“The Books of Self-Loss” by Junot Díaz

This is the seventh story in this summer’s online Flash Fiction series. Read the full series and our Flash Fiction stories from previous years here.

“Beloved” was the first time we read together. In second grade, when you were still with your boyfriend Moreno and I was living in that cold apartment in Easton. That was the year you did everything you could to be Assata—from your hair to your books, your clothes, your classes. I was still suspicious of everything about the community, but I read what you gave me and when I didn’t have shifts, I went to your gatherings, always taking the sheets you handed out like I didn’t know you. Your boyfriend never came or you never invited him—I didn’t ask him which one. I bought a paperback for both of us because I had the better job.“Today is always here,” Sethe said. “Tomorrow is never here.”) What I remember is the fog of your breath as you read it in my bed, your dark, narrow shoulders hunched over the pages. You asked me if I cried at the end. I tried to laugh at first, then seeing your expression – the girl who never had a friend in high school – I tried to answer but you turned to the frosted window, not believing me.

Freshman year, I was the one with someone. My white girlfriend went home to Cherry Hill every Friday to see her family, she was always back on campus on Saturday. Which meant Friday nights were ours, when we danced like crazy. You stuck to me, I stuck to you. Saturday mornings, we ran together, no matter what we had drunk the night before. All across New Brunswick, back when there was no gentrification. You were fit, I was just there to sweat. Two solid months with us and then for spring break, you gave me “nervous conditions” (We coexisted in peaceful detachment) and a week later you said, we should really stop this. And I stupidly said, why? Our last race and someone was protesting on College Avenue and I didn’t hear from you for six months, which is a decade at the university. You spent that summer in Barcelona and I ended up with the book because you left it in my room.

The next time I saw you, on campus, senior year, you had shaved the sides of your head like Storm and were working in Brower Commons, because we all had to work, and after I finished my lunch I tried to talk to you but you pushed me away. He doesn’t mean anything, you told me, to your girls on the bench. I heard about your program in Barcelona from your brother, how you spent every weekend training in Europe and sleeping in the resorts and how at the very end, in August, you made a solo pilgrimage to the mountain of “The Sound of Music”—Mehlweg (why do I still remember that name?). “The Sound of Music” was your favorite musical, it helped you survive your mother and Paterson, but none of your study abroad friends joined you—they went to Morocco—and you ended up going alone. You met a young Japanese Korean girl on a tour – her last trip before she started working full time at her father’s muffler factory. She was in her twenties, drinking wine and something else I don’t remember. You two toured Switzerland, made friends over Oshin (which you watched in DR), and she didn’t believe you’d learned Japanese until you’d written a few characters, then she was more than enthusiastic, and invited you to Kagoshima to stay with her family. Kagoshima is the real Japan, she said. Not Tokyo. Not Kyoto. When, at the last inn, she kissed you, you didn’t stop her but you didn’t encourage her either, and that was it. You heard a neighbor yelling about something in Finnish but you didn’t hear your heart, which was a sign, I guess. The next day she just watched the rain while you wrote a letter to your brother and by afternoon she was gone, no address, no number, and you finished your von Trapp journey alone. That fall you took up Japanese again and, looking at yourself – in the dining room, in the Douglass Library, on George Street – it was obvious that you had changed but I couldn’t, at the time, explain how.

I came to your room once to bring back the book, but we just talked, you in your shorts and me with your dumbbells. Was there a chance that night? Maybe, but I didn’t want to throw it all away, my new fiancée, my unhappy certainty, and maybe you felt the same way. I kept the book until the last second and you kept hitting my arm and laughing, with your big perfect teeth. In your photos from Europe, your kissing friend is tall and tense, a pearl necklace in a hyphen around her pale neck. You, on the other hand, look downright elated, your eyes like golondrinas, ready to defy all laws, all gravity. Months later, I got a call from you. You were leaving for Japan, without any warning. Do you love me? you asked. I didn’t expect that, and by the time I got somewhere private, you had already hung up.

And then “Abeng” arrived in the mail. No signature, no return address, nothing. Just my name typed neatly on the envelope and an old edition, with only one underline. All the forces that worked to keep these people in slavery were now working to keep them in poverty. It was many years later and by then I was already living in Boston. As I was leafing through the book, I remembered the weekend you took your final exam in my room. Was it on Cliff, on “Abeng”? Maybe? Maybe not? But I remember watching movies on my torn up couch and no one called us all weekend, not your boyfriend, not my girlfriend, and you looked me straight in the eye like I was something that could make sense, and I don’t think I’ve ever been happier. ♦