One Hundred Women
By Kristina HalvorsonNina is a graduate student. She has been living with her friend Kelly for almost three years, but now Kelly is dating someone and she and Nina hardly spend time together anymore. Nina misses Kelly and doesn't know how to ask her to be her friend again. She addresses the audience.
NINA
I've lived with Kelly for two years now; this is our third. We do well together because our lives are so different - we don't ask much of each other, nor do we expect much - so when we're able to give each other attention, any attention, it's welcomed, if not necessarily needed. For the most part I consider myself a strong woman. I'd like to think I don't need much from anyone. People find that admirable. You know, I think it's actually gotten to the point where even if I did discover I needed anything from her, I wouldn't know how to ask. We're grownups, for God's sakes. Companionship should be an extra, not a focus. I have a career to build. She's just my roommate.
We've lived in this quiet realm of no demands for so long, this place of easy peace. There have been months, hundreds of days when I asked nothing from her. But now something has changed. Suddenly I'm lonely. Suddenly I want her near me. Suddenly, in place of our peace, there's a silence waiting to be filled. I wonder if she can hear it.
I don't think she's stopped lately to listen.
I think about Kelly and her boyfriend a lot. I think about the time they spend together, about what movies they watch, where they might go for dinner, if he's good in bed - but I especially think about the time they spend lying around, watching TV, doing nothing together when I so desperately want to be doing something, together, with her. Anything. God.
I've started to wonder if I'm in love with her. But as I say it out loud I realize how ridiculous it sounds, how impossible it would be. "Kelly, I know I've been a little clingy lately, and, well, frankly, I want to go to bed with you." That's not what I want, I don't know what I want. What I know is that I'm empty, and lonely, and that she fills me up like no one else can, male or female. The way we can talk, how hard we can laugh, how easily we make up each other's home. Used to.
I think I'm getting desperate. For some reason the only way I can imagine getting her to spend more time with me is to seduce her. But in the end, what would I say to her once the lights came back on?
There is a place, inside me, where one hundred women live. It is full of light and anything but lonely. I keep Kelly there, and my mother, and my third grade teacher Mrs. Rhodes, and my best friend Christine from eighth grade, and all the other women who have touched me somehow. There are so many. I close my eyes and imagine them sitting close together in interlocked circles, talking, holding each other, laughing. Inside me, they know one another. Perhaps some of them are the same. When I am alone I laugh along with them, wrap my arms tight around myself, hugging myself, drawing them closer to me.
It's only when the men invite themselves in - into the room, into the laughter, even into me - that the links of this, this woman-chain are weakened. The men call, and the women come. The circles break apart. I begin to feel like I am coming apart, that my parts are loose and dangling. I hug myself even tighter and re-name, re-imagine my women.
There are at least one hundred of me, without them, I think - Nina the scholar, Nina the poet, the student, the counselor, the lvoer. I wait for the strongest one of me to step forward so that I can find the right words, summon up the elusive courage to bring back the women I've somehow lost.
And yet, despite my frantic attempts to call forth the philosopher, the diplomat, the encouraging friend, somehow it's always Nina the lover who wins out. She gives in to the romance, releases the women to their princes and saviors. Her mother remarries, her schoolteacher moves away with her husband, her best friend falls head over heels for a ninth grader. And Nina the lover nods, Nina the lover knows. She lowers her head and waits for her turn to come, and in the meantime the women fall away from her one by one by one by one...
What can I do but embrace her, this lover who lives inside my chest, and bid farewell to the other ninety-nine of me, who always retreat in silence.
How difficult can it be to call out the name of a friend you're terrified of losing?
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