Big Secret / Heaven Up Here
Under a jet cloud by a freeway –
It's odd how one person's ether is another's object. My folks moved to this city when I was eighteen, and I saw it as a summer refuge from a greying life, distant from everything that slowly killed me in the way that things tend to slowly kill teenagers; to A., it was home. It was where life decayed – slowly killed her. Life was slowly killing us both when we met, and for three months, we forgot this fact. I don’t admit this to K., I hardly admit it to myself, but I spent those three months light-headed in the way teenagers feel light-headed when they’re in the throes of something that won’t last: except, I wasn’t a teenager. I wonder if I should tell K., who’s flipping through news channels in a language neither of us speaks in a hotel room her husband has left to find a supermarket that stocks electric razors. I wonder if I should tell K. about how I met A. at the butt-end of a business trip a decade ago, but what good could possibly come of that conversation, I wonder. I’ve come to learn that no good can come from conversations about the past; perhaps no good can come from conversation at all. It’s best I pick up brochures from the concierge on the way up to the room.
I wonder if A. still lives in that blue-green apartment complex 2.4 km away from this supermarket, which appears to be doing its best impression of the supermarket back home. Adjectives are being stacked and shelved in whitewashed aisles, and a middle-aged woman is inspecting the label of a protein bar that’s the kind K. likes. In many ways, K.’s taught me to be more thoughtful. She’s patient, calm, well-adjusted. And therefore, by extension, so am I. Spats have been few and far between, disagreements rare, name-calling non-existent, and none of this due to a lack of effort on my part. When my folks say I’ve settled down, they truly mean it as more than the euphemism it has become. Freed from the swells of turbulence that punctuated my youth, I’m sediment on a riverbank, because K.’s sediment on a riverbank. We’ll rest here, still, undisturbed by the river’s ebbs and flows. We’ll die here, still. Stationary. Unmoved.
This checkout line is longer than it needs to be, the clerk is busier than she needs to be, this supermarket is as understaffed as the one back home. I remember a version of myself that would have abandoned this queue mere seconds after joining it. A version that would’ve stormed back into the labyrinth of the supermarket to return the items to their aisles. A version that spent three months in a two-bed on the ground floor of a blue-green apartment complex in a strange land until one day finding himself greeted by a locked door with a letter taped to it – A. feels the walls closing in and she’s sorry. The key’s in the pot with the lilies. K. would never lock a door on someone, never tape a letter to a door, never leave a key in a pot with lilies. So, by extension, neither would I.
The sun’s beating down; I wish I’d worn sunscreen and sunglasses as K. had recommended. I wonder if Pepper, the mangy dog, still guards the entrance to A.’s blue-green apartment complex. I wonder where she spent that night I spent packing my things in the dead-silent ground-floor two-bed. I wonder where the river carries the silt. Maybe I’ll never know. Or maybe right when I’m about to shuffle off this mortal coil, I’ll finally learn. I’ll finally get the answer to all these questions. I’ll be let in on the Big Secret. Just as I’m readying myself to bow out, the cosmic tumblers will click into place, the lock springs will open, and the Big Secret will reveal itself. And instead of being some sort of an eternal paradise, the afterlife will be a brief pause. Heaven, a temporary break – a moment's furlough. An opportunity to whisper the Big Secret to someone I once loved.
