Four Stages of Pandora

Daria Masyukova

“Medusa wasn't always a monster, Helen of Troy wasn't always an adulterer, 

Pandora wasn't ever a villain.”

– Natalie Haynes, Pandora’s Jar: Women in Greek Myths

Recurrence

Who is Aidan Whitney

Who is Pandora Hope

Where to buy new novel by Hope, Pandora

When did Aidan Whitney date Pandora Hope

What was the true reason for the breakup of Aidan and Pandora Why does Pandora Hope hate Aidan Whitney

How to find a boyfriend that looks like young Aidan Whitney

The screen of my Mac glows blue, and I see my reflection smiling at today’s most popular searches when it goes dark for a second. They are all about me and her, her and me, all over the internet, digitally reunited after three decades of silence. I click a random opened tab, and her black-and-white author photo pops up and stares at me eagerly. I wonder if I should reach out to her.

Her book came out five days ago, an auto-fiction nonsense called “Menless Diet.” Pandora wrote five hundred pages about her dating men of all sorts and flavors, specifically famous ones—she had an exquisite taste for guys with money. The purpose of the novel was to agitate female readers to boycott men completely since the only thing they are bringing into their lives is chaos.

It took people time to get through the abnormally long ten chapters and realize who was who—Pandora wasn’t brave enough to mention the real names of her boyfriends, but she provided enough details for the hoi polloi’s investigations to bloom. A little act of revenge towards those men who hurt her.

“I thought you simply made love to her a few times. Didn’t know you two were dating.”

Winona approaches me silently, hugs me from the back, and her cold palms gently slide along the wrinkles of my black silk shirt, smoothing them out. She turned sixty the other day, and her favorite Atkinsons “Gold Fair in Mayfair” perfume is no longer capable of hiding the sour, dusty smell of her body decaying. It is pitiful. I have a lot to love her for, but now, when she is shrinking and rotting, my tongue cannot twist in the right direction when I am trying to call her beautiful or honey.

“Well, it is a long story, Nona. And I ended up marrying you anyway. We had three amazing kids, traveled around the world, and bought this beautiful penthouse. No need to be upset. The past is in the past, right?”

She loses the hug, leaning away and sighing. Her breath is stained with jealousy. Winona might be wise—wiser than me, because we are divided by a ten-year age gap, and men tend to mature slower—but she is still a woman. She walks up to the fireplace and presses the button on a touch panel. The artificial fire lights up, the metaphor of our heatless, fading desire.

“Yeah, and our present is absolutely fabulous. My daughters blame me for all their misfortunes, my son is dropping out of Yale to be an artist, and my husband hasn’t laid his hands on me in three months. And now she, this wannabe Pulitzer nominee, crashes the ruins of our world that have already started to fall apart by themselves. Your name—no, our last name is all over the news, and this—just look at this.” She pulls her phone out of her pocket. “Look at all these emails I have received from the journalists, look at the number of notifications I have from my coworkers, my friends, the friends of my friends, and God knows who else. My sister is spam-calling me, wondering if I am okay, because the shit that Miss Hope said in her silly little book is insane. They are accusing you of raping her, of abusing her, do you understand this or not?”

I feel bad for her. For the past twenty-five years, Winona has been a decent wife, a shitty mother, and a great mistress. Always next to me. Always in control. She discovered me in the puddle of dirt, the same way an archeologist digs a piece of antiquity out of the stale clay soil, raising me from a boy who had no idea that forks might come in different sizes into an individual who can be taken to a gallery opening or charity gala.

The Whitney surname—I owe it to her, I took it when we got married in Miami. My career in acting—I owe it to her, because her dad—let him rest in peace—was a director, and they both promoted me smartly, capitalizing my looks over the talent of others. My whole life, the version of me that she sees every day when we wake up in the same bed wearing matching pajamas—I owe them to her.

The scariest thing about this is that I don’t feel the urge to pay her back for her good deeds. Do I really need to do it, to at least comfort this strange old woman who nervously fixes the crooked flowers dying in a fancy Rococo-style vase, the strange woman who I also happen to call my wife?

“Come here, Nona. Let me get you a glass of wine, and then we will go to sleep. There is no need to worry about anything. We have a good lawyer, and Pandora is the one who is in a vulnerable position right now. Trust me, we will work everything out, okay?”

