Did everything have to have meaning anyway? Did my every decision have to be derived from reason or be in direct correlation with the life I had once chosen for myself? Couldn’t I simply exist as I was: a handful of disjointed experiences without a point of reference, a middle-of-the-story person?
“Do you think I made a terrible mistake? Leaving without finding out the truth, I mean?” I asked him, seeking validation almost as much as I dreaded it.
With a clear-eyed expression, Kai counterposed, “Do you feel like you made a terrible mistake?”
“I feel… scared,” I admitted. “Of the future. Of myself. But not regret. Not really.”
“Then you didn’t make a mistake.”
“But now I will never learn who I am.”
“You know who you are,” Kai argued, looking at me in his intense, unshakable way. “You are Anya. You’re a columnist for RAM. You smoke slim, unflavored cigarettes. Your favorite color is pink, but you never wear it. You like coffee with milk and no sugar. Your favorite dessert is strawberry popsicles. You are friends with Betty from accounting and Sophie from marketing. You have an apartment on Arcade Street, and you’ve filled it with books. You love to read about love because it makes you feel hopeful about life, and at the end of the day, hope is what makes life bearable. You don’t cry easily, but lately you’ve been crying all the time, and that’s okay. It’s okay to feel your emotions as they come. It’s okay to follow your instincts instead of your logic once in a while. And no matter how scary and confusing it might be, it’s okay not to remember everything. It doesn’t mean you’re a lesser person. It just means that you’re new.”
“And yet so much of who we are is who we’ve been,” I whispered, touched by his complete way of knowing me, and at the same time understanding that this was all it was. Not the truth, just his truth. Kai’s unrelenting kindness, which was both the fuel of his optimism and his way of making sense of this world.
“Perhaps,” he said. “But memory is rarely true anyway. It’s like a lens that either softens or sharpens a picture but never clarifies it. And we forget so many things too. I remember most of my childhood, but, you know what? I can’t remember the last time I played hide-and-seek or the last time I returned home drenched to the bone because my friends and I were throwing water bombs at each other or the last time I traded marbles with a random kid at the park. I can’t remember the last time I sat in that tiny blue chair I had in my room. Did I grow out of it one day and ask my mom to get rid of it? I don’t know. It’s funny because I remember all of my first times. But I can’t remember all of my lasts. And I think this is the human condition. We’re always chasing newness, and newness is the only thing we remember in the end.”
I wasn’t sure if that was true. I wasn’t sure of anything except for the unutterable relief that rose in my chest just from hearing him speak. A momentary, all-encompassing calm. And if it were all a little absurd, a little surreal, this place and my situation in it, it did not matter now. Now there was only the beauty of his face and the generosity of his words.
“Kai,” I said just to feel the splendid syllable of his name with my tongue, “I’m so glad you woke me up that night.”
He smiled with his whole face just as a soft golden light made a halo out of his hair. Without untwining our hands, which had rested in each other all night long, he pointed with his index finger behind me. “Look. The sun is rising.”
The view out of the window was a color-bleeding vista, the sky composed of grand, melodramatic sweeps of auroral purple and cotton candy pink. Below, the open field was a mere golden-green blur as we continued to speed past it, diving into a place with no landmarks, no signs, no roads, but the autumn-hued loveliness of the earth itself.
Then the curve of the sea: glorious and divine, blue blending into blue.Newness, I thought, my soul lifting, my eyes wide and wet and dazzled.Newness and the vast blue sea.
Part II
escapism
(noun)the tendency to seek distraction and relief from unpleasant realities, especially by seeking entertainment or engaging in fantasy.
Chapter Eleven
Iwould never, ever forget the pure, lovely shock of standing on an open field for the first time in my life, of breathing clean air, and of seeing the fullness of the sky stretching out and out with nothing to stop it, nothing to cut it into fragments of blue. Or the way the reeds swayed and rustled in the wind.Shush, they were saying.Shush. Be quiet. Be still. Listen. You have nothing to worry about, nothing to rush to. Time is infinite so long as you let yourself exist in a single moment. Or the limitless clear air, filled with the song of creatures unseen. Or the way the field gave into sand, fine and ivory grains getting swallowed by the arms of the sea.
For this moment, I thought,and for all the moments that feel like this, no matter how rare or brief, life is worth living.
With eyes wide open I ran, sheer force of will and a rich fragrance of salt carrying my body. Wind blew back my hair. Tall stems lashed at my legs. Soft earth sank where I stepped, the sea drifting closer and closer to me until the foam spray dampened my cheeks, my clothes, my shoes.
The feeling in my chest was like dying or being born. It didn’t matter which. Both were meant to be forgotten anyway.
“Kai!” I cried out, loud and tearful.
He was right beside me, breathing hard from our running. With a hearty exhale, he threw our bags on the sand behind us so they wouldn’t get wet, then faced the immeasurably deep blue horizon with me.
“I feel like screaming,” I told him.
“Then scream,” he said.
My shoulders shook with scarcely contained energy as I cupped my fever-warm cheeks. “Won’t I look ridiculous?”
“I don’t know. DoIlook ridiculous?” he asked and, without further warning, proceeded to scream at the ocean, the veins in his neck standing out, thick and pulsing.
Charmed by the easy way he did all things, even screaming, I clenched my fists at my sides and joined him. And I did feel ridiculous and theatrical at first, but after a moment something broke in my chest, an unconscious resistance. My throat cleared, and the sound became guttural, rolling out and back to me like the tide at our feet.
Kai’s screaming bled into laughter, and he grabbed me around the waist with one arm and twirled me around in the air until I was laughing too—laughing so hard that my eyes filled with tears and my lungs strained with joy. I hadn’t known myself capable of holding such happiness. Life moved through me like the air did through these reeds.
