Some Things About Love, Magic, and Terror
life still
She raised her hand. Paused. You've got something...
What? I said, tilting away, agitated at her attention.
We were on the tube. Seated. Restless. Alive. Three kids leaned at the door between carriages, phones out, eyes lit. A collection of seventeenth-century masterpieces. Girl with the Jaded Eyebrows. Boy with That Kind of Floppy Hat Whose Name I Don’t Remember. Other Boy with No Hat. They took turns looking at each other over their phones. Some parts of them in love with other parts. The terror of it all still part of the charm.
You've got something just there, V said. On the tip of your nose.
I pushed her hand away. One of the kids, the girl with the eyebrows, shouted for sanity.
The two boys made it into a rhyme. A repeated chorus. Just a little sanity, please, dear Brittany. Just a little sanity, please.
You don't want me to touch you? V said.
I made a show of wiping my nose and turned away.
The train sped around a curve.
Why do you have to make such a big deal out of everything? V said, rolling her eyes into an endless sigh.
I didn’t see when the bomb went off. I didn’t notice anything strange until I noticed V, her mouth still frozen in the perfect ‘o’ of her sigh, staring dead over my shoulder. And then I noticed everything else. The chorus of thumbs interrupted, fingers paused over phones. A woman hanging from the handrail, her hoodie up and headphones on. Her toe caught mid-tap, waiting for the next note to fall.
Still life.
Breathless silence.
Some, like V, stared at something behind me. Eyes cracked wide in horror.
I licked my lips. My heart tripped over itself.
I wondered if I would recognize death the way I recognized love. As something both surprising and inevitable. As a stranger I had somehow always known.
I turned and saw the world coming apart at its seams.
infinite possibility
Once, this.
Us. Me and V. In bed, awake against the late dark morning. Buses sloshed red through the rain. Foxes fought like children. Malick hummed in the next room. That guy. So annoying.
I never believed in fairy tales until I met you, V said.
She turned. Brushed the hair out of my ear. Let her fingers run along my shoulders.
And not just because of that thing with the magic following you around, V said, turning away. Studying the ceiling. It’s this feeling like the world is suddenly precious and in desperate need of our protection. Like everything matters and, at any moment, could all go horribly wrong.
Like anything could happen, I said.
Exactly, she said, still looking at the ceiling.
I didn’t see anything particularly interesting up there.
Infinite possibility, I said.
Sounds great, doesn’t it? she said, her toes finding my shin. Soothing scratches.
I grabbed my phone. Opened the news.
It does, I said.
Malick stopped humming. Which meant, most likely, he had just come. It’s something we know about Malick we don’t want to know. Annoying.
Did you hear about Oxford? I said.
College? she said.
No. Mine. Mississippi.
I held my phone, cradled a backlit monster in the palm of my hand. White boy, fifteen-years-old. Wallace Ryan.
My god, V said. Look at his hair. It’s horrible.
Maybe that's where all the hate comes from, I said. One bad hair day after another.
magic
V and I met at a thing called The Liar’s League. Actors performing short stories. Writers performing humble brags. V had written a story about Hitler’s gay niece. I had written a story about a mermaid fucking a werewolf. Both stories featured a great deal of spanking. We couldn’t believe our luck, meeting in a city like London. What were the chances?
It’s literally like magic, she said.
Well, I mean, I said. Not literally literally.
We fucked madly and loudly across those first weeks, in her bed, on my sofa, on kitchen counters. There was some spanking. Occasionally the world turned upside down. Or one of us grew wings. That happens sometimes when I have sex. Or go out for a coffee. Or argue over the grammar of life and death and magic and terror.
It’s embarrassing. The magic. This thing that follows me around. A consequence of having died and been brought back to life. But that’s a different story.
It’s also sexy, I guess. The magic. If you’re into that sort of thing. V was. So, that worked out.
Our relationship more or less revolved around the violence we did to each other’s bodies and words, in one way or another. Maybe that’s most of what most everything revolves around. God, I hope not. I don’t really believe in God, though, so I don’t know why I always capitalize it. Anyway.
I worked at home. Home was a tiny flat behind a car wash. Work was stories. Mostly erotica. Mostly about werewolves and mermaids.
