We had rehearsed for hours. When she arrived at my doorstep the night before, breathless, she told me that he was leaving tomorrow. But, she had insisted on a last dinner before he left—I imagined her gripping the cord of her house phone as she spoke with him, strangling her fingers with its plastic coils, carefully infusing each phrase with measured nonchalance.
She wanted to say so much to him, she wanted to say everything, but she never quite had the words. And yet her simple request—Will you help?—sounded to me a powerful melody, drawing from my lips an involuntary Yes. And so we began.
She practiced relentlessly, and when she would suspect that I felt it required no more iteration, she would ask to repeat it just once more, to make sure she would not forget when the time came. When we had finished, she handed me her credit card and insisted I have dinner a few tables away from where they would sit, in case she required an emergency consultation.
And as I watched her lips, two tables down, I could read the contours of our speech:
I love you. (She let the pause wander.) I never thought I would tell you—I suppose I always assumed we would have more time, and for a while, yesterday, I thought I would let you go without knowing, but I don’t think I could handle that. I don’t mean to stop you, nor do I mean to change your mind—I know you love her in ways you could never love me. (She had cried at this point in practicing, and repeated it until she could say it clearly.) I have been your friend, I have seen you happy, and I wish for nothing more than that. Love is sacrifice.
In that moment, I remembered the night before when she watched me with her dark brown eyes, speaking those words again, and again.
There once was a boy who dreamed he was a butterfly. In the dark of many crisp fogless nights, he would pass through his window into the sharp open air--the moon greeted him and he answered with small gusts of twilight from beneath his wings. As he grew from a boy to a man, his ability to dream began to be hindered by life itself--he slept little, and when he did, it was frightful and shallow. One day, he happened upon a mountain path on one of his fortnightly walks around the neighborhood. Curious, he decided to wander up the path. As he took his first step, he noticed that the sun had already quite settled on the far horizon, slowly sinking into the crimson ocean, and the forest surrounding him grew dark. Oh how the wind howled! The moon grinned menacingly and glared at the man, as if whispering, you have forgotten me and you have come back. The man, blinded by the fierce light, sauntered forward, bumping into trees and eventually stumbling into a lush patch of tall grass. He was never found, for I am sure the forest consumed him that night, but around twilight, the trees will often whistle and sing his tale: he was lost not because he had grown, but because he had convinced himself he could never again be a butterfly.
My cousin is a fairly secretive person. I cannot exactly discern whether this is due to her ethnicity or her personality. When I arrived at her house to stay for two days while my mother and aunt took a short trip to Nara, I found a note with some suggestions for where I should go the next day under a cold beer. I figured she might have gone to bed early that night. At around three in the morning, either her footsteps or the remnants of jetlag brought me into a half-dreamstate. She opened her screen door about five inches, just enough for her thin frame to slip past, and promptly closed it behind her. The heavy metal click of the front door shattered the silence of the night and I fell back into dream. I awoke to the warmth of her cooking. Her lips curled into a smile as I stumbled across the bedroom's threshold and said it had been a long time since we last saw each other. It had. I asked her where she went late last night. She smiled quickly. Too soon, I was out the door for a day out and about. I must say my memory fails me as to the day's events, but I soon found myself half asleep, in bed, watching her open her screen door, slip nimbly past, close the screen door, and finally, the familiar metal clang. I forced myself up and stole to her screen door. It is perhaps too easy to apologize for a moral failing after the fact, precisely because temptation is strongest in the moment and the result is necessarily binary--we resist or we succumb.
A screen door, as hers was, is made up of little more than an inch or so of wood, and some materials constituting a paper thin translucent sheet. It was heavier than it looked. As I slid the screen door several more inches than it was used to, I quickly turned around, expecting her to be standing, watching. A momentary breath of relief was smothered by my beating heart as I stepped across the threshold. There must have been at least a thousand shoe boxes in the small space of her room. They say murder is easier the second time around. Each box contained a single picture that covered the entire bottom of each box. I recognized one or two out of all the ones I searched through--a precious few of her time in San Francisco a decade or so ago. I returned to my bed and woke up the next day to the sound of eggs frying. I stepped out and smiled at her. She saw and smiled back.
That is how I unveiled a small part of her life--began to comprehend a small bit of who she was. At least that is how I did it in my dreams.
