Turtles All the Way Down(35)

“But it’s still happening, right? Like, there is still a meteor shower. We just can’t see it.”

“Correct,” he said.

“So, what would it look like?” I asked.

“Huh?”

“If it weren’t cloudy, what would I be seeing?”

“Well.” He took his phone out and opened it up to some stargazing app. “So, over here in the northern sky is the constellation Draco,” he said, “which to me looks more like a kite than a dragon, but anyway, there would be meteors visible around here. There’s not much moon tonight, so you could probably see five or ten meteors an hour. Basically, we’re moving through dust left behind by this comet called Giacobini-Zinner, and it would be super beautiful and romantic if only we did not live in gloomy Indiana.”

“It is super beautiful and romantic,” I said. “We just can’t see it.”

I thought about him asking me if I’d ever been in love. It’s a weird phrase in English, in love, like it’s a sea you drown in or a town you live in. You don’t get to be in anything else—in friendship or in anger or in hope. All you can be in is love. And I wanted to tell him that even though I’d never been in love, I knew what it was like to be in a feeling, to be not just surrounded by it but also permeated by it, the way my grandmother talked about God being everywhere. When my thoughts spiraled, I was in the spiral, and of it. And I wanted to tell him that the idea of being in a feeling gave language to something I couldn’t describe before, created a form for it, but I couldn’t figure out how to say any of that out loud.

“I can’t tell if this is a regular silence or an awkward silence,” Davis said.

“What gets me about that poem ‘The Second Coming’ . . . you know how it talks about the widening spiral?”

“The widening gyre,” he corrected me. “‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre.’”

“Right, whatever, the widening gyre. But the really scary thing is not turning and turning in the widening gyre; it’s turning and turning in the tightening gyre. It’s getting sucked into a whirlpool that shrinks and shrinks and shrinks your world until you’re just spinning without moving, stuck inside a prison cell that is exactly the size of you, until eventually you realize that you’re not actually in a prison cell. You are the prison cell.”

“You should write a response,” he said. “To Yeats.”

“I’m not a poet,” I said.

“You talk like one,” he said. “Write down half the stuff you say and it would be a better poem than I’ve ever written.”

“You write poetry?”

“Not really. Nothing good.”

“Like what?” I asked. It was so much easier to talk to him in the dark, looking at the same sky instead of at each other. It felt like we didn’t have bodies, like we were just voices talking.

“If I ever write something I’m proud of, I’ll let you read it.”

“I like bad poetry,” I said.

“Please don’t make me share my dumb poems with you. Reading someone’s poetry is like seeing them naked.”

“So I’m basically saying I want to see you naked,” I said.

“They’re just stupid little things.”

“I want to hear one.”

“Okay, like, last year I wrote one called ‘Last Ducks of Autumn.’”

“And it goes . . .”

“The leaves are gone you should be, too I’d be gone if I were you but then again, here I am walking alone / in the frigid dawn.”

“I quite like that,” I said.

“I like short poems with weird rhyme schemes, because that’s what life is like.”

“That’s what life is like?” I was trying to get his meaning.

“Yeah. It rhymes, but not in the way you expect.”

I looked over at him. I suddenly wanted Davis badly enough that I no longer cared why I wanted him, whether what wanted him was capitalized or lowercase. I reached over, touched his cold cheek with my cold hand, and began to kiss him.

When we came up for air, I felt his hands on my waist, and he said, “I, uh, wow.”

I smirked at him. I liked feeling his body against mine, one of his hands tracing my spine. “Got any other poems?”

“I’ve been trying to write just couplets lately. Like, nature stuff. Like, ‘the daffodil knows more of spring / than roses know of anything.’”

“Yup, that works, too,” I said, and kissed him again. I felt my chest tighten, his cold lips and warm mouth, his hands pulling me closer to him through the layers of our coats.

I liked making out with so many layers on. Our breathing steamed up his glasses as we kissed, and he tried to take them off, but I pressed them up the bridge of his nose, and we were laughing together, and then he started kissing my neck, and a thought occurred to me: His tongue had been in my mouth.

I told myself to be in this moment, to let myself feel his warmth on my skin, but now his tongue was on my neck, wet and alive and microbial, and his hand was sneaking under my jacket, his cold fingers against my bare skin. It’s fine you’re fine just kiss him you need to check something it’s fine just be fucking normal check to see if his microbes stay in you billions of people kiss and don’t die just make sure his microbes aren’t going to permanently colonize you come on please stop this he could have campylobacter he could be a nonsymptomatic E. coli carrier get that and you’ll need antibiotics and then you’ll get C. diff and boom dead in four days please fucking stop just kiss him JUST CHECK TO MAKE SURE.