Once, the two of us on my apartment floor, bits of story scattered around.
V asked if people really liked the monster porn thing. She held up a page of one story, checking it over for the proper amount of grammar and sexual tension. It was hard because she was English, and they have some weird ideas about both those things, really.
People love monsters fucking each other, I said. It gives them hope, I guess, that everyone has their somebody.
Uh huh, she said.
There’s something magical, I said, about being able to please people, you know, without being present with them.
Less messy, she said.
Yeah.
V put the page down. She said, Aren’t you present in your writing?
I said, Do I look like a horny mermaid to you?
V rolled her eyes onto the floor.
I told her about my most popular series. It was about a lesbian mermaid named Allison who grants her own wishes and has a lot of weird sex in a lot of weird places. You might think there’s not much conflict to be found in a story where the main character gets everything they ever wanted, but you would be wrong. Just because you get everything you ask for doesn’t mean you ever get what you really need.
I based Allison on a girl I had known once who was literally magical. Literally literally. As in not metaphorically. We used to argue about metaphors a lot, actually.
A lot of my readers leave comments saying they love how much I seem to believe in the magic of my worlds. I never respond but I always wonder what kind of people think that magic doesn’t exist. Don’t they read the news? It’s post-rational out there.
Later on, the two of us spent, counting each other’s breaths in the timeless space between fucking.
V asked me if it was important Allison be a lesbian. Why couldn’t she just be a mermaid? Why do you have to define her as one thing or another?
I don’t know, I said. It just came out of me that way.
Like magic?
Yeah.
Like you couldn’t control it if you tried?
Yeah.
You should probably try harder.
I asked V what was the point of writing about a past that never existed.
V said, Nothing is inevitable, John. Not even the past.
the past
Once, this other thing happened.
This other thing was that I loved a girl with magical hair who also loved me and everything was great until I pissed her off and then proceeded to get smashed to pieces by a Corolla.
Allison brought me back to life but not to love.
I crawled out of my grave and knocked at her door.
“It’s too late,” she said.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“You were dead too long,” she said. “I had to move on.”
“But you brought me back to life,” I said.
“Better luck next time, I guess,” she said.
This was in Oxford. Mine. Mississippi. Three years ago. A lifetime.
After I crawled out of my grave, and Allison shut the door in my face, I left. I traveled the world. I walked the canals of Kochi at sunrise. Marveled at the ancient Chinese fishing nets sewn with glistening droplets of water. Sat with a bright-eyed, Japanese man in Tokyo and learned how to fold paper into the shape of a king and queen. The old man told me of his love for “The Tennessee Waltz” by Brenda Lee. He said it reminded him of the one that got away. He smiled, proud of his idiom.
I swam off the coast of Namhae, in the South Sea, with a girl I came to love, but never kissed. I went down on a married woman in Busan whose name I don’t remember but whose hand I remember holding as we walked to breakfast.
Everywhere, magic followed. Strange and stranger things. Hotel televisions switched over to other time zones. Sitcoms from the Victorian era. Medieval satire. Museum lights blinked on and off in morse code that, after I bought a code book, I understood to mean: YOU ARE NOT ALONE.
Sometimes during sex, the world turned upside down.
Once, a banana laughed at me.
My parents died and didn’t come back to life. I don’t think that was magic. That was probably just regular old real life.
I sat in the gardens of the Rodin museum all through this one summer afternoon in Paris, thinking about thinking about life and death and kissing Francoise Hardy.
One of the sculptures winked at me like it knew something I didn’t.
I had this feeling after I left Allison. After I left my death behind. A feeling like in old Looney Tunes cartoons. As if I’d run off the edge of the known world and my only hope of surviving was to never stop running and to never look down. Like I was living on borrowed time. Like eventually, however much of Allison’s magic I still carried with me, it would run out. No matter how fast I ran, no matter how much I never looked down.
Eventually, everything falls.
One day, I would turn a corner and see death in dark overalls and a striped long-sleeved shirt and she would say, What’s your hurry, bub?
After I died, I never stayed anywhere for very long.
Until I met V.
V asked me about Allison a lot.
