After I asked her, we drove the entire coast with our windows down. I dipped the torn corner of a sponge into some weak white paint to write she said yes! on the back window. Cars honked and hollered and each time they did we held each other’s hands high in triumph. When the forest grew thick the light flickered through, soft and warm, draping our ride in vintage cinema. We stopped and grabbed a couple of yellow, smiling balloons from a roadside florist and they danced while we drove. We let them go and they soared high and forever. We knew they’d never come down.
It was pouring the day we moved into our first home. We brought green ponchos for our friends and we all looked like martians as we ran boxes from the moving truck to the shrinking family room. That night the house was ripe with the smell of paint and wet cardboard. We went to the garage and sat in the car and with a bottle of wine from our martian friends, we cheersed.
I had been wearing a ring for almost a year to the day when I was yanking the car door open and helping her swollen, anxious belly inside. The world must have figured me a fugitive as I sped through the streets. She broke the crank to the window searching for things to blame the pain on. On the drive back, there was one more of us. Sam Cooke was on the radio, and our little girl slept.
The day she learned to walk was the same day she first noticed her mother in heels, I’m almost certain of it. Just like a lady to learn to grow up fast if it means a chance to look pretty. Every memory I own of that little girl learning comes with the tap tap of stiletto on hardwood—her proud smile as she comes to realize it was she who made the sound.
With such a start, nothing was going to stop her from realizing what lipstick was. To ensure she didn’t leave any part of her lips unglamorous she’d use up all the color it had, every time. Tubes would disappear from where they were and they’d turn up everywhere else. I probably shouldn’t have been as surprised as I was when I got into my car one morning to find a puddle of melted cherry-red glued to the upholstery.
The rearview mirror hung above, crooked, frosted with her fingerprints.She got older quickly, just like they say happens. What they don’t often mention though is that
we’re not immune from zipping through life right alongside our young ones. So much life got trapped inside a blur of a decade. I’d look back and wonder if maybe there were parts of me that got lost in it all and never made it out. There were nights my wife poured a heavy glass, and I’d know she’d be wondering the same thing. Because we knew people like us ought to, we’d make time to visit the lake, or the coast. The drives were long and a lot of the time quiet, but when the road went straight for a while we’d find ourselves looking into each other. Deeply. All the way down to where the love was. We’d arrive to a sky stingy with stars and we’d hold each other, looking for comfort from the fact that we didn’t often hold each other like we used to.
Our little girl turned tall and breathtaking and full of lady, just like we knew we wouldn’t avoid. Ambitious and sure, sometimes she was scary in how sharp she was. The night of her prom she came out of her room looking so beautiful that I felt dumb for telling her. I gave her the keys to my car. I hardly remember doing it. It was as if that exact moment I saw that she was a woman who could handle anything. The guy who arrived for her didn’t deserve her, and seeing how big his eyes got when she came to the door, he might have agreed. She drove, the guy was in the passenger seat, and it made a lot of sense that way.
The week afterward she was grounded. Her friends took turns coming over to do yard work hoping to make up for the cost of a new taillight. My daughter spent hours trying to shampoo the rum and beer out of the backseat. But, as I’ve learned, memories have their way of settling into places and never leaving.
Moving an old desk out of the garage I found a tattered world map cluttered with ink. Dotted lines, hurried notes—stars plotted across the surface with courage and passion. I could hardly recognize my handwriting. I never imagined I would one day turn foolish enough to put blame on love, but that evening when she asked if I had remembered to pick up the laundry detergent, I shook.
Frightened and ashamed with things I screamed, I spent a hollow weekend crying into the steering wheel. My bags didn’t fit in the trunk, but I tried my damnedest, and when I got to my brother’s they spewed out, awkward and rejected.
He came out and hugged me and we carried my things in silence, knowing how risky words were.
Life can wad up too much in one place sometimes. It can sit real and stale and make it hard to breathe. It can swirl in a cloud so thick that you’ll never get past it. I knew that was true. Good and bad, precious and terrible. Things so real that they sunk me in their weight. I locked all of it up and walked away from it, not at all knowing if life would pile up any better this time around. The hood of the car glistened. The crank to the window still dangled, broken. I never did care to get it fixed.
Danny was all shiny when he showed up. That’s how my father put it.
“You look shiny, son…”
He wore a grin approaching self-righteous, and I knew what he was thinking. My dad’s a man of the land. A “Marsh Hound” to those who honor the term, a “Fish and Wildlife Technician” to those who might gloss over it, and living as such he thinks, or he knows, that he’s got a truer relationship with the earth than most everybody else.
