Rawr
by Juan Velasquez
Like a newborn, it took me a few seconds to adjust to the light. Through my cloudy vision, I could make out the word “rawr”… sent by… Warren?
I was hiding from the party.
“What?” I said out loud. I felt a pang of pride ripple through my chest. I was already speaking to myself in English, after only a couple of months in Canada.
But ten years of English lessons didn’t prepare me for this. Rawr? Is this even a word? An acronym? It's definitely slang... Maybe an insult? Am I supposed to sound it out?
“Rawr,” I whispered in the blue-grey bathroom.
It took me four milliseconds, I promise, no longer, to realize that it was an animal sound.
I asked the rudimentary web browser to enlighten me, but it just left me in the dark. There was no consensus about the exact meaning of rawr, but everyone—from Urban Dictionary to Webster’s—seemed to agree there might be a hidden message behind it. The word was not meant to fold into itself, it was meant to spread out and infect everything around it. Warren sent it like a projectile aimed at my heart but it landed in the twisted folds of my brain.
“It means I love you, dinosaur,” Google said.
At that point, I realized maybe I was too drunk. The only way to be sure was to drink another beer.
Leaving the bathroom, a different kind of darkness greeted me; yellow and mellow, coming from the dozens of candles that littered every surface and from the Christmas lights strewn along the walls. In retrospect, the decor did seem a bit antiquated for eighteen-year-olds but maybe somber lighting never goes out of style. A line of people let out a disappointed sigh when they saw me. Waiting a long time for the bathroom, they had expected someone more interesting to come out: maybe a local celebrity or at least an attractive couple with dishevelled clothes and messy hair.
“Do you have coke?” a blond woman in line asked me, slurring her words.
“What?”
“Coke?” she made a snorting gesture with a key.
“No,” I replied.
As she walked away, I muttered in Spanish, “These people don’t get how their pleasure fucks over my country.” I had never been personally affected by the drug trade but, like most Colombians of my generation, my brain was littered with violent images from national newscasts and American films. I sounded annoying, but in my defense, it was the early 2010s and being sanctimonious was in the miasma.
I searched the crowd of sweaty bodies for Abby—she had our other beers in her tote bag, but at a mere five feet, five inches, she was buried under the sea of inebriated Neanderthals and Vikings that made up the university’s student body. Abby and I felt like aliens around our peers, but perhaps we were not that foreign. We dwelled on the small fissure between us and them, even though there was a vast canyon separating all of us from the rest of the world. Still, there was a definitive cultural and aesthetic discrepancy, which can be vital to an eighteen-year-old. We used incongruent banks of references to communicate and whereas we took great pride in our outré tastes and alternative style, these people were brutish, reactionary, and worst of all, basic—the most damning adjective for millennials my age.
I practiced active listening and searched for Abby’s voice in the room. I heard the guttural chanting of bros in salmon shorts, the same incantations that Grimes would satirize a year later in a music video. It sounded nothing like the melodic cadence of Abby’s speech. She delicately and slowly pronounced her Ss, creating a sense of ease when she spoke; I would often stop paying attention to her words, as I embarked on a trance-like journey down the river of her voice. In fact, I heard Abby before I even saw her, when she was humming Vampire Weekend in line for Frosh. I tapped her shoulder and by the end of the day she was rubbing my back, humming the same melody while I vomited on the sidewalk. In an alcohol- and cannabis-induced stupor, her voice blurred national and temporal boundaries and took me back to my childhood bed where my sister would sing me lullabies whenever I told her there was a ghost in my room. They shared a penchant for nurturing the weak, they both faced their fears—of drunk froshies and malignant ghosts, respectively—to save me the bile of my toxic thoughts.
A drunken Economics major puked in front of me. I was going to help him but, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted an ugly flannel shirt so I knew I had found Lucien. His unkempt ginger hair and overeager smile beamed from the other side of the living room.
Lucien was just like any other gringo white boy, except he was always a bit behind the times; indie was dying but he was holding onto its rotten corpse. He played the ukulele and talked like a character in Juno until 2018. He never outgrew the rehearsed folksy attitude of those days. I knew he'd be hovering around Abby, so I let him guide me to shore, through the waves of cardigans, Christmas sweaters and plaid shirts.
My friends, true to their spirit, were sticking to themselves, in a crescent moon formation, looking at everyone else but not interacting, waiting for the other small group of “cool” people to magically approach them. Abby sat on the window ledge, her American Apparel skirt riding up and The Smiths t-shirt, putting her hand outside to ash her cigarette on unwitting pedestrians on Parc Street, all the while, Lucien sipped his IPA and kept track of her every move. Tina stood in the darkest corner of the room, her long black hair covering her face. She stared at a group of people flailing their limbs in the air, playing catch up with the beat of a Taio Cruz song.
