My magnificently talented friend Hannah Connolly (here’s her art blog and portfolio website) made this illustration for my story Jesus in his twenties. You can read it here — I thought it might be nice to put it up in downloadable format.

If you’d rather read it here, click through to see more:

THE DEATH OF THE UNIVERSE

“Want a pop?” the Death of the Universe asks, rising from the armchair. “I’m gonna go to the kitchen real quick.”

Jesus looks up from the lease, signed moments ago, and nods gratefully. It is the hottest summer on record; even in his new landlady’s cool, umbral flat the inside of his collared shirt is beaded with sweat.

“Oh man, yeah.” He realizes, too late, how childlike he sounds and runs a hand through his hair, embarrassed. “That’d be great. Thanks, Dee.”

She smiles and leaves the room. Almost instantly, the exact moment she is gone, the laws of physics change. The sofa cushions dissolve underneath him, and he drops, stunned, flat onto the floorboards. Parts of his body fall off him — one leg, from heel to knee, and an arm, fingertips trembling — and then reattach, like magnets. The television set begins to ascend with all the self-assurance of a cloud moving through muggy air. Jesus gets up, panicked, and busts his lip on the coffee table; his mouth fills with blood. 

He is submerged in the disorienting but familiar sensation of being attached to an emotional state, but now it is a million times more physical, dragging him down as though he were tethered to it. The world shifts underneath him, precariously, fatalistically; objects in the room disappear one by one. The potted ferns, the glass-paneled doors leading to the small balcony, the shadow produced by his own body. He looks to the heavens to find the ceiling, roof, and walls gone. Distance thins to nothing. Next door, the neighbor, sleeves rolled up, is hanging up her laundry; three hundred miles away, rain is beginning to fall over the center of the Atlantic ocean. He’s dizzy, but impossibly lucid too, as though understanding the size of the universe for the first time.

Dee returns, two cans of Coca-Cola under both her arms, and closes the door with the inside of her foot; she laughs out loud at Jesus, lying on the floor, clutching the leg of the table, the expression on his face, and, in an instant, all is right again.

“Sometimes the world isn’t quite real when I’m not around,” she says, a bit apologetically. She gets down on her haunches so that she is level with him and hands him the can. “Life only makes sense when death exists.”

However shaken he is he has to smile at a statement like that, the contrasts embedded in it; how it is so hard to take but so casually said.

Dee pops the tab on the Coke and takes a swig. He lifts himself up so that he’s leaning against the sofa, where she now sits, elbows on her knees. She looks at him with her dark eyes so like those of his childhood angels and reaches over to pat his head with an unpracticed but unfeigned gentleness. The image of the Archangel Gabriel suddenly comes to him: how he’d pick him up from school in beat-up sneakers and a jacket of ochre leather, and ruffle his hair with the same sort of hesitant tenderness. Like Gabo, little about Dee explicitly suggests the supernatural, but despite her human form there’s something illusory, dark, in her shape, like she is a landscape in a woman’s body, a pyramid in the desert, buried, hidden in plain sight.

SOUL

He explores the neighborhood around the house. The eggshell-colored camellias, the yellow clouds at sunset, the warning bell of the freight train, coming from somewhere in the opaque distance — these sights, sounds, enter and exit his consciousness and invite a breed of emotion, halfway between tenderness and discomposure, into his heart. It’s the kind of feeling he wouldn’t know how to describe but it is never far from his mind, and he revisits it constantly, as though it were a memory of love, or a memory of fear.

Soul, who lives in the room across from his own, accompanies him, sometimes, on evening walks. The first few times he notices her following him, not at a distance but at his side, as normally as if they were close friends, he thinks perhaps she is a ghost, which he sees so often in the glowing, red-toned midsummer; but then he spots her in the communal kitchen, scrolling on a smartphone and eating Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and realizes his mistake. It is an easy one to have made: Though Soul looks like a young woman, the same age as he, perhaps, she is a touch too transparent to be human. In the right light, and at the right angle, she disappears from view entirely, an illusion in visual continuity. But this doesn’t bother Jesus; from birth he has believed nothing can stay forever, and he finds comfort in impermanence that confirms distrust in the immaterialness of his world.

Soul likes to carry around a small, outdated digital camera; her taste in photography is what she self-deprecatingly calls “sepia-tone Instagram tacky,” meaning dimly-lit, impersonal images of the flowers, the bicycles chained to lampposts, and Jesus’ dark ponytail, which she sometimes tugs on to get his attention. Her expression, when he turns to face her, is immobile but her touch is gentle, and unassuming, and it reminds him powerfully of his mother, affecting him like balm to a wound.

Once, he shyly suggests they get a passerby to take their picture together; immediately, Soul shakes her head. (She doesn’t tell him, but she was told her once that photographs steal souls and she’s never been able to quite shake the fear.) Usually the directness, the finality, of this refusal would disconcert him — Jesus has always been more sensitive than he would like to admit — but around Soul the possibility of being hurt, of feeling painfully, somehow seems to have been removed, wholesale, from the pressures of emotion. Life is simpler, more mechanistic, with her, and easier to bear. Is this what a relationship between nonhumans looks like? Is this, he wonders, how the Earth and moon think of each other?

DAWN AND DUSK

Ox returns one rainy night. She drops her suitcases down and immediately gets to work repairing everything that is broken in the apartment block. Sleeves rolled up to elbows, she fixes the A/C on the third floor, and then moves onto the washing machine, the flickering light bulb over the entrance, and the kitchen sink, clogged with grease for three weeks. Jesus wakes to the sound of her off-key singing and he lays awake in the cool violet light of very early morning, listening to her; he feels renewed, like his heart is traveling, and he forgets his exhaustion.

Her brother, Pike, returns that morning. Unlike Ox, he brings nothing with him but the clothes he wears: a navy cable-knit sweater, gray slacks, and rubber flip-flops embossed with the name of a seaside hotel on the Mexican coast. He finds Ox immediately, sitting on the kitchen floor; she winks at him, and then reaches up to briefly, but meaningfully, squeeze his hand, before her attention returns to the plumbing. This is the first time she has seen him in thirty-six months.

Jesus meets them at breakfast. Neither of them are particularly impressed by his introduction of himself as the son of God.

“So what?” says Pike, not maliciously, but not kindly either. He sits on the counter, ankles crossed, a toolbox in his lap, as Ox combs through the pipes under the sink. His eyes, dispassionate, and yellow as sand dunes, survey Jesus, from top to bottom, in one long look.

Despite himself, Jesus bristles. He’s ashamed by what he wants to say but he says it anyway. “Well, who are you then?”

Before Pike can respond Ox takes the handle of a screwdriver out of her mouth and smiles big. “Does it matter?”

(Dee tells him later that they are the dusk and the dawn, second-gen twins descended from a long line of famous meteorological phenomena.)

After dinner that night, the five of them around Dee’s coffee table, Ox tells them about their maternal grandfather, El Niño, shooting through oceans with languid regularity, and his romance with the Atlantic hurricane. Ox is a once-in-a-lifetime kind of storyteller. Her voice and stride flow back and forth along a gradient of prophecy and delicacy, like dense coral, porous, sensuous, but also concentrated, impenetrable, diamond-like. She stands up, gesticulates, walking around while she talks, resurrecting scenes from her prodigal memory with her physicality, her presence that fills the room like smoke into a vessel. She can make Dee laugh out loud (a true rarity.) Even Soul pays rapt attention.

But it is Pike that Jesus finds himself looking at most often: his aromatic limbs and hands, his almond-eyed presence that is honey and amber, the clarity, permeability of his expressions, which are unambiguous and unconcealed, and tempered by his silence like iron submerged in saltwater. For Jesus, who has always thought himself incapable of romantic love, this new, sudden interest is a revelation, as well as a source of terror.

Pike is aware of the attention, and bothered, in a vague way, by it. He doesn’t like this boy, he’s decided, or how his hands twist in his lap, when he’s sighing and fidgeting and has his head tipped back, looking at him, at Pike, his brow furrowed like he’s undoing the Gordian knot. When he can’t take the self-consciousness anymore, he leans over Soul, seated between them on the couch, and meets Jesus’ stare.

“Keep your eyes to yourself, son of God,” he whispers, heatedly, but quietly enough that it’s a private exchange. Jesus is so surprised he forgets to be embarrassed and smiles foolishly, brightly. In front of them, Ox is pacing, hands held in front of her, palms upturned, saying: “He loved her so much, the year she left there was no wind over the ocean.”

Pike turns away quickly; outside, the setting sun flickers imperceptibly.

The love in my body doesn’t understand the white bees, dark stars, and ships of hyacinths that Neruda knew. My love doesn’t understand his metaphors of twilight shadows, lavender kisses, and sea foam. My love has chosen, instead, the bloodied half of the moon. The visceral side of the soul: bile, breath, bowels. Very occasionally, emanating from the breast: blossoms.

There’s no beauty here, in these feelings for you, trapped and droning like house flies. I think of how little I deserve your virtue, your hands that are as guileless as the wind moving over fields. Forgive me. My love doesn’t live in the real world. Honestly, it builds nothing of purpose. The perversion of the empire of my love by the coast, made from mist, muscle, and magnolias. It exists half a mirage away from collapsing into the saltwater.

Did you ever suspect that I hid so much dominating energy within this body? Neruda would have recoiled at how much I desire–so shamefully–to see you sob each time I leave. He would have warned me against this decadence. This gambling of suffering, paid for with your purity. But there is still time, isn’t there? So much time, yet, to dream thoughtlessly, and to inflict those wounds that can be cured only by nakedness.

The moon over the dam is brick red, and pockmarked with deep scarlet indentations by the sea of serenity. But as we make our way back towards to the main road, I look up during a conversational lull to find its color totally altered.

“Hey,” I say, turning from the window to Sasanka’s profile, “how’d the moon turn so yellow?”

If he notices the tone of my voice, like I’ve witnessed a glitch in the matrix, he gives no indication. He barely glances at the moon, swollen and gilded, like a medallion. Instead, he shrugs, unperturbed, as though nothing unusual has transpired. “You’ve never seen anything like that before?” he asks.

We continue driving by the river, which is visible only through the reflections of moonlight that pattern its surface in crenulations. In my mind, a familiar chord is being played, but, like a piece of music intended for one instrument but then rearranged for another, it is just unusual enough that it takes me a second to recognize it. When I finally do, it blossoms like thunder.

On a different evening, we are returning from a day at the lake and, as Sasanka pulls into the gas station to refuel, I notice a fire on the horizon. The dark silhouettes of palm trees are outlined against the growing blaze. The nighttime, like crushed velvet, or black lambskin, is nestled around it, soft, and eerie. Again, Sasanka is nowhere near as mesmerized as I. He coolly points out that, during this time of year, it is not unusual for farmers to burn their excess hay to fertilize the ground for next year.

Inside me, something between mourning and devotion swells.

