MSN Mondays: 30 reasons it's okay to be single at 30

1. Wait, you're still single? Panic! But seriously, it's okay according to MSN. But honestly, call your mother, maybe she knows someone. Have you heard of J date?

2. Online dating. Everyone now knows that online dating is a totally legitimate way to meet someone and have a lasting relationship, a torrid evening, or fulfill our need for validation. But it wasn't always this way. Up until a few years ago everyone was still saying crazy shi- like, "Isn't it better to meet in person? Back in my day," and other things that have nothing to do with how amazing online dating has proved to be for the world at large. I've seen commercials. Anyhow, if you got married when you were 23 you missed out on this craze because you were too young for it to become normalized. Be thankful that you're thirty and single.

3. Pets-You know who doesn't like pets? Lots of people. You know who you don't have to ask if you one day walk by the pound and spot the perfect kitten or a one-legged dog in an alley, your significant other. Congratulations, you now have a pet chinchilla that you just know your significant other was going to accuse of spreading disease because that's just how they are.

4. You don't have to split your Netflix queue up into different profiles. You don't have time in your life to pick between two profiles when you open up Netflix. You want it to take you straight back to the next episode of Call of the Midwife not have the effrontery of someone else having a profile where they watch French foreign films with quirky Midwestern leads.

5. Thirty is the new 20. I have no idea what this means. Is this some kind of comment on longevity and life extension? I'm pretty sure The Atlantic has written a lot of article about this talking about the economic downturn, outsourcing of labor and knowledge based economy, but I understand it to mean that 30 year old's can no longer get into bars or buy booze, which is terrible. This is why you can't let a government do anything.

6. You have time to write fan fiction, or your novel, or a blog post, or tweet frequently. People who aren't single when they are 30 are struggling to keep up in this fast-paced technologically advanced society. They are like, what's Instagram again? Please, you just posted a picture of your dinner and you and your dog on a walk at sunset. What is Instagram? It's you looking good and keeping up!

7. You're giving people a chance to build up some wealth. It takes a while to find your way in the job market, stop wasting precious time writing blog posts, and move up the corporate ladder. If you've waited until thirty and still aren't married. Awesome! You're getting someone who is contributing the full 5 percent into their matching 401K, and you know how good this news is. A few years from now you'll be sending out pictures of you and this other old person who has not wasted time with relationships from Hawaii.

8. Moving-If you're still single when you're thirty you can say something like, "This city doesn't suit me" and move off to Brooklyn or Barcelona or something. You don't have a significant other in your ear reminding you that you don't speak Spanish and that the hipsters already spoiled Brooklyn, and you don't want to be late to that game, and while you're up it seems like the trash could probably be taken out.

9. This list isn't helping. It's making me realize that thirty really is quite a long list and probably age. I'd have an easier time spoofing them if it was fourteen reasons it's okay to be single at fourteen. (Hint: it's not. Everyone is dating at 14 except you).

10. Vacations-Admittedly, similar to moving. You can take them. You can be like, huh, I've always wondered what Kansas would like in September, and you don't have to ask anyone if they also want to go to Kansas, you can just do that and have that experience.

11. You can take up an instrument and play for hours. You're not going to have that time if you were in a relationship. Your mother always knew you'd be good at violin, and now you have the chance to prove her right.

12. You can build the entire world down to its minutest detail in Minecraft. No one is going to ask you to stop playing and have a conversation or remember that you have a job. If you were 23 you'd probably spend all this time recreating bars or women you used to love who are now very blocky. No, you're thirty and you're single, and you can't wait to spend 48 hours trying to mine for enough iron to build a skyscraper just like that one you saw on Google Earth in Beijing.

13. You've made it through your twenties single and avoided a whole minefield of bad choices. Remember that guy who you dated for two years who didn't have any discernible job and also hated people? Remember that girl who was hooked on prescription drugs and occasionally stole from you? Of course you do, at some point you were considering whether they were marriage material. Congratulations, you made it!

14. You've put off being in a relationship so long that the annoying question of when you have kids will be severely truncated. Plus, you still have plenty of time to have kids if you want and more people are having kids later anyway and it's cool to be those old parents who spend all afternoon drinking wine and working in the yard when everyone else's dad and  mom are still slogging away.

15. Because if you suddenly just switch to liking rose instead of a good red wine no one will be around to tell you that rose is for plebians. I can't overstate how important this is.

16. You can meet someone at any point in time. I mean, you probably won't because weird, stop talking to people on the metro and the elevator let's all just pretend that we can't see each other and end this social interaction as quickly as possible, but yeah, it could happen.

17. You get to sleep in on the weekends if you want. You don't have some partner up making a nice breakfast and making you feel guilty for getting up at nine, or trying to coax you into a hike, or worse, children who always get up at 6:30 in the morning regardless of the fact that it's the weekend. It's the weekend kids, come on! How soon until they start closing down bars?

18. You can set up your Spotify playlist just as you like it, without any intrusions of Raffi or that one album by Bush from the 1990's. I just want to hear hours of Tori Amos. It's okay. You're thirty and single. You get too.

19. If you decide to watch every season of The Wire over the course of seven days you don't have to feel guilty that it's so gritty and try and find some middle ground show. You can emerge after those two weeks feeling like you know Baltimore, and by know Baltimore, I mean avoid it.

20. You won't have a one year old actively pouring the last vestiges of Sprite all over your couch. Why does that seem like a good idea? (Sorry actual reality intruding into fiction).

21. You can become an expert in yoga and be both content with your spirit, learning to let things wash over and past you like a boulder in a stream and rock a body that makes you feel like thirty is the new 20.

22. You have enough time to get through that list of the top 100 novels of all time that The Guardian put out a few years back. I know you want to be an intellectual superstar. You can.

23. You can honestly check the weather. I mean, people who aren't single do this all the time, but you can become a real weather checker, someone who knows the European forecast model and is loling at statuses on Capital Weather Gang and maybe getting together with them for drinks because you can, you're single at thirty. You checked the weather? Please, look at this new satellite photo that just came out from Canada.

24. You don't have anyone to check out your outfit to tell you that it's not a good fit or that you probably need to wear an undershirt with that vest. You can just let it all go.

25. You can name your dog whatever you want. If you want to name him Fido or Butch or runs after rabbits until his tongue falls off and then we have to take him to the vet because ew. It's your prerogative.

26. You can become an expert bowler and invest in your own bowling ball with a rose in the middle and spend a lot of your free time learning how to spin it properly. And when things get hard in your life and people are complaining about relationships or jobs or whatever, you can just say, "I'll be bowling" and no one will be there to stop you but you.

27. You can follow your dreams of selling hot dogs from one of those carts on the National Mall and just spend time shooting the breeze with people while you provide them low quality meat and have the time of your life.

28. 30 isn't even that old anymore. Life expectancy is creeping up towards eighty yo, and I've heard that old folks home are a great place to meet people. I'm just saying you've got time.

29. You've had time to pursue your career or your education and can continue to pursue your career or education or love of weaving without worrying about whether you'll be able to get a good loom in Anchorage, Alaska.

30. I suppose the best reason that it's okay to be single at 30 is that it's okay to be single at any age. I'm not advocating an anarchist view of coupling, I'm just saying that things are complicated. Easy though it may seem is there still anything as strange in the world as how we feel or don't feel about another person, which is intertwined with how they feel or don't feel about us? Anyhow, tonight is for feeling peaceful. Pull back the covers on your bed and slide into the cold, smooth sheets. No one is downstairs watching television. No one is waiting for you to call. The morning light is all that awaits you. Go to sleep, my love.