I guess because every time something magical happened between, or around, us, she got scared maybe I was thinking about the girl whose magic brought me back to life.
You’re not over her, you know? V said.
Very astute, I said. You try getting over the girl that brought you back to life.
V said, She only brought you back to life because she killed you.
She didn’t mean to kill me, I said. It was my own fault for not looking where I was going.
You don’t know that.
And she didn’t bring me back to life because she killed me. She brought me back to life because she loved me.
Love is the only solution for the problems caused by love, V said. Is that it? Love kills you and love brings you back to life.
Love is death, I said. Long live love.
Some moments last forever, V said.
The way she said it broke my heart.
the stars. my god.
Once, in Soho, we turned a corner.
The stars fell from the sky. Fading silver lines cut across the night.
It’s beautiful, V said.
It’s not bad, I said.
Zoot. Zip. Bam. Bang.
That one looked pretty close, V said.
Shit, I said.
I pulled V under the awning of a cafe. A star cut through the air where we’d been standing. It burned in the pavement a few feet away.
A woman across the street stood still in wonder. She tilted her head back. Her hair stuck up, as if struck by lightning. Her eyes shone. My god, she said. The stars.
We told her to run.
She didn’t.
She took one in the leg. Fell, crying. Embedded in her thigh, a shard of heaven.
What do we do? V said, the two of us kneeling, covering our heads.
Panic.
I didn’t say that out loud I don’t think.
The woman screamed. We watched her attempts to crawl under a tall tree.
Wait for it to pass, I said. That’s all we can do.
The sky continued falling.
But she's hurt.
If we try and help we’ll just get hurt, too. Maybe worse.
What if she dies?
That would be worse, I said.
V rolled her eyes over my heart like it wasn’t working properly. Maybe she’s right. I was dead for six months. I don’t really know what that does to a boy’s heart. Allison certainly didn’t believe it had done me any good.
Trust me, I said. The magic never lasts long.
i know you are
V lived on top of a Tennessee Fried Chicken. We always woke up starving, our bodies dripping with greasy dissatisfaction. Muddled dreams of wriggly pink meat rolled in flour and burnt beyond recognition. American transubstantiation. Our faith rewarded in salt and fat, the body and blood of capitalism.
She shared the flat with a sometimes couple named Malick and Angel. One from Barcelona. The other from Newcastle. Sometimes, during sex, we could hear Malick humming melodies from The Sound of Music. One morning, he told me to please forgive him. He said it was the only way he had found that kept him from coming too soon.
I concentrate on the music, he said, and the music concentrates me. He poured himself a glass of something that looked like orange juice mixed with charcoal.
If it bothers you, he said, I would suggest singing along.
Brilliant, I said.
During the day, V worked at a fancy umbrella shop. Slender blue Oxford button-down. Long black tie. Polished, uncomfortable shoes. At night, she sat at her kitchen table and crafted meticulously detailed autobiographies of things that never existed. Joan of Arc’s bastard daughter. Hitler’s gay niece. Oliver Cromwell’s poodle.
She lived with the constant anxiety of turning out like her father. An alcoholic. Red cheeks. Scarred knuckles. Pickled breath. A failure at everything but love, which V never doubted, only lamented. That she should be loved by, and have to love, someone unable to care for themselves or others.
V made lists like nobody’s business. We shared this trait. We competed at who could make their lists the longest. Lists of emotions. Lists of moods. Lists of books with people in them who might not actually have been people (Gatsby, for example, V held forth, with his dark moods, endless late night parties, and mysterious past was most assuredly a vampire). She showed me her lists in the margins of her books.
I don’t need to read them after I write them, V said. I just need to have made the list and things feel okay for a while.
It feels good, V said, knowing there are pieces of me in all the books I’ve read. Little ordered columns of my pain raised between the lines of stories that mattered enough to me to remind me of something in me that needed arranging.
Like old furniture in an old house, I said.
But not, V said, because my mind is less like a house and more like a bottomless well.
Maybe the chairs are stuck on the walls, I said. So that you can take a break now and then and read a book on your way to the bottom of everything.
Maybe, V said.