When she is done sobbing on my shoulder, I leave her in our empty-smelling bedroom and shut the dark wood door. The house is pitch black and only the moon grins at me through the opened window. I sit down behind the kitchen table with a glass of whiskey on the rocks. Pandora’s book is peacefully lying next to me, and the wind flips its pages. The smell of fresh ink fills up my nostrils.

Every sentence, every word, every letter in it is a lie. If I were a writer, I would tell them the true story, the story I have been desperately trying to reassemble in the course of these three decades. The story of a woman who never had a true persona and made me totally insane. Who infected me with herself and made me suffer from something unknown, something that has been sleeping deep down in my soul for such a long time but never really went away.

It would be up to them whether to believe me or not. I am an actor—a shitty actor, but an actor after all. I know my Stanislavski like kids know “Our Father” when they still believe in God.

Stage One: Toxic Acquaintance

We are forty-eight and fifty right now, Pandora and I, but once upon a time, we were eighteen and twenty.

Freshly moved to New York, eyes widening at the sight of skyscrapers, lungs full of the smell of weed. Our hopes were higher than college girls doing cocaine in the club restroom while their much older dates discuss stocks and cars in the VIP lounge. We were naive. We were hoping to find peace in democracy, love in the triggers of guns, and taste for life in the aisles of Target filled with huge packs of chips and gallons of sodas.

Pandora and I met at the end of September. I still remember her silhouette, trembling under the lantern lights. She stood next to the Christopher Street-Sheridan Square station’s entrance, looking innocently isolated from the rest of the world. Compassion strangely squeezed my soul when she looked at me for the first time and smiled, opening her umbrella.

The typical loneliness of immigrants was the main reason for our match on Tinder. We both spoke Russian and grew up in the same patriarchal culture of post-Soviet countries, carrying the generational trauma of the inability to self-express. The main difference between us was the past that ended up leading us to the States. Pandora needed New York to grow. I needed New York to survive.

Pandora had never worked in her entire eighteen-year-old life, not a single day. Pandora had her daddy, and her daddy had her back, her tuition, her life-sustaining two packs of Marlboro Golds a week, her depressive lows and manic highs, her panic attacks, and other problems of the “I’m not rich, just comfortable” class. She wore a three-thousand-dollar sapphire ring on her index finger, casually caught flights to Europe when the boroughs couldn’t satisfy her appetite for fun, and used “summer” as a verb. Pandora went to NYU and double-majored in art history and French with a creative writing minor. During our first date, she suspiciously giggled when I asked her why she didn’t apply anywhere else.

“I just absolutely adore violet. Didn’t think that other unis’ apparel would look on me as good as the NYU one.”

Pandora regularly skipped her classes, although she was perfectly aware of the cost of her tuition, and I lived at an immigrant shelter in Queens at the time. Both of my parents were going slightly insane: in the course of five years, we went from my dad being a respected drug dealer in Bishkek to selling everything we owned and fleeing to the United States, where no one gave a fuck about us. Pandora wiped the park benches with Clorox wipes before sitting on them, and I occasionally had to eat whatever I would find left on the train: cold McDonald’s fries, half-drunken bubble tea from Miss Du’s Tea Shop, hot dogs from a food truck bought by disgustingly rich tourists who were already too full to finish them. One of Pandora’s biggest problems was her inability to afford a Russian-speaking therapist because her mom had forbidden her from getting help from “one of these fraud doctors,” and my biggest problem was whether I would manage to get at least an hour’s sleep between my three jobs. I don’t even know how we managed to fall in love.

I have no intention of painting Pandora as a spoiled ungrateful monster. First of all, she wasn’t one; second, there were much worse things about her than her daddy’s money. I tell you that as a man who is finally financially stable enough to say that happiness is supposed to be bought.

I guess I just couldn’t survive in New York alone. I wanted a woman next to me because there were always many women in my life. I breathed them in like oxygen. My mother, who gave birth to me but wasn’t smart enough to choose a proper man to be my father. The girl ten years older, who I lost my virginity to when I was thirteen. To be honest, she raped me, but I prefer to pretend that it was my idea to fuck her. My sister, a rare example of a smart woman. Spoke seven languages, got pregnant, and now she is nothing more than someone’s wife. My first love—a total bitch.

