No Regrets, Coyote
Photograph by Carina Cain
By Carina Cain
Our friendship didn’t really make sense. Not from above water. I was the barnacle and Vic was the whale. Vic swam and I enjoyed the ride. It went like this, from the very first day we met, until the winter we had to part. From my perch on Vic’s back, I sunk into the lull of second-hand motion and always looked up to watch as the sun shot through that first layer of delicate water. Watching the glow. Whenever we broke the surface, Vic acted like it was something we had both engineered. We both knew, though: I actually provided little momentum. But Vic never tried to pry me off, and laughed at my jokes, and loved me. When I thought too hard about how Vic loved me, I usually ended up crying. Vic didn’t know about that, and that’s how I liked it.
*
“It’s hard for you to trust people, isn’t it,” Vic said.
Vic only said this because we were stuck in traffic on the San Mateo bridge. Zero movement. Any sort of stasis made Vic inquisitive. A minivan was blasting Katy Perry behind us. And it wasn’t even so much a question as it was a declaration, that’s how I knew there would be no wiggling out of an answer.
“That’s a fair assessment,” I said.
“Is it because you don’t trust people or because you’re afraid to trust people?”
It was late September and the grain of the sun was just beginning to soften. We were close friends by this point. Never in my life had I become attached to someone so quickly and so thoroughly.
It wasn’t until Katy got to the chorus of “Firework” that I settled on a response. “Well, I trust you.”
Vic patted my hand. “But I’m the exception.”
I didn’t argue with this and Vic sighed. “June, things might be easier if you opened yourself up to more people.”
“I agree,” I said.
And I did, but I also had a hard time explaining to Vic that opening up to more people involved hours of trust exercises that I simply did not have the energy for. And that I had a working system of trust. I assigned different levels of trust to all of the different people in my life. My people pyramid. Vic was high up there. And I was at the top.
“Well, you can talk to me about anything.”
“I know, I do.”
“Yes, but I have to use a very specific line of questioning.”
“I know. And you’re so good at it.”
Vic sighed and patted my hand again. “And you’re so good at deflecting.”
I looked at Vic and we caught each other in a smile.
“Boom, boom, boom,” Katy sang behind us.
“Even brighter than the moon, moon, moon,” I crooned back.
“My god,” Vic said and dropped my hand to reach for the AUX cord. “Suddenly I’m thirteen and throwing up hard lemonade at the school dance. What Joni Mitchell album should we listen to?”
*
We met right after college ended, which is the strangest and most obnoxious time ever. I was working at a bougie Mediterranean restaurant near my off-campus house on Piedmont Avenue and was really hating every minute of it. My BA was just a piece of paper and seemed particularly irrelevant inside the impenetrable tech empire bubble that had quickly inflated around the entire Bay Area. A sociology degree was no needle, so I waited tables. My parents were aghast, so I lied about my hourly salary. I was adrift, so I browsed Zillow every morning looking at multi-million-dollar houses in Atherton. It went like this.
Things weren’t bad, they were just weird and felt unnervingly temporary. I already had a couple pretty close friends, so I was completely satiated, friendship-wise. Then Vic spilled wine all down the front of my shirt on a slow Tuesday night in July. The wine glass crashed into me with alarming force, following a wild trajectory generated by a pair of flailing arms. Because theatrics are part of every great story, I learned. I learned this because Vic told me, in between frenzied apologies and frantic pats of a dry napkin to my chest.
“Oh god, now I’m groping you. I’m not trying to grope you. Oh shit. Where’s the goddamn water?” Vic had this spectacular transoceanic accent that suggested time spent in the rolling hills of some Scottish territory. It was lilting and beautiful, especially when applied to funny words with ugly meanings. As if Vic needed an accent that implied a storied upbringing to be any more interesting.
Two seconds post-spillage, amid the tumult of limbs and words, I could tell Vic was the kind of cool that cannot be replicated or mass-produced. I could tell by the way the other people at the table scrambled to pass the water, six hands grabbing onto the pitcher and thrusting it toward its inquisitor. There was a desire for acknowledgement that permeated their movements. This Captain Hook-looking guy won.
“Oh thank you, Dom,” Vic said and dunked the napkin straight into the pitcher. The wet cloth was cold as it hit my sternum.
Somehow this shocked me into speech. “It’s really okay. It’s almost closing, so.”
