Page 14 of A Curse for the Homesick

STANFORD

2014

When I showed up for International Student Orientation, I was given a key to a room with two small mattresses wrapped in blue nylon. To orient us, they told us important cultural things, like that Americans took lines very seriously, and if you cut them at the waffle station, they would hunt you down and murder your family. There was only one other international student on my hall, and for the first few days, we were the only ones there. His name was Samir. We met in the hallway on the way to the bathrooms, both of us holding toothbrushes.

He said hi. I said hi.

“Are you enjoying learning how to stand in line?” he asked.

“I’m more intrigued by the waffle station, to be honest.”

He told me his name, and I told him mine, and then he asked where I was from, which seemed like more of a formality than an actual question because it said where I was from on the piece of paper the RAs had taped to my door.

“Stenland,” I said. “You?”

“My mum’s Jordanian,” he said. “My dad’s Brazilian. I grew up in Quebec. Complicated, but whose life isn’t?”

“My mum’s Stennish. My dad’s Stennish. I grew up in Stenland.”

“I suppose that’s not very complicated,” he conceded. “Which one’s Stenland again?”

“East of the Faroe Islands, north of Shetland.”

“Near Norway?”

“West of that.”

“So…middle of nowhere?”

I nodded.

“Is it the one with the whale hunts or the one with the stone disease?” Samir asked.

“The latter.”

He whistled. It was a nice sound. He was a nice-looking person, all thick hair and dimples when he smiled. His build was like Henrik’s, that of someone who lifted up a lot of heavy things and set them down again. He wasn’t Soren; I reminded myself this was a good thing and not a bad one.

We made plans to get dinner together that night; I put my number in his phone, and he texted me right away with a smiley face. When I saw the shape of his name on my screen, I thought, for a second, it was Soren . For the rest of the time I would know Samir, every time he texted me, I would look at my screen out of the corner of my eye and think it said Soren.

* * *

The American students poured in a few days later. Flustered parents wore red hoodies. RAs offered to help unpack IKEA lamps with fanatical intensity. I met my roommate, Bianca. She was from DC, and everything she owned was yellow.

We were all so squished together that I fell into step with the rest of my dorm without really thinking about it. Samir and I went swimming at the pool. Bianca helped me choose classes. In the early mornings, when it was afternoon for Kitty and Linnea, I’d call them and show them around campus with my phone camera. On account of her hatred of calls, Kitty only sometimes picked up, but when she did, I felt the knot in my chest loosen like a hand unclenching.

“And this is another palm tree,” I’d say, panning my camera. “And this is a fountain, but there’s no water in it because we’re in a drought.”

“It feels like you’re a million miles away,” Linnea said.

“And a million miles closer to the sun,” Kitty said. “Your video gives me a headache.”

The campus left me with the sensation that I’d accidentally stumbled out of one genre and into another. I wasn’t used to the color palette, all red roofs and dusty earth and azure sky. I wasn’t used to the smell of eucalyptus trees and freshly mown grass. Even the speed of the world seemed to shift, though I couldn’t tell if it was going faster or slower. Maybe the world was going faster, but I was moving through it more slowly. I got it in my head that I would feel normal again as soon as it rained, but it never did. It was never even cloudy. If you had a sunstone here, you’d never need to use it.

* * *

I declared a mechanical engineering major in my second month. My academic advisor told me it was quite early, and wouldn’t I rather explore my options? I said no thanks.

For Christmas, my dad tried to convince me to come home, but now that I was gone, I was positive, absolutely certain that I would become a skeld the moment I went back. I told him the plane ticket was too expensive.

One of the local students from my hall, a guy named Damian, told me I could crash in his guest house while the dorms were closed, no sweat. It was roughly the size of Kitty’s home. I wondered if there was any way to sufficiently thank his parents for having me and concluded there was not. To be unobtrusive, I spent the break doing math problems from the next quarter’s textbooks. When that started to make my head hurt, I read winding fantasy sagas and watched nature documentaries on the guest house TV. Sometimes I’d go for walks in a December air so warm I didn’t need a jacket and listen to podcasts about global affairs, reminding myself that the world was wider than Stenland.

On Christmas, when my phone lit up with a new text, my heart exploded into a thousand tiny pieces. It was Samir asking if Damian’s house was as posh as rumors would lead him to believe. I put my phone in a drawer and didn’t let myself look at it for the rest of the day.

As the end of the academic year crept closer, my dad started asking me to come home again. I frantically applied for jobs until I had one, as a lifeguard and swim instructor at a summer camp at Lake Tahoe. My dad congratulated me and said, “This Christmas, though?”

I was beginning to wonder if I could go my entire life without going back.

By May, Damian had decided my dating life was getting tragic and that he would set me up with someone as a present. I was at dinner with him and Bianca at the time.

“I don’t think I want to be set up with someone,” I said.

“Sure you do!” Damian said. “It’ll be fun.”

We were eating burrito bowls that had one uniform flavor despite containing seventeen ingredients. Our table was a sticky diner-style booth. Every few minutes, a group of people we knew would pass, some dressed for studying, some dressed for going out. We were dressed for going out already; I’d been informed we would be going to the Row and attending a frat party at one of the houses some of our dormmates had joined. I had also been informed that staying in my room doing math was not an option.

“Mmm,” I said.

“Come on. How long has it been since you got laid?”

Bianca swatted Damian on the chest. “Don’t be reductive.”