And Eline, of course. My favorite ex. Smoothly curved. Hysterically calm, jealous, manipulative. Suffered from a fatal combination of orthorexia, bulimia, and anorexia, could eat only six specific meals. I carried the list of them written down on the blank side of the smoke shop bill in my wallet. Plain rice with sesame seeds and a splash of soy sauce; egg whites with black pepper; low-calorie apple jelly; cottage cheese with nothing; teriyaki chicken as a cheat meal; rice cakes and avocados. Eline was constantly tired, almost on the verge of a blackout. She kissed her girlfriends when she got drunk, I kissed her girlfriends when I was sober. That was what we had in common.

I broke up with her two weeks before I got with Pandora. Eline stayed back in Kyrgyzstan, our home country, which I highly doubt you Americans even know about. The distance was too much for us; we were capable of being toxic and obsessed with each other in the same city, but when seven thousand miles suddenly divided us, she realized that it was time to move on.

Pandora was nothing like Eline. She was an escape. New country, new girl. It was meant to work out. She ate greasy cheeseburgers. She talked with her mouth full. She cared for me in a way that no one had cared before. Pandora paid for me in the nice restaurants, invested in online computer science courses so I could continue pursuing my education in some way without getting in debt for college, and genuinely cared about my life and my well-being.

Pandora was a fresh, unripe banana among the ugly, brown-spotted outcasts. But as soon as I peeled off her epidermis and took a greedy bite of soft flesh, I suddenly realized: although I was starving, I didn’t want to eat this banana at all. This banana was a fucking crazy box full of surprises. Mostly unpleasant ones.

Pandora’s name suited her like a sturdy umbrella suits the windy rain of New York, like a morning cigarette suits the first sips of cold brew, like clean bed sheets suit long-wanted sleep. She was a hurricane, grabbing everyone and everything that wasn’t steady enough to fight her. She had small boobs, but a nice ass, round and meaty. Her skin had slightly green undertones that made her look unwell from time to time, but there were no pimples or acne scars on her childish face. I, as a man, should have been delighted to share dinners and a twin XL bed with her.

But, as I said, she was a banana I didn’t know I didn’t need. And she started turning bad as soon as I left her unfinished.

And Eline was the apple of my eye. Oh, Eline. If only there wasn’t the Atlantic Ocean between us. I liked you so much, but not enough to dip into the freezing water and die while trying to gain your trust back.

So, I pursued Pandora. Despite all her flaws, she was actually there, available to me at any time of the day.

Maybe that was the reason for our downfall. We were young and confused, completely different people coming in the same package with IMMIGRANT written all over it. She loved me too much to keep her sanity. I loved her too little to be honest, at least with myself, and not ruin her virgin guts when she let me do so.

Stage Two: To Be Cumtinued

When the obsession of the candy-bouquet period wears off, most couples end up sucking the souls out of each other in the most intense arguments ever and then part ways. They realize that sometimes they cannot simply close their eyes and pretend that they actually can stand the way their partner dresses, or stick earplugs into their ears every time their lover chews apples with an especially disgusting crunching sound. There is always some catch, a detail that you simply cannot put up with no matter how hard you try to do so.

Our catch was anything sex-related.

We had our first kiss a week after we met. The owner of one of the three coffee shops where I worked—being a good barista was the only value I had besides my handsome facial structure—invited us to the latte-art event where they also happened to serve free beer. I tried to explain to Pandora what was happening in the tiny world of the coffee cups, pitchers, and filters, the milk being poured into the coffee in a specific way to create a tulip or a seahorse, but Pandora cared about getting intoxicated as fast as possible more than listening to my mansplanation of latte art. She had just gotten out of the golden cage of her mother’s hypercontrol, and she desperately needed to act grown up. In her eyes being drunk meant being cool. Sexy. Unstoppable.

The house music in the coffee shop was too loud, and the Bud Light in my hands was violently sweating. My colleagues Diego and Tessa, already drunk, were flirting with one of the contestants. I knew that they were a couple—they always fucked in the storeroom during lunch break—so I pointed them out to Pandora and asked her opinion about polyamorous relationships. I was running out of ideas for the conversation.

