Short Fiction: I Love Slovenia
A short story I wrote four years ago.
Hello capybaras! Thanks for reading Sleepover. In the spirit of accessibility, this newsletter will always be offered for free. Please consider a paid subscription if you’d like to support the things I create — with and beyond this project.
As you might have noticed, I’m sending this newsletter with a slight delay, mainly because it’s Dios de los Muertos in Mexico and my mom and aunt are visiting the city for the first time — AKA I’m playing tour guide! Instead of what I’m currently thinking about (that I need to stop eating pan de muerto and drinking mezcal every day), I’m sharing a short story I wrote several years ago.
As some of you know, I am working on my first book. During the pandemic, I spent three months writing a queer romance novel that was, in every aspect, a complete disaster (it reads like the journal of a sexually repressed drunk who recently had a stroke). This time around, I am taking it slower and with a more intentional approach (outlines, etc.). The primary goal is to finish a novel that I am proud of — to write a long-form piece of work for myself and process certain aspects of my life through the act of writing. The secondary goal, of course, is to get it published.
All that said, I’ve never really shared any of my fictional writing before. While this is an old piece that reflects the obvious dispositions of being in your early twenties, it captures a semblance of what I’ve felt over the past decade on a daily basis (the manic urge to move to a new continent). Even though it makes me cringe to read old pieces, I presume it also serves as a kind of exposure therapy, since I ought to get used to sharing fictional pieces. Most of all, it’s an easy way to share something with you all while still being able to lay on the couch with Mijael and my cousin Tenaya while drinking mezcal and watching Coco.
Note: There will be no “Capy Corner” with the weekly news roundup or “Weekly Playlist” this time around, because mezcal and Coco are more important. I am also considering restructuring this newsletter in general to incorporate different opportunities for community engagement and Q&A’s, as opposed to content that is solely one-directional. But more on that later!
I Love Slovenia
Mary is twenty-six and lives in New York City. She dyed her hair the color of strawberries back in college in New England. She did so because she saw a group of other girls in her dorm doing the same thing; it was her way of making friends back then. Her hair is still this color, gold mixed with pink mixed with red. But it is no longer a social statement—rather, the hair has become a part of her, a genuine aspect of her character, along with her love for short stories from independent journals with quirky names and drinking triple-shot cocktails in sundresses you might expect someone to wear if they loved frosé. She sits on a stool outside of a glass walled restaurant in the Lower East Side picking at a salad that looks more like a garnish, drinking an old fashioned with her friend Tanya. Tanya sips on a mimosa, what one might deem more fitting at eleven in the morning.
But Mary does not care for fitting in or standing out. She just is.
That is the line that drew Mike to her. They bumped into one another a couple years ago at a concert in a museum in a part of Brooklyn that made you feel cool just being there. Mary was wearing a blue sundress that day. The dress caught and tore on the spiral of a wine opener at Tanya’s pregame before the concert. She ripped the rest of it into small frays to match the original tear. It looked like fashion, Tanya said at the time. Or like she robbed a homeless person of their clothes. Mary wore it anyway. Mike found it amusing. They chatted, they danced, they went home together.
Mary and Mike kept seeing each other until one day, Mike asked—not Mary—if either of them were sleeping with other people. Mary said no, but that she could, meaning both that she’d have an easy time doing so and wouldn’t mind it. Mike said he didn’t really want to. That was four months in. Mike was tall, went to the gym often, and gave Mary the feeling that she was being watched when they were together, that as a unit they were something to feel envious about. If they were to have kids, by some terrible mistake or mutually unexpected existential urge, their kids would be envied too, with Mary’s Japanese hair and Mike’s Jamaican build. This was as far as Mary thought: half-Asian kids were always adorable, half-Black even moreso. And so theirs would be irresistible, a fact more than a manifestation.
Two years in, Mary began to wonder if she and Mike meant what they were supposed to when they said they loved each other, especially since Tanya was in pieces at the time, unsure if she could say it herself to her then-boyfriend Joe. Tanya never did say it; instead she moved into a new apartment and onto a new man, Omar, who eventually drove Tanya mad too. That time Tanya was in pieces because Omar took too long to say it. Mary remembers drinking a double whiskey that day at brunch. Better that he didn’t say it, Mary thought. She could barely remember his face now. All of Tanya’s previous lovers, whether they inspired enough conflict for an emergency brunch or not, melded into a featureless shape in Mary’s head.
People made such a fuss about the word, but what did it matter? Surely it didn’t mean the same thing to everyone. The older Mary grew, the less words meant to her. At twenty, she realized saying “I am a strong woman” in the mirror like her mother had told her to since she was five made her no more of a woman than she already was. She knew that if she and Mike split she’d feel sad, she’d miss having someone around, the talks and the sex and the feeling that she was never stranded. Were comfort and convenience not their own kind of love? Tanya always seemed to be chasing something Mary wasn’t even sure existed. She had her doubts every now and then, but she and Mike stayed together. Three years now. She was happy about it, considering Tanya was still hopping between all the men in the city. Each one seemed to pick up a different porcelain piece of her waiting to shatter. Always in pieces over brunch.
He’s just waiting for the opportunity to leave me, Tanya says. The way he talks about his coworker Molly . . . It’s gross, like he doesn’t even think I notice the way he talks about her. They’re probably having an affair right now.
