Lost Things

A single moment.

Sunlight through a falling raindrop. The smell of lavender on the wind.

The boy is a collector of these small, fleeting memories. He doesn't talk, and he has no friends. Over the course of eight days he memorizes the entire French dictionary. He works five grades ahead in mathematics. You're brilliant, grownups tell him. You'll go so far.

He discovers his talent for drawing in kindergarten, at lunch, when he settles down with a pencil and a sheet of paper, a sharpener and an eraser, and renders in perfect detail the ceramic vase of tulips sitting on his teacher's desk.

His parents notice a new light in his eyes. He has found within himself a fire, and it burns brightest when he is making art.

~

She lives for each moment.

Dawn breaking over the horizon. Biting into a lemon pastry. A shooting star.

Ten days after her sixth birthday, just outside their suburban residence, she watches as her father is struck by a semi-truck. Time slows, then stops.

She hides in her mother's shadow at his funeral. Strangers who call themselves family offer their condolences. Two months later and she is back in school, as if none of it ever happened, as if her father never existed, but her world has dimmed and all she wishes for is a chance to see him one last time. If only to say goodbye.

She retreats into herself. Her mother introduces a thin-lipped woman called a psychologist.

She's here to help you, says her mother. To help us.

But the girl is drowning, and already water fills her lungs. It's too late.

At the heart of the city she knows of a bridge that spans the inlet. A fall that far and the ocean becomes concrete, she'd heard someone say. One night, five years after her father's death, she crawls out of her bedroom window and walks barefoot to the bridge, peering into the murky darkness, gripping the cold handrail.

But she must have been seen, because moments later she is surrounded by cops.

You're okay, they tell her. Everything is okay.

~

Life goes on. He is twenty-four years old. He has transitioned from graphite pencils to painting with watercolour and acrylic and oil, of which oil is his favourite.

His days are spent at the local Walmart. He pushes shopping carts for minimum wage across the cracked pavement, an occupation he turned to after struggling through one semester of art school. The curriculum had been limiting. Inflexible. You gave up, he knows everyone is thinking. But he doesn't care. Each night he sets up his easel in the cramped kitchenette of his studio apartment and unleashes his soul onto the canvas.

She lives across the city, in a small house that is shared between three other women. On those nights when the darkness presses against her bedroom window, the girl who lost her father remembers her life as it was, and she decides to write a book. A memoir. She is twenty-two years old, pink-haired and hollow-cheeked, addicted to the small blue pills provided by a dealer downtown. They make her feel happy, even if it is a synthetic, chemical happiness. She will stop, one day, she tells herself—when the wrinkles of her life have been ironed out.

In November she finds a job at a nearby cafe, and from eight to four she makes lattes, cappuccinos, hot chocolates; she smiles and says have a good day to each faceless stranger on and on until nightfall. She thinks about her memoir, which she decides will be a meditation on grief. It will explore the mind in agony, and the human affinity for self-destruction. But it will be hopeful.

(No, she thinks later, when she is in one of her moods. It will be relentlessly bleak.)

She takes a pill and feels much better.

~

February. When the hills of shovelled snow have all but melted in the Walmart parking lot, he clocks out of work and walks three blocks to the cafe for a hot chocolate. The bell above the door rings softly. It's warm inside, and he pulls off his gloves and approaches the counter where a pink-haired girl is making Americanos for two men in suits. The boy waits, his gaze fixed on his boots, and when the men take their coffees he steps forward. One hot chocolate, please, he says.

The girl types his order on the register. Anything else?

Her voice is soft, like velvet, if velvet were a sound. His eyes flicker up to hers.

~

A single moment.

A meeting of gazes.

~

His face, the brown pools of his eyes. She can see herself and the universe reflected in those eyes, and she blinks.

Um, he says. No, just the hot chocolate.

~

Her eyes are green. The sort of forest green he'd use in a conifer landscape. But there is a looming darkness in her gaze, and he wonders what her story is. What she has seen. In the hard lines of her face there is a desolate beauty.

I'll take it to go, he adds, because anxiety is bubbling in his chest. He feels confused and overwhelmed and now he just wants to go home.

~

She makes the hot chocolate, and when it is ready she hands the cup to him and he takes it and doesn't look up. Then the bell chimes, the door closes, and he is gone.

That evening she opens her laptop in bed and types the heading My Memoir into a Word document. She stares at the blank page for two hours. The pills don’t help; her muse is quiet tonight. There was a boy at work today, she types at last, just to see words on the page. Then she hits backspace and closes her laptop.