“If it works for them, then it’s alright, I guess.” She took another sip of beer, swaying to the rhythm of music. “But I would never like to share you with anyone. You are too cool to be shared, Aidan.”

Ten minutes later we were in the restroom, Pandora sitting on the top of the toilet as I pressed her against the graffiti-stained wall. It was suffocatingly hot in the cabin, and each time I pulled away from her to catch my breath, her face started melting under the dim lights as though I was hallucinating. This wasn’t a gentle kiss, full of love and uncertainty of genuine affection. We were two animals who had happily wandered inside the zoo enclosure to mate and produce something seriously faulty from the beginning.

“Wait.” She grabbed my hand, which pulled the band of her tights to take them off. “I don’t want it to happen here.”

Pandora turned out to be the final boss of virgins: she hadn’t even dated anyone before me. I wondered why another guy hadn’t fucked her yet. She wasn’t obese, and her face was, if not heavenly beautiful, then simply attractive; she wore slutty tops and always had her open cleavage pushed up by a Victoria’s Secret bra. She told me that she had been bullied throughout middle school for the way she dressed and the way she looked, so no one wanted to date her. It was hilarious to hear, as a man. We have this amazing ability to make love to whoever we want to if she gives us a signal to do it. Her pussy being untouched was totally on her.

But I liked it. I never had a girl that I could spoil. We spent the rest of that night wandering around downtown, making out while waiting for the red hand to change to the white pixel guy at the crossings and hiding from the tourists who looked at us judgingly when my hands slid to her butt from time to time. We left the sounds of us kissing everywhere. Pandora sat on top of me on one of the benches in the World Trade Center area, her cheeks blushing when she first discovered the feeling of a man’s dick getting hard under the touch of her crotch. The next morning, she sent me a picture of her hickey-covered neck and called me thirty times until I finally picked up the phone during my break.

“We were so dumb last night! Making out in front of the 9/11 memorial? Aidan, this is fucking disgusting. I feel like a dirty filthy pig.”

“You aren’t dirty, Dora, you are just young and horny.” I blinked at Diego who came in the room to pick up another batch of frozen sandwiches. “And considering the number of hickeys you left on my neck, you do really like me.”

I found a sadistic pleasure in walking her through the discovery of different aspects of sex. We rarely had the opportunity to properly fuck in the comfort of her dorm since her Californian roommate Maddie was always there late in the evenings, editing her stupid film projects and yapping to her girlfriend on FaceTime. I hated her for being lesbian. I grew up knowing how the world should properly work: my father told me that men are the ones to hold the power, and women provide the reason for this power to bloom due to their vulnerability. It is about balance. People like Maddie disrupted it. How can a woman exist, being fulfilled by feminine energy only? Maddie’s independence was a lie, and her constant presence in Pandora’s room was an obstacle preventing me from getting what I really wanted.

It is funny how thirty years later I ended up being the one dependent on a woman. Youth rarely knows what is right and what is wrong, and has no idea of how life can make all of your principles break into pieces.

The absence of a place where we could be alone made us creative. Pandora’s first time happened in her dorm on Halloween night—nothing particularly eventful; she was in pain, I tried to be gentle, but she ended up bleeding and staining her perfectly white and crispy bedsheets. But before and after that our appetite for each other was satisfied in secluded, but still public spaces: the terrace of the restaurant in Little Italy long after the closing time, my fingers deep in her vagina and her cold palm wrapped around my dick; the train to Beacon where I covered our laps with my giant puffer jacket so she could give me another handjob; the Greenwich Village streets in the middle of the night, completely empty, the perfect setting for a round of oral sex, switching between the giving and receiving positions. We were nervous about being caught all the time. It was the part where our opposite lifestyles met. We both had a place, but our places, technically, weren’t our homes. It was hard to call home either her tiny room with a window facing the opposite side of the building which she shared with Maddie or my space in the shelter where the guards made me strip before entering if they suspected that I had a lighter or a bottle of alcohol on me.

