“When you sat there and looked pretty for an hour straight while being my chauffeur.”
“You think I’m pretty?”
“I told you, when your mouth is shut—yes.”
I heave a sigh.
We’re silent for a few minutes.
She starts so quietly I almost miss it with the wind flying through the open window. “There’s this scene where this guy and a girl are walking through the countryside, and everything is written so delicately, like one wrong word could shatter the moment,” she says. “She starts talking about her past, about howlonely she feels, and you can sense that she’s slipping away from him even though they’re right next to each other. And then she says, ‘I want you always to remember me. Will you remember that I existed, and that I stood next to you here like this?’ and… ithurts.”
What the fuck? I look over at her. I don’t think I’ve ever heard Annie sound like this. I got a taste of it earlier, but… I don’t have the words to describe this Annie. Not like Annie does. Heartbroken, almost. The bluster all gone. I glance over at the book cover.Norwegian Wood.
“The way the author writes it… I don’t know. The landscape feels like it’s grieving with them, like the wind and the trees understand something.” She huffs a laugh. “It’s not just sad.” She pauses, thinking.
When she speaks again, I can barely hear her. “It’s that quiet kind of sadness where love and loss exist at the same time, and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it.” She shakes her head, looking out her side of the car. “His prose is just beautiful.”
Beautiful Annie Li. Open. Introspective. Soft instead of jagged edges of steel meant to protect her more vulnerable insides. I want to tell her this, but she thinks I’m prettier with my mouth shut, so I don’t. This earns me a glance and another small smile, and it’s so beautiful it hurts. It’s painful. It fucks me up. I keep my mouth shut about it, but something has unlocked. Those were the most words Annie has said to me in fourteen years.
Pretty soon we pass a sign. I get an idea.
“Wanna see some beautifully sad nature shit in real life?” I ask.
She nods, and I make the turn onto the Blue Ridge Parkway.
Now, I’d like to think I’m a pretty easy guy. Science and math. I like to describe complex concepts in simple ways. Think it’s elegant that way.
I’ve driven through the Blue Ridge Mountains before, did while I was at Duke. Thought they were mad pretty.
Driving through them for the next few hours with beautiful, complex, intelligent, articulate Annie, though, is a whole new freakin’ experience.
She describes what we’re doing and seeing in that quiet, poetic voice of hers, forcing me to notice the elegance in the complexities of the world around us. Changes my whole worldview, shifts the narrative into something… beautiful.
The road winds through the mountains like a ribbon, rolling and dipping with the curves of the parkway. Sunlight filters through the trees, casting golden patches onto the pavement, the world stretching out in all sorts of layers of deep evergreen and soft, smoky blue. A different flavor of blue. This should be called Blue No. 1, not that artificial nonsense. The valleys below are hazy; the peaks above kissed by the last light of the afternoon.
She leans forward at one point, pointing at a hawk circling lazily overhead. I end up watching her more than the damn bird, though, the way her eyes light up, the way the wind through the open window makes the strands of her hair fly all over the place.
“I can see why you’re a writer,” I blurt out after we pass a break in the trees. It’s like the world opens up—a sheer drop to our right, an endless horizon of mountains stacked against each other.
“Like waves frozen in time,” Annie had said.
She looks at me now, then looks away. Doesn’t comment.
“I wish I could write like you,” I try again, but I really do. If I could write my cookbook in that voice of hers, making everything sound good—feel good? I’d be a millionaire twice over. “Would I be familiar with any of your work? Anything published?”
She drums her fingers on the handle of the door. “Maybe,” she finally says. “There’s some stuff out there, some of it big, but none of it under my name.”
“Don’t most writers have a pen?—”
“I failed, Nico,” she cuts in softly, as the road twists some more, pulling us deeper into the heart of the mountains. Wildflowers dot the roadside—yellow, purple, white—tiny bursts of color against the deep emerald grass.
“Huh?”
“I’m…” she begins. “I’m just… not.”
“Not what?”
“Not anything.”
