One morning Mona woke up, went about her day and felt something was…not quite right. She brushed it aside and went to bed. Woke up the next morning, went about that day like normal, though still there was that same oddness. Gave it one more day, again unable to shake off the feeling.
Today she could no longer ignore it. Ignore what, exactly? It was the question she’d been asking herself all along. She was perplexed by her own inability to answer, which was why she’d left it every time, hoping whatever it was would pass.
They were little things, inconsequential things—another reason why she’d ignored it—and only upon reflection, rather than in the moment, did they bother her.
For instance, the sandwich she’d eaten for lunch that day. Normally, Mona brought in a packed lunch in order to save money, but today she had treated herself to a sandwich at the fancy deli that charged a fortune.
She always ordered the same thing even when tempted to try something new, for fear of ruining a good thing: fleshy, half moons of mozzarella with slices of tomato, tangy sundried tomatoes and pesto so garlicky, it nearly brought tears to her eyes, oozing between slabs of crusty baguette soft on the inside and crunchy on the outside as you bit into it.
She’d tried to replicate it at home, buying a very expensive baguette only a certain French bakery in the nice part of town sold. Organic tomatoes on the vine from the organic fruit and vegetable vendor. Sundried tomatoes brined in olive oil she already had at the back of the fridge, waiting to be used for such an occasion. She’d waited to buy the mozzarella and jar of pesto at a specialty Italian deli that sold cheeses, cured meats, handmade pasta.
After all that trouble of sourcing each ingredient separately, you’d think the sandwich would have tasted out of this world, only it had been woefully disappointing.
Which is how she justified buying her sandwich from the expensive deli. She’d stood in the line that snaked all the way around, then raced back to her desk, peeling back the layers of parchment paper and anticipating the initial delight that would accompany the first bite.
Instead—and this was the part that had been disconcerting—the sandwich had been lovely (right? she asked herself in puzzlement, taking another bite to confirm this), yet no rush of pleasure followed. It tasted…fine. Okay. The texture was right, everything about it seemed in order, yet it tasted no different from any of those nondescript, triangular sandwiches she grabbed from the vending machine whenever she was in a rush.
Perhaps, Mona told herself, she had made too big a fuss about it, her thoughts too all-consuming around a ridiculous sandwich, like overthinking a first date or potential sexual encounter.
However, the not-quite-right feeling persisted.
Also, there was the Muddy Delights conference call with the German clients yesterday. Normally, they were so pedantic about every miniscule detail—comma splices, the precise shade of turquoise (“We compared it across different tablets and the blue just doesn’t look right. Could you bring back up #5dbcd2?” Jürgen would say, waiting for her to type in the hex code they had rejected seventeen iterations ago, so that they could all stare at the color in silence yet again)—to where Mona regularly had to mute herself to avoid accidentally screaming or rattling off a string of profanities. Yet the call had ended, shockingly, without incident.
No, that wasn’t entirely true. Peter had then asked her about a participial phrase: “Is it correct to say, ‘bouncing up the pavement?’ Do dogs not bound up, rather than bounce? or at least in Germany they do, ha ha.” Normally, Peter’s pretend-jokey tone—that he, the German, should be correcting her, the native speaker—would have rankled, but somehow Mona had felt not the least bit affronted.
Afterward she thought, Now, isn’t this a relief? Things that previously got under my skin no longer do. I am free of petty annoyances.
And yet. Something about it didn’t sit right with her.
There was one more thing. A couple nights ago, when Mona flipped on the kitchen light to get a drink of water, she saw, out of the corner of her eye, a mouse darting across the floor.
Normally, Mona would have freaked out, even let out a little shriek, and either backed away from the room or else scrambled on top of the counter to avoid any part of her body possibly coming into contact with the disgusting thing. Instead she had watched—her feet bare and vulnerable along the tile floor—almost with a detached curiosity, to see where it was headed (underneath the sink, its quivering tail protruding for half a millisecond) and made a mental note to have the exterminator recheck the whole apartment.
Afterward Mona couldn’t make sense of it. Although she hadn’t found the mouse sighting to be particularly pleasant, it was as though her squeamishness about rodents had simply…vanished. Was that even possible, to grow out of such a thing? She hadn’t thought so.
