“…you know what I mean? It’s like it just gets interpreted as noise. And then there’s… Hey, are you listening?”
It was getting dark, and the rhythm of the wheels on the asphalt and the passing streetlights were hypnotic. I was zoned out, head resting on the window, trying not to think. I mumbled something that must have satisfied him. I had no idea what he was talking about. Behind us and to the east were the myriad lights of the city, full of some kind of farewell. Even at this distance I could make out brands, movie advertisements, spotlights, fast food, lingerie. Everything that made up a life. Ahead and to the left was a slowly thickening darkness, punctuated by scattered ships.
“…baby? Hey? Are you there?”
I snapped out of it. “Sorry, yeah. I must’ve been napping for a second.”
“Is it okay if you drive for a bit? I want to get some sleep before driving through the rest of the night.”
“Yeah. Sure.”
A quick glance over at me. “Everything all right?” And eyes back on the road. “You seem… quiet?” Somehow turning a statement into a question.
“I’m fine. Just tired from today.”
We pulled over. As we swapped seats, I took a moment to look back down the road. The sun had set. Pools of empty light repeated into the distance. There was a break in the wind, and the road was quiet. I shivered, then got back in behind the wheel.
He slouched down in his seat as I turned the key. “Wake me up when you get tired,” he mumbled. I nodded, not caring if he was watching.
The plan was just like him—driving through the night so as to eke out a little extra time away; even if it meant the following day would be a write-off. But I’d grown tired of trying to convince him when he was wrong.
As I drove, I found it difficult to differentiate the stars and the signal lights of ships in the vague darkness ahead. The ships bobbed on the waves; the stars shimmered and shifted as the night air cooled and flowed down to the Earth. Both moved with the same drift, like seaweed or ghosts.
Driving in the dark always made me want to switch the lights off and coast, or to close my eyes and see how far I could get with my foot pressed to the floor.
Occasionally I chanced a glimpse of his sleeping face, reflected in the passenger window, pale and dull like the daytime moon. Once, he had hurt me by telling me he never dreamt.
“What do you mean?” I said.
We were in the kitchen on a sharp November afternoon, wrapped up in jackets, the heating off to save money. We were both broke. Beyond the window, the sky was cool and crisp, and the shadows on the road had an air of eternity to them. We were making bread, the countertops and our jackets covered in flour.
“Exactly that,” he said. “When I go to sleep, there’s nothing. I close my eyes, I think a bit about the day, and then I wake up. There’s never anything in between.”
“Nobody doesn’t dream, Lin.” I prodded him in the stomach with a flour-coated finger. “I’m sure if they hooked you up to one of those brain-scan things they would see plenty of late-night activity.”
He shrugged. “But if I don’t remember it at all, what’s the difference?”
And then suddenly it hurt me very deeply that he might not dream, might not think anything in the quiet hours of night. “You’re making this up,” I said, feeling unreasonable and self-aware but not wanting to stop. “I’m sure I’ve heard you talking in your sleep. I can’t… I don’t know.” And then, knowing that this was too far, that I had no right to say it, but saying it anyway: “You’re lying to me.”
“Sure. Whatever you say.”
He’d started doing that recently, I don’t know when. Shutting down, instead of trying to convince me of something. I’d lost count of how many of our conversations ended with that pained, “Sure.”
I was never sure where to look in the flat silence that followed these moments. My gaze slipped over the kitchen, all the evidence of our intertwined lives. Mugs and plates and tea towels and even the toaster—signs of things done together.
The cold autumn light lent these objects an air of finality, like things that would be over soon, already distant, somewhere between where we stood and a metaphysical horizon; but not faded or hazy because of this, rather becoming bold, distinct entities that pressed up against your vision in farewell. I leaned on the windowsill and put my forehead up against the cold glass. Breathed out.
Now it was his face pressed up against the glass, perfectly still even as the car shivered over the road.
After that conversation, I had begun to watch him carefully whenever he slept and I was awake. He never so much as twitched or cried out in the night. I began to believe him.
As I drove, I tried to count the streetlights which rushed past. I imagined the uncountable string of them, stretching out behind and in front of us, a frail necklace, almost invisible in the dark, tracing the melancholy line of our journey, headed north away from everything I loved.
We met in the middle of one of the coldest winters either of us had known.
It was at a friend’s gallery opening. I had debated with myself all week as to whether I would even go. Recently I had been feeling detached. Most nights I would stay awake until 4 or 5 a.m., scrolling through internet forums, listening to music I’d loved as a teenager, crying. When I awoke it was usually dark already.
