. That bastard fucked someone else’.
Val pauses and returns her gaze to Stella, after it had wandered to the other tables of the bar and beyond, past the rain-streaked window panes and onto the cold and frigid street. Stella looks back, smirking and holds her stare. After a moment, Val’s eyes return to the floor, confused as to how she got here, to the point of such expression, and concerning a notion she’d never actively given much thought to before tonight.
“And… the shit things still exist,” Val continues her voice slightly lower than before, “but so does this stupid tradition, this grandiose, pompous practice of pretending nothing happened.” She looks back at Stella.
“Why do people look away when someone is crying in public? Do we not all cry? Do we not all feel pain? Immeasurable and unimaginably isolating pain? Do we not all weep? Do we not all cry almost as often as we laugh?”
Val takes a breath. Her face relaxes, almost as if giving in to a force greater than her own emotional intelligence.
“It’s dumb and it’s not human. To have to adjust one’s outward perception based on environmental expectations, when one is facing an internal turmoil bigger than oneself. Sometimes a turmoil bigger than all of us put together. To have to hide the very things, the very emotions that prove life, that prove sentience. Isn’t that the total opposite of humanity? Of truth?”