“Hey, where were you?” Abby screamed as I approached them.
“Sorry, I was in the bathroom. The line was so long, I think people were doing coke in there,” I said.
“Ugh, of course they are.” Abby replied. She smelled like fermented barley and rosewater. “I would just do it out in the open. Everyone already is.”
She handed me a big bottle of Fin du Monde without me asking.
“Man, that’s not cool,” Lucien interrupted her as he turned to face me. “We all know the consequences of our bad habits on your people.” He put his hand on my shoulder with the pitiful condescension usually reserved for misbehaved kids.
I was annoyed by his gesture but at least grateful that he didn’t make any jokes at my expense.
“If I had a loonie for every time someone made a joke about me selling cocaine… I wouldn’t have to sell cocaine anymore,” I joked at my own expense, in a classic Juan gesture, dismissing my own emotions for a cheap laugh.
Abby laughed and Tina chuckled. Lucien looked at me with concern and started speaking in a grave tone. I couldn’t muster enough energy to pay attention to him because I was still thinking about Warren’s text. The letters R, A, W, and R danced circles in my head, enthusiastic and joyous. I watched as the W moved to the front of the conga line, followed by the A and then both Rs. My mind filled in the blanks and spelled out his name. I shook my head to scramble the letters back into place, hoping they’d magically rearrange themselves into some word I could use to reply to Warren. I wanted to say he looked really cute in his denim button-up, or that I loved the chalky scent of his Lush fragrance, but a coward like me couldn’t say words with my whole chest.
Terrified of being seen for what I really was, the English language turned into a game of Minesweeper.
I had always wanted to be a writer. Stories came to me unprompted, bursting out on lonely nights. But my literary dream was shattered when I realized I didn’t know enough synonyms in English. Perhaps, my priorities were skewed. Instead of looking up the meaning of every word in Great Expectations, I learned English by watching cable TV and listening to music. But Gossip Girl did not prepare me for rawr and I never really had an emo phase. So, the word hung alone in the air, with no context or cues, making it impossible for me to decipher its meaning. Before leaving for Canada, I had to prove my mastery of the English language by talking to an examiner who made up hypothetical scenarios and said words like ‘bamboozle,’ ‘lampoon,’ and ‘embezzle.’ They sounded funny, still do, but their meaning couldn’t be more removed from their sound. Still, I managed to crack the code, I paid attention to the other words the stoic examiner was saying: corporate, margin, profit, prison, white-collar—all terms I was familiar with from watching far too much CNN in 2008. I expounded on the crimes of the financial class and excelled at the test.
I might’ve been born and raised in Bogotá but I was also a child of the failed project of globalization: a time when nations’ borders were rigid but information flowed as freely as our rising seas. American cultural imperialism was my stepfather and the internet my drunken aunt, and they both taught me how to speak, walk, dance, and love.
And in love I was, or at least that’s what my Psychology textbook said. But my love for Warren was different from the dictionary definition. This is not a romantic coming out story, in case you were hoping for sex scenes: our relationship was fraternal, friendly, and without a drop of faggotry. Warren was just my friend. It wasn’t that I was in denial about my homosexuality—I was well aware of it. I was just hiding it, cloaking it behind pretentious hipsterism and corny emotivism. I adopted a delicate vision of masculinity using what was trendy those days, but it wasn’t reflective of my true self. Behind my veneer of cultured sensitivity, there was a stoic spirit and a rigid soul, a pair of eyes unacquainted with water, tear ducts that had never clocked in for work. I was still a kid. I didn’t know myself and I wasn’t particularly in touch with my emotions. I was struggling to build a self that was strong enough to bring to parties.
The familiar scent of my own Old Spice deodorant brought me back to the party.
I looked up, Abby smiled at me.
My vision was blurry but I could I see that Lucien was re-enacting the story of when he learned to play the harmonica at Tam Tams, yet again. Without uttering a word, Abby was screaming for help. She always revealed everything about herself at once; talking to her felt like stepping straight into her heart—I didn’t even need to knock. But talking to myself was a different story, the drawbridge never fell and the gates were bolted. If you wanted to reach my heart, you’d have to battle my stubborn brain first.
I smiled back at Abby and pretended as if I wasn’t in the middle of anxious contemplation.
Since the onset of puberty, when my endocrine system declared war on me, I pushed my feelings to the bottom of my stomach and the darkest reaches of my intestines to make sure my desire would never betray me in public. I took pride in being mature, precocious even, when compared to my erratic peers who bent at the whims of their libidos. I was better at thinking about my feelings than I was at feeling them. I was always better at naming things than I was at experiencing them, which is precisely why rawr perplexed me. A reminder that the gap between a written word and one that is felt is as big as the Darién gap. Its inscrutability broke down my defenses, it tore down my walls.