“Shiny, indeed. But it’s the wrong kind of shiny. See, you look shiny like a pickup truck right off the lot. You should look like a truck that just had a week’s worth of work washed off it.”
Danny took the end of his necktie between his fingers, fiddled nervously with it. He looked around our home—a wall-length, freshwater fish tank, curtains cluttered with illustrated elk and buffalo, firewood stacked to the ceiling
My dad, whose threatening first impressions are sort of his guilty pleasure, gestured warmly for Danny’s briefcase.
“Well come on, let’s get you settled.”
It was the beginning of his two-month internship. He was enrolled in a program that arranged for college upperclassmen to go off and get surrounded by an unfamiliar trade. It was supposed to make them more well-rounded, give them some perspective. Mostly though, it fulfilled elective requirements. Danny had an accounting destiny, some hyphenated firm in the city most likely, so they sent him here to live in the mud with us for a while. It was just about a dream come true for my dad—a chance to exaggerate the ruggedness of his life to a city slicker, display his earthiness. And as we helped Danny unpack the designer cologne and argyle socks and nose-hair trimmers from his bags, it appeared that he’d have such a chance.
The next morning—Danny’s inaugural morning on the job—my dad had him standing thigh-deep in stagnant, filmy water. After the last storm, several pockets in the land had retained the downpour, so we were checking to see if habitats had developed.
Danny’s clothes and equipment borrowed, fitting him like an ass-out hug, he swept a net
across the dark pond, every so often taking what he caught up to his face and poking at it with timid, gloved hands. I walked around the shores of the water, combing through the loose vegetation. Up near the truck, my dad wrote in his notebook as different voices came in through the radio.
“Okay. I uh … I think this is something. It’s moving. And gooey.”
We walked over to Danny where he cradled a newt out away from his body, like it might turn on him otherwise.
“I thought it was just more sludgy stuff. Then it blinked.”
“Yes, sir. Red-bellied newt. Taricha rivularis. Pretty one, too. Enough poison in that right there to kill a good–sized human.”
The fear of god flew into Danny’s eyes. My dad smiled.
“Just don’t eat it, son. You’ll be alright.”
We taught him how to chart what he found, where he should look to find more, and continued deeper into the trees. Sometimes I’d look at him and it’d be clear he was lamenting his normal routine. He’d yank his boot out of yet another sinkhole and it’d be no secret he was irritated. Toward the end of the day though—that dimming hour where everything turns restful and aflame—I noticed him smiling, looking out across the reeds as they exploded their color. And I was glad to know he’d come around.
On our way back home my dad parked the truck on the levy so that when we sat on the tailgate we were looking straight out across the reservoir. He pulled a cooler out from the backseat.
“Whatcha think, Daniel? Got a Marsh Hound future in ya?”
He laughed a little, “I don’t know about the future…” and then he went silent for a bit. I knew what my father wanted to hear—something, anything about how different life out here was. That would be enough for him, to feel as though he was living as few others were.
"I think I'll enjoy it, though. I don't get to do stuff like this, really ever. It's cool to know people are out here working in such a way. Out in the open, where everything is. For me, I need to walk through a door, in to some place, to know it's time to work. Sort
of strange, really.”
My dad nodded and looked out far somewhere, like he just had a thought that dragged him out there.
He must have been up early the next day. Very early, and I don’t know where he found such a thing. At the end of the walkway to the levy—our path every morning—he installed what looked like a single side of a tiny house. A thin, A-framed wall with a wrought iron door. The door served no true working function, opening up only to more of the outside. To, as Danny put it, where everything is.
“How ‘bout it? There’s your door.”
Danny was somewhere between impressed and incredulous.
“Well, I suppose it’s time to work then…”
In just a couple of weeks Danny was able to gather, transport, and reintroduce fish eggs needing hardly any help. He’d still spend plenty of time on his phone and computer at nights, but how much can you really expect? Most experiences don’t go and change life completely—their impact shows up in pieces. We knew Danny wouldn’t give up everything he’d worked for to start a new life in the mud. He’d go back to the city and probably stay there, doing very well. Every so often though, he’d come across something that reminded him of his Marsh Hound days. For a few moments he’d recall strange, pleasant memories, and they might even stick around for a while as he got back to life his way.
