Palindrome

By Stephanie Chou

Photo by she's jack

Aziza is making me pose in front of the gates of a closed Shwarma restaurant as she takes my picture with a Polaroid camera. She has already volumized my hair with a cloud of hairspray, turned the cuffs of my leather jacket up, and draped an unravelled scarf across my shoulders. She makes my outfit meticulously uncaring, everything is done only to make it seem like nothing was done at all. I have not mastered the indifferent demeanour of looking like I don’t know my picture is being taken, so I awkwardly stare straight into the lens and grin like I used to for high school photos. We watch my ghostly outline come into being. “Fabulous,” she remarks before tucking it into the inner pocket of her purse.

Today is the first time I’ve seen Aziza in two years. In habit, her priority is creating keepsakes for memories that haven’t happened yet. My Polaroid will follow her home to Toronto when she is done with Vancouver like she has been done with it so many times before. She treats cities like one-night lovers; when they disappoint, fulfill, or when she’s in love, she walks out the door – without reason, without notice, without goodbyes. They become obsessive recollections she uses for future reference. Aziza left right after we graduated from high school. In the past two years she has already fallen in love with New York, Montreal, London, and most recently Toronto. But her return this time is different; this time I know when her flight’s scheduled to leave.

Aziza visits me at work and we grab a beer on my lunch break. Admittedly, not a usual habit, but she is the only person who’s ever told me that I am not allowed to die and when someone has so much faith in your immortality, you go for beers. We sit in a dark booth in Café Crepe, enclosed by the blood red walls and dim lighting. She used to have hair extensions all the way down to the small of her back, but now she sports a closely cropped Agyness Deyn-like boy cut. When Aziza still lived in Vancouver, she would get hair extensions no fewer than four times and take them out a few days or weeks later in a daze of fickle regret. That is the way she is, an unpredictable equation of action and reaction. Aziza is almost too slim and her elongated limbs are arranged nonchalantly out on the leather bench across from me. The heels of her oxford pumps occupy the empty space next to her; her knees lock her legs in perfect 120-degree angles. She takes a Polaroid of the pitcher of beer and adds it to her collection.

“Yeah, Toronto’s really great, you know,” she says as she smoothes her bangs down compulsively. “Like, I’ve really got it together now. It was really shitty before I left, but I don’t even drink in Toronto. Seriously, I’m sober there.” Aziza finishes her beer and leaves red lipstick on the brim of the glass. “It’s just in Vancouver, you know. For old time’s sake.”

For old time’s sake. I wonder which old time. The Tuesdays she missed doing the P.A. announcements in senior year for extra credit because she was hung-over from the night before. The times we snuck out to the Mesa Luna to see bands like Pretty Girls Makes Graves and Death from Above 1979, and she would hold her gin and tonic so tightly in her underage hand like it was the elixir of life. The time I was bent on getting into university, and she was bent on partying with Steve from some band and making it onto a party photo site. When I got my acceptance letter, I exclaimed to her “I did it!” and she exclaimed “I MADE IT!” and sent me the link to a photograph of her at the party with a joint in her hand, half of Steve’s face in the corner. Her identity became defined by who she knew, who knew her, which drinks she liked, which drugs liked her. Those are the old times.

Friendship with Aziza is a complicated transaction. She is like a credit card company with the allure of countless perks, but with a terrible interest rate. Out of an imagined necessity, the terms are agreed to with little foresight. The thing is, Aziza is contagious; she possesses one of those rare magical personalities that people are automatically drawn to, despite themselves. Rooms swell up. Words echo. Aziza has a way of speaking about the most mundane things like they are the greatest. Adrenaline pumps through every vein and artery in your body even if you are just posing in front of a derelict Shwarma restaurant. She makes you feel things are ten times more exciting than they actually are. She has already made friends with our waitress who begins to skew her attention towards us as Aziza does a spot-on Whitney Houston impression. Aziza’s words are emphatic in the right places, her hand gestures grab the right imaginary things in the air, and her eyes look at yours in the right way when she says: “You don’t understand, I had to.” It makes you really believe she had to.

During one of Aziza’s final days in Vancouver before yet another indeterminable episode of absence, I find myself sitting on a curb with her outside a bar on the insistence that “we have to relive our youth.” The only problem is Aziza refuses to go inside. Her return has made her realize that her crafted memories of the city are much better than what the city has to offer. She is dissatisfied with this bar, and all the others we’ve visited in the past few days. None of them compare to “how things used to be.” With liquor in her bloodstream, nicotine in her lungs, and regret in her heart, the fleeting feeling of needing to escape grips her by the ankles again. I watch on the sidelines, as I’ve always done.

“I’m sick with nostalgia,” she tells me as she taps the ash from her cigarette with a manicured finger. “It’s going to kill me, it’s like a cancer.” She takes a long drink from the coke bottle filled with whiskey she has in her purse. She puts it back and I glimpse the edge of my Polaroid picture poking out from its home — the Polaroid that was taken just days earlier to fulfill the duty of remembering an undefined moment. A keepsake to quiet the nostalgia she knew would hit her once she left. So similar to the nostalgia that hits her now during her return.

“I promised myself I would never come back. Why the fuck did I come back?” My silent response is the one she expects. We both know we’ll never know. That is just how Aziza is. Much like how she’ll put herself through the painful process of getting hair extensions put on and off multiple times for reasons only her mood can denote, she’ll bring herself back to the city she loathes just to fall in and out of love with it again — squeezing from it any sentimental memory she can. Aziza is as much of a palindrome in person as she is in name. Things will always be the same — backwards or forwards, whether she flies a million miles east or west.