THE PERMISSION.

By Swati Sudarsan

Twelve hours ago you had spotted the dead hamster.

Ronnie had brought home the hamsters two weeks ago. At first, you thought he had bought them on a whim (given Ronnie’s proclivity to impulse and irresponsibility), but you eventually realized that they were a planned attack. Ronnie had sensed your listlessness, a faint knowledge of the words “we’re over” on your tongue, tense as a guillotine refusing gravity. He never knew how many times you had almost let the blade slip, swallowing it back in because you couldn’t afford the words yet.

Though you are categorically an animal lover, you had been repulsed from the moment Ronnie brought the hamsters home. Their cardboard box vibrated from the menace of their tiny claws, and they emitted high-pitched chirps in a language of friction. Within a half hour of their homecoming, you noticed a pinprick hole beginning to gnaw out the side of the box. Ronnie had stared dumbly as you frantically stabbed the lid of a plastic Tupperware. You stashed the hamsters inside, screaming at Ronnie to call an Uber. Thirty minutes later, you pulled up to a flickering sign that read Soldan’s Pet Supplies. After buying the cheapest cage possible and some pellets of hamster food, you had sighed,“Ronnie, we can’t fucking Uber each time we need to feed these rats.”

The dead hamster lay on its back, face melded into a perma-grimace. The other hamster still alive was silent in its wheel. You knew Ronnie would be devastated when he came back. He had bought the hamsters in the hope that the mutual responsibility would sew your relationship tighter, a formula he had learned from his parents: have babies, stay together. He was signaling that he wanted permanency in the relationship, an urgent memo given that you are both on the cusp of graduation. But now one hamster is dead, the other alive. Half a permission to leave.

You have considered when you can break up with Ronnie. You might do it around graduation, or sometime shortly after. If the other hamster had died too, you wonder if you would have taken the opportunity to leave him, but you lack the time to truly stretch your imagination. Ronnie is due back soon from a visit home, which is just 10 miles away. Anyways, you are unfamiliar with imagining yourself outside of Ronnie. There is no space to think beyond him when you are acquiesced by his constant barrage of gifts. Ronnie thrived on his ability to purchase power - his love language was bribery. The financial burden of a break up is not really something you can afford, you are accustomed now to a lifestyle evolved past 25 cent ramen. You overlooked the intolerability of Ronnie since he ensured you had not just a full belly, but a lifestyle and society. Since you had started dating Ronnie, you had filled out, but so had your social life. The fights with him had grown more intolerable in the last few months, but you are determined to hang on until graduation when you will leave behind the vestiges of everything you have now and could build anew on your own dime.

Ronnie had also trod on your ability to think outside of him with his constant presence. He filled in the cracks between your classes with himself, and your only friend group was also his. In addition, Ronnie had basically stopped going home the last few months as your fights had grown more frequent. As if tangible presence correlated with healthy romance. Ronnie had only gone home this weekend because your last fight had resulted in him sleeping on the couch. He knew he had pushed too far this time, so he left hoping your anger would evaporate by the time he came back. He wanted to do this while making you feel like the one in time-out.

Ronnie’s ability to reverse and negate the essential truth of a situation was truly a craft. He had learned this skill from his friends and cousins in the campus Indian American Association. IAA was more community than club, but it liked to charade as a service-driven society. After its one annual volunteer event (aptly named after Mahatma Gandhi), the rest of the year was dedicated to house parties and formals. The parties were never officially hosted by IAA, but they were attended only by organization members. Many of those in IAA had grown up together or were distant relatives, so the parties operated on the implicit contract that if one person got busted, everyone got busted. Something about the mutual silence made people act feral, as if the wilder they acted, the less likely someone might tattle the events of the night to their families. The mutual silence was a spell of protection over the community, a permission to act without rules.

