Youthful Folly

Laura Wolfskill
Nov 7 · 17 min read

As a concept, Withdrawal means that one ought to keep petty men at a distance, but here … such a one remains attached to the place where he is located. Not only is such a one unable to keep himself away from harm, he also has worn himself out in the process. So it is appropriate that he finds himself humiliated with shame and placed in great danger.
— Hexagram 33

I pause before the second flight of stairs, squinting through my glasses to read the number outside the classroom ahead. The door is open, and a yellow, inviting light warms the room. From twenty feet away, behind the stair railing, I can’t see anyone at the whiteboard. I try the number again. 210. Releasing a shaky breath, I creep up the last few steps to the second floor.

In front of me sits the empty room, while the rest of the floor branches out to my right, behind a small locker bay. I seem to be standing in a miniature lobby. To my left, three black leather chairs line the wall, and a map rests above them. I walk over the tiled floor and scan it.

A sigh escapes from beyond the hallway, and I freeze. Wait, no, I tell myself. That was distinctly feminine. That was a lady sound. I force down another gulp of air and turn from the map, slinking toward the hallway. Soon the space opens up into a righthand wing, a circle of classrooms I recognize from the map — and a white-haired woman at a printer.

“Can I help you with something?” the professor asks, not turning around. Normally these are the words that fly, impatient, from the mouth of a teenager working retail. But her tone holds the friendly formality typical of elderly women.

She sashays to her left, and her pin-straight hair slides with her. “I’m almost done here,” she adds, and peeks over her shoulder for a second.

“Oh, no thank you,” I say softly.

“All right.” She smiles and turns back to the printer.

I hang behind her until she collects her papers and waltzes off in the direction of room 210. Then I breathe again and begin making my way down the wing.

Just one second, I remind myself, maybe two. All you have to do is walk by the window and look in. Just once. And he won’t come after you — you know that.

The first room number I see is 252. To the right of it, 260, and — tucked in the corner, with the door closed — 266.

266. My heartbeat rocks my entire body. Somehow it feels like I wasn’t meant to find this, like I’d get lost in the building as I wandered in infinite circles. Or I was supposed to arrive two hours late, long past when he released his class. Or my car should have spun around in the unexpected snowstorm and tumbled into a ditch. God had always found ways to stop me before.

But by some miracle and an old familiar impulse I am here, cloaked by my winter coat and hat and glasses, tugging on my backpack, inching toward him. He is there, just fifteen feet away, behind that door. In the past five years, have we ever gotten this close?

I stop to listen for his voice commanding the class in a way I’d know instantly, despite not having heard it for years. All that floats to my ears are a few piano notes from a practice room somewhere nearby.

I muster all my upper body strength to draw another breath and release it. Then I step forward, craning my neck to see through the door window into his classroom.

A strip of thin beige blinds — the only ones in this entire wing — greets me instead, protected from the outside by a layer of glass. The only discernible sign of life through the window is a yellow glow from the classroom lights. Everything else is opaque, veiled by the plastic shutters.

I stand there for a moment, frozen and breathless, reassessing. Then I slump against the wall, let out a mixture of air and bitter laughter, and shake my head up towards heaven.


“It is not I who seek the Juvenile Ignorant but the Juvenile Ignorant who seeks me … he wants me to resolve the uncertainties that he has.”
— Hexagram 4

Michael smiles at me across the table. The low lights in the student center bounce off his green eyes, which are so large they barely crinkle amid his constant grins and laughter. His brown hair is longer now, curled up behind his ears in the way that suits him. He spins his right hand in a circle toward me, motioning.

“So you’ve been really depressed, and you don’t have sex with your boyfriend,” he summarizes. At his last remark, we stare at each other and start cracking up again.

“Go on,” he says eventually, more serious this time. “Tell me more about your life.”

I fiddle with the deck of cards in front of me, propping it on its side and slapping it down again. “Well…” I look out the window, surveying the nighttime landscape of NIU, the few students exiting the library and traipsing through the cold to their dorms or the Starbucks below us.