That

What was it like to be a deer? It’s hard to imagine because human beings, particularly western ones are no longer creatures of the moment. We float now, more like ghosts or automatons than people, trapped in our minds or in the glare of a computer screen. What was it like for the deer in that moment before time expired? Did deer’s sit around thinking about the day of their death? Did it change their conception of life to know that they were only going to live for five or twelve years or however long deer lived? For some reason the image of his old hamster, dead after two years popped into his head, and he imagined a domesticated version of a deer bowling through the house in a giant plastic ball, knocking over furniture on its way outside. It was, as many thoughts are that we choose not to share, patently absurd.

                Someone was going to have to kill the deer.

                “Do we just drive over it again?” For a while H walked around on the side of the road looking for a large rock. The fact is that he wouldn’t have done anything with the rock if he had it in his hand, but he wanted to feel useful, so he looked for a large rock that he would do nothing with.

                “What speed do you think we’d have to get up to in order to, you know, end things?”

                “Is it troubling at all that we’re standing around talking about this deer’s death right in front of it?”

                “Would moving out of earshot be more appropriate in any way shape or form?”

                A blue sedan whizzed past as the two of them stood ten feet away from the deer, though now H was looking for a large stick that he could use as a club. There was no way that he could club the deer, even being near it nearly brought him to tears or made him feel nauseous. The coppery scent of blood hung thick and insects were starting to whir.

                “We have to do it,” Daniel said, not moving.

                Then they heard the slow purr of an old engine and the blue sedan pulled slowly over to the side of the road and a middle-aged man got out. He was balding and round around the middle, but he moved briskly out of the car, slamming his door and walking towards them. He was wearing white tennis shoes and old blue jeans.

                “What are you all up to?” he asked, shading the sun from his eyes with his right hand.

                “He came out of nowhere,” Daniel said, shaking his head. 

“He came out of the grass is what it looks like,” the man said. “He doesn’t look quite dead yet. Are you two going to fix that?” 

And then

After they’d stopped the car the key thing was to figure out whether or not it was dead. 

“Are its eyes open?”

“I think so.”

“It came out of nowhere.”

“I know.”

“Nowhere.”

“It appeared as if by magic. The eyes are open. Does that mean that it’s dead or alive?”

The deer was lying on its side, it’ right leg twisted at an obscene angle. There was probably some internal bleeding. The road was straight and narrow. On the right hand side a stand of elms stood tall and black, on the right, telephone wires threaded through bits of sky. It was dusk. Mosquitoes were starting to appear with birds weaving in and out, swooping down from the wires like crazed gymnasts. 

“I think he’s still breathing?”

Neither one of them wanted to touch the deer to confirm that it was breathing. If the deer was still breathing then they’d have to do something about it. H was squeamish about killing anything larger than an ant. He regarded animals larger than that as ensouled beings without really developing any sort of theological framework. In his mind it was related to the eyes.

The deer was definitely still breathing.

“We’re going to have to kill it. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit. We’re going to have to kill it.”

“Why do we have to? Maybe it’ll get up or pass away on its own time.  What if we just stand here and wait until it goes?”

“We could be standing here for hours. I think we need to call 911 and tell them we hit a deer.”

The deer was lying on its side—the edge of its tongue was resting in the dirt. A few cars drove by, briefly slowing before moving on down the highway. Certainly someone would stop soon and tell them what to do before it got dark. The deer had big dark eyes that flicked back and forth between the two of them, and you could just tell that under better circumstances it would have been running already. 

A letter to my son

                Just last week a plane went down in the Indian Ocean. There were two hundred and thirty nine people, two of whom were infants, who traveled from this world into the next. To say there are no guarantees in life is to recite a simple cliché. And yet, clichés exist as clichés because they recite truths, some that are too easily swept beneath our sea of thoughts. I suppose that’s why I’m writing you now, to remind both of us what you were like at 15 months. It’s conventional wisdom in these sorts of scenarios to say that it will be a treasure for you years down the road, to know what I was thinking about you in early 2014, but I think it’s a gift now even before you can read the words.

                After your bath, when you are wrapped in a white towel, your red hair curls in the back middle. It looks like a lion’s mane if it had been permed. This is appropriate because you still growl at every animal you see in books. Sometimes, we can convince you that an owl hoots or that a cow says moo, but you quickly seem to forget, or not care and go around growling at hens and pigs all the same. No one is scared of you.

                You love to play peek-a-boo because it is a delightful game. Though, as I said, most things delight you. At this stage, you mainly point at things and grunt. It’s not always clear what you are saying, but it seems to be something along the lines of “look at that, what a wonder,” like when you pounded on the cold glass of our front window for fifteen minutes as I shoveled snow.

                You are an agreeable little child, possessed of a sort of a quiet calm. You routinely sit in the back of the car as we take your sister to and from school, occasionally making noise to remind us that you are there. I’d recommend that you keep such a disposition as the world provides no guarantees, so you might as well be content in it.

                You laugh fairly frequently, often when you are holding two blocks in your hands or when you knock a book off the shelf. Look at what I’ve done you say, and we tell you that we are proud. You’ve gotten into the habit of bringing me my shoes before we go outside, carrying them over proudly aloft in your hands like an Olympic torch or a ribbon from school.

                We read you books, but you are not quite like your sister. You like to sit on our lap as we read, but if you are not tired you will leave in the middle of the story to retrieve another book that you’d like to read instead, though sometimes, after you sit down with the book it turns out that all you want to do is throw it on the floor.

                I think you have a good arm, but I am biased. If I coach your little league team someday, I will make you the pitcher because that’s what dads of little league teams do, insist that their children are the best. At times you throw the ball with your left hand, and I worry that you will be different. Isn’t it just better to throw with your right? You’ve already got red hair. Just fit in kid. We were watching basketball the other day in the basement, two days after you learned to walk, and you learned to dunk on a tiny hoop downstairs. I am here to report that you were delighted, and so was I.

                You have always been on the large size for your age and people ask me if you are going to play football. I always tell them no because you are too gentle of a boy. Though I confess that when we went outside the other day for the first time in months you were delighted to be waving around your first stick, which you were probably imagining was a sword. And when I looked up from weeding to hear your diabolical laugh I saw that you had broken the stick into three pieces. Perhaps you are already learning that the pen is mightier than the sword, or perhaps you liked breaking it. I should say hear that you have a diabolical laugh, a quiet villain’s chuckle. The chuckle is two quick intakes of breath that are short but deep, making a kind of guttural yet very amused noise. Your real laugh is reminiscent of your sister’s. Your intake of breath is quick and accompanied by a high pitched squealing, perhaps the noise that a pig would make if it wasn’t always growling.

                You have four teeth and are capable of eating an apple. When you are given pieces of banana you seem to regard it as some sort of eating challenge and attempt to stuff the whole thing in your mouth, which never works. Whenever I give you sliced almonds they always wind up getting strewn all over your chair and the floor because it turns out that nothing slides so pleasingly as sliced almonds.

                You learned to dance before you could walk: coordinating arm and head movements while squatting though pretending like you couldn’t yet walk. It’s good to keep people guessing sometimes.  The first word that you learned to say was “hi,” though I suppose it was hey. At first when someone walked in the door you would yell, “hey” at them before crawling away. Now, I assume because you are such an agreeable little boy, you’ve taken to saying “hi” in a voice that would be described as sweet and seductive if it wasn’t attached to a fifteen month old boy. One of your favorite people to say hit to you is yourself in front of the mirror. Sometimes the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree.

