Non-Sequiturs
We departed off of the gravel path onto one that was instead paved with bundles of patted-down—clearly having been trotted through before—reeds, each bundle ending in a handful of tiny yellow flowers. The sleek, reed-surface twinkled with sunlight in tune with our footsteps, and the whole forest smelled of dry hay and pine. Immediately, and perhaps this has always been one of my faults, I began to think to myself—and luckily there were no eavesdroppers on my private, recursive inner-dialogue—what it would be like if we were married, and selfishly, I had you all to myself; not for ownership’s sake, but to experience a truer sense of oneness with you, and to own a kind of final, sealed memorandum on love: if the flowers would still glisten the same way, if I would still feel the same strange arrhythmias in my chest at our odd and sudden departure from the trodden path, or if you would still send back towards me the same, probing little glances over your bare, left shoulder as we made our over the new one. I suspect most likely not, and none of these things would have felt the same to me, but then again I suppose everything could have been different too had we taken our walk on a different day, had we chosen rather to go watch a movie, or had I put on a polo shirt this morning instead of my button-down.
All of these, tied up in the odd temporality of our knowing each other—for we had met under the outbreak of war in this country, and owing to the fact that we were both guests here (diaspora Jews living in Israel are at once both natives and foreigners. Your dark skin, thin, delicate hands, and angular face hinted that you were more so the former; my clumsy stockiness placed me squarely in the latter category), we were doomed to return to our homes too soon, mine New York and yours London, although you were a chronic mover—somehow gave substance and form to our weekly meetings: there was something important here, an elusive truth waiting anxiously to be pinned down, an essence to be extracted, that neither of us had yet seemed to figure out. After each of our meetings, we departed from each other’s presence hesitantly, and our embraces goodbye were full of trepidation, as if we were standing on a thin layer of ice which was just thick enough to support our combined, standing-weight, but not enough so to bear our simultaneous footsteps in opposite directions, and so we would hold each other thus in the evening light, afraid to let go of the other for fear of drowning in a frozen, lonely sea. But why we held on so tightly was perhaps a symptom of an even deeper fear, that being the fear of loosening our grip just ever so slightly, and with a few new-created inches between us, allowing for the space to look the other in the eyes head-on.
We never did, and departed each night as if walking away from a set of almost-winning scratch-off tickets that hadn’t been completed yet, or a glowing hearth in the black-purpleness of a winter storm—in other words, we were both so naïve as to believe that circumstance should hold this much leverage over completeness, or perhaps perfection.
It’s why our exiting from the gravel trail onto the battered, forested one signaled an important shift, at least for me (your crescent moon-like visage was always inscrutable, or rather, when you decided it should be, and not a moment less so). This summer-like March morning, we—or you really, you were leading the two of us like Lewis and Clarke—had for whatever reason decided to tip the thin, copper scales of this precarious balance in the favor of love over fate. For a while after our foray into the reeds, I nevertheless doubted your motives, and the longer I waited for you to hand me a sign, the more so I wavered in my faith of the whole project.
The reeds widened out into a clearing and you shot me a look, once again over your bare shoulders (their bareness, beginning from just below your clavicles, was perhaps reason enough to suspect something that day; when we took off our overcoats on account of the unusually hot weather, and the blue, floral blouse you were wearing revealed its lack of shoulder-straps, thus marking the first instance either of us had worn anything even slightly showing) that meant to say that you had given up on the predictive human capacity that was paralyzing us both—the same one that every night, at the thin border of dreaming sleep, would spin the small handful of our days together into a vast, endless quilt of could-be’s and ought-be’s (although I can once again only speak for myself. I was never privy to your nightly, final goodbye’s to wakefulness, as much as I longed to be)—and finally acquiesced to the present moment: I noticed it reflected in the way your cheeks pinched upwards, and how your upper lip peeled back to reveal the neat row of upper teeth underneath, a row of which was mostly filled by your two front incisors, large, curious things—all of the day was making its way into you at once; the grand expression of the world had, at last, been allowed to flourish in you, and with it, my own presence and love, which made its way onto your face, and both actually and poetically, in the glossy surface of your dark eyes.