Yet I decided that night, for whatever reason—perhaps simply because my friend had called me and that brief act of care took me momentarily outside my fugue—to go to the opening.
Inside the gallery, the lights were low. People moved between the artworks, their features indistinct. My friend was constantly surrounded by others, and I never quite found the chance to slip into the circle and say hello. I sipped wine and tried not to feel alone. I felt the detachment, lifted so briefly by my friend’s call, beginning to drift, to settle down again on my shoulders like snowflakes.
I had discovered quite quickly that I didn’t particularly like my friend’s art, so in an effort to seem engaged I tried finding something else to look at. My gaze slipped over everything—art, people, white gallery walls—until it came to rest upon him.
It’s hard to say how it went—was he already looking at me, or had he simply noticed me noticing him? He was talking to a group of people, but every now and then he looked over the shoulder of the person directly opposite him and met my gaze, even as he continued speaking. I crossed my arms, drank some wine, watched. It had never happened before like this, I would never have expected to ease my discomfort in the gaze of a stranger—and yet…
Eventually he finished speaking and the group dispersed. He was left talking to one other person, but I saw him excuse himself and begin making his way across the room to me. I put down my glass. Left out the rear door. It scared me that he had seen me, that he might try to get to know me. I was afraid that whatever ease had existed in that short moment might vanish as soon as I tried grasping it.
Outside, it was dark and beginning to snow. I shivered, pulled my coat closer around my shoulders. The air ached in my lungs as I walked. Snowflakes danced slowly in the sodium orange of the streetlights. As I listened to the quiet crunch of my shoes in the snow, I caught my breath. My heart began to settle. I took a moment to sit on the kerb.
All of a sudden I felt light, like I had escaped something. I was glad, in the end, not to have had the time to speak to my friend, not to have had to justify my absences or the bags under my eyes.
A cooling mist came over me. I imagined how simple it would be to go the rest of my life never meeting the gaze of others, speaking quietly and hiding as much as possible from people, from the world, in my room, in the night, in the silence. As terrifying as this imagined future was, there was a slippery sort of comfort in it, something enticing and easy as a drug. If I could only become completely detached, then everything would work out.
But then he was tapping my shoulder.
“Excuse me,” he said.
Maybe it was an instinct similar to the phenomenon doctors call terminal lucidity, the sudden and unexpected rallying of terminally ill patients in the hours or days before they pass, which lead me to reply instead of turning away down the street. “Oh?”
“Sorry,” he said, but I felt this shyness seemed feigned. “I saw you watching me and I couldn’t help… I’m not sure—do you want my number?” I saw he’d written it on a torn out notebook page. Already prepared, before he even left the gallery.
So, still riding the high of terminal lucidity, I let him give me his number. And then despite everything I called him the next day.
On our first date, he took me to see a play which I thought as a concept was a bit contrived for a first date, but the play was good. During the show I cried, and he held my hand.
Later at dinner I told him I was a little embarrassed about it. The restaurant was dimly lit—a favourite of his, cheap, good food, nothing fancy. I’d expected him to take me somewhere pretentious. I liked this instead.
He said, “I think it’s a good thing you can express your emotions like that. A lot of people really struggle. I do.”
I didn’t tell him it was the first time I’d cried around another person since I was fifteen. Instead, I said, “Thanks for being so nice about it.”
We were sitting side by side in a booth.
He shrugged. “It’s really nothing. I’m better at taking care of others than myself a lot of the time.”
I let myself lean into his warmth after we’d eaten, and I almost fell asleep in that, listening to the chatter of the other restaurant patrons and the quiet guitar music playing over some tinny speakers, feeling small against him, listening to the beat of his heart, big in his chest, letting my eyelids fall, listening to the rain against the roof and windows of the restaurant, listening to my own breath growing slower and slower.
We slipped by under the stars and I pictured our car photographed by some passing satellite or even noticed by the moon herself, our headlights spotted from above a sign of our passage, a single bead slipping down the string of the streetlights.
It was true, at least, what he had said. That he was better at taking care of others than himself. He had helped me, in so many ways.
After that first date we started going out regularly. As we did, winter bore down. People began to talk more each day about cold-fronts, supermassive frost events, extreme conditions, unprecedented snow fall. We sheltered in his apartment with the lights turned down and the heating up, burrowed in and insulated from the weather. Dug in like this, I felt grave and almost apocalyptic. I also felt happy, for the first time in a very long time.
