Gravity
You should know that this is the most painful thing I have ever written.
I listened to Skinny Love by Bon Iver and Wicked Game by James Vincent McMorrow on a loop as I wrote this. There is some mild swearing and drinking. I don't own the Penderwicks.
…
Come on skinny love just last the year,
Pour a little salt we were never here,
My my my, my my my, my-my my-my...
Staring at the sink of blood and crushed veneer…
…
You were seventeen.
It was one of the Penderwick family's annual trips to Arundel and you weren't the little girl that you once were, with the knees perpetually scraped, your hair perpetually knotted. Your spirit was the same though. Wild. Free. Stubborn. Beautiful.
Something was there that summer that wasn't there before, something in the way the wind rustling in the trees sounded like his name. You never meant to feel this, but it's hard to avoid the wind [and you like the way it played with your hair]. Something was there that wasn't all that different [only much bigger].
This thing, growing like a cyst in your belly, had a name. You would not say it, you would not.
So you beat him at soccer.
And at archery.
And foot races.
But beating him doesn't wipe that goofy grin from his face like you wish it would, and now that grin has let loose a handful of butterflies in your stomach. As a girl that loves science and research, you want nothing more than to catch these butterflies, pin them up, tuck them under a microscope. Maybe you could dilute their colors and elegant shapes into an antidote and make this feeling go away. But these aren't those kinds of butterflies.
The name of this thing, as big as the sky is wide, is a very small word. Jane always beat you at crosswords, but you think you know the answer to this one. It hangs on the tip of your tongue but you won't let it fall because if you let it hit the earth like a shattering rain drop it will shatter your world. No, no, it can't be so.
Rosalind catches you staring at him across the gardens, walking towards you. [No, not staring. You were just zoned out. Your eyes were just glued in place. The laws of gravity just momentarily forgot Newton's name and a unique gravitational pull developed between your eyes as his slim features. But definitely not staring.] And when you turn a deep pink [you hate the unavoidables of biology] she leans over and whispers in your ear. "Its name," she says, "is love."
You sputter. You forget what it means to walk and fall flat on your face. You curse gravity.
[He wonders if you know how beautiful you are when you are tripping, literally tripping.] [1]
He jogs over to help you up, offering a hand.
"I am not a princess, I can do it myself."
Your words have the desired effect… pain. It flicks across his eyes and now they are less like celery and more like a forest floor [deep and dark and dead]. You are a grenade, aren't you? Blowing anything that gets too close to bits. But the brief look of pain clears on his face, and he has the audacity to grin down at you with a smile that could destroy the moon and swallow the sea. In you defense, that smile is enough to make anyone want to detonate in enemy trenches.
This was your moment of tragic realization. This was the first time you put a word, a terrible, ominous label, to this feeling that has become so synonymous with the freckled boy you can no longer seem to tell the two apart. Your nose bled for twenty minutes and you blamed gravity. Your stomach was gripped by an icy hand of something new, and you blamed him.
[Jeffrey's tragic realization had come and gone two years earlier. You were sitting on the roof laughing at something he said and suddenly Jeffrey was hit by a particularly powerful case of vertigo and butterflies and he quite nearly fell from his precarious perch on the shingles over your garage. He does not blame you. He simply waits.]
…
You and him always seem to find yourselves under the stars, laying on your backs in too tall grass after one-on-one soccer matches. You were looking through a telescope at his eyes one long summer night and it was more like looking through a kaleidoscope; green, with flecks of gold and toffee brown. There were stars there too, forming constellations that all looked like your own reflection.
His pupils are wide with wonder as you point your telescope towards the real stars then, and you can see whole sky reflected in his pupil's inky black. "Teach me how to fly to the moon," he said. His eyes are sparkling, laughing.
"I was under the impression that you were going to teach me."
He laughs and your glass heart bursts into a thousand tiny pieces, so small that they resemble stardust. The summer breeze blows your heart through the night like you hadn't spent seventeen years trying to keep it under lock and key, like everything you and fought for [literally fought, there are boys with bloody noses to prove this] was for naught, in vain.
And maybe it was. But maybe you don't mind being scattered by the wind because he is still smiling at you.
