Picture Us In The Light(107)
Still, you didn’t understand until your brother came, and then it was clear; his father had been trying to protect him. Your brother had the unmistakable air of one who’s been the very center of someone else’s universe all his life, one formed of all those hopes and dreams and fears and pains and longings and regrets. You know what that feels like, you and Ruth both.
It is no longer possible to hate them. You miss the hatred. After a while it can start to feel like a friend. Or maybe it’s just that the other things roiling underneath are unmasked now, and those things are harder things to feel. You are adrift. You cry a lot. You go drunk stargazing with Byron and Lance. Ruth sends you an Edible Arrangement and you eat the entire thing in one sitting. You go to see her and spend too much of your stipend taking her shopping and out to eat.
Like everything, it starts small. First you reread a post about his showing in December. Then you screenshot it, save it to your desktop. You let your eyes flick over your lab calendar and rest on the blank spots in between incubation and hatch.
You look up his campus on a map. You look up plane tickets to Rhode Island, just out of curiosity, just to see. You call a hotel with a forgiving cancellation policy. Finally you grow tired of pretending, and you book a flight.
You surrender yourself to momentum. On the plane you buy a miniature bottle of wine and let it blur away all the sharp corners of existence, and out the window you watch the landscape give way and give way, again and again, while you sail past it unscathed. You always feel most at home in the sky.
When the wheels touch down you feel the land returning to you, spreading like gangrene from that initial thud, and you have to take a Xanax. The mountains you flew over are all siphoned from the land, all come to press against your lungs in a rush of pressure, and in the terminal you hunch over on a grimy chair, gasping for breath, forcing a smile and a nod for the woman who stoops to ask worriedly if you’re all right. You want to grab her hand and beg her not to leave.
It takes you so long to find your way to campus and then to find the gallery space you’re worried you’ve missed it, but the room is full still. You see the other boy first. He’s leaning against the wall by the door watching, his eyes shining, and when you follow the direction of his small, private smile it leads you to your brother.
Your brother is standing by a painting talking to a woman you recognize from his posts as one of his professors. He’s engrossed in their conversation and it’s a few minutes before he looks up and sees you.
He’s across the room still; there are people between you, and you aren’t certain you won’t turn and walk out. You stay close to the door and recite the mantra your sister made you repeat (I am doing this for myself, I owe them nothing, I can always leave). But then he says something to his professor and comes toward you. All the air in the room goes hot.
There are so many ways this could have gone, so many ways this still could go. But in that instant, the one where you saw that flash of recognition strike him like lightning, you felt what you came here to see if you’d feel: the same strike at the same time, an atomic pull you can’t explain. You feel the distance between you as a physical entity, and you feel it compress with each of his steps.
And then he’s in front of you, startled and unsure.
“Hi,” he says. Something in his tone strikes you as brave. Maybe hope is always brave.
Ruth would hug him. You’re not sure you will ever be able to. But you’re there, and you can breathe still, and you say hi to him back.