“No, no. This is such a nice top. God. Is there anything I can do? Can I buy you a new shirt? Or I could dye this, probably. It might look great with a bit more red. We could make something out of this. What do you think?”
The sentences were slung together so randomly and quickly, I almost got caught up in the sounds and lost track of the sentiment. Vic’s perfect face looked eager and dewy. I knew I probably looked confused and oily.
“Oh, okay,” I said.
“Great, when are you done here?”
Casually, like I wasn’t some stranger who had been tasked with dumping half-chewed bits of rejected lamb into the garbage two minutes earlier. That was the thing about Vic—no person was off limits. Nets would be cast and if you were lucky enough to be swimming past at just the right moment, you would be caught and hauled onto land.
I stumbled into a reply on my sea legs. “Pretty soon.”
“Great, I’ll get us a Lyft.”
The rest of the table deflated when Vic dropped that “us.” They were not to be included in this project.
“Great.”
And that’s how it went.
*
I didn’t mind orbiting Vic because at the time I had no other trajectory in mind. And then suddenly there was this gravitational pull that suggested I go limp and trust in physics. I was no science student, but I went with it. Sometimes it seemed with Vic, I had no choice. Not in the sense that my hand was forced by this monolith of a person, and the allure of such an existence rendered me limp, but in the sense that my own personhood would suffer if I didn’t release the coil of my body and spring in the direction Vic was headed. I didn’t want to miss out.
This was, of course, the big fear factor. I had missed out on enough already, on account of uncertainty and nerves, and I knew I couldn’t continue like that. I had to break the cycle somehow. I realized this about two weeks before meeting Vic one night as I was sprawled out belly up on my twin bed. It struck me suddenly that I was incredibly bored. That, in fact, I was bored much of the time, for many hours of every day. And, after a moment of stewing in this feeling, I couldn’t help but wonder if that was because of the chain of choices I had made in my lifetime that had led me here to this incessant boredom, or if it was because I was a generally boring person. That was a troubling thought. So, I didn’t think about it for long. I hoisted myself into a sitting position, grabbed my laptop, and watched a show with an effervescent female lead until my brain was entertained enough to fall asleep. This happened again the next night. Two weeks later I met Vic to break the cycle.
*
Vic was a very good and very bold driver. It wasn’t unusual for us to cut off an entire line of traffic and slip between distracted cars on a freeway exit. I never commented but my face said it all.
“Oh no, June! Don’t look so scandalized, it’s not a big deal.”
I am scandalized and I can’t help looking like it, I’m an easily scandalized person. I thought this but didn’t say it.
Instead, I stuck my head out the window and yelled, “So sorry,” to the cars we blew past.
Vic grinned. My heart thumped oddly and I suspected it was from a weird hybrid of glee and discomfort, not solely embarrassment.
*
We talked and breathed, mostly. I don’t know what else to call it. Hanging out. That seems too casual for the way we cohabited a space. Usually, it was Vic who played the conversationalist, and I would be remiss not to join in.
Vic said: “I had this doll when I was a kid. One of those American Girls—the ones that come loaded up with an outfit and piece of property for every day of the week. This one, I can’t remember her commercial name, but I remember I would give her these gradual haircuts about once a month. Enough of a trim for me to notice, but not my mom. Well, about seven months into this it got to the point where she was sporting this Ellen DeGeneres hairstyle and finally my mom noticed, but only because I also got my hands on some food coloring and dunked this girl’s head into a bowl of it the day before Thanksgiving. My mom walked in on me doing it and asked if I was trying to turn her into a lesbian.”
“Ha. What did you say?”
“‘Mom you really shouldn’t stereotype lesbians like that.’”
We laughed. I said, “When I was little I used to hunt in the garden for caterpillars—you know those fuzzy black ones?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, well I’d gather a handful and a pair of cuticle scissors and line them all up and cut off the fuzz on their backs.”
“Wow.”
I kept going. “Yeah, and sometimes I’d accidentally cut too close and stab into their backs.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah. And I don’t know if it was blood, or what, but this grey stuff would ooze out and I’d feel really bad and find them the best leaf I could to rest them under.”
We paused to let this sit out between us. A breeze was blowing into Vic’s room through an open window. It licked at my neck and made me shiver. Vic pulled a blanket over us.
“That’s some child sociopath behavior, June.”
“I know,” I whispered.
“Jesus,” Vic said again, smiling.