"Teach me to fly. We will go to Jupiter," he said.
You shake your head hard in protest. "We have too much gravity to overcome." You are making translucent excuses and his smiling eyes know it. In your defense, your own heart has been shattered and spread like dandelion seed. And his smile is like sunshine making your dandelion seeds take root. And now blooming in your chest is the most badass flower, going from bud to radiant blossom in ten second flat. [2]
"You and me Skye, we could do it."
Tonight, fingers and trembling hearts are so shy and you do not touch him for fear of getting burned. But all great things start small. After all, they say that the entire universe once was once condensed into a point that was thousands of times smaller than a pinhead. And then gravity ripped it apart in the most wondrous and exquisite explosion the universe has ever seen.
You will come into existence like the universe did, with a big bang. It will hurt to become. [3] Doom is impending, inevitable. All stars explode, get ripped apart by their own gravity, and our sun is no exception. Your atoms are splitting. Someday the sun will destroy the only world you have ever known.
And you might just let him.
…
You are researching black holes and gravity and theorists at Yale University, and it feels so impossibly far from where he studies rhythms and music theory and composers at Julliard.
The distance between you is yawning, endless.
He forgets to call back.
You get busy with exams and can't write.
The distance grows wider, and now the space between you has cracked open like the sky in a summer storm but you throw yourselves into work and you manage to half forget the fact that the other has neglected to write, to call. Do enough math problems and you half forget the terrifying, dizzying, and grossly simple fact… you miss him. You think that perhaps it is a blessing, this distance between you. Out of sight means you can occasionally put him out of your mind.
You think it must be gravity that makes you gravitate to your phone, check for a message you know won't be there. Unfortunately, you are in the midst of your term paper on famous scientists and Einstein rips apart your theory, writing "Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love." Drat. You curse the old man, stumbling over his next words. "How on earth can you explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?" You cling to the words "biological phenomenon" and begin searching biology textbooks for an explanation for the way every classical song sounds like his name put to music.
It is 2:04 a.m. the night before you physics exam and you are slumped over three biology books, your thumbs black with ink from paging through them. It is there that you realize that science cannot explain the physical pain in your chest when you think his name any more than it can explain the universe, and you actually, literally, in the middle of the library, throw your hands up in the air in defeat. This is the night you lose faith in everything you know. The night you lose faith in knowledge. All you are sure of now is the very real ache beneath you ribs.
You still check your phone, and you still blame gravity. After finals [You get a D on physics, a D] he calls you with an invitation to a piano recital in July. Your heart does a funny dance, like that of a flame in wind.
No. [flames]
Never. [still]
Not you. [burn]
You promise him that yes, you will be there come summer.
…
Spring comes bright and innocent with stained grass knees and a blooming heart.
Your classmates pull you from the library where you have been hibernating all winter and to houses you don't know, lawns riddled with red plastic cups and music spilling like bad beer that you don't touch.
A boy comes like spring did, a little drunkenly and sweetly, talking equations and his Theory of Everything. You try to think of something like Everything, and can't seem to stop picturing the universe reflected in the contours of his green irises, and you wonder how he became your world without your permission. You rebel against freckles and green, and take this new boy's hand [you only briefly wonder how his fingers would feel if woven between yours].
Come July, this boy insists that he attend the concert as well. You let him.
In a dark concert hall, you see him for the first time in seven [eight?] months. Jeffrey is exquisite and you are a little breathless watching him from five rows back. Every note hangs in the air, shimmering, shivering, and the echoes in your empty rib cage make your bones vibrate to something he has created [but this is not the first time].
You find him after in the dark corners of the stage where he introduces you to her, carefully.
Music major. Beautiful. And according to him, "brilliant."
You stumble away, fumbling for your boy's hand. He introduces himself and Jeffrey's smile never once cracks.
You think you might hate him a little bit.
[hate is so much easier to say]
…
You linger along the weathered picket fence of your backyard, picking at the peeling white paint and attempting to fade away into the red, white and blue décor. You have almost succeeded when you feel his fingers slip into yours, tugging you away from the fading edges that you teeter so dangerously on, away from your imagined oblivion.