I think back to a story Satya, whose name means “truth,” told me, featuring Lord Rama and his disciple, the monkey god, Hanuman. (The latter is my favorite character from the Hindu scriptures; fortunately, and unfortunately, I’ve always had a thing for mischievousness in men, mythological or otherwise.) Rama is approaching the natural end of his life, but the god of death will not come as long as Hanuman guards the lord. To distract him, Lord Rama drops his ring deep into the earth and sends Hanuman to recover it; Hanuman arrives at the tunnel’s end only to discover a whole mountain of rings identical to the one that was dropped. When he asks aloud which ring belongs to his Lord Rama, the voice of the serpent king materializes from the darkness to respond: “which Rama?”

The serpent king goes on to tell Hanuman that, in a sequence on constant loop, every generation a ring falls from above, and, when a monkey comes to retrieve it, on Earth, one Lord Rama dies. When I remember this story, I think of myself one week ago, and that mistaken state of mind that allowed me, capriciously, arrogantly, to trust in permanence. But the truth is, my memories of those ninety-degree noons, the peach and cherry-colored clouds casting jagged shadows over the hills, are already beginning to fade. Even the image of Sasanka, with whom I shared the kind of midnight intimacy that language cannot bear to capture, has started to wilt under the weight of an encroaching season of mangoes, oranges, and new obligations of emotion that no longer include my presence.

“Which Rama?” is meant to be a lesson on reincarnation, but, for me, it is most applicable as a lesson on letting go.

“Moon” is both a noun from nature, and a verb of desire. I think of “to moon,” or “to dream about,” and I imagine languishing nude upon a divan of royal purple and mustard velvet, or idling in a clawfoot tub of rapidly cooling water, with the background switching in and out like a theatrical scenery: a starless grove during the witching hour, a road in the Midwest leading to a a fried chicken joint ensconced in a strip mall, the surface of Earth’s satellite. There isn’t much in the way of this dark, existential beauty in my younger brother’s room, where I sit alone now in the same clothes I’ve been wearing for four continuous days, but my mind finds it easy — perhaps dangerously so — to descend into the escapism of other times, spaces, and emotions.

I fling an arm out from the divan, the bath, and prop myself up, both legs swinging over and out. I’m naked in the New Delhi airport, at one in the morning. (Here, bodily nudity is a visual metaphor for vulnerability of the heart.) The Scorpio and I sit surrounded by our banged-up luggage, expansive ceilings framed by frosted glass, and hour-by-hour fluctuations in world currencies, labeled in cerulean and orange neon. I confess to him that I am possessed by the urge to hurt people that I know care for me to test the limits of their love; exhausted, but understanding, he reacts with companionable silence. With him I feel the level of kinship shared between all passionate signs who who pursue validation and fear rejection.

There’s an eternal pull in the air, in the desultory conversation, which I recognize as the narcotics of intimacy, and which the Scorpio later describes as “universal love.” He threads an arm around my shoulders. We discuss future meetings with the detached assurance of two people who will never see each other again. There’s a dusty, voluptuous softness to his eyebrows and eyelashes, a sensuality that reminds me of smudging and warming dark oil pastel between my fingers. This is not a romantic attachment, I promise, but, truthfully, is has all its traps, shadows, and addictions.

The French call twilight “the time between the dog and the wolf,” but, over text, my French-speaking boyfriend tells me he’s never heard the phrase before. He adds in a little wide-eyed typographic emoji, two small-case o’s with a period between them, and I feel my heart clench in response to this childlike glimmer from a boy who is otherwise maturity incarnate. Dating him, someone with actual emotional wherewithal, has thrown into sharp relief the occasional inadequacies of my own character: my tendency to obfuscate, to conceal and obstruct, to indulge in an appetite for vanity rather than truth. As it approaches his, my own heart shifts, like a celestial body grazing another thin, silvery orbit, a chiaroscuro of space and light; so this is how a woman who was once level-headed and balanced can become frivolous, taxing, demanding, petty, and passionate.

Lately I’ve enjoyed these words: gibbous moon, peach melba. The first term is the moon with a crescent taken out of it, and the second is a dessert of fruit and vanilla ice cream. At night, I feel these words up with the same involved gusto as the palate savoring salt or honey. It functions as a distraction from the darkness, which continues to be my most acute source of terror. When even wordplay can’t end the fear, I think of my French-speaking Libra, his unassuming, girl-next-door charm. The memory of him has the same appeal as leaving a movie theater in the evening: the feeling of a fable emerging from its confines, extending and expanding into the real world. That particular, rarified breath of dusk, streetlights inundating the moody purple shadows with amorphous, chestnut-gold halos. Like youth, twilight is casual, commonplace, an experience shared by many, but its familiary does not preclude it from an adventurous, audacious nature. It is performed repeatedly, but singularly each time, by the moribund, pink sun, the veil of misty, maturing stars.

It’s been almost a year, and still he asks for my consent to kiss me when we reunite. I think of an evening, at the cusp of last summer, the boy on the floor, reclining against the side of my bed, chin up and head lolling, his gaze trained, attentively, but leisurely, as though admiring a watercolor painting, at something in the distance. Maybe it was the sentimentality of the coming night, the sensation of being shot through by desire, caught between the illness and the antidote, but just those eyes crippled me totally. God, the recklessness imbued in that umbral second. I would have let him lay waste to my entire life. It was later that I realized that the decision to breach the gap between platonic affection and intimate love was never made consciously, but rather experienced bodily as an inevitability, as certain and binding as the movement of the moon, during that time between the dog and the wolf.

When one occupies a female body for over two decades, maleness acquires an exoticism and mystery that is less about eroticism and more about difference; the thickness of a man’s wrist, the distribution of weight at the crest of his hips, the texture of the skin on his face, chest, and groin. Watching a man get dressed, I assume the charisma and focus of the protagonist of a television fragrance ad; my head propped up by a palm on my cheek, and an elbow against the mattress, I feel languid, luxurious, and casually powerful, as I observe Mars rise and prepare himself for the day.

With all the hubbub about the divine feminine, you’d think I’d feel more attached to my breasts, like Apollo to the pallid bosom of his Daphne, or to the monthly bleeding that recalls allusions to moons, taboo, and sisterhood. But my chest, truthfully, has limited glamour, which is not a statement made out of self-deprecation but rather natural feeling: to me, breasts possess only the same rustic, venereal charm as babyish mangoes, or animal meat. And with regards to my menses: there is very little pleasure in lowering panties bought in a Florida Walmart in the early spring air and observing a fat stripe of clotted, phlegmatic russet and rose from seam to seam.

And yet his body, now entering a slow camouflage in torn cargo shorts and a faded fraternity shirt, has all the gracious, unattainable romanticism of a sweet-eyed Old World princess. I feel as though I’ve been transported to a boudoir, both our identities remaining intact as the expectations for our genders reverse, and I marvel lazily at the male vessel: its gradient of color, from warm brown and green to bruised purple and pink, its pleasantly and distinctively rich and sour odor, its gamut of textures extending from throat to gonads.

What I admire most about the body of this frat bro, perhaps, is its effortlessness in retaining and exuding a charm that has eluded me in all but my most labored attempts at beauty. I am familiar with how to play my own figure to its best advantage; for instance, I know to tilt my face slightly for the camera, so the light catches my upturned eyes, and to stand with my arms behind my back and my knees held apart, trembling like a fragile doe. But these aesthetic performances are not natural, and are instead almost purposefully deceitful, relying as they do on the exploitation of archetypes: the readiness of onlookers to buy into the myth of women born in the age of the Internet. Ultra-feminine, but simultaneously alluringly androgynous, filtered through blurred, tonal layers of milk-white and lavender, posed in a foreground of palm trees and gas stations, decorated in chokers, bandannas, and itty bitty Spandex underwear. My practice of female expectation has always been a disavowal of this standard and a form of tacit cooperation, stimulating in me both satisfaction and shame.

But his form, I realize, has no such preoccupations for me. The transformative power of our closeness has elevated him beyond considerations of physical beauty. His smell, shape, weight, height — all those supposed imperatives in the complex equation of human attraction — become wholly immaterial when challenged by the reality of my love. It is only here, in a bedroom shrouded in subtropical trees and thunder, where the pressures of ontology die and are replaced by veneration and pride. Impossibly strange, to have discovered self-love buried in romantic love, to encounter one’s soul in its exchange. Stranger still to say this in words but: it was embracing his body that revealed the ability to understand my own as a composite of muscle, fragrance, scatology, eschatology, flesh, fat, melancholy, pus, and devotion. All of it devoid of human notions of innocence, corruption, virtue, or even femininity and  masculinity. (I feel like there was a thesis to this when I started writing? But now it has devolved into a pool of lukewarm, dazed emotion; what can I say? I love him, and his body, like I love me, and my body, and it is an attachment both sexual and asexual, aesthetic and functional.)

My favorite set of lines from “Winter Syntax” by Billy Collins read: “The full moon makes sense. When a cloud crosses it / it becomes as eloquent as a bicycle leaning / outside a drugstore or a dog who sleeps all afternoon / in a corner of the couch.” Like moons, bicycles, and dogs, there is something about sitting together on the couch, both in our bodies, that invites eloquence. A fluency of feeling that is closer to echolocation than speech, a realization of presence that consumes all the senses.

The name “Mangoes Marina” has the steamy, kitsch sensuality of a strip club; with the terms inverted, I imagine it could even be the alias of a playfully comic online writer of erotic fiction. But the marina is a tamer location than its name suggests: a white-and-chestnut dock framed in floral trees and liquor stores, where the boat remains docked for two days and a night in fecund and vivid mid-May. We refuel, empty the trash, fill up the jerrycans, and do the laundry. I tag along as this sequence of operations is performed, ostensibly as an assistant but more accurately as an observer. The entirety of the trip, really, has been characterized by observation — mainly of my boyfriend, who won’t be named in this text (a decision made out of consideration for both his privacy and my heart, which cannot bear to type out his name without squirming in sudden shyness. But because he does deserve some manner of identification, let’s call him “Strawberry.”)

Scenes from the Bahamian sky: On my first night, the clouds appear in a triptych of blues, each superimposed upon the next in tones of increasing lightness. A visual voyage from dark, lavish navy to semi-opalescent bleu celeste. At twilight, they are often bulbous, pulpy, arranged on a background of glowing rose. My favorite clouds are enormous and grotesquely fast-moving, possessed with an energy that borders on life-like, and, as they void themselves over the textured sea water, they rouse in my mind the most passionate ideas in my memory: the physicality of ripe fruit, the mysticism of witches, the divinity of thunder. I remember most vividly the rain at night; awakening on the deck to the sensation of wetness across my breasts and toes. Maybe I love Strawberry because our reunions coincide so often with rainy days, which are to me an experience in ecstasy like that of Saint Teresa. (Near the end of my visit, on a magnificently rainy afternoon, he dresses me in his waterproof jacket and watches as I roam barefoot in the puddles in the parking lot.)