Everything started falling apart in the genital-symbiosis area exactly when Maddie left for a winter break, and I basically moved in with Pandora for a whole week. She was done with her finals at the same time as her roommate, but she told her dad to book the most expensive plane tickets for the 27th of December instead of the 18th because she needed time to recover after her chaotic end of the semester and feel “the Christmas spirit of New York.” It was complete bullshit. We simply wanted to fuck without being worried about Maddie walking in on us naked and hot or without freezing our buttocks off trying to make love on the streets.

We spent the evenings fucking, smoking pot in Washington Square Park with my skateboarding buddies, going out to eat, returning to Pandora’s dorm completely drunk and high, fucking again, and falling asleep, limbs intertwined but hearts distant. We argued more than ever. She refused to try out new positions because sex was still quite painful for her even when we were making love in good old missionary. I felt bored and disappointed, reminiscing about Eline and me.

The day before Pandora had her flight to Moscow we spent a ridiculous evening together.

I was a man. I loved to watch erotic videos. I used to lock myself up in the shelter bathroom every evening while my dad was beating the shit out of my mom. Choosing a perfect video was one of the most stable rituals in that chaotic life. I felt in control when it was me who had to decide what was on the menu that day: a couple making love to each other gently and passionately, a college girl going to a frat party for the first time and getting locked up with a company of blond guys with scarily blue eyes, a strict teacher punishing her student for a bad grade. After getting into a relationship with Pandora I noticed that I started going for something violent more often—the stress she put me through made me crave disgustingly awful things.

Pandora didn’t get it. When I asked her what kind of videos she preferred, a piece of penne alla vodka fell from her tongue. She told me something about this industry being the abscess on society’s flesh, underage girls being the victims of men’s satisfaction, men getting unrealistic expectations of female bodies, and—the funniest nonsense I’ve ever heard—me potentially becoming dysfunctional in that area from watching too many videos of this nature.

Pandora, a newly created sex addict, was explaining this to me. Pandora, who had her hands in my pants while we were sitting on the bench somewhere close to Pier 51, was defending her species with a furious face. Pandora, who dressed me up in her lingerie and made me act like a woman, was blaming me for my preferences.

I couldn’t help but laugh.

That night I made love to her violently. Brown eyes sparkled with pearly tears. The bed smelled sweaty, and at some point I heard her whispering, telling me to slow down.

I didn’t. She somehow made me so angry with the feminism soaking through her pores that the only thing I wanted at that moment was to do everything she didn’t want me to do.

Early in the morning, I saw her off to JFK and got back to the shelter where I jerked off to Eline’s nudes and went to my first shift in the coffee shop right after that.

We never talked about that night again, Pandora and me.

Stage Three: Disgusting Child

The day I dreamed about our never-to-be child, we were on the Eastbound M8 bus. Pandora didn’t want to take it. She hated buses. In her world, public transportation rules were pretty simple: if it’s far, go by train. If it’s so far that you will have to get on something besides the subway, open the Uber app. But I insisted on taking that bus. It was a matter of principle to make her compromise on doing something she didn’t want to do.

That whole winter was nothing but torturous wind. It became the permanent resident of New York: constantly in a rush, probably a tad rude at first sight, but definitely an irreplaceable part of the city. The wind used to catch us off guard, biting our bones while we clung to each other like penguins, all black and white in matching coats and thin long sleeves, trying to get back to Pandora’s dorm. I was the one who taught Pandora to put style before anything. She always froze to death in wide baggy jeans that I carefully picked out for her and never complained about it because she knew I would make her not only warm but hot, hot and wet—if Maddie was out, of course.

It was the end of January, and I left Pandora on that Eastbound M8 bus—not physically, only mentally. Her body trembled from the cold. I sat next to her, and our reflections stared back at us from the window that transformed into a mirror as the sky darkened. I looked flawlessly tired under the gentle touch of the dim light, drained after my shift. Being a handsome man in New York was hard—too many reflective surfaces, too many stares from girls and guys as I walked down the street. Being a handsome man with Pandora was even harder. She was an average eighteen-year-old with self-esteem lower than a baritone, and I was her first boyfriend ever. No wonder she was persistently jealous.

And now she was late and probably pregnant with our child. I carefully examined her strangely calm face. The same dim light that made me look nice gave her olive skin a note of sickness and dug enormous black circles under her puppy eyes. If we had a child, it would be disgusting. We smoked away the days: hand-rolled cigarettes, menthol Camel, Marlboro Gold. That fetus was broken from the start.