There was a quiet sense of adventure whenever we did journey beyond the apartment. Waiting at nearly empty train stations as the wind howled through, revenant-like; or walking, so completely ensconced by our jackets that we felt like astronauts, exploring some alien and hostile world. When we returned from these trips, we would bundle into the bed for warmth while the kettle boiled and the sky keened. Those days were almost drunken, heady and revelrous, despite their insularity.
One night we sat on the couch facing each other, sharing a worn blanket, each clutching a mug of coffee as the world wailed and came apart beyond the walls. He was upset about the way his family had become distant in recent years.
“It’s especially bad at Christmas—we’re like strangers, almost. It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad. We just, like, don’t know how to interact.”
I picked up one end of the blanket we were wrapped in. “Isn’t this from your family home? It’s so worn… I feel like it can’t be from somewhere loveless!”
“Oh this?” he said, picking up the other end. “It was like this when we found it!” He smirked, then his face settled, serious. “But really, it’s complicated. I don’t know where we stand to be honest. It’s like…” He paused, searching for the words. “We used to be really close when I was growing up, but since I left home, whenever I come back it’s as though I don’t know what to say to them, like I don’t remember how to be around them. We all used to be so close when me and my brother were kids, but now they’re just… different. Or maybe it’s me that’s different. I guess we’ve all changed, in our own ways.”
“Does it make you feel sad?” I asked. Then realised. “Sorry, of course it does. I guess that’s a stupid question.”
“No, it’s not. It’s complicated. On one hand, I’m sad. On the other, I think I’ve accepted it. It’s how life works. People float through and people float by, always vaguely perpendicular or parallel, but far, far apart. I don’t see people as being able to stick around when they all have their own lines, subtly off from your own.”
“Even if it’s family?”
“Even if it’s family. I mean, at the end of the day, they’re just people too.”
We were quiet for a moment. The rain abated a little, and the world was silent in an ensconcing kind of way, as though his apartment was wrapped in low grey cloud, thick and sound-absorbent.
The happiness I felt during these honeymoon days was always coupled with a vertiginous sensation that the exact feeling of this time and place was already memory. I wanted so badly to feel that happiness in the present, complete; , but it always escaped, like a Magic Eye puzzle that you couldn’t look at head on, or sunspots at the corners of your eyes, or something else, slippery and sad and quietly desperate.
“What about… us? Are our lines perpendicular or parallel?” Hesitatingly, afraid of the answer, afraid that even this already-lost happiness would disappear completely, like a dream he might not remember.
He ignored my question, leaned in, kissed me.
Road reflectors flashed past in straight lines. There had been a brief period after that conversation when I had started to think in terms of perpendicularity and parallelism as well. I caught myself, often in the early morning while he still slept, wondering which was better.
Being perpendicular meant that at least, for one brief, instantaneous moment, you occupied the exact same space, even if later you would grow so far apart that whole universes could occupy the distance between you. Yet being parallel meant that while you would perhaps always stay close to someone, you would never be able to bridge that final distance, never find yourself truly understood by them.
In the end, I found it too hard to understand this worldview. I wanted to believe it might be possible that the lines of some people’s lives coincided perfectly. Once or twice, during this period, I imagined that maybe when he awoke, I would inform him that there was a third option—but by the time he did, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, there were always more important things to do. Eventually, I stopped thinking about it, and he never again mentioned this belief, that people were only passing through or moving on.
A car rushed toward us. As it approached, the headlights briefly illuminated the interior, crazily throwing shadows and stark brightnesses over the surfaces. In this light, I glanced over at his sleeping body. He looked small. Like a child almost. Peaceful. I let my eyes linger there, away from the road for a few moments, just watching his breath, watching his chest rise and fall.
Last year we took a trip to see his parents. We drove up on a weekday, one of those blue autumn days, the old forests lit up in orange and red and green as we drove through them. It felt like we were the only car on the road and all that colour was just for us. He drove the whole way and I felt, at least momentarily, that the distance between us had vanished, just for a little while. I sat in the passenger seat and chose the music on the stereo; sometimes we sang along and other times we listened to the sky and the leaves in comfortable silence.
We stopped at a lake halfway there. Some unnamed puddle in the middle of nowhere but it was so still, a mirror, the everlasting nothing of the sky reflected so perfectly that it felt, looking into it with our feet on the shore, like you might slip and fall simultaneously down and up forever.
