A true story about compatibility

I once knew a girl named Hadas. I was introduced to her by a friend who believed, for aesthetic reasons, that she and I would fit together not as different puzzle pieces complement each other, but as identical spoons hug. “You two both have no god.” He said to me before I’d met her. He told her those same words. Hadas and I talked about that for years. In our eyes we were nothing alike.

Hadas was one of those people who always knew how to be cruel to her friends but was never punished for it. She never learned her lesson and never once found herself alone. She had yogurt white skin, a baby’s double chin, small black eyes sunken into her face like buttons on a sofa and big round breasts that were the topic of many teenage conversations amongst my friends. They called it “Hadas worship”, as they jokingly ruminated about the placement, shape and size of her nipples. In fact they were deathly sincere and solemn. They wondered if she was still a virgin, and how she would react to the simple request of taking her clothes off so they could see her naked.

I never expected a thing from her. She could disappear for months and then reappear as my best friend in the world. She’d flutter about between social groups, boring every group with pointless anecdotes about her other friends. She told confusing tales in a machinegun pace that left me uneasy. She spouted nervous laughter in between her sentences. She showed up at my door with a bowl full of vodka-soaked chocolate balls that she’d baked herself for my birthday and then eaten half of. Their smell alone was enough to induce vomit. She ate the rest in my room and then drunkenly harassed me. “Come on,” She whined. “Ask me questions the way you always do.”

She told me a dozen more stories about people who had no more than a name, all delivered in the breathless excitement of a child who’s just run home from kindergarten. Then she said “Maybe you should write a movie about them!”
“I can’t write a movie about them. I don’t know them.” I said.
She was taken aback by that. “I tell you about them all the time.” She eyed me suspiciously.
“Yeah, but that’s not enough. I need to be there, hear them, really understand them. I need to be there without really being there.”
“If you want me to I’d be willing to record them.” She said.
“You’d be willing to what?”

Hadas suggested we place a small tape recorder on her body so that she could secretly record hours of her friends’ stoned conversations. I would collect the tapes from her, study them at home and produce a movie about them. I was to intimately write about the people in her life, since she believed herself to be incapable of capturing them and the truth she felt so strongly about. She needed that from me. I was flattered. My arms tingled. For a moment I could picture myself tying the tape recorder to her pale leg, realizing in my fantasy that all she really wanted was this closeness, this intimacy. All she wanted was for me to touch her leg.

But she and I were nothing alike, and we both knew it.