LITTLE GIRL BLUE

Della had spent a few days back at her apartment in a near-perpetual fog of cigarette smoke and Nina Simone records. There was no need to worry about the smoke alarm above her bed, as she'd taken the batteries out the previous summer during an intense heatwave in the city. Besides, her landlord, Mr. Baker, was usually too busy chasing up late payments from his more unruly tenants down the block to worry about health and safety checks in her little place. She remembered one time when her shower stopped working, and she had to call a plumber on her own since Mr. Baker never returned any of the messages she'd left on his phone. You could be sure, though, that he’d have gotten back to her in a minute if she were behind by just one measly dollar on her rent.

It was because of this same shoebox apartment that she had argued with Teddy. Della wanted to give it up once and for all and move into his much bigger place, but his noticeable hesitation when the issue was brought up prompted a response from her that led to an almighty row between them. Now she was "cooling off" back at her own place, and the claustrophobia of the apartment had become increasingly apparent to her, as if it had shrunk in an Alice in Wonderland-type of way while she'd been away.

Every time she had an argument with Teddy and returned to her place, she felt the same way she did whenever she went home to her folks for Christmas and saw how tiny her old bedroom was, with everything preserved in time like an old photo album. Her apartment now seemed just as small—a museum of her single life before she met him, filled with mementos of a much different woman than the one she was now. Maybe it was a perception thing, she thought to herself. Everything seemed so much bigger when she was with her man and so much less so when she wasn’t.

The row about Della moving into Teddy's place expanded into an even more heated argument about the lack of direction in their relationship. For too long, Della felt as if they were just treading water without any sense of forward momentum. If time was a measure of his feelings, then he'd had plenty of it to show his desire to build on the success of their initial courtship. What was it about men these days that found so many of them afraid of investing in a future with a partner? It was a common problem that she'd debated with her girlfriends. Any time one of them did make the evolved leap into a more committed status, such as moving in with their partner or marriage, it left the remaining ones stuck in an uncertain status quo, feeling more and more anxious. No one wanted to be the last one to turn off the lights on their social group when most of them had now flown away like the Eastern Bluebirds that migrated every autumn from New York to Mexico.

Watching the splodgy raindrops pelt her window like tiny water bombs, Della began to feel worried about the future with Teddy. Usually, after 48 hours, one of them would fold and send a conciliatory text to break the ice. But this time it hadn't come, and she didn't want to concede any emotional territory to him before he did. She felt righteous in her position about their future and saw it as a definite sign of weakness if she were to offer an olive branch.

So for now, it was just her, an adolescent return to smoking, and the Nina Simone record spinning on the vintage turntable suitcase Teddy had bought her for her birthday. Listening to the music, she found it uncanny how the lyrics seemed to have been freshly written, as if just for her in her current predicament, even though the song was from all the way back in the 1930s. And why was it always the case that so often, when she was miserable, she felt inclined to double down on the emotion and make it ten times as sad and lonely? Maybe there was some logic in this approach—facing the pain of heartbreak by running toward it and not running away, like when you'd press a bruise on your arm to test your pain threshold after you'd fallen over, like she had when she was fourteen. Her mother had repeatedly told her to stop touching the purple-blue contusion back then, but she ignored her completely as she had when she warned her that Teddy was a noncommittal loser.

Now she had no visible bruise, just the one she felt in her aching heart, and it was just as tender as the one on her arm she remembered from her teenage years. Still, she didn't have Nina to keep her company back then like she did now, and for that, she was eternally grateful.

Suddenly feeling a little more optimistic that Teddy would call, Della sighed in a way that seemed to release all the stress she’d been holding in her body. She was resigned to waiting a little longer, and in the meantime, she would just have to be Little Girl Blue.

Won't you sit there?
Count the little raindrops
Falling on you
It's time you knew
All you can ever count on
Are the raindrops
That fall on little girl blue