“Whenever I come back to DeKalb, I just get kind of… Weird,” I say. “I haven’t lived here since senior year of high school, so returning will revert me to who I was back then. And winter makes it worse.”

I turn the deck of cards 90 degrees, laying it across another deck to form a T shape. Then I look up again. Michael’s green eyes watch me, soft and patient.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about Ceph,” I say, and let out a deep breath.

Michael smiles, knowing.

“I feel so ashamed because it’s been five years, and I still haven’t moved on” — I close my eyes — “and it’s just ridiculous. Like, does he ever think about me? No. Is he still hung up on this? No.”

I peek out at Michael again. “It’s like… Guess who needs therapy?” I say. He smiles more. “I guess it’d be easier if I knew why.” I let go of the cards and wave my hands around. “There’s nothing extraordinary about him. You know? Why him, out of seven billion people? He’s just an awkward, nerdy, average…” I shake my head.

Michael breathes out. “Well, Laura,” he murmurs, “You were a child, and you had this relationship with an older man.”

I grimace. “Not like that.”

“Ooh, so defensive,” he teases. His gaze lands on me in a more pointed way. “I know it wasn’t like that — the words just make it sound that way. But, hearing them, can you see why it’s stuck with you?”

“Maybe,” I say. “Maybe it’s because he and I were the only ones involved in the ‘situation.’ I feel a bond from the trauma, or something. I want to know that he got through it.” I set the card deck on its side again.

Michael eyes me carefully. “Should I text Ceph?” he asks, with half-commitment. His fingers reach for his phone. “Ask him how he’s doing?”

“No,” I say. “I want to see him — that’s what it’s all about.”

Another smile pushes at his thin mouth. He gestures toward me again: Go on.

“I don’t want him to see me,” I clarify. “I just need to look at him once in his new life, for one second, so the him that’s been in my mind can be set free. I’ll watch him walk away and let him live his life.” With my free hand, I gesture from my head outwards, splaying my fingers into the air. “He’ll be released. Finally.”

The deck of cards falls from my left hand and hits the table. I look back at Michael, who still regards me patiently. “Does that make any sense at all?”

He leans forward in his chair and nods.

“Be careful with temptation,” he says, after a moment. His smile fades, but his tone is still warm. “From my experience, that desire can never be satisfied. Even if you think you’ll get some release, it won’t feel like enough.”

His eyes shift toward the wall, dancing around as he remembers. “You think you’re filling a cup, but there’s a hole at the bottom. The more you fill it, the more you lose.”


Méng consists of a dangerous place below a mountain … If one retreats, he will come to grief in danger, but if one advances, he will find the mountain a shut door, so he does not know where to go.
— Hexagram 4

I slam my car door closed and hurry down the dimly lit street, yanking my hood over my head. The early November wind flies against my face, as if to hold me back. I break it with my shoulder and hobble away from the scattered streetlamps, toward the road that cuts behind Sterling’s main stretch.

I try to dodge the fire-orange leaves that dot the asphalt, even though no one else is around to hear them crunch. With each short tut of my boots, my mind spins even more.

Why? is all I can think, over and over. Why why why why why. Why him? Why this? Why now? It’s been five years and I am still crazy. What am I doing?

I don’t stop long enough to really consider — I can’t. The questions and pain and longing run through my bones like blood, feeding my organs, propelling my limbs to move, move, move.

Third Street is so covered in foliage that I almost don’t notice I’ve reached the intersection. Then again, I haven’t been back here for years. Stepping on his campus and approaching his classroom must have instilled this new courage in me.

My steps slow, and I gaze out to my left, past the other houses and dark lawns and occasional trees. Soon his back porch will come into view. They are home, all of them — I saw both cars and a child leaving the van not ten minutes ago. The lights will be on.

I stop. Beyond a pale blue home and a string of leftover Halloween decorations, between the branches of two bordering oaks, the lightbulb over his driveway shines into the night.

I take another step forward.

More light breathes out from his kitchen window. The rectangular cut-out provides a glimpse into a row of maple cabinets, a black stove.

I glance around me, giving the road another once-over just in case.
And then I wait.