                I suppose this is all just a very long-winded way of saying that I’m proud of you, which is a strange thing to say about someone who regularly poops and demands that you change it, but I’m proud. Just now I put you down for a nap and as soon as you knew what was happening you started to cry. I shut the door anyway and said goodbye because we have this short little time span in your life when I know better than you do. Now you are upstairs, napping peacefully, head cocked to the side, butt up in the air, sleeping the sleep of a contented child. 

Nothing ever changes except when it does

He was never going to be a proper writer. He didn’t know words like portmanteau. He wasn’t particularly interested in naming things precisely. A desk was a desk, a house a house, a wall a wall. He knew from classes that the exterior of a scene should reflect the interior of the characters. And yet, he didn’t put much stock in that. He had a beige couch because he liked to sit and a black and white checkered blanket because his mother had bought it for him. His exterior world was not really an accurate reflection of his interior world, which was almost infinitely more interesting. The world was full of people and things. He favored the people. Just once though he’d like to describe a scene in detail, the exact location of a painting, the stripes on a carpet, an overhead lamp in detail, a few wicker baskets pushed into a bookcase, the dusty covers of books, the darkened chandelier overhead, but what a waste.

                The car was a bullet driven through the heart of a very lonely country. There were many other cars on the road, driven by people that he didn’t know, flashes of headlights or shades of red and grey. Some days he could not shake the feeling of disconnection. The sense that all of his feelings and actions were his alone that he was to carry them out to an island in the sea and organize them like shells upon the sand, making lists and piles of his favorites as if it mattered. One’s own life only mattered immensely to them.

                They were driving at a good clip when the deer stepped into the road. It was more like a fawn, something between a deer and a fawn. Maybe it was a yearling. Everyone tells you not to swerve when you see an animal in the road, but most everyone does. Daniel swerved to the left and as best as they could tell they clipped the deer with the right front fender and sent it spinning back onto the side of the road where it lay. 

This is something that is not me watching basketball

The incoherence of having someone not love you. Standing at the corner of the car, watching the daylight skitter across chrome, H watched the day fade. It’s strange to be the centripetal force that drives the universe, puts the planets in their orbits, orders the world and its actors and also to be nothing to someone. Surely no one else is having the surreal experience that you call a life. Remember the exact wrinkles and brown spots on the knuckles of your grandmother’s hands the month before she died. Surely this did not happen to a person; it happened to a person that is you. Every time you stand in front of a mirror you see yourself, or a version of yourself reflected. How could someone else not see it?

The strangeness of sometimes not wanting to be yourself; H watched a gull picking at trash before winging off with a brown bag in its beak. Some days, despite being the force that ordered the world H didn’t want to be himself. He found the prospect of slogging through day after day and month after month as himself to be wearying. No doubt he’d persist in it, but that didn’t mean he always liked it. Despite the sting of her rebuke, he could understand where she was coming from. Sometimes he was tired of him too. The wind was soft and easterly. He liked the wind because for him it portended the coming of a warm evening.

But really, how could she not love him? He loved her. Or felt something akin to loving her. Maybe she was mistaken in her feelings about him, or just needed more convincing. Maybe she needed him to back away for a few days, which would serve to remind her that he was interesting. Although, maybe she needed to hear from him again, reminding her with his words and thoughts that he was driving across the country thinking about her. Maybe she needed both. Was it possible to ignore her and pay attention to her both? What if she secretly hated him or found him unattractive or distasteful in some way?

Out the passenger window were rice paddies and iridescent headed ducks floating beatifically, like images of the countryside seen in magazines. Sometimes he’d point out a bird to Paul, something brown and small and ask him what type it was. Paul was the sort of person who knew the names of birds. To H, they were all just birds of slightly different sizes. Language was a mere remnant of what it sought to represent. He supposed that by using the precise word, a person could come closer to evoking the thing itself. Such a path of thinking was not conducive to passing a car ride in a pleasant manner. He missed Lauren without ever having had her. 

A conversation about attraction

H noticed that all the trees were crying now too, though their leaves were acting as handkerchiefs, trying to wipe them away. “Just, anecdotally did that have a point? I mean, we are all kind of hurtling towards our deaths here, and I’d prefer to spend that time valuably-“

“Sitting in your room watching  a sitcom?”

“Not every night, but some nights, yes? Okay, but only the good ones.”

“Debatable. Anyhow, I read something really interesting a year or two ago about attraction that really stuck with me. It was an essay by a married woman talking about just how batshit crazy attraction really is. How we can see it in Rousseau’s love of cross-eyed girls or those Shakespearean stories where a person is convinced that they’ve fallen in love with one of two twins. As if you could tell a difference between them. But we all know that we both can and can’t. What is it that makes a person attractive to us, particularly at first?”

“Cultural mores?”

“That, yes, to a degree. The conversation is fraught with peril. But beyond that, it’s weird right? Like, have you always been able to pinpoint exactly why a certain configuration of features makes you attracted to a person? The gist of the essay, and I’m giving it short shrift here because I don’t really remember much of what I read, is that you objectify the beloved. I think the author is spot on because she points out that women objectify men as well. What the hell else is a person but an object we’d like to possess? Her point is that we need to kind of reify this reality with our notions of sexual equality and roles etc.

“So I’m objectifying Lauren?”

“Of course you are. If you weren’t you wouldn’t be thinking about her at all. She is, after all, an object, holds mass and is comprised of atoms. I’m not advocating for some return to baser values of the middle ages or anything I’m just saying it’s the sort of thing that you might want to consider.”

“I think when we’re talking about attraction here we’re somehow conflating it with sex, which isn’t necessarily the same thing.”

“Have you ever been attracted to someone with whom you did not want to copulate?”

“Probably.”

“I’d guess the real answer is no. That it’s a bit of a mystery, yes, but that the desire to be on a stalled elevator with someone to see what happens, probably just a lot of panic about oxygen levels followed by confession of fears of confined spaces, but yeah, that desire is central to attraction.”

“I feel like you’re drawing a mind body dichotomy here that isn’t useful. I’d argue that the elevator scenario is tangential, rather than central to attraction. And that it’s possible to be attracted to someone for all sorts of things that don’t involve the two of you going back to her place for the evening.”

“You have clearly not been back to enough places.”

And so on. 

Attraction is strange

He was trying to follow the thread of conversation with Phillip, which wound about the car as a virtual simulacrum to the road itself. Instead, he found himself thinking of Lauren. He was thinking about the slightly dusky color of her arms, which was not the normal sort of thing for a man to be thinking about a woman, but perhaps he remembered her arms because he had been paying such close attention to them before the accident happened. They were a symbol of a life he’d never get back. Also, attraction was strange.

They stopped the car to change drivers. Philip went out to smoke and H walked through a small copse of trees. From there, he was overlooking a dry culvert littered with rocks, beige, white, uncaring for eons. Behind him, the trees were singing. It was the sort of sound that you embraced like someone you love.

The two of them sat at the table, folding their coat over and pushing them on top of the little stand, where they quietly wept for the remainder of the morning. H was older now and had a slightly different face. Maybe he'd died in that plane crash. Sometimes it was hard to tell.

“I’ve been thinking lately of Lauren,” H said, sliding a small yellow square of Splenda between his thumb and forefinger. “I can’t stop thinking about her, which is either a sign of very deep and abiding love or some strange sort of attraction. Have you ever been attracted to someone without really knowing why?”

