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Ohio is Shaped Like a Heart |
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Written by Ciara Xyerra
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Every romance novel in the workspace was finally priced, alphabetized, & shelved. I was aiming for bookstore employee double sainthood by cleaning out my bins. Sawdust scraped the covers of the novels unfortunate enough to be on the bottoms of my piles, three years after the bins had been built. They had never been dusted off or even sanded properly, so I was deep in a cubby with my sandpaper & dust mask, pondering the new stocker that had been hired. He had been described to me as tall, dark, & from Ohio. Ohio! The thought of another Buckeye State ex-patriate lurking elsewhere in the building made my heart race a little faster. Stockers often made their way into my workspace, wheeling in carts piled high with genre fiction. I hoped the Ohio boy wasn’t the one who thought Moby Dick belonged in nautical fiction. I wanted him to be intelligent, well read, & confident. I wanted to commune with his mind & retrace the pathways that had led me away from the small agricultural towns of my youth all the way out to the sprawling Portland bookstore on the river. I was homesick & thought he may be the cure.
When I had boarded the Greyhound bus in Port Clinton eight months prior, I knew I was leaving behind the parts of my life that had been familiar & comfortable, the things that had been choking me & holding me back. I wanted to see mountains, I wanted to touch the ocean, I wanted to live in a town with four-story buildings. But Portland was beginning to feel like a collective pit stop on the road of life. No one who lived in Portland was actually from Portland, but for all my searching, none of them were from Ohio either. My best friends were from California & Louisiana. They confused states like Illinois & Idaho. This mattered to me--my identity was being erased. I was becoming an urban statistic, young, tattooed, artistic, migratory. All I wanted was to call a vacuum a sweeper, a soda a pop, & not be laughed at. So I decided this mysterious new employee from Ohio would be my soulmate, or at least my best friend.
Everytime a tall, dark-haired young man wheeled a new book cart into our workspace, I ran over & demanded to know what state he was from. Several employees asked me, “We’ve worked together for seven months & you’ve never said a word to me. Why do you all of the sudden want to know what state I’m from?” From this, I determined that the men I asked weren’t new & therefore were not the new guy who would be my corn-fed darling.
After three days of torment & inquisition, I was on the floor surveying the new display I had created for the sale romance novels. The airport store had accidentally order fifty extra copies of a terrible Judith McNaught hardcover & it was up to me to move them. I heard a cart rumbling behind me, turned, & saw a tall, dark-haired man wearing corduroy pants & a hooded sweatshirt. I watched as he deposited the cart next to the coffee counter, bought a soda, & slowly made his way to the elevator. I knew it was him, the new guy from Ohio.
I raced after him & grabbed his arm as the elevator doors opened. “Excuse me,” I said, “Are you from Ohio?” One look into his face & my question was answered. His eyes were cobalt pools taken straight from the murky, polluted depths of Lake Erie. The lines around his mouth, worn in from years of sullen moping, were as straight & narrow as a row of corn on a listless July afternoon. His skin seemed to be comprised of the very reflection of the moon as gazed upon by unhappy youth dreaming of the big city.
“Yes,” he replied, in a perplexed tone. “Are you from Ohio too?”
“Yes!” I yelled, taking his hands & smiling into the Midwestern perfection of his placid face.
“You’re the girl everyone has been telling me about. As soon as people found out I was from Ohio, they told me, ‘You have to find the girl with the hair that sticks up all over & too much eyeliner. She’s from Ohio too.’”
“Well, I guess that’s me,” I replied.
We talked for perhaps an hour, sitting on a bench in the cozy Stephen King corner. We talked about his skateboarding, music we both liked, parties we’d been invited to, the bookstore union, books we were reading. His opinions were strong & contrary, & he had read one of my zines. “I needed something to read on a till shift,” he told me,” & your zine caught my eye. I didn’t know you worked here. I thought it was really good, but really forceful. I thought about writing you, because you included an address, but I didn’t think you’d reply.”
Of course, my racing heart melted into a red puddle. I grasped his t-shirt sleeve rapturously, imagining late nights walking through the streets & sipping cocoa, reading books back to back at the library on rainy days, maybe even road-tripping to Ohio someday, stopping at all the presidential monuments & the space museum. He was a little piece of glimpsing the first lights of Cincinnati as the hills roll by in the distance, right there next to me, explaining why he loathes cats (because “they move too fast”). I tried to win his heart a few days later by giving him a free ticket to see a band we both liked, but I only got a hug, not the date I anticipated. I let him drift away again, until I finished my new zine. I gave him a copy with my phone number on the inside cover. He said he’d call me in three days, but I only waited until the following afternoon to invite him out with me.
We ate candy & tussled at a playground. We climbed a small bluff & looked down on all the sparkling lights in the city, like the stars we had stared at growing up I small dark Midwestern towns. That night I finally kissed my Ohio boy. We were standing in the doorway of my apartment. He had carried my bike up the steps for me, & thought it was strange I had nowhere to put it. I always locked it up at the street sign next to the driveway, but I wanted an excuse to invite him in. He was backing slowly out the door & I asked him, “Do you want to kiss me?”
He laughed, an uncomfortable laugh. “I don’t know. I feel weird. I like you a lot.”
“I like you too,” I said, & kissed him. He tasted delicious, like tractor exhaust & sweet corn & the rain right after a tornado. He tasted like Akron & Toledo, my industrial cities, & he tasted like the honeysuckle flowers I used to eat when I was five years old, waiting for the kindergarten shuttle bus. I ran my hand down his ribcage, like railroad tracks that go on for miles until they disappear into a horizon of scattered forests & marshy fallow fields. I touched the place where his belly sank into his body, so skinny like the slats on a falling down barn, like the kittens I rescued from the ditches & I wanted to rescue him & be his Ohio soulmate. But we only kissed once. That’s all it took. I pressed my head against his shoulder, his damp jacket smelling just like the upholstery of a car after the windows were left open in a thunderstorm. He was everything I loved & loathed about the past. He was everything I had already left behind.
But I couldn’t leave him behind. I have carried him with me like a talisman, a piece of something I have loved with abandon, something I wouldn’t give up without a fight. He has been like homemade buckeyes, rafting through the flooded backyard in a toboggan, heat lightning in Indian summer, all typewritten on the backs of old maps & sheets of graph paper. I plucked him up out of my past & took him with me into the future. |
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