*
Somehow Vic could afford to live in Noe Valley. No information was ever volunteered as to how this was possible, given Vic didn’t work so much as existed, and I never set out to inquire until an answer was forfeited.
I also can’t say what exactly it meant when I went to Vic’s, because nothing extravagant or illicit ever happened. I would leave my house and my two roommates with the promise: “I’m going to Vic’s.” That was enough, in my mind, to explain why I felt like a feather being lifted by some sort of artificial breeze every time I exited my life to enter Vic’s. Like a door slamming and me floating across the Bay Bridge in one instant. A kid’s adventure.
*
I wasn’t ever in love with Vic. Not in a way that would entreat me to recline naked on a bed and will our bodies to twine together. We got naked to assess stomach pouches, the muscles in our backs, the flat of our butts (asses, Vic would groan, who says butts? Call them what they are, even if they’re barely there at all).
“You’re straight?” Vic asked in the car a few weeks after the night we met.
I had been asked this question in all its forms a lot in college and still didn’t have an answer three months into having a diploma.
“Maybe not,” I said.
“Hmmm,” was Vic’s reply.
“You’re not, right?” I asked.
Vic cackled. “Definitely not.”
And that’s how it went.
*
Sometimes I would look at Vic and think how did you come to care for me? How much do you care for me? Do you care for me as much as I care for you?
For me, caring was easy enough to fall into, but it also came with a warning. An expiration date. Caring for people often made me edgy and confused in the moments I was alone long enough to dwell on impermanence, like I wanted to contain the feeling of contentment that came with good friendship and stick it in a freezer. So, in case the expiration date snuck up on me, I would be able to pull it out for consumption any time I wanted. Little moments to snack on.
It never felt like there was an expiration date with Vic. Maybe because we met outside the confines of an institution that operated under a series of deadlines. There was no counting down the months until the end of a semester. No counting down to the end of a school year, another finals week, an hour in a painfully intimate poetry class. After college, time didn’t rule me in the same way, and that was both a relief and severely unnerving. I met Vic when time didn’t have any structure, and maybe that’s why I never considered a natural parting.
*
“What’s the point of all this, do you think?” Vic asked me one day.
“You mean in an ontological sense?”
“Don’t bring theory into this. I mean in a personal sense. Like we’re born, we live according to the laws of society, or we don’t and face the consequences, we find someone we like enough in the moment to be with, or we don’t, maybe have a family, or don’t. Then we’re gone and the next person does it. What the hell is that about?”
“I think you’re oversimplifying.”
“Obviously I’m oversimplifying. But the question still stands.”
“Well, I don’t think living is about the individual.”
“Okay, Mother Teresa.”
“She was kind of a heartless wench, you know.”
“Stop patronizing me and answer the question.”
“Um,” I said. “I think we’re here to live for other people. Like, there’s peace in solitude, and bettering yourself is an ongoing process. But I think the best kind of living has to do with finding bits of yourself in other people. And you’re never going to be happy for more than an hour at a time. Stringing together hours is what keeps us going.”
“Just happiness? I don’t think so. I agree with your logic, but other stuff is fuel, also. Anger, for one. Being angry keeps so many people going. And there’s a difference between all the anger. Good anger out of love. Bad anger out of hatred.”
“Yeah, but that kind of anger isn’t sustainable.”
“Ethically, no. But Bill O’Reilly is still kicking, somehow.”
“That’s just 100 years of Viagra coursing through his transformer body.”
*
“I went to college for two years. Then I thought I’d had enough, so I dropped out.”
“Oh,” I said. “That’s a big move.”
We were at a restaurant waiting for our food. It was the kind of establishment that slowed down time to the point where idle gossip turned into voluntary confessionals.
“Well, my parents called me an idiot for three months, but they still love me.”
“Of course,” I said.
This was early into knowing each other, so I hadn’t yet come to understand that this was Vic’s way of expressing vulnerability: a dramatic admission followed by a qualifying “but” clause. What I held onto then was the drama. It made me think.
All my life I had set upon the task of schooling in a frenzied way that seemed entirely necessary. Certainly, it was expected. My parents would have still loved me if I had told them, “Actually, I think I’ve had enough now,” but they wouldn’t have liked me. And probably, I wouldn’t have been able to shoulder that knowledge and still like me, either.
“I regret it now,” Vic said and pulled me away from a thought spiral. The conversation wasn’t over and I wasn’t expecting this concession. Usually, Vic was very confident.