All this indifference, and toward things she ordinarily felt strongly about, made her feel like she’d lost the plot. Either it was her own sanity or else something strange was happening to the world around her.
She glanced over at Louis, his lanky body curled into an S-shape around the memory foam pillow. She considered waking him to explain all this, but quickly abandoned the idea. One, it was difficult to rouse him once he was in a deep sleep—unlike Mona, who stirred every time a car screeched past a little too loudly outside—and two, Louis would likely minimize whatever she said, as though it was she who was wildly exaggerating. He was the least excitable person she had ever met, which was why, she supposed, their relationship worked.
Even when they’d first gotten together some five years ago, Mona had never experienced butterflies in her stomach, the way she had toward other men. He’d been a friend of Dorian’s from school, someone Dorian had lost touch with over the years and then gotten reacquainted with.
She or Louis was invited over to Anika and Dorian’s first, then the other showed up to avoid sitting home alone. They formed an improvised foursome watching TV, playing cards, drinking beer—sometimes whiskey, late into the night—with Mona and Louis then crashing out on opposite ends of the L-shaped couch at three in the morning (and Anika periodically checking in to see whether anything had happened between them, with Mona pulling a face: “Ew, no, he’s like a cousin!”). By noon, the four of them woke up, bleary-eyed from the night before, ending up at the neighborhood diner for a late breakfast before going their separate ways.
By the time Louis kissed her—it was on Dorian’s birthday, and she was in a tight, sequined top because Anika had mentioned one of Dorian’s single guy friends might be there—it had somehow ceased to surprise her, the aftertaste of beer and pistachio nuts from their mouths commingling together, the single friend forgotten (he hadn’t even shown up, in the end). Louis had looked equally unfazed by their kiss, as though they’d already been going out for a while. What had drawn her in was the utter familiarity of it, of already being known by someone.
Once Mona had asked him, “Compared to other people, do you think you just feel less—excitement, anger, joy—or do you feel just as much, only you don’t express it in the same way?”
He’d looked evenly at her. “It’s an impossible question to answer since I can’t get into the heads of other people.”
“Yes, but which do you think it is?”
He shrugged. “I honestly have no idea.”
Louis, in her position, would be genuinely incapable of gauging whether the intensity of his feelings over the last several days had been altered, given his general insouciance.
So Mona pondered the matter for some time, and finally came up with a test of sorts. Something that would irrefutably settle it, once and for all.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
“Why do I have to wear a button-down shirt for Anika and Dorian?” Louis asked her, staring at himself doubtfully in the mirror.
“It’s not for them specifically. It’s because we’re going somewhere fancy,” she said, kicking off the kitten heels and reverting back to her original choice, black platform heels with gold ankle straps.
“Are those new?” he said, eyeing how she now towered over him.
“They’re older than our relationship. I just never wear them anymore.”
If she was going to do this, she wanted to do it properly. Go big or go home. There was no point in explaining any of it to Louis, who would not only fail to understand the aim, but also rationalise that the only one going insane was Mona.
She could imagine him asking with a shake of his head, “All this because of a sandwich you thought you loved, some annoying clients of yours and…a mouse?”
The restaurant was buzzing, three floors of an open plan layout. Hunks of meat were suspended from steel hooks in an enormous glass display, as though they were touring a high-end abattoir.
“We haven’t seen you in so long!” Anika squealed. “This was a great idea.”
Mona had positioned it as a very late birthday meal for both her and Louis, since their birthdays were so close together. They had never been the kind of couple to make overt celebratory gestures, but then again, she justified to Louis before he could balk at the expense, they hadn’t even celebrated their thirtieth birthdays properly, never mind ones since.
She saw how excited Anika was and thought, See, people do still feel things.
When their server poured their wine and she took a tentative sip, she expected the tannins to flood her taste buds—which is why she normally preferred white, because of the smoother aftertaste, rather than the chalky bitterness of reds clinging to the back of her throat—but it lay flat on her tongue. She carefully inspected the bottle—an Argentinian Malbec—as though the label would impart a clue. Dorian had randomly chosen it off the wine list—“always the second cheapest, so the server doesn’t think terrible things about us,” he said with a grin.