You had met Ronnie at one such event, the IAA winter formal. The event marked the time of year when bitter midwest frost killed the warm winds from Lake Michigan, and legions of anemic brown girls scrambled to find boyfriends that would hold their dying hands for at least a season. You were not really on the hunt that night, you were new to the community and just wanted to fit in. You tried to talk to girls who iced you out, until Ronnie had spotted you. After that, he seemed infinitely present. Every time you went to the drinks station, there he was with a fresh plastic cup. It was charming that night, but later you learned his friends had set up a rube goldberg of meetcutes throughout the night. There was something sickly in the way the community had colluded to get you together, before you had even expressed an interest in him.

Ronnie had swept you into his wings. He made melding into IAA easy, previously an impossible task given you were the only one paying your way through college and sending any extra home. You had no capital to match designer bags with the other girls, or even to go to Sunday brunches that sealed friendships. Ronnie had sniffed out this vulnerability like a shark to blood. After the IAA event, he often took you out to dinner, which you kept agreeing to since it meant a meal and at least three more with the leftovers. In fact, Ronnie had asked you out over pad thai, which you agreed to with a kiss on his wine-stained lips. You had stayed over with him for the first time that night, falling asleep only when the sky raised into a fragile morning blue.

You had moved in with Ronnie in the months after. It made sense; you would both save on rent. You paid only a quarter of it though, and repented by picking up after Ronnie in the way a housemaid would. In fact, a few months ago, you had been rearranging Ronnie’s underwear drawer when your hand snagged on unexpected nylon. Inside the drawer was a black duffel bag stained with white. It was heavy with paper. You figured it housed Ronnie’s porn collection, but when you unzipped the bag you had found mounds of crisp cash. You thought Ronnie maybe casually dealt weed to his friends, but the audacity of the bag was larger than that. You were scared of its origins and meaning, and had shoved the bag back into the drawer and out of your mind. The less you knew, the less you would be responsible for this bad news cash. Anyways, he was due to buy you textbooks for the semester, and you could not afford to upset the stasis of your relationship.

But now, with one hamster dead and one alive you are at a crossroads. A decision is to be made, facilitated by the trove of cash you had just remembered. You go back to check if it’s still there. It is. Any thief could take it in minutes. Any girlfriend who is leaving him.

You pull the bag from the drawer, and quickly estimate its worth. Conservatively, you guess there is $10,000. This is financial insurance to leave Ronnie, it is permission for you to consent to your own life. You can use the money to evade him. The money is modest, but you can find a solo apartment off-campus, and take online classes until you graduate. If you ever have to venture back to campus, you will duck at every brown person you see. If IAA can’t find you, they can’t control you.

You grip the bag, feeling like you are inhaling helium. Somehow, gravity has loosened its hold on you. One hamster has died, but the other has lived. Viva la hamster! - you are going to get out. And no matter how small its life, you will not leave the hamster in the peril of Ronnie. You are tethered to each other, the sole survivors of this little life. You reach into the cage and grip the hamster tightly in its wheel. As if in understanding, it does not emit a single chirp. You forage on the ground until you find the shorn Tupperware lid, and place the hamster inside. You sense the hamster’s discomfort, and find a tender edge within yourself. You grab a wad of hundred dollar bills and methodically shred them into long lines. You lay the bills onto the floor of the Tupperware, then drape the hamster back on. You call an Uber.

You are silent the whole car ride, though your phone is humming with texts from Ronnie. He has probably come back to find you gone. The hamster sits quietly in your lap. Perhaps it is mourning its friend, or maybe it anticipates the adventure. Your reverie is broken when the Uber dumps you at your destination. Directly above you is a sign with a flickering “S” next to the “oldan’s.”. You walk through the doors, and dump the black bag on the front desk. You demand: “Get me the largest hamster cage you have and three months' food.” Maybe it’s premature or maybe it’s right on time. You are ready to start over.

Swati Sudarsan is a first-generation Asian American writer. She works in public health research during the day, and writes in the margins of her life. She is based in Oakland, CA with her partner and cat.