“Really?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Vic said. “Sometimes I hate myself for reacting to situations instead of sucking it up and waiting it out.”
“What was there to be sucked up?”
The look Vic gave me meant it was something uncomfortable. “Oh, you know. Food.”
Vic was thin but strong. We ran together sometimes and I always struggled to keep up.
I rolled some words around in my mouth before dropping them out loud. “You did what was best for you at the time. To me, that’s harder than sucking it up.”
“I guess,” Vic said in a way that had me reaching across the table and offering my body for comfort. Vic grabbed onto my hand and didn’t let go until our entrées arrived. We split the dishes, which were delicious. We didn’t need a box for leftovers.
*
I liked to imagine that Vic and I were destined to meet, but I had never been totally onboard with the idea of destiny, so I settled on imagining that we met under a similar set of circumstances for a reason out of my control. Our futures were both blurry enough to warrant some skittishness, but solid enough in theory to soothe most bodily flutterings. Vic was good at most things, and didn’t really have to try in order to flourish. I was good at a few things, and had to exert some energy to be better. We were both horrible dancers. Vic had a handful of big passions, I had too many interests and not enough focus to decide if one of them could maybe be my passion. We both tended to overgeneralize. We were spectacularly different and basically the same.
“I want a vocation, not a career,” Vic told me. “I want to enjoy what I do and make money doing it.”
“I want to make over $60,000 a year without having to join a tech cult,” I said.
“Interesting,” Vic said.
“That probably makes me a bad socialist.”
“What, the desire to flourish in spite of our current capitalist hellscape?”
“Yeah, I guess you could put it that way.”
“Hmm,” Vic said. “For now, I think that just makes you an adult with a phone bill.”
*
I became a more exciting person with Vic, at least internally. Externally—hard to say. I was already good at faking, but maybe Vic made it more authentic. I was always authentic when it was just the two of us, but sometimes Vic would drag me to local gatherings that smelled like BO and weed. Most of San Francisco already smelled this way, and I was well-acclimated, so then it was the people responsible for dragging the outside in that I had to work harder to enjoy.
They were mostly college grads like me. Depending on the location of the function, sometimes there were a shocking amount of Stanford dropouts present. They liked to talk a lot about the process that went into dropping out of Stanford, and not so much about the effects of doing so. Engaging with the dropouts was often a mind-bending experience.
“Oh, Cal,” they would say when they asked about my alma mater. “Could’ve gone there, but the culture is just a little generic. Everyone walks around with question marks hovering above their heads, you know?”
I didn’t, but also wanted to avoid providing a confirmation of this profound assumption with an inquiry.
Vic was standing next to me in this particular instance and said, “That’s because no one there is preoccupied with figuring out how to kill Mark Zuckerberg and wear him as a skinsuit while pitching another investment app to their girlfriend’s Oracle board member dad. They’re thinking about other things.”
The silence was astounding. I looked intensely into my green solo cup (it was a sustainability-themed party) and tried not to choke on the sip I had just taken. Vic, I love you, I thought.
*
Driving in the car with Vic, I tended to feel invincible, like everything was in order and formidable thinking was actually pointless. So, driving in the car with Vic, I didn’t really think. I sang and gossiped and sucked down an obscene number of 7-Eleven Slurpees. Car time was for living, not anticipating what living would mean in an hour, a day, a year. This was another controversial habit of mine: anticipating the present from a future perspective. Controversial because Vic said I needed to stop anticipating if I ever wanted to experience organic moments of spontaneity, and I said yes, you’re probably right, but methodical planning is one of my defining characteristics and is what gets us to places on time, so that might be a grey area for us. And while I did wish spontaneity was more in-character for me, I also relied on the knowledge that Vic and I balanced each other out in this regard. I planned ahead and Vic drove us there eventually. The in-between was for car time.
“What should we do with our lives?” Vic asked in the car one day.
My stomach tumbled because this wasn’t a question for the car at this moment. We weren’t stuck in traffic, we were coasting down Highway 1. We were in motion, headed to a destination, so there was no pressing need for this kind of critical thought.
“I really don’t know,” I said. My voice sounded weird.
Vic looked at me and then back at the road. I looked out the window at the grey plateau of water that was shimmering like a never-ending strip of gossamer fabric. The sun was just starting to set.