Just a few years ago I was wrapped up happily and stubbornly in my belief that married life was a fraud. I knew the divorce rates, had read books on monogamy and its errors. I’d look down on the couples of the world with a smug, omniscient grin. Then I met Landon. Within weeks I was hypocrite of the century. My friends loved it. They destroyed me for it and though I partially wanted to deny it all and save face, I was mostly smitten with the fact that they were right. I was falling for Landon. He was this beautiful, sarcastic, brilliant human being who with just one look could make me feel like a goddamn fool, and I wanted to chain myself to his days. I was in trouble. Deep, impossible, gorgeous trouble, and twenty-one months later I was smiling down at a ring on my finger, shaking my head, like what a bastard it was for turning my life upside down.
I used to indulge in the ridiculous fuss women would put up over wedding dresses. I’d watch brides-to-be on reality television try them on—a circle of their friends crying when they did—and I’d laugh my ass of at how pathetic it all was. But Landon’s brother Jeff was dating Katrina Plume. Highly touted dress designer Katrina Plume, and when I found that out I groveled in a way that put those reality TV girls to shame. If you lived on the West Coast and were getting married, Katrina’s designs were pie-in-the-sky fantasies that you’d eventually bring yourself back to earth from. But I had an in, and Jeff made a call, and my best friend Rachel and I went to Katrina’s home, her home, where I tried on custom designs. Dress after dress she’d roll out the most beautiful things I’d ever seen until one dress made Rachel breathe strangely and start crying. Then I cried, too. We were pathetic. Pathetic and loving it.
Just days before the wedding I tried on the dress and the corset was sliding down a bit. I had been swimming three, four times a week in preparation for the big day, but I hadn’t realized I was actually accomplishing something. The thought of getting it resized so late seemed dangerous to me but Jeff, spastic and persistent as always, wouldn’t accept otherwise. Trust me, this kind of thing happens all the time. Meet with Katrina, she’ll be happy to make the adjustments. I’ll have it waiting in your hotel room the day of the wedding. No problem. Seriously, none at all. The look on Landon’s
face when he sees you will be worth it, trust me.
It was a couple hours later than I was hoping, but on the morning of the wedding Jeff called and told me my dress had been delivered. I stood in front of the door to my suite, giddy, and my bridesmaids huddled anxiously behind me. We spent the morning at the spa and they were already in full wedding attire. High heels, chiffon coral dresses, full hair and make up. I was actually thrilled it had worked out this way, where I had another first view of the dress. I tried opening the door slowly, dramatically, but I was hurried through the doorway. We spilled into the room, laughing. Then everyone got quiet. There was no sign anybody had ever been there. No opened doors, no lights left on. And certainly—very, very certainly—no dress. No dress, and all of the excitement and energy I had for the day instantly went toward hating Jeff. Rachel handed me her phone, it was already dialing him.
“Hey!”
“Where is it.”
“What?”
“The dress, where the hell is it.”
“It’s in your room. I hung it in your room. And Landon’s note. On the bed.”
“This room is spotless, Jeff. No note. No fucking wedding dress.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Who did you talk to at the hotel? Who let you in the room?”
“Nobody. The door was open.”
“What?”
“I walked by and the maids were cleaning so I went in and set up the room.”
“Then you just left?”
“Well, yeah.”
I was furious. I tried to resurrect the old me. Tell myself it was just a dress, a stupid dress, but it was useless. I was consumed in the irony I became, and I was raging. How easy would it be for someone to just walk in, as you did, and take the
dress? The maids could have even grabbed it. I mean it’s a Katrina Plume, Jeff! You know, Katrina Plume, your fucking girlfriend?!
The front desk didn’t have any information. Oddly enough there wasn’t a wedding dress stuffed into their lost-and-found box. I stomped through the hotel questioning anyone I saw. I had on hundreds of dollars in hair and makeup, about twenty dollars in basketball sweats, and an army of gorgeous, sparkling bridesmaids marched behind me. I must have looked exactly like a pimp who was looking for answers.
Landon called. Regardless of pre-wedding rituals, he insisted we meet up. We sat on a park bench across from the hotel and he proposed caring but absurd solutions. Things like tracking down his mother’s old wedding dress. He was trying, but with each suggestion the disaster of my wedding only became more real. And then tears. Again with the fucking wedding tears. He put his arm around me and gazed out somewhere, wondering if he should dare say anything else. Then he laughed.
“Nothing’s funny right now, Landon.”
