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by Jessica Sebor

He said it with such a combination of shyness and surety that he made it sound like the most important thing I had ever heard, as if he were reciting some biblical text so inspiring that he assumed I would write it down on the back of a receipt and keep it buttoned in my breast pocket for the rest of my life. However, I did not feel enlightened, and I did not take out a pen but found my only comfort in the oncoming headlights that forced his eyes straight ahead so that he could not see me cringe. I got a feeling in my stomach that reminded me of when my mom would put out her cheek for me to kiss in front of the sixth grade carpool or the time when I bit down on a forkful of my aunt’s egg and broccoli quiche, thinking it was lemon pie. I did not realize the face I was making until my eyes were already squinted and my jaw already tight.

Instead of the statement striking me as romantic and wonderful, it seemed empty and unrealistic. Although I thought about saying it back followed by something incredibly witty and heartfelt, we were neither in a rose- petal jacuzzi giggling from the effects of bubble bath and champagne nor were we under some street lamp with freezing rain washing the tears from our flushed cheeks. I blinked dramatically to myself in the darkness and tried to release his words by pressing my forehead more firmly on the passenger’s window, forcing it to become so numb that I could not discern where my own skin ended and the cool glass began.

He looked over at me, and I looked down at the door handle and made my fingers fumble around silently in its crevice, hoping to find a cough drop wrapper that would give me something to fidget with or a stale piece of gum that would give me something to say. I found nothing, of course. I never found anything outside the glove compartment, except for that time I reached deep into the crack between the seats and discovered a ten-year-old cigar. It had been stashed there by the previous owner for a night of unexpected celebration, and I remembered trying to find a place to smoke it, settling on the field behind his house, graying the darkness with sweeping puffs, and wishing that I could inhale it from the lit side so that my lips would not have to feel the soggy end where he had been sloppy with his spit.

I could almost feel the smoke coming in from the vents of the car’s broken air-conditioner. The stillness became more weighted and more suffocating. As each house passed it became more impossible for me to think of a reply, because each one marked a new level of his discomfort in my silence and each increased the irrevocableness of anything that I would say. I looked back at my hand to try to find some limbo-like distraction as I sat between the irritation of the immovable driver and the evocation of the passing walkways. I tried to be surprised at how long my nails had grown and to think about how I needed to cut them and to wonder if my skin was actually as pale as it looked or if it was just the darkness that was making it glow. But my eyes refused to focus on the little cracks in my knuckles, and my fingers seemed only to be an extension of the armrest and just about as relevant.

The car stopped, and I looked up because I had to. I saw the pale blur of his face but did not meet his gaze, staring instead out the window behind him at my neighbor’s house across the street that looked, at the moment, to be impossibly two-dimensional. Out of the corner of my eyes, I could see his, and they looked so hopeless they struck me as pathetic. My lips curled the way they did when he tried to kiss me on the train, and I had become embarrassed not because of the shamefulness of his public affection but because I refused to return it. I bit down on the soft tissue inside my left cheek.

Everything in the car suddenly seemed to be growing less avoidable and more potent. The dry, musty smell of the fake velvet Buick seats grew stronger, and I became distinctly aware of how low the roof was and how long the middle seat between us was and how loud my breath sounded once the engine had been turned off and how tightly he was gripping the wheel even though he was no longer driving and how hot it got at night in August. I tried to swallow that stale cigar smell, but felt that if I forced it to go down I would vomit up the air. Without knowing what I was saying or understanding what I meant, I choked out “No you don’t” and opened the door.

There was a time, before this, when I believed in absolutes, when I more than knew what they stood for, when they were what I valued. I would write one-word acrostic poems and enter them in grade-wide contests and take home my honorable mention ribbon to show to my mother and to decorate my fridge, Laughter Openness Value Everything written vertically in false-cursive and surrounded by colored-pencil tulips.