She kissed my ear and we made love on the floor of her study, a copy of The Great Gatsby, and those eyes, watching us.
Sometimes in my life I have felt like all we have watching over us are the fictions of our past. That probably doesn’t bode well for me or the world.
I should probably read more contemporary fiction. I should probably find something to believe in before I die. Again.
Yes, V said, you probably should.
Did I say that out loud? I said.
No, V said. It unfurled out of your head like a thought balloon.
Oh, I said. Sorry. I didn’t mean to be so animated.
Ha, ha, V said. Ha.
It’s hard for me, I said, to keep straight what people are saying and thinking and doing sometimes. Myself included. Maybe it’s a side effect of resurrection. I wonder how Jesus coped.
I like you a lot, you know? V said.
I like you, too, I said.
Are we saying I love you? V said, rolling up on an elbow.
I don’t think so, I said.
But are we not saying it in that way that really we are saying it but we’re just too afraid to say the words? V said.
I’m not scared of words, I said.
What are you scared of? V said.
Silence. The word bubbled out of my head. Hung in the space between us. I ignored it.
I know you are, I said, but what am I?
puzzles
There’s a scar on my back from where the car killed me. A raised, dark red line. Some of my fingernails are still bruised from that time I clawed out of my own grave.
Once, V wrote a list down my back of all the different things she believed about the world.
Kindness, she wrote, over and over, on down my spine.
She kissed my scars after. Suckled on the memory of my resurrection. Asked about what it was like. To be dead. To wake up in the dark with the memory of a girl’s song turning my heart around. Sometimes I thought maybe V loved my pain more than she loved me but then I figured that was silly.
If she was in love with anything it was probably the magic. I knew what it was to be in love with the effect someone has on the world. On you.
Once, the two of us in the rain. V’s umbrella upside down at her feet.
She stared at her reflection in a rain puddle. She asked if I saw what she saw.
Her country had just voted to deny entry to people like her. Voted to accept the reality of terror as reason for insanity. Her country allowed me to walk around, though, a veritable magical menace, because of the special relationship our countries shared.
The world turned upside down.
I didn’t know what to say.
V, writer, woman, daughter of Mashhad and Bristol. A girl I kissed. A girl I loved in a way that terrified me. A girl I loved in a way that escaped my capacity for expression.
I see you, I tried.
That’s nice, she said. That’s what everyone sees, though.
Once, at home, in the kitchen, radiator on. Malick and Angel pleasantly drunk on the sofa, watching Barbarella. It’s weirder than you remember. A similar amount of sexy.
V and I ate toast.
People, V said, hate puzzles they can’t solve. They enjoy being content. That’s why all anyone here remembers of Sherlock Holmes is that he solved mysteries and wore a ridiculous hat. They never remember his wonders over the mysteries no human could solve.
So, I said, you’re not content?
V said, Are you?
I don’t think that’s an option for me, I said.
A butterfly crawled out of my coffee and flew to the window. It banged at the glass. Over and over.
I don’t understand how anyone feels at home in the world, I said. I believe that some people do. But I don’t understand it.
I got up. I opened the window and let the butterfly go. I felt unaccountably sad.
Do you want to feel at home? V said. Doesn’t living in a foreign land give you the right, the comfort, the excuse, to go on feeling as alienated by life as you always have?
I sat back down.
Not exactly, I said.
I brushed my toes across her ankle.
What? she said.
I’m thinking, I said. Sometimes it helps me think if I touch you.
What are you thinking about? she said.
I’m thinking, I said, of how when I think about home I never think about love. I think about futility and I think the only place I can and have ever felt at home is in the pursuit of what is impossible.
Is that what falling in love with me is like? V said.
It’s what falling in love with anything is like, I said. You always feel like you’re falling and you always hope that maybe this time you’ll learn how to fly before the end.
Before the magic runs out, V said.
Yeah, I said. Like that.
life, cracked by darkness
The girl with the eyebrows halfway to the floor, blood on her forehead, falling but not fallen. The two boys with her thrown apart, pinned against the bulging walls. Behind one, a gap opened in the carriage’s body. A crack of darkness.
The other boy, his head tilted back, still smiling.
The end of the world hits before we know it.