“What room is our suite?”
“Huh?”
“What room are we in?”
“…1241. Why are you asking me this?”
“Any chance that detail got miscommunicated?”
He nudged me and pointed up.
“I know I’m not supposed to see it yet, but…”
And right there. Right in the window, exactly ten floors beneath where it should have been, a Katrina Plume wedding dress stared down at me as if asking what I was crying about.
The classroom sounded full of snakes. Ms. Reese stood above a pile of sprawled out, half-attentive kids who hissed as she pointed to the letter ‘S’ on the laminated alphabet banner. She moved on, and the sounds of the room were those of a car failing to start. Te-te-te. Tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh. Then the sounds of everyone trying to think hard about something, all at once. They were almost through and David—wild, messy-haired David—was staring over to the corner of the room at the vulnerable castle of wooden blocks his classmates had freshly constructed that morning. He knew that after “Z” when they were finished being bees it would be break time, and he’d ruin that castle.
He ran as fast as he could and kicked through the heart of the blocks. Rectangles, squares, triangles of wood bounced off the wall and floor. He smiled and squealed and most of the kids did some version of the same, whether thrilled or upset. Evan, being one of the castle’s architects, sighed at work lost, but not with any surprise. Evan walked over to a small plastic fire truck and pushed it slowly across the play area’s thick rubber floor.
Earlier in the year Evan would turn angry over David’s demolitions, but now he was more just curious. Maybe even somewhat envious. Evan cherished his time building castles or towers or putting puzzles together—he felt capable and proud once finished—but David seemed to accomplish those same feelings just by ruining one of those projects. There was no process, David’s joy would arrive in an instant. One, violent instant. Everything seemed to be worse off afterward, too. Blocks everywhere, the adults upset. But off David would go, happy as Evan has ever been.
Evan talked to his parents about David. Complained about him really, when school first started. The messy-hairedkid who liked to ruin whatever he was working on. They said that some kids justliked misbehaving. That he shouldn’t let someone silly like that bother him, nor should he think it was okay to start acting that way. But that wasn’t a worry. Sure, Evan sometimes wanted to, seeing how happy and carefree David was, but there was no way he could come to do it. Not after his incident at the grocery store. Evan was trying to help his mom get a jar of pickles but as he reached for one he knocked it over. It hit the jar next to it and they both fell to the marble tile floor,
exploding loudly. Because of what he had done everybody in the store stopped what they were doing so they could stare. It was like how Ms. Reese and everyone else would stare at David if he pushed someone over. David wouldn’t mind the attention. He’d even seemed to light up, grow because of it. But Evan, standing in the crawling green slime that day, felt like he was shriveling in the spotlight. He wanted to vanish, in fact he even tried to, hugging the back of his mother’s legs.
One day when Evan’s father picked him up from school, he was smiling as wide as the cat in the Alice book Ms. Reese sometimes read. Never had he talked so fast or whistled so much, he kept saying he couldn’t wait to get home. When they did, he said something to Evan’s mother that made her act in the same, sped-up way. They hugged for a long while, laughing, jumping. His Mother took out a golden, shiny bottle from the refrigerator. She shook the bottle and held it up high and then POP! White, cheerful foam erupted, streaming around the kitchen and landing on everything. It soaked into their clothes and sloshed across the counters and they never once, not even for a moment, stopped laughing. Everything was a mess, just like the way David turns the classroom. But eventually Evan too, without even knowing why, was laughing.
“What are you guys doing? What’s happening?”
His father picked him up and twirled him around.
“We’re celebrating, buddy! Your dad just got a very big, new job, and so we’re celebrating!”
“But everything is getting so messy! That’s not okay, right?”
He rubbed Evan’s head, smiling “Well, not usually, buddy. But every once in a while, especially if we’ve earned it, it’s alright.”
“Like cake?”
“Yes! Exactly. It’s like cake…”
A few days later Evan was playing with the basketball in his backyard. In what had become a routine, he was standing behind the white line on the ground, trying to shoot it from where his dad could. He had never been able to get very close, he simply
didn’t have the strength, but he discovered that if he stood facing away from the basket, throwing it high and behind him, he could toss it farther. Not at all more accurately, but farther. He spent what must have been hundreds of tries hurling the ball toward where he guessed the basket to be. It would hit the fence or a toy on the ground, bouncing awkwardly away from him, and he’d retrieve it back to the line for another effort. He was in over his head, but it was still fun. Then, unexpectedly, he turned around to see the ball floating exactly where he dreamt it would. For a moment he was worried it would fall short, but it was perfect. It dove straight through the hoop and swam through the net with a soft, peaceful woosh. He didn’t know what to do. He jumped up and down but it didn’t seem like enough. He ran around in circles, he danced without music, and then he saw them. Scattered around the yard were great, heaping piles of leaves. He knew his dad had spent time on them, but he couldn’t help himself. He needed to. He ran over to each one, picking up all his arms could carry, and wailed jubilantly as he sent them into the sky.