(I wish to spend just a moment longer on the curling nature of the reeds before I depart from this image completely. Of course it shall live on in the rest of this story whether or not I continue to mention it, but it was crucial in the formation of the feelings shared between myself and V that day, and if I don’t get it just right—at least so goes my fear—you may left languishing about with a primordial, half-formed sense of what we’re actually dealing with here).
So where are we then? The reeds crackling beneath our feet were gray-green and sun-dried, although they were alive enough to bend and wave without snapping completely; they were becoming increasingly heavy in our path, and soon it became necessary to lift up our knees with each step, and pull our feet fully above the thick layer of detritus just to avoid toppling over, like one flails one’s legs about side-to-side while running in a foot of thick, powdery snow topped with a layer of crusted ice, or rather an ocean tide that rises up to one’s shins. In fact, with the flattened reeds twirling in currents underneath our feet, scintillating in direct light, the path could hardly be distinguished from a warm body of shallow, pulsating water, and had I been able to extend the boundaries of my imagination just a little bit further, I could have convinced myself, and perhaps you as well, that we were in fact not in a forest at all, but wading up to our knees in sand and salty foam.
To our sides, where they hadn’t been flattened down by regular passerby, the reeds rose up straight in impenetrable walls, while towards their apexes, which was about shoulder-height for the two of us, they splayed out in all directions, so that we needed to almost constantly brush them out from in front of our faces. But the juncture between those that stuck up out of the ground and those that laid flat was an imperfect one, and so our path was more like one continuous, semi-circular, wicker basket, one that extended on all sides; at any moment the patterned, weaving walls of our tunnel, like those of the split Red Sea, could come crashing in on us.
I could’ve continued on that path with you for eternity. With the high walls blocking the remainder of the world from view, and the streaming ground leading us ever forward, we were perfectly insulated, and yet there was no stagnant feeling or unrest. I felt acutely satisfied with life—with both happiness and despair equally, knowing and unknowing; I would’ve told you so too, but I sensed that you had already come to the same conclusion based on your regular, effortless strides, and so silence was the only medium we needed.
Eventually we arrived at a large boulder with a flat top, like a raft in our endlessly trailing river, and you suggested we sit—a daring proposal—as the sun was almost directly overhead now; of course I agreed. The boulder was planted firmly at the top of a large hill that rose above our reeds, and to get to it required a second departure from our path. Only this time, there was simply no path to guide us there; instead we crawled directly into the wall of goldenrod, parting it with our hands and guiding the soft grass past our triceps and shoulders like one would water in the breaststroke.
You asked me to carry your handbag, which was stuffed to the point of overflowing with your overcoat, and hanging on its single strap you said that it was hurting your shoulder. I took it from you and hung it over mine. In that moment, the whole world consisted of fragrant grass, yourself, and nothing more. Therefore your requests were as natural and as irrefutable as electromagnetism or logic itself, as you constituted half of all matter, and by extension, your words. To have refused you, or even hesitated, would have amounted to grand treason, or maybe even insanity.
The top of the boulder contained just enough space to fit us both with me sitting in a half-lotus position and you somewhere halfway between kneeling and sitting, leaned over on one of your shins and thighs simultaneously (I would’ve suggested that your join me, but you were averse to anything that resembled meditation. You thought it was some type of silicon-valley productivity scam no matter how much I tried to convince you otherwise, and even to suggest you try sitting in a half-lotus to save us space on the rock, or to be more comfortable, would have angered you). Our view of Jerusalem, on the other hand, contained more than enough space to fit us both. I don’t think either of us had realized exactly how high and how far away we’d come from the park where we’d started—we had somehow separated ourselves from the city across a deep and scarred ravine; on the other side the old walls of the city looked like a crust of bread that had been hastily tossed atop the horizon. You were never particularly religious, though, and I was never the one for archaeology or history, so neither of us ever found the old city as impressive or as grandiose as others may’ve. Generally, we stayed away from it altogether, preferring the city’s wooded outskirts.
