Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
It was my first time leaving the city. My first time boarding a train. My first time escaping the netting of my life.
The world I knew remained afire with activity, a dazzling infinity of people and destinations, but the train station was as still and quiet as a thing in a painting.
Two sets of train tracks going in opposite directions were wedged between two separate yet identical boarding spaces.
One side’s purple awning, big draping clock, line of metal benches, and schedules posted on the walls reflected the other’s like in a mirror.
Twin universes: autonomous and at the same time inherently interlinked.
I watched it all as if from a great distance, so detached from my body that I could barely hold up the cup of coffee Kai had gotten me and had trouble making out the outline of the train as it barreled toward us.
The seats inside the cabin were pale blue and generously spaced out, and the windows were clean and expansive. Kai tucked our bags under our seats, and after we took off our coats, we settled down without talking, without even looking at each other.
With an inaudible announcement, the train started rolling down the track once more, fast, faster, away from the city lights and into the vast, unknown darkness.
I pressed my forehead against the cool glass, observing my breath drawing circles of fog over my reflection. “I’ve never been on a train before,” I told Kai without turning to look at him.
“I know,” was all he murmured. Then, slowly, carefully, he took my hand in his and laced our fingers together until you couldn’t tell where he ended and where I began. “Why don’t you get some sleep?”
Irregular curves of mountains peered in the faraway distance, gray hunched silhouettes against the impenetrable black sky. Faintly, I recalled what Kai had said about the place we were going: The sky is closer there.
“I want to see the sun rise,” I whispered.
“I’ll wake you before that,” he promised as he unfolded the coat from his lap and dragged it over me like a blanket.
Too vacuous for any kind of resistance, I melted into the seat, experiencing everything through sense alone.
The familiar scent of Kai’s cologne. The living heat of his body next to mine.
The subliminal rumble of the train. My eyelids grew heavy; my mind turned blank for what felt like a single moment.
But when I opened my eyes again, everything was purple and liquid with dawn.
I lifted my head off Kai’s shoulder, stretched my limbs as much as the space allowed me, and took a sip of the forgotten coffee, cold now and tasting of the paper cup.
Kai too had fallen asleep, his head lolling back against the seat, his lips slightly parted. He looked so serene I didn’t want to wake him, but as though he sensed my gaze on him, he stirred, eyes opening slowly at first, then all at once.
Breathing in, he sat up straighter. “Hello,” he rasped.
I couldn’t help but smile a little. “Hello.”
He gave me an apologetic look, consciousness returning to him in fragments. “Fuck, I’m sorry. I promised to wake you before dawn.”
“It’s okay. We both needed it.”
Another inhale, followed by a long, shaky exhale, his fingers holding back his hair. “Anya,” he said softly, “will you tell me what happened?”
Prickles of tension crept over the back of my neck, my smile falling. I couldn’t bring myself to look at him as I murmured, “I don’t know. I just left. I couldn’t tell them… I couldn’t ask…”
“You were scared,” he said, meaning I was scared of what I would find out, not scared of the Center itself. I knew that, but I chose not to correct him. Because he was right. Because the Center was not the problem.
Deep down, under multiple layers of shame and guilt, I could admit now that I did not want to remember.
What I really wanted was to forget the fact that I could not remember.
I wanted to be normal again. I wanted to be happy, no matter how shallow that sounded.
I just wanted to be happy. To allow myself to exist and at the same time accept that my existence meant nothing.
The freedom of that nothingness. I am no one, which means I can be anyone.
Did everything have to have meaning anyway? Did my every decision have to be derived from reason or be in direct correlation with the life I had once chosen for myself? Couldn’t I simply exist as I was: a handful of disjointed experiences without a point of reference, a middle-of-the-story person?
“Do you think I made a terrible mistake? Leaving without finding out the truth, I mean?” I asked him, seeking validation almost as much as I dreaded it.
With a clear-eyed expression, Kai counterposed, “Do you feel like you made a terrible mistake?”
“I feel… scared,” I admitted. “Of the future. Of myself. But not regret. Not really.”
“Then you didn’t make a mistake.”
“But now I will never learn who I am.”
“You know who you are,” Kai argued, looking at me in his intense, unshakable way.
“You are Anya. You’re a columnist for RAM.
You smoke slim, unflavored cigarettes. Your favorite color is pink, but you never wear it.
You like coffee with milk and no sugar. Your favorite dessert is strawberry popsicles.
You are friends with Betty from accounting and Sophie from marketing.
You have an apartment on Arcade Street, and you’ve filled it with books.
You love to read about love because it makes you feel hopeful about life, and at the end of the day, hope is what makes life bearable.
You don’t cry easily, but lately you’ve been crying all the time, and that’s okay.
It’s okay to feel your emotions as they come.
It’s okay to follow your instincts instead of your logic once in a while.
And no matter how scary and confusing it might be, it’s okay not to remember everything.
It doesn’t mean you’re a lesser person. It just means that you’re new. ”
“And yet so much of who we are is who we’ve been,” I whispered, touched by his complete way of knowing me, and at the same time understanding that this was all it was.
Not the truth, just his truth. Kai’s unrelenting kindness, which was both the fuel of his optimism and his way of making sense of this world.
“Perhaps,” he said. “But memory is rarely true anyway. It’s like a lens that either softens or sharpens a picture but never clarifies it.
And we forget so many things too. I remember most of my childhood, but, you know what?
I can’t remember the last time I played hide-and-seek or the last time I returned home drenched to the bone because my friends and I were throwing water bombs at each other or the last time I traded marbles with a random kid at the park.
I can’t remember the last time I sat in that tiny blue chair I had in my room.
Did I grow out of it one day and ask my mom to get rid of it?
I don’t know. It’s funny because I remember all of my first times.
But I can’t remember all of my lasts. And I think this is the human condition.
We’re always chasing newness, and newness is the only thing we remember in the end. ”
I wasn’t sure if that was true. I wasn’t sure of anything except for the unutterable relief that rose in my chest just from hearing him speak.
A momentary, all-encompassing calm. And if it were all a little absurd, a little surreal, this place and my situation in it, it did not matter now.
Now there was only the beauty of his face and the generosity of his words.
“Kai,” I said just to feel the splendid syllable of his name with my tongue, “I’m so glad you woke me up that night.”
He smiled with his whole face just as a soft golden light made a halo out of his hair. Without untwining our hands, which had rested in each other all night long, he pointed with his index finger behind me. “Look. The sun is rising.”
The view out of the window was a color-bleeding vista, the sky composed of grand, melodramatic sweeps of auroral purple and cotton candy pink.
Below, the open field was a mere golden-green blur as we continued to speed past it, diving into a place with no landmarks, no signs, no roads, but the autumn-hued loveliness of the earth itself.
Then the curve of the sea: glorious and divine, blue blending into blue. Newness, I thought, my soul lifting, my eyes wide and wet and dazzled. Newness and the vast blue sea.