And then, when we know it for what it is, it’s too late to do anything.
Past the kids, in the other car, a fog of blood and steel and darkness lit by a white burst of flame the size of a watermelon.
My legs were useless. My arms, too heavy to think about moving.
V, beside me. Still as death. Not breathing. But, then again, nobody was. Silent faces shadowed by dust and debris, motionless and bright.
I moved. I stood.
One shaky step after another toward the doors along one side. Useless emergency stop button. I tried prying them open. Wriggled my fingers into the rubber seals. Pulled. Yelled. Knuckles popping. Memories of death snapping loose. Endless dark morning awake to nothing. The world outside your window blowing past, backwards and forwards. Alone and timeless. And then Allison’s magic. Then coming back to life. A body in a box. The world turned upside down. Silence like a foot against my chest. Suffocating. My raised hand, scratching at the bottom of everything.
Punching.
It’s not so much being dead that’s scary. It’s knowing what it takes to live.
The doors of the London subway defeated me where the earth couldn’t. Almost tore off a fingernail before I stopped. Panting.
I wondered if the magic allowed me to affect the world. It didn’t seem like it. Then I looked back. At the teenagers. Through the dust and debris, at the crack of darkness behind them.
Maybe there was time.
Maybe it was big enough to slip through.
Even if there was, though, and even if it was, I couldn’t carry myself and V off the train without walking towards the blast.
I couldn’t dig myself out of this metal coffin without facing the children and the world behind them being torn apart.
things i didn’t tell her
Once, one morning. V, a breakfast silhouette. Girl at Window. Girl with Bowl. Girl with the Sometimes Orange Hair. Girl at Radiohead Concerts Who Wrote the Numbers on People’s Hands That Marked Their Place in Line. Girl Spooning Lucky Charms Between Her Lips. Crunch, crunch. Her body an outline of negative space inside of which all of time and also a memory of my dad lamenting his one and only son blocking his view of his one and only favorite television show, Columbo, saying I made a better door than a window. An idea that took and takes hold of me. Another’s body a doorway into some other room of existence. A door, like a body, unlike a window, promising nothing but offering everything. Let’s make a deal. What’s behind door #2?
I have always believed in a love that kills. That if a love doesn’t slay you, then maybe it’s not true.
I have always been less certain of a love that saves. That puts you back together. That brings you peace. That brings you home.
V turned. Lips moist with milk. Pale blue eyes, almost green, sanded clean of cynicism by frequent encounters with horror and wonder. Alcoholic fathers, kind strangers, the dog that once followed her home and ended up scaring away an intruder one night, only to vanish in the morning.
A girl that believed enough in magic to believe anything was possible in any direction.
She wiped her mouth clean with the cuff of her jumper. She wiped the cuff of her jumper on her jeans.
I am dying, I thought.
I didn’t. I don’t want to die.
I didn’t. I don’t know what any of this means.
She said, Will you come?
V wanted me to visit her mom. Her mom had cancer like everybody. Her dad left them a long time ago.
V said she didn’t have much time.
Who does? I said.
I can never read you, you know? V said. You’re so closed off, sometimes. Not even closed off. It’s like you carry this wall around with which you literally punch me in the face.
I didn’t think that metaphor held together. I told her that.
V sighed.
A fly landed on her nose. She swatted at it. Missed. It buzzed against the window.
V had studied art history at Oxford. Her mother, the artist. A constant influence. Sometimes V and I visited museums and V would stare all afternoon at one still life. Her nose scandalously close to the canvas. It felt like forever. Like life was passing us by while she stood still and I stood with her because I couldn’t figure out how to leave.
Always, just before a docent finally noticed the girl crossing the barrier between art and life, she’d raise her hand and point out something small. Something seemingly inconsequential. A fly on a piece of fruit. A dead mouse in a corner. A reflection of a skull in a teaspoon.
Death is always in these things, she’d say, if you know where to look.
I’m scared, I said.
Of my mom? she said.
Of death.
But you already died. Been there, done that, right? Literally lived to tell the tale.
I know, I said. I’m not sure I can go through it all again. The dying.
Or the living? V said.
Or that, I said.
