Enter your email Address

ENTROPY
  • About
    • About
    • Masthead
    • Advertising
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Info on Book Reviews
  • Essays
    • All Introspection
      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Variations on a Theme: Individuation

      February 27, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Our Side Of The Clouds

      February 26, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Side Effects May Include Monstrosity

      February 25, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      WOVEN: Bruises Around the Heart

      February 24, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Individuation

      February 27, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Radio Days

      February 23, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Daddy Rocked the Baby, Mother Said Amen

      February 20, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: The End of the World

      February 9, 2021

  • Fiction
    • Fiction

      BLACKCACKLE: Cain, Knocking

      February 24, 2021

      Fiction

      The Birds: A Bird Heart for Forgiveness

      February 19, 2021

      Fiction

      New Skin

      February 17, 2021

      Fiction

      The Birds: Skittering

      February 17, 2021

      Fiction

      Variations on a Theme: Larger Than Life

      February 6, 2021

  • Reviews
    • All Collaborative Review Video Review
      Review

      Review: To Limn / Lying In by J’Lyn Chapman

      February 25, 2021

      Review

      Review: Nudes by Elle Nash

      February 22, 2021

      Review

      Burials Free of Sharks: Review of Xandria Phillips’ Hull

      February 18, 2021

      Review

      Review: Censorettes by Elizabeth Bales Frank

      February 4, 2021

      Collaborative Review

      Attention to the Real: A Conversation

      September 3, 2020

      Collaborative Review

      A Street Car Named Whatever

      February 22, 2016

      Collaborative Review

      Black Gum: A Conversational Review

      August 7, 2015

      Collaborative Review

      Lords of Waterdeep in Conversation

      February 25, 2015

      Video Review

      Entropy’s Super Mario Level

      September 15, 2015

      Video Review

      Flash Portraits of Link: Part 7 – In Weakness, Find Strength

      January 2, 2015

      Video Review

      Basal Ganglia by Matthew Revert

      March 31, 2014

      Video Review

      The Desert Places by Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss, Illustrated by Matt Kish

      March 21, 2014

  • Small Press
    • Small Press

      OOMPH! Press

      February 24, 2021

      Small Press

      Dynamo Verlag

      February 17, 2021

      Small Press

      Abalone Mountain Press

      February 3, 2021

      Small Press

      Gordon Hill Press

      December 8, 2020

      Small Press

      Evidence House

      November 24, 2020

  • Where to Submit
  • More
    • Poetry
    • Interviews
    • Games
      • All Board Games Video Games
        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC

        February 12, 2021

        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: Lady of the West

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Paperback and Anomia

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: The Real Leeds Part 12 (Once in a Lifetime)

        November 10, 2018

        Video Games

        HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC

        February 12, 2021

        Video Games

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Video Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Video Games

        Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is the Spirit of Generosity

        December 31, 2018

    • Food
    • Small Press Releases
    • Film
    • Music
    • Paranormal
    • Travel
    • Art
    • Graphic Novels
    • Comics
    • Current Events
    • Astrology
    • Random
  • RESOURCES
  • The Accomplices
    • THE ACCOMPLICES
    • Enclave
    • Trumpwatch

ENTROPY

  • About
    • About
    • Masthead
    • Advertising
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Info on Book Reviews
  • Essays
    • All Introspection
      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Variations on a Theme: Individuation

      February 27, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Our Side Of The Clouds

      February 26, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Side Effects May Include Monstrosity

      February 25, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      WOVEN: Bruises Around the Heart

      February 24, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Individuation

      February 27, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Radio Days

      February 23, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Daddy Rocked the Baby, Mother Said Amen

      February 20, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: The End of the World

