“And how come I’ve never heard of it?”
Mr. Leonard laughed at that, the sound like leaves wafting through park gates. “Well, look at you. You’re a baby. You’ve probably never needed it.” Raising his brows and lowering his chin, he looked at me over the rim of his glasses. “If you don’t need it, then you don’t know it. It’s what makes this place so special, no?”
At twenty-eight, I was not exactly a baby anymore, but Mr. Leonard did have a point there. The Insidewasspecial. Here we were relieved from the rapidly evolving technologies and the infinite streams of useless information that plagued the Outside. Here, we only knew what was necessary for our survival and well-being, living on that rare sweet point between everything and nothing, overstimulation and oblivion.
And yet, it gnawed at me. Nostalgia. Something you’re missing.
What could someone be missing living here? The whole city was built like a hug, full of glossy neon signs and four-story buildings leaning on each other like drunken friends, quaint lampposts littered with band stickers and technicians’ phone numbers, wide sidewalks cluttered with metal benches and the occasional yellow silhouette of a phone booth, green parks ringing with the laughter of children hopping over white, chalk-drawn squares, and the boisterous voices of teenagers sliding over colorful skateboards. We had no crime, no poverty, no pollution, no social injustice to fight against. Here we were connected not only to each other but to the best and most important qualities of humanity.
The idea of someone longing for the past when living here in the present was utterly incomprehensible to me. But if the book really was from Outside, maybe that explained why such a miserable word existed in it.
If the Outsiders lived better or worse than us, it didn’t matter. It was none of our concern. The human mind was not built to know everything all at once or dwell on matters beyond its control. We only had power over ourselves, and so our sole purpose was to be good, honest, helpful members of society. After all, there was nothing like the ripple effect of accountability. Harmony and peace were inevitable when everyone took responsibility for their actions and acted mindfully and respectfully toward others. Basic human decency proliferating itself.
And so, I had all I could possibly need here. I had friends I liked, books to read, work I actually enjoyed doing, and a charming little apartment on Arcade Street. The neighborhood was a bit noisy, especially at night with all the bars and restaurants lining the block, but for a young person who didn’t like driving, it was the best location since everything one could possibly need was within walking distance.
From my fourth-floor apartment, I could see the whole city waking up in the morning, the sunlight tumbling, lush and cold, over the slope of buildings and treetops. And in the evening, I could watch the streets twinkle with activity and the array of stone chimneys puff out black coils of smoke now that it was autumn again. Which was exactly what I was doing now, leaning on the balcony’s rain-kissed railing, with a blanket thrown over my shoulders and a cigarette smoldering between my fingers.
Below, the street buzzed with the chatter of passersby, audible even over the rumble of several moving vehicles and the screech of the bus as it slowed to a stop. No noise was ever louder than our togetherness.
The neon sign, posted on the rooftop across from me, advertising a popular sugary drink, flickered red and white below the Center’s billboard, which seemed to hover as though on its own a few inches above.Here we are all connected, it reassured us.
It reminded me that my assessment was coming up soon, and I felt myself rise up to my toes, my eyes searching for the honeycomb dome of the Center, glowing like a beacon in the faraway distance. The beauty of its hexagons was immeasurable; its brightness, infinite. No matter where you were, you could always catch a glimpse of the giant white dome. The Center was the heart of this place. It was where we all began and ended, the converging point where our well-being was interlinked.
???
After I finished my cigarette, I disposed of it in the ashtray wedged between my petunia pots and went back inside.
The warmth of the apartment washed over me sweet and thick like treacle, making my fingers sting from the abrupt change in temperature.
I loved this place. I loved that you could take in all of its sunny, age-scrubbed beauty in a single turn. I loved the butter-yellow wallpaper that had started to fade around the ceiling and the quaint kitchenette, with the kettle always rattling on the stove. I loved the creaky hardwood floors and the leaky faucet that was releasing droplets of water in the bowl of cereal I had yet to wash. I loved the faint buzzing noise the TV made every time I changed the channel, its long antenna glowing silver in the dark.
Here, there was no one to disturb me, no one to judge me. There was only the cup of tea I brewed and would soon forget about and the radio I would leave playing all night long.
I tried to imagine what nostalgia would feel like in my body, a body so accustomed to feelings of comfort and delight. Would it make me ill? Would it upturn the harmony of my soul? It didn’t sound so bad to long for something, for longing implied having loved too. But longing for something you could never have back seemed nightmarish.
Why would the author describe nostalgia as bittersweet when there was clearly nothing sweet about it?
Missing something.I didn’t know why I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The mere notion had a fairy-tale quality to it. The dark spell a witch would use to unravel the hero’s destiny. Less of a word than a mystic portent of doom.
When I went to the bathroom to wash up and get ready for bed, I lingered before my fluorescent reflection in the mirror above the sink.
What if Iwasmissing something? Something I hadn’t noticed.
Closely, with an intense feeling gathering in the hollow of my breastbone, I examined myself in the glass, but I appeared to be the same as yesterday and all the days before that. The same straight black hair and round blue eyes, the same soft mouth and perpetually sad eyebrows. Nothing had gone askew or amiss. The only different thing about my appearance was my tongue, which had been stained red from the popsicle I’d had after dinner. I made a silly face in the mirror, then laughed at myself, grabbing my toothbrush.
When I got into bed, I battled with the duvet for an hour or two before I accepted that sleep was going to evade me tonight. Numbly, I stared at the alternating glow of the neon sign, filtering through the sheer white curtains on my window and flooding the room with its anxious indecisiveness. Red and white. Red and white.
The lights lapped over the bed and caught on to me, pulling me under into a black, depthless void like deep seawater.
There was a pressure in my chest, a disturbance in my blood. Something beneath the surface of my skin was breaking.
Chapter Two
Kai and I were not friends, not even rivals. His column was about health and lifestyle, my column was about trends and fashion, and although our desks were only separated by a low plexiglass divider, invariably strewn with neon-pink sticky notes and in-progress material, a sight that often resembled a mad scientist’s pinboard rather than anything else, we were as indifferent to each other as two people were allowed to be within the family of RAM.
Of course, there had been a few occasions that could lead someone to believe he and I were on friendlier terms than we actually were, but these were sparse and always initiated by him. Like that time when a bunch of us were sitting around the smoke room, a round table between us littered with ashtrays and half-empty coffee cups, when suddenly Kai grabbed one of the paper napkins and handed it to me without looking up from the book he was reading. “Coffee foam,” was all he said as I reflexively touched my fingers to my upper lip. Or that other time when he got me an orange juice from the vending machine because he said I looked a bit under the weather, or even that one late afternoon when he dropped a pain relief patch on my desk after noticing the stiff way I was moving my neck.
Nothing unusual, really, just small everyday kindnesses.
