What Was and What Will
We are falling apart. Right this moment. In a cheap diner with sticky red booths. Up until now, I thought I understood what’s important. A part of me still thinks that it is the things I can see; a firsthand knowing of the unimaginable. Living in a world as perplexing and fantastic as a story. But now you are telling me that it is not enough, and I must ask, what could be more important than a miracle?
The first one I remember happened when I was 6 years old. I saw a flock of birds heading towards the river at sunset. Ravens or crows, I couldn’t tell the difference. They coalesced. A pulsing beat of wings and caws that echoed off each other. The shriek of their voices thrust–knives cutting the air–and I was forced to stop and look up. The longer I watched, the thicker they grew. Birds came from every way to join the black mass. The street was empty and I was alone as it happened. It felt like watching an eclipse that only I could see. They grew thicker and thicker, growing so strong that the lines between the birds vanished. It was just the shapes of feathers, wings, talons, and soon those were gone as well. They became undulating darkness, indistinct from one another, a blemish on the dusk horizon. Yet still they moved. It moved? And as the blob travelled through the sky, I started to recognize it as a cloud. A dark cloud. A cloud for rain. The kind you see and feel must bode misfortune.
I will only recognize that this moment was not an ill omen when I am 60. Then, I will see a cloud break apart into swans, their limber necks untangling like a ball of rubber bands being fretted at. It will be a day of burning blue sky and the lake will be dappled by small froths as wind scours the surface. Once the swans are all free, I will hear the clarion of their call. As a cloud they are mute, either oppressed or simply content in singularity. However, once individual, apart, alone, the geese will need to cry out and hear some return. I won’t fully understand what it means–for birds to be clouds and clouds to be birds–but I will know that it is a fact of the world and not some portent of terrible years to come.
As a child though, I began to dread birds. I lived on the border of the city. Sidewalks yielded to gravel and grass, and all the houses were low and needed new paint. We had chickens and I was afraid of our backyard. The flap of their wings made me jump and the small ruts in the dirt left by talons seemed like promises to violence. Most of all, I was scared that they might mush together into a storm cloud that rained eggs. I didn’t know if bird-clouds could rain, but I was 9 years old, so I imagined it had to be eggs. Only from the safety of the sliding glass door would I watch them. That summer I saw a hawk kill one of the smaller hens. At first, it was lightning, a blur of speckled brown and white that crashed out of the sky. And then it was horribly slow. The talons wrapped around the hen and they rolled across the lawn, thrashing and squeezing and twisting and ripping and wrenching and killing. After the hen fell limp, the hawk fluttered to the other side of our wire fence that kept coyotes out, and there it began to peck. I stayed behind the glass.
My father will die when he is 82. There are 25 years that separate our age, but as he dies it will feel like centuries stand between us. It won’t be at home. It won’t be peaceful. It will be like a hawk, and he will fight in its grip desperately, gasping as if something was stuck behind his lungs. I won’t be ready for that loss. I won’t be able to fill myself with platitudes. I will remain in awe of death and its ignoble swiftness.
The first time I left the city, I was 16. It wasn’t with my parents, even though my father always promised he’d take me fishing on some weekend. Instead, a friend let me in on his family camping trip. We went to an unnamed clearing somewhere in the woods near the coast. The tent was just canvas and poles. After a while we managed the canvas into a misshapen hut, barely strong enough to last the night, but that was as sturdy as it needed to be. In the morning when I wandered out to stretch my legs, I found the forest was overwhelmed by blue. Never had I experienced such a light. Everything was submerged, as if the ocean had come to reclaim the world.
I floated between fir and fern, glancing springs of wild huckleberry and trillium, turned coral in this new light. Dew filled the air and the ground was soft to my steps, yielding an aimless path I was happy to be on. For hours I went, letting my trepidation of the unfamiliar melt. Something filled in my chest, the tinted air sponging through my lungs and seeping into the fibers of my body. I did not feel the terror that had shadowed my childhood encounters with the uncanny, yet I cannot say that I felt safe. If I had been a spectator, watching myself wander off into the blue forest, it might have been different. I might have been afraid. As it was, all I could do was be within it, slaking an unknown thirst, the kind you only feel once it’s been sated and rapidly begins to dry.
Eventually the blue forest dissolved and the light returned to one I could recognize. The air breathed familiar and plants became uninspired, a predictable outcome of nature. That was my first great loss. My only desire in that moment was to return; regardless of if it was a trick of the dawning light as it cracked through needle boughs, or a phantasm of the otherworldly; regardless of if there was a danger so overwhelming that I just did not notice it; regardless of if I really did want to return. All I felt was an immense desire to reclaim that tenuous feeling I had no name for.