      February 9, 2021

  • Fiction
    • Fiction

      BLACKCACKLE: Cain, Knocking

      February 24, 2021

      Fiction

      The Birds: A Bird Heart for Forgiveness

      February 19, 2021

      Fiction

      New Skin

      February 17, 2021

      Fiction

      The Birds: Skittering

      February 17, 2021

      Fiction

      Variations on a Theme: Larger Than Life

      February 6, 2021

  • Reviews
    • All Collaborative Review Video Review
      Review

      Review: To Limn / Lying In by J’Lyn Chapman

      February 25, 2021

      Review

      Review: Nudes by Elle Nash

      February 22, 2021

      Review

      Burials Free of Sharks: Review of Xandria Phillips’ Hull

      February 18, 2021

      Review

      Review: Censorettes by Elizabeth Bales Frank

      February 4, 2021

      Collaborative Review

      Attention to the Real: A Conversation

      September 3, 2020

      Collaborative Review

      A Street Car Named Whatever

      February 22, 2016

      Collaborative Review

      Black Gum: A Conversational Review

      August 7, 2015

      Collaborative Review

      Lords of Waterdeep in Conversation

      February 25, 2015

      Video Review

      Entropy’s Super Mario Level

      September 15, 2015

      Video Review

      Flash Portraits of Link: Part 7 – In Weakness, Find Strength

      January 2, 2015

      Video Review

      Basal Ganglia by Matthew Revert

      March 31, 2014

      Video Review

      The Desert Places by Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss, Illustrated by Matt Kish

      March 21, 2014

  • Small Press
    • Small Press

      OOMPH! Press

      February 24, 2021

      Small Press

      Dynamo Verlag

      February 17, 2021

      Small Press

      Abalone Mountain Press

      February 3, 2021

      Small Press

      Gordon Hill Press

      December 8, 2020

      Small Press

      Evidence House

      November 24, 2020

  • Where to Submit
  • More
    • Poetry
    • Interviews
    • Games
      • All Board Games Video Games
        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC

        February 12, 2021

        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: Lady of the West

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Paperback and Anomia

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: The Real Leeds Part 12 (Once in a Lifetime)

        November 10, 2018

        Video Games

        HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC

        February 12, 2021

        Video Games

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Video Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Video Games

        Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is the Spirit of Generosity

        December 31, 2018

    • Food
    • Small Press Releases
    • Film
    • Music
    • Paranormal
    • Travel
    • Art
    • Graphic Novels
    • Comics
    • Current Events
    • Astrology
    • Random
  • RESOURCES
  • The Accomplices
    • THE ACCOMPLICES
    • Enclave
    • Trumpwatch
Creative Nonfiction / Essay

False Start

written by Guest Contributor August 17, 2020

Image Credit: Sylwia Padiasek

 

A Thursday afternoon marked two months that I had been living with Ryan. Before, we were just a girl and a guy who’d been dating a few weeks in Manhattan. We were the couple twirling their pasta at little Italian places with their elbows touching strangers, kissing outside bars, returning to separate apartments, phones lighting up with I had so much fun texts. Then the quarantine began. Now I was also Ryan’s roommate, staring at his bananas, waiting for them to ripen so I could bake them into bread, skirting around the question: should I leave?

I used to have an idea of what love felt like in your early 20s: thrilling, short-lived, apart from daily life. I was accustomed to leaving and being left, and it alarmed me to think of relying on anyone other than myself.

In January, I matched with Ryan on Hinge and met him for drinks at a bar in Hell’s Kitchen. We sat in a corner booth, sipping on cocktails, our knees touching once in the night. He was earning a medical degree, smart and even-tempered, with brown eyes and undercut black hair. He had a big aquarium, he told me, where he took care of fish and coral and hermit crabs. In February I told Ryan that I was the star and he was the rock. He found this funny.

“Do I have to be a rock?” he said.

“You can be a coral,” I said.

“Which makes you,” he told me, “my zooxanthellae.”

Later, I looked up the word. I read about the little organisms that attach to coral and make it their home, giving the coral its color.

So we began dating. We walked through downtown Manhattan, met friends in tiny bars, kissed goodbye in the Port Authority underground.

