Short Story: The Doppelgänger

The messages we send, the things we can't take back

Each week, I go to a writers’ hour at a local bookstore, and we work alongside each other in silence for 60 minutes. These are fictional short stories written in that time about friendship and yearning and loneliness and love. They’re very lightly edited, written in a haze and delivered to make you feel less alone in the world <3.

The Doppelgänger

You swear that’s him because your whole world just stopped. The tram halted on its tracks, the electricity quit running through its wires, and the lights stayed green. For a second, it was him. And he was walking towards you. And you were together. And you were in love.

And then he turns. And reveals that nose that’s someone else’s. Time picks up again. And you shudder back to reality, your phone in your hand, open on a blank message, the cursor blinking.

Hey

You delete it.

How are y

Delete.

I know it’s been a wh

Fuck. You wonder if he’s seen the three dots animate and then disappear. You delete the whole thing, click the screen shut and continue walking home.

The doppelgänger stirs a dormant feeling that you thought you’d gotten rid of. Like that part of your body you work away by getting a personal trainer. Or an outfit you donate to charity. You thought it wasn’t there anymore, and so you’d forgotten about it. Or so you thought. Because now, on the cobblestoned street where you live, it’s so alive again, you could almost keel over and throw up your pastry right over your shoes.

You’re there, but you’re also not. You’re also up Cerro del Tío Pío in Madrid four years ago, in the thick August heat, right next to him. The sky is turning purple. It’s starting to rain. He’s looking over at you with that lopsided grin. Two empty mini Martini Rosso bottles lie tipped over on the grass in front of you. Your shoes are kicked off, and you're trying to work out when to kiss.

And even though, at present, you’re standing on the street, where, if you look up, you can see the windows to your apartment, you’re also on the top of one of those seven hills, trying to figure out how to pause time so you can stay there and fall in love over and over, forever. Even though you’re standing alone, you’re also right there — beside him. Before he ruined your life.

He definitely hasn’t seen the three dots. You’re in his fucking archives. He’s in someone else’s DMs. Some other tattooed man is on his vision board. You walk up the two flights of stairs to your apartment. When you enter, the man you love now is in the shower. You can hear the warm steam rushing down his body down the hallway, relieving you of a bit more time to process the stupid shock of the doppelgänger. You connect your speakers to the internet radio station on your phone, which fills your kitchen with music while you unload the groceries. A bunch of perfectly formed heirloom tomatoes. Four ripe bananas. Three avocados and a lemon. You flick the coffee machine on and open your phone up again, this time to message Zara, your friend in California, who’s still living with her boyfriend of seven years despite breaking up five months ago.

Him again?

I know.

Forget it man, he was crazy.
Or if he wasn’t, he made YOU crazy.

Exactly. It’s been four years. I can’t believe I still feel so crazy.

Actually
Maybe it was you who was crazy all along
Did you ever consider that

Not helpful

There will be a moment in time where this will feel ok

Do you tell yourself that too?

Every day

Does it work?

I’ll let you know
In the meantime
Don’t email him again
x

The internet radio DJ announces a different track up next. The shower’s still on. The coffee machine’s not hot enough yet to pull half of you back from Madrid.

When you met, you were on a life sabbatical. You hadn’t dated in years. Dealing with some health stuff. You were making good money and had a nice place in Lavapiés that you filled with expensive furniture, but it always felt empty. You never felt this type of emptiness more than when you lay down in the MRI machine with paint injected into your veins so they could find out what the problem in your heart was. The doctors would quietly slide you backwards into the white tube, where you weren’t allowed to move for hours. It felt like the waiting room before death. Everything about being alone in your late 30s started to feel like that.

That emptiness followed you everywhere. It became a feeling you were conditioning yourself with, like all the other things people can’t control, like the price of things. How long something takes to mend. Geopolitics. When luck changes. He took that control right out of your hands and put his own on the steering wheel. Your steering wheel. You loved picking him up in that fucking car, watching him standing outside his front door before you could see him. Every time you looked over the passenger seat, you still expected him to be there.

The hot water in the bathroom clicks off. The light on the coffee machine comes on. You take the milk out of the fridge.

It happened quick, like the movies told you it would. Eating octopus salad in the square around the corner from your house. Drinking tintos until 3 am on a Tuesday. Making out in your elevator as you rode it to the top floor. Lying on your living room floor and listening to music for 12 hours straight. He made life feel like it was one of those holidays so good, you stopped believing seasons could change. Trump had just been voted in again. Spain was swinging further and further to the right. You were scared for the future, but at least he’d be there, too. Whenever you spent the night, you never properly slept, your heart thudding awake, so afraid it would stop beating if you fully fell asleep. Afraid that if you did, you would wake up, and he wouldn’t be there. One day, that turned out to be true.

Flat whiiiite! Loove you!

The man that you love now’s voice reverberates through the apartment. The radio changes track—this time, some African disco beat.

The worst thing about love ending and time passing is that even after all these years, you can still see him dancing to this music in your kitchen, bare feet and just a t-shirt on, butt poking out, hair messy. One morning, close to the one when he left, he came in while you were making him coffee, put on a song said, ‘I love this, and I think I love you,' and turned it up so loud it filled your whole apartment until it was the only thing you could feel in your entire body as he rushed out the door on the way to work. It was UB40’s ‘Don’t Break My Heart.’ You have thought about that moment approximately 1,279 times ever since.

But you are older now. You catch your reflection in the kitchen window, silver making its way through your hairline, cheeks filling out. You never imagined yourself at this age. 38 is so close to 40. It’s so close to halfway (?) through your life. You have a stable job. You meet your friends for drinks and dinner, and occasionally go on holiday with them. You live with another man whom you love. He is sweet, and sensitive, and safe. Safer than the man you thought you would be with forever.

After he left, you got so angry, you had to write it all down. You wrote it all down in long, pained emails and sent them, one after another. Message after message until he stopped replying. The anger was like a jug tipping over that could never fully empty. On and on it went. His silence filled your rage with more emails, more messages.

You’ll never be loved properly again.

It has taken you until relatively recently to realise you were maybe part of the problem.

Some nights when it’s late and you can’t sleep, and there’s no radio to fill the silence, you think about those emails, buried in his inbox next to a gym discount offer and a DHL notification. You think of what you said, and wish you could erase it. The feeling rises like hot sick in your stomach, and the only way to calm it is to think of the physical things; his hair in your hands, his legs stretched out across your sofa while he read the backs of your books. The calming sensation of the past before it unresolved itself.

The milk frother screeches. The internet radio DJ announces a song from The Clientele as it starts to play.

You glance down the hallway to check that the man you love is not yet making his way to you. The bedroom door is closed. You have the smallest window of time left, open your phone to the show’s chat room and type a message. It’s very unlikely that he happens to be listening to this very station, at this very moment, to the same morning slot you both used to, together. But it’s worth knowing that he might be. It’s worth knowing that you tried. You type quickly.

Love this song. Can I write a dedication for you to read aloud?

Yes!

The bedroom door opens.

I love this song. It reminds me of someone I once loved. He’s who introduced me to The Clientele, and we played it non-stop one summer. We’re no longer together, but if he’s listening, I hope he knows: I always think about you when I hear it. I’m sorry about what happened. I hope you’re happy. I hope you found what you were looking for.

The host chokes up as she reads the last bit. The man you now live with enters the room.