Roos | Part One: {Non-Player Characters}

She stood up with an air of presumption that suggested that she knew my answer before I had the time to compute it - typical NPC lag.

Have decided to revisit and rewrite this. I thought the version before was too much a story, not enough of a point. idk.

To me, there are three types of people in the world; all defined by their proximity to, or interaction with, books.

The first of these three types are those who simply don’t read, the joyfully naive who live their lives day-to-day without an imagined yardstick for comparison — the purest Non-Player Characters of the living world. 

Then, secondly, there are those who read books regularly and often. Cursed to forever be jealous of the complex characters that inhabit the novels on their bedside tables, and the exciting, ultra-worldly stories that they navigate. Never do these people read about characters too like themselves; for there are no novels written about the people who would spend all their idle-time reading about the exploits of their better-constructed, ink and page-bound counterparts. No, these people are too preoccupied with reading that they would leave a living a life worth writing about to someone else. They too are NPCs, yet they refuse to admit it, self-aware as they are.

And then there are those few who move through their lives with such an unlabored finesse that they seem to share a sort of tangible existence with those main characters in the books with which humble readers can only envy. Their personalities so describable, their characteristics so observable, and their motivations so easily surmisable. They exist perceptibly unencumbered by the minutiae of everyday life; never observed cleaning under a couch (if only to find evidence of their partner’s infidelity), or scrolling Instagram endlessly (but to stumble across a serendipitous, yet untimely, message from an ex-lover). They are generally flawed, but it is their flaws that let way to the compelling stories that make their lives so enviable.

I have long-since spent my life occupying the middle of these three groups, with an ineffectively concealed desire for upward mobility to the latter. Reading about characters, either generously embellished or wholly invented, has airbrushed my expectations of life into something that I perceive as achievable but is likely a nothing more than fabrication on top of an imagination.

Meeting Roos was like coming into contact with one of those rare, fabled protagonists, a wholly main character. With an immediately magnetic personality and an observable passage through life that seemed to jump out of the pages of a carefully crafted novel more than a Google Calendar, full of their predictable monotonicity — the reality for so many more of us.

I haven’t been able to lie since middle school, she said unprompted during a lull in conversation which punctuated the fact that while we sat next to one another our minds were evidently miles apart. 

Uh huh, I managed back passively, the majority of my own concentration focused for the moment across the wide canal in front of us as a group of drunken tourists laughed and stumbled into one another the unique way people only can while in a foreign city on holidays. 

By this stage, Roos and I had been sitting on the hard stone front steps of her building for hours. It was a neighbourly ritual that I had come to look forward to at the end of every other day; defined as much by our conversations with one another as the moments in between where we found contented quietness in each other's presence.

Where earlier we had been sitting in the full summer sun, now nothing more than a few stubborn rays of light made it over the rooftops of the elegantly gabled Dutch former-merchant houses that seemed to surround us on all sides. Soon, as we both knew, these final rays of sunlight would lose their pointless struggle as well and would disappear behind the narrow and tall buildings. And then, soon after this, the ornamental street lamps lights that lined the canals would flicker on in unison. This would be, as it generally was, the signal that our daily ritual had met its end. Roos would walk up the few hard stone steps into her house, and I would walk down the canal, across the low-hanging metal and stone bridge, and into my own apartment which stood stoically opposite to hers.

I had first noticed Roos the same day that I had moved in two months prior. For her part, I observed a stranger that would sit on her front stoop most evenings with a combination of a book, a cigarette, or a friend – but always with an evident appreciation for the activity of inactivity and an unmatched air of ease with her place within the world. I saw that conversation came easily to her with anyone who walked past. A warmth with other neighbours, a generous calmness with lost foreign travellers asking for directions, and even a perspicacious wit to those few brave men that noticed her beauty and cumbersomely tried their hand. Staring out from my living room window that first day, surrounded by nothing other than moving boxes and a strange sense of alienness in my new home, it seemed to me that this mystery person sitting on her stoop lived those moments only otherwise captured in a serene novel or a poet’s imagination. Dressed casually but considered in a way that matched her effortless demeanour, I resolved to become friends with this mystery protagonist and to spend at least a few evenings with her on her front stoop as well. 

Between our two homes on their opposite sides of the sepia-coloured canal was a typical cross-section of one of Amsterdam’s many water networks, the city’s very veins displaying a remarkable synergy of form and function. The slow-moving conduit of dark water dotted on either side sparingly with many once-loved boats; a build up of leaves and rain water the markings of their uniformly neglected selves. The canal itself, symmetrically walled-in on both sides by the tightly bricked, moss-covered embankments that discerningly separated land from water. These too hemmed in with loose entanglements of bikes and cars, separated by large elm trees adorned with lush verdant foliage. All this before a final stretch of irregular bricks, meticulously placed generations ago, to form the parallel roads that ran opposite to one another in front of both mine and Roos’ houses. The view on either side of the canal, a near mirror-image of the other.