Then one morning I woke up in Ryan’s apartment to Governor Cuomo’s stay-at-home order. The next couple hours distorted. We entered a wormhole. I don’t remember choosing to stay; I just stayed. I watched as Ryan cleared out a drawer for me, as our motions compressed within the walls. We made gnocchi for dinner and talked politely at the table. Balancing our plates in the dishwasher, I wondered what was going to happen to us.

I began to acquaint myself with his apartment, with the correct way to maneuver around the hard corners of the bed in darkness, with the silverware drawer and each TV remote. At night, I listened to him sleep and moved my knee closer against his back to make sure we were still alive. One day I drew Ryan at his kitchen table, the sun filtering in through the window, sketching his face, shadowing below his eyebrows, shaping his chin. I watched him play Animal Crossing from the other side of the couch and felt like he was my brother.

All day, we heard the sirens. They cut through the silence, the red lights flashing on the street. 20 minutes later, there was another one. How many of the people strapped into the stretcher in the back would die from coronavirus? 538 deaths in a day. A tent hospital in Central Park. A Navy ship docked in Hell’s Kitchen, a few avenues over from where we had our first date.

We went for a walk along the Hudson River and passed a dog park locked in chains. A woman pushing a baby zipped up in a stroller. She was saying something, to herself or the baby, her lips hidden behind her mask. We did not meet eyes as we passed by, each clinging to opposite sides of the pavement. Ryan and I were holding hands, did not let go until we arrived back in the apartment, washed with soap and water, threw our clothes in the laundry. We discovered the flowers on our Animal Crossing island, Ryland, had bloomed.

One evening, Ryan rested his head on my lap. I brushed the skin of his cheek with my hand and forgot the time. He was falling asleep. There was only this moment—I lost track of the others: a career I had been planning for, nights I used to have to myself in bed with a book, dinners with friends. I craned my neck until the second it hurt, whispering as close as I could to his ear, that I loved him.

I knew I had come to rely on him, that now he, and he alone, was my daily life. I felt like the couple in the last scene of Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. They are sailing together and make the Captain hoist the yellow flag of cholera. They bypass the ports, forget the other passengers. Their ship is in quarantine. They only have each other. I remembered the lines: “they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death.”

I looked at Ryan and knew we had not been living together long enough to possibly understand these things, and yet I felt that we did. What was the truth? Because it was a lie, of course, in Love in the Time of Cholera: their yellow flag, the quarantine itself, fabricated to shut out the world. For them, quarantine was born from love; it was something they chose. Any form of separation amounted to death.

But for us, love was born from quarantine, and I knew our separation would come, like the end of a magic trick. Making this life together was a false start, a temporary fix for conditions we could not control. I knew there was something bigger looming—something solid—that was waiting to come back to us. Yet the dreamlike monotony of the days began to seduce me. I felt more and more like an heiress, making her way through the rooms of an apartment that is suddenly hers, stealing time. We were young. I had just met him. Nothing was owed. And yet, everything was amplified. 10,022 deaths.

I began to dream of children, plan for a mortgage. How to merge finances? How to make a mask for a baby? Pancakes in the morning, casserole at night, lunches Tupperwared and labeled. Aprons, sewing machines, oven mitts, a dust rag and Clorox. Ryan the then-doctor, leaving the house to save lives. Me: the wife. The mother. During the Spanish flu, in 1918, that woman was my age.

That’s when the bananas started to go bad. We’d bought them on the seventh week and left a few untouched in the bowl. Brown streaks were creeping up the yellow peels, sucking out the starch. They smelled sweet, deadly. Ryan mentioned his mother’s recipe for banana bread. She sent a photo. The recipe was handwritten, dated August 2013, with stains across the paper. It had been in their family for two generations now, and I wondered if it would be in mine. I smashed the bananas, whisked the eggs. The golden brown bread steamed as I knifed it in half. I felt thwarted, like there was something I was not seeing clearly.

That night, I held Ryan’s face in my palms. His beard was growing out; he was shampooing it when he showered. We were in bed.