Our child will probably have her bad eyesight and my sharp chin, I thought. And it will be ugly anyway because I didn’t want it to be born at all.

“Aidan,” she murmured to me, “I want to ask you for a favor.”

Favors made me anxious. Agreeing to help someone out felt like lending them money, and I never had enough money or emotional capability to do so.

“Sure, go ahead.”

Pandora glanced at me, biting her lower, crusty wind-burned lip. I saw the contemplation in her features, thoughts running through the foundation-filled wrinkles. They mixed in the way all kinds of alcohol mixed in a Long Island Iced Tea, creating a poisonously delicious blend.

“I know that you don’t give a fuck about my writing,”—someone requested a stop, I noticed a yellow cord had been pulled—“but I really need you to read the story I wrote yesterday. I mean, you have done drugs, haven’t you?”

She never cared about serious things like potentially being pregnant, or failing a class, or talking about the problems in our relationship, or any other shit a teenage girl can have going on in their stupid life. But she cared about her writing so much she wouldn’t sleep, or eat, or shower, or even think properly. Pandora was dying to be recognized, basically desired to be the reincarnation of Dostoevsky, and being declined by the publishers over and over again made her physically sick.

I didn’t understand the obsession. I belonged to the real world, where people talked about politics, rent, grocery shopping, currency rates, or scoliosis. Not metaphors and imaginary development of imaginary characters.

“What do drugs have to do with it?” I quickly looked at her stomach, exposed through the unzipped fur coat. The single thought of something growing in her uterus, something that partly belonged to me, caused a painful lump in my throat. I had an urge to throw up.

I am still not sure if I was disgusted with the concept of pregnancy in general or with the fact that it was Pandora who was pregnant. When I tried to imagine Eline with a baby bump, I didn’t have any tenderness growing in my soul, but I simply knew: that child would be perfect. It would have her silky hair, tastefully crispy laugh, and eating disorder, and it would be an overachiever, mentally ill, but appealing to everyone.

If it was a girl, she would be catcalled as soon as she turned twelve. If it was a boy, he would fuck older women and smoke pot, lying on a fluffy carpet in his ascetically minimalistic room. And no matter what he or she would do, I would never hate that child.

But Pandora’s and my baby. I would like to have it just to ruin its life. To make it pitiful.

We got off the bus, and the silence kept growing. I felt it flying above our heads, hiding in the dark corners of Tompkins Square Park as we were walking through. I didn’t mind Pandora’s quietness. I was holding her hand in mine, but it didn’t feel real. It was cold, dry, and lifeless, with the texture and feel of a raw chicken foot.

“I will never become a good writer,” she whispered. “I haven’t tried cocaine. I haven’t hooked up with anyone on the first date. I didn’t do anything crazily interesting in my whole life. But you have. So, I need your opinion on my piece.”

Pandora didn’t have to do anything she mentioned to lead a crazy life. She was already dating me, a man far from mentally stable, and ignored the fact that she might have been knocked up. She filled up the void by typing out nonsense on her laptop instead of fixing her spoiled brain.

“Well, I lived a little, but I don’t think that it is a good idea for me to help you out. And you’ve also told me that there is nothing better than to write about the things you’ve lived through.”

I simply couldn’t stand her. The smell of her musky perfume was crawling up my nostrils, and her hair laid too nicely. She obviously did it for me, and it was driving me crazy because she tried so much to be perfect when what I actually wanted from her was her imperfection.

Her referring to my life as something crazily interesting was another cruel slip of the tongue. White girl in her best days of flourishing dreamt about being like me for the experience while everything was being served to her on a gold-rimmed platter: great college, trips to other countries, unlimited amount of cash, and a bright future, cause bitches like her somehow always manage to climb on a pedestal the moment they turn thirty. Pandora could make zero effort and still be successful due to her daddy’s connections back at home or the connections of her equally rich classmates here. But she insisted on pursuing writing. A thankless business, according to her own words, where no matter how hard you work, you rarely get anything in return.

“Maybe you should take a pregnancy test.”

Pandora giggled and told me that she had gotten her period in the Mexican restaurant we had gone to before getting on the bus. We had had the most awful tacos ever there and she had paid for them—as she always did when we went out.