You sit up on the roof, the very one from which he quite nearly toppled from when you hit him like a truck almost six years ago, and you pass a bottle of strawberry wine back and forth as you watch kids dancing barefoot in the street, lighting roman candles and sparklers with reckless abandon.
Your upper arm brushes his and your nerves are set on fire [a flame dancing in the wind]. You have become a firework. Veins and arteries are a lit fuse, the wine running through your veins, the catalysis for softly slurred words that will inevitably lead to a beautiful and paradoxically destructive explosion that leaves messy craters in your chest.
"How is… what's his name?"
"We broke up." You search his face.
"And her?" you ask.
"Gone."
You feel grimly triumphant at this, and vaguely terrified. You breathe in deep and your lungs fill with stars and smoke from fireworks. He is talking about a childhood then, a hedge tunnel and gingerbread childhood, and you watch him talk. You can't stop your throbbing heart from feeling that lazy summer night, and you hate it, you hate it.
"Damnit Jeffrey, I don't want to fall in love with you."
He stops for a moment and when he speaks again his voice is so soft. "Why not?"
Another sip of wine is warm and syrupy sweet in your throat. Your eyelids grow heavy and your tongue so soft with untold truth. "You are going to hurt me."
"I will. And you will hurt me. But we will do it passionately and with the best intentions and you might break me, but I swear to god, it's going to be beautiful." A firework bursts overhead in blue and paradox and your dandelion heart throws its mane to the unavoidable wind scattering itself like a suicide.
"You will not break me. You will crush me into pieces so small I will never be able to find them all again, and I'll never be whole." Wine makes you rather poetic [Jane would have been proud].
"Are you whole now?"
Part of you [your head] argues that your sharp angles, elbows and knees and bitter tongue will never fit into another's soft parts. That you will just hurt them. But part of you [your heart] insists that you are a little more like the jagged edges of an unfinished jigsaw puzzle and keeps whispering his name over and over like he is the missing piece. Insists that the corner pieces are the best ones, whispering "Yes, be open. Expand. Expand."
You turn away. "The moon is." Astronomy is so much easier that feelings.
"When will you learn that you are not the moon, Skye?"
"When I learn that gravity is not to blame for the state of things."
…
The next time you see him it's an unexpected August thunderstorm. The raindrops that hang in the air between you seem to smudge his silhouette as if he were merely an ink drawing of a boy and someone had left it out in the summer rain for the ink to run.
He is more than a little wet when you pull him inside but he picks up Batty all the same. She is talking fast and muffled [her face his pressed against him in a hug] about grand pianos and key signatures and how she can't believe he is here and he assures her that no, he would not miss it for the world.
Bags are flung down, Jeffrey is caught up and dinner is served. Dinner is a raucous affair, clinking cups and loud stories and lots of laughter that filled up the room. After, the family fragments; Rosalind off to study Latin, Jane off to write, Daddy to his study and Batty back to her keyboard that she had been perched in front of for hours, practicing for the recital the next day. Her piano piece is full and haunting and you secretly do not loath it [you secretly rather like it]. You offer to do the dishes [much to everyone's surprise] for the sake of getting the quiet kitchen all to yourself.
You stand in the dimly lit kitchen with your forehead pressed to the glass of the window over the sink watching raindrops race across the cool surface. Beyond the little drops of water the dark is too heavy to see anything, so instead of a wet yard you stare back at your own blue eyes. This house is haunted by a younger you, and you admire her so for her stoic heart. Nowadays yours does a bit too much feeling, softened by years [by him].
You feel his presence before you see him, or hear him even. He has a way about him that makes everything, the animate and inanimate alike, seem to lean in towards him. You still swear that this is gravity's doing, because how else can you explain the way he sucks the focus in a room toward him effortlessly, or the way eyes seems to find him inescapably? [You push away memories of drunken truths mumbled on stumbling breaths a few months ago, the only time you were ever honest about this.]
"Do you need a hand?" he asks.
You don't turn around. "Thanks."
He falls into rhythm beside you, wiping plates that you had already washed and putting them away in the cabinets. You pass him plates still warm with soapy water, and he dries. You don't talk, but you are both waiting for something to be said. Sometimes silence can be violent.