I didn’t realize it that night, but Warren was as purposefully unintelligible as me. He only gave me vague cues about his longings, his words were fun but noncommittal—lacking in vulnerability. When I first met him in the cafeteria, he was eating a salad with a conspicuously limp wrist, but the next day we shared an elevator ride and I overheard him listening to Japandroids. “Gay until proven straight” was the motto those days, but I was too scared to get proof. Where was the Wikipedia entry on Warren? Why wasn’t there a Pitchfork review of his heart? I needed Carles to write a post on him so I could make sense of what he was trying to say.
The week before the party, we sat dangerously close, our shins touching for a few seconds while we studied for a midterm, quizzing each other on Generalized Anxiety Disorder. I invited him to the party but he was already going to a friend’s post-rock show at La Sala Rossa.
I imagined him, swaying his hips slowly, sipping a beer, thinking about me.
“Can I have another beer?” I asked Abby.
As she searched through her bag, Lucien picked his nose, and Tina stared into space. A silent lull emerged. I seized it.
“What does rawr mean?”
“Rawr?” Tina asked with a delicate, inward voice. She was the only one paying attention to me.
“R-A-W-R,” I said.
“Hmm...” she replied.
Tina did this often. She would vocalize her thought processes, throwing around hmms and umms in the middle of passionate debates, whispered gossip chats, and even intimate conversations. She filled nothing with something, but the something was so shallow, that it soon became a nothing of its own. We started to ignore her hmms and umms, and soon, we were ignoring her altogether. She pulled the hair behind her ear, demure and reserved as ever, and I wondered what she was hiding. We got along in that regard, both masters of disguise.
“I think it means like—” Abby sighed and handed me another Fin du Monde. “It’s hard to explain it because it doesn’t mean anything per se, but it’s like, you know—” she whirled her hand in circles towards us, as if her reasoning was obvious.
“No, we don’t know because you just keep saying like, like, like,” Lucien said.
Abby stepped away from him.
“It’s like sending an emoji—” Abby said while gesticulating wildly with her hands. “The sign doesn’t necessarily have one literal meaning, it’s just more of a vibe, a gesture to show affection.”
“Nah, I don’t think so,” Lucien retorted. “Abby, I love how you think of language in such romantic ways, but it’s probably a reference to something. A movie or a song, something like that.”
I searched every corner of my brain for an answer. I told them how much I loved film when we first met; my whole personality revolved around it. I was the one who liked movies, like Lucien liked music, Abby liked literature, and Tina liked staring into space.
“Like when Lady Gaga says paws up and does that claw gesture?” I said.
I tried my best, I swear.
“No, not like that—” Lucien replied, a bit taken aback.
“Scene kids do it,” Abby said impatiently. “It’s adolescent inanity. You obviously never had a scene phase.”
“Rawr.” Lucien made awkwardly sensual cat gestures. “Maybe, it’s an invitation, a dare to rawr back.”
“I’d say it’s more flirty than sexual but it depends on the context.” Abby said, she turned to me and offered me a cigarette. “Where did you hear it?”
I lit the cigarette and took a long drag, planning my next move with caution. Telling them the truth was out of the question. At best, it would cloud their interpretation of the text because they'd assume me and Warren were just friends, which we were, but also, maybe we weren't—maybe he wanted something more. At worst, it would raise suspicions and with the Lady Gaga remark, I was already peeking out of the closet a bit too much.
“Someone texted it to me,” I blurted out.
“Ohhh it's a text. Who sent it?” Tina asked, emerging slightly from her dark corner.
“A friend.”
“A friend,” Lucien repeated, making scare quotes with his hands. He gave me a cheeky look and poked me with his elbow. He was always trying too hard to establish some sort of masculine camaraderie with me; I was Abby’s best friend and he was in love with her.
“Is it Megan?” he winked at me.
“You hooked up with Megan?!” Abby shouted. She was so shocked I hadn’t told her that she dropped her lit cigarette on the cheap IKEA rug beneath us.
“No, I didn’t! We just kissed for a second at Korova.”
“She has a crush on him, though.” Lucien chimed in.
“Who is this Megan girl?” Tina asked.
“She’s a cute blonde who lives in my dorm,” Lucien said.
Abby threw a dismissive wave. “She’s so basic.”
“Yeah, totally.” Lucien nodded eagerly, retracting his initial statement.
Abby and I locked eyes and laughed telepathically at Lucien’s brownnosing.
“Maybe it’s an attack,” Tina said out of nowhere. “She’s fighting with you.”
