CHAPTER I
HOMEOSTASIS
Pondering the phone in my hand, I pretend it isn’t really ringing.
“Who’s that?!” Olivia asks, creeping up beside me.
“No one,” I reply with disinterest.
Pocketing the device, I look up just in time to catch her dirty look.
“What?!”
Olivia rolls her eyes, then, with practiced affection, grabs my arm and leads the walk away from the movie theater, down East Twelfth street.
As we stroll home towards Alphabet City, the sun is out working overtime in the late summer evening, bathing a gallery of tourists and natives. Identifying somewhere between the two after three years of study at NYU, I must say I don’t hate living in New York City. Cynicism has always been part of my DNA as a native Bostonian and so I fit perfectly here.
Still, in any form, in any city, beauty is hard to ignore; lukewarm evening sunlight hits me with a picturesque vision encompassing a few of the brick edifices ahead, the vibrant graffiti defying decorum and the luscious shine of the asphalt road ahead of us.
These are all familiar facets of NYC, things I’ve seen before, but today they appear flagrantly, fresh to perceive.
Sometimes, beauty can be forceful.
On cue, the fiery, beautiful force of a woman holding my arm starts a speech she has been repressing or practicing internally since silence began a minute ago. She lets out a sigh first and then starts with, “Mi amor, I just think it’s petty that–”
“Oh…petty?”
“Petty…hypocritical even, that you punish your father for never spending time with you…by ducking his phone calls.”
“Not that simple!” I quickly reply. “It’s not just about him not spending time with me or…argh…Olive, you know it’s not that simple,” I stutter with self-doubt.
It’s not that simple?
“Seems pretty simple…to me,” she says sweetly, not judging me but trying in some way to make sure I’m happy with my recent choices.
Hugging my left arm tightly, she comes closer, trying to pacify.
“You still remember why I’m pissed, right?” I ask gently.
“Y-yeah…uhm, fair enough,” the awkward truth forces her to stutter. “It’s sweet of you to defend me…us. I just…uhm, he…just thought we were, maybe…rushing things. He was just–”
“Being an asshole?” I offer the sentence-predicate with a purposefully sullen scowl at Olivia, uninterested in taking on her new ideas about my old man.
Olivia smirks, meeting my stubbornness with the usual good humor.
“He’ll come around,” She encourages. “I’m amazing and he just needs to meet me a few more times.”
I chuckle, unconvinced and still discouraged on the topic of fathers.
“Just want you to be happy, big-head,” she says with a serious expression.
Leaning in to kiss her lips, mine say, “I am happy…with you. Very happy.”
She blushes, satisfied with that message.
We cross Second Avenue, smitten like some tragic star-crossed lovers, tangled quantumly, caught in a shared trance that has lasted over three years since we met freshman year.
Olivia Marcella Greene is of Dominican descent, raised in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, and a rising senior at the New York University College of Arts and Sciences, like me.
She was orphaned at fourteen. I lost my mother at eight.
Although, once upon a time I had thought myself supremely scarred by my mother’s relatively meek passing, the violent car crash eight years ago that took hers, as well as a father, electroplatedOlivia’s personality.
That part is hard to see for most but hard to ignore for someone like me who, sprung beyond deliverance, has made her the subject of intimate investigation. Every micro-movement, every look, every smile, every quip and quirk, every outburst catalogued and still cataloguing.
Tragically, even after being together for so long, I know better than anyone that she can be as warm as she can be cold with me, able to switch temperatures at whim.
But then again, that is the best part about Ms. Greene; she is spontaneous as–
“Fuck, I almost forgot! Guess what?” Olivia quickly veers off.
A particular greatness of this long-standing tradition of our ‘guess what?’ game lies in the inevitability of surprise, mostly good or never any worse than laughably sad news. Another great thing is that I have never actually had to guess.
“What?!” I ask with genuine interest.
“I can come see your game on Friday,” she says, beaming at me excitedly with bright green eyes. “I got someone to cover my shift!”
“Really?” I beam as we stroll together.
Ours is an NCAA Division-Three team but still a competitive one that I co-captain this year.
Olivia Greene is our biggest fan, mine at least.
In fact, I don’t think I would be half as engaged if she didn’t show up to most of our games. Friday would have been an exception but…
“Yeah,” she says flashing her bright smile for only short second. “Pero, you have to promise to chill with the extra jumping,” she says as we slow our walk at the sight of our apartment building entrance. “Last game, you nearly hit your head on the freaking rim!”
“Here I am, trying to impress my girl,” I make a silly face in playful despondence.
She winks at me proudly and then kisses my silly face.
God, I’m lucky.
Perhaps it is just lipstick containing pure oxytocin: I want to ask this woman how she has bewitched me into such love but, I do not mind it in the slightest. In fact, it is a most pacifying symbiosis between us because lately all else has been chaos.
I’m not sure that she knows how lucky I feel to have her.
I try to say it in words as often as I can these days – ‘I love you’ – but words never seem equal to the sentiment in mind.
We have been living together for the last six weeks. The small four hundred square feet one-bedroom apartment in the middle of Alphabet City feels like home already.
It all makes me feel…homeostatic.
Olivia laughs as we walk hand in hand up the narrow stairs. “Isn’t that a biology term?” she asks. “Mister political scientist,” she adds with facetious wit.
Olivia is a Pre-Med student, Bio-Chemistry major specifically.
She and Dad actually have a lot more in common than either realizes.
I chuckle half-heartedly, thinking unintentionally of the man again. “Yeah. Homeostasis. It’s a word my dad used to use. I like it. It makes me sounds like–”
“An asshole?” Olive inquires with a huge grin.