He turns to take your wet dishes from you just as you turn to get the soap from his side of the sink. Limbs collide, a little chaotically and awkwardly. You stumble back against the kitchen counter and suddenly a warm, slightly damp hand is pressed into the small of your back, the other resting just above your hip. Your faces are so close, and you can't look away. His lips are parted, trembling slightly and your mouth opens to match his. He wavers, closer, closer, and stumbling fingers knot in his shirt. The moment won't stay still but keeps teetering on weak knees. You don't remember how to breathe as his mouth comes closer yet but you don't have to, because suddenly the air in your lungs is his shivering exhale, and as your chest swelled with his breath in your lungs it sighed contently, "Ah yes expand. Always expand."
"Skye," he says your name and his eyes ask a question. You will not answer, you can't, and suddenly you realize the proximity of your fumbling mouths and shuddering hearts and you look away [you have defeated gravity].
Something shatters then, and whether it is the tender moment, a glass heart, or a wet ceramic plate is unclear, but it hurts like nothing you have ever felt.
Something between you is bleeding with quiet sincerity [4], and you let it run dry.
Batty plays beautifully.
…
You don't speak for a month.
When September rolls around, Jane takes matters into her own hands.
You are packing your things up to take back to college for your senior year, and now among meticulously folded maps and carefully stacked books, you find pieces of him you can't ignore. An old astronomy book he bought for you two years ago [now the spine is cracked and the pages are so impressively doggy eared that you can't deny how much you loved that book], a cassette tape of classical music that he forcibly made you listen to, a small wallet photo of both of you, laughing…
Jane never knocks, insists that it's her room too and such matters are hardly necessary. You jump when she barges in, talking fast about some new advancement in the literary world before she sees the photo in your hand and draws up short. Mixing on her face is an odd combination of gentle understanding and obvious accusation.
"You miss him."
"I do not."
"Why not just talk to him?" Meeting silence she presses on. "Skye, what happened between you two?"
You look up at her a little helplessly, and she joins you on your stripped bed, peeking into the cardboard box at the things that make you think of him [it feels a bit like she is peeking into your soul, and you want to lock it away].
She looks up. "Listen to me. As your sister I will not stand you moping around-"
"I'm not-"
"-and you ignoring him is positively ridiculous. It isn't his fault that you two are a tragic love story-"
"We are not-"
"-and you really ought to stop blaming him for the inevitable." You roll your eyes and Jane slides closer on the bare mattress, staring you down with chocolate eyes. "I mean it, Skye. Surrendering [Yes this was the word she used. Surrendering. You shudder at just the thought of a white flag] to love this one of the bravest things you can do and you are no coward, Skye Penderwick. Face your fears. Carpe diem, isn't that what Daddy always says? Our days are numbered so we can't wait to take a leap of faith into the uncharted territory of our hearts. We are so very finite, and this makes every moment, every first kiss, first dance, and "I love you" uttered from doomed-to-die lips, so very precious. Don't let yourself become inured to the cold Skye. Let him in."
You blinked.
Stood up.
"That was impressively bombastic. Even for you."
Jane groaned, exasperated, and flopped backwards on the bed.
You were hopeless.
…
You don't speak for a little over a year.
You are in New York for an astronomy convention, walking back to your hotel on the bright and crisp October day, when you see him walking the other way on 5th Avenue. He is a blur of color, smudged by the cars and taxis speeding through the street, and you stop where you are. He is wearing a long black coat and has his headphones on as he walks with his head down. Leaves swirl around him, falling like they are in love with the pavement.
You think for a moment that you will be able to fade away into the throbbing city, but something catches his gaze and then it's on you. He stops where he is. You stare at one another from across the street as bicyclists and cabs and buses go about their business like you aren't having a staring contest with a ghost across the avenue. You can't remember who breaks the look first but suddenly you are on the same side of the street and you are stumbling over hellos and how are yous. He asks if you would get a coffee with him and you don't remember saying yes.
Nevertheless, you are in a small café shortly after.