Outside, the sidewalk was being battered by rain. The drops were huge as if the sky were crying in the sort of way that would make you want to look away, to pretend like you hadn’t even noticed. Who knew that you were on such intimate terms with the sky? And that the sky was so emotional? The sky was the kind of girl you’d admire from afar but never fall for.

Daniel was rearranging the salt and pepper shaker on the table to form either a soccer goal or a pair of uprights. H didn’t know if was supposed to slide the Splenda through as it were air hockey or if he should go for the extra point. He did neither.

Daniel sighed and leaned back in his chair. The juke box was playing a song from their youth. The song was about loving someone until the day that you died, even if they never noticed you. “It seems like a bit too long to hold out now doesn’t it? I generally tap out at about two weeks,” Daniel said, referencing the song. “The rest of your life sounds like an obscenely long amount of time to do anything. At the very least I’m sure I’d be bored of loving them. It would obviously occur to you before forever that they chewed with their mouth open or were slightly annoying after two drinks, right? You can’t be stupid for eternity.” 

In which he tries to write a poem but fails miserably

H tried to write a poem about the trees and his experience. He self-consciously wanted to use italics. He knew that poets often used line breaks and that line breaks should be an essential part of the poem. Even if it didn’t make sense on a grammatical or sense level, the point was that a line break communicated absence, existential dread, a hint of a connection like the sub-conscious. Poetry was abstract, except when it wasn’t, like when someone was writing about their first sexual experience. Then it was still abstract but could also be direct. Also, it seemed useful to write about one’s grandmother or relationship to food or the body, sacks of flesh. 

Mornings washed-

In light

Of the same sort

That must have washed

The first of our kind

Bare

Hunched

Retreating from the green tints of the morning--

Clutching a stone and

Scrabbling into the depths of a cave

Scratching into limestone

Thin lines that become a man—

With the body of a deer

Trying, even then, to bring order to chaos.

He really didn’t understand poetry. He suspected that you had to have a sort of mind for it, like cricket. He was fairly certain that if he’d ever had the chance to play cricket he’d have been a legend. Life was like that though, throwing up road blocks that prevent you from becoming the Buddha. Overhead, a helicopter tore through the fabric of the sky, probably carrying someone to a hospital. He tore up the piece of small paper that he’d written the poem on and gave it to the wind. He’d thought about giving it to Lauren, but now it was gone forever, just scraps of paper with markings that meant nothing at all. 

The Trip

 The country was large, though not as flat as he’d first perceived. The Midwest was comprised of greenish hills, covered in scrub and a low place where the water collected and the pink tongue of a cow could be seen from the passing car. The roads, which seemed so central elsewhere, were just byways between row upon row of food. Here is where the country got all their food. The land here didn’t feel as wild as it did in the west, it felt like a place where it had settled, comfortable with itself. He could see tall grain silos, which reminded him of the story of Joseph and his brothers and how terrible parts of the Bible could be. Large bales of hay were stacked in empty fields as if posing for pictures though no one was there to take something in a sepia tone. There weren’t many rivers or trees, and he supposed that they’d have driven up north, towards certain places that were considered the west, soon there would be nothing but rivers and mountains and trees, places like Wyoming and Montana that he had only a vague sense of, not having been there, but imagining them, in all their untouched glory.

On the way, H and his friend spoke a great deal, though often H would find himself staring out the window, watching crows on wires, turkey vultures arcing in the sky and thinking of the plane. His friend, Phillip, loved film. He wanted to talk about silent films by French directors. H didn’t know anything about silent film and found the concept strange. Apparently 85 percent of communication was non-verbal. Maybe this meant that the silent films were only leaving out the ten percent that was less interesting. He tried to imagine a world in which every communication was non-verbal. Years later, he’d think of this car ride on his trip through Florence, looking after the affairs of a woman that he’d loved had met an untimely death. Not now.

The best part about driving is the conversation. Or maybe the best thing about driving is the wind running through your hands. At night they’d stay in a Motel 6 or a Super 8. If they were lucky the continental breakfast would be served starting at six. Otherwise, the two of them would head out onto near empty streets, bits of black tar paved towards the west, a newborn sun rising up over the dark husks of trees. 

Her Response

Her response was sent four days later.

                I hadn’t really thought about whether I’m lonely or not. I suppose I don’t spend enough time dwelling on things to ever have it come up. I think this is kind of callous sounding or something, but maybe the anecdote is just to stay busy. Don’t sit around thinking about those people or whether or not you’re lonely and you probably won’t be lonely. I know that makes me sound simple, but I believe in the power of positive thinking.

David and I are having the best time that we’ve had in months. Being around him, even for a few days, reminds me that he’s the sort of person that I could spend a lifetime with, which seems kind of crazy to say at my age. Like, the other day, he just called me in the middle of the day, when he had this tiny little break at work, just to say that he was thinking of me. It’s nice to feel special, to feel loved. Have you ever felt that? If not, you’ll love it when it happens.

I think I understand what you are saying about living in the west. The feeling of the place is cavernous. It makes you want to write big poems about the grandeur of the soul. Out east, everything seems a bit more insular. I’m not sure which is better. 

After the plane went down

Was it a comfort, or a disaster, the trivial nature of one human life? It was after they’d been recovered from the water that H and Lauren began to talk. They were riding together in a rescue helicopter, blades slicing the air like a great ball of angry samurai.

                His first e-mail to her was sent three days after he’d reached Carolina.

                The trees here grow closer to the freeway than anything I’ve ever seen. Out west, we have these great green bushes that line the highways and then, unobscured views of foothills or mountains. You are always aware that you are in a valley. Here, without realizing it, these people are all living in a forest. In a strange way it’s easy to imagine what this place must have been like before anyone lived here—great swaths of dense forest. Out west, you are always aware of the space, the grandeur of things. I can see why they built cities so densely out here. It reflects the landscape.

                This is all just a weird way of saying that I’m mostly happy to be alive. The other day, we stopped to get gas, and as I was standing there, pumping, looking out at the trees and the garbage scuttling along the ground, a thin breeze lifted the hairs on my arm, and I started crying, thinking what a wonder it is to be alive. I say mostly because I also keep having dreams about all the other people on that flight. I remember this woman. She had long, dark hair. It was moving about in the water of its own accord while the rest of her was still, and it made me think of how your fingernails keep growing after you die. And it’s like, this lady’s hair doesn’t know that she’s gone. What a strange thing, right?

                I’m sorry. This is the strangest e-mail I’ve ever sent. I think I should be asking you things like, how is the time going with your boyfriend? Are the two of you finding time to talk? I seem to remember you saying that the two of you loved to talk to each other all night long. Is that really a thing that people do outside of movies? Don’t the two of you get tired? I think I’d tap out at around 2 AM or so. Like, don’t you think that most great philosophers worked during the day? There is this misconception, I think, that philosophy is something that you track down late at night, huddled in your own existential loneliness against the oncoming night, when actually I suspect the best sort of philosophy is that of Socrates, just kind of walking around and basically punching people in the face with deep questions. Because otherwise, it’s just a mind spinning on its own, which is fu-king lonely. Anyhow, I’m lonely, which is part of why I’m writing this. Are you lonely? What do you remember? 

We live in two worlds

                We live in two worlds. In the first world nearly everything happens in good time, model trains spinning round the tree. In this world, alarm clocks siphon away sleep at seven, car engines hum to life, children are dressed and fed and hustled out the door, and our joys and failures are nothing more than a missed traffic light, an ill-placed word with a supervisor. This world runs as it always has, or so we convince ourselves, forgetting, as everyone does, the worlds that came before, when home burials were frequent, or books were burned in Alexandria. In our minds, the first world will always be, a place where we walk briskly to the mailbox, shout a curse at a barking dog, and then go back inside to our quiet little lives.