“He” is Jerald, probably the handsomest guy Tanya has ever dated. A shame about the name, though. Mary thinks the name Jerald casts the image of an ugly bald man from the 1700s, not someone whose abs have attracted fifty thousand people to follow him on Instagram, the same shirtless body in different mirrors. There is reason for Tanya to be paranoid, considering many of the comments on his photos include open lip emojis, and that isn’t to say that Tanya is just being paranoid in this idea of an affair either. No, there is some evidence pointing to its likelihood, though Tanya lacks the incriminating information.
Once Jerald made an advance on Mary, when they all took a trip to the Hamptons together. It was Mary and Tanya’s first time to the land of the rich, since they both worked in publishing, and back then they were only assistants. They’d shared dreams of overpriced weekends like those ever since they’d first met in the mailing room. Jerald grabbed Mary’s waist when she went out for fresh air. He pulled her in so quickly she almost gave in, but she caught herself in time and cupped his gorgeous face with her hands. We shouldn’t, she said, we can’t. And that was all she said. She didn’t want to ruin the trip for Tanya. Mary was also an amateur at faking disgust. Though she was disgusted with Jerald and his lack of moral code, she was of course attracted to him. Resisting him in itself felt like a win.
You should probably leave him, Mary says. You’re better than Jerald.
The other girls, Pat and Nicky, chime in every now and then with gasps of support and disdain for his character (That is so fucked up . . . I can’t believe him . . . I’m so sorry Tanya . . . Ugh, that’s absurd . . .), though they’re mainly trying to guzzle down as much champagne as they can in the hour of bottomless mimosas they have left.
I know, Tanya says. But it’s not that easy. You’ve never had to consider leaving Mike.
Yeah, you’re right. But if I had to, I would, Mary says.
Have you?
Thought of leaving him? Of course.
But why? He’s so good to you, Tanya says.
I don’t know . . . I don’t think we need a reason. I’ve been thinking about how we’re not getting any younger. We shouldn’t have to wait for anyone, or put up with anything that doesn’t serve us, Mary says.
Tanya nods in agreement, though she feels upset at the way Mary speaks, as if Tanya’s romantic life is something that can be fixed with an answer.
Mary is thinking about other things too. She has been wanting to quit her job, or at least curious as to what it might look like to do something different. A change. A pivot. They’ve become muddled to her, the reasons she wanted to work at a publishing house in the first place. She loved reading, of course. She loved books, literary fiction, the buzz of being in the middle of it all, living proof that the internet was not the inevitable massacre of print as so many people loved to speculate—at least not yet. But she was tired of going in every day and doing the same thing over and over. The same apartment. The same boyfriend. The same brunches in which her friends made decisions to fall for or flee from another guy, decided mainly from their own monologues and never what the others had to say. Hence Tanya gazing off into the distance, Pat and Nicky finishing the final golden gulps from their glasses, asking the waiter for another refill. Mary takes a swig from her drink, places it down with care, and leans forward.
I just think that if you’re unhappy, then you should make the decision that serves you, not you and him, unless you really think that prioritizing your relationship with Jerald right now is more important than prioritizing yourself. I love you, Tan, and if he was worth what you’re worth—I mean, no guy will ever be, but if he came close—then I’d tell you. And I don’t think he is, Mary says.
Tanya’s muscles relax and her eyes begin to mist. She feels more love than confusion now, grateful for Mary’s words and the magnifying effect the mimosas have on them.
You’re right, you’re right, she says. I’m not putting up with his bullshit anymore. I’m telling Jerald that we need to talk. Tonight. I’m not going to keep on like this.
Tanya and Jerald do talk. Jerald eases her anxieties. They stay together. This is what Mary foresees, and this is what happens. And perhaps this has something to do with why Mary chooses to leave Mike, the next day, and quit her job too, because she sees how her friends trick themselves into staying in the same place. Even when they think they are moving forward, they are all still there, doing the same things over and over again. Mary will not be one of them—no, she thinks, as she walks to Mike’s studio in Brooklyn over the Williamsburg bridge. She notices a holographic sticker dissolved across the tarnished, pink metal. I ❤ Slovenia. She recognizes the name. She studied abroad in Venice her junior year, and Slovenia was only a four-hour drive away. She never went. Now she wants to go. I’ll leave New York, she thinks. I’ll leave the job, I’ll leave what I know. This is the only life I have to do it with.
• • •
Muffled chimes of mixed traffic from the street below rise through the open windows. Mary draws an alchemy of nostalgia and resolution from the details around her: Mike’s soft dimples, the studio’s wide glass windows, the plush chocolate rug on the hardwood floor. It is as if these things speak to her in a spiritual tongue, renewed by the evidence of their impermanence. Go, leave, this is right.
I don’t feel like it’s mine anymore, she says. My life here.
Do you think moving to Europe is going to change that? Mike asks. He draws back: It’s just . . . Mary, come on. You can’t think that moving somewhere else is going to solve all of your problems. As tempting as it is to think, that’s not how life works.
I don’t think I know how life works, she says, and thinks: Do any of us?
She hugs Mike and speaks into his ear: I need to figure that out for myself.
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With love,
Your favorite capybara ~ AKA Travis Zane
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Sleepover is a party that turns into a sleepover, a newsletter publishing cozy content to your inbox every week, and an occasional mixed media series promoting BIPOC+, queer, and womxn-identifying creators — produced online and in print.