Nevertheless, I enjoyed the view of the whole thing from afar—from this distance, the religiousness that ensconced my daily life had been reduced to pretend-play, and like when one rides in an airplane and gazes upon rows and rows of identical suburban homes and hedges, one begins to question the idea of owning a home, or anything at all really, our view activated some greater sense inside me that what we had on top of this rock was perhaps the holiest thing that could ever be, much more than the stale doctrine that lurked around the labyrinthian sandstone corners of the old city.
You were of course having some thoughts too settle over the horizon, and I began to watch your eyes scan back and forth, watch each tiny flick of your pupils form an arc that traversed many miles of ground instantly, your gaze hovering over the distant ground like a fine mist. Exactly what your eyes were seeing, however, I could only surmise. I think, rather, you were quite talented at looking at one thing while thinking another, and may have not been considering the landscape at all, but rather wondering what you may say next, or what our next move would be.
My suspicions were confirmed when you pulled your eyes off of the horizon, onto your bag, and suggested we play a game of chess. You were better than I was, and brought your collapsible board wherever we went, suggesting a game whenever there was nothing left to talk about, in order to excuse ourselves to silence over a board, the occasional grunts and humming replacing any need for conversation or eye contact. You would also suggest a game, I had noticed recently, whenever you felt insecure, the last time being when I had proved you mistaken in an argument over capillary action and you were confused about the number of hydrogen bonds a water molecule could make at once—it was four and not two—and you pulled out your chess board, pulled me by the arm to a park bench and challenged me to a match; I was handily defeated as white in about twenty or so moves. Here though I had the feeling you wanted to play for neither of these reasons; we had already established a perfectly comfortable silence there on the sunny boulder, there was no need to mask it with any false pretenses. Neither had I any reason to suspect that you were feeling insecure with me.
And so we set up the board in our continued silence and you gave yourself the black pieces, as you usually did, although the sun was almost too bright to see the difference and all the pieces looked nearly the same yellowish-brown color. Before I could get too far slipping the little pegged pieces into their holes, you suggested that we play with a randomized back-rank—you knew that if we played a normal game, with the queen on her color and so on, you would win (I knew none of the openings). But if we played ‘twisted chess,’ as you called it—even though the format had a real name, ‘freestyle chess’—you knew we’d have more even chances; therefore, I knew again that you weren’t playing to win, but rather were more interested in the whole dance of it. Our hands occasionally brushed against each other’s while plucking the pieces out from their pile, and each time your lips would break into a fine, narrow smile. Occasionally too you’d send me a quick glance when this happened, but never when I happened to be looking at you: as I set up my side of the board—a strange set-up where the bishops were already placed on their longest diagonals and the knights were touching each other—I could only ever sense your eyes in my periphery.
At some point during our game I proposed an idea that I had read about in a novel once, that being the idea that chess pieces aren’t pieces at all, but rather entities like gravity or light that extend over the entire universe, and only their smallest fractions appear as pieces over the board: for example, I had said while pointing at one of my rooks, imagine that there are beams of light that extend out from this rook in the way it moves—forward-and-back, side-to-side—and they travel across the entire universe. At this first declaration a crude, mad smile broke out across your face—you liked the idea already, and I could tell that you were running with it in your head, working out all its consequences for us and the world. I continued anyway, and suggested to you to now imagine that the rook was like a bead on a string, hanging at the intersection of this celestial crosshair, and one moves it along the board simply by sliding it in either axis.
You interrupted me right when I pointed to my bishop, and began to relay to me your understanding. So really, you now started, the bishop was only the little wooden tip of an infinitely large, “bishopey” iceberg—and I laughed when you said “bishopey,” and thought you were genius for thinking of that word alone—or the arrowhead on the tip of an endless “bishopey” arrow, and then, lifting up your finger from the piece and extending your arms out in both directions along its axis, you pointed directly at me, and said that the "bishopey” force, then, goes right through my chest, and all of a sudden I felt nervous that you’d somehow figure out how to use it to read my mind, but you relented and then moved your knight instead; the idea broke down when it came to knights, you pointed out.