The wind picks up again, throwing leaves off the trees and into the street. It runs against my legs through the thin layer of cotton. I shiver and shuffle my feet.

Come on, Ceph, I beg. Come on. Just once.

The scene at the window remains unchanged. I sigh and risk another look around me, then return my eyes to his kitchen. Only the cupboards stare back.

What made me laugh outside his room yesterday now falls on me like a hot blanket. A single candle burns within my heart, melting layers of tendon and tissue. My chest aches.

For a moment I remember Gatsby watching the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, and I almost reach my hand out into the night. Instead I turn around and let the wind carry me back to my parked car.

At my parents’ house, I dig my old sketchbook out of a storage bin and switch on my desk lamp. I sit down and crack open the spine.

Raw obsession cascades from the pages and onto my lap. I flip through, riding each wave once again — the penciled portraits of his face, the U2 lyrics, the half-poems, the desperate prayers. No hands but mine ever clutched these pages. It was too dangerous to tote around, this unfiltered mosaic of my mind. Swiping tears from my eyes, I read the last entry date: 11/5/14.

I flip to the next blank page, grab a box of crayons. Black goes on first, in earnest zig-zags from the top left corner to the bottom right. Deep purple follows in its wake, then navy blue. Gray. Black again.

I reach for a bright red pen.


A noble man would withdraw from that of which he is fond, so he can discard it, but the petty man remains attached to what he loves and so is obstructed.
— Hexagram 33

“Have I told you about I Ching?” Michael asks. “The Chinese oracle?”

We’ve moved to Tom & Jerry’s for a late dinner, following the ebb of conversation over chicken gyros and fried pickles. Black-and-red school memorabilia line the restaurant walls. The occasional customer passes by our corner spot, but for the most part, we are alone. Now Michael sits forward in the booth, bobbing slightly to the background music, his green eyes gleaming.

“I don’t think so,” I say.

“I’ve done at least twenty of them, and they’re scarily accurate,” he says. “Not like horoscopes, which apply to anyone.” He scoffs at the idea. “You couldn’t just take one at random; it wouldn’t make sense.”

I prop my chin on my hand. “What are they?”

He hums a little, thinking. “They’re an ancient practice, a way of getting insight into something. They come from The Book of Changes — so, the oracle tells you what will change, and what it’ll change into.”

He draws on an open part of the table with his fingers, forming imaginary square diagrams. “They’re made up of numbers and lines. The traditional practice was to use reeds, I think.” He considers it for a moment. “I used one right before my dad’s death, and it described deliverance. That gave me a lot of peace.”

I nod along, unsure if I quite get it. He looks at me and grins, almost sheepishly.

“I really want you to do one with me,” he says. “I think it can help you.”

Immediately, rhetoric against The Occult swarms my brain, coupled with warnings about tarot readings, psychics, seances. I remember Saul and the witch of Endor. Voodoo. Ouija boards. You never wanna get mixed up in that stuff, I can hear my old pastor say, even if it seems harmless.

But in front of me sits Michael. Michael, who I’ve known and loved for eight years, who has wrapped an arm around me through it all, who found God just recently and won’t stop proclaiming it, who affirms that my dreams from last summer — Jesus’ death, Mary and the Rosary, the demons — were completely real and valid, who attests that God and Light will triumph. I press a finger to the crucifix beneath my collar.

“Okay,” I say.

We clear the table. Michael snags a napkin and pen from the counter, then reaches into his pocket and dumps an assortment of coins in front of us.

“I like to use dimes,” he says, singling one out. “Do you have anything?”

I fish through my wallet with shaky fingers and produce mostly dimes. Michael takes two, grouping them with his dime, and we set the other coins aside.

“Now, take a minute to clear your mind and form a question,” he says.

“What can I ask about?”

“Whatever you want.” He smiles. “You don’t have to ask about Ceph. You could ask about your boyfriend, or your job. I asked about school when I was on probation.”

My breath catches as I consider it. “I… I do want to ask about Ceph,” I confess. “I just want to know if we’ll ever talk again.”