She took another sip, again experiencing the same, watered-down flatness, as though she were drinking flavoured water. None of them—Anika, Dorian, certainly not Louis—knew even a bit about wine, let alone could be considered wine connoisseurs, so she couldn’t ask their opinion. “Nice,” would be the best she’d get out of them as they drank deferentially from their glasses.
When their steaks arrived on sizzling platters—hers rare, Louis’ medium rare—Mona waited for her mouth to involuntarily water, but it didn’t. She speared a piece of meat with her fork and brought it to her lips. Magnificent, worth draining the bank account for, a recent restaurant review had proclaimed.
It smelled as it should, though Mona could no longer conjure up the smell of cooked steak except, wasn’t it meant to be tantalising? Neither could she argue with the texture in her mouth nor how perfectly grilled it was—slightly charred on the outside, red and tender on the inside—so what was it?
She chewed and thought about it. The flavour. That was what was missing. The punch, the oomph. Even saying those words to herself felt ridiculous, but it was true. It was like eating a facsimile of the thing.
She studied Dorian and Anika across the table from her. Dorian had been the most enthused about coming here. She watched him shovel the steak in his mouth, barely coming up for air between bites, and wash it down with enormous gulps of wine. Anika, on the other hand, was taking small, polite mouthfuls. She’d never been a big carnivore; the restaurant was wasted on her.
Louis, certainly a meat-and-potatoes man, looked as though he was enjoying his steak. But if you asked him what he thought, Mona bet he would nod agreeably, then bring up an obscure complaint like the peppercorn sauce was too watery. He somehow always missed the point and focused on irrelevant details, which had amused her somewhat in the beginning, decidedly less so now.
She looked around at the other diners—the restaurant had since become packed—at how everyone, outfitted in dinner jackets and flowing dresses, was gorging themselves on hunks of Chateaubriand and succulent lobster legs, juice dribbling down their chins, fingers glistening with oil. Plates of half-eaten, smeared tartare and carpaccio tossed carelessly off to the side along with bottles of half-consumed wine. Shrill peals of laughter, a cacophony of conversations, cutlery clinking against plates all reverberating off the metal beams.
Mona suddenly thought, They look like caricatures of people meant to be enjoying themselves. Consuming without tasting, oblivious to what’s around them. Had she drunk too much wine (how effortlessly it had gone down, this water-like wine), was that why she thought this?
By the time they’d settled the bill and walked over to the bar a few blocks away, it was three deep full of people waiting to order. Mona had planned the itinerary for the evening. What she hadn’t wanted was a quiet bar, the kind they normally favoured where you could hear yourself think and conduct low, easy conversation with the person sitting across from you. No, she wanted the latest hot spot where you went to be seen, where you didn’t look overdressed in your black dress and heels, where a cocktail cost the equivalent of an entire meal, depending on where you went.
Once they were led to their table, she could see the boys shifting uncomfortably as they thumbed through the menu and whistled at the prices.
“Fucking hell, Mona,” Louis said. “As if dinner didn’t set us back enough.”
“I’ve been dying to come here,” Anika said. “Do you know how much in advance you have to book?”
“For a table at a bar?” Dorian asked incredulously.
This was the last of the test, she decided. She needed to put herself in a place like this to see whether the indifference would still hold. Mona could feel herself becoming more and more intoxicated. That, too, was the point. She was normally an exuberant drunk; with her inhibitions lowered, she always felt on top of the world, like she could achieve anything, like everyone was the best version of themselves.
She didn’t feel like that now. Rather she felt monged out, like she’d accidentally taken too much cannabis, her eyes wide and dilated, her body somewhere out of reach, her mind slow to follow.
She glanced at the other patrons through slightly blurred vision—those smoky gin cocktails were strong—and saw how they were speaking louder and faster, as though she had inadvertently fast-forwarded a film segment. Women leaned up against men, women leaned up against women. Mona studied their facial expressions expectantly for signs of elation or merriment; instead, they looked like extras hired to act out being patrons at a bar. Throw your head back and laugh at a joke. Swill your cocktail, take sips at regular intervals. Have words stream out of your mouth. Wait for the other person to react. Allow more words to stream out of your mouth.
