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It sucked having a dead person in your family, and I knew what he meant, about seeking solace in the old light. Three years from now, I knew, he'd find a different favorite star, one with older light to gaze upon. And when time caught up with that one, he'd love a farther star, and a farther one, because you can't let the light catch up with the present. Otherwise you'd forget.
That's why I liked looking at my dad's pictures. It was the same thing, really. Photographs are just light and time.
"I should go," I said quietly.
"Can I see you this weekend?"
"Yeah," I said.
"Could we hang out at your house next time, maybe?"
"Sure," I said. "If you don't mind being harassed by my mother."
He assured me he didn't, and then we hugged good-bye, and as I left him alone in his room, he knelt back down to the telescope.
--
When I got home that night, I told Mom that Davis wanted to come over this weekend. "Is he your boyfriend?" she asked.
"I guess so," I said.
"He respects you as an equal?"
"Yeah."
"He listens to you as much as you listen to him?"
"Well, I'm not great at talking. But yes. He listens to me. He's really, really sweet, and also at some point you just hav
e to trust me, you know?"
She sighed. "All I want in this world is to keep you. Keep you from hurt, keep you from stress, all that." I hugged her. "You know I love you."
I smiled. "Yeah, Mom. I know you love me. You definitely don't have to worry about that."
--
After going to bed that night, I checked in on Davis's blog.
"Doubt thou that the stars are fire, / Doubt that the sun doth move."
--WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
It dothn't move, of course--well, it does, but not around us. Even Shakespeare assumed fundamental truths about the fundament that turned out to be wrong. Who knows what lies I believe, or you do. Who knows what we shouldn't doubt.
Tonight, under the sky, she asked me, "Why do all the ones about me have quotes from The Tempest? Is it because we are shipwrecked?"
Yes. Yes, it is because we are shipwrecked.
I hit refresh after reading it, just in case, and there was a new entry, posted minutes before.
"There's an expression in classical music. It goes, 'We went out to the meadow.' It's for those evenings that can only be described in that way: There were no walls, there were no music stands, there weren't even any instruments. There was no ceiling, there was no floor, we all went out to the meadow. It describes a feeling."
--TOM WAITS
I know she's reading this right now. (Hi.) I felt like we went out to the meadow tonight, only we weren't playing music. In the best conversations, you don't even remember what you talked about, only how it felt. It was like we weren't even there, lying together by the pool. It felt like we were in some place your body can't visit, some place with no ceiling and no walls and no floor and no instruments.
And that really should have ended my evening. But instead of going to sleep, I decided to torture myself by reading more Ayala stories.
