“What do you love?” she asked.
I shrugged. I could have answered with a sarcastic response, or something canned, but Amy wouldn’t have tolerated that. She demanded active participation, demanded I think, and would have no less than that.
“What do you want to do when you are older?” she asked.
Her choice of words intrigued me. I asked because I knew the answer would be interesting. “That’s a weird way to ask the question. Usually people ask ‘What do you want to be when you grow up.’”
“I’m not usual.”
This was a bizarre answer, even for Amy. I turned away from the edge and looked at her sitting cross legged in the middle of the floor. She looked like more of a child than she ever had, rolling a small stone around in hands. It disturbed me to see her so disarmed. So weak.
I sat down beside her, tilted her face up so I could look in her eyes. She wasn’t crying, but she looked ready to. “What’s wrong Amy? What’s bothering you?”
“One of the girls at school asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I didn’t know, and she told me I was ridiculous because I had no plans. And that I was stupid. Of course, I know I’m not stupid.”
She sighed, a moment, and collected herself.
“And then I started thinking about it. I don’t care if I don’t know what I want to do when I grow up. I’m ten! I don’t have to start worrying about that for years. But it bothered me that I don’t love anything. That I have no passion for anything.” After a pause, “I’m broken.”
“I don’t get it.” Even as the words came out of my mouth I felt stupid.
“I mean I have no ambitions. No goals. Everyone else keeps talking about how they’re going to get University degrees, then get married and have kids. Houses and picket fences, two cats in the yard. All that garbage. I don’t have those sorts of dreams. Or any at all.”
“Maybe that’s because you’re ten?” I was already thinking about this in my own terms and beginning to understand why she was upset.
“They all have dreams and ambitions. I’m smarter than them but I don’t. What’s wrong with me? Why am I broken?” she replied.
I had no answer. I sat and let her thoughts sink in. I had no ambition. Most of my friends knew what they wanted to do when they were older. Had a plan. Had some idea what they wanted out of life. I just wasn’t sure it mattered. I decided to find out.
“But Amy, does it matter?”
She laughed at me. “Matter? Does ambition matter? You’re even worse. I’m nothing. You’re this massive well of potential, of capability. But you have no ambition. You can do no greatness without great ambitions. You court irrelevance.”
I was startled by this sudden reversal, her sudden change of target from herself to myself. “I thought this was about you?” I asked her.
“Ha. It’s about both of us. Stop being so short-sighted. Some day we’ll wake up and realize our greatest fear has come true. That our ambivalence has begot our meaningless. Irrelevance. And that will be our own personal hell.”
I stifled back a nervous laugh, but she looked right into my eyes, and again I felt the weight and gravity of her gaze.
“You’re the proverbial grasshopper Adrian. In the sunshine and warmth it’s all song and dance, without care for your destiny.”
She turned away from me and threw the stone out into the forest.
“What will you do when winter comes?”
“You know, the ancient Babylonians had a thing for duality.”
She tossed her newspaper down and stood up to stretch. I always admired the way her body seemed to lengthen and uncurl somehow when she stretched. She thrust her arms into the air and stood on her tip-toes, momentarily making the shape of a girl-sized letter “Y”. Her back arched in an almost impossible way when she tipped her head back. She looked like she should fall over, but she never did.
Amy was the most graceful person I had ever met. I wished I could capture that grace on paper, but it was beyond me.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“The Zodiac is full of it. Tension and balance. Opposing forces.
Gemini’s twins locked in endless struggle for dominance. The scales of Libra balanced precariously against each other, good and evil matched perfectly. The fish of Pisces, one struggling upstream, thrusting its body through the world to get where its going. The other lazily drifting along with the current, going wherever its taken. Neither escaping the other.”
I thought about this for a moment while I scribbled a fish in the
corner of my sketchbook. I looked at it, imagining its upstream
plight. “I guess. Seems a bit hopeless, doesn’t it?”
She flopped down on the floor beside me and looked at the angular graphite fish I had drawn. She plucked the pencil from my fingers, and touched its tip against the paper. Her hand was gentler than mine, barely skating over the surface. The ghost of a fish, thin and spindly and beautiful revealed itself next to mine.
“How can it be hopeless if you’re never alone?”
“I’ve lost the thread.”
“No, you haven’t.”
“I can’t find the story any more. I’ve lost it.”
“No, you haven’t. It’s still here. I’m still here. I’ve always been here.”
“I’m not good enough.”
“Good enough? You’re the best. The only. If you can’t do it, it will never be. Pick up the thread. See that it is good.”
“I’m scared.”
“I know. I am too. You won’t fall.”
“I already have.”
“I’ll catch you.”
“Why?”
“Because I love you.”
One of my best friends growing up was Andy, a boy slightly younger than I was. At the beginning of the school year, we had been the “new kids,” and had utterly failed to integrate into the tight clique of Grade Three, students that had been together since kindergarten. I had moved from out West the previous summer and Andy had come from another school in town. Andy and I had become friends through necessity.
He was a thin, blond boy with a big head and rapidly blinking eyes. He was, by all accounts, an oddity. He was better read than any third grader had a right to be, and his class marks rivaled mine in almost every area. Even while the mothers of girls in my class were arranging their daughters marriages to me, they’d unconsciously step away from Andy when he came into a room.
It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with him. He was just twitchy. He’d forget the names of people in the class, even the boy he sat beside. He talked in stilted, choppy sentences, unless he was explaining a math problem. When he talked about numbers, he could be as smooth and convincing as a politician.
Years later he’d be diagnosed with Asperger’s and eventually kill himself, but back then he was just a weird kid. I admired him for his failure to judge people, and secretly liked him for being more of a misfit than I was. And for being a friend.
I miss him.
Surely you’ve noticed the slight changes around here. It’s been a long time. Something had to be done. Subtle, for now, but necessary.
Bon appétit. Or something.