“You know how there’s always a prettier twin? It’s sort of like that.”
My mother had the kind of responses that made it seem like there wasn’t anything she hadn’t thought about. And maybe that was true. She certainly gave herself enough time in the mornings to do the thinking. Seeing the sunrise was her cup of coffee—what she needed before she went ahead and tried on the day. And as far as I know, she never went without one.
Years ago I went on a date with a guy who wasn’t very interesting, but he tried pretty hard to be. He ran the gamut of handpicked first-date questions, swirling a glass of his brought-from-home merlot. What time period would I visit if I had a time machine. What celebrity would I most like to have a drink with. Eventually he landed on, “What is your earliest human memory?” specifying human memory for God knows why. All I could picture was being on the roof of our old home, sitting on my mother’s lap and looking at her as a warm glow rolled into her blissful green eyes. It’s still the only one I can picture. As far as first human memories go, I think I got pretty lucky.
As a child, I didn’t know enough to question it. In the morning, my mother would be on the roof. That’s just the way mornings went. Sometimes dad would be up there too, or he’d come wake me and carry me up the fire escape and we’d all sit out there, whispering like all we knew were secrets. Mostly though, it was just mother. We’d carry on sleeping somewhere beneath her, and she’d come let us know when the day was here.
The first time I slept over at a friend’s house, she ran into her mom’s room in the morning to wake her up for breakfast. It was around then that I realized not all moms sit atop their houses every morning. A curious kid needing answers, I asked my mom for them. But at that age I wasn’t much for sitting in one place for long, nor did I understand what beauty was, and her story required at least a little of each of those things.
My parents used to live in New England, and when they did they were sailors. They’d set out often around the coast of Maine or southward down the East Coast. Occasionally, they’d find time for even longer trips. Bermuda. Turks and Caicos.
They spent a lot of nights on the water, cuddled up on a narrow bed in the hull of their sailboat. The mattress was firm, the boat would sway, the ocean would growl and you’d wonder what it was up to; mostly, you don’t sleep too well on a boat. So, instead, my mother would get up in the dying dark to make tea and sit out on the stern and wait for the sky to grow its color. The light would roll out naked and honest and slow. It’d humble her—make her grateful. She used to say, “When a day is born in front of you, you feel like you’re the only one around to see it, and you want to treat it like it’s your own child.”
I think most of us look for ways to squeeze all we can out of our days. For her, this worked—making sure she saw how special of a thing she was getting every morning. She had her critics—those who needed to mention how they were also up that early. Only, they were at the gym, or the office. Working. Then there were those who insisted they’d see the sun set everyday, almost by accident, and still get their sleep at night. That’s when she’d mention the prettier twin thing. At a cocktail party a man once told her, flatly, “Actually, there are more particles in the air toward the end of the day. Sunsets tend to be more vivid and, one might even say, prettier, than sunrises are.” She gave him a look I’ve learned to duck after seeing, “You must be the kind of guy who dates girls with too much makeup.” He snorted in a way that let everyone know she was right.
Some days I too would question her routine. I’d wake up late and happy and think that mom would probably enjoy that kind of morning. But as I got older, and especially once I got married, I found myself envying her for her quirk. I’d think about her life out on the ocean—how dad had a tendency for putting his arms around her just as the light broke—and marvel at how she could be so wise to realize happiness was that simple.
When her time came she was calm, reposed. To my father she said, “You know, if I could do it all over again, I’m not sure I would. There's no way I’d get this lucky twice.” He said she smiled. And I know he smiled back, because we were lucky too. The morning afterward I made a cup of tea and went out to my balcony. The world was still dark. I was timid, like maybe I was doing it wrong, and I wondered if the sun would evenshow up for me. I felt my husband come up behind me and though he was a bit
early I grabbed his hand and sat him down and we waited.
