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magicforest
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I must confess: since That Night, I have been worried that Sidney will think I am childish for crying in front of her. Have you ever noticed that it’s only adults who cover their eyes with their hands as they cry? Little children feel no shame or self-consciousness and can indeed be dragged around a busy supermarket by their humiliated parent while crying openly. Not unlike how I did That Night. When is it that we learn that crying is related to immaturity? Isn’t the path to adulthood just one long lecture from society on how to hide your feelings? Is this consistent effort to restrain myself something I impart to others? Have I taught this to my students?
I don’t like what she saw. I don’t like the Ethan that she saw. The Ethan that she saw was not the intelligent, witty, collected, calm, cool, suave-espion-meets-intellectual-Adonis I was hoping to portray myself as. Instead I was helpless, bedraggled, and weeping inconsolably. Perhaps inconsolably is too strong a word. Her unfolded body was some consolation, if I do say so myself.
I hate the word weeping.
I think I will try to use the word resplendent more often. Resplendent. Resplendent. Resplendent.
So I was awkward enough around Sidney after baring my soul, which is supposed to be the experience in a couple that draws them closer together and gives them a new understanding and appreciation for eachother’s emotional depth and complexities, but if anything, I was petrified. I don’t know why, and I still don’t know why, and I may never know why, but I was scared of her, and scared of the house, and scared of everything.
The house. The house is what ties everything together. I was looking for it for a long time because I knew I’d have to move to the city. Finally I drove in, through the fuel and the metallic-hooded cars and the smell of tinsel and hot dogs and melting black tar. I bought the first newspaper with classifieds I saw and went into the café where I was meeting my sister, and soonafter became immediately and pleasantly distracted by Sidney, who was sitting across from me looking resplendent in something light and soft and probably fashionable. Of course, I didn’t know she was Sidney then, but long after I did and I found the newspaper in my satchel, (good word, satchel) I saw the ring from the bottom of a coffee mug, the wrinkled print smelling faintly of cappuccino, and in the ring was the advertisement for the house, perfectly centred.
And of course, there was the disaster of That Night which occurred a long while after that initial discovery of the advertisement, and then this awful abyss of doom I’ve been swinging back and forth in, imagining Sidney, wanting Sidney, maybe even needing Sidney, but without anything substantial to cling to except my love for her, which is questionable and yet burns through me with a ferocious intensity, steadily and deeply and sweetly.
It was a student who actually pulled me from whatever it was that enabled my paralyzed fright and lifted me in the arc of escape.
She came into the office. I was substituting for the principal while he was having an hour-long smoke outside and probably doing something indecent.
She was wearing a long, plain trenchcoat that covered her entire body. Her hair was a magnetic fuschia, so neon it looked like it had been dipped in the Periodic Table. It was alternately spiky and curly, and she had complimented this look with various silver garnishes all over her head.
She looked shaken, tremulous. “They are trying to censor me,” she said, looking over her shoulders frantically, as though for government tyrants coming to shut her up.
“What?” I said, both a little startled and a little amused. Sidney has said irritably that sudden fear and sudden bemusement are my two most common instinctual reactions to life.
“They—are—trying—to—censor—me,” she said deliberately. Her dark eyes probed me intensely. It was unnerving.
“What do you have to say that requires censorship? And who are they?” I almost asked, Is it the mob? but caught myself. One thing I don’t need Sidney to point out is that if my reaction to life is either fear or bemusement, my reply to life’s commentary is either overwhelming graveness or unintended farce.
My questioning also enthused her own instincts. “I didn’t do anything wrong!” she said quickly.
I smiled despite myself. “What did you not do wrong, then?”
Her henna-adorned hand shook a dog-eared wad of lined papers at me. Against my better judgement I decided to read their contents aloud. The first page was titled simply, “About God”. I had just parted my mouth to begin, when my office door flew open, sending the whispering secretaries scattering like bowling pins, and in rolled a very indignant student teacher. One of the just-freshly-oven-baked college students determined to either neoclassicize or otherwise explode from the inside out the current educational reforms, he was already dressed like a would-be inspiring teacher; academic oxfords and elbow-patches and funny black hats. “This girl—” he said, throwing his arm at her like a fervent lawyer, “This student—”
I began. “God is an accumulation of moments I have found so tiny they could only fit inside my soul, and yet so vast that they stretched me out infinitely wide and I lay over the earth under a dome of cobalt blue and streaked white sky, utterly alone, perfectly alone.
“God is when the ugly beauty of the world so unbearably needs capturing that it overwhelms you and runs through you from crown to sole, an axis like a stick of light, allowing you to shoot upwards at a magnificent velocity and spiral into the sky, evaporate into the blue.
“God is when the homeless man holds his cardboard sign asking for a smile, and I give him a smile so radiant that the smudged light coins I place in his trembling hands are forever dimmed. God is when I harvest the garlic bulb I nurtured and cried over. God is when I hold my sleepy newborn cousin against my chest and her fragile heart beats faintly against mine.
“God is breathing in fog. God is the smoothroundstars. God is puddlewonderful. God is grinning gleefully in that moment after the pain and torture and and tragedy when the world eclipses in light and a new day somehow begins and all of humanity, each individual, has another day to fuck things up more in this great giddy stew of life.
“God is in punctum. God is the opposite of everything that does not exist. God is my ability to feel pain. God is the hurting, the aching, the loneliness. God is all those emotions and tragedies that make up being human and being alive.
“God is the wild deer that looks at me solemnly, the wild pear I throw into the pond off the island, the wild hair of a little child muddied from the playground, when I first experimented and discovered I liked to touch worms in their sleek, wet slithering bodies.