Strawberry’s father describes the waves and foam as fields crested by sheep: a metaphor that makes me want to laugh with pure and unexpected joy. The surface of the sea behaves as though Epicurean, non-Newtonian, Dionysian. At times jagged, massive, and at others finely milled, nearly imperceptible, the waves between cays capture a spectrum of form. I understand now why so many nymphs copulate in these waters, and why the representation of the sea in oil paintings is extravagant, enigmatic; I picture Boucher’s “Arion on the Dolphin,” the titular character clothed in waves, hugely feminine eyes cast at the heavens.

On the islands, Strawberry and I walk through streets lined with Bahamian pine, Surinam cherry, and coconut palm trees. The rental homes are painted in a palette of flushed pastoral colors: baby blue, pale peach, lime green, sunshine yellow. Tiny flowers immersed in grass, picket fences straddling Man-O-War from shore to shore. I think of maximalism, the art of excess: hibiscus, frangipani, hurricanes descending.

My tan lines start at the base of my throat, and end at halfway between my hips and knees. Nut brown to olive-veined cream, the contours where colors change are studded with hickeys. The royal blue bathing suit I bought specifically for this occasion ends up being a size too small, much to my embarrassment and Strawberry’s delight. There’s something inescapably sexual about this landscape. Even the names of local restaurants have a coquettish purposefulness: Nipper’s, Grabber’s, Papa Nasty’s BBQ. In the shade of poisonwood trees, we drink sumptuously overpriced beverages made from pawpaw, guava, banana (the lusty, aromatic fruits.) The “Goombay Smash,” a cocktail indigenous to the Bahamas containing coconut cream, rum, and pineapple, features prominently in one of our best afternoons.

While snorkeling, an activity Strawberry’s mother adores, I discover my favorite fish species: the parrotfish, which comes in queen, princess, stoplight, and rainbow varieties. It bumps clumsily against the coral, nibbling audibly at its surface. The colors of the parrotfish possess that surreal beauty used by Creationists in support of their beliefs: neon, hypnagogic Creamsicle orange, aquamarine layered in a gradient, fuchsia so glitzy Ariel in the Atlantic clutches her scales in vicious jealousy. Runners-up for the prize of my love include the trumpet fish, the hogfish, and the squirrel fish (entirely on account of their names, which add a dash of flavor from the carnality of land animals.) In an instant of prodigious coincidence, a green turtle glides by within a few feet of us; I feel caught in the depths of sensation, like watching wind move through the boughs of trees.

In springtime India, a woman in my hostel splits a pomegranate and hands me half. (Insert that mythological chestnut about Proserpina here: her blue velvet gown rippling behind her as she falls.) Broken open, the pomegranate spills its globular, wine-colored contents. Each individual seed plays with light like bodies of water do, the single white grains refracting with the glamour of pinky pearls. Past the initial tartness, pomegranate tastes faintly of meat, a gamy umami flavor that reminds me of sex, or monosodium glutamate. (This is not the first time I’ve made a comparison this vulgar, and trust me, it won’t be the last. Nothing better than a tradition of metaphors that encompass both fruit and fornication.)

Months later, while on the road to Damascus, Strawberry and I split a serving of fried rice, Bayou Bourbon chicken, and existential anxiety in the food court of an American shopping mall. There’s something so fatally unreasonable about being twenty-three and thinking you know anything about philosophy but eh, fuck it. Strawberry is always a willing audience to my demonstrations of ego, a catalog that includes plagues, absurdism, and the separation of the body and mind. If he notices how badly I’m trying to arouse his interest, he reveals nothing. It occurs to me that he could easily decide to embarrass me, but in the next beat I recognize, with a punchy breath of fondness, that it just isn’t his style.

In love, I have encountered a syncretism of ego and insecurity that manifests itself in incremental contradictions. I am possessed by the desire to be adored and, conversely, abandoned; to be described as charismatic, but diffident, bratty, but poised, empathetic, but unyielding. On more than one occasion, I fall into the “cool girlfriend” trap, going along with nearly any proposition in an effort to construct a facsimile of relationship perfection. This attitude would be untenable if it were not so typical: a girl trying, passionately, but pathetically, to be impressive.

In the Florida Panhandle, we have a dinner date at a pho restaurant in a strip mall. The interior decorating captures an aesthetic that is halfway between elementary school cafeteria and airport waiting lounge. We face each other over a table surface laminated to resemble oakwood grain. A plasma screen television mounted on the wall above the counter plays an endless loop of Vietnamese music videos. Squirming on emerald-and-burgundy upholstered plastic seats, I look at Strawberry’s impassive face as he scans the menu and feel the sudden horror of inaccessible emotion. I realize that I don’t know how he feels about me. An accompanying realization: I don’t know how I feel about me. Only the idea of me seems real.

When my moodiness over us feels pathological rather than circumstantial, I retreat to the supercut my mind has assembled of the past year: the nacreous, drunken flush across Strawberry’s cheeks, the ancient forest in the summertime, the midnight in May spent crying together. I think of Martin Buber’s “I-Thou,” a framework for human relations that feels like buried instinct rather than improbable theory. (Yes, I too am rolling my eyes at myself. Bear with me here.) To communicate as an “I” with another “I,” the world of the free, and the genuine. My misreading of Buber reinterprets the theory as a mechanism for emotional exchange between souls. But what is a soul? What is Strawberry’s soul, which I imagine to be the human core stripped of everything extraneous? Without his green eyes, his rounded, Slavic features, his soft spot for folk songs, his particular combination of shyness and charm, his blasé, sometimes evasive attitude, so impossible for me to decipher?

Strawberry orders two bowls of soy sauce ramen in Kansai, Japan. Outside, the hoods of cars parked alongside the rice fields gleam like Tungsten. In silence, I break apart a pair of disposable chopsticks and examine the textured strips of seaweed, the delicately soft-boiled egg, the helix of flavorings, as though reading our fortune like a millennial witch. I think, not without shame, of the night before: a baffled, semi-sweet fumbling, a faked climax. The unbearable melodrama of my pronouncements. How what had started as an impulse, a brief encounter, had culminated in entry into an underworld, loving and not dangerous but mysterious nonetheless, and I was buoyed up through it by him, my heart turning over in my chest with Prosperina’s brew of anxiety and exhilaration. Seems about right, for a first time.

Long-time readers will remember “Jesus in His Twenties,” a cryptic, surreal little bildungsroman about a millennial Jesus Christ growing up alongside a handful of philosophical, metaphysical housemates. I added a few extra chapters onto the story in early 2016, hopefully arriving at a semi-conclusion, but never got around to posting it here. It is, without a doubt, a bit rough around the edges (my God, I sure was a devotee of the semi-colon), but I hope you enjoy.

THE DEATH OF THE UNIVERSE

“Want a pop?” the Death of the Universe asks, rising from the armchair. “I’m gonna go to the kitchen real quick.”

Jesus looks up from the lease, signed moments ago, and nods gratefully. It is the hottest summer on record. Even in his new landlady’s cool, umbral flat the inside of his collared shirt is beaded with sweat.

“Oh my gosh. Yeah.” He exclaims, realizing too late, how childlike he sounds. He runs a hand through his hair, embarrassed. “That’d be great. Thanks, Dee.”

She smiles and leaves the room. Almost instantly, the exact moment she is gone, the laws of physics change. The sofa cushions dissolve underneath him, and he drops, stunned, flat onto the floorboards. Parts of his body fall off him—one leg, from heel to knee, an arm, fingertips trembling—and then reattach, like magnets. The television set begins to ascend with all the self-assurance of a cloud moving through muggy air. Jesus gets up, panicked, and busts his lip on the coffee table. His mouth rapidly fills with blood.

He is submerged in the disorienting but familiar sensation of being attached to an emotional state, but now it is a million times more physical, dragging him down as though he were tethered to it. The world shifts underneath him, precariously, fatalistically. Objects in the room disappear one by one. The potted ferns, the glass-paneled doors leading to the small balcony, the shadow produced by his own body. He looks to the heavens to find the ceiling, roof, and walls gone. Distance thins to nothing. Next door, the neighbor, sleeves rolled up, is hanging up her laundry. Three hundred miles away, rain is beginning to fall over the center of the Atlantic Ocean. He’s dizzy, but impossibly lucid too, as though understanding the size of the universe for the first time.

Dee returns, a can of Coca-Cola under each of her arms, and closes the door with the inside of her foot. She laughs out loud at Jesus, the bewildered expression on his face as he lies on the floor, clutching the leg of the table, and, in that instant, all is right again.

“Sometimes the world isn’t quite real when I’m not around,” she says, a bit apologetically. She gets down on her haunches so that she is level with him and hands him the can. “Life only makes sense when death exists.”

However shaken he is he has to smile at a statement like that, the contrasts embedded in it; how it is so hard to take but so casually said.

Dee pops the tab on the Coke and takes a swig. He lifts himself up so that he’s leaning against the sofa, where she now sits, elbows on her knees. She looks at him with her dark eyes so like those of his childhood angels and reaches over to pat his head with an unpracticed but unfeigned gentleness. The image of the Archangel Gabriel suddenly comes to him: how God’s main angel would pick him up from school in beat-up sneakers and a jacket of ochre leather, and ruffle his hair with the same sort of hesitant tenderness. Like Gabo, little about Dee explicitly suggests the supernatural, but despite her human form there’s something illusory, dark, in her shape, like she is a landscape in a woman’s body, a pyramid in the desert, buried, hidden in plain sight.

SOUL

He explores the neighborhood around the house. The eggshell-colored camellias, the yellow clouds at sunset, the warning bell of the freight train, coming from somewhere in the opaque distance — these sights, sounds, enter and exit his consciousness and invite a breed of emotion, halfway between tenderness and discomposure, into his heart. It’s the kind of feeling he wouldn’t know how to describe but it is never far from his mind, and he revisits it constantly, as though it were a memory of love, or a memory of fear.

Soul, who lives in the room across from his own, accompanies him, sometimes, on evening walks. The first few times he notices her following him, not at a distance but at his side, as normally as if they were close friends, he thinks perhaps she is an angel, which he sees so often in the glowing, red-toned midsummer. But then he spots her in the communal kitchen, scrolling on a smartphone and eating Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and he realizes his mistake. It is an easy one to have made: Though Soul looks like a young woman, the same age as he, perhaps, she is a touch too transparent to be human. In the right light, and at the right angle, she disappears from view entirely, an illusion in visual continuity. But this doesn’t bother Jesus. From birth he has believed nothing can stay forever, and he finds comfort in impermanence that confirms distrust in the immaterialness of his world.

Soul likes to carry around a small, outdated digital camera; her taste in photography is what she self-deprecatingly calls “sepia-tone Instagram tacky,” meaning dimly-lit, impersonal images of the flowers, the bicycles chained to lampposts, and Jesus’ dark ponytail, which she sometimes tugs on to get his attention. Her expression, when he turns to face her, is immobile but her touch is gentle, and unassuming, and it conjures up in him a powerful remembrance he can’t quite name.

