The world has been this way for a long time.
(1,417 words)
The world has been this way for a long time.
I was thinking, after I dropped your daughter off at the fields, how many years we’ve all been living at the precipice, waiting for the drop. Beneath the floating city overhead, the soccer fields still sit, all mid-August brown, beside the storage units; paths climb up to the water towers, hidden in the trees. You and I came here as teens, loitering by the towers. We would sit on the concrete and have conversations too deep for three in the afternoon. Now your daughter is reaching the age when the soccer fields and the concrete and the dirt paths will all belong to her.
It’s funny: the things that are passed on, the world that remains. We live in a lineage whether we want to or not, one built on the ruins of every time past. The city cast a shadow over the valley as I headed out to Trisha’s, its hot wind buffeting the car like a leaf. Then it was gone. Sometimes, I think the builders were just trying to find a way of living without ruins—everything new, nothing around them but the air. They don’t want to reckon with the past—they want a blank slate, and they’ll burn the world beneath them to get it.
* * *
I’ve spent much of my adult life wondering how much longer.
When we first met, I would wonder: how much longer it would be before you commented on how cold I was, how I never told you how I felt. I remember lying in your arms with your laptop on the table while a news crew reported on a wildfire. Live wires crackled, siding melted off houses, flames danced in evil jubilee. The reporter told us a passing city had started it: fans and engines stoking sparks which fell and raged through the drought-dry brush.
How much longer?
Every time I’m out in the streets with chants in my ears and clashes with cops getting closer through the crowd, I think to myself: This is when it all takes off. This time, we’ll remember that the people who did this have names and addresses, and we’ll take the fight to them. We’ll knock them out of the sky, and their cities will come crashing down like meteors, and in the blaze they will be forced to reckon with those of us below. Every time I think: This is the last time we will do this.
But then I keep living.
Many of us do.
* * *
We were at your mother’s farm for a birthday a few years ago. We could sense what was coming, but didn’t know how it all would happen. It was a little gathering, a few people that you knew from your childhood (funny how long the world’s been like this) and I was in the kitchen with your mother. She was passing me food to bring out to the table, plastic gingham pinned down with bag clips, blue-and-white china weighing down the corners. As she handed me deviled eggs, she said, “They talk about you a lot, you know.”
Outside, your daughter was playing badminton with other children. (A little close to the cattle fence, but they were country kids—they knew what they were doing.) In the sky above, a thick, white contrail drifted through the blue, dissipating.
“Do they?” I asked, trying to hide my trepidation.
Your mother: I didn’t have a read on her then. She was all short white hair and pleasant cheer, with a liberal insistence that I expected to result in uncomfortable questions. But you’d trained her well, I think, and I’ve just been burned by generations of women I don’t connect with, who mistake me for something I’m not.
She dried her hands on a canvas apron and said, “They think highly of your opinions.”
I nodded, awkwardly.
“Are you planning to stay around?”
She said it in such a way that I knew she didn’t mean for dinner. Trapped, holding a plate of slippery deviled eggs, I realized I’d been cornered. Maybe she’d sensed my uncertainty.
At the time, I’d been planning to stay with you for as long as it seemed right, but old women mean different things than I do. The kind of relationships they expect: dresses and suits and names on paper. Contractual things.
Stay around. Would I have been so spooked if all my relationships weren’t built on the ruins of things I rejected? It made me think of my own differences, carving space for myself in the gaps of others’ lives and leaving when I had to. As a child, I’d wandered the paths between the fields and water towers, a place of escape between structures that weren’t built for me. As an adult, I’d searched for other ways to go on living without forcing myself to be something I’m not. “I think so,” I said, as honestly as I could.
Later, as you and your father were out feeding the animals, your mother and I sat on the porch with golden wine. People left one by one. The day was getting long and threadbare, like beloved yellow linen. The far-off thrum of fans and engines started as the city made its circuit, and patches of blasted, dry land scored the valley, the earth uninhabitable and scorched.
Then your daughter climbed up on the deck and sat at my feet. It was the first time she seemed like she trusted me, instead of just regarding me with distant, student-like respect. “Alyssa showed me the hayloft,” she reported. “There are no adults allowed up there, though.”
“Even if we’re cool?” I asked, and she shook her head sadly, making your mother and me laugh.
“Sorry, no,” she said, in the way kids mimic jokes they’ve heard. “You just don’t make the cut.”
The city appeared in the distance, rising up like a shining black moon over the hills. Your daughter watched it with a detached interest: an everyday sight, regarded without reverence. For me, though, it still felt recent—yet another new horror to reckon with. Another vast, damning excess.
For a moment, we were three generations, all stacked on top of each other, and time swept out before me like a landscape one could traverse, backwards and forwards, return to again and again.
The city grew. It blotted out the sky, and the deafening roar filled the valley as it accelerated. Your mother shouted over it, pointing out the lights and signs on the silver-black buildings to your daughter, and I sat there feeling no awe, only cold fear. With the earth used up, the rich flee to the skies, mocking us with their insulation from consequence.
The hot wind swept over us, and the sun sank and plunged us into yellow and red and fading, waning blue.
* * *
At night, when our other partners and your daughter are asleep downstairs, I come up and sit with you as you work. The building where we live is leased, and our lives are still leased, and the heat gets thicker every day, but sometimes the fever breaks. I curl beside you, and think of those philosophers who’d thought that history had been killed, that there was only one shining future.
That was early in my life. A whole lifetime ago, now.
The world has been like this for a long time. People have had so many convictions—that the world would end, that the world would be saved, that God would pass judgment on the wrongdoers and rain down fire. Now, staring down a fire artificial and godless, I wonder how long we will live like this, building in our own ruins until we run out of space. Living in the shadows of the cities overhead.
“Communists have to be optimists,” you always tell me, and I believe you. I do believe you, curled up like a fox beside you as the light burns slowly, and cicadas still rush outside the window, and night coils late, with an infinity still left to us before dawn. Your stillness lets me settle into a love I’m glad you let me feel without demand or recourse. Something changing, and returning, and unforced.
“How will we know when we’re beat?” I asked you once in a moment of despair.
And you reminded me: “We have to be optimists. It’s not up to us to say when we’re through.”
Vincent Endwell originally hails from unceded Onondaga territory (Central New York). Their work has been published previously in Dark Horses Magazine, Corvid Queen, and Your Body is Not Your Body, an anthology from Tenebrous Press, among others.