photo by Haley Schaub
Nodus Tollens
*the realization that the plot of your life doesn’t make sense to you anymore.
How strange a moment that you and I should cross paths like this. I had a professor that used to ask me why here, why this character, why right now. I never had answers she was satisfied with and I often told her “because it simply is”.
And here we are, it simply is.
This night on this bridge overlooking this highway and its veins of red and white, blood and bone, me and you and the dark sky above smattered with stars like a sheet of black velvet sprinkled with loose diamonds. How could I pass you up? How perfect, how oddly fleeting, what onism this is.
What streets have you known that I’ll never see? Idyllic farmhouses in central Nebraska or even face-up towards the night sky, teetering on the edge of a New York subway grate. Have you ever been overseas and been unchanged currency? Have you traversed Santorini or haunted the cemetery in the hills of England, tucked safely into the backpack of a world traveler? I have often wanted to stand and marvel at the base of the Valley of the Kings and now I wonder if maybe you have. Can I see all the things you have seen?
Or perhaps, like me, you feel as though you’ve seen nothing at all. Is that what it means to live anymore: I have to be well-traveled? I can’t feel complete until I’ve crossed oceans and country borders and continental boundaries? I want that to be an act of enrichment, not an act of completion. They make me wonder if I’ve lived at all. I’m too young to keep being told that I am lacking. Does holding you make me worldly?
Thirteen years is really not an awfully long time to have been alive, but at thirteen I thought I’d seen everything worth seeing already. At thirteen, I also thought I had shouldered enough pain to relieve Sisyphus for a day. I can see that you are battered at your edges, cut and hewn, smoothed and scratched in ways that have marred you. It’s hard to tell which were intentional and which were purposeful. I too have known people that make me remember that I’m always trying to be kinder than I feel.
I have come to accept that you can do what you will and people will judge you as they choose but the effort won’t betray you in the end. But I have never felt like I was in the right place at the right moment like you must feel now. I did not mean to find you. Who placed you right here just for me? Where do I stand in the long line of people who have treated you the way I have done just now? And how do they forget, I wonder, knowing I too will forget despite the smell of blood you have left on the tips of my fingers.
Have you ever known a wishing well? Perhaps in that one way we are alike more than anything. I feel as though I bear more than just my dreams, resting in the hollows of my shoulders and the grooves of my palms. Bear your scars and your calluses with pride, not shame, my father used to tell me. At least those that take the time to hold your hands will see that you have either fought or made something and that either the selfless act of creation or the knuckles bruised in self-defense are good signs for anyone that thinks they can handle someone with as much soul as you. And though I’ve never been a fighter, he told me at least I have known the insanity it takes to bring something brilliant into existence.
Do you hold the hopes of another in the grooves of your body? Or is it only me who wonders how much of what weighs me down is not mine to carry?
Haley Schaub holds degrees in English and Mandarin Chinese. Her work has appeared in The Tunnels Magazine. She hopes to continue pursuing her love of human vices, virtues, and addictions in her writing. Haley spends most of her days writing, reading, and harassing her dog. She’s currently working on a novel that she hopes to have done by the summer.
Another Man's Review 