Once, he shyly suggests they get a passerby to take their picture together. Immediately, Soul shakes her head. She doesn’t tell him, but she was told once that photographs steal souls and she’s never been able to shake that fear. Usually the directness, the finality, of this refusal would disconcert him — Jesus has always been more sensitive than he would like to admit — but around Soul the possibility of being hurt, of feeling painfully, somehow seems to have been removed, wholesale, from the pressures of emotion. Life is simpler, more mechanistic, with her, and easier to bear. Is this what a relationship between nonhumans looks like? Is this, he wonders, how the Earth and moon think of each other?

DAWN AND DUSK

Ox returns one rainy night. She drops her suitcases down and immediately gets to work repairing everything that is broken in the apartment block. Sleeves rolled up to elbows, she fixes the A/C on the third floor, and then moves onto the washing machine, the flickering light bulb over the entrance, and the kitchen sink, clogged with grease for three weeks. Jesus wakes to the sound of her off-key singing and he lays awake in the cool violet light of very early morning, listening to her. He feels renewed, like his heart is traveling, and he forgets his exhaustion.

Her brother, Pike, returns that morning. Unlike Ox, he brings nothing with him but the clothes he wears: a navy cable-knit sweater, gray slacks, and rubber flip-flops embossed with the name of a seaside hotel on the Mexican coast. He finds Ox immediately, sitting on the kitchen floor. She winks at him, and then reaches up to briefly, but meaningfully, squeeze his hand, before her attention returns to the plumbing. This is the first time she has seen him in eight months.

Jesus meets them at breakfast. Neither of them are particularly impressed by his introduction of himself as the son of God.

“So what?” says Pike, not maliciously, but not kindly either. He sits on the counter, ankles crossed, a toolbox in his lap, as Ox combs through the pipes under the sink. His eyes, dispassionate, and yellow as sand dunes, survey Jesus, from top to bottom, in one long look.

Despite himself, Jesus bristles. He’s ashamed by what he wants to say but he says it anyway. “Well, who are you then?”

Before Pike can respond Ox takes the handle of a screwdriver out of her mouth and smiles big. “Does it matter?”
(Dee tells him later that they are the dusk and the dawn, second-gen twins descended from a long line of famous meteorological phenomena.)

After dinner that night, the five of them around Dee’s coffee table, Ox tells them about their maternal grandfather, El Niño, shooting through oceans with languid regularity, and his romance with the Atlantic hurricane. Ox stands up, gesticulates, walking around while she talks, resurrecting scenes from her prodigal memory with her physicality, her presence that fills the room like smoke into a vessel. She can make Dee laugh out loud (a true rarity). Even Soul pays rapt attention.

But it is Pike that Jesus finds himself looking at most often: his aromatic limbs and hands, his almond-eyed presence that is honey and amber, the clarity, permeability of his expressions, which are unambiguous and unconcealed, and tempered by his silence like iron submerged in saltwater. For Jesus, who has always thought himself incapable of romantic love, this new, sudden interest is a revelation, as well as a source of terror.

Pike is aware of the attention, and bothered, in a vague way, by it. He doesn’t like Jesus, he’s decided, or how his hands twist in his lap, when he’s sighing and fidgeting and has his head tipped back, looking at him, at Pike, his brow furrowed like he’s undoing the Gordian knot. When he can’t take the self-consciousness anymore, he leans over Soul, seated between them on the couch, and meets Jesus’ stare.

“Keep your eyes to yourself, son of God,” he whispers, heatedly, but quietly enough that it’s a private exchange. Jesus is so surprised he forgets to be embarrassed and smiles foolishly, brightly. In front of them, Ox is pacing, hands held in front of her, palms upturned, saying: “He loved her so much, the year she left there was no wind over the ocean.”
Pike turns away quickly; outside, the setting sun flickers imperceptibly.

JUDAS ISCARIOT

“The Internet, actually.” Jesus says, when Soul asks how he found Dee’s place. The rent listing for her apartment building had been on Craigslist, of all places. SINGLE ROOM AVAILABLE IN SHARED BLOCK. 554 ZENITH II. Even through the cellphone screen he had immediately perceived the rare mood of the place, its misty, mossy aura like a forested afternoon. He remembers clicking through the added images, imagining himself there: in the communal kitchen, with its linoleum surfaces made to resemble marble, in the living room, watering the potted ferns.

“The Internet,” Soul repeats in a thoughtful voice.

“Soul here loves the Internet. She’s a recent social media cult convert,” Ox says. “Don’t you have something like two hundred followers on Twitter?”

“Four thousand,” Soul says. “You should follow me,” she tells Jesus solemnly.

“You really should,” Pike says from the couch, where he’s flipping through pages of a newspaper called The Celestial Weekly (Its thin silver and lilac pages flicker like holograms.) “It’s good.”

Soul makes a small face that Jesus now recognizes as her version of an expression of genuine contentment: one slow blink and pursed, slightly upturned lips, the apples of her cheeks reddening briefly.

“That’s high praise from you,” Ox says. “I thought you swore off social media entirely?”

“Well. I was in need of something to read.” He pauses. “While I was traveling.”

Jesus stares at Pike, who continues to look idly through the newspaper as though no significant disclosure has just been made. He’s never heard Pike mention his travels (or, as Soul tactfully put it when Jesus asked, “Pike’s half-year mental breakdown”) before.

If Ox is as surprised as he, she does not show it. But her the line of her shoulders stiffens just a fraction, and in the Indian Ocean, the first few seafoam-crowned threads of a tropical depression knot together, disfiguring the surface of the water.

“Where did you go?” Jesus asks, trying, desperately, but unsuccessfully, to keep the interest from his voice. “When you were traveling, I mean.”

“Top-secret.” Pike says glibly. A more perceptive man than Jesus would notice the unnaturally low, measured tone and drop the subject. But judiciousness doesn’t come naturally to him, not yet. In a previous life this was a lesson learnt only through crucifixion.

“Oh, come on.” Jesus says. “What do you have to hide?”

“None of your business, son of God,” Pike says, a little too quickly, and the mask of coolness slips. The rough edge to his voice is obvious now, something haughty and pained that refuses to cave.

Jesus is immediately contrite. “I’m sorry,” he says plaintively. “I didn’t mean to pry.”

Pike says nothing in reply, and turns his eyes away from him, but Jesus doesn’t feel like he’s been forgiven at all. He is caught in the thorns of Pike’s neutral, but slightly unbalanced expression, which commands instant attention, and total deference, like the first snow, or a tiger moving through abyssal, verdigris blossoms. The nudity, the captivity, of an emotion scarring the skin, eyes, lips, from brow to throat. He wishes he could apologize again, or, better yet, make him laugh; but Pike’s indifference feels as inalterable as the weather. How can it be that a face, Jesus thinks anxiously, can be both close enough to touch and as distant as Eden?

Ox takes The Celestial Weekly from Pike’s unmoving hands, rolls it up and raps him gently on the head with it.
“Earth to Pike,” she says playfully, and her brother blinks and looks up at her with a fondness so open it makes Jesus ache. It’s an ache older than original sin, and it reminds him that he might go his whole life without anyone looking at him like that. Jesus looks away, as fear breaks into bloom.

ARE YOU MY ANGEL

The Death of the Universe helps Jesus with his groceries on Saturday afternoons. He doesn’t own a car or know how to drive one, so she takes him in her aquamarine Ford Fiesta to the grocery store, where he loads up on celery sticks and microwaveable macaroni and cheese. He always gets M&Ms too, the extra-chocolate kind which he knows are Dee’s favorite, and which he shares with her on the way home.

From the Death of the Universe he has learned a whole host of lifestyle tips, in subject matters that range from the quotidian to the arcane. Jesus writes these down diligently in his journal, which originally contained recollections of dreams but now is the vessel of comments such as “Dee says to rein in unnecessary spending by keeping a record of purchases” or “Dee says the area immediately adjacent to the Cascadia fault will be the site of a magnitude 8 earthquake on a full moon night.” He has also picked up the words to “A Supermarket in California” which Dee recites, impeccably and with rare gusto, as she pushes the cart along the white-tiled aisles.

“What peaches and what penumbras!” she says, as they wait in the “12 items or less” queue, unconcerned by the way shoppers in front of them turn and stare.

Jesus tries to remember what is next but comes up empty, so instead he exclaims “Who killed the pork chops?” and they both laugh.

On the drive back, Dee takes the coastal road. Soft skeins of rain envelop the car. Jesus rolls down the window an inch, just enough for the fragrant seaside air to enter. The smell of salt permeates the farthest reaches of his body.

There’s always a hypnotic, prayer-like quality to Dee’s steady driving, but it is magnified in the rain, knotted into sensual, audiovisual elements: the perpetual, rhythmic oscillations of the windshield wipers, the voices on the radio, muzzled by static, the faint outlines of the objects outside the car, nearly invisible in the weather. An instance of quasi-unreal isolation from ordinary life, Jesus thinks, that exists, perhaps, in the marginal area between Earth and Heaven.

Through it all there is a single constant, anchoring him firmly to the present: Dee’s hand on the steering wheel hovering in the periphery of Jesus’s vision. Her physical presence gives his world an additional dimension that is unknown but not unrecognizable, a little like the concept of death itself. But despite what she represents, he never feels safer than with her. Jesus is reminded, once again, of her similarity to the Archangel Gabriel, and tells her so.

“Ah,” she says gently, smiling. “A good guy.”

“You know him?”

“I’m friends with all angels.” She chuckles. “Better to have them on your side than otherwise, you know?”

She continues: “Don’t tell the rest of them, but Gabo’s always been my favorite.”

“Really? Why?”

She ponders this for a few moments, her fingers on the dashboard tapping along to a moody, layered R&B ballad.

“When you’re in my line of business, you’re mostly concerned with things like entropy, and matter, and the expansion of space. Light-absorbing particles in black holes. The end of time. The meaning of time. That kind of thing. So mankind, which amounts to you know, a collection of inelegantly packaged carbon and nitrogen molecules, is just, the most absolutely minimal blip on the radar.”

Jesus pretends he isn’t the tiniest bit hurt by this.

“But Gabo…he’s been enamored of humanity for as long as I’ve known him. It makes him interesting. He’s always electing to be reborn into human lives.”

“Like you, then?”

She looks at him, confused by the question.

“No, I’ve never been reborn, of course. I’ve always been around. Ever since the very beginning.”

“The beginning?” Jesus thinks of the honeyed jungles of Paradise.

“The singularity. Sometime before atoms began to form, thirteen or so billion years ago. If there was anything before that, I have no recollection of it.”

Jesus shifts in the diamond-patterned velour front seat, head lolling against his shoulder. “I don’t remember anything from before my current life either. At least, nothing concrete. Gabo used to tell me things, and I thought that maybe they were familiar, but they’re not really.”

He looks down at his hands, then lifts them up so they are gilded in the passing headlights. He tries to imagine, not for the first time, the nail, that pain, but there’s nothing marking him.

“None of those memories are mine.”

The bitterness in his voice is not lost on Dee. She shakes her head. “Christ already had his moment in the sun. Gabo means well, but you’re not him. You don’t have to be him.”