But you’re not dying, dummy. It’s my mom.
The way V looked at me I felt like I was already dead, but I didn’t tell her that.
Here are some other things I didn’t tell her.
I didn’t tell her that I’m afraid to get close to death because I’m afraid death will recognize me as someone she loved and lost and will now do whatever it takes to get me back.
I didn’t tell her that this fear of death has led me to having a fear of weakness. That I can’t stand to be near people I love who are hurting. That having died, having been vulnerable, makes it harder for me to be near people who are dying or vulnerable. That this is why I didn’t go home either time my parents got sick.
I didn’t tell her that the more I forget death—the more I forget her face, her smell, her touch—the more scared I am of dying.
I didn’t tell her give me your Syrian refugees. Your Parisian dead. I will weep for those I’ve never met and push away those I love as far as they’ll allow me.
I told her that I didn’t want to go and she couldn’t make me.
love
Once on the London Eye, we took turns kneeling in front of each other as the big wheel turned around the sunset skyline of Westminster. Sometimes we looked out the windows. People waved. Trees dripped. You haven’t seen this city, V said, until you’ve seen it from the top of the world, post-orgasm, that lingering blue hum of warmth and sadness suffusing your muscles and bones, spreading out over the towers of old London.
Who talks like this? I said.
Me, V said. You. Not everyone. Not always.
This was October and everything seemed to be falling apart because that’s the only way it knew how to survive. There wasn’t much of a queue. Everyone was afraid to be anywhere anyone recognized as important. An autumn of terror the news dubbed it. Some of us took hope, however misguided, in the name. As if terror, like leaves, might fall from the sky and vanish of its own accord. That it might, in leaving, make room for more and better life.
My head in her lap. Her hand slid between the second and third buttons of my shirt.
Do tulips always blossom along your shoulders when you come? V said.
No, I said. It’s always different.
The slow spun sky ticked away as our carriage curved, in jolted step, back to earth.
V said, Your eyes remind me of a cocker spaniel I had growing up. His name was Duffy McDoogle Dog.
I really expected more from a younger you.
I leaned hard into absurdism as a pre-teen. I've since grown out of it.
Into?
Whimsical realism.
This whole relationship must be perfect for you.
It's cool. I mean. I’m in love with you. You know that, right, bub? Right?
A part of me believed her and a part of me believed it wasn’t me she loved at all but the promise of tulips and falling stars.
V dug her nails into my chest. I looked away at the darkening sky.
John?
The carriage door opened of its own accord. In poured the noise and odor of the world. Skateboard clatter. Guitar strum. Laughing children. Bitter calls for peace and quiet. Wet pavement. Roasted peanuts.
John? Hey, dummy. Don’t shut me out.
Silence.
Please.
terror
V, in bed, scattered across our mornings. One leg folded under the other. Phone propped on her chest, face lit by the pale blue light of progress. Unsettled. The same conversation. The same endless moment of dread.
Did you hear about Beirut?
Did you hear about Damascus?
Did you hear about Paris?
Did you hear about Busan?
Did you hear about Tripoli?
Did you hear about Havana?
Did you hear about Chicago?
Did you hear?
There are moments when the world seems determined to tear itself apart.
There are people who have these moments, as well.
How do you keep it together in moments like this? With people like this?
I don’t know. I don’t even know how I’m alive. How any of us are. Not really.
But, here we are.
Hello.
shit
V’s hand curled in my hair. Her voice dug a trench between us. Rasping. Scraping. Uncovering bones. Tins of boiled ham. Old newspapers. There was a whole vanished world buried between us.
Magic isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be. Anything can happen. It sounds great, I know. You try it.
Your life is your jar, she said. And all you do is sink into it. One day you’ll disappear. Alone.
My life isn’t a metaphor, I said.
Everyone’s life is a metaphor trying to find what it signifies.
V tossed the bones and tins and newspapers in a pile in the corner. The pile was getting pretty big.
She wasn’t happy about me not seeing her mom. She was equally unhappy with my refusal to love.
I thought of how much life is wasted trying to understand what it is that’s being wasted.
Life doesn’t signify anything, I said. It just is. Oxford ruined you.
V said, You’re jealous of other people’s privilege.