He hesitates. “Careful asking a question like that, though,” he warns me. “Remember, it’s an oracle. It’ll give you more of an analysis than a prediction.”

Thinking of Oedipus, I laugh grimly and nod. “Right. Okay.”

I inhale and try to calm my mind, but all I can hear is Billie Eilish blaring from the restaurant lobby, and my heart races from the possibilities of power. Can I really know anything I want? Gain wisdom into everything? How am I supposed to pick just one?

“Take your time,” Michael assures me.

I hold my temples and close my eyes, blocking out our surroundings so I can see my thoughts. I breathe again.

The images start trickling in. My room at the house back in Huntington: the slate-gray bedsheets, the glossy wood flooring, the crystal doorknobs. Walter’s black-and-white striped shirt catching some of my hair when we embrace. My counselor, as he leans forward in his chair and squints his blue eyes. The countryside off US-24 in mid-autumn, walled by rows and rows of vermilion trees.

And Ceph, somehow, casting a recent beige film over it all. For a second I see his head turned sideways, inquisitive, mouth opening to reveal almost-straight teeth, as he prepares his remark. His hazel eyes shine sharply. Then the question begs itself, sprouting plainly in my mind.

“Okay,” I say, opening my eyes and looking at Michael. “I’ve got it.”

He grips the pen tightly. “Excellent. Flip the coins. I usually shake them,” he adds, “like dice.”

I slide the three dimes off the table and into my palms, jostling them around. I don’t know what to hope for but I pray for it all the same, holding my breath as I release the coins back onto the table. They ring against the plastic top before they settle.

“We tally them up,” Michael explains. “Heads is 2; tails is 3.”

There are two heads and one tail. “7.”

“Okay,” he says. He scrawls hht onto the middle of the napkin, drawing a broken line beside it. “Now do that five more times.”

In the next five rolls, I never produce three of the same side. Somehow I can tell this is a bad sign. Michael shows me the completed hexagram, composed of six broken and unbroken lines.

“No lines of change,” he says.

He pulls out his phone, loads a free translation of the I Ching, and places the page between us. We lean into his tiny phone screen, searching for the diagram that matches the one on the napkin.

“4,” Michael announces. “Does that look right to you?”

“Yeah.” My fingers still shake a bit and I stare at the three dimes on the tabletop, willing one of them to flip around and match the others, altering the final roll. But it’s too late.

Michael takes his phone for a moment and clicks on Hexagram 4. His eyebrows shoot up, and his eyes race over the first few lines of text.

“What? What is it?” I press.

“Well,” he says, pausing for dramatic effect, “…The title of this one is ‘Méng: Youthful Folly.’”

Suddenly I burst into uncontrollable laughter — not the first but definitely the harshest of this evening. I lean sideways in the booth and stomp one of my feet. Somehow this guffaw releases all the trembling that racked my body a few moments ago.

“Oh, my God,” I choke out, exasperated.

“Hmm? What’s so funny?” Michael teases knowingly. He starts chuckling too. “Here; read this with me.” He stands up and slides next to me in the booth, placing his phone on the table between us. We hunch over.

Méng [indicates that in the case which it presupposes] there will be progress and success. I do not [go and] seek the youthful and inexperienced, but he comes and seeks me. When he shows [the sincerity that marks] the first recourse to divination, I instruct him. If he apply a second and third time, that is troublesome; and I do not instruct the troublesome. There will be advantage in being firm and correct.

I frown and re-read the words.

“Did you finish?” Michael asks. I nod. “That section is the Image, which is a summary, and then you move to the Judgment, which interprets it.”

We read the Judgment, though the language is just as dense and fuzzy as the initial Image.

“Can I ask what your question was?” Michael says.

I smile sadly. “‘Where does he fit into all this?’ — ‘He’ being Ceph, and ‘all this’ being my life.”

“Vague. I like it.” He grins for a second, then becomes somber.

“I think it says you should leave him alone. Look,” he says gently, pointing to the Image, “The situation describes a mentor and pupil. ‘I do not seek the youthful and inexperienced, but he comes and seeks me.’ That’s you, searching for him. The first time it happened — in high school — it was meant to, and he instructed you.”

