Everything’s Not Lost
I.
“Hey, so I listened to that song you mentioned,” I said. “The last one on the album. ‘Everything’s Not Right.’”
“You mean ‘Everything’s Not Lost’?” he said, adjusting his glasses.
“Oh, yeah, right…” A short pause. “That says something about me, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah,” he said and nodded once.
II.
I like to think he hears me through his paws.
It’s been over five years since I wrote that one down. I remember because it was during my Micron pen stage, when the material experience of writing mattered almost more than the content.
I can recreate the scene pretty easily in my head — though I’m not naive enough to say that means that it’s exactly how it was.
I remember Riley crouched down on his haunches, scratching his cat behind the ears. Ears that were just for show. Sebastopol was born deaf. My brother had picked him up as a kitten from the Humane Society a few years before. On his 27th birthday.
I’d never asked Riley why he went for the one deaf cat of the bunch, but as he crouched there, his fingers massaging Sebastopol’s skull rhythmically, he answered the question anyway.
“Sebastopol reminds me of how we’re all connected — physically,” he said, the cat’s tail beating a rhythm on his calf.
“It’s the same with all of us,” he continued. “With everything, really. You can only hear me because of sound waves. And sound waves are just physical interactions between air molecules bumping together. The final molecules in the row just happen to rub up against these delicate organs in your ear. So you can hear me.” He didn’t look at me as he spoke. He did look at Sebastopol from time to time—but mostly he just looked at the floor or at the leg of the kitchen table where I sat. Which was next to my leg—so it was sort of like he was looking at me.
“The same goes for how we see things,” he said. “It’s just photons flying around and bouncing off of stuff. They don’t carry messages themselves. But based on how they move—their angle, their speed, their vibration—we create an image of things.”
He lifted his hand from Sebastopol’s head and put it out in front of him, its back facing his gaze.
“Still, we manage to think of everything as separate. As out there and disconnected. As though we could see or hear it without something there to physically connect us.”
He slowly lowered his hand, keeping his eyes on the spot where it had been, his eyes registering new photons with a new set of things to tell.
“And Sebastopol?” I asked.
He didn’t answer right away, but he began to pet Sebastopol behind his useless ears again.
“Sebastopol’s ears don’t work,” he replied. “I know that. The way they don’t move when there’s a sound the way a cat’s ears should. But he knows when I come home anyway. He registers that I’m approaching, even when he’s not looking. His ears may not work, but vibrations are vibrations, and ears aren’t the only thing in a cat’s body that feel vibrations.”
As he spoke, I stared at my water glass — at the water inside and at the glass in my hand — and began to rock it along its bottom edge, making a slow twirl on the tabletop. The water line staying level.
“I like to think he hears me through his paws,” he finished simply.
Those were his last words that visit. He gave me only the merest, barely perceptible nod when I said see you later a few minutes later and left.
A short bus ride back to my apartment and I pulled out my notebook and my Micron pen and wrote down his words.
One more clue in a sea without waves.
[from a Google Doc titled “Novel Beginnings”]
III.
I had last Saturday and Sunday off work—a proper weekend, at last.
What’s more, the sun finally came out at Mt. Cook. Beautiful days that sent everyone out on hiking trails and to mountain bodies of water. Happy happy joy joy throw your hands up in the air and wave them around like Kermit the Frog!
Day 1: I hiked with a group of friends up to Red Tarns and then partway up Mount Sebastopol. I even swam in one of the ponds! That night, I looked at stars from my backyard.
Day 2: I went out with friends to the Blue Lakes in the Tasman Valley, where we frolicked in the biggest of the ponds (tough to call them lakes) and slathered ourselves in thick, therapeutic-seeming clay. After coming home and showering up, I ventured out with one of my housemates on a Glacier Explorers tour. We rode in a motor boat, watched icebergs somersault in a glacial lake, and sucked on pieces of mind-numbingly-old and -cold ice.
Sunshine everywhere. No shortage of outdoor activities to enjoy with my friends. This was my weekend.
And what did I find myself thinking about? Just how nice it’d be to stay in a house out in the middle of nowhere, with no one else around. In late fall, the first snow about to fall. Nobody to interrupt the sound of snowflakes hitting the earth or the sight of an extensive and cold landscape.
I went back to work on Monday, my mind a mess. Trapped in a anxious-depressive state the likes of which I haven’t experienced for a while.
What gives?
IV.
I wasn’t lying when I told her I feel more lonely the more I have people in my life than when I’m traveling alone by campervan. When I’m in a life that includes consistent human connection, I’m aware of both my desire to connect with others and the distance that I have the hardest time bridging.
[notebook entry dated December 16, 2018]
V.
My brother-in-law, Michael, once said to me (while we chatted behind a bar at my cousin’s Star Wars-themed wedding reception) that he and my sister didn’t want to discourage “magical thinking” in Zoe. Zoe is my niece, and if I recall correctly, he said it as he lifted her, giggling, off the ground. A good dad.
Magical thinking. I’m not sure where he or my sister pulled that phrase from, nor can I say what it means to them.
But I’ll take shot at it:
Magical thinking is Daniela, halting our conversation over wine to insist that this moment has happened before. So sure, in fact, that she begins to predict where the conversation will go—laying out a future that will never emerge, now that it’s been derailed by her prediction.
It’s Borges, who I now read in Spanish, playing with questions of what is real and what we do after we die—without ever committing to an answer.
It’s a dream journal by my bedside, filled with my morning-blind, chicken-scratch recollections of worlds that quickly fade from memory.
It’s me sitting with my therapist in Seattle and beginning to notice things—like the small movement of her wrist, the quality of the air, the pattern in the rug on her office floor—that suggest to me that, if I were to tune myself just so, I’d know precisely what she will say next.
It’s Nat saying “have you tried just writing down your ideas?”, Mom patiently helping me compose my first report in second grade, Enrique planting in my head the idea to quit my job, someone somewhere once upon a time naming a mountain Sebastopol—all of these moments and people I did not choose and could never have chosen, coalescing into this fool’s errand to write a story that is, if not worth reading, at least worth writing.
Magical thinking. A trust in the subtle connection between things—real and imagined.
Of course, I’m still a cynic. An ex-Mormon, after all. I believe that, when we die, we’re simply a tapestry that unravels, our unique pattern forever lost in a mess of constituent parts. And even though we all may well be connected through cosmic energy or what-have-you (a thing I can’t deny), I’ll still forever doubt that anyone can tap into such a deep, universal connection.
And yet, at my best, I like to believe there is a place in this universe for people like me. For people like our little Zoe when she’s older. For those of us who enjoy scoffing at the erroneous belief in one moment, even as we, in the next, find ourselves playing and dancing to a music that, invented or not, we still hear thrumming against these delicate organs in our ears.
VI.
I heard a soft chuckle from the darkness to my right.
I’d just gotten home from a late shift at the buffet. I’d quietly entered my shared room and begun rummaging through the closet by the dim light of my phone’s lock screen.
But the thing is, right after entering the room, I clearly heard my roommate Tom get out of his bed, walk over, and begin rummaging around on his side of the closet. Still in the darkness.
We continued at this charade for 10 to 15 seconds before I heard Tom snicker. When he finally flipped on the light switch, there I was, kneeling down, peering into what had been darkness, trying to grab a pair of clean underwear for my shower.
In the sudden brightness, I looked up at him and he looked down at me. We laughed and shook our heads. Hard pressed to explain why the hell it took us so long to turn on the light and acknowledge each other’s presence.
Things to look at…