The air between you is so still it's like glass, and breathing in hurts in a way that confirms your metaphor. You swirl your coffee, wince at the bitterness, and wince at the awkward small talk nature of your conversation. He is talking about the weather and because it has been sunny and cold since the beginning of the month, the conversation isn't going anywhere. You watch him talk, watch his all too familiar lips form words, and you find that you are almost jealous of these mere collections of letters, these carefully formed sounds on breathless exhales. You tell yourself that you are simply jealous of his eloquence while speaking, the way he never stumbles on words the way you do, but you know that this isn't quite it [Jealous because these words are braver than you. They know the contours of his lips, the topography of his mouth, and you have written it off as uncharted territory]. He rambles about fall leaves on the Hudson and cold breezes on Second Street, but his voice starts to sound the way it did when he said your name that rainy August night and suddenly your only thoughts are of green on blue and breath on breath, and he is in the middle of a sentence about the way the sun sets gold over the city skyline when…
"You never called." Your voice is so much louder then you expected it to be and you look around to see if anyone noticed. Apparently New Yorkers are used to loud.
He whispers. "I didn't think you wanted me to."
"I didn't. But…" You can't say it.
"I missed you," he says.
[I missed you too.] You say nothing.
"How are your studies going?"
You smile, just a little, because it isn't small talk anymore.
…
Talk is easy after that, and after an entire year of not speaking, you have a lot of it to do. The café gets crowded, so you leave, taking the stories to the busy streets of New York in the evening. You find yourselves walking along the water, sparkling like a million tiny diamonds as the sinking sun strikes it. It makes the water look warm, when surely it is frigid. Jane would weave metaphors comparing you to the Hudson [Your hard smile a carefully constructed façade hiding the truths beneath like cold water.] But metaphors are for the romantics, and you prefer to see things how they really are [cold water is cold water, and hidden truths are meant to be hidden].
"I bought a new apartment two weeks ago," he says, his hands shoved in his pockets, his face tilted away from you just slightly, and toward the sun.
"How do you like it?"
"It's… empty, honestly. Lonely. And the walls are the most unbearable white."
You laugh. "So paint them."
…
He let you pick out the color at the hardware shop on the corner, and then you are standing in the middle of an empty [and very white] apartment in the fading light with two buckets of paint.
You are by no means an artist, so you paint numbers on the walls and he fills in the space between them. Isn't he always filling in the spaces? [He has filled in the spaces between your ribs].
You move too quickly and flick a drop of sky blue paint that catches on his jaw. He laughs and your eyes widen as you realize his intentions for revenge. Laughing, you run, flicking paint over your shoulder as you go. Blue paint catches in your hair. Blue paint catches his ear. Blue paint flecks look like freckles.
He has you pinned against a wet wall with eyes laughing, and you throw your hands up in surrender. His laughing look fades and he is looking at you in a way that makes your mouth go dry.
"Thank you for coming."
"Of course."
The sun sets brilliantly through the windows overlooking the city and falls on the swirling blues, still wet. The sunlight spilling into the room makes the air between you and him seem to shimmer. It's like you are looking at him through a veil, and your limbs become clumsy and uncoordinated. Feet forget how to walk, hands forget where they are supposed to go. He is saying your name, just your name like a prayer, and his thumb comes to your jaw to touch the fleck of blue.
He is saying something about your eyes now, and how the paint on your chin looks like chips of your crystal blue irises and you can't think, you can't think. Surely quantum physics and string theory are missing something very important because the numbers aren't adding up in your head and you can't figure out why you are so impossibly incapacitated by the way he is looking at you right now, smudged by blue and sun but you are, oh you are.
"Jeffrey." Just his name.
He stops talking about the way your eyes look like whole notes.
"Skye."
"You know that... it's just… I'll always come."
He looks at you like that is quite possibly the greatest thing you have ever said before the space between you closes.
And he is kissing you.
Hard.
Gravity.
Your paint bucket in your hand falls because fingers forget the art of lifting. Gravity. You let a blue paint puddle grow around you both like a bruise and you think that this is fitting because there is no way you are coming out of this unbroken, without wounds.