                Another world lives just beneath the surface of this world. And when it erupts, the first world is scattered, like shards of glass from a broken mirror. When the plane dipped a second time as if let out by an expert yo-yo master, it was this second world that H entered. The fact of the matter is that when faced with the possibility of his own death all H could consider was how little he’d done. His life was a horror as he suspected most people’s lives were when looked at in the proper light, like pebbles of rain failing on the ocean, giving the impression of change before falling back into the incandescent quiet of the sea.

                The sky was wreathed in clouds and cloaked in its illusory blue. A mile below, terns were sifting through the mud, beaks awash in light. The Hawthorne and Indian Holly swayed in quiet breeze. What did it all mean? The fact that the world kept up its maniacal spinning whether you were alive or not? 

The other life

Other things happened in his life, years later which were to have, if not as profound, nearly as important an effect on H’s life. Some of which I’ll briefly narrate here to allow me time to remember what happened to that plane and H and Lauren. I know that it was important, but I can’t recall in what way. Anyhow, read on.

               

She was getting into the car quickly, and then she was gone. He was walking down a street in the cold, self-consciously blowing out puffs of what looked like smoke, except no one was allowed to smoke anymore, so this was about as close as you could get, walking down the street, lined by parked cars, watching the cold.

                She probably wasn’t coming back. Or if she did come back, it would only be for a short while, just long enough to figure out that she hadn’t really intended to come back, but had somehow talked herself into coming back, if only to confirm that she really never should have come back. It was the type of girl that she was, or had been, or whatever someone becomes when they go from being a central figure in your life to someone on the periphery. The representation was probably only calculable, or definable in a mathematical sense. There really was no proper way of describing it using the faculties of speech, which were limited. It was impossible to get it straight: the relationship you might have with a person who you could see two years later walking down the street and either cross the street to avoid or perhaps, if they came up on you unawares, engage in conversation with and maybe end up sleeping with on that same night, with the only real contingency being whether you saw them from far enough away or not. There really wasn’t a good term for it.

                She’d been interesting, smarter than him. She was studying advanced linguistics and was fluent in French and Portuguese. Many nights, after he’d made some slapdash dinner, they’d sit around the living room, and he’d watch her work for a while before interrupting with questions. He was bored easily and liked to be paid attention to. She was interesting, and he wanted her to expend all of that massive mental energy on him, which he knew was selfish, which is why he made himself wait for sometimes up to an hour before he interrupted her with a joke, or a story from work, or a question about how to say something in French. Like most Americans he loved how French sounded. He would have her explain the nuanced meaning of certain words, the French sounds brushed past his mind like snowflakes past a window. He liked to watch her mind at work, bending round things in its own peculiar way—the way she had of staring just above his head when she was thinking of something, but really, her attention was elsewhere, turned inward, scanning that beautiful mind of hers.

                It’s a wonder now looking back at a collection of evenings tossed together in his mind like a pile of photos on the floor, that they were ever together at all. She could sit and discuss French existentialist thought in detail, while deconstructing the very notion of the language that they were using to explore thought, and the best he could muster up were a few facts he’d gleaned from a book he’d once read about Rome. The problem was that she did things thoroughly, completely, she beat dead horses and then dug them up later in the week to beat them up some more, while he came upon a horse with a stone caught in its hoof and called it dog food. He read books quickly. He had conversations quickly. Everything he did was based on the idea that he could be doing something else.

Nothing changed

                The conversation died down shortly thereafter. She was back listening to music and musing on her visit with her boyfriend would go, and he was back to considering the fiction of Henry James, James’ steely commitment to reality. The drinks were served. H got a ginger ale with ice. When his drink was done, he sucked on the pieces of ice, cold, though not too cold to discourage him. The cabin smelled vaguely bad as most cabins do. Three seats ahead of him a couple was trying to quiet a baby by occasionally walking down the aisle, a bottle held at the ready in case the infant ever stopped crying. It had to be the ears. There was no telling whether the infant was feeling as bad as it sounded or whether infants just have a tendency towards drama. Give the kid an Oscar for best imitation of a stereotype.

                Though he believed in the afterlife rather fervently, H wasn’t sure what the afterlife might look like. He had heard people say that it would be boring, and he had vague pictures of people strumming harps, clouds and ethereal light. Later in life he’d learn to blame the Renaissance painters for that image of heaven. Part of the reason that he couldn’t picture heaven was that he couldn’t imagine what people would do there to pass the time. If it really was joining into some corporate prayer and song worship thing then maybe it would be fine to just have harps and clouds. At root he understood that most people’s conception of heaven had a great deal to do with their own wants and desires since no one could ever cross that threshold and report back. The veil between life and death was constantly being invoked throughout literary history precisely because of its opacity. Any recollection or thoughts about it tended towards, wouldn’t it be great if, or something along those lines.

                They were flying over a small body of water, maybe one of the Great Lakes. The girl, Lauren, why couldn’t anyone he met ever be named something dramatic, was listening to her iPod in a daze. The stewardess came by and asked if they wanted peanuts.  He did not. The reason that he still knew Lauren, or thought of Lauren was beyond his control, it was not kismet. When the turbulence first hit everyone on the flight remained calm. H started white knuckling the seat but didn’t notice any change in the people around him, any sign that they were bothered by being miles above the ground. The second bit, much stronger, sent a few trays snapping down and one person had the audacity to yell, “Oh, shit,” as the plane lurched and then steadied. Lauren put down her iPod and smiled at him. 

An abrupt end to expectations

                Finally, he stopped paying attention to the girl, sitting alone, listening to music. Or rather, he tried to stop thinking about her. What kind of a derelict person spends an entire plane ride listening to music? This is a moment of pure wasted time. The only way to combat that was to read or sleep, though he leaned toward reading. Listening to music was something you could do anytime. On the plane you had the luxury of uninterrupted time. It slightly annoyed him what a colossal waste of time this plane ride was for her.

                The plane had arced around, and the pilot was telling him how far away they were from their destination and about the weather in distant cities, which was, you have to admit, still a rather strange thing to know about somewhere else. Aw, the weather, something everyone had in common. Sixty six degrees was sixty six degrees whether you regarded it as perfect or still too cold. He glanced out the window, seeing a vast wall of grey clouds that signified nothing. He didn’t like to look too long at the plane’s wing because it seemed absurd that something so small could be keeping them aloft. It was the jet engine, he knew, but still, a young boy learns the joy of flight through wings. He learns it by watching birds and sending small paper airplanes aloft. What a miracle flight was!

                The girl was scrolling through her iPod, trying to pick the perfect song for cruising towards the Rockies. He thought whether it would be polite to make a suggestion to her or point out something stupid, like the in-flight magazines. The trick of starting any conversation is figuring out what the two of you might have in common. Unfortunately, merely finding someone attractive is rarely considered good grounds for striking it up. His mind searched frantically. They both were wearing shoes? Maybe he could ask her about the weather? Her music had started again. He wasn’t really ever going to talk to her.

“What are you reading?” she asked, rather suddenly, breaking up what he’d assumed was going to be a silence that lasted five hours, broken only by a request to go the bathroom and concluded with a wry and knowing smile about the rigors of air travel.

“Uh, Daisy Miller?” he answered, checking the title of the book surreptitiously to make sure he wasn’t lying. 