“At some point, I’m going to have to leave,” I reminded him.

It was the first time I had mentioned it out loud. We both knew the point to which I was referring: the return to my own apartment. And yet Ryan was quiet. Then he said, “Stay.”

I looked at Ryan. I realized what I had not seen before. In the other room, the water turned on in the fish tank, trickling like a pipe leak. Every time I had asked Ryan why he wasn’t going back home to his mother, he said it was because he couldn’t leave his fish tank for more than two weeks. If the water doesn’t get changed, the zooxanthellae break away from the coral, which then bleaches and dies. They rely on one another to live, Ryan told me. But they are not inseparable. They need the right conditions.

Through the crack in the curtains, the morning light was coming into the room. As we spoke, Governor Cuomo was extending the quarantine for another two weeks; both our parents were working in hospitals; 25-year-olds were dying. Ryan had fallen back asleep, but I felt awake. All this time, I had thought our arrangement depended on quarantine; now I saw it also depended on us, that each day we determined its conditions. The trick had ended: we wanted to live together as much as we had to. I was no longer playing a role. And I realized, though the tricks were different, we had reached the same fate as the couple in Márquez’s story. We were sailing in close quarters up against death, with some vague, timeless destination in our minds, making the choice to stay afresh each day. And it reminded me of another Márquez line: “it is life, more than death, that has no limits.”

I looked back at Ryan, murmuring something in his sleep.

“Okay,” I said. “I will.”


Erin Winseman is a recent graduate of New York University’s Cultural Reporting & Criticism M.A. program based in New York City. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Middlebury College in 2017, where she was the recipient of the Mary Dunning Thwing Prize.

False Start was last modified: August 17th, 2020 by Guest Contributor
COVID-19Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez
0 comment
2
Facebook Twitter Google + Pinterest
Avatar
Guest Contributor

Entropy posts are often submitted to us by our fantastic readers & guest contributors. We'd love to receive a contribution from you too. Submission Guidelines.

previous post
The Birds: a poem
next post
The Snarlin’ Yarns – Break Your Heart

You may also like

On Weather: Storm Story

August 14, 2016

WOVEN: Bruises Around the Heart

February 24, 2021

The Words I Carry

March 15, 2018

Becky with the Good Affair: Recycled Garbage and Extinction

May 30, 2018
Facebook Twitter Instagram
"target="_blank"

Recent Comments

  • furiousvexation Loved this. Killer first line and such a painted picture. Bravo!

    The Birds: a poem ·  February 17, 2021

  • Deidra Brown Wonderful, moving work!

    The Birds: a poem ·  February 15, 2021

  • Ceres Growing up in a rural area, I've observed first-hand the disparate outlooks between urban children with environmentalist parents and children raised in the country. Modern agricultural practices...

    HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC ·  February 13, 2021

Featured Columns & Series

  • The Birds
  • Dinnerview
  • WOVEN
  • Variations on a Theme
  • BLACKCACKLE
  • Literacy Narrative
  • COVID-19
  • Mini-Syllabus
  • Their Days Are Numbered
  • On Weather
  • Disarticulations
  • The Waters
  • Session Report series
  • Birdwolf
  • Comics I've Been Geeking Out On
  • Small Press Releases
  • Books I Hate (and Also Some I Like)
  • The Poetics of Spaces
  • Tales From the End of the Bus Line
  • Fog or a Cloud
  • 30 Years of Ghibli
  • Cooking Origin Stories
  • YOU MAKE ME FEEL
  • Ludic Writing
  • Best of 2019
  • The Talking Cure
  • Food and Covid-19
  • Stars to Stories
  • DRAGONS ARE REAL OR THEY ARE DEAD
  • Foster Care
  • LEAKY CULTURE
  • Jem and the Holographic Feminisms
  • D&D with Entropy

Find Us On Facebook

Entropy
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram

©2014-2021 The Accomplices LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Read our updated Privacy Policy.


Back To Top