When We Were Infinite: List 5

I could bike to his house, or I could call someone else, but either option felt eternal and also untenable.

“Also, Jason—we’re here if you need anything. All of us are. You know that, right? I always assumed you knew, but just in case we never explicitly said it.”

I had been terrified, and I had snapped at Brandon and then hung up on him, and I had, in a way, preemptively lived through disaster; I had emotionally gone through it because it had been real to me—and for what?

I tore open the envelope, ripping faster at the end so the scratchy, fibrous sound of paper tearing became a tiny crescendo.

I watched him looking at the menu in line, his hands shoved into his back pockets, all the contours of his expression and his body so familiar to me.

It had been over three years since I’d been here, but it looked the same—the trellis against the side wall of the leasing center, the huge carved wooden sign that functioned as a building map.

On the way here, I’d pictured knocking, going right in, but my nerve had dissipated seeing him, and my image of how this was going to go had evaporated.

As though I were caught in a spell, my whole body turned to something like cotton—I felt diaphanous and weightless, unrooted.

And at the time I’d always felt there was something almost glamorous about apartments, and for a long time my father’s seemed a sort of daring zenith in my mind.

You can talk about these things, you can give form and detail to their grandiosity, precisely because you know you’ve lost them already, or you’ve never had them at all.

When I stood, there was a palpitation in my heart, a heavy, hollow thump like a knock on a door.

I couldn’t keep my mind from descending into panic over all the machinations that could be happening out in the world without me.

Then Jason laughed, incredulous, all the lines on his face softening.

“I’m leaving,” I said, and though they blinked at me, startled, and glanced at each other—and I felt them reaching for a consensus, I felt the emptiness of a future when that kind of meaningful look would go unanswered—they didn’t try to stop me.

To get to the Golden Gate Bridge from Congress Springs if you don’t have a car takes nearly four hours if you’re relying on public transit, and when I looked up the route on Google Maps it was so convoluted, with so many stops, I knew I wouldn’t be able to do it.

People always said you made new friends after high school, that you met new people, but then you met new people and they blathered on about inane trivia about bridges while you were trapped in their car.

I could feel the bleakness of my future trying desperately to winnow some kind of sustaining purpose and intimacy from a hundred stupid interactions like this one.

He turned it on—I didn’t have the energy to stop him—and we listened to the second half of a mediocre rendition of a Delibes operetta.

And then the next song on Paul’s playlist (Beethoven’s Fifth, which if I were in another mood might have amused me) ended and the next one that came on—it took me a little while to recognize it as a take on the end of Bach’s The Art of Fugue.

I wouldn’t consign myself to San Diego or Irvine and I would find some way to make Juilliard work, and that would be how I would start over, who I would be.

On Monday, I feigned illness.

At the airport before our flight back home the next day, I bought her a box of Milk Duds, her favorite candy, an infinitesimally small gesture compared to what I meant.

The truth was that now Jason was always the vise around my lungs; at least when we were talking openly about him, I didn’t have to pretend I wasn’t still trying to breathe past all those bruises.

I could feel something ratcheting up between us.

To me it had always been a difficult, anxious, angry piece, at parts nearly incandescent in its fury, but also somehow one that had made me feel less alone.

I don’t know why I thought fleetingly that he’d back down, that he’d realize how absurd this was, but he didn’t.

There were probably thirty or forty people from my class at Las Colinas who’d gone there with me, but it wasn’t anyone I was close to and that made it worse somehow, seeing them around campus, an uncanny valley of my life.

I barely talked to Jason, although I wished often—and maybe perversely—that he’d call me.

I had to relearn how to hear things again, how to sift through things like pain and rage and loss and from them cull what I could transfer into sound.

And Mr. Irving was ecstatic—he teared up when he found out—but I think my mother was the most overjoyed of all.

But one day in Colloquium the teacher mentioned how normal it was to have impostor syndrome and afterward, London, who lived a few doors down from me, said, “I thought she was going to say, everyone here has impostor syndrome except for London, who we can all agree is a legitimate hack,” and we all laughed and it was a little better after that.

“For a while I thought I’d just literally never come back home, but then the guilt got to me. First-generation problems, I guess. But it’s easier now that I’m gone. Also, I’ve been seeing this therapist.”
“Really?” I was surprised. “Like, of your own volition?”

And it was easier there, somehow, between us, like in a new place we were unfettered from all our ghosts.

When I was with him, the future was all expansive possibility.

We’d been to hell together, with Jason, but maybe those are the things that draw you close and it’s the mundane that lets you drift apart: different locations, different obligations.

I’d never seen Tag angry—he found it unseemly and also unnecessary, a waste of emotional investment.

Sometimes the people who know you best can speak into your life—they can illuminate all its shadowed parts for you to see. But I wasn’t quite sure if that was still true with us, whether that was the kind of adage Sunny would tell anyone or whether she still knew how to be exactly right about me.

Maybe, as we were all moving into new futures yet again, it would feel like a requiem.

She walked into my room like she’d been in it a hundred times and handed me a bouquet, peonies and greenery she told me she’d bought on the way at Trader Joe’s and had arranged herself and then tied with a silk ribbon she’d packed expressly for that purpose.

And in that room, in the way the night felt suspended like the morning was never quite going to come, it was as though all the things we’d been remembering and revisiting together had formed a little pouch around us, had pulled a drawstring to cordon us off once more into this old closeness.