On my 52nd birthday, there will be an incredible moon. It will come so close that people step out into the streets, convinced they might be able to reach out and scoop at its cheesy face. I’ll wonder at it. I’ll wonder what makes it so yellow, what makes it so big, what keeps it from crashing, why has it never felt so close before? By then, I will know that the moon is married to the tide and I’ll wonder how the ocean feels with such proximity. What turmoil will it feel upon the leaving? Needing no answers, I’ll wander out into the street, joining hundreds who have gathered. The question of whether they understand what is happening won’t even cross my mind. And suddenly, someone will start playing the trumpet. At first it will feel like a joke, but more and more the crowd will move with the insistent brass, thrumming in staccato pulses: forward then stop, then forward again, questioning the moment and answering with their feet. All of this until a tuba joins in, strong enough to add real momentum and officially begin the parade.
We will march through the streets under the swollen moon, happy for our feet and each other’s company. Some dance. Some skip. I will find someone’s hand to hold for the first time in ages, and be glad to be with them, remembering how tenderness feels.
When I turned 21, we drank. It wasn’t my first drink, but we pretended like it was. We hadn’t been drunk together, this was new for us. Later, at the apartment, we opened a pomegranate, in part wanting the taste, in part wanting something to do together. We needed a task to sidestep the anxiety of tenderness. The knife went to the work as if it were an apple, cutting too deep in a full orbit when skin deep was all we needed. We were drunk, remember? The seeds split apart, tumbling in a burst like fireworks and leaving two halves. Missing pieces, leaking red.
Our surprise was paralyzing. Only in part because of what we saw, but the greater shock was having someone to see it with. A witness to our witnessing; which to that point had been utter isolation. There, below our unsettled eyes, the broken pomegranate pulsed. Like hundreds of little hearts, the seeds thrummed in the honeycomb flesh. And you saw it too.
I’ll see you again, though I thought I never would. It will be spring. The best weeks for eating sugar snaps. That year my garden will fail wonderfully. The peas come up empty and all I can manage is a laugh. The crisp pods will have nothing but the space where life could have blossomed, and I’ll taste one to learn that all the sugar is in the peas. I’ll enjoy the crunch well enough though, and harvest them anyways. Still craving real sugar snaps, I’ll go to the grocery store and see you there. Before you see me, I will ask myself: would you want me in your life again?
Eventually, I’ll decide you would not and leave. The only food I take home that day is flour, coffee, and saffron. All found in the aisles on the opposite side of the store from you, and then I will say that I got what I came for and serendipity decided not to act. I’ll wonder if that is wrong. If it isn’t my decision to keep us apart after you broke us apart. And I’ll wonder if you remember the January when it rained.
It was every day. 31 days of rain. Each day you took me outside to look into puddles. You said that if we looked just right, we could see where the rain has been. And it was true. Some puddles offered themselves up, becoming looking glasses into a history of evaporation and condensation. In one, we saw the broad deserts of northern China. A cloud that carried itself over sand and crackled ground, holding out until the Pacific for its next cycle. Through the puddle we could see that vastness pass below and you told me it was named Gobi. Certainty was always your strength, even in the face of the unknowable. Regardless of which desert it truly was, we were captivated. Only in this moment could we experience such a place in such a way. Our eyes weren’t meant for the sky, and even more so, they were never meant for the frightened way a raindrop looks down on barren deserts, grasping desperately at its gaseous state for fear of being swallowed by so much sand. It was the kind of feeling that swells in your chest, back behind the lungs so they are squeezed flat and breathing is a battle. Breathless, we watched the telescopic puddles, unaware of the rain that fell on our necks.
The first oddity that I come across without you will make me cry. Not from magnificence or awe, it won’t even be that wonderful. Mundane would be the appropriate word if it wasn’t an impossibility. Just some ice floating in a half-finished soda. I’ll notice the perspiration first, wet greeting my fingers as the summer heat pulls through the glass. Then in the next moment, the sun will be caught by the glass’s glisten and lure my gaze so that I see all the drifting bits of ice are shaped like lotuses. As soon as I realize what I’m seeing, I’ll leave, not able to stand crying in a diner booth without you.
I proposed in a diner booth. You laughed and made me cry. You loved me, but 25 was way too young to consider such a thing. The math you laid out confused me.
“Marriage is a half for half exchange, and I plan to live for one whole century, and I can’t spend three quarters of my life with only half of my life which means that most of my life won’t have most of me and then is it even a full century?”
“Don’t you want to be together?” I asked.
“Yes, but only if there’s the chance that we will be apart.”
Eventually, I’ll get better at taking chances. I’ll return home when my parents leave to begin their road trip retirement. Only a few chickens have made it this far, and not the ones I grew up with. The backyard is free from fear now, and I can grow a garden. At first it is just sugar snaps, because I still have hope you might come back. Actually, at first they are just seeds. When I cover them with dirt, a feeling bubbles into my chest. Not behind my lungs, more beneath them. Akin to dread and hope, it will take some time for me to understand and name it. A powerful feeling: wonder.
Eric Oman Callahan is a writer from Portland, OR who explores themes of family, grief, and love through fabulist short stories.
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