Jesus bites his lip. He can’t be sure if she knows, but in a single motion she’s located the most ancient, and tender, of his insecurities. He trains his gaze on the movements of the scenery outside the Plexiglass window: the surface of the sea trembles underneath the continued rain.

OUR LADY OF SORROWS

Ox and Pike don’t fight often but when they do it produces a shift in local air pressure so profound that for eight hours a tropical rainstorm thunders around the apartment block. The first few times it happens Jesus returns from an afternoon of job hunting to find his boxers and novelty t-shirts soaking wet; he is forced to spend the remainder of his evening in his only suit, drying his clothes with a hair dryer. Eventually he learns Soul is more prescient than he is in this and other matters, and wakes up early when she does, before the gray midnight flowers into dawn, to take down the laundry drying on the balcony.

As autumn progresses, it only gets worse: The effect of the short days transforms Ox’s blunt, vigorous personality into an invasive one, incompatible with Pike’s high-strung evasiveness. They love one another, Jesus knows, but compassion has its limits. On one particularly terrible occasion Ox’s exasperation reaches its emotional apex and she yells “You’re better than this, aren’t you?”—Jesus can’t imagine what she means by this—and Pike kicks her out of his room.

Jesus waits until the worst of the rain has passed before delicately making his way through the exterior hallway that connects the apartments, towards Pike’s door. He knocks two times, holding tightly onto the doorframe against the wind, and, upon hearing nothing, tries the knob. It’s open.

It takes a few moments for his eyes to adjust to the dim light. The room is messier than Pike’s ultra-controlled demeanor would suggest; Jesus thinks, with a not insignificant degree of awe, that is might be nearly as messy as his own bedroom. It’s like the garden of a long-dead emperor: lovingly curated, once, but now overrun. The curtains are drawn, limned in occasional flashes of lightning. Pike is sitting on the floor, legs folded underneath him. Overlapping sheets of wet watercolor paper are assembled in a ring like petals around him, and he sits in the center as though residing in a blossom, or as if his whole body had a halo.

“Sorry,” Jesus says, his hand on the door. He thinks he must look like a madman: encircled in the residual marine blue glow of the storm, the streetlamps shuddering behind him, his hair escaped from its ponytail and framing his face and nape in darkness.  “I really didn’t mean to intrude. I can go, if you want.”

“It’s fine,” Pike says wearily. “Come in.”

Jesus closes the door, muffling the sound of the rain. He sits on the outside perimeter of the circle, hands clasped neatly in his lap like a child. He wants so badly to ask what Pike’s doing but he contains himself. His mind returns to the mood of Dee’s car: the soft silence imbued with the sacred.

Pike moves his fingertips over the saturated surface, and the water begins to change color, from transparent, blue-tinged to brilliantly opaque: oily reds, and oranges, royal, milky purple. Pike’s brow furrows; forms and layers take soft shape, tangling together into a blend of clouded satin.

“Woah,” Jesus breathes. “It’s a sunset. How are you doing that?”

“It’s the same basic principle as the water particles in the dusk sky,” Pike says. After a moment’s pause he beckons to Jesus. “Here.”

Pike takes Jesus’s hand, four fingers against the palm and the thumb over his knuckles—Jesus trembles visibly, at the contact—and swipes it over the paper.  “Breathe in, son of God,” Pike whispers.

Does time stop? Does the world come into an end? Jesus can’t say for sure: every one of his senses is submerged in the sensation of Pike’s hand on his, channeling a breed of warmth so strong it approaches bodily pain. It slices cleanly through his flesh, a wound with no blood, and pours onto the floor in a blur of rose and slate.

“Dee’s not the only one who can manipulate reality,” Pike continues. His voice sounds a little calmer now. “Of course, this is nothing compared to what she can do. It’s just a small thing.”

“I think you should talk to your sister,” Jesus says, abruptly. He’s been practicing the line since he was at the door but he’s surprised at himself, at how emboldened their closeness has made him feel. “She says stuff she shouldn’t, maybe. But she really cares about you.”

“I know. I know that.”

“She’s like a mom.” Jesus says.

Pike rolls his eyes but doesn’t contest the assessment.

“I didn’t really have a mom, growing up.” Jesus doesn’t know why he’s suddenly talking about himself, but it feels right, somehow. “I moved in and out of foster homes, mainly. Gabo–I mean, the Archangel Gabriel–took care of me. Most of the time. But I still think about it all the time.”

“Think about what?”

“Talking to my mom. Wherever she is. If she’s even still like, alive. I don’t know. It’s stupid. I have a lot of pretend conversations with her.”

Pike sighs. “Why are you here? Why are you telling me this?”

It’s a gentle question. He’s still holding onto Jesus’s hand, though he doesn’t seem fully aware of it.

A fragile negotiation: deciding how much, or how little, to disclose. The weakest, and most courageous, thing two people can do. Safety exchanged for trust. Vulnerability exchanged for intimacy. Jesus hesitates; he could shrug, and Pike would accept that, and let it go, maybe forever.

“I don’t think you should ever be unhappy.” Jesus says finally. “Not if you can fix it. Not if the only thing between you and happiness is just a choice that you can make.”

It’s not quite what he wanted to say—it’s a cliché, banal, he thinks, punishing himself already—but it feels close enough. Pike lets go of Jesus’s hand and gets up. At the door, he pauses and looks back at him fiercely. He looks like he might say something. He doesn’t.

The imprint of Pike’s thumb remains on Jesus’s hand for days afterwards: a reddish fingerprint like blood.

MOVIE NIGHT

This week it is Ox’s turn to pick the movie. They are crowded around the monitor of Dee’s IBM desktop, waiting as the machine boots up. Soul, the Messiah, and the sunshine twins are arranged atop Dee’s chevron-patterned duvet. The Death of the Universe sits on a wicker chair dragged in from the dining room, her cheek resting against her knuckles, humming a melody Jesus is certain he recalls but cannot name. The windows blinds filter in the encroaching nighttime, bracketing their bodies in symmetrical, gold-violet bars of light.

Jesus can hear Pike, at his side, laughing into his hand as Ox tells a joke. Jesus fidgets; he crosses his arms over his chest, and then uncrosses them, eyes darting. He’s been trying to muster the courage to start a conversation for the better part of the past five minutes but piercing the environment now strikes him as unimaginable.

They’re not like him, these major and minor idols; he is mismatched here, beside their equipoise, their shared, heavy-lidded looks, their broad and weighty futures. He balls his hands into fists in his lap and is suddenly overrun with the guileless need to feel worthy. The desire lies like a foot of water over the surface of his mind.

Pike’s fingertips dust over his elbow, lifting his from the reverie. He tilts his head slightly and flashes him a questioning thumbs-up, to which Jesus offers a hesitant answering nod. It’s a small gesture, but it feels like the blood rushing back into Jesus’s body: to be noticed, he realizes, is another way to return to the present, and to close the distance between the heart and the soul.

Ox inserts a thumb drive into the booted IBM with her selection pre-downloaded onto it. The DVD menu pops up: Rodger and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music. Jesus half-expects a derisive noise from Pike, who judging from previous weeks prefers science fiction, but he is surprisingly agreeable.

“A classic,” he says. “Nice.”

“I’ve never seen it,” Jesus admits.

“Really?” The twins say in unison.

Ox sings along, in her unabashed contralto, to every song.

“Jesus reminds me of Maria,” Pike says, at one point, to no one in particular.

Jesus smiles politely, but he is privately thrilled. He memorizes all of Maria’s lines and hums them under his breath during his walks with Soul. She is not amused and tries to make that clear to Jesus by pointedly narrowing her eyes at him, to no effect. (Testily, she posts on her Twitter feed, eve_1050: Musicals will be mankind’s downfall.)

DUAL NATURE OF LIGHT

Like the original Jesus, but unlike the current Jesus, Ox is skilled in home repair, specifically carpentry, and makes her living as the local handywoman. In the early hours of the morning, Jesus opens his window and watches her ascend a ladder, with the solid dignity of an ascetic, propped up against the apartment block’s outer wall. She likes to work on the red-orange tiled roofs as the sun rises, she’s told him, and often remains there throughout the day; sometimes, on walks with Soul, Jesus will tilt his head back and spot, from the street level, Ox’s figure high above, surrounded by crows.

The birds perched on the rows of tiles don’t seem disturbed by Ox’s presence; in fact, they are oddly deferential to her, pecking obediently at the bits of sandwich that she offers them. Jesus is always a little disappointed by the way they take to the air as soon as he calls out Ox’s name.

“How’d you sleep, son of God?” Ox yells out, her voice carrying, somehow, into the room as clearly as if she were by his side. She sounds like something universal, whole, historic, like the voice he might imagine a mountain having.

“Okay,” Jesus says, chewing on a nail.

“Just okay?” she asks. Ox is the type to follow up on remarks; she never lets anxiety linger in the air uncontested.

“I had a dream,” he says, voice dropping lower and lower, “that someone—I couldn’t tell who—was performing surgery on me. Cutting my brain into pieces so it looked like a flower.”

“Hm,” Ox murmurs. “Unsettling.”

“Do you ever have dreams like that?”

“Not really. I don’t really dream. When I do, it’s more like—prophetic announcements than abstract scenes, I guess.”

“What do you mean, ‘prophetic announcements’?”

“Pike and I see the future in dreams,” she says, nonplussed. “Not much. Nothing like Cassandra—she used to live in your room, a few years ago, totally the weirdest girl ever—we just get them every so often. Comes with the trade.”
Jesus leans back onto his bed, the mattress dipping underneath his body. He feels a familiar weight collapse onto him. Dee is 13.82 billion years old, Soul has the hidden grace and spirituality of a young god, and the twins can see into space and time. Meanwhile Jesus is unemployed, scraping together savings each month. He’s been looking for entry-level work diligently but if he is honest the efforts have been disinterested and mechanical. He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to be doing. The star of Nazareth: What good has it done him?

“Jesus?” Ox calls out, after a minute has passed.

“Yeah?” he says, not entirely able to hide the sadness from his voice.

She climbs halfway down the ladder, peeks into his window and unceremoniously climbs into his room. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he mutters, his face spilling with warmth from temple to collar. He pulls his knees to his chest, and buries his head in the cradle of his arms. “It’s okay. It’s okay.” He doesn’t know to whom he’s speaking, when he says this—is it directed at her or him?

“Jesus, buddy, you can tell me.”

He hiccups. “I guess, I don’t know—I just feel like a loser.”

Ox is quiet for a moment. Then, she says: “You know, I didn’t get a chance to thank you.”

“Thank me for what?”

“Pike told me what you said. That he shouldn’t be unhappy. It seemed so uncharacteristic of him, and I asked him where he’d heard something like that and he looked all abashed and said, ‘Jesus told me, and I believe him.’”
She smiles. “I think that’s a kind of power that you have. You say things, and people believe you.”

“Why?” Jesus asks.

“I don’t know,” she says honestly. “But it’s true.”

She reaches over to ruffle his hair with one calloused hand; her touch, Jesus thinks, smiling, feels like tropical weather.