Life, death, love, loss. I assumed then that these words carried with them a singularity that I could temporarily understand by reciting their definition and that I would in time know through experience. Love found synonyms in family, friends, and abstract, unrealized romance. Death was sorrow and sorrow death. These phenomena were conclusive and unquestionable. A person was either completely alive or totally dead, in love or out of it. These absolutes could not be fabricated from the stuff of our world of in-betweens, but were purer and more infinite. I had learned through stories of Cupid and Satan that these were powers imposed upon us from some other realm. The legends of Pluto, Persephone, Pilate, and Jesus taught me that these were not forces that one could reckon with; these were not forces that one could control. The retelling of such stories led me to assume that this belief was universally understood.

I heard countless times from teachers, parents, peers, and television that “all you need to live is food, water, air, and love.” The first three elements were intuitive. Food, water, and air were all things that you could smell, or see, or at least feel, important of course but free of mystery and lacking power as I always had complete access to all three. As for love, life, and death, while their invisibility made me uneasy, this quote laid out an equation that made them somewhat manageable: you need love to live; without love you die. In this way, I understood the connection between the abstract forces. They were individual necessities that worked together to create a certain structure for each person’s life, what they needed to have to continue with it, what they needed to understand to appreciate it, and what they needed to value to find satisfaction and fulfillment.

These forces revealed their power not only in their life-span structuring, but in their direct and momentary power to confront us. When a person was confronted with the powers of death, life, loss, or love, the forces would release passion as a squid would ink, leaving the victim immersed in an opaque black cloud that let him see nothing more than an epitome of darkness. While in the midst of this passion, a person was under its control; free of any other thoughts, one would succumb to and let it solidify in laughter or in tears. After my belief in this kind of one-track passion solidified, I was confronted with both a want to experience it and uneasiness because I had already lived so long without it.

In elementary school, we were introduced to the Great Thinkers, and learned from page-long handouts about the men before we were able to understand their ideas. What struck me most about these men were not the thoughts or inventions that they created, but their process of creation itself. I had seen a spherical globe, and I had solved a math equation, but I had never sat scribbling theories in my notebook for days on end only to pass out due to the effects of hunger and exhaustion. I had never stood staring at the sky for hours, able to move only when shaken by one of my many pupils. The outside world had never dissolved for me, and in my understanding that this was passion, I wanted to feel it. When I walked my dog I would look up at a bird in his nest and try to stand motionless until I became lost in him. However, I always ended thinking that I had achieved my goal only to realize that my mind was congratulating itself when I was supposed to be caught up in the wing-flaps of a starling.

Observation could spark fascination but never absorption. I thought perhaps if I could not find wonder in the obvious, I would be able to find it in the terrible. My favorite book in the house was Weegee’s World, my father’s worn album of street photography that captured my fascination, awe, and affection. The page where the binding has been broken is called “Their First Murder.” It has no blood, no body, but a crowd of half a dozen faces. One woman’s face is twisted in a terrible, wonderful expression of sadness. Her mouth is turned in such a way that she could be singing an aria, but her gently shut eyes and strained cheeks show that her exclamation is softer, sadder, and less practiced. Her skin is patchy, her teeth are tiny, dirty and uneven, and her hair is shiny and black. The other faces around her are larger, but less sympathetic. This is a little girl, tearing at other’s shoulders in a wild act of thoughtlessness and curiosity. There is a little boy pulling the girl’s hair, his face angry and his eyebrows fierce. There is a middle-aged woman in the background, looking separated from the intensity of the group and unsure whether smiling or crying will help her win a way into the collective passion. There is a blond boy in the foreground with light eyes, gelled hair, and an open-mouthed grin that juts above the crowd of heads. He has obtrusively white teeth that stand out against the others’ worry-lines and wrinkled brows, matched only by the whites of his own eyes. He is full of excitement and courage, oblivious to the tragedy that has befallen his fellow human or the sad and delicate vulnerability of the wrenched faces around him.

The first woman does not notice any of them. Every wrinkle in her face is turned in a way that identifies her grief; her squinted eyes are neither examining the body nor noting the photographer; they are not even being used; her expression speaks in an unguarded way that is both embarrassing and enticing.

When I read the caption, Dead Man’s Aunt the picture seemed logical. She has been confronted by something that was absolute. Her nephew had been living, and now he was dead. She had loved him and now he was lost; her grief was not only intense but well founded. I understood that this was the kind of limitless passion that such a situation would evoke. In a way, I wanted to have this experience. I wanted to see death, because I was certain that something that definitive would overwhelm me. I understood that this was the kind of boundless response that such a situation would demand, even when the smiling face of the blond boy kept swirling around in the back of my mind.