Michael moves to the next sentence. “‘If he apply a second and third time, that is troublesome.’ That’s you right now.”

I heave a big sigh but say nothing. My eyes retrace the words on the screen, trying to make them sink in.

In the past five years I’ve hit this wall many times: the realization I’ll likely never see him again, that we’re better off apart. But still I press against chance and try to better my odds. I inch as close to him as I can without breaking that imaginary barrier between us — a glass door of sorts — even if it means I slam into it five hundred times and keep bruising myself.

“What do you think?” Michael asks.

“I think,” I say quietly, “that makes a lot of sense.”

I scan over the last words in the Judgment again. “Especially this: ‘The method of dealing with the young and ignorant is to nourish the correct nature belonging to them.’ He definitely did that, and it’s helped me even now.” My finger rests on the final sentence. “‘The superior man … strives to be resolute in his conduct and nourishes his virtue.’

Michael gazes at me. “Crazy, right?”

I don’t have much to say to that, so he hits the ‘back’ button on his phone. “Pick any number between 1 and 64,” he tells me. “Just for fun.”

“16,” I say.

He selects Hexagram 16, and we read over it to see if it relates. The language here is even more confusing, detailing cosmic earthly obedience and heavenly armies. Definitely not applicable.

“See, you can’t just pick any one,” he says, standing up to exit the booth. “They’re special. And, over time, their meaning becomes even clearer.”

Half an hour later, I drop him off at his car in the NIU parking garage. Just last night, I’d sat here and sobbed, wondering how to solve the emptiness that cries out whenever I return to DeKalb — that restless need to find Ceph, to make him patch the hole at the bottom of my cup. But for now, as Michael wraps his arms around me for a third hug, I am strangely full.


The good fortune associated with Juvenile Ignorance here is due to compliant behavior achieved through an obedient mind.
— Hexagram 4

I breathe in deeply and run the three dimes through my fingers. Sunday morning sunlight rides in through my bedroom window, warming the fabric covers of books on my desk. Beside me, low heat unfurls from a fresh cup of coffee.

I close my eyes.

Ceph poses on stage in front of a wooden cross, his lean form clad in navy slacks and a dark dress shirt. He launches an arm into the air, preaching, and his glasses slide down his little nose. Then the two of us are swaying in Marie’s driveway, that night after the first snowfall five autumns ago. Sterling is as black and quiet as a funeral; the only sound is the delicate stretch of his cargo coat as he hugs me goodbye.

The question I scrawled into my sketchbook two nights ago re-emerges, in the same bright red as the pen I used then.

Where are you??

I shake the dimes for a few seconds and let them fall. They tumble onto my desk, spinning around before they decide.

8.

I flip them again. Another 8. And another. On the fourth roll, I get all tails — 9, a line of change. I exhale and collect the dimes. Then I roll 6 and 9 again.

“Three lines of change,” I mutter. “Of course. Of course, Ceph.”

I slowly pen the first hexagram into my journal, glancing back at the website Michael sent me to ensure the line shapes correspond to the numbers I rolled. Then I record the second hexagram beside it. The three lines of change morph into their inverse — broken lines to unbroken, unbroken to broken. Returning to the table of hexagrams, I click on the corresponding images: 8 and 33.

Outside my bedroom, my dad rehearses the same piano piece I’ve heard for 22 years, filling the living room with fluttery, out-of-tune notes. Our neighbors’ handyman blows copper- and mercury-colored leaves into neat piles around the base of their trees. 200 miles away, my boyfriend will be placing a wine-soaked scrap of bread onto his tongue.

I study the hexagrams and start writing.


Bibliography

I Ching [Yi Jing]: The Book of Changes (n.p.), https://www.yellowbridge.com/onlinelit/i-ching-coin.php?fbclid=IwAR0na12S5nFWiApCT0xvcTavwkDe2mS4_Sq_Im2l8cfKqzyJPQ7yGv54fn8.

The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi, trans. Richard John Lynn (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).


©Laura Wolfskill 2019

Laura Wolfskill
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