“You’re still God.”
“Yes. And so are you. At the end of the day, the universe is clearly a proponent of equality.”
“So, basically, you lay down on Boston Common and achieved enlightenment,” Ben says.
“Basically.”
He throws up his hands. “A couple visits to Dharma Bums and you’re already a Zen Master.”
I grin. “I progress through things very quickly.”
“Like father, like daughter.”
Ben reaches for his copy of Dark Diving. Flips through it to a dog-eared page. Reads my dad’s words to me.
“When his dear friend Michele Besso died, Einstein imparted his theory on death to Besso’s sister, in a letter of condolence. He writes, ‘Michele has left this strange world a little before me. This means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction made between past, present and future is nothing more than a persistent, stubborn illusion.’
In my search for quintessence—the meaning of existence through understanding what dark matter (and therefore the universe) is made up of—I find myself returning to this scrap of knowledge that Einstein imparted to a grieving woman and, perhaps, to his own grieving self. Is it possible that Einstein discovered true quintessence—the secret to eternal life that philosophers and alchemists have been searching for across the centuries? Perhaps the Elixir of Life isn’t a tonic at all, but the simple knowledge that time is elastic and, as such, what we would consider a life’s end—consciousness forever relegated to the past—is its beginning elsewhere.”
“Houston, we have SCIENTIFIC PROOF OF ETERNAL LIFE!”
Ben laughs. “Maybe. But I think he’s ultimately saying what we have to be okay with is not that we’re going to die, but that we don’t know what, exactly, or where or when we’ll be when these physical manifestations of ourselves time out. So we have to live the hell out of the atoms we are right now and be okay with letting the form they take go when the time comes. But…” He smiles. “Maybe my atoms will always find your atoms.”
I think of our kiss: I am lost without you. Quantum love.
“No object has a definite position except when colliding with something else,” I whisper.
He nods. “You’re my definite position in the universe.”
“We’re a funny pair,” I say. “You love gravity, and I’m always trying to escape it.”
“I’m so proud of you. I can’t wait to be standing outside, looking up, and knowing you’re somewhere above me looking down.” His lips turn up. “But every astronaut needs to have her feet on the ground sometime.”
Ben Tamura is my favorite gravitational pull.
I take his hand and kiss the palm.
“You hold me, too, you know,” I whisper against it, the universe of me in the palm of his hand.
His eyes turn glassy.
“I’m so sorry, Ben. All these months. I—”
He stops me with a salty, sweet kiss. “Save your apologies for all the heart attacks you’re going to give me when you’re a fighter pilot, hm?”
I squeeze him a little tighter. “Thank you for the meteorite.”
“I promise I won’t get you rocks for every occasion. Despite being a geophysicist, I do have some self-control. But I thought you might like that one.”
I burrow closer to him. “You know what’s strange? If the wave hadn’t happened … maybe I would never have met you.”
He runs a hand over my head. “I don’t think anything happens for a reason. The wave being the price we pay in exchange for this. I think a part of me would have found a way to collide with you, Mae, no matter what. Even if I had to take a quantum leap to make it happen. I’d have found you.”
Because I’m his definite position in the universe. And he’s mine.
I kiss him. I kiss him with all the kisses I haven’t given him for over four months.
Then I pull back, stare at him. “You bastard.”
I can’t keep a straight face, so he just raises his eyebrows.
“When were you going to tell me that this room is a wormhole?” I try to sound extremely angry.
A minute out there—a whole night in here.
Ben grins, jumps off the bed, and bolts the door, then crawls back across the mattress toward me.
“You’re the astronaut,” he says. “Shouldn’t you have seen that one coming?”
I rest a hand on the buttons of his shirt. “You’re right. Maybe I should correct my course.”
“I think we’re finally on the optimal flight path,” Ben says softly, laying me down. “Don’t you?”
Only love.
So many ways to die. But so many ways to live. Maybe even forever. Quintessence. Always being. Never ending.
I nod. “Second star to the right and straight on till morning.”
Benediction
maybe the empty places inside us
are just homes waiting to be filled
Table
Basement
Holy Cross Church
42
Hannah
If addiction is genetic, I don’t know where I got it from.
Everyone in my family seems fine. Okay, on Dad’s side, maybe Gram likes her after-dinner port a little too much, but she’s a grown-ass seventy-five-year-old woman who’s earned it. Mom’s side might be the link: I’m pretty sure Pappoús was an alcoholic—no one says it that way, but he always had a shit-ton of ouzo on hand. Still, no one ever became an outright junkie. Went to rehab. Overdosed.
If Nate would just smoke a little too much weed or Uncle Tony hit the red wine harder. But no.
It’s just me who’s a loser. Jo would want me to reframe that, but that affirmation shit is just not working today.
Tomorrow, I’ll have been sober for five months. Today doesn’t count yet. I don’t count a day until I wake up the next morning without using. Some people count it once they hit midnight, but we all know the hardest time is after midnight. In NA they give you sobriety swag in the form of chips that signify how long you’ve been clean. You can put them on a keychain or whatever. I have white, orange, green, and red. Next month, I’ll get the biggie: a six-month blue one. It’s like that time when I was collecting the Strawberry Shortcake Happy Meal toys, but not nearly as fun. I still want that blue chip, though.
Before I lay down under the angel to die, I was waking up every night at 4:03, which is the time my parents died—8:06—divided by two.
For the past three days I’ve been waking up at exactly that time. I’m trying not to read into it.
Especially since today is my birthday.
And also Mother’s Day.
All things considered, that is some twisted shit, my birthday being on Mother’s Day.
I read in one of the million pamphlets they gave me in rehab that suicide is the second-leading cause of death in the United States for my age group, and tenth overall.
It’s why I decide to go to a meeting before the family celebration tonight. Before I have to pretend to be a happy birthday girl.
I’m in a church basement near BU. This particular meeting for Young People, as they call us, could be worse. Everyone is college-aged and pretty cool. Mae came with me once and called it the Tattoo Show. There’s coffee and doughnuts from Dunkies. The speaker is this chick from New York who’s a conceptual artist, and she talks about how her art helped her stay sober. And it just reminds me that I don’t have anything like that, you know? Just my acorns. That’s it.