Extraordinary world

Before.

Francois Rabelais. He was this poet. And his last words were ‘I go to seek a Great Perhaps.’ That’s why I’m going. So I don’t have to wait until I die to start seeking a Great Perhaps.  

Because you simply cannot draw these things out forever. At some point, you just pull off the Band-Aid and it hurts, but then it’s over and you’re relieved.

He was shaken by the overwhelming revelation that the headlong race between his misfortunes and his dreams was at that moment reaching the finish line. The rest was darkness. “Damn it,” he sighed. “How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!”

And now is as good a time as any to say that she was beautiful.

That’s the mystery, isn’t it? Is the labyrinth living or dying? Which is he trying to escape – the world or the end of it?

“Why do you smoke so damn fast?” I asked.

She looked at me and smiled widely, and such a wide smile on her narrow face might have looked goofy when it not for the unimpeachably elegant green in her eyes. She smiled with all the delight of a kid on Christmas morning and said, “Y’all smoke to enjoy it. I smoke to die.”

She talked softly and thoughtfully, like she was telling me a secret, and I leaned in toward her, suddenly overwhelmed with the feeling that we must kiss.

You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking how you’ll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining the future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.

“Sometimes I don’t get you,” I said.

She didn’t even glance at me. She just smiled and said. “You never get me. That’s the whole point.”

I didn’t know whether to trust Alaska, and I’d certainly had enough of her unpredictability – cold one day, sweet the next; irresistibly flirty one moment, resistibly obnoxious the next.

“Suffering,” she said. “Doing wrong and having wrong things happen to you. That’s the problem. How do you get out of the labyrinth of suffering?”

And both of us lying on our sides, she smiled, our noses almost touching, my unblinking eyes on hers, her face blushing from the wine, and I opened my mouth again but this time not to speak, and she reached up and put a finger on my lips and said, “Shh. Shh. Don’t ruin it.”

“I try not to be scared, you know. But I still ruin everything, I still fuck up. Don’t you know who you love, Pudge? You love the girl who makes you laugh and shows you porn and drinks wine with you. You don’t love the crazy, sullen bitch.”

And there was something to that, truth be told.

You don’t have to care about her, I told myself. Screw her.

People. I thought, wanted security. They couldn’t bear the idea of death being a big black nothing, couldn’t bear the thought of their loved ones not existing, and couldn’t even imagine themselves not existing. I finally decided that people believed in an afterlife because they couldn’t bear not to.

There comes a time when we realize that our parents cannot save themselves or save us, that everyone who wades through time eventually gets dragged out to sea by the undertow – that, in short, we are all going. Find your way out of that maze.

She shook her head and sipped the cold coffee and wine. “Pudge, what you must understand about me is that I am a deeply unhappy person.”

Alaska started. “Truth or Dare, Pudge.”

“Dare.”

“Hook up with me.”

So I did.

“This is so fun,” she whispered, “but I’m so sleepy. To be continued?” She kissed me for another moment, my mouth straining to stay near hers, and then she moved from beneath me, placed her head on my chest, and fell asleep instantly. As she slept, I whispered. “I love you, Alaska Young.”

After.

“Last night, Alaska Young was in a terrible accident. And she was killed. Alaska passed away.”

I thought: I’m going to throw up.

In between gags and coughs, I sucked air in hard. Her mouth. Her dead, cold mouth. To not be continued. I knew she was drunk. Upset. Obviously you don’t let someone drive drunk and pissed off. Obviously. And here is whatever of her I had left in my mouth, here in the trash can.

All night, I felt paralyzed into silence, terrorized. She was dead. She was warm and soft against my skin, my tongue in her mouth, and she was laughing, trying to teach me, make me better, promising to be continued. And now. And now she was colder by the hour, more dead with every breath I took.

That was the first time I had seen her, and now we were coming to the last. More than anything, I felt the unfairness of it, the inarguable injustice of loving someone who might have loved you back but can’t due to deadness. It hurt, and that is not an euphemism. It hurt like a beating.

And if I cared about her as I should have, as I thought I did, how could I have let her go?

Did she love me?  Or it was just another impulsive Alaska moment? It was not enough to be the last guy she kissed. I wanted to be the last guy she loved. And I knew I wasn’t. I knew it, and I hated her for that, I hated her for not caring about me. I hated her for leaving that night, and I hated myself, too, not only because I let her go but because if I had been enough for her, she wouldn’t have even wanted to leave.

She taught me everything I knew. She made me different.

Everything that comes together falls apart. When you stop wishing things wouldn’t fall apart, you’d stop suffering when they did.

I’d tasted her boozy breath. And then something invisible snapped inside her, and that which came together commenced to fall apart.

I’d finally had enough of chasing a ghost who did not want to be discovered.

“So how will we ever get out of this labyrinth?” I asked.

“If only I knew,” he said.

“After all this time, it still seems to me like straight and forward is the only way out – but I choose the labyrinth. The labyrinth blows, but I choose it.”

There were so many of us who would have to live with things done and things left undone that day. Things that did not go right, things that seemed okay at the time because we could not see the future. If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions. But we can’t know better until knowing better is useless. But the not-knowing would not keep me from caring, and I would always love Alaska Young, my crooked neighbor, with all my crooked heart.

So I know she forgives me, just as I forgive her. Thomas Edison’s last words were: “It’s very beautiful over there.” I don’t know where there is, but I believe it’s somewhere, and I hope it’s beautiful. 

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