That possibility hadn't crossed my mind but once it crystalized into an idea, I couldn't unthink it. Maybe Warren was fighting with me. The last few texts I’d sent him were a bit aggressive, but in a funny way, or so I thought. He had teased me for coming to this “basic” house party and I replied I was trying to understand his culture. I thought he’d register my sarcastically sassy tone as humorous, but now, because of my comedic incompetence, I might’ve stopped our love from blossoming.
“Maybe…were you guys arguing?” Lucien asked.
“No, I don’t think so.” I was getting overwhelmed and confused. The knot in my stomach tightened like a noose and my pulse echoed through the room. I drank more beer.
“Those are cat fight sounds,” Tina offered, adding fuel to the fire.
“No, they’re not!” Abby said. “You guys are being stupid and ridiculous, why would Megan start a fight saying rawr?”
“It’s not from Megan. Let’s just forget about it,” I mumbled.
“So, who’s it from?” Tina said in the highest of volumes I’d ever seen her reach. Her cheeks were burning red. I had never seen so much life in her.
Instead of illuminating me, my friends had put an interrogation lamp over my face. Blinded, I looked around the room for a window to jump out of this conversation, but found nothing. The walls vibrated to the sound of Britney singing “whoa oh oh oh oh oh oh oh,” over and over again. People were kissing, falling, screaming.
My perception failed me, my powers of exegesis fell short. The categories I relied on to make sense of the world came undone.
I was up to the brim with anxious energy and seeing no other alternative, I just giggled. At first it was very cringy, but after a few seconds, my commitment to the bit turned sincerely funny, and I started laughing out loud. Faced with my bizarre response, my friends could not help but join me in the giggling, probably thinking that I got too drunk again. What else were they going to do? Stage an intervention in the middle of a party? The tension that had been bubbling all evening finally erupted in a rapturous and ecstatic laughter that lasted a couple of minutes—our vocal cords harmonizing and our breath cycles synchronized.
What an absurd situation, for me to be feigning laughter, then actually finding humour in my own humiliation. As usual I resorted to self-effacement when asked to define myself. I saw myself from above and the sight was embarrassing: crawling like a baby, escaping the realm of intelligible identity, out of fear of being called a “happy,” but painful, word.
Gently, we settled down. I finished my beer. We stared at the couples kissing against the walls with envy.
“Hmm—” Tina said once the quiet turned awkward.
We didn't stay at the party much longer because we were the only people interested in talking to us. We walked home with our hands in our pockets, ambulances blaring in the distance. One by one, everyone retreated to their respective dorm until it was just Abby and I eating poutine on a bench on Sherbrooke Street.
“You seemed a bit upset about that text,” she said. “I’m sorry, I think we were all drunk and nervous about being at that party.”
I smiled and hugged her with one arm.
“Who sent the text?” she asked.
The cheese curds were squeaking loudly in my mouth. I chewed with animus, buying myself some time before having to answer her question.
“Tina has a crush on you,” she said before I could swallow. “I think she was a bit jealous. I don't think the person’s trying to pick a fight with you. If it's someone you like, you should reply with something flirty. What's the worst thing that can happen?”
It was only late October but I saw a snowflake for the first time in my life: It fell slowly, lightly, melting carelessly on the sidewalk.
“I think it was just a joke. But, I’ll think of a funny response when I’m home,” I said, changing topics, commenting on the snow.
The curtains in my dorm room were drawn and the lights were off. My roommate was breathing fast, probably having another nightmare. I tried using my phone screen as a flashlight. After a few centuries and many careful steps, I reached my springy mattress and pulled the blanket over my head to protect him from the glare of my Blackberry. I stared at the screen for hours, trying to figure out Warren’s riddle but only getting further away from the truth.
Exhausted and bewildered, I circled back to the first idea I had had in the bathroom.
“Rawr,” I finally replied. Four and a half hours after his rawr.
I waited for his response until the sunlight became brighter than my phone. Dawn filled every corner of the bedroom. I closed my eyes to shelter myself from the light but my eyelids shone red like someone had painted their inside in a warm crimson tone. I tried clearing my mind but I kept hearing his voice, phantom echoes of our conversations buzzed around my ears like flies. Trying to shut out his sentences, I conjured the reverberations of my sister’s humming, with Abby harmonizing. I just wanted to go back in time before I got that text, before words and meaning forced themselves on me, back to that bathroom, dark as a womb. I always preferred nonsense over language anyway.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Juan Camilo Velasquez is a Colombian/kind-of-Canadian writer and video artist based in Montréal, Québec. He works in communications in the arts but he’s spent most of his adult life in academia studying English and Film Studies. His creative writing has also appeared in Commo Mag. You can find him on Instagram at @cherubwings