At my grandmother’s wake, I think I found more sadness in the fact that I was not crying than the fact that my grandmother was dead. The latter seemed natural to me while the former unforgivable. I tried to squint my eyes and wrinkle my brow, but nothing came of it other than a guilt-ridden headache. Remembering her offers of cream cake and her bath powder smell, I did not try to find comfort but grief. Repeating to myself the fact that she had spent the last two years in a hospital unable to speak, and remembering my father’s words, “In many ways we lost her a long time ago,” I did not try to find solace for her spirit, but justification for my own. Instead of being immersed in a black squid-cloud of ink, I felt disconcertingly separate. I was not supposed to be able to think about what shoes I was wearing or if she herself had chosen that shade of lipstick to be buried in. This was death. This was sorrow.

I knelt down in front of her, looking at the way they had crossed her hands, trying to remember the correct way to cross myself. I inhaled inconspicuously, trying to smell her powder and her death. I tried to look into her closed eyes and become lost in their wrinkles and the recollection of their blueness, only to discover that she was no more dead than the starling was alive.

“She is never coming back,” I repeated to myself, assuming that thinking it would help me to “come to grips” with it as my mother said, that this numbness was merely some stage, some denial period of my mourning. But I already understood it. I knew what death meant, and my acrostic poems had already prepared me for its consequences. It was watching a movie when I already knew the plot. There were no surprises. I was merely waiting for what would come next.

Later I would lie to myself about this. I would hold up the framed picture of my grandmother that rested on my brother’s bookcase. Alone in his room, I would finger the soft angles of her face and tilt my head to one side in a learned action of thoughtfulness. I would whisper to her, knowing that she could not hear me, but secretly hoping that someone else could. “I will think of you every day,” I would say, praying that this could be true, and realizing that yesterday I had forgotten. I would clench my jaw and stiffen my shoulders and feel shame in the force that I needed to put behind these actions.

In a seventh grade poetry unit I wrote about her funeral. In the poem the girl sits straight backed in the pew until she sees her mother crying, and succumbs to her own emotion. I liked how the poem sounded and almost convinced myself of the memory. My teacher liked it too, saying that it was a fine work of symbolism. He asked me to read it out-loud to the class, but when I did it sounded clichéd, and my face turned red not because what I was saying was embarrassing, but because it was untrue.

In her book, The Orchid Thief, Susan Orlean breaks from her journalistic discourse when she reveals, “I do have one unembarrassed passion: I want to know what it feels like to care about something passionately.” This strikes me in the way something does when someone guesses one of my secrets, making me feel at once astonished at the statement’s insight and naïve for thinking I was hiding it well. The same uneasiness that haunted me when I realized that I had lived for so long without singular passion comes back to me twofold, as this statement coming from someone twenty years my senior seems to prophesize a lifetime of frustration. I learn later in the book that she is married and that her father is dead.

I wonder what makes Orlean say this and what gives the little blond boy the ability to smile. Though these responses once seemed the obtrusive and inexperienced exceptions to the greater whole, they now seem more honest than the crying woman in the picture and infinitely more real. Even though I have heard the word “love” and have seen dead bodies lying in caskets, I can remember counting the houses outside the Buick’s car window and I can remember hoping that I would not trip when I knelt down to cross myself. This makes the stories of my Sunday school teachers and the structures of my third grade poems seem less serious and more dated. The values I once assumed to be infallible and constant have become faded and distorted, putting the words in the context of age and time instead of the unchangeable, outside realm to which I once assigned them.

I realized after I read my grandmother-poem out loud to the class that I had made it sound too important. I had put too much weight on the words “funeral” and “family” in both the writing and the reading, and even more than my lie regarding my actions, these words were what seemed false and fabricated. By trying to define this experience in the same context that I had defined “death” I had over-thought its implications and anticipated a response to the point that my words had taken the space of my memory, as stone would fill the bone of a fossil, over time replacing the decaying matter with mineral deposits so that soon nothing was left but rock.