He frowned like he was thinking. “Is it reductive, really, or just indelicate?”

“Soren was eons ago,” Bianca said. “It doesn’t seem like the worst thing to get back out there.”

Hearing her say his name made me feel ill. I pushed away my burrito bowl.

Something I’d learned quickly upon my arrival was that one’s sexual history was a seemingly inexhaustible mine of gossip and conversational value. Everyone had dug through everyone’s social media, and I had been informed that Soren was “actually pretty hot, especially if he got a better haircut.” Even though none of these people had ever met him, it elevated my standing among them that he had deemed me worthy. Everyone constantly tried to outdo everyone else’s exploits while pretending they weren’t actually that titillated by the competition.

In my first week, in a game of Never Have I Ever, the first thing out of Damian’s mouth had been, Never have I ever been caught fucking in my car in a parking lot by a mall cop.

Half the people I’d been sitting with had clapped their hands and put a finger down, and I must’ve looked confused because someone had turned to me and very sympathetically said, Have you never had sex?

I’d said, I’ve never been to a mall .

There was a strange tension to the whole thing because everyone spoke rather exhaustingly about how having a lot of sex or a bit of sex or no sex at all were equally great choices. Spunky RAs threw condoms at us but also reminded us that abstinence was neat too, if that was what we were into. For all their insistence that none of it mattered, everyone seemed to care a lot.

And I didn’t hate being asked about it. Because it gave me an excuse to talk about Soren. To show off a picture so I could be told he was actually pretty hot. If I was feeling boring and tame for spending so much time doing homework, I could casually mention that we’d once had sex in a sixteenth-century tower. If I was feeling bitter, I could rehash the story of our breakup in exacting detail. At the end, someone would say, He just expected you to throw your whole life away to stay there? What a dick.

Even when I said terrible things about Soren, I always liked saying them. Because it was the only thing I still had of him, and it was the only thing I still had of the version of me I was with him.

“He hasn’t texted you, has he?” Damian asked. “Classic ex thing to do. Text you right when you’re getting over them.”

“No,” I said. “He hasn’t texted me.”

“And thank god for that,” Bianca said. “I still can’t believe that bastard wanted you to just stay there for him.”

“Thanks, Bianca.”

“You’re welcome. Let’s get drunk.”

* * *

The floor of the frat was so sticky it felt like my shoes were suction-cupped to the tile. Over the speakers, the bass thumped loudly enough that you couldn’t hear other parts of the song. I thought of how excited Lukas had been about the prospect of American frat parties. If I saw him again, I would explain the rules to rage cage.

I was wearing a thin black dress and white tennis shoes that probably wouldn’t be white much longer. Outside, it was too cold, but as soon as I stepped inside, it was too hot. Bianca handed me a beer of unknown origin, and Damian made a beeline for our most attractive RA, who would be allowed to date members of our dorm at year’s end.

A hand reached through the crowd and grabbed me. I startled, but then relaxed again when I found myself chest to chest with Samir.

“That’s a great dress!” he shouted into my ear.

I nodded my thanks.

“How’s the night going?”

I gave him a thumbs-up.

“You really don’t say that much, do you?”

I laughed and yelled, “It’s just loud,” and he said something to that, but I couldn’t make out what and didn’t ask him to repeat himself.

People kept jostling me from behind, and every time Samir and I got pressed closer, we didn’t move apart again. He was sweaty and I was sweaty and the music was too loud to think over. I felt, in my stomach, some of that old want that had felt so big I thought it would consume me. When I kissed him, he kissed me back.

At some point he started shouting about whether or not I wanted to go back to the dorm, and I shouted that I did. The walk back wasn’t as cold as the walk out had been. We got to our hall, and he asked if I wanted to go to his room. I said yes again. On his bed, we started kissing, and he asked if I wanted to have sex, so I said yes a third time and he went to lock the door and text his roommate to go get some mozzarella sticks at Late Night for a while.

I lay back on his pillows, and he climbed on top of me, his dark hair a wave off his forehead.

“These are nice pillowcases,” I said.

“I think they’re bamboo.”

“Ah. Sustainable.”

“You know what they say. Nothing sexier than sustainable home goods.”

He took off his own shirt. This might not have been weird in the abstract, but I’d always taken off Soren’s clothing and he’d always taken off mine, so it struck me as transactional and presumptive to remove your own. Just to be fair, I took off my dress.

Objectively, Samir was probably better at sex than Soren. He did things that felt good, and he kept asking what I liked. I kept saying, “That’s great.” It seemed to last a long time, which literature had taught me to believe meant it was good, but mostly I felt tired. When it was done, I didn’t feel an insatiable pit of want, but I wasn’t sure I felt satisfied either. He didn’t kiss my temple.

“That was fun,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Same.”

“See you in line for waffles tomorrow?”

“I’ll try not to cut.”

I gathered up my dress and shoes and went to take a shower. I had a feeling the two of us wouldn’t do that again, Samir and me. In the hot water, I stared at the tile and let my arms hang by my sides.

I didn’t know why I would feel like I belonged to Soren less after sleeping with someone else, since I’d never felt like having sex made me his. But I felt further from him now, more my own person, less his girlfriend, less someone who was hoping he would change his mind. I have now had sex with two people. I wondered, in this place where that seemed to be such a valuable currency, if this in turn made me a more interesting person.

The hot water never ran out. It just went and went and went.

I felt so much better. I felt so much worse.