Chapter 41 #2
He lifted his arm on the pew, his hand now an inch away from my chin.
Even this innocuous shift made me woefully alert to his body.
A memory seemed to return to him. He smiled.
“I was stupid obsessed with Camus in high school. Mostly because he was cool, French, had a bunch of women. But he also wasn’t just in a room talking.
He was basically poor growing up, and was the editor in chief of a resistance newspaper during the war.
Remember how his stuff was all over the internet during the pandemic because of The Plague?
But the actual plague he was talking about was fascism.
” He coughed into his elbow. “Anyway, back to high school, sorry, I’m fucking tired, but absurdity, this idea that nothing happens for a reason was…
” He paused. “ ‘Comforting’ isn’t the right word, but it felt freeing to me.
I mean the myth of Sisyphus could easily be about clinical depression.
” He laughed. “Just that, even though there’s senseless cruelty in the world and our lives may mean nothing, we still protect life, we seek meaning anyway. ”
Before I could respond, he asked, “Why writing?”
“I feel like we’ve talked about this already.”
“I feel like you’re avoiding my question.”
I paused. “I used to write about my dreams when I was little and turn them into these books I stapled together in a manila folder. I didn’t know the difference between a dream and a story. But I don’t know. I think my answer isn’t all that different from yours.”
“How so?”
“A story is like a map to me. I’m trying to reach some new place with it. But while you write, the world is moving, it’s changing, and it’s, like, who cares, everyone has Waze anyway.”
“That how you feel right now?”
I paused. “You know, I was talking to my friend, an acquaintance, really, about Gaza a few months ago, a Black girl. She was like, Why do you care so much about the Palestinians? My first reaction was to be incensed. But she was like, Why aren’t we talking about Sudan?
Why don’t you care about Haiti? And I was like, I do care.
But then I saw that the story of white people stealing land, weaponizing apartheid, genocide, that’s a story that activates me, that I can find myself in.
But the story of Black people massacring other Black people, that’s a story I don’t know what to do with. ”
He watched me. “What happens when the story no longer serves the people in it?”
“I don’t know.”
His fingers found my cheek. They were freezing.
I brushed his hand over my lips. Meeting his eyes, I slipped his thumb into my mouth.
He made a small, pitiful sound. My stream of thoughts snagged on Jay like a branch, but the current of salt and skin was stronger.
There had to be a way to have both him and nights like this.
Tristan shoved his thumb deeper. “It’s like you’re taking Communion.”
With a full mouth, I said, “I’m agnostic.”
He laughed. I thought he was going to kiss me, but he gently removed his thumb.
“I don’t wanna fuck up this relationship,” he groaned.
“With me?”
He blinked. “With Nia. It’s…” He ran a hand over his face, falling silent.
“Want to pray about it?” I sounded like my grandma when she was alive.
He laughed. I laughed too. “I don’t know why I’m laughing,” he said. “I actually do pray. But the way you said it made it sound dumb.”
“I thought absurdists didn’t believe in God.”
Smiling, “I never said I was an absurdist.”
There were other people with whom spending the night in a vacant church wouldn’t have been such an awful betrayal.
But there was also a different logic, one that accommodated this.
At that moment I wanted to live inside that logic more than I wanted to be good, to punch a hole through reality and make a new one.
I moved closer to him. He studied my face like he was making a calculation. “You really don’t remember when we were in the woods?”
“I don’t remember meeting you at all.”
He smiled weakly. “That sucks.”
“Why do you keep asking me that?”
“I just didn’t think you actually forgot that we almost kissed.” He looked up at the ceiling. “I thought you were just acting like you forgot.”
This revelation didn’t register the way it should have. Maybe because we’d kissed by then, more than kissed. A line had already been irrevocably crossed, and I was simply watching it recede. If anything, in some twisted way, I felt vindicated, like a part of me intuited our history all along.
“Who tried to kiss who first?” I asked.
“You tried to kiss me”—flashing a cocky grin—“obvi.”
I dropped my head in my hands, laughing, groaning. While my face was still hidden, Tristan buried a hand into my hair and drew me up to look at him.
“Clearly that night stayed with me.”
He kissed me hard, almost angry. It felt wholly plausible we were going to fuck in this church. I didn’t know how I was going to make it out of this situation in one piece. But maybe that’s what I wanted, to risk myself completely for this life everyone told me was impossible.