A short list:
Why the universe is expanding
What dark energy and dark matter actually are
If life is possible on Mars
If Dad’s quintessence theory is correct
How the first particle came to be
My parents’ last words
How I will die
If Nah will ever forgive me
If Dad was really going to leave us
What it’s like to be in zero gravity, on a space walk, looking down at Earth
Why Ben Tamura feels like home
If it’s me, something about me, that makes people go
There are no answers in the darkness. Just more questions.
I think about what River said, at Dharma Bums. About feeling everything no matter how bad it is. About waking up from the trance.
I sit up, lean my pillow against the wall. Cross my legs and close my eyes.
“Okay,” I whisper. “Let’s ride.”
I ride the breath like a wave, not the wave, just one that brings me to the shore of myself, again and again.
In.
And out.
In.
And out.
I sit and sit, the thoughts sometimes racing, other waves that crash against my mind, never ending, but I let them go, let them crash.
H20 and NaCl—water and sodium chloride. That’s all a wave is. Elemental. Shifting. Changing.
Not permanent.
Not me.
The more I fall into the breath, the more I realize that the thoughts are just on the surface of me. I dive deeper. Sink. Beneath the waves—beneath the wave.
Stillness.
Quiet and deep.
Like all of space is inside me.
They say that the ocean is the closest environment to space we have on Earth, and more than half the human body is made up of water, so maybe our bodies know the language of the dark, of the deep, already. We just need to listen.
I listen.
And then: I feel.
Without the distraction of the thoughts, I can feel … everything.
* * *
What Dad did—to Mom, to us, to that little baby in Rebecca Chen’s belly far away in Los Angeles, and what Micah did to Nah, and what Nah and I did to each other, the lying.
I feel the weight of the ocean in my chest.
I don’t push it away.
I don’t work the problem.
I ride the wave.
In order for an object to float, it must contain some trapped air. That is the only way it can rise above the surface.
Eventually, the breath pushes me
up
up
up.
The wave recedes. For now.
I open my eyes.
Somehow, the darkness is a little lighter.
There’s a tap on my window. Then another one.
I turn.
Ben is framed by yellow curtains, flakes of snow swirling all around him, as though just by meditating I’ve summoned him.
He spreads a gloved hand on the frosted pane and rests his forehead against the window and I can feel him through the glass.
The cold in me turns warm. Like soup.
I crawl out of bed and pull the window open. He is covered in snow. There is a storm behind him that must have started after Nate brought me home from the orchard. That long, silent car ride.
The wind is a knife, and it cuts through my thin T-shirt.
My moon lamp catches in Ben’s eyes so that the night sky is now inches from my face. I don’t feel the cold anymore.
“I wanted to kiss you good night,” he says. “It’s your birthday. And no birthday girl should go to sleep without a good-night kiss.”
Did Dad knock on Mom’s window late at night? Did he send her into zero gravity? And when she found out about him and Rebecca—was it like falling, or another kind of floating?
The wind is a knife. Serrated. Death by a thousand cuts, that’s what this is. Caring about someone and knowing it will end.
“This is very romantic,” I say, carefully. “And you came all this way in the cold, and I wish I could be the girlfriend you want, Ben, but—”
“You are the girlfriend I want,” he says, leaning in a little, his hair dusted with snow. “And the one I have. How convenient.”
“It’s ANYTHING but convenient! I don’t have time for this! For girlfriend things. I don’t have space inside me for it.”
“I love you.”
Sometimes … sometimes you can actually hear Earth rotate.
I look at this boy who climbed to my window in a snowstorm. Who clings to the flimsy wood, patient. My quantum boy that I found in the chaos. And I want to grab him and never let him go.
But I can already feel what it will be like when he leaves.
I shake my head. I wish he hadn’t said it. Everyone who has ever said that to me goes away for good.
“Yes. I do. I love you,” he murmurs. “Right here, right now. The wave and your dad and your sister and Micah—no one, nothing, can take this moment from us. It’s ours and I love you and if you don’t have time, that’s okay, because I’m not asking you for anything more than this minute. I’m not even asking you for it—I want to give it to you. A minute can be a gift.”
His breath comes out in a puff, and I breathe him in, his heat melting me, melting that ice that built up so quickly inside. The physicist Carlo Rovelli says that time and heat are linked, that the only way you can see a detectable difference between the past and the future is when there is a flow of heat.
This heat I feel—does it mean that Ben and I have a future? Can thermodynamics keep two people from leaving each other? Maybe things got cold between Mom and Dad, and so there could be no future. No more time. No more minutes.
A minute can be a gift.
“I didn’t open any birthday gifts.”
Ben’s eyes are sad. And hopeful. “I know.”
Time is a gift.
I am learning this the hard way.
Sixty seconds. This minute, one minute with Ben. A gift.
His lips are a little blue, but he doesn’t complain.
I kiss them.
Then I drag him inside.
As soon as Ben is here, in my room, I don’t want him to be anywhere else. I want more gifts. More minutes.
“The universe is expanding,” I say. “Maybe I am, too. Maybe there’s more space in me than I thought.”
He kisses me like we’re in the final scene of a movie and the music is swelling and there’s a sunrise behind us. It’s a pretty good kiss.
Ben pulls away, looks around. “You failed to mention that this room is a wormhole.”
“What?”
“Yeah. You tricked me, you minx.” Ben is grinning, and it takes me a second, but then I see where he is going with this. Never fall for an MIT boy. “A minute in here is actually a whole night out there. Spacetime, man. Total mindfuck.” He shuts the window, pulls off his scarf. “Well played, you. You’ve got me for the whole night.”
I bite my lip, thinking. Micah would do something like this for Nah.
Ben leans close, his lips brushing my ear. “For science, Mae.”
My eyes fly to his, and he’s grinning, my person, and I almost say it, those three words, but I can’t, I can’t, so I just kiss them to him. He tastes like coffee and cinnamon.