Our game progressed as if neither of us were trying to win—refraining from taking each other’s pieces until well into the mid-game, when all of our pieces were tied up and all of our lines of attack muddled together. Although it wasn’t before long one of us had to take a piece—I had managed to fork a rook off the board— and the game disintegrated from there. I won soon after that, but you said you’d never enjoyed a game more.
We exchanged the foldable chessboard for a small collection of Tupper-wares from my satchel—leftovers: wet Israeli salad, tuna salad, and rice—and you produced a roll of bread and a half-empty container of hummus from your purse. I wasn’t particularly hungry, but we had carried them with us all this way, and the thought of carrying the sun-warmed mush back home with me would’ve been nothing short of shameful; the meal clearly constituted an important objective of our walk together, it being one of the few things we had agreed on beforehand: “lunch tomorrow?” You texted me, to which I replied, “of course!” (What I was so infernally excited about I’m not sure, but somehow an “of course” or even worse, “of course.” would have been infinitely worse offenses in my mind). You didn’t reply for a while, giving me hours to worry if my exclamation mark had been too presumptuous, but when you finally did—a cool “great, let’s bring food with us” that gave me nothing to work with—it was far too late to shop for picnic food. It was a silly, insignificant thing, the whole texting business, but the painful fact nonetheless hovered over us heavy as the pollen-laden heat: you weren’t comfortable calling me, and neither was I you. Had we not eaten what we’d brought, or had we not taken our lunches out at all, and pretended, as much as I wanted to, that we hadn’t planned on lunch, it would’ve been a clear recognition of this truth to both of us.
Still on the heels of our game and intoxicated by the heat, however, we ate our meal contentedly, and we even shared with each other. Once again though I found myself far, far in the future, wondering about a relationship in which we called each other at night—as part of a ritual perhaps—talked for a while about something important, and then discussed the next day’s lunch. What a shame—I lamented—our lunch effort had been: I would’ve loved a redo, perhaps one in which I concerned myself less with punctuation. But there was no such redo, and we were here, with no way around our tasteless, lifeless lunch, and both of us knew it.
You commented on the tuna salad, “you made this, right? It’s good,” and for a second, prompted by a peculiar glint in your eye, I got the impression that you were mocking me, and by extension, our whole effort here on the rock, but you looked back down at your food, and then to me, and then over the horizon again, and I realized that you were just as innocently in search of direction as I was. In particular, it was the order of the sweep that clued me in to this realization. First your eyes darted to the tuna salad as the antecedent to your comment; you had to look there first, you had no other choice. But then, finding nothing but limp, blended tuna, and perhaps upon realizing that you were a sphere of emotions and consciousness seeking meaning, you picked your eyes off your Tupper-ware towards me—another sphere—for direction. But then remembering our predicament, you had to look away, for in case I happened to be looking at you, we could’ve matched gazes, and we would’ve needed to address the awkward, malformed infatuation we had for each other, and thus your eyes arrived finally at their meaningful, comfortable spot over the old city.
They remained there for a long while. I packed up our painfully emptied Tupper-wares and joined you in your scouring. I had the strong urge to return to our path, to be walking with you somewhere; our winding, beautiful river had emptied out into the sea, and our raft was now hopelessly adrift on the open ocean without an end or beginning in sight.
It was torture—and then all of a sudden bliss. You closed your eyes, said you were deathly tired, and before I could protest, rested the back of your head on my open lap. On your back now, your knees bent upwards, your hands folded over your stomach, gently rising and falling, and your cheeks pinched upwards just ever so delicately. All of my imagination went haywire. The sun had begun its slow descent, horseflies were buzzing, and I wanted to ask you a million questions; I would’ve traded everything—the rest of my life included—just to be able to read your mind for a second. Your eyes darted back and forth behind your eyelids.
“We’re probably getting sunburnt right now,” I suggested.
“I love you,” you replied.