You’re drunk, she reminded herself. Once you get fixated on thinking something, it’s difficult to shift your perspective.
No, the other part of her thought. It’s a gut feeling.
Somehow Mona found herself with Anika on the makeshift dance floor (when had the bar become a dance floor, she wondered idly). She could make out Louis and Dorian standing off to the side, watching. She had switched drinks sometime in the night and was now holding a glass of white wine, swaying and shouting the lyrics, along with evidently half the bar, to a song popular from when they were teenagers. Ordinarily, she would have felt at one with everyone—the world changes, yet it stays the same! as she and Anika locked eyes and smiled serenely at each other—yet she felt strangely devoid of emotion.
How, when music was the one constant evoking emotion in her (not only her, but in everyone)? She thought about all those times she had driven down the coast, windows down, wind whipping through her hair, the radio on full blast to any number of songs with the power to make her weep. In those moments, looking down the expanse of highway, miles of ocean to her left, she’d perfectly understood the potency of life, how it went on and on, with or without her; she just happened to be there, alive, in that moment.
How had music always moved her so much, but now no longer?
A few years ago, she’d taken too much—or not enough—MDMA in the club. Instead of feeling high like everyone else, all of whom were talking a million miles an hour, stroking one another’s faces, arms, rapt with wonderment, Mona had felt trapped inside her own body but incapable of speech or even thought despite her racing heartbeat, her feet frenetically spasming and moving to the beat. The more she panicked, unable to call out to anyone except to the deep recesses of her brain—stop, stop, I want it to stop, though of course no one could hear her—the longer it seemed to go on for. It was like a perpetual loop playing over and over again in her head.
She’d lacked the wherewithal, even, to put one foot in front of the other and go outside for fresh air. The thought of leaving the club and the only people she knew in the entire world right then frightened her so much that she became permanently affixed to her little spot in the corner. Eventually, Mona had the realization that she was imprisoned in this trance-like state for hours upon hours, so in the end, she’d surrendered herself to the involuntary movements of her body, closing her eyes and allowing the hypnotic beat pumping from the speakers to wash over her.
She tried to do that now, letting whatever forces were at bay take over.
Only it wasn’t really like that time in the club, because she didn’t feel panicked or out of control. It was the same lack of pleasure, flavour, that she’d been experiencing all along.
Mona felt too drunk to try to explain any of this to Anika, the words lying slack on her tongue. And Louis—she gazed over at him and Dorian locked in deep conversation; it would be about a video game they both played incessantly—if there was no desire for her to even want to explain it to him, and even less hope of him understanding, why were they even together? Why had she chosen this staid, predictable person, this safe and complacent, secure but dull, relationship? What would she do now with him?
Her thoughts involuntarily floated toward Sebastian, as they tended to do in moments like these. Sebastian, in whose presence she’d been like a child marveling at everything for the first time. “When I’m with you,” she’d once told him, “the world is always in colour.” But their relationship had been untenable: high highs, low lows, perpetually at a breaking point. When they’d finally, finally broken up, Mona had experienced unspeakable relief at the same time as profound grief.
As she continued dancing, another memory flitted past. The time she and Anika had travelled to Lisbon—this was years before Dorian and Louis had come onto the scene—and ended up howling with laughter on the streets for no reason at all. Every time one of them tried to regain control, the other would dissolve into uncontrollable fits all over again. They had linked arms and walked toward their hotel, stumbling upon a public square along the way, where a lone busker stood, strumming his guitar. The square had been lit up, resplendent and white, the busker’s voice rich, powerful. She’d gazed upon it in wonder.
“This is the best moment of your life,” a voice inside her had echoed. “Look around you. Remember the euphoria you feel. Remember this feeling for the rest of your life.”
And Mona remembered that feeling still.
That was what she wanted to feel now: unadulterated joy, although she might also take despair, if it meant doing away with this numbness. She wondered what it would take to feel again, whether she would feel again, or whether everything had passed her by already before she’d had a chance to appreciate any of it, and this not-quite-right feeling was here to stay.