Her words gave me a sense of relief. They felt like jerking off in a steaming shower and accidentally discovering a new dimension while doing it.

We dated for a few months after the pregnancy scare. I would say that it wasn’t even dating at that point: we simply fucked, and kissed, and cuddled, but we both were aware that it was over.

She cried violently when I finally dumped her under the Washington Square Park Arch in March, and she begged me to stay. She cut her wrists each time she went out with me as a friend and wore sleeveless tops so I could see the freshly made wounds staring at me with their redness, but I already knew that she got what she wanted.

The inspiration. The tension. The broken heart. Everything that fed her writing with the pain of existing.

Stage 4: Shapeshifting and Last Words

Sometimes it was really scary for me to look her straight in the eyes. They were round and big, completely black when it was dark outside or in a room with artificial lightning, but when the rays of direct sunlight hit them, they lit up with fire. Her eyes were demonic. You could see the Gates of Hell in their oily irises. You could sense the danger mixed with lust. You could feel the heat burning at the ends of the thick eyelashes that surrounded them.

When everything started completely falling apart, I shared with Pandora a lot of details about Eline and the other relationships I had had. I searched for a way to reduce the power of the hurricane rising inside of her, the hurricane that would burst out the moment I told her I wanted to break up. I thought that making her jealous would be the best way to incinerate her soul so badly that it would simply have no force to burn when it came to our final moment.

Pandora might have seemed melancholic throughout my story, but she actually wasn’t. At least not all the time. Every day she acted differently in her own skin; I almost never knew when she would become aggressive and throw the cocktail glass at the bar wall, or when she would suddenly experience a wave of love washing her whole body and go and donate two thousand dollars to the animal shelter. Sometimes she would run to me after classes, smiling and telling me how great her classmates and professors were, and ten seconds later she would be so irritated with me that the words coming out of her mouth would be full of poison and hatred.

Pandora was lost in her body, lost in her mind, and, therefore, lost as an individual in the scale of the whole world.

I used to be the one who hurt women. It was my job as a man to ensure that the balance was being respected. Try to understand me rather than judge me: I grew up in a family where each woman had her own assigned character, which never changed, so when men got bored, they hurt them on purpose to spice things up. My mother was a mute lamb, pure and harmless, always following the steps of her husband. She didn’t work unless he told her to, which he rarely did, being extremely jealous and leaving the whole family to starve when the money he earned wasn’t enough. She patiently covered for him when the social services came to our house to pose some questions about her children fainting at school and being covered in bruises. She helped him stuff little bags with white powder, and she listened to the sounds of him raping me and my sister, and she got beaten when she tried telling him to stop.

My sister was the fugitive: she ran away from home when she was seventeen, desperate to prove everyone wrong and show that a girl from a dysfunctional family can be successful in life. She went to the local university to major in Linguistics and Translation, and she started traveling around the world for international conferences, getting a lot of job opportunities. A year after graduation she returned to us, pregnant and with a husband who seemed to be the same man as my father, just younger. I suppose she missed the abuse and got too bored. She needed the ghosts of the past implemented in her skin at that point. Her family ended up separating from ours and not moving to the States, but simply because her husband didn’t want to. New York was one of her biggest dreams at the time when she still had them.

My aunties, my cousins, my much older brother’s wife who I rarely saw, the things I have heard about my grandparents who died before I was born—everything gave me the impression that women actually loved to be hurt, so I projected it on every relationship I had further in life. I considered Pandora to be hurtable too. I wanted the last months of our existence to be colorfully eventful. I didn’t want to be bored while waiting it out and making sure that she simply wouldn’t kill me when I broke up with her.

The more she learned about Eline and others, the more she changed. I started noticing how Pandora was slowly morphing into something that was nothing like her. Something liminal. Her face was suddenly so familiar, and her breathing was the breathing of my first love: whispering, soothing, smelling like green tea mints. She blinked like my colleague Tessa, and when I examined her fingers, I noticed a strange resemblance to the long porcelain fingers of Eline. She was like a dream turned into reality. All women that I have ever found attractive, all combined within her.

