Absence is presence
Some days are circles, of all things, without edges, and easily deflected.
•
“It’s quite possible,” she said, after every physical affection had been pulled from her body, “that you’ve never met anybody like me before.”
She swung her bare leg over his, an almost imperceptible weight he could get used to.
“No, there’s nobody like you in these parts,” he agreed.
They were equals in some ways, but in others, not so much. It hadn’t taken him very long to put two and two together, but sometimes, he thought, the sum of the whole is greater than its parts.
“How long do we have?” he asked. “Today? The days after this?” It was always how their conversation went.
She sat up in bed and looked out the window. The fingers of daylight were beginning to caress the edges of the city. It would be bright here very soon. She chose this room for that very purpose, even if it was smaller than the others in the house.
“When you fall in love again,” she said, and this was after a long pause (so long, in fact, that history had already repeated itself), “tell her to put the flowers on this side. They’ll need a lot of sun.”
•
Describe a scene from your daily life.
The sky has come down around us in a shroud.
Use plain language.
It is dark. An old man comes toward me.
Vertigo • Priscilla Becker
•
The song that my friend could never identify for ages was “Svefn-g-englar” by Sigur Rós. I teased him about it constantly.
“Well, it doesn’t have actual lyrics I can understand, you know. I just heard it when I was out, and it had the line ‘it’s you’ sung over and over.”
My Ágætis byrjun album happened to be playing when we were hanging out once, and he demanded I stop everything I was doing and tell him the title of that one track.
We were still messaging about it that same evening on his commute home.
I send him this, from the internet: “‘Svefn-g-englar’ translates to ‘angels of sleep,’ or sleep angels or sleep talkers or sleepwalkers or something, and the refrain, ‘tjú’ is a sound made by Icelanders to comfort babies. Not sure if all of this is accurate.”
“I thought he was singing ‘it’s you,’” he said. “Anyway, that’s too much information. I just needed the title, and even that’s too hard to recall.”
I then send him a voice note on how to pronounce it.
“Nope. Not helpful.”
“I really like their song ‘Hoppípolla.’ It means ‘hopping into puddles.’ Want to switch favorites? It’s easier to remember.”
“Nah,” he said, and then after a beat, “You know how you’re like one of those lifelines you call on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”
“Sure,” I answered. He said stuff like that too often for it to be weird anymore.
This conversation had been shelved in my mind for years, until about a few months ago, when he phones me out of the blue.
“Hey. Can you play me the ‘It’s you’ song? You know the one.”
•
Virginia Woolf writes, “Whatever hour you woke there was a door shutting.”
•
We called it the day Augustine came home.
By then, he had learned to say “I love you,” in 14 languages, but I doubt he ever actually said those words to anyone and meant them. He picked things up only to put them down again. And every time he left, he would only take his coat.
We cleared the rest of the garden, angled the chairs away from the glare. The food would be arriving any minute now. We had ordered from five different restaurants because nobody could agree on just one.
After lunch, history was unpacked gently, a box of stories—this was you, Augustine, when you were a baby (you had the quietest laugh), and this was you before the missions (you only told a few classmates you were going away), and this was you at the street party, with Mike and your other best friend (what was her name again?), and this was you in Lumiere where you could never get drinks because of that row you had with the bartender (that was a dodgy club), and this was you on the day when you would get no older (so long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, goodbye).
There was a small stream a short distance away where we used to go. Occasionally, we would cup our hands under the water, corralling tiny, nearly transparent fish as they swam downwards. Catch, release. Catch, release. I told him, “Our hands are little terrors.” I felt rather than heard him laugh. I wish I remembered his voice.
Augustine is gone now, but The Loss of Augustine grows in his place, an embrace that still clings with desperation.
•
From my notebook, the one that didn’t like humidity very much:
Nothing holds the moon in place;
only our infinite gaze.
We cut its light off at the root,
and plant it in the dust—
a tree to bear stars.
•
I’m not frequently astonished.
I’ve been surprised before; bewildered, sure; confounded, absolutely.
But today, I’m astonished.
There’s a sinkhole in the yard the size of a desk just outside the sunroom. It wasn’t there when he went out to check on the noise from the neighbors before noon. It wasn’t there when I got in from work with the Keralan takeaway. It wasn’t there a minute ago, in fact.
I drag him to the window and point it out. “It’s one of those thin places,” I say, quite pleased. “I’m sure of it.”
“Thin places,” he repeats. He looks at the sinkhole and narrows his eyes, parsing the sight in front of him for some hidden meaning. He then sits down in one of the chairs with a beer in his hand, a nightcap.
Some context. Jordan Kisner says in her book Thin Places: “It’s a Celtic concept, one that stems from an old proverb that says, ‘Heaven and earth are only three feet apart, but in the thin places that distance is even smaller.’”
And,
“The original thin places were wild landscapes because the idea was born in the heaths of Connemara, a place that’s so austere and ancient, so full of twists and hiding places and divots a thousand years old, that it seems somehow likely you might poke a hole through to another reality.”
Also,
“…the delight of thin places was the unpredictability of their location. You can find them someplace with magic written all over it, like Connemara or the Himalayas, but they also pop up in dive bars, bedrooms, hospital rooms. They can appear and disappear.”
He hums rather drowsily, and the air between us vibrates and shimmers a little. "But we aren’t in Connemara. Or the Himalayas.”
“But this is an unpredictable place, isn’t it? With magic written all over it!”
“Our yard. An unpredictable, magical place.”
I nod and smile, and he finally concedes.
“Right. Okay. Well, let’s ponder the magic tomorrow, shall we? When we’ve had a bit of sleep. I’m hammered.”
He stands up and shuffles about, sighing at the rooms, closing windows, turning lamps off, then on, then off again. Just to be sure.
He’s had how many beers, I don’t even remember. He mutters that he’s Irish and how dare I. It’s sweet and it’s silly, and in the end, it doesn’t matter.
He falls asleep first. I, however, am still burning with curiosity about our thin place, so I tiptoe down the stairs and out into the yard. My sock feet are silent and give nothing away. By then, the sinkhole had stitched itself closed. The grass over it looked like new growth.
“The least you could’ve done was stay for breakfast, you know,” I whisper to the ground, slightly despondent.
When I shuck my socks and go back to bed, I find him on his side, breathing softly, a freedom and a solitude. I really don’t expect to touch heaven at this time of night, but now, as I pull the blanket over his shoulder, it’s close enough.