AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Best Fitzgerald?”
“Cruise of the Rolling Junk”
“I don’t know it.”
“Ah, but it’s Fitzgerald at his finest. Travelers in the bloom of youth bound for points unknown, happiness hanging from trees, rings to tilt for, garlands, bright and shiny and reminiscent of the sweetness of life, to be won. Oh, but to be able to write like Fitzgerald,” I enthused.
“I’ll look for it.”
“It’s hard to find. You won’t find it for your Kindle, either. I’ll send it sometime.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Nao Kao, when have I ever not been ridiculous?”
One of his preferred laughing stickers floated onto my screen.
“Remember when we went canoeing?” I asked.
“I remember everything, Liss. But that was probably the most ridiculous.”
I went back to my work, thinking about how the little details Nao Kao revealed conversation-by-conversation proved his comment was no idle boast – from the grade I’d earned in a particular class, to the exact hue of a favorite sweater, to the specs of the camera he’d cajoled me into purchasing one weekend at Best Buy, Nao Kao forgot nothing. Some might consider the ability to lodge so many memories a gift, but to my thinking it was at least as much a curse.
My phone buzzed.
“What’s your favorite line from literature? Or any book?” He must have been feeling pensive.
“There’s this little memoir I love about a hardscrabble childhood in war-torn Africa,” I had no sooner typed the words than I wished to recall them. Nao Kao did not need the author ofCocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulnessto remind him that the beauty and the sorrow of life is that we never know which moments of heartbreak or ecstasy will be the most defining of our life.
“Scratch that. The opening lines inCutting for Stoneare probably my favorite. The idea that none of us asks to be born into this life, and that those of us who find purpose other than wretchedness, destitution, and an early date with death should consider ourselves lucky beyond measure.”
“Too dark. Are you always so morose?”
Funny that you should ask, I wanted to say. My therapist, Stacy, asked me the same question recently, and I was forced to acknowledge that for all my bright and chipper exterior, my streak of darkness appears to be congenital. Memories ofAdventures with Nao Kaowere not the only treasure I had uncovered these past few months.
In the depths of my childhood closet, which I had been kindly requested for the hundredth time to set to rights only to finally do so, I uncovered reams and reams of writings dating to the days when both my orthography and penmanship left much to be desired. From the earliest writing sample, on the back of which my mother had dutifully recorded the date, in the middle of second grade, on through the musings of Christmas Eves more recent that I cared to admit, dark narratives tumbled forth.
In the earliest little story, I killed off the heroine – she was eight, like me – and on Christmas Eve, no less. It was fast-acting leukemia that got her – diagnosed around dawn, she was dead before dinner.
I pinned the ending of another story to the cork board in my office, simply because I liked the melancholy and morosity it evoked, even a decade after I penned it.
A patio in Gastown was the last place he expected to see her, but there was no mistaking Clem. Her blue suit was well-cut; the seafoam green scarf wound in neat loops around her neck was clearly silk. Where a dozen silver bracelets had once glinted around her wrist, a heavy diamond bracelet lay.
As the memories broke over him like waves tumbling against the shore, her old laugh filled the air. In that moment, the street noise – the homeless man incessantly seeking a quarter, the whistle of the steam clock, the din of trains and boats and seaplanes – disappeared and he was twenty-two again, striding unsteadily toward the girl he believed he would marry.
From deadly diseases to car accidents to star-crossed lovers, my stories had it all. Except for a happy end.
Was I always so morose?
“You know it,” I replied to Nao Kao. “What’s your favorite quote?”
My phone rang with fires to put out. Late night in Laos was mid-morning for me.
It would be hours before I returned to the conversation, long after Nao Kao had gone to sleep, before I would see his reply.
“You don’t remember? The line fromLove Story,la.”
Now that he asked, of course I remembered. What I hadn’t decided was whether a belief in never needing to say you’re sorry to one you loved was a romantic ideal or a selfish one, or maybe, like so many things that were neither black nor white, it was both. Either way, Nao Kao always did love Erich Segal. In grad school, he convinced me to readLove Story,and I still wasn’t sure I had completely forgiven him for the tears I had shed.