“That’s okay, Junie,” Vic said. “We’ll figure it out.”
*
At parties Vic would dance with me for a while, then evaporate into the crowd and I’d find someone in a corner to stand by. I’d hold a drink to feel more tethered to my body. Sometimes the person in the corner would talk to me. Really, we talked a lot about the weather, which is surely a marker of ageing up—relying upon conversational tropes to make the whole ordeal a little more predictable. Weather talk involved comments on the drought and how long fire season stretched now that the land was irrevocably parched.
“Jerry Brown makes me sick,” said one corner person at a Halloween party in the Marina. “He’s a Jimmy Carter without empathy.”
“Oh,” I said.
“What we need is an actual environmental oversight committee who will hold these guys to the bullshit they spew every August after another historic fire. We can’t compromise on punitive measures they pass just to look good,” he said.
“What would not compromising look like?” I asked, to be an active conversationalist.
“Well, doing extensive surveying of forest floor health would be an obvious first move. Topographical investigation.” The music was pulsing and he was moving hard, dressed as the Pope, and I was certain one more beat drop would eject the zucchetto from atop his head.
“Did you study ecology in school?” I asked.
A headbang. “No, what a waste of time that would have been. Only government jobs in the soft sciences. No, I studied comp lit.”
“Oh,” I said. “It’s just that you sound,” and here I searched for the appropriate word, “involved.”
“Probably because I’m so aware. I’ve always been very aware.” The zucchetto was leaning.
“Oh,” I said. “Who are you voting for in the primaries?”
“I don’t vote. Politically I’m very ambiguous.”
“Oh no,” I said and downed the rest of my drink quite quickly. “Shoot, I’m all out. Nice talking to you.”
Finding Vic amongst the crowd was much easier than I anticipated, and by the time our bodies collided in the kitchen I was laughing.
“Vic,” I said. “You’ll never believe who I just met in the corner.”
“What?” Vic yelled into my ear. The music was still blasting.
“I just met your soulmate in the corner.”
“What?” Vic yelled again. “Who?”
I pointed. “The Pope. His name is Houston. He’s very aware and doesn’t vote!”
“Oh,” Vic yelled and hooked an elbow around my neck. “Fuck you, Junie!”
I was laughing hard. Vic planted a kiss on the side of my face and giggled with a breath that smelled like tequila and sugar.
“Junie,” Vic yelled. “You know I don’t date people named after places.”
*
Vic moved to London at the end of March and told me about it a month prior, in the fog of late winter. An assistant position at an art gallery in Southwark. I was still waiting tables and thinking about applying to grad school.
It was very off-the-cuff and uninvolved, as far as major announcements go. But after spending almost a year in close quarters and conversation with Vic, I could recognize that this was a very off-the-cuff kind of person, and tried not to take it personally. It still hurt.
“But are you sure?” I asked, multiple times. My body was reacting in a way that had my brain struggling to soothe it: my fingernails were digging small craters into my palms and my stomach was flopping around like a dying fish. “Are you sure about this?”
“It’s what I have to do for myself. It’s what I need. And I already have dual citizenship, so.” A shrug. “I can’t stay here, doing nothing.”
It was logical and illogical simultaneously. Logical because doing nothing after expecting to do something, and being expected to do something, was unsettling for me, too. Illogical because I had never considered the possibility that it was unsettling enough for Vic to plot an escape.
“I’m not leaving you, I’m leaving this place,” Vic said. “It’s important you know that.”
“Okay,” I said. “I understand.”
Really, I did understand. I was kind of crying. Vic saw and then we were both kind of crying.
“I feel like I’ll trap myself indefinitely if I stay here,” Vic said.
Trapped wasn’t a physical state I had ever associated with Vic. Wandering, yes. Stalling, maybe. Yet, in my mind, it had always appeared voluntary.
“But I’ll miss you,” I said. My voice caught on a syllable and Vic tugged me into a hug.
“That’s okay,” Vic said into my hair. “I love you.”
“Okay,” I said. “I can’t live my life through yours.”
“I hardly have a life, so yeah, that’s not a good idea.”
“Okay,” I said and went to pull away. Vic just hugged me harder.
“No regrets, coyote.”
Carina Cain is a Bay Area local who graduated from Lewis & Clark College with a B.A. in English. She is admittedly too fond of the hyphen, and wholeheartedly believes that arts education is fundamental to the well-being of society.
