Flowers by Alex Tamaki                                                                               Bookmark and Share

 

            
            After the funeral, Raleigh shifted his coat on his shoulders and walked out the gates of the cemetery, quiet and indifferent but for his eyes in the face of the loss. He took a quick look down the street and then stepped off of the curb to cross the road. It was cold, and he felt it, moving over all the old cracks. He was shifting, face down, humming something, some kind of eulogic chamber-piece in his mind. But then, when he was over on the other side, he felt the absence of his hat. It had been placed on the seat as he rose at the end, when he had spoken a few words at the service. It was still there—it had to be—so he turned back toward the gravestones laid out in the yard close behind, turned to retrieve it, and he walked onto the road and into the path of an oncoming car.

            
            Then only flying.


           Pulled back, thrown down, up into the air or around something, somehow: he did not know. What was that light—music? No, an elegy, a kind of deeper whispering: almost like the sharpness of his breath as he flies through the air.  This thick air—what liquid. What solid, fluidic space, catching all the light and slowing his fall: and he is still swimming through it too, swimming through this oceanic roadside air and clear funeral scent, but even then it brought back only image, and only impressions coming up, from out of the power and the force of the car: all silent movies in the sea. Moving rolls of film, or of life. All of them quiet and all of them clear and without narration.

            
            A girl gives him flowers.


           They are white; white and red too, though later he sees on one a small patch of deep, spreading blue, reaching out slowly to the ends, from the center: it reminds him of the girl. The others—all the other flowers, the larger and more beautiful, all the rest—they bring to his mind the hands of his friends. But the blue one is her.

            
            And what will you give me? She asks, only half-hoping for another flower or something else for herself, suddenly he laughs and throws them all into the air.

            
            Adam!


           She chases him down on the grass-covered park; they float by him in the light. Sightless, soundless truths, feelings of the air on that day or another one very soon after, another before; to the tables and the benches on the grass, green as it had seemed and still always seems, and wet with dew. All of them sitting together, all the family and all the friends in the park, beside the sea.

            
            Even after they’d all gone away, gotten older, growing up; even now it was clear how they mattered, they had raised him.

            
            He had felt something at that instant, but it was far off. He can see as she walks down the front steps of her home and listens as she tells him of her friends, who were not his, the ones who didn’t know him and never tried. But he listens anyway, and with warmth for her, as always somehow glad for her friends and her joy. After all, what other kind of love could he give? What could he ever give—was this not enough? It was all he had; it was everything. For she had smiled and laughed with him, too, before moving off, before going away to join with her own friends again.

            
            Standing against the old and heavy door; looking outside from within that wooden borderland, almost locked in between the worlds within and without, and leaning, looking across that street, in the frame.

            
            And one day, years later, he meets her at the park. He finds her sitting on one of those old wooden benches, by a table now lying empty and flat and without food. She smiles at him as she has always done, but there are tears in her eyes now too, simply welling, simply growing within, and waiting for release.

            
            I’m getting married, she tells him. But her joy is somehow marred by what it does to him: she can see how he is saddened by the news, even as he is happy for her. He isn’t torn; that was never the case, it isn’t true. She sees in him only the lasting joy that has been between them, all his life, and at the same time she feels all the last, impossible hopes fall away.


           She feels it in him. She feels it and understands, perhaps even before he does himself. But he is glad. It may be too late, but they will always be together, just like they always have. She may be walking forward, but he sees himself still standing behind, in support, and closer than mind.

            
            And he feels in himself only this remaining fragment of her, sees it as she felt, the only thing left after an illness and another kind of flight, one only subtly different from that of his own. It had been those last words that he’d spoken which had turned him around: the hat was only an extension. The words themselves, and the feelings, were so much more important, and this way was simply so clear. Like a more direct link in between them, he had spoken, and even after that the words and all else and everything behind them, and within them, had continued on inside his eyes, and so he had turned. And too the emotive images of light and of color that flew with him, on through the sea.

            
            It was a deeper kind of love. A deeper thing, a feeling, not desirous, not sexual, not of a family—something more. The only thing that can result, from growing up alongside each other and playing alongside each other for time beyond thought, beyond memory and beyond imagination. It was an eternal thing, less distracted by any human foibles or wants, and closer to the heart.

            
            And it didn’t feel rushed to him now, despite having been cut short. An instant, fleeting life: that’s all there is. It's the only thing, the only thing here, on earth, for us and ourselves; it’s the only thing and the only one I could ever want. That was it. Only this. This thing, this love, what depth.

            
            But it was never cut short. If anything, it had gone on too long: if they both had only died before ten, as infant children in the past that now unwound to show what remained, then that would be life. What fractional relations of a life there can be, or an infant ever have?  One day, two; for us, they shrink to years. Shrinking fast, and pulling fast, pulling us and calling, or forcing us to hurry; on and on and on, as the thing we call a day, or a moment, or everything else in an instant loses meaning. If the world had only ended then, all of infinity would reach.

            
            The love itself still remained. It didn’t matter—it mattered because it didn’t matter. He grew up, love, life with the feeling all the time; he felt all the joy, all of the sadness; sat by her bed and held her hand; he spoke at her grave.

            
            And if it were possible, he would have sighed, or maybe laughed before he hit the ground. If only it were possible—but in a way, he did.