In many ways my idea of absolutes had always been made of this stone, concrete and tangible. I at some point expected them to complete the fossilization process backwards, manifesting themselves in my own bones, to turn from the lifeless, rock form that I understood into something organic and inside of me. However, the only passion that has remained has been Orlean’s, non-singular and completely man-made. The idea that the only thing constant was something that I constructed was at once unsettling and unspeakably powerful.

I felt that power one night, sitting cross-legged in a patio chair at the other end of the table, smiling lazily and drifting in between spoken philosophy and frivolous reflection. The time made the atmosphere seem easy and luxurious, and the wine made the conversation seem irrelevant but intense. The newness of these people did not make me tense, but instead put me at a strange, and in some ways pretentious, sort of ease.

“I mean, this is like real fucking life, man,” he said, his smile cocked to one side and his wine glass slanted dangerously to the other. “This isn’t . . . summer camp, this isn’t fucking nursery school. This is it. Look at these people. I just walked by a mother nursing her baby on the steps at two in the morning. That. That is life.”

I grinned at him knowingly, not because I agreed, but because I saw that his speech was my poem; his “life” was my “family” and my “funeral.” He had assigned the words so much weight that even he knew that they could not be real.

“I read this book over the summer,” I responded to the question from the boy sitting next to me. Love in the Time of Cholera, I continued, “It’s about this boy who becomes infatuated with a girl he sees without ever speaking to her. At first she accepts his letters, then becomes independent enough to reject his affection. They each go through affairs and she through marriage, but at the end they find each other in old age and live happily ever after. It was kind of amazing.”

We were then distracted by the prospect of refills, and I let the book slip out of conversation, but its pictures and ideas stayed, swirling unassumingly in my mind, reinforced by the distinctly Spanish atmosphere of the café, the heat of the late summer night, and the accent of the waiter. I was only half-awakened when the first thinker began to speak again.

“Ok, so this play I’m writing, it starts with just this one guy in the park, feeding the pigeons, and he goes into what I’m calling ‘The Ballad of the Birds.’”

“What’s it about?” someone asked, interested more in posing the question than finding the answer.

“Well he is looking at these birds, and he is just disgusted. Pigeons are fucking filthy animals. There is this one that has like five feathers left, patchy and dirty, but even though he is basically revolted by it, there is something beautiful about it, and he can’t figure out whether the fascination is with the bird or its deterioration or both.”

As he went on about what the birds represented, I stopped listening to him and for a moment he reminded me of the main character in Marquez’s novel, Fermina Daza. In a paragraph she turns from a girl quietly traveling to her cousin’s village to a young woman, pleasuring herself wildly on a bathroom floor, after she acts on her freedom, but before she begins to realize its implications. The speaker’s words hung recklessly like the cigarette out of the corner of her mouth. I looked up at the strands of Christmas lights hanging out of place on the vine-covered steel bearings, and they seemed to bloom. I breathed in deeply, expecting to smell them.

After the check came, I walked back to my room in a state of lavish apathy. The idea that I would almost definitely never see the majority of these people again did not cross my mind, much less phase me. I turned myself now into Fermina, when she discovered the mistake of idealizing her young romance, dismissed her four-year-long suitor with a sentence long note, and felt infinitely powerful when making a nun cry. I remember the time I read the line, “One night she came back from her daily walk stunned by the realization that one could be happy not only without love but despite it.” When I read this the first time I had put down the book or at least closed it to catch my breath. Yet now the line did not make me flinch, but instead passed easily through me, giving me not disappointment but satisfaction.

This moment felt happy, but in this group there had been no tender vulnerability, no commissary of history, and certainly no love. The lack of connection felt comfortable, and I tilted my head towards the street and the taxis. Scuffing my feet with my eyes half-closed, I felt that this moment could extend forever, that Marquez was in some ways wrong. There did not ever have to be scented letters sent, tears over letters returned, years of marriages and affairs, all culminating in a fateful reuniting and a last line of “forever.” That instead, his young Fermina could live forever, wandering through the Spanish-Caribbean countryside smiling, free from any type of longing despite anything she might lack. I knew that this moment of contentment, this invincible power would eventually pass, but I smiled to myself as I came to understand that all else would as well.

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