It is because once, in middle school, I lied about kissing a boy, she continued, speaking to herself as much to me, I had never kissed a boy before so it was evidently the cardinal sin of any teenager to lie about having done such a thing. Her usually soft native-Dutch accent broke through slightly stronger as she reminisced on her childhood.

The group of drunken tourists that I was watching stumbled around a corner of an alleyway and out of my sight, the echo of their laughter becoming fainter. At that moment I turned my body to look at Roos, noticing now how immersed she was in her own story. 

My sister somehow found out that I had lied about this –she was only two years older than me so kissing our first boys was a sort of competition between us– and so she made my life hell for telling this stupid little lie. She stopped, looking both into the distance across the canal, and back in time through her memories for a moment until she shook her head and came back to the present. Anyway, since then I haven't been able to really lie very much.

That seems like an endearing character trait – I’d rather not be able to lie than not be able to do anything but lie. Jokingly, I added, I hope you thanked your sister for that life lesson.

She laughed lightly before continuing, There are times though, when I wish I was a better liar, again contemplatively, as if she was thinking again only to herself. It would make mine and Jaap’s lives both easier.

I had seen Roos’ husband Jaap the same day that I had first seen her. While she had been sitting on her front stoop peacefully ruminating on her thoughts, I had noticed him through their wide living room window –a common characteristic of Dutch houses, your life on display like a menagerie to anyone who wants to look– as he moved busily around the house. Performing the chores that I couldn’t imagine Roos ever doing; for what writer would waste their effort making their protagonist perform such things when they could be developing their character, accelerating their story, spurring them towards an unknown climax. At the time I had mulled over how this busy man could be doing anything other than sitting on that front stoop next to that mystery woman given the opportunity.

In the months that followed I had come to know Roos and Jaap, bridging the physical space between our two homes as well as the distance between our roles as neighbours to friends. Initially through casual hello’s and then ever-lengthier conversations, until I too found myself sitting on their front stoop at the end of many days – the mystery woman, less of a mystery, while Jaap would generally still be busying himself inside.

The pair had been married for eighteen months, but had been together as a couple on-and-off for closer to ten years. Being only a couple of years older than me I inferred this made them not quite highschool sweethearts, but certainly sweethearts since close to when they had finished highschool. On one occasion Jaap had told me, boasting proudly, that he and Roos had been together for Most of our adult lives – putting his arm around her as he said it. At the time I noticed the smallest flinch in Roos, as if she was less proud of the shared achievement. For his part, Jaap seemed blissfully indifferent, or even happily ignorant, of these faintly perceptible reactions in his wife. 

Jaap is a very good liar, Roos said candidly, Like right now he told me he is at drinks with his work colleagues but I know he is with his other girl, Sophie I think her name is. 

This was not as surprising as it ought to have been, some weeks earlier I had learnt from Roos that the pair were in an open relationship. Or, at least, now trying to be in an open relationship; in the same way that people say that they are trying for children before they actually fall pregnant. In both there seems to be an anxious state after the choice has been made but before the imagined success has been realised.

Still slightly uncomfortable about her admission but conscious that she was now confiding in me where she perhaps couldn’t with her other friends –too many shared friends who, after so long together, were as much Jaaps as they were hers– I listened attentively.

I’m thankful that he chooses to lie to me. We agreed that we could both sleep with whoever else we wanted but somewhere in that decision we forgot to think about how, or if, to communicate when that happens to one another, she was staring across the canal and I wondered if her mind was again in a different time as well.

I said something unenlightened about how there can exist a space between the fine lines of lying and being truthful where you can coexist with your feelings of guilt, guilt-free. How often, in novels as in life, life is best coloured through our ability to tell a story that is slightly better than the reality.

She disagreed, There is only the truth but a lie is one of many. If someone plays with their words to not lie they haven’t made another single truth, they’ve just created another, prettier, lie.

With this, the last of the rays of light were pulled over the unseen horizon and the ornate street lamps flickered to life up and down the canal around us, the warm light of their reflections dancing on the soft water of the canal. Taking this as the usual cue to begin my short journey home I stood up to leave when Roos’ hand grabbed softly at my leg. 

Looking down at her, still laying across the steps of her front stoop she asked, You’re not coming inside? She asked, with a nonchalant tone that seemed to negate the gravity of what she was implying. Jaap told me his work drinks will be until late, so we’ll be alone until at least midnight.

As I stood there momentarily, feeling like an instrument to accelerate her story more than my own, she stood up and turned her back on me to walk into the house with an air of presumption that suggested that she knew my answer before I had the time to compute it. My slow inaction nothing more typical NPC lag.