I said, Why shouldn’t I be?
V said, That privilege doesn’t determine our choices, only our range.
Fuck off, I said.
She said, I’m tired of your shit.
She looked over at the pretty big pile in the corner that was starting really to not really be in the corner of her room anymore so much as all along one side.
I said, Radiohead is stupid. And they’re much less popular than Taylor Swift.
V said, Nothing is gained by anyone in that comparison.
I said, More people have seen Twilight than have read On the Genealogy of Morals.
V got out of bed. In the bathroom she washed my magic off her hands.
She left for work.
too late
Once, the two of us sitting on the steps outside the Royal Academy of Art. V said her mom used to bring her here every month. To give her a sense of history. Of a world worth fighting for and, at times, against.
I can’t shake this feeling, V said, like when my mom goes she’ll take the world with her. She came here to start a new life. A life that was supposed to be more free. That was supposed to be more.
And now. Now it’s all going. It’s all gone. She’s taking it with her. The world, V said, before all this shit started happening. The one that took risks for something more, not less. The one where the walls between people fell down, not up.
It’s all gone upside down, she said.
I have a feeling there have always been walls, I said. It’s scary opening yourself. To stuff. To things.
I have a feeling, V said. That nothing stays dead. I tell myself that the world has suffered worse than this. That it has died and come back to life. That it will again. That everything eventually comes back to life in one form or another. It’s kind of a scary thought, but I think my mom would like it. Would be proud. I think she’d want to believe that if the world she ran to ended up running away from her that it might one day come back.
You can’t go back, I said.
What if you can’t go forward either? V said.
Some things stay lost, I said.
Some things don’t, V said. Look at you. You didn’t stay dead, did you?
I don’t know, I said. Sometimes, I just don’t know.
V put her arm around my shoulders.
A butterfly flew past. I didn’t have time to recognize it one way or another. I cried a little bit. I’m not sure why. But, it’s probably obvious. Maybe I’ll figure it out later.
“What time do you want to see your mom tomorrow?” I said.
V smiled. She squeezed my shoulders and pulled me into her. She leaned her head close to mine. She brushed my hair away. She whispered in my ear.
She said, This isn’t a dream, John. This is real life. And you, my friend, are really alive. And I’m really right here with you.
That was her way of saying thank you, I think.
I still haven’t figured out my way of saying I love you.
Maybe I’ll figure it out later. If there’s time. Maybe it’s this story. I don’t know. There are fewer mermaids and werewolves than I’m comfortable with, really. It all feels too real, sometimes, doesn’t it?
some moments last forever
I carried the girl with the eyebrows through the crack in the train wall. Her jacket caught on jagged metal teeth. Held. Tore. And then the boy with the hat. And then the boy with no hat. I went back for V. I carried her out.
I sat her against a wall with the others. I was sweating. Uncertain. Was it far enough? Was it safe?
Maybe I should carry them, her, all the way down the tunnel to the next station.
I didn’t know how long this moment would last.
The train car that held the bomb expanded like a balloon. Shattered glass floated out like Saturn’s rings. A disco ball of pain, lit by the flash of the bomb.
Was it growing? Would it ever stop? What happened to the world if it didn’t?
I knelt beside V. Gravel shifted under my heel. Her eyes, wide and frigid with shock.
It looked like she was crying.
I brushed the frozen tear from her cheek with my thumb.
Maybe this was it. Maybe this was what it looked like when the magic really and truly ran out.
I hoped not. Because, God, I wanted more time. But I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe in much, really. But I still want more of everything.
All the time. More. More. More.
I turned and looked at the train. I wondered how many people I could save if I tried.
I didn’t care.
But I knew V would.
I didn’t want to think of how she would think of me if she knew I left even one person on the train. If I didn’t try to do something.
Kindness, all down my spine.
Her eyes rolling over my heart.
I turned.
I left her behind.
For a moment. For just a moment, I told myself. I would be back. I would be back again. And again.
Endless resurrection, right?
Some moments last forever.
You know that right, bub?
I didn’t. I don’t know.
I hope the magic lasts, though. For just a little while longer.
If not forever, at least long enough to do some good.