When I was twenty years old we lost my grandfather. I cried because we were just beginning to form a relationship. The next day, my mother brought me a journal of his, “I don’t see any reason for you two to stop all of a sudden.” And as I read, he and I would talk and laugh wildly. Now, my mother was gone. But the sun would still rise. And I didn’t see any reason for her to miss it.
I’m not a man you’d likely come to for advice. I wouldn’t blame you for it; I’m just not a man who knows much. But I am sure of one thing—life changes out of nowhere. It’s true for anybody.
I’ve spent most of my days doing what was asked of me. I cleaned the house as a child, when my little brother Indika cried I’d bounce him until he turned off. If there were ever coconuts on the table it meant my mother wanted to use their milk for cooking. I’d crack them and drain them and leave the shells in a row.
My father had a store that people came to if something in their home was broken. At first I only stocked the shelves that were close to the ground, then I got older and was allowed to climb the ladder. I’d press my hands to the ceiling and pretend I was holding the store together. My father would smile and thank me, but eventually he said I had to stop because handprints were starting to show. And I was fine with that, because at least there was proof I had done it.
Then I was twelve, and my parents went to meet God. It happened out of nowhere, just as I said changes happen. Nobody would talk with me about why they left, and nothing in the whole world was fair. I threw a chair into the kitchen wall and when I did Indika cried. And I felt bad because I had a feeling that his tears were wasted on the wrong thing.
A man with a shiny mustache and a yellow dog bought the shop, and my uncle came to stay with Indika and me. The day he arrived we drove to a giant tree that hung over the river. He gave us ginger beer and told us that it was okay to be sad for a little while, but if we go on staying sad it’ll tarnish us. The saying goes that wise men shall not let themselves get tarnished, and I know I mentioned that I’m not a man who knows much, but I have always envied those who do. I listened to my uncle.
He got me a job at the local resort carrying bags for wealthy people. These people, they know a lot. I can tell by the way they talk and how they put money in my hand like they’re tired of having it. Sometimes I’ll look down at the bags I’m carrying and, I swear, they’ll be glowing from the inside. I’ll want more than anything to open them up so I can see the things they know but, I never do. I do my job well. I am
cheerful and respectful, I only ask questions if I really have to, and when nighttime comes I go to sleep to wake up and do it again.
The people are always different. Different skin, different clothes, different hair if they choose to show it. And the scents! I bet you would never guess all the ways a person could smell. When I was a little boy I would think about a world beyond my own that I knew nothing about. I’d sit under stars imagining it, and I’d convince Indika it was real. But not too long after I started working at the resort I realized that those dreams were foolish and maybe even petty. To my great delight, I was wrong. There isn’t just another world out there of which I know nothing about—there are worlds.
Yesterday a man came in with three large, gold-flecked bags and sand on his shoes. An older man, but he was spun tight as rope—his beard full of purpose. When I picked up his bags he walked over to me and squeezed my arm, “Whoa, son. Arms like this, I bet you’d make one hell of a deckhand.” He pulled a sailor cap out of what was surely thin air, and hooked it onto my head. The rest of the walk to his room was wordless and all the while I stared down at my arms and wondered if he meant what he said. His money was gritty, and when he handed it to me I felt the callous in his fingers. Then life changed.
Waiting for the elevator, I saw a sailor in the reflective silver of the shaft doors. He looked strong and full of future, and it took a good long while to realize who I was admiring. My uncle had earlier told me that I had become a man, and I didn’t listen very seriously, but as I stared at my reflection I was startled with the thought that he could have been telling the truth. I looked exactly like the kind of man who I had grown used to attending to. It was the first time that my ideas outgrew me, or maybe it was the first time I let myself have the ideas I had always been allowed. In impressing myself, I realized that I probably had it in me to impress others. And though I’ll admit I was frightened when I came to know it, it was clear that it would be my final day of carrying bags.
Today I’m on a train for the first time in my life. I bought the ticket with money other people were tired of, and there’s plenty more sitting fat in my pocket. The train
huffs and roars along the countryside and as it does the view from the open door confirms my hunch. There’s not just another world beyond my own—there are worlds. And now I know more than just that. Now I know there’s nothing holding me back from those worlds. I left a note for my uncle begging him to hand the job that I left over to Indika. Indika’s much wiser than I am—he’ll be smiling and gone in no time.