What had he been reading? It was possible that she was a reader and interested in figuring out his tastes, making a recommendation. It was also possible that she was bored of her music, or in a transition moment, moving between music and a book or work of her own that she intended to get done, and she was just trying to pass the moment in a normal and comfortable way. It was also possible that she was from the south, though he hadn’t initially detected it in her accent, and was being polite as a cultural more.

It was also possible, though perhaps less likely that she had asked him about the title of his book because she wanted to strike up a conversation with him, had found him attractive, wanted to see if he was interesting, maybe strike up a long distance relationship after the flight where they’d write each other letters of increasing significance and maybe visit once a month until they could get properly engaged and eventually wind up having a lot of really beautiful and amazing children that would take after her. It was possible.

It was also possible that she was going to ask him a bunch of vapid questions and waste the precious time that he was hoping to devote to the stories of Henry James. From up close she wasn’t quite as pretty as he’d first thought. Though he found this tended to be true for roughly everyone, himself included. Looking at someone from really close you tended to notice things, blemishes, or certain asymmetries that the mind tends to blot out when first looking at someone. He was certain that the same was true in his case, and it was just one of those things that was a further reinforcement of that old adage about beauty fading. It happened rapidly.

“I’ve never read anything by, Henry James. Who is he?”

She didn’t even know who Henry James was? Did she grow up under a rock? Was she from some backwoods school in Kentucky?

“He’s a famous American author from the late 19th and early 20th century. Kind of a realist.  If you’re familiar with the term? His descriptions are spot on.”

“Hmmm, maybe I’ll read him sometime. My boyfriend is always trying to get me to read, but they are mostly sci-fi type things, Star Wars and the like that I’m just not interested in.”

Had he come on too strong by mentioning that Henry James was a pretty great realist? Maybe he shouldn’t have used the phrase, spot on. Perception is an amazing thing. With a single ominous word she had just changed the entire tenor of their conversation. Sadly, there would be no beautiful children, no drives to the country. Hell, they might not even talk for the rest of the flight. He was already looking forward to offering her a wry smile and wishing her a good time on her trip to visit her boyfriend. 

In Flight

                One the flight had levelled off and H had stopped thinking about the possibility of his death, wondering how many people would attend his funeral and what would be said, he was able to focus on reading. Although, his actual focus was on the girl sitting next to him. Specifically, he was focused on the positioning of her left arm, which was nearly touching his. Were they almost touching arms out of some sort of intentional gesture? How much of his interpretation of the event was based on his desire to begin speaking with her? In point of fact, if he was sitting next to an elderly man or woman, he probably would be interpreting the same gesture as one of hostility, a laying claim of territory that was by all rights, his. He had read somewhere that when you felt comfortable with someone you started to mimic their gestures, and he was trying to figure out if the two of them were breathing in and out at the same rate. They were! Though he couldn’t be sure that he hadn’t already started to regulate his breathing in accordance with that knowledge, in fact, there was a good chance that their breathing wasn’t similar at all.

                Again it struck him, far more than the pages he was turning without really comprehending the main ideas that all of his thoughts were contingent. If he found the person next to him unattractive, every gesture would mean something entirely different. There was a chance, maybe even a good chance that the girl was entirely unattracted to him and was not noticing the fact that their arms were almost touching. Or she had registered it, and was secretly annoyed at the proximity, feeling that the space was hers, though by virtue of sitting in the middle seat he felt that the shared arm rests were probably his. Maybe she hadn’t noticed him at all, which seemed to actually be the case. Maybe she was just intently scrolling through the songs on her iPod trying to find the right song to pass the time.

He was reading a novel by Henry James that was set in Italy. The portion he was reading was a description of a villa in some part of Italy, Florence maybe? It was possible to read something without registering any of the words. If he moved his arm a quarter of an inch or so, the two of them would be touching. She was listening to music, ear buds in, her arms flat on both arm rests. He had never been to Italy, or anywhere for that matter. This trip out east was only the second time he’d left the Pacific time zone. This didn’t entirely matter as reading never evoked anything visually for him anyway. The words were just symbols on a page, which his mind made no effort to decode or to make corresponding images of. If a character was said to have long red hair and a snub nose, in his mind, he pictured nothing. That was not probably what authors intended. Or did they? Why bother describing someone if it didn’t matter to the reader? 

All the lovely evenings we've spent painting the stars

                The worst thing about airports were the parents. The harried, tired-looking, parents, trudging around the airport with children slung to their backs like pictures of primitive man, or holding tightly to the hand of a little three year old who is either being reminded to hold onto his bag or being promised that if he can just keep it together for another few minutes he’ll get an ice cream or a treat, or avoid a spanking, depending on parenting style. Some of the parents were good at it, smiling as he walked past them, holding on to the two arms of their toddlers as they tried to learn to walk or swooping them up with a kiss after they started crawling across the unimaginably filthy floors.

                But the ones that he really watched that made him the saddest were the moms traveling alone. Something about a brood of kids with both parents in tow left a feeling of organized chaos, but watching a mother travel alone was to witness the chaos without the organization. These women would be carrying three bags on rail thin shoulders, coaxing a two-year old out from under a table while with their left hand they feed a baby a bottle ineffectually. These were the faces that he swore he’d remember years down the road when he found himself thinking of having children of his own, these poor, tired women, walking alone down a long hallway barely holding their shi- together.

                On the flight he sat down quickly and quietly, swinging his bag up into the overhead compartment and sliding into the middle seat. He pulled a book from his bag and began to read. Except, he wasn’t really reading, rather, he was watching the people shuffle past him on the flight, thinking about the egalitarian nature of flying in coach and hoping, if he was honest, to see some attractive face, looking anxiously at her ticket before sitting next to him. It was a nice way to pass the time, trying to guess at what the future might hold, connecting him to everyone that had ever existed in the history of the world.

                The girl who sat next to him was not conventionally pretty. Actually, she was conventionally pretty in a bland sort of Caucasian way. He was terrified of flying. The old joke went that he was actually quite fine flying it was crashing that he was worried about. This wasn’t true though. He hated flying. He found takeoffs to be the worst and generally spent them in prayer. He was not showy about it, but closed his eyes and prayed to a God that he mostly ignored to please keep him safe as he flew through the air, debasing himself to say, once and for all, that if only he could make it through this trip he’d be better once he got back on the ground. On the ground, if he lived, he swore he’d change. The fact that he was never struck by lightning at the conclusion of these trips when he so brazenly forgot his promises as soon as the wheels touched the ground was either weakness of character or a confirmation that he needn’t have been praying in the first place.

                He prayed with his eyes open though because he cared deeply about how other people perceived him. The last thing he would have wanted someone to think while he was praying and fearing for his life, was to think that he was praying because he was deeply afraid for his life. This did not make sense but many things in life do not make sense. Well, perhaps it did. It had been agreed upon by any number of people and even proven in studies that flying was considerably safer than driving. And yet, as everyone knew, the terrifying thing about flying was the loss of autonomy, the breaking down of the illusive barriers that are very much a part of the modern post-enlightenment individual, which suggest invulnerability and control, mastery over the world. No one could possibly, in his mind, feel like a master over that which he had no control. Flying was magic, plain and simple, and so he’d use his magic to combat it.

                When he was much younger, his grandfather, an inveterate alcoholic, had told him a story about the stars. The story was about a boy who wished to be taken to the stars. His grandfather was a gregarious drunk with extremely steady hands. H was always reminded of a bullfrog when he thought of his grandfather, swimming through whiskey colored streams. When he told stories, he’d rock back and forth in an old chair with his glass of whiskey held loosely in his left hand. His grandparents live in an old house in the country where the wind often carried the scent of honeysuckle and the stars were feathers on the dark bird of the sky.