He moved further down the shore and scrabbled for stones to skim. Ripples spread out across the stillness. The vast quiet of the forest interrupted by the sound of it.
He shouted at me, from across the other side of the lake. “Did you know the French word for that crisp red-brown fall colour is feuille morte? It means dead leaves.”
His parents were beautiful, like always. Warm, broad people, their eyes full of light and laughter. His father, especially—I loved his hugs. He always smelled earthy, and the way he held you was all encompassing. When he let go, I would feel dazed as if I had emerged from a long tunnel into sunlight again or arrived home after a day spent sunbathing at the beach.
We ate his mother’s cooking and listened, afterward, as his father told the same story he always did, about how the two of them had met.
“I was only sixteen. I remember the boat especially well, because it reminded me of some devil, huge and eating us. I don’t remember the inside but it was dark. When the devil finally finished digesting us, we were shat out in Los Angeles.”
“Language, mi amor,” said his mother.
“Sorry,” said his father, finishing his beer. “Anyway. The first thing I saw on the street was your mother. America! I thought. City of angels! I thought. I hadn’t dared believe on the boat that all these things we had been told could be true, but here it was, the very first day—no, the very first hour of our arrival—and everything already proved by the fact I’d glimpsed a real life angel.
“I didn’t speak a word of English or Spanish, but still I managed to seduce her. Don’t ask me how.”
Then he kissed her, as he always did after telling that story, and I wondered about the depth of that love, about the possibility of something so powerful it required no communication, because I could see it there, in that house, written on their faces and in the tones of their voice and on the walls and even in the sky and the trees around them, even after so many, many years.
And I wondered too, how he could have grown up amongst this and still say he didn’t feel close to them. How it was possible to imagine yourself on a perpendicular line to these people who had such love in their hearts.
After dinner we sat in their lounge. I looked out the windows, watching our ghostly reflections, feeling like dead weight as he spoke to them in Cantonese and Spanish without translating for me. It was very dark out.
I tried very hard, that trip, to be happy. I liked his parents. I hadn’t wanted them to think that love might not be as easy for everyone else as it was for them.
Why had it hurt me so much, that day when he said he never dreamed? I’ve always been prone to dreams, both waking and sleeping ones. Violent, meandering things. I can’t imagine life without them. So maybe it was this naming of a specific difference that suddenly made it so obvious—as though whatever world he inhabited instead of dreaming, instead of caring whether people stayed in his life or not, was so far away from me I could never access it. I could feel the massive weight of this world above me, brightly visible but so, so far away. I could look up and feel it pressing down on me, but never reach it, get close enough to change it, or fix it, or learn to live in it.
Slowing down, I pulled onto the grassy verge separating the road from the ocean. From here I could see cliffs across the bay, shiny white things under the moonlight. Ruptures where the planet’s bones emerged, naked and bleeding. My knuckles were white and my cheeks wet. I wanted to open his door, push him out into the night, speed off. I wanted to put my foot to the floor, drive us both into the ocean. I wanted to get out of the car and feel the night air on my burning skin.
I dried my eyes. Checked them in the rear view. Stared out one more time at the stars, the boats, the skeleton cliffs. Then I shook him awake.
He blinked, mildly, a little confused. “What’s the time?”
“Just a bit after midnight. I’m getting sleepy. Is it alright if you drive from here?”
I was looking straight ahead, afraid that he might look at my eyes and know everything I was too scared to say. As we swapped back, I chanced another look down the road. Still haunted, shiny in the moonlight.
As I sat in the passenger seat, I finally felt something beginning to take shape in my heart, something swollen and bloated and black. I wanted to spew it up, give it to him so that I could be done with it, so that I could turn around and walk back down the road, alone. I almost did. I felt it rising in my throat as we crossed paths in front of the bonnet, and I thought that when we sat back down, me in the passenger, him in the driver’s seat, I would let it out, tonnes and tonnes of this slick black thing, until the car was full and we either drowned or escaped or even learned to breathe in it. But I didn’t. I held my breath, swallowing it back down, deeper into myself. Afterward, I felt withdrawn, detached, not unlike when we first met. I watched myself slide down in the seat, lean against the window, close my eyes. Beyond, the boats and the stars kept their inconstant shimmering, oblivious, our tiny passage escaping their regard, unimportant, silent. Maybe, I thought, if I stayed like this, perfectly still, breathing softly, I might fade away, and he would keep driving, not realising I had gone, or perhaps forgetting I had even been there to begin with.