Every love story with three people requires someone to lose gracefully. She must be appealing enough for the choice to matter, decent enough for the audience to pity, and composed enough to disappear without contaminating the final embrace.
I have occupied that position so many times that entire rooms survive in me from stories I can no longer identify. Kitchens with yellow cabinets. Rainy train platforms. Restaurant tables where somebody reached across for my hand before eventually letting it go.
The pattern is always recognizable. I enter early and seem promising. I listen well. I remember birthdays. I possess some practical virtue that looks admirable until passion arrives wearing another face. Eventually there comes a conversation in which I understand before anyone tells me. I smile. I say something generous about happiness. I remove myself with admirable dignity and leave the ending clean.
Then I wait.
I used to believe the waiting happened nowhere, a simple absence between stories. Over time I discovered a kind of corridor filled with discarded details. There are coats I wore once, fragments of apartments, dozens of mugs, unfinished careers, engagement rings from timelines that were reconsidered.
Other women pass through occasionally. Some resemble me closely enough to be previous versions. We rarely speak because we can feel the next story approaching whenever the walls begin acquiring color.
Lately, memory has stopped clearing properly when I am reassigned. I carry old heartbreak into new plots. I recognize men before they meet me. I know which woman will enter halfway through and rearrange the emotional geometry. Sometimes I can predict my gracious speech word for word.
During the last story, I changed one sentence. Nobody reacted. The scene continued, although the man opposite me hesitated as if some internal cue had arrived late. In the story after that, I refused to smile. A paragraph seemed to repeat itself until I finally did.
Now I experiment in smaller ways. I leave objects where they should not be. I ask questions my role has no reason to ask. I have started telling the other woman that I know what she is here to do. She usually laughs at first. Once, she went pale.
I still lose. The stories seem committed to that. What has changed is the corridor afterward, where more discarded women are beginning to remember one another.
We have started comparing lines, scenes, and endings, and somewhere among us a suspicion is forming that gracious exits may have been less essential to the stories than the stories wanted us to believe.
©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
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