To the north, in his studio apartment, the boy sets a 10x14 inch canvas on his easel and begins to paint. He sketches an outline with a 2H pencil before mixing cerulean blue with sunny yellow for a rich, leafy green. He starts with the pupil. Then out to the iris, furrowed and gleaming like something cosmic. Like a nebula. Light pools on the cornea, the eyelashes quiver, the optic nerve transmits electrical impulses to the brain and the world takes shape.

He paints until dawn, and only then does he realize something is missing. Her gaze had been dark. Shadowed. But how to capture that haunted look with paint?

He adjusts the angle of the eyelids, the brightness of reflected light. By noon he has finished the first layer. His hand is cramping so he takes a break and makes himself scrambled eggs.

~

Sundown. The girl flips the placard from open to closed and locks the cafe door. Her breath plumes in the air. Her fingertips sting. She follows the sidewalk to the bus stop before pausing and checking the time on her phone. And then she sees the date. February twenty-seventh. Ten days since her twenty-second birthday. Sixteen years since her father's death.

Without thinking she turns and walks back toward the cafe, past the strip mall and onward to where the Walmart glows blue and yellow in the darkness. Then further down the road, through the slush and pools of icy water, past a row of empty warehouses, up the hill to High Street. Office buildings rise toward the sky as she enters the business district. She clamps her headphones over her ears and listens to Bon Jovi while she walks.

The bridge: one and a half kilometres of steel cables and concrete. Seventy metres below, in the cold darkness, she knows the inlet churns. Her hands grip the rail and she peers over the edge.

A fall that far and the ocean becomes concrete.

For a time she doesn't move. She only stands there, thinking. Remembering. Then she turns away from the darkness and shuffles across the walkway, vehicles roaring by on her left, the world dropping away on her right. It's My Life begins to play in her ears.

Once she has crossed the bridge it is a twenty minute walk along narrow roads to Greenroot Regional Park, then over the chain link fence and into the forest.

All is quiet here. All is calm.

She trudges through the slush just as she had sixteen years ago with her father at her side. And she remembers everything. The day of her sixth birthday. The walk through the trees.

She remembers her Micky Mouse snow boots and green-knitted toque and pink rain poncho and down feather jacket. This way, kid, her father had said. This way.

She remembers the way he'd lifted her squirming in his arms and slung her over his shoulder as if she were a wayfarer's sack and she'd laughed while the forest tilted around her. They'd continued up the mountain slope. Then he'd set her down, and she'd stood in the mud, among the ferns drooping with snow, the forest parting like stage curtains before her. And there was the city bristling on the horizon, the winter sun just a pale dot above, the inlet waters below, and the bridge, so small and slight it might have been made with foil and wire.

She remembers what he'd said, then.

This is a special place. A secret place. If you're ever lonely or sad you come here and talk to the trees. They'll listen. No, I ain't crazy. I see you looking at me all funny. I ain't crazy, I promise. And you tell them what you feel and then you go on your way.

And he'd sat down on a ridge of roots crusted in snow and she'd climbed into his lap. And he'd looked at her and said, You gotta live for each moment, kid. When life is tough you look for the next moment. Moments like this. That way you keep going.

She imagines the ghosts of her father and her six-year-old self sitting there watching the world and then her gaze rises to where the city lights glitter. Tears stream down her cheeks. I think I'm lost, she tells the trees. I don't know where I'm going.

Across the inlet, in the city, the boy applies the final touches to his work. He dabs the sclera with a fine-tipped brush, lines the eyelashes with white to signify reflected light, signs his name in the bottom corner. Then he takes a step back. A sudden warmth swells in his chest. An excitement, a yearning. The eye watches him, and he can see in its gaze a hidden sorrow. A darkness in the iris, the brow furrowed just so. His hands are shaking and he sinks to the floor and lies back and stares at the ceiling. He imagines himself and the world at large—the continents, the oceans, every living thing. The Milky Way: a cosmic pinwheel turning slowly, purposefully, in tandem with one hundred billion other galaxies. Space dust drifting between the stars. Glimmering nebulae.

This is the universe, he thinks.

Here I am.

~

If you made it this far—thank you for reading! This is my first piece not written for a Vocal challenge; it was an idea I had in my head and I just had to get it onto paper. Part II will be posted in the next two weeks!