Kanreki
by Patricia Q. Bidar
Now home, beside the sea
I am back to my old routines and tricks. Here in my subsidized apartment for people like me. I am rested on the inside, looking out.
Every morning, I think of Christian first. His warm hands. His tendon-y arms. That concerned forehead. When I said stop, he always stopped. We were just kids. It would be “So long” until next we met. Met again. Again. And then our time would be up.
Going backward in time
I was released from the psych ward early. I hadn’t had a chance to eat or shower or charge my phone in the common room. It had been determined I was not a threat to myself or to others. I walked slowly to the smudged metal doors with my new prescriptions and the plastic bag with my banana-shaped stress squeezee, rubber-treaded hospital socks and no-name lotion. Dry shampoo. The collages I’d made in Art.
The night before that
Christian and I were curled in our XXL chairs half-watching murder shows with the others until it was time to go to our rooms. We did not hold hands or offer to sneak peeks at anything. We hugged good night. Woodenly, although he did place one hand on my middle back and pressed hard and I knew it was to feel my breasts against his chest.
Before that, at dinner, Christian was sitting alone with his meal in front of him.
“This must be the place,” I said.
He issued his little smile, his gaze misfiring to above my left ear. We were like ships, discombobulated after slipping from our bottles.
“Hey, I’m sorry about that vagina comment.”
“It’s forgotten.”
He ducked his head in a way I remembered. “A lot of river. A lot of years.”
“Thirty-ish more to go!”
“But why?” Which made both of us laugh.
I told him about my parents’ passing. “Disappointed until the end,” I said. “You still live around here?”
He eyed me, as if wondering what I’d heard. Which was nothing. “Yeah.”
When I was back in town in the early ’90s,
clearing out my parents’ place, I was lunching with the realtor at the old Hobbe Nobbe Coffee Shoppe. Christian was working as a short order cook. We met up at the register, long enough to clasp each other’s forearms, and search the face of the other. I said nothing about my parents, whom he’d known. The realtor treated me differently when I returned to our table. After seeing me with the likes of him. I’d briefly fooled her by wearing one of my mother’s old pantsuits and a jaunty hat.
Before that, Christian hadn’t appeared
at lunch, or in the evening common room where the TV blared and visitors came– none for me—bearing fried delights and soda from town.
We were hustled to our rooms
The art therapist and I were the first to be ushered out.
There is no safe word here. The price of my strategic vacation from freedom was that I gave up control. No. That’s a cop-out. I was capable of speaking. But I didn’t.
Before that, the volunteer art lady panicked
and buzzed for backup. I froze. I stood. I took a deep breath and felt a windy tearing in my throat.
Before that, my old friend
turned and fell into me, wrapping me in aromatic arms.
“I saw your vagina close up,” he said in an overloud voice. “Your pussy, that is.” Benzo-dampened, but the same. His gaze was a slippery ninja.
At 16, Christian and I
spent all of our free hours together. Mainly in silence. Riding thrift store bicycles up and down the asphalt undulations of the town’s drive-in theatre. Sex, we learned on each other at his family’s unpeopled apartment. We viewed the other’s genitals under blankets, using a flashlight. After graduation, as such things happen, we ended up in different lanes.
“I like it here,” I said softly, choosing a few cobalt buttons and a glue stick.
I reckoned if I heard his voice, I would know if it was really him. Christian.
Before that was the art lady, calling out,
“Today’s Kanreki! Japanese! Beginning afresh!” delivering the headlines like an old-time newsie. A tall man shuffled in and took the chair next to mine. His head was egglike, lines etched into cheeks and forehead. The others were busy choosing art supplies.
It was sweet of the art therapist to want to single me out, but the best part about being there was the anonymity. Like her, I was here voluntarily.
Before that, the charge nurse must have told
the art therapist that it was my 60th birthday. She’d brought special items all in red: pom-poms, origami squares, palm-sized bits of velvet.
“The Japanese call 60 a landmark. We begin again as babies,” the art lady cried. “The birthday person wears a red hat and vest!!”
Here I could walk slow laps in the halls, guzzle apple juice and diet ginger ale. Drag a heavy, unthrowable chair to the common room’s wide windows overlooking my hometown’s rolling hills, a golden vista punctuated with black oak trees.
I crossed a state line and two bioregions
for a respite at my old stomping grounds. A gift for my 60th. Handing the impossibility of me over to the pros. The familiar, I’d imagined, would be a comfort. A tip from me: The heavy double doors float open when one appears at the ER and utters certain words.
The walls of the place were green and no longer yellow. The bedspreads and lamps, updated. In the psych ward, the only things non-optional were medications and meetings with the psychiatrist.
But I never missed art time. I couldn’t bear to disappoint the art lady, that hopeful volunteer with her nondescript clothing and naked lips. I imagine she’d gotten instructions about that, so as not to whip us “guests” into a lather, or into strong feelings we might act upon.
Patricia Quintana Bidar is a Western writer from the Port of Los Angeles area. Her work has been featured in Wigleaf, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Pinch, Pidgeonholes, Flash Fiction America, Best Small Fictions 2023, and Best Microfiction 2023. She is a submissions editor at Smokelong Quarterly and a Prose Reader for Quarterly West. Patricia lives with her family and unusual dog outside of Oakland, CA. Her first collection of short fiction, Pardon Me For Moonwalking, will be published by Unsolicited Press in 2025.
Connect with Patricia at http://PatriciaQBidar.com, on Twitter (@patriciabidar), or on Instagram, Facebook, or BlueSky (@patriciaqbidar).