                H generally sat at his grandfather’s feet when the story was being told. He was often mesmerized by the whiskey, waiting for the glass to fall and shatter in a thousand pieces. Sometimes, while his grandfather spoke, H would look up into the sky to try and make sense of the riot of stars. He knew that people had named them, but he knew they were too distant to be properly named. They were celestial beings of another world, a better world. That was the gist of the grandfather’s story. The boy was granted his wish and went to live among the stars.

                The details of the story are unimportant. Rather, what was important was the feeling of awe that the story created in the child, sitting at his grandfather’s sweet amid the sickening smell of honeysuckle and the fetid odor of the stream. Beneath his grandfather’s voice was a cacophony of noise, crickets chirping, fireflies popping in and out of existence, and the hum of bottlenose flies. Like all stars eventually the boy who had gone to live amongst them burned out. And when he died, he sent a thousand of his offspring whirring back towards earth. It was the grandfather’s contention that if they were still for long enough, eventually they’d see one of his children burning across the night sky.

                And H remembers the smell of his grandfather’s shoes, oiled leather and the strong whiskey, with diminishing ice floating in the glass. And though he knows that it can’t be true, in his mind he swears that they saw a shooting star every time his grandfather told the story. Stranger still is that when he asked his brother about these evenings in the country, the low blue sky and wood smoke, his brother claimed that all he recalled was their grandfather’s drinking. H’s brother insisted that most nights ended with their grandfather slurring about his time overseas before drifting into a fitful sleep. 

Actually it starts here

                In point of fact, this story properly begins a few years earlier, when H was boarding a plane to fly out east to help an old friend drive across the country. Although, if we’re being extremely technical, perhaps it begins at the moment of H’s conception in a queen sized bed in an apartment in San Francisco. Though, if you were to continue in that vein, you’re bound to wind up back in the garden or in the Great Rift Valley, or both, depending on belief structures.

                I imagine then we’d start with the valley and the river. We’d start with flocks of birds—pink and white—soaring across the horizon, flying towards a low slung and heavy looking sun. We’d start with the hippos, wallowing in the mud, nostrils exposed—waiting for the heat of another day to pass. And eventually, we’d move away from the alluvial plains to a copse of trees where two figures would be hunched over, looking out across that same plain wondering where to get food and find happiness.

                Airports are dismal places. H was toting his carry on over his shoulder, he always tried to pack light to avoid waiting in line. Most of being at an airport was waiting in line to confirm that you hadn’t done anything wrong, put in too much luggage, booked the wrong flight, brought too much gel or forgotten your boarding pass. In this way airports were vaguely reminiscent of school mixed with his idea of prison.

                The majority of the people in the airport all seem distant. It’s one of those strange public spectacles where everyone gets together to ignore each other. If someone bumps your bag with theirs it’s considered a violent intrusion of personal space. By and large everyone had agreed to this arrangement, though small children occasionally broke through this spell, ran around laughing, smiled at strangers, or threw fits on the floor, breaking the silent code that most of the adults have agreed to—if we all have to go through the ninth ring of hell—let’s at least do it with some personal dignity.

                Though H tacitly agreed to the same strictures when traveling, he wasn’t entirely sure what purpose they served. Was there anything more uniformly alienating and ubiquitously encountered than air travel? It seemed to him that the tacit agreement that everyone was in it all alone, or with their own particular family group didn’t really make the situation any more hospitable. The only time you saw people commiserating is when something had gone wrong, a flight delayed or someone who had forgotten to take off their shoes. Then you could find some camaraderie in bemoaning the idiots who had caused the problem.

                But who had demanded that everyone in an airport had to be unpleasant? What if airports were like bars, places that you went to meet and to be met? What if people smiled more frequently and didn’t only default to the glazed over look of a person who hasn’t slept in months? H was tired though and sorry he’d agreed to fly across the country. He’d met someone towards the end of his first semester and college and had wound up getting invited to her house for a stay, though he’d had to turn it down in order to help his friend, which now seemed like a stupid idea in comparison with spending time with Nicky.

                Deep down, H was conflicted about the minor inconveniences of being in an airport. By and large he found the bag searches, the gel restrictions, and the endless checking and rechecking of documents and identification to be intrusive and annoying. In some moments, he blamed the attacks of 9/11 for being the worst thing that could have ever happened to air travel, making everyone’s life inconvenient for time en memoriam. And yet, what was a small inconvenience when weighed against the cost of a single human life. Who was he to complain about his nail scissors being taken away when 3,000 people lost their lives? He would give away everything in his bag, every time, if he could undo it. And yet, it still irritated him, these small incursions into what felt like his private life. And the jarring experience of being in an airport of having his underwear sifted and sorted through by an aging woman with curled hair was a reminder of his double anonymity. He was no one, and yet, the fact that he was no one meant that everything he owned could be searched and seized at a moment’s notice.

                Depending on the degree to which he’d packed, one of the most annoying parts was finding a way to reorganize and pack his bag after it had been sifted through. Because yes, he’d brought nail scissors and now they were gone, and he had no idea how everything had originally fit, and wouldn’t this whole process be nicer if the TSA also provided an efficiency expert to repack your bag after the check, maybe even providing a little extra room to assist you in stuffing it underneath your seat once you boarded. 

And after that?

            The bar tenders were a mix of skinny guys with crew cuts and tattoos and older women who either a) liked their job and talking to the regulars or b) were deeply pissed off about the state of the world, hated their job and secretly hated talking to the regulars. It was pretty hard to tell. This not knowing lead him to have very terse conversations with the waitresses and then to tip them slightly above gratuity. The feeling here was that they had probably had enough assholes talk to them in their life, so he was trying to put them out of their misery. If misery it was, if it wasn’t misery then they probably just thought he was an asshole.

            He ordered a 7 and 7 from the waitress, making only the smallest amount of eye contact and waited for his friend, James, who was always late. James contended that he was always late because time got away from him. James contended that he was obsessed with time, so much so that it became a hindrance, caused him to be late to things that he would have otherwise been on time to. Somehow, according to James, paying attention to time made him more susceptible to its vagaries. This was obviously not true, but it was the sort of thing that you let slide in the name of friendship. He was late because he chose to be late.

            “Who do we have tonight?” James asked after sitting down quickly, ten minutes late, and slinging his coat across the back of the old, dark stained bar chair. The décor was either medieval or medieval torture chamber depending on how you felt about what dim lights were trying to hide. Was there anything worse than a fully lit bar?

            “Cassandra, tonight?” he replied answering James question. James had no compunction about engaging the waitresses in conversation and even knew intimate details about them like whether their children’s fathers paid child support on time. In H’s opinion, that was weird. Strangers were strangers for a reason. You didn’t know them, nor did you did you need to know them.

            “Let’s not talk about, Cassandra,” H said.

            “You never want to talk about Cassandra,” James answered. “This is because you are a retrograde human being, who thinks that the whole world revolves entirely around his mood at any particular moment.”

            To be fair, this was true, though H felt it was true of most people and that the best anyone could do was wrestle with it. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. H supposed that you could go about being the best version of yourself; the sort of person that he’d wanted to be during his teen years when he’d belonged to a particularly evangelical church. In this version of himself, H would have spent the majority of his life in service to others, which really was quite rewarding. And yet, he didn’t. It was hard to say if this was just pure laziness or the cumulative effect of living in an individualistic and capitalist society. Either way, he wasn’t particularly happy today.

“I’m not happy,” H said, taking a sip from his drink. “Also, this is terrible. How do you mess up whiskey and ginger ale.”