This morning the world outside my house went silent and still, as if thrown in front of a camera. Having debated it for weeks, everything has finally turned crisp, bold, confident. On my front porch I watch the steam from my coffee streak across new air, then I lift my sights to the mountains. The big day is upon us. Soon you’ll be dressed in white.
In the middle of July, to hold myself over, I bought a new pair of skis. July, that wretched month where the town runs out to melt themselves into the sand and the grass and laugh loudly into thick, fetid air, pretending they’re living. We always get new gear in the summer. It’s when everyone else tries to forget that, in just a fistful of months, winter will mute the sun again. Goggles, boots, gloves—they just about give the stuff away. We pluck it off the shelves and hide it in our homes and smile like we’re guilty of something.
I hung the skis in an “X,” the way they’ll look twirling through January sky. Sometimes at night moonlight will maneuver its way through my windows just right and cause the sharpness of them to shimmer like swords. I boughtCapras this season—never before did I feel I could justify it. As a kid I’d see someone carrying a pair over their shoulder and think they owned the mountain. In a way, they did. For a while I’ve had the money for them, but it takes more than that to wear a pair. If I had worn them in seasons prior, I’d have been a false idol. My air wasn’t big enough, my landings not smooth enough—too often I’d catch an edge when coming off a rail. But now I woke up beneath them—the silhouette of a mountain goat etched subtly on the tail of each ski—and was confident that I ought to. And in just a few days I’d be tearing them off the wall.
The first chairlift ride of the year—if someone allowed me only one moment, taking all others away, I’d choose that one. It’s always my best friend Kyle sharing the seat with me. Every day we ride he’ll have a different bandana hugging the bottom half of his face, the rest covered by reflective goggles and a pulled-down knit cap. Somehow though, you can still tell he’s grinning like a fool. If we’re lucky the clouds will be open slightly, sending down a soft, twirling spiral of white as we ascend. It makes me feel like we're being teleported. And there’s not much evidence against that.As we ride up it’s easy to glance around and see that hundreds, maybe thousands of people are swerving
or speeding or tumbling down white valleys. But that all changes once we’re dumped atop the mountain’s peak. We teeter where the flatness beneath us runs out, looking hungrily down to where it goes steep and speeds up everything on top of it. Shift our weight, shake out our legs, roll our necks, and hurl ourselves into the fall. Then, we’re alone. On the ride up we saw families teaching their kids to ski, snowboarders etching their paths into the hills, but now they’re all gone. Even Kyle, covered head to toe in his rituals, is gone. We’ll see each other again when the ground slows down. Until then, we’re flying. Our skis scarcely touch the snow as they send us on a trip that’ll never be duplicated. Every so often we’ll leave the snow altogether, spinning, posing, living in the sky while it lets us. Somewhere beneath us there’s the earth sitting bored and dirty and forgotten.
In the evening, we’ll all meet up at the Blythe’s home. It has vaulted ceilings and a long, endless dining room table, both crafted from cedar. Bodies slow and happy, we’ll crumple into the chairs and tell our stories. Outside on the deck a few six-packs of beer peek out from a tall bed of snow, and in the garage our jackets and gloves are hung on a line, dripping with the day. For months we waited as the air outside wilted, lifeless and flat. Heat lingered in the night for far too long—nosey, like a neighbor you wished would get a job out of state. Now the heat is gone. Onlywarmth is left. We’re rich with the winter.
At night we slide into beds greedy with layers. Thick, fluffy comfort, we vanish underneath it all, bodies all used up, deserving of the rest. By morning we’ll be pinned to the mattress. The blankets go still and heavy on top of us. When we heave them back a new day will be right there, waiting. Our jackets and gloves and boots dry and anxious, we’re lucky to need them, and we waste no time.
It all goes away eventually, though. Only, less certainly than when it comes in. Or, probably more to the truth, we choose to not realize it right away. We might feel the change, but we don’t just go ahead and start living accordingly. We cling. It’s like anything you love, I suppose. If it ever becomes clear that it’s soon going to fade, simply stop staring at it so directly. Don’t give it the opportunity to tell it to your face,
that way maybe it’ll never say goodbye. But, of course, it only works for so long. At some point we’ll take the time to truly look around and see that for every day we tried to convince ourselves otherwise, a little bit of magic has disappeared. We told ourselves that, out of the corners of our eyes, the mountains around us were still glistening with the season, but they’re patchy at best. The chairs, once bustling with work, will soon have nothing to teleport us to. We’ll be sitting on dry, deflated ground, looking up, wondering how something like this could have happened.