“How can you attach God to morals, to striking people down and reviving others, to giving some woman a winning lottery ticket as thousands of children on the opposite end of the world die of famine and nobody notices because we humans like our dead hidden and their mothers and daddies are dead from the same evil? To attending church to see some suburbanites add the warm hug of spirituality to their lives as a closeted gay adolescent sits uncomfortably in the front squirming as he's cut in half? To the gravestones? To the responsibility for human wars and human injustice which have always been and always will be our fault? To the assignment of Hell or Heaven, though neither exist, and it doesn't particularly matter because if you are bad the world is more hellish and if you are good the world is more heavenly and therefore regardless of what happens in the afterlife, there is a perfectly sufficient amount of meaning in everything you do here on earth, enough that I need not live for what comes after, but for what I have now? To an old man with a deep booming voice in a throne made of cloud?”
I turned the last page over and looked with no small interest at the girl. “This is quite well-written,” I said. “Very poetic.”
The student teacher gave an almost-comical little squawk. “Do you realize,” he gasped, “Do you quite realize that she is suggesting God may be nothing more than—than a wave of light?”
“It all seems more preposterous to me,” said the girl with trembling lips, “To have your god, than the possibility that God may be nothing more than a wave of light.”
I passed a hand over my eyes. “Great jumping Jesuits,” I murmured. “Great jumping Jesuits.”
I straightened. The two had started bickering madly and I had to rather leap between them like a fanciful dog. “Listen now,” I said. They did not.
“How do you know what God is not?” he demanded.
“How do you know what God is?” she demanded.
“The Bible, the Holy Word of God!” he shouted.
“Who says it’s the Holy Word of God?” she shouted.
“Biblical scholars! Clergymen! Faith! What-have-you!” he roared. “What about you!”
“Scientists! Physicists! Skepticism! Scholars!” she screamed. “Prove God! Prove that hell is fair! Prove that we are sculpted in God’s image! Prove the falseness of all other religions! Prove that Jesus died for my sins! Prove that the Bible is complete, let alone true! Prove that this is what Christ wanted! Prove that God cannot be questioned! Prove that—”
“Prove otherwise!” he shrieked.
“Everything is subjective—” I interjected. “Everything is—”
I looked at the phone. I looked at my shoes. I looked at the phone again. Did I have the nerve? No, but I needed her…I needed her…I have only witticisms, she will make them fall silent. I picked up the receiver and dialed.
“Ethan?”
“Sidney. I need your help.”
“What is all that yelling?”
“Sidney—”
“Good God, are they arguing about religion? Funny, I thought they took that out of public institutions.”
“Sidney, please, I need you to talk to them.”
“Well, I can’t very well leave, you know.”
“Just on the phone.”
“Well, all right, I guess so. But don’t blame me if I get you in trouble.”
“I won’t.”
I handed the phone to the student teacher first. He was still blustering about. “Excuse me, but you have a call.” I said. He faltered and looked blankly at me. It amazes me still, how highly prioritized that potential conversation waiting at the end of the cord remains for most people. He pressed the phone to his ear. “Hello?”
I took this time to observe the girl, who was tear-streaked and panting. “Are you okay?” I asked her. She shook her head, her eyes were bright and irate. I took her hand and tried to remember my adolescence, so blue and electric and pulsing and rain-warmed and wet at the time, so coarse and unimaginative now.
The student teacher drew the phone slowly away from his ear with a glazed expression. In slow motion his hand felt through the air and pushed the phone at the girl. She took it. “It’s for you,” he muttered, “I apologize.” Then he quickly disappeared. With her pink curls shaking she listened now, and I thought I heard vague reassuring croons from Sidney’s voice.
“Yes, thank you.” the girl said, and hung up the phone.
We looked at eachother awkwardly.
“What did she say to you?” I said nervously.
She smiled. “She said she had five questions for me.”
“And what were they?”
“One, how morally different are the two of you? Two, do you both not feel the thrills the tragedies of being alive? Three, are you not attacking things very vital to eachother’s souls? Four, are you not doing this for your own sake rather than eachother’s?”
“That’s four.”
She paused and looked down almost with guilt. “Yes, that’s four.”
“What was the fifth?”
Now she gazed up at me with her crystalline blue eyes. “Are there not times to fall silent?”
We fell silent.
She made for the door. I turned around to let my face crumple in privacy.
“You really love her,” her voice said. “Don’t you.”
I did not turn around. I felt my mouth empty and the windows of my body opening. “Yes,” I whispered. The door clicked behind her. I turned now, and stared at her, bundling her trenchcoat around herself as she went outside, walking away, one ugly adolescent whirlwind of truth.
Then I dashed across the office, almost knocking over the secretary who leaped out of my away, alarmed. I snatched the cordless phone from it’s stand and dialed, waiting, listening, my hands tapping the counter involuntarily.
“Hello?”
“If I can’t look at you, right in front of me, and touch your resplendent hands and your resplendent hair and your resplendent face, and listen to your stupid ranting and your babbling and your awful puns, Sidney, I will dry up and die right now.”
Pause.
That went we went to see a small indie film at a little nook of a theatre. Sitting close to Sidney I wanted to kiss her so badly that my chest ached, and I lifted her fingers to my lips and kissed them instead. Then my head went to her shoulder and I was whispering in her ear, and kissing her ear, and kissing her face, as our necks dipped and swayed in a swanlike waltz, and in the darkness with eyes closed we found eachother again.
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041127
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