In the background, a couple was having a faux argument over which songs to pick on the juke box. But really, they were in love or lust or whatever, they liked each other was the point. And they weren’t really disagreeing about anything, or if they were, it was only as a vector to have something to apologize for in order to move closer together.

“You’re not happy for a very specific reason,” James said, getting Cassandra’s attention and spending a few moments conversing with her briefly about her seven-year old son’s math test.

“You’re unhappy because you’re wasting your time thinking about whether you’re happy,” James said, pausing to smile and nod at Cassandra as she walked by. “The worst thing in the world you can do is sit down and consider whether or not you are happy. You’ve already lost. Of course you’re not happy. We’re not trained in being happy societally. In fact, we’re trained in entirely the opposite way for the sake of economic viability. And even if you won’t grant the imperialistic nature of capitalism as an ism, then you’d have to concede that happiness is not a biological imperative either. We’re not wired for it. What possible use does being happy serve to a hunter gatherer or an early agrarian farmer? That’s a pretty useless bit?”

H thought that James was probably wrong. He’d seen studies saying that happy people were more effective workers, boosted morale and probably grew better crops and cheered up the pigs. Happiness, or contentment, or whatever, had always been an important part of human life dating back thousands of years.

“Actually, H said, “I’m unhappy because I forgot my coat. All I’m wearing is this thin sweater and it’s freezing.”

“You’re lying,” James said, spinning his glass on the bottom, one corner raised in the air making the sort of noise that would probably be annoying to the waitress if he didn’t know about her child’s mathematics test.

            H left an hour or so later, after they’d talked about graduate school, who various professors were failing or favoring, who they hated, who they liked, who they wanted to like but couldn’t help but hate. Outside, the clouds had rolled in, and thin drops of rain were sliding across windows, cars, and foreheads. If you stopped and looked closely small and beautiful things were happening. A puddle in the street, an unfilled pot hole, was reflecting the light of a neon sign that was really quite lovely. The water was running down the side of the trees, glistening in the way of spider webs in morning dew. A man who was running to hail a cab was kicking up sheets of water in a way that was reminiscent of certain waterfalls, and a woman with red hair, caught without an umbrella as well, had wet hair, which made it slightly curly and alluring. Nobody saw any of this because they were in such a damn hurry to escape the rain. 

What happens next?

Sleep was strange like that, a mini-death. He never, or almost never, remembered his dreams. Sleep was a strangeness to him, something he spent nearly one third of his life doing with no real opinion on the subject, and he was the type of person who had an opinion about nearly everything. It seemed like  a lack of intellectual curiosity, this brushing past sleep as if it weren't important, but who had time to study anything in detail these days? There was only time to update people on the progress of your life and to check on the progress of theirs.

                It was cold in the city and everything seemed uniformly grey. The sky was cement, casting a monochromatic sheen over everything. Something about the cold days in the city, although, come to think of it, maybe cold days everywhere, are somehow worse and have a deadening sameness about them, leaving a person with the feeling that this has all happened before and will probably happen again, though no one is particularly interested in the outcome. Like a  baseball game between two cellar dwellers or a couple who fights frequently at it once again. It was the sort of day on which it is best to read something on the couch in the hopes of falling asleep. Soon enough, it will be over.

                He was meeting a friend at a bar because he was lonely, though everyone was lonely. The wind was blowing from the Northeast, angling round corners, making every step a sheer act of willpower. Sometimes, he’d think that if he angled one of the tall, monochromatic, square buildings between himself and the wind that it would stop, but it never seemed to. Perhaps the wind was blowing from all directions. The street was lined with a little park where two small dogs barked at one another and their owners sat on rickety benches, narrow-eyed and cold and resenting the world. 

                He had never liked dogs, though he understood the idea of the appeal of dogs. What’s appealing about a dog are the fairly simple requirements that it exacts in order to give love. It was an entity that required only food and water and shelter in order to give something that we spend our lives in search of. He’d read a study once that they’d conducted, perhaps in some Eastern Bloc country, about babies who were denied physical touch during their infancy and wound up dying as a result. Or maybe he’d just heard about the study. It was unclear. Either way, having a dog reminded him of that particular study as dogs are often little bastions of affection and warmth giving. It was his belief that everyone was still operating at a bit of an affection deficit and secretly desired the physical touch of other human beings more frequently than could ever happen. Dogs were a solid way of making up for this deficit, offering love without the complication of giving much love in return. Though, the fact of the matter was, by merely enacting loving type behaviors, pats and hugs and the like, people really did wind up loving their dogs. In conclusion, he did not really care for dogs.

                The bar was a slovenly looking place, Moe’s, with special’s written on a chalkboard outside. Anyone who had ever had the food at Moe’s knew that nothing about it was special and would joke that the sign should be changed to, “Some things that might be passable if you’re really starved.” It was a great place to drink beer though, because it was cheap and served in copious amounts. 

Tell me a story

           A low pressure system was pushing an array of clouds shaped like whatever children dreamed them to be across a bruised sky. If you looked up, which city dwellers rarely care to do, the business of living in a city is most decidedly unrelated to the skies, you would have seen a flock of geese in a fairly uniform V, flying somewhere else for the winter. If you were brave enough to dream, it was easy to picture the geese angling down through gentle breezes to rest in some rice paddy, flooded by winter rain. And in that paddy, if you continued to use your imagination, which I’ll grant you is a largely useless thing to do, a viscera of purple light might be reflected in that darkening water where the geese aren’t swimming or shaking the water from their backs. The foothills are in the distance, golden where the sun still shines, ravines lined scraggly looking trees, oaks or junipers.

            In the valley, near where the geese are shaking water from their backs, the thin line of the highway travels straight, and an array of cars, flick on their headlights and turn on their wipers to brush away the bugs that congregate near the fields, only to die upon the windshields of the cars that pass by. Are the drivers lonely? I don’t know. I know only that they are driving across a thin strip of highway into the loneliest and loveliest part of the evening, just after the sun has gone down, but the vestigial light still gives a brief tour of one more failed day’s work.

            I don’t live there anymore. Nor do the people about whom this story is actually written. They say that when you leave a place behind, you carry it in your bones, but we all know that is not true. You carry it in your mind, in your failing and unreliable mind, along with the other fragments and ephemera, like what washes up on shore at the beach, treasures only if a child finds them, or if the light strikes them and they glitter.

            The low pressure system pushed the clouds into the sky and by nightfall, the stars were obscured. Would God have moved the clouds to make his promise to Abraham, or did he wait until it was clear? What does the answer say about the nature of Divinity? These are the sort of questions that a city dweller might ask in lieu of looking up at the sky.

            He’d been at the library all morning reading an assignment on the nature of reality as constructed through the prism of Wittgenstein’s early theories about language, later redacted. Descartes was a cheater, slipping the I in before the second statement, which is really quite easy to ignore. Wittgenstein was a bit trickier, because yes, okay, if one’s being honest, it is possible to see that there is no such thing as a tree. But rather, that language constructs the idea of a tree, thus making it a tree. Why couldn’t the root systems be something entirely different? Well, because they belong to a tree. Theories, like many pretty people, had the bad habit of being interesting only for the first few minutes.

            Elsewhere, the real world had been trundling along, like a freight train through some endless tunnel. As a child, he’d always held his breath when his family’s van had traveled through a tunnel. Once, just north of the Bay, he remembered holding his breath for too long and passing out in the back seat. He’d awakened, a few moment later, to bright sunlight skittering off the water, dazzling him, awakening him back to life.