That was not what I desired. I needed her to break like others did, but it seemed that her mind was growing stronger and stronger in its powerful insanity. Pandora became skinnier because she simply stopped eating anything, and she was so happy when we went shopping together and the size-zero pants she tried on were too big for her. She stared in the mirror with the smile of an anorexic girl, wide and trembling. That smile, I knew it too well. Eline had it. Pandora’s black eyes were suddenly burning all the time, uninterrupted; the sunken cheeks made them radically stand out.

She was shapeshifting, bending in any direction I wanted her to, adapting to the harsh conditions of what she thought to be my love. Pandora was never jealous of Eline: she calmly nodded when I shared another detail about her, and the next day that detail would be incorporated into her life. She listened to music I had liked listening to with Eline, she wore the same exact outfits Eline did, she got jet black hair extensions and did her make-up like Eline did. Pandora was so calm and peaceful for the last two weeks of our relationship that I started doubting whether I should break up with her or not.

But the calmness before the hurricane is never a good sign. Never.

On the day of our breakup, she called me in the middle of the night, screaming her lungs out and telling me that she had a gut feeling that I cheated on her. Technically, I hadn’t. I had texted Eline the other day and we ended up talking on FaceTime for a few hours, discussing our life in the present and our life in the past. Pandora simply couldn’t know about it. It was my and Eline’s secret, so I carefully asked her why she thought so.

“You have been so distant lately, and you keep talking about her, and you never text me first, saying that you are busy working,” she sobbed on the line, her voice mixing with the sound of rain. “But I called all the places where you work, and two of them said that you were fired a month ago. So what the fuck are you doing when you don’t have shifts at your job? And why are you paying so little attention to me when I turned exactly into the person you wanted me to be?”

We broke up the next day, and you already have an idea about how it went. I was too scared to stay with her any longer: I knew that she could adapt to my needs, and that was exactly what scared me. She was not a woman, she was a monster, a parasite. I suffocated with her.

Pandora and I met for the last time six months after our separation. I had just started seeing Winona, but Pandora was still bright and clear in the core of my mind. I called her on Friday evening, asking if she would like to have dinner with me. She did.

“What’s your secret, Pandora?” I poured her a glass of Sauvignon Blanc, looking at her and wondering what she was thinking about me at that moment. “How come you agreed to have dinner with me, a person who hurt you so badly, as I remember you said?”

She stared at me with her scary eyes and giggled in that special manner of hers that made me feel inferior.

“You never hurt me, Aidan. How can I be hurt if the broken heart you gave me filled me up with inspiration.”

“You contradict yourself. So I did break your heart, but you are thankful for that, is that what you are saying?”

“Not exactly. I simply don’t even see it as a heartbreak at this point. My biggest dream will come true because of the way you treated me. You awoke a writer in me. But your biggest dream—being an independent man, a superhuman who rules the world—I highly doubt you will achieve it by yourself. Too much is lacking in your life. Money. Recognizable surname. Talent.

You have been here for such a long time and you still haven’t moved a bit. I am going up, at least in the sense of getting an education—and where are you going?”

I knew where I was going—at least after she would pay the bill for the three-course meal. To Winona’s apartment, satisfying the needs of an aging woman and earning what Pandora told me I lacked.

Her last words and the fact that I didn’t hurt her spoiled the rest of my life. Every time I enjoy something that I thought I have earned I remember the disgust on her face, and then I look at Winona and wonder how I ended up being in this situation. I escaped my family, but I never broke the cycle of dependency. Only now, I am the dependent one.

Afterwards

We are standing on opposite sides of the room, and our eyes meet for the first time in thirty years. She looks healthy and beautiful, accompanied by her female editor. Their hands are glued to each other, and I see the engagement rings on both of them. I guess Pandora really meant it when she said she was done with men.

Winona dragged me to this charity gala event, thinking that it was the worst time for me to hide from the public. We needed to restore their faith in the virtue of our surname. We needed to persuade them that I wasn’t guilty.

Why is she so happy? Is she really finally living her best life? Does she deserve it even though she started with everything and I started with nothing?

When Winona and I come back home, I get an email from the director of the movie I was supposed to play the main part in, and he tells me that they need to replace me for now because of my bad publicity.

I know that Pandora is smiling right now, intoxicated with her awesomeness and her unfair victory.