“They’re not blind or deaf. They’ll eventually feel the envy from people right here in the town who see themselves as also in dire need but who were never given a free house or car. They’ll see that Canadians aren’t necessarily all as warm and cuddly as we’re currently making ourselves out to be. And still, they’ll forever have to be expressing how grateful they are to us.”
That’s what it is to live in a family. Constant negotiation. Perhaps it’s true that all good things are bound to come to an end. Entropy. The law of physics. All things fall apart. But things also go in cycles, of course. Gravity. Decline. Disintegration. And then renewal. The process toward disintegration beginning always in renewal, and renewal preceding and following disintegration.
We’ve been living together almost half a dozen years, but there are times I look at Alex’s face in repose and realize I have no idea what goes on in her head unless she actually tells me. And if I were to ask her what is on her mind, how do I know if what she’d tell me is the truth? I can’t know. And vice versa. We just have to trust. Or believe. There’s a difference between these two, isn’t there? I wonder what she really sees of me that she doesn’t say out loud.
“I guess that’s the thing about getting older, isn’t it?” Alex said. We’d been chatting, just days ago, pleasantly at last, as if all was well between us, and then she came at it from what she might have thought of as slightly higher ground: “We start searching for anyone and everyone we used to know in our younger days. That’s what social media has done to us. It makes us imagine we can create this expansive story, this full picture, of our lives, stitch every single recorded moment of our pasts and presents together seamlessly. Everyone’s an artist these days, creating self-portraits, portraits via social media of their world.”
During the decades when our friendship ebbed and flowed in the natural, uncontrived way that it did, I’d not really bothered myself too much about the whys and whereofs of it. But in the last few years, after the intentionality of the distancing, whenever he’d come to mind, something welled up, making me a little ill, remorseful. I noticed at some point that I have a tendency to hum a single note whenever I think of him. It is not exactly a pleasant sound but more like a sound meant to hide a groan. This strange, sudden, and involuntary emission is a chord made up of the notes of regret, remorse, and guilt. So perhaps my need to get on with a visit with him is not really out of the blue. What is out of the blue is the recognition of this pending visit as a chance to clean up an aspect of my life—a chance to scrub karma, or something like that.
It’s possible, at least in the very grand scheme of things, that thoughts are more material than they are ephemeral, like radio or energy waves, and must necessarily leave our brains, and when they do they float out into the universe. If so, then a googolplexian of thoughts—oh, way more than that, a googolplexian times a googolplexian of one-word thoughts, novel-length thoughts, unfinished thoughts, all, this minute, are criss-crossing the universe, each carried in a microscopic elastic bubble of something like an invisible gas or whatever medium might surround and preserve it. The bubbles are so small, smaller than a proton, that no invented microscope could see them as they slam into each other, and although they do so, no bubble is ever punctured because the gas or oil that preserves them is also slippery. They float bump slip slide float and bump again until they arrive at the head of the person or persons to whom they pertain. Perhaps they buzz—without an actual buzz sound, of course, perhaps more like a vibration—waiting for their intended receptor to tune in, to undo the latch, open the mind, and catch them.
The feeling of jealousy, as long as its causes are not wounding, affect a delightful flame in me. This provocation and playfulness of feigned jealousies was a shared trait, a sensibility, that attracted us to each other.
Time came and went, and if anything changed it was my heart. It toughened. An enormous amount of energy is required for a heart to toughen, and in the end it’s draining.