EPHEMERA FROM THE CELESTIAL WEEKLY

This week’s best Twitter updates from our favorite online persona

eve_1050: Saw Cthulhu in the McDonald’s on Main
eve_1050: For those interested, he ordered the 20-pc chicken nugget
eve_1050: Does anyone know a decent exorcist?? Asking 4 a friend
eve_1050: Will suffering ever end lol

An advice column by The Death of the Universe

            Dear Death of the Universe,
I’ve been in a relationship for a while, and I thought it was going well, at first. But now I’m not so sure. I don’t recognize who I am when I’m with this person. Was I just in the honeymoon period before? Are we fundamentally incompatible? Did I throw myself into the arms of the first person who came my way? I like the security of being committed to someone else, and I have good memories, but this doesn’t make me happy anymore. What do I do? Should I stay, even if I’m not happy, even if leaving would be a risk?
Sincerely, Haunted by Possibility

            Dear Haunted,
Around four billion years ago, I witnessed the first rains on Earth. You’re probably not familiar with the planet—few are—but it’s located in the Orion Arm of the Milky Way, which is itself contained within the Virgo Supercluster. Those are H. sapiens terms, though, which are admittedly obtuse. (The species has a bit to go before they understand their place in the universe.) I normally point individuals in Earth’s general direction by telling them to take a left at the Cosmic Supervoid and head straight until the quasar grouping, then to just keep going for another ten billion light years until they hit this oddly squashed, mostly aquatic, fairly unattractive cosmological lump. That’s Earth.

But I digress. Back to the story I was telling. Four billion years ago I had just arrived to Earth. There was no water, no life, and the atmosphere was a blend of methane and ammonia so thick it looked like smog. Unfiltered sunlight striking the dark air. Volcanic explosions every which way. The First Law of Thermodynamics and I were there—just wasting time.

Then Thermo made this surprised noise—a sharp intake of breath—and pointed upwards. (The only permutations I feel or induce relate directly to the aging and eventual death of spacetime but Thermo’s a joy to travel with because she can discern shifts in energy as they occur.) As soon as she looked up, these pockets of water vapor in the air suddenly condensed enough to form droplets, and it slowly began to rain liquid water from the atmosphere. It didn’t stop raining for the next fifty million years.

I found it to be charmingly frivolous at the time, but now that I remember it, it was like being in a dream. The two of us in the warm, milky water, and the planet filling its oceans, and everything knew a kind of magical, gentle, total peace.

I don’t know that I would recommend visiting Earth now. It might not be great for your heart, if you’re a sensitive soul. I myself will probably have to relocate in a few hundred thousand years. It still rains here, and it distracts me, sometimes, from everything else that’s going on—but it’s not enough.

Maybe I’ve gotten sentimental with age. Who knows. I do love it here, and I love how much this world has changed, and how it is peopled, now, with creatures that confound me in pleasantly surprising ways. But there’s a level of destructiveness, and self-sabotage here that began with the volcanoes of billions of years ago and has reincarnated into the humans themselves. I think this will undo me, if I stay.

Haunted—If you want to leave, that is your decision to make. Sometimes, if you want to save yourself, you have to do the dishonorable thing. Sometimes love is not the important thing. Sometimes love is not close to being enough.

Sincerely,

The Death of the Universe

BODHISATTVA

Pike’s shift at the Godzilla, the small bar he works weeknights, starts at eight in the evening and ends four hours before sunrise. Occasionally Jesus is invited to tag along, and he spends the evening chatting with the regulars and watching the 24-hour news on the mounted television. The world is an ugly place, Jesus thinks, as the anchorwoman signals to an on-screen videotaping of a desert bombing. But he turns and catches Pike watching him, the expression on his face nebulous and impenetrable, and the thought fades into nothingness.

When work is over they walk through empty streets, as close as they can be to one another without touching. Snowbanks are stacked onto the sides of the road. Pike has his hands in his pockets, and his eyes are on the translucent clouds, visible as texture in the plummy nighttime air. Jesus finds that that semi-darkness disguises the agitation of his heart, and it is easier to be truthful, or at least uninhibited.

“It’s like,” he says, “I don’t know what I’m good at? Or if I’m even good at anything?”

“You’re certainly good at being self-deprecating,” Pike remarks dryly.

“But you know what I mean.” Jesus insists. “Right?”

Pike’s eyes move from the dark clouds to Jesus’s face. “I do,” he admits, with a low, purposeful intensity that rings as clear as the fragrance in saltwater, in blood.

Jesus is intensely conscious, as always, of the movements, positioning, and conditions of Pike’s body: Pike’s shirtsleeves, the fabric swaying at his side like breezeless ocean waves, the ribbed rosiness on his jawline where he nicked himself with the shaving razor. The olive green-veined depressions of his throat, undulating with the rise and fall of his breath. His voice softening as his energy ebbs.

But this inventory of observations is not braced by the sting of unrequited attachment anymore; Jesus’s love has matured into something that is companionable, comfortable, and that asks for nothing. This, he thinks, is the difference between being chained to an emotion and being anchored to it.

“I’ve been thinking,” Jesus starts.

“A dangerous activity, for you.”

Jesus snorts and pushes Pike’s shoulder in playful retaliation. Pike’s answering smile is surprisingly shy and Jesus’s pulse quickens.

“I wonder what I could have done differently? I wonder if I could have avoided living this kind of life?”

“What do you mean, ‘this kind of life’?” Pike asks.

“ I mean—a life where I feel like maybe I made a mistake somewhere, and now I’m stuck on this path that’s not right for me.”

He kicks at the snow. This fear has been heavy on him since the spring, a layer of thickened dust on his soul. He looks at Pike through his eyelashes, his heart rising into his throat; Pike is looking at him attentively, waiting for him to continue.

“I used to think that I could do anything? My dreams used to be so big. But now they are getting smaller and smaller.”

Pike shrugs. Jesus looks at him, surprised, and then doubles over, suddenly, hands on his knees, laughing out loud.

Pike frowns, brow furrowed in concern. “What? What is it?”

Jesus rights himself and wipes his eyes. “I don’t know. I guess I thought you’d try to console me? Tell me that I’m being silly, and that I can actually do anything I want?”

“Why would I do that?” Pike says, frowning. “I don’t think you can do anything.”

Jesus nods. “I know.”

Pike pauses. When Jesus thinks back on this moment, he’ll envision a tide rising in the split-seconds before impact against the coast. “But, you know, I used to be—I used to be really scared about, you know, moving forward and doing this whole dusk charade for the rest of my life. And instead of not, like, marinating in my self-hatred and medicating my insecurity with aloofness and facing shit like an adult—”

The early morning crows lift their heads and cry into the crowning sun.

“—I ditched my sister who is like, the only person to love my sorry ass, and peaced out to Mexico and spent eight months working in a hotel bar. And, man, what a loser move that was, and I felt like I couldn’t do anything the whole time, and where am I going with this? I don’t know where I’m going with this.”

Pike laughs nervously. Jesus’s heart is beating so fast he thinks he might collapse into a column of smoke.

“I don’t know what to say,” Jesus says. “I wish I did. This is so stupid, but I—I wish I could say something that would make all your fears and insecurities go away.”

His voice takes on a layer, now, that is hyperreal but somehow familiar, and that seems like it comes from faraway. “If I had my way, you’d never feel any pain.”

Pike smiles; he takes Jesus’s hand and squeezes it briefly. “I said I don’t think you can do anything,” he tells him. “But I think, maybe, everything that’s important, you can do.”

QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT/JESUS OF NAZARETH

They are playing a Super Smash Brothers on a Nintendo64. Dee and Soul are a formidable team; Soul’s style of play is unenthused but precise, targeted, and deadly, and Dee has set world records for nearly every game you can play on a console. Pike, the sorest loser in the house, frequently complains that playing against them is an exercise in futility. This is certainly true now, as he and Jesus, their opponents, are getting thoroughly trounced; their animated avatars react theatrically in response to Soul’s devastating critical attacks followed by a booming “KO” that eclipses the screen. But Jesus finds he isn’t bothered at all; he laughs easily at Pike’s pouting, and Dee winks at him.

“What can I say,” Dee responds obliquely, “I’ve had a lot of time to practice my gaming.”

“Roughly 13.8 billion years of practice,” Soul says, smiling.

“I can’t imagine there were Nintendo games during the fusion of helium and hydrogen in the early cosmos.” Pike says.

“No,” Dee concedes, “Not as such. Though I got some reflexes avoiding debris in the asteroid belts.”

The doorbell rings and Dee looks up expectantly. “That’ll be the post,” she says. “I gotta get this, here, Ox, you play.”
She tosses the controller at Ox and leaves the room. Immediately, Jesus starts to feel the world shift, walls trembling like almond blossoms, and he takes a deep breath, eyes closed, and steels himself. But a few natural, average moments pass, and he opens his eyes. Everyone is staring at him with perplexed expressions.

“Alright there, Jesus? You good to go?” Ox asks, signaling towards the game with her free hand.

Jesus looks around to confirm the reality of his surroundings: Dawn, Dusk, Soul, the haziness of the light from the coming spring waiting by the balcony. He nods, first hesitantly, then firmly. The world is unchanged. Or perhaps, more accurately: the world has returned from its state of change, and he is still here.

Every couple we pass on our bicycle tour of the Tiergarten seems to be in the middle of the most somber conversation of their lives. On a park bench, a young man stares tearfully at a female companion seated beside him. The content of their partnership is drawn in between swaying branches in the Impressionistic style: light and feathery strokes, framed in the gilded notes of a plump, sylvan July. There’s something touching, albeit hardly unique, about his expression, drenched in that Romanticism that feels so Edgar Allan Poe, and naturally, takes on a pained, sepia-toned form. Ah, adolescence. I imagine him clutching her pallid hands as he promises, in the center of Berlin’s fairy tale gardens, to cryogenically freeze himself alongside her in their old age. There’s a pause and he looks up, the spell briefly broken, to catch my eye. I am perched on a Dutch bicycle borrowed at the hotel reception, one foot on the dusty path for balance. I half-smile, feeling suddenly and severely my intrusion into their intimacy, and pedal away, into the glossy shade cast by the flowering trees.

In the mountains surrounding the Elbe, my brother and I are halfway completed with the day’s trek when I hear the white noise for the first time. It sounds like muted, distant thunder, or like what I imagine it feels like in the mind, when you are looking at a body after death. The waters of Lethe against the shore. At that altitude, when we peer down, the granularity of the leaves of the valley are erased into a mottled, still wave of mutton fat jade. As the white noise fades away, the question of its origin comes up and freely we speculate: the river down below, the Bohemian winds, the reverberations within thousand-year-old layers of white and salmon pink sandstone. Unreasonably, but maybe understandably, I’m possessed by the notion that the noise has something to do with the ocean. Everything mysterious seems like it must come from the sea, you know?

