Founded in the fall of 1991, Laurel Moon is Brandeis' oldest, national literary publication. Each issue we publish features original work from undergraduate students.
I’m not religious, barely spiritual, but every time the plane takes off I say a little prayer as my feet lift off the ground. Bodies thrusted into the air and I wonder how it’ll feel when we all come crashing down.
When are your eyes not glued to the outside? To watch all that’s left behind in favor of air you will never breathe.
Moments I’ve felt impermanent:
1. It’s one hundred and three degrees and the dust of the rolling monsoon is creeping up behind us all, fragments of rocks scraping against my shins and getting lost in the holes of my old sneakers. I stand alone outside my grandmother’s house, nose turned up to watch the sky in the hopes it will become the same color as the asphalt road so later I can pretend it’s also beautiful. A beat up white pickup rolls past slow, hesitant of the wind pressing us down.
Take a breath of the creosote poison, the dust, and the smoke from his mouth gaping far too wide as he turns around, his wheels protesting. He emerges from the truck with arms outstretched to take. To take childhood and the innocence it holds to its chest. The rain kisses the top of my head, my scrawny arms slick. The wind presses against my back and pushes me quickly, quickly back into the house.
Before the rain stops, my grandfather gives me his old pocket knife. I wear it on my belt loop for the rest of the summer.
For the past several weeks, on my way to the station, the impossible minutes in the train car, the transfers, and the rest of the walk to my pathetic apartment at the top of far too many stairs, I have found myself to be crying. It’s often that I don’t notice until I see the faces of the other commuters, sometimes with concern or discomfort, some simply trying their best to ignore me. No one ever speaks. My breath doesn’t hitch. It’s all so quiet, in fact, that the sound of my key turning in the lock startles me. The apartment reeks of the scented candle I always light within minutes of crossing the threshold. It’s become a sort of ritual: coat tossed onto the couch, bag to the floor, lighter held close to the wick of what Target calls “cozy nights.” This, like the tears accompanying my trip home, like the career I had always longed for and now finally have, has become monotonous and dulled into a nothing. Still I go through each motion, sit in yellowing train seats with PRAY scratched into all the familiar places, and buy the same grey candle when the wick runs out.
When I cross the same threshold in the morning, I will hope that something extraordinary will happen to me.
This too has become tired.
What kills me is the fact life is so often slow but the moments that change it or could have come so quickly I almost miss them. Maybe it was the moment simple dissatisfaction became something more depressing. Or a night of restless sleep interrupted by the light of a T.V. left on, playing an all too bright ad where the actress seemed so much happier than me and I thought she must be doing something right. Something. It came slow and bubbled up inside of me like bile until I couldn't stand it any longer. And it gave me permission to make an exit from the dullness and insignificance I feared might have become a permanent facet of my life.
I buy a new candle--this time it’s green--and by its light, I draft my resignation.
2. The love of my life broke my heart first at eighteen.
Then again at twenty-two.
And maybe a hundred times in between though neither of us noticed in those quieter moments.
The last time, she fell victim to a woman with a steadier voice and calloused fingertips that would turn the pages of Vonnegut novels (that I could never get her to read) as she read the words aloud before bed.
The three of us pretend to be friends on Tuesday afternoons, drinking tea outside their apartment that overlooks the East River. They try not to sit too close together or refer to themselves as “we.”
Wednesday morning sinks its claws into the night, and a stranger grips my hair in two sweaty fists as I relinquish my guts to the bushes at Irving Plaza. I tell him how I had never imagined myself to ever be one half of a “we” but now the absence of such a distinction makes me feel like a sawed-off arm.
For a while he says nothing, rubbing my shoulders as the chokes and sobs and retching twist into one and subside. Tears woven with days old mascara drawing dark lines against my face.
They almost taste sweet.
“So have you ever fucked a man?”
There’s vomit on my shoes.
And it smells like peppermint tea.
All of that time spent trying to learn how to treat my body as a friend. She is all that I have.
But still all I can think about is how they die like this in my favorite song and how at least he had someone beside him to turn to. The mother next to me clutches her baby as it screams and I try to find a melody in something.
“What song do you wanna die to?”
I stare at my notebook and then back up at the empty chair across from me, nervously clutching the 12 ounce black coffee I ordered in haste. It tastes acidic and sour, stinging my tongue and making me wince in a twist of disgust and regret. I wanted to feign maturity, punctuality, in some desperate attempt to “make connections.” Networking. Whatever that means.
I tap my finger against the cup as I wait, feeling the warmth enter and run out between each beat.
I catch a glimpse of her crossing the street and try to find something else to focus my attention on. Her silhouette strolls through my peripheral until it reaches the door and it’s then that I let myself watch. When she enters, she breathes in the warmth of the coffeeshop, scanning the crowd of too-small circular tables, her wide eyes softening with recognition that falls across her face. Somehow, I’d made myself believe I didn’t really resemble my ID photo.
“Freezing out there, huh?” she says, peeling off her coat to reveal the bright pink turtleneck underneath. It’s the same sweater she was wearing in her picture from the peer mentorship website. I feel a tinge of embarrassment. I’m not even sure exactly why. I manage to get out a strained “Yeah.” and bring the cup of coffee back up to my mouth. She stares at the cup in my hands. “Shit, am I late?”
