Acacia: Acacia

Chapter 9: My Saharan Sanctuary

- 45 Less than six months earlier, I had been blissfully happy with Tony on our adventure to the East. In the days that followed the massacre that was the Jenna encounter, I missed Tony so much, I felt as though I was suffocating. An unceasing bane. At the end of each day, I would fall into bed,brutally exhausted from the labour of restraining myself from calling every number in California until I found him.What stayed my hand was the haunting question: Is this what it had felt like for him? To have the person he ached for not choose him back.Deep down,I knew the answer, and it made my heart flinch from within. So I never called. I wanted to hate Jenna, but I refused to be that girl. To compromise my dignity by lashing out in jealousy. I was not going to sprain my pride riding those green waves. Taylor Wolf didn’t want me. Fine. I was not going to grovel. Nor was I going to let the idiocy that had hijacked me into falling for him turn me into a shrew. An inevitable stampede of hurt led me into a few comprehensively depressing Miss Havisham-ish days. But I was not made to sit still.Adult irresponsibility did not suit me. So I rallied my disordered spirits and forced myself to get on with life. My life. My second semester of med school was well under way and I was not going to let myself fall behind because of a boy. I had worked too hard and come too far for such nonsense to be my demise. Taylor knew that he had injured me.His natural instinct must have been to reach out to me – after all, we had been good friends – but he didn’t. - 46 Everything in my demeanour warned him to back off and let me suffer in silence. I set my will obdurately against his, shielding my pain from him with a veneer of frustrated pride. And so we never spoke of what had happened. For the most part, since the Dean & DeLuca debacle, I managed to dodge social situations where I would have to interact withTaylor and his spunky new accessory from Poughkeepsie. I was relieved to find out that Jenna, a recent graduate of Vassar, was a student in Journalism, which fortunately situated her in a different part of campus. I, of course, saw Taylor in all my classes and ran into him periodically as I left and returned to my apartment.We were polite to each other. Polite. And whenever I did see Jenna, I obligated myself to be generous towards her. Through my forced friendliness missions, I was surprised (and thwarted) to find her open and sincere. I could not fault her for possessing such amiable qualities, qualities that had so evidently captured Taylor’s attention. Manners apparently barren in my maladjusted mania. Why was I so constipated?Acacia indeed! Prickles and thorns. Through her relationship with Marcus, Rebekah and I had become good friends. In fact, she was one of the very few close female friends I had in New York. She was loud and quirky and an unexpected addition of lightness and laughter to my life. She gave a nodding tribute to her Jewish heritage while she explored every form of art within her reach,especially photography.When Rebekah found out aboutTaylor and Jenna, she tried to cajole me out of my mourning with a girls’-night sleepover at her apartment. But, as much as I enjoyed Rebekah’s company, not even her perpetual, glass-half-full sanguinity could console me. It actually pained me to watch her try so hard. I needed something much more potent than nail polish and chocolate. I needed to dance again. I started taking dance classes when I was four years old. Every so often, my preschool teacher would have guests come to our class to give presentations that theoretically were supposed to broaden our horizons. - 47 I don’t remember any of those lessons, except for one. Half an hour for which I owe that sweet matronly teacher, whose name I can’t remember, more than I could pay back in a ten thousand lifetimes. She had for us that day, a ballerina. I cannot remember what the dancer did to ignite my imagination, but whatever it was, I was smitten. Dance became my...