In the Palace of Sanssouci, which I, with my usual grotesquely unhistorical humor, describe as a dick-measuring contest between the Prussian emperor and the residents of Versailles, we wander amid ultra-detailed landscaping and 18th century chinoiserie chic. Hundreds of tourists traipse across the terraced lawn. Life seems so urgent now, and I can’t decide if that’s due to the current stage of my life, or the current state of the world. But I myself am detached. In Sanssouci, surrounded by vineyards, playful Rococo, and caramel yellow Caryatids, I find myself incapable of prompting even fractured emotions.

I remember an afternoon from three years ago, during a similar summer, in Kyoto’s Ryoanji. In the gold-toned heat, Alex and I sit on the wooden viewing platform beside the temple garden for the better part of an hour. Flanked on both sides by a varied crowd of strangers, we stare at the five groupings of stone and puzzle over the meaning behind their number and arrangement. Alex’s theories from that day are still my favorite: The principal emotions, the bodily senses. Most of my life I’ve enjoyed paired objects, triptychs, and, being an April-born Aries, the number four, but I see now there’s something robust and mystic about sets of five. The Ryoanji zen garden is one example, but then there’s also five-petaled flowers, five-faced Shiva, the five wounds of Jesus during the crucifixion. Taste, hearing, smell, sight, and touch. Anger, disgust, happiness, fear, and sadness.

I come across a photograph of snow online and am overwhelmed, unexpectedly, with a crushing nostalgia for winter. The hours of night filled with darkness, but also the violet, ultra-reflective glow of the snow banks. The sensation of submersion in the honeymoon of a situational “otherness” when snow, delicate, translucent, and symmetrically shaped, is falling. The temperature at white twilight, as the wind slows and stills. An ode to winter, written during a season of cherries, plums, and beaches.

In the backseat of a first-generation Daewoo Matiz, I am reading a roman à clef that seeks to describe the overlap between the grotesque and the sublime. The palm trees and dry, yellow plains take on an almost phantasmagorical quality. Moody, layered 80’s ballads emanate from our car radio, set to a brew of white noise, dark news updates, and Kiss FM. The idea that idiosyncrasies are flowers in the garden of the mind has led me to cherish those peonies, irises, and chrysanths that I otherwise would have left for dead. Consider indole, an organic compound found in fecal matter, but which at low concentrations smells of flowers. At the gas station, we buy potato chips and a Milkybar; they melt gradually in the mouth, a blend of salt crystals, cocoa butter, and the heat of the Spanish summer.

Rural Japan, the southern coast of India, the American Midwest: they each left their emblems — aromatic pine, rich benzoin, Buffalo wings. But this upcoming departure feels like it’ll be the most difficult to shake. Every memory made here is incurably bittersweet. Marmalade orange, ziprasidone. I can’t help being irascible when my mother cries, but know, at least, that I regret it always. I don’t know how to say that, in our interactions, I am seized by a fear that consumes every minor detail of existence: the craggy mountains, the fine lines like petals around her eyes. The most painful reality of being the child of divorce is that my parents will grow old alone.

From faraway, I text Strawberry silly endearments, but I wonder, privately, how much any one person can wring from love before it withers. To my mother and my father: You deserve much more than what can be given to you. You always have.

In the east, the apartment buildings rise into the evening. The multi-colored lights in their rooms blink slowly on and off like approaching airplanes. Against the intensely black horizon, their size reminds me of the gods from the Cthulhu mythos, but more benign somehow, quasi-angelic: a reversal of the fall of Lucifer.

Clusters of trees between houses, their trunks so tall and so slender that I can’t understand how they hold up their huge, unwieldy bouquets of diamond-shaped leaves. A tiny Shiba Inu dog lying on its side in a miniature Japanese town enclosed in trees. An orange tabby cat poised by a vending machine. Thickets of bamboo, so dense no light can make it through, and the vaguely mechanical sounds emanating from somewhere within. The dirty patina of old coins exchanged during purchases of yuzu-flavored soft drinks at a lonely convenience store.

The nighttime view from my window reminds me of a gloomy 80’s music video, slowed down fifty-percent; dark, melodic, glittery, soft, the cars visible as beams of light, moving at a steady pace, in and out of my line of sight. おつきさま, the full moon, penetrating through a field of clouds with the brightness of a switchblade.

Dimensions are altered slightly here in Japan. The cars seem designed for Polly Pockets, but the insects are massive. Cicadas, wasps, and moths flit through the air with gold thoraxes like the size of human thumbs. Compound eyes unreal in their size. Animals crop up in uncommon circumstances, like omens from nature I don’t know how to interpret. A bone-colored crane motionless in the middle of a river. Monkeys close enough to touch, emerging during the autumn rain to crawl along the phone lines suspended above a shrine. A single olive-green lizard I’ve named “Marmalade,” found in a paper bag on my shelf.

In Kyoto, with Strawberry, I walk through the nighttime, along the bridge straddled by a sprawling bamboo forest. It is late into the evening on Sunday, and we are mostly alone in Arashiyama. A typhoon warning has prompted an exodus of tourists and the shuttering of the cat café, the tea parlor, and the kitschy smattering of Edo-style souvenir shops dotting the main road. Immersed in a darkness that arrived swiftly and unexpectedly, we linger by the river’s edge, the mountains close enough that I feel their figures present as third parties to our conversation. Strawberry leans against the railing and his eyes, though stripped of color in the dusky conditions, gleam with an authenticity untouched by artifice. After a lifetime of cultivating a suspicious nature aimed mainly at my own behavior, I am thrown by how deeply and fully he believes in an idea, a conjuring, of me, that I myself have never trusted.

A tiny bookshop open in the hour before midnight, where I flip through pages of a Japanese fairy tale, a butcher called “Fishery and Chicken Tanaka,” an eggplant-purple subway train leading back towards the city proper. The night like pitchblende. Aphrodite in the foam. The wind, felt and not seen, from the kingdom east of the sun and west of the moon.

How important is shared sense of humor in a relationship? How important are common priorities and visions for the future? Under his clothes, Strawberry’s skin is like almonds split open, in color and odor. The sudden protagonist of a folktale à la Oscar Wilde, guided by a lark of silver, a witch in disguise, and a god clothed in peach blossoms, I arrive at a final miracle. The birds outside, lost in a song of autumn. The once-green leaves, shedding in whirlwinds, a shallow tide of amber, orange, and watermelon red. A twin-sized mattress, moved to the floor, and fitted with navy blue Mickey Mouse sheets. How likely is it he might be the one I’m writing about in all my stories?

Strawberry comments that Japanese chashu ramen tastes like a pig sty, and immediately I understand what he means: there’s something delectable, but undeniably disgusting, about the braised, slimy pork belly suspended alongside billows of flavored oil and shoestring noodles, in a slow-boiled broth that is fatty, sticky, and as richly gold as saturated urine.

I am nonetheless glad he makes the pig sty comment after we’ve finished our meal and are sitting lazily on the restaurant floor cushions. While he serves us both lukewarm water from a textured plastic jug on the low tabletop, my mind goes to a farmstead swathed in amber ears of corn, the porcine mewling coming from the muted red barn in the corner of “American Gothic.” I think about the scatological, the vulgar embedded in human lifestyle: underarm sweat trapped underneath my nylon rain jacket, pig lard emulsified in soup.

Outside, the first typhoon of the season announces its approach. We walk to the station in a rain like dust falling. I think of how cinematic this time of year can be: the leaves like August’s sarcophagus, the sudden darkness collapsing upon afternoons at five o’clock, a final, blazing amen from the fall. If I were a girl in a movie, this is where I’d rely on film-making’s deftness to produce feeling: the arrangement of a piano-heavy score, each note like velvet, coinciding with our steps against the pavement, the panning over the fragrant, lushly orange landscape. Cutting a take the way a gardener might labor over a delicately manicured hothouse flower.

Even when I find that the beauty created by the fine articulations of directorial input feels a touch too manufactured, I still am in love with it. Hopelessly, indulgently, and totally. For better or worse, I am a devoted patron of the manufacture of emotion. It’s the affectation encased in the part of me that wishes the replay of my first kiss came with artfully curated music, a shot of my face shrouded in airbrushed moonlight. Maybe the violins emerging in crescendo.

But kisses are, in fact, much more delectable, and infinitely more disgusting. The tongue trembling in your mouth. Sweat, glossy and acrid, building above the Cupid’s bow. The fleshiness of lips, slightly sweet and tender, like horse meat. Absolutely obscene. And that’s not even getting into the amount of saliva involved. But, truthfully, there may be nothing better than kissing in the mortal realm.

Walking home at night, alone in a suburban neighborhood, I am seized by something that could be a fugue state, clinical depression, or Byronic infatuation with a mood of dark, plummy blue. Potentially, probably, a simultaneous blending of all three. It’s barely past six in the afternoon, but the sun set hours ago; the cul-de-sacs parting from the main road are soaked through in nighttime, and occupied solely by ornamental plants and silver-plated bicycles propped up against fences. Once in a blue moon, I spot a young man in a suit, briefcase in hand, or the sweeping headlights of a minivan circling the gardens that will be mute until spring. But mostly I am fiercely conscious of being alone. In this isolation, I draw comfort from the small things that will accompany my body in perpetuity: the sensation of my winter coat around me, brushing against the backs of my knees, the sound of my breath and footsteps on the gravel. Beside a driveway, a Christmas tree glows faintly.

On the last turn before home, I spot something I’ve never seen on this commute before. A few feet to my left, a rectangular hole lies deep in the ground, enclosed by tall wire fencing on all sides. It is easily fifteen feet across, as many deep, and paved in concrete. My heart leaps in confusion, and for a moment I stand in the glassy pause between the end of peace and the beginning of horror. I feel like I am standing in front a painting depicting an act of extreme bloodshed, or watching a video on loop of lions feasting after the kill. But soon enough my vision adjusts to the darkness, and my rational brain kicks in, and I recognize, with a breath of relief, what I am looking at: the community pool, emptied in preparation for the winter. There’s the ladder extending into the shadows of the deep end, and posters with red-lettered warnings about the dangers of jumping. In the cool night, with the wind softly shaking trees that shed their fragile crescent leaves into the pool bottom, it looks so misplaced. Like an entrance to another world, too hastily camouflaged to be perfectly disguised.

At the discount supermarket beside the station, a mounted television screen plays the video of Mariah Carey’s Christmas classic on repeat. A shopping basket made of peach-colored plastic looped around my elbow, I pause to contemplate the image for a moment. A 90’s Mariah in red velvet plays in snow while I watch her almost twenty years later, on a dark Saturday afternoon in suburban Tokyo. There’s something about this instant: shopping for groceries by myself, a girl in tennis shoes with no weekend plans and no future goals, that feels like a revelation midwifed by loneliness. I buy toilet paper, oranges from Ehime, and instant miso soup containing dehydrated pork and a foil packet of monosodium glutamate. As I’m leaving, I suddenly hear and feel thunder, so close and so physical my mind leaps from my body. It takes me a second to recognize that the sound is not coming from outside, but from the thudding of bowling balls against the synthetic wood lanes of the alley on the second floor above the supermarket.