“Oh no, no, I’m just early that’s all.”
“Okay perfect,” she drapes her coat across the chair, “is it alright if I order before we start?”
“Oh yeah, of course!” I wince at how childish the ‘yeah’ must make me seem but in spite of this, she smiles, bowing her head a little before moving towards the counter. Her coat stares at me in her absence, dark grey with snow collected in the folds of the felt. They’re melting quickly, growing into droplets and escaping to the floor, the seat of her chair. I suppress the urge to read disappointment in the way she stands while she waits, the way her eyes pass over the phone in her hands. She’s here to help me. I tell myself not to think too hard about everything, how it’s only about taking a step forward, sticking my head out the window and seeing what’s out there. I let the words tangle in my head.
I press my spine against the back of my chair and move my shoulders back. Her coat becomes a body, the space above it, a head. I stare at it, practice my eye contact, and dig soft holes into the palms of my hands.
She finally sits down. Her drink smells so strongly of caramel that it makes me smile. “So. What do you hope to get from this?”
I can’t feel my legs but my back presses firmly against the seat, my heart hammering my flesh into the leather that offers no comfort. I watch my chest rise and fall. There’s no sound and that’s what amazes me. The quietness of it all.
The lights are flickering now and whispers float down the aisle because anything spoken too loudly will become true.
We are snow. Caught in the clouds, tossed upwards to grow again and again until we are big enough to come down.
3.
It’s a few days after graduation and my dad takes me to an old restaurant in Oracle Junction where his father had taught him how to play pool. He tries to pass the knowledge down to me with minimal success. I hold a mug of coffee with chalky hands and smile as he reluctantly wins the third game in a row. I’ve always been a graceful loser.
The evening is seamless, ultimately uneventful but leaving us with the warmth of uncomplicated contentment. We leave Oracle believing this will be the kind of night we might both feel nostalgic for after I go away for college. On the drive home, the Oldsmobile takes each turn of the ever-winding road with ease, the engine’s usual sputtering reduced to a low rumble. I stare down at my phone, queueing up songs and listening to my dad’s commentary on them, the light from the screen making me blind to the world outside the car.
There’s yelling, a screech, a horn blaring, and a crash. I will never quite be able to get the order straightened out in my head, nor be able to tell you at what point my dad hits the brakes. There isn’t a jolt, only the sudden realization that we are no longer moving, the music, now painfully out of place and far too loud, still playing over the speakers.
Lights break through the windows, then through my dad’s open door, then mine. The smell of metal and airbag powder greets me sharply, my feet touching the pavement but unsure of where else to go. I sit there idle, watching my dad make his way towards the commotion: a delivery truck on its side, the back door jagged and hanging open like a mouth stuck in surprise. From it, lit by the one working headlight of the crumpled SUV, I can make out limbs: limp arms connected to limp shoulders and heads looking up towards the sky.
When I find my dad again, his hands are pressing against the shoulders of a boy no older than twelve. Men climb out of the gaping mouth, running into the desert off the highway and towards what I’m not sure but the boy, held down against the asphalt, with the dark puddle across his gut growing steadily, watches with wide eyes. He kicks at the ground, at the strange man holding him down, but moves nothing. I don’t realize how close I am to them until I see him start to cry. My dad is crying too.
It’s going to be okay I’m so sorry everything is going to be okay please stop moving you’re hurt I know it’s scary please you have to stay still you’re going to be okay you’re going to be okay.
Oh how quickly it all ends. And it’s always when it’s just beginning, isn’t it?
It’s Christmas and I sit too close to the fireplace, letting the heat singe my eyelashes and turn my face a deep red. The rough brick ledge leaves divots in the back of my thighs and the heels of my hands. I straighten my elbows and push down with all my weight until my palms turn cold.
“Don’t lean so close to the flames,” my aunt warns without looking up from the plates as she sets them down precisely on the table, “it would be a shame to start your new job with half your hair burned off.”
“It’d be a good icebreaker.”
Her laughter echoes in the chimney, “You can make friends with or without hair.”
Something twinges in my chest when she says this and a soft “Mmmmm,” is all I manage. She continues to make her way around the table, the occasional clink of dishware being the sole indicator of her presence. I run my fingertips across the pocks on my hands. They’ve gone numb. “It feels almost childish, you know?
“What does?” she asks.
“Making friends. Or, needing to. I don’t know how to explain it that well, but the whole thing--having trouble with it--makes me feel childish. I feel like I should have already found those people.”
“You will,” she says, lighter in hand “anyhow, most work friends aren’t real friends in the first place. You enjoy each other’s company out of necessity.”
“Maybe.”
“Let yourself be excited. New city, new job, no attachments. You’ll see.”
She lights the final advent candle and rings the dinner bell.
The plane is shaking and the fluorescent white lights are on. I keep wishing they’d turn them off. Let us spend a few more minutes in the sunshine! I cry. The other passengers are glaring but if there was ever a moment to find a voice, this was it.
I take out the keys to my apartment.
PRAY I carve into the back of the headrest.
My eyes are open and I hope we won’t fall too quickly.