His mouth is melting, open. Blue fingers twist through messy hair. Arms go around you. Green eyes wide open, meeting blue. Your back hits wet plaster and you have become an art project but you don't care, you can't. Because this is vertigo and falling up because the laws of gravity no longer seem to apply to matters of you and him. Atoms explode on atoms and you are two stars collapsing in on themselves and you feel as though you have been ripped into existence. The big bang.
He still doesn't have any furniture [it is all in boxes in the kitchen] but you both sleep there on the hardwood floors in the middle of the room, in the middle of your painting. Lying there, you learn that while you had once thought yourself blessedly removed from things as metaphorical and unquantifiable as love, perhaps you aren't so removed after all. And perhaps you are the opposite. You learn that you quite like the way he says your name in his sleep.
And nothing has ever scared you more.
His walls look like the sky now, and he can't look anywhere without thinking your name.
…
You wake beside him the next morning [It feels like a different kind of morning. Perhaps a bit more like mourning.] and the way his kisses still course through your veins makes you feel slightly hung over. Headache. Shaky knees. He is like poison under your skin. You leave before he wakes.
He knows that he is alone before he opens his eyes because it is so cold.
He doesn't chase you.
This is the frayed end and the torturous beginning of something that never really begins. This is the topography of false starts [5]. You will spend forever like this, almost touching but not quite. You are two galaxies, long spindly arms reaching out to each other in the black void, your gravity almost strong enough to rip each other apart but not quite… and you simply pass by in the nothing. Something somewhere in the universe cracks, but you have your fingers in your ears and he has his headphones on again to fill up the space you left in his rattling brain and neither of you hear the stars rip themselves apart in their grief.
You are a book half written that is too good to put down, a grave half dug and too shallow to lay anything to rest there. He calls sometimes, talks about the weather. You were so close…
Almost.
But not quite.
…
The next time you see him, he laughs like he's never been lonely, and that's alright with you. Maybe you didn't know you knew better and you tiptoed around the confession like a landmine that you wanted to dance on. Rosalind knows better, catches your arm, asks you a question that you don't hear. You don't need to hear though, because you have been asked it too many times to count since you left his apartment that cold October morning.
"I'm ok," you say. She doesn't believe you, but lets it go. Maybe she knows that you are just trying your best.
He walks with you on wet pavement, and your fingers brush.
Your hands find his in all the dark corners, under tables with paper tablecloths.
At Batty's graduation you sit on the front steps and his knee bumps yours.
It's ok.
You could have had it all, but it's ok. [6]
…
You find his green eyes in a room dressed in white. [He thinks you have never looked more lovely]. When they say "speak now" he gives you the smallest smile and keeps his mouth shut, the taste of you held under his tongue, words he could never say held between his teeth like a bullet.
…
You are careful to avoid the subtle touches now.
…
He watches you with him.
…
You're at a party, standing in the main hall of Arundel and you are both on opposite sides of the room talking to other people when your gazes catch over the heads of strangers. [Your eyes are like soft drops of blue glass, and he thinks he can see the whole world there and something like forever]. You smile, and for a tender moment, a fragile, fleeting, shivering moment, you're connected by some invisible line, by some impossible force that isn't gravity at all. In that moment you are fearlessly in love. When the moment snaps like the thin silk of a spider's thread, gossamer, you turn reluctantly away.
…
Near a black hole, time slows. And while no one will ever really know, astronomers believe that at the bottom of a black hole time stops completely. You want nothing more than to love him there. But time doesn't stop and gravity keeps pulling on the frayed edges of things, always falling, never landing. This is the tragedy of flightless birds and gravity. This is the tragedy of you and him.
End.
I'm so sorry it had to end this way.
…
[1] Andrea Gibson, "Honey" ["He wonders… literally tripping"]
[2] Jandy Nelson, "The Sky is Everywhere" [And now blooming… ten seconds flat"]
[3] Andrea Gibson, "I Sing the Body Electric, Especially When My Power's Out." ["It hurts to become"]
[4] Caitlyn Siehl, "The Poet" ["bleeding with quiet sincerity"]
[5] Paul Guest, from "The Report from Home," in The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World: Poems ["This is the topography of false starts"]
[6] Caitlyn Siehl, "A Burial" (this one is not a direct quote but more of the inspiration for this paragraph)