[A story inspired by
“And yes I said yes I will Yes,” the last line of Joyce’s Ulysses]
Once upon a quiet night, in a quiet city made of soft white sand,
a young boy raced through his house and into his bedroom. Laughing and leaping,
he crashed lightly into his bed of fine sand. Gleefully pouring sand from hand
to hand, he slowly settled into a comfortable position as he eagerly awaited
his nighttime story. The moon outside reached its peak in the sky and the
infinite dunes glistened and danced in the midnight gusts and winds. The boy
waited for this particular moment every night; an ocean of light would rush
over the kingdom, illuminating his bedroom. Beams of moonlight traced his
widening smile as his father entered the room with a thick leather-bound book
announcing itself as the “Book of Many Stories” by way of faded gold plating.
“I wish to hear a story, father,”
whispered the boy, containing his excitement.
His father flipped through the
seemingly endless trove of stories.
“Which one would you like to hear
tonight?”
A heading of “Superheroes Galore!”
flashed across the page.
“No,” said the boy immediately,
“not those. I want to hear a story from when you were young.”
His father laughed heartily.
“Then I will tell you the story of Percy and Gordon.”
He closed the book; there are
stories even its infinite pages cannot contain.
Percy and Gordon lived next door to each other in the
beautiful village of Margana. From when
their limbs could grasp motion, the two boys played among the dunes of sand, dancing
on unending crests and troughs, laughing in full delight from day until night,
when the sweet sound of their mother’s voices could be heard calling for them in
the distance. It was a wonder for the magic of youth to be unleashed upon such
an expanse. Their imaginations filled the skies with enough spared to sweep the
yellow oceans twice over. When they tired, they lay within the folds of golden sand
and dreamt of their futures.
“I want to
grow up to be a scientist,” Percy would say as his eyes scanned the clear blue
sky.
“And why is
that?” asked Gordon, unconsciously grinning.
“To save
the world, you know that.”
“I know. I
just wanted to hear you say it.”
It was not until later that they actually had to consider
their futures. As time passed, their words became waxed with doubt and their
minds reeled with confusion. Purpose. No longer did the golden sand glisten for
them. Purpose. Nor did their mother’s beckoning voices sound sweet. Not when
they bellowed for purpose.
Most men in this village were, like Percy’s father, destined
to become merchants. As with most, they bought and sold everything from maize
and wheat to truths and lies. They traveled often. Gordon’s father, to the
disdain of many in the village, was an artist and chose to stay at home,
creating paintings of sand. Feeling the conscious pull of time passing by,
Gordon began to spend more time at home, sitting by his father, watching. He
sat silently, watching his father work the flowing sand with soft hands. For
hours, his eyes followed every wave and slash of his father’s motions,
mesmerized by the fluidity and ease of composition. When his eyes finally grew
weary, he piled a large mound of sand against the wall and fell slowly into
dream. He awoke to a whisper in his ear.
“Guess what
I got?” inquired the familiar voice.
Gordon
opened his eyes to dozens of crudely drawn boxes on a sheet of sturdy brown
paper.
“My dad
brought me back a graphic compilation of all the known elements in the world,”
he explained excitedly, “but he only let me copy it down. Is this not a work of
art?”
Smiling,
Gordon shook the morning sand from his clothes, and pointing proudly to his
father’s toil, said to Percy, “My father painted the night for me. Look at the magnificent
stars, the perfect moon, the paths of the wind traced onto the midnight sand;
this is a true work of art.”
Percy’s
gaze slipped to the floor.
“My father says that is not art.
That is merely a hobby and a waste of time. I think that if you—”
“Leave.”
“I meant
that my father…”
This time it was his better judgment that silenced him. As
he heard his own words trail off into the morning wisps of wind, he felt
embarrassed at his own behavior. He gripped his poorly drawn table of elements along
with his number-two pencils and with downcast eyes, hastened for the door.
Eight months passed without a single word between them.
Gordon’s father was invited to teach temporarily at a faraway school as a
master of fine art. His son wanted to go with him and after relentless begging
and pleading they began packing for their travels. As Gordon happily hugged and
thanked his father, a brown paper airplane flew in through the open window and
landed in his lap. Immediately, the color caught his eye and he unfolded the construct
to find a picture of himself and Percy standing in front of the two doors of
their adjacent houses. An outline of a larger house surrounding the two
buildings contained the only text across its shaded façade: Gordon Tehvitan
Ibele & Percy Nograd Gilsenpe: Two as One. He rushed outside and saw Percy
standing bathed in moonlight. Gordon opened his mouth to speak, but his words
were choked back by the furious winds. Instead his friend spoke, “Forgive me,
but above all else, please remember me.”
“And what
did Gordon say?” demanded the boy now sitting upright clutching handfuls of gleaming
white sand.
The boy’s
father gazed out the window at the glistening stars, the pale wondrous moon,
and said in a whisper, “And yes I said yes I will Yes.”