Lately, out of a desire to occupy my thoughts with something other than fear, I’ve been reading the books left on the shelf in my living room by previous tenants. At least one tenant left behind their required reading from an art history course, a fact revealed by the content of the texts: The thoughts of W.H. Auden, the letters of Van Gogh, and several dense analyses on art itself. On the train into Tokyo, I read thinkpieces about the purpose of art, the nature of its operations, and the effect of its manipulations on the mind and the emotions. I am not sure if I can comment meaningfully on such pieces without engaging with, and thus succumbing to, their trap: that any one person can dissect the feeling of feeling.

The feeling of feeling. If I overthink this, I start to panic. Perhaps panic isn’t the right word; “unravel” might be a better one. A human in a human world, I know I feel every animal sensation: disgust, hunger, pain. What does it feel like to feel the loftier, cortical emotions? I have never been sure I understand love, spirituality, or art, which may be the three vertices that make up the geometry of truly higher-order apes.

Across from me in the subway car sits a young man in heeled boots, an alpaca wool shawl in blue, red, and mustard, and a silver necklace with a flat, round pendant, in the style of a saint’s medallion. I think of an illustrator friend, and how her descriptions were submerged in the language of art, suggesting an alternate way of seeing: a woman’s head “shaped like a hot air balloon,” the skin on the cheek shaded in “pinky-purple.” I try to recast the young man in her eyes and come up with a poor, but honest, imitation of her vision: uncommon colors, unusual lighting. A prophet from the era of fast fashion, scrolling through a chat screen. Though I’ve long since lost touch with my artist friend, in these instances, her mode of perception still manages to echo through my mind. It comforts me to finally understand that she, like every individual to enter and momentarily wander through my life, has sewn a thread through me that can never fray thin. A drop of rain always remembers the ocean from whence it came.

In the northernmost of Japan’s main islands, I watch as Strawberry witnesses snowfall for the first time. On the eighth floor of a department store, he pulls out his phone to film the snow coming down on the unremarkable street below. His movements as he walks along the window, gently angling the camera to capture the fullest extent of the scenery below, are full of a natural, breathless tenderness, like the beats of a winged insect settling on a flower. We play outside in the snow, and, with total absorption and entirely no embarrassment, he builds a tiny snowman with mouse ears made from dry leaves. I am reminded of the undisguised rapture of childhood games, but filtered through a new layer of adult consciousness. The wind feels like it could pick me up from off the ground. Snow, piled up against the curbs, glows like a halo. The day progresses into soft blue and golden apricot, littered by an arc of reflective clouds.

I write when I’m pain mostly because writing is what cools the pain. It does not cure nor resolve it, but it does cool it; it brings its temperature down into the world of the bearable. But the unintentional result of writing-as-healing, repeated over the course of years, is that the posts on this blog are, in their majority, sad to the point of histrionics. This August, “Conscience Round” will be ten years old. I began writing here when I was fourteen, an age that can be forgiven for sentimentality, but I will readily confess that, even as I’ve aged, I’ve never lost that taste for unpalatable, indigestible melodrama. I will confess too something most of us know already: writing about the bad is usually more fun, and somehow easier, than writing about the good.

But the map is not the territory. I don’t want to reach my twenty-fourth birthday in possession of an online diary that is textual misery. I promise, there’s plenty about life that I enjoy. Really. For instance, not too long ago I fell in love with Olympic figure skating, and especially, specifically, in the nature of physical strength and physical beauty. How a single movement can be a hybrid of that which is strenuous, and that which is sensuous. It was not so long ago that I practiced martial arts and felt that same energy enter my body as I crouched into fighting stance, and I remember, with the same tenderness that one recalls a first love, how immediately explosive, charismatic, and powerful just that motion could make me feel. I have decided to reform my now sedentary living habits, and maybe build up to a standard of athleticism that would permit me to comfortably practice karate again. I have bought a bicycle, which is still lacking a name (I’m debating between “Aphrodite” and “Nikujaga,” a Japanese meal of beef and potatoes) but which has expanded my radius of exploration several kilometers in every direction. The countryside to the north is dominated by inclines and traditionally-constructed houses veiled in bamboo and cypress. My calves ache as I crest the hills, and I’m suddenly aware of how blood moves underneath my skin, its speed and sound.

I’ve been trying to rediscover my love for fiction, both the consumption and production of it. It’s been years now since I wrote a story, but last night I dreamed of a thick, dusty manuscript which could be mine. What a tragedy it would be, if I gave up that dream entirely. I’m doing my best to reconnect with the muscle in me that commands the urge to write; if that sounds as esoteric as holy communion, know that the ghost of God and the writer’s muse are never far apart. I’ve started reading fantasy novels again, which return to me the three relics of childhood: imagination, curiosity, and the instinct for adventure. I had almost forgotten the pleasures of a magical playground, which lies outside human realms but is still familiar enough that I can reenact the theater of human emotions there. There’s something so fulfilling in rejoining its vision now. While I suspect I’ll never return to writing pure fantasy, I think I’ll always gravitate towards stories that contain its elements, and resurrect its flavor and mood. Threads of gossamer, dragon scales, spells of healing. A heroine’s journey. The soft gray mist around a castle moat, the last of three trials. A sorceress in a grove of willows, turning to face an approaching visitor.

I’ve taken to listening to music from the cheesy, indulgent 2000’s, and it transports me, for at least a brief moment, through the fine mesh strainer of youthful, gem-flecked optimism. Nostalgia is almost the sister of romance in how thoroughly and universally she bewitches. I’ve also been exploring music as an art form that warrants response; I’ve never been a sophisticated or scholarly listener of music, but I love reading critical reviews of performances and albums. The literature of music is peppered with fascinatingly textured onomatopoeia and technical language that manages to convey, with startling specificity, the ethos and engine of a song. When a writer can ground the experience of sound in a relatable world, but still leave a degree of the mysterious, the mystical, what was once abstract takes on a second life in the text.

I know this has been a meandering laundry list of what I love, but I’ll finish soon, and I’ll leave you with something important. The last month of winter is rupturing over the Japanese landscape. I’m a voyeur to its departure, which despite representing an end to the season, feels like triumphant performance by nature. Snowflakes collect in my hair during sudden daytime storms. I walk through the neighborhood wearing a checkered scarf bought for me by my father. The cold wind feels like something supernatural. Slowly poking through the trees, spring arrives in bashful, pink-plum blooms, like a bruise spreading through the forests. The world is changing like a mind in transition. Gradually, but powerfully. Eventually, I will wake up one morning to find the view from my window totally transformed.

In the middle of the day, carried away by a wave of drowsiness, Strawberry falls asleep wearing his sweatpants and white undershirt. There’s a pillow arranged around his face to shield his eyes from the sunlight splashing over his chest. It’s difficult to describe what happens when I glance over at his sleeping form. Let’s just say: My mind registers his presence and is swept off into the ocean.

The cherries are blooming in Japan, a two-week event which alters the tenor of life across the islands as millions awaken to petals unfurling in one continuous wave. When the blossoms eventually do come apart, disassembled by the wind, they erupt over the roads in a manner not quite like snowfall, but something isomorphic to it. At times, the results can be spectacular. On one particularly memorable occasion, we drive straight into a gust of petals. The mountains adjacent to us appear almost a pixelation of mottled green, cinnamon-brown, and bursts of pink.

To celebrate my birthday, Strawberry and I do dinner and movie in Kyoto. The flowering cherry trees under the full moon are the visual equivalent of a song you can dance to: sultry, magnetic, but with a tang of sweetness that makes repeated tasting palatable. The movie ends right before midnight, and we have to sprint through the Gion district to make the last train. My skirt is hiked up around my thighs so my legs can move unobstructed. The soles of my sneakers strike the pavement like blows. Running like this reminds of how much I rely on my body, and on its trillion interacting parts. Eyes blinking in the darkness of night. The tension between muscle, bone, and tendons. Nerves aflame. Oxygen suspended in the blood. My hands, held against my sides and balled into fists.

In the mornings, we make coffee so thick and so strong that it reminds me of the Spanish hot chocolate of my childhood. Among other things, Strawberry has converted me to the worship of brewed coffee, and as a lifelong tea drinker I am less abashed by this than expected. Maybe adulthood starts when you begin to seriously configure your identity based on your beverage of choice. (This is tongue-in-cheek. Mostly.) Though he’s agreeable to most Japanese traditions, Strawberry has always been averse to tea ceremony, conducted with finely powdered green tea. He tells me, in his shy, charming way, that he thinks ceremonial matcha tastes like seawater (“like when the tide is low.”) It’s a comparison that would never have occurred to me. I imagine getting up from the bed, opening the door to his second-floor apartment, and feeling the froth of gentle, verdant waves lap against my ankles. A seabird carving a slow, wide arc over the surface of the water. Not quite holy ground, but something isomorphic to it.

Strawberries are transitioning out of the supermarket displays, being replaced by watermelon, the more summertime-appropriate fruit. It’s June; plump clouds crowd the sky, butterflies fly in and out of glassy curtains of rain. Half of this year has already disappeared into the mirage. I will be leaving my current job in two months, and going back to school in the fall.

This future is something leonine. Powerfully attractive, shimmering provocatively against the amber of a setting sun, but still forbidding in its stature, and capable of a great terror. When I cannot sleep, I imagine what would happen if a lion were suddenly teleported into my apartment in the nighttime. Stolen away from the red and tangerine dream of the plains, its knee-high sea of honey and cherry-colored grass, and plunged into the shadow of my bedroom. A 200-kilogram king of beasts versus a twenty-four year-old and a scruffy polyester rabbit.

On the phone, my mother tells me that I’m not “una cría” anymore. Una cría: a cub, a foal. I imagine a young wolf awakening in a den, and sleepily emerging into a pool of moonlight. The night and the forest moving to encompass her in their mossy, fecund odor. Her longing visible in the exhalation of her breath. Her eyes conspicuous as bloodstains against the dusky fur of her broad, gently tapered head. I think of her glancing around slowly, pawing at the soft peaty ground, before then padding forward, and disappearing soundlessly into the unmarked darkness between the trees.

In my neighborhood, there is no shortage of strikingly beautiful stray cats. They are well-fed by local retirees, and if they suffer injury during the course of their lives, their silken pelts and clear eyes reveal nothing of this. I bicycle past a white cat, its back turned to me, sitting motionless underneath the train tracks. To experience a day in this cat’s eyes. To disappear under fences and through foliage. To race down a hill carpeted in flowers. To join the 24-karat covenant with the birds, the bees, and nature in summer. To be led only by desire. To be somewhere else.

On my way to the train station, I drag an olive green duffel bag through the red light district of Kabukicho. I haven’t slept in nearly three days, and the street scene moves past me at a speed both fast and slow. Today, memories of that morning come to me in chunks. The light of the incoming dawn. Pooling in the gutters, urine like goldenrod. Rainbow-colored dunes of garbage. Departing club-goers in lustrous, jewel-toned wigs. Sensory experience frothing and glittering, like sea foam lapping at the heart, as I watched the sun crest, like a crown of yellow diamonds, over the mountains.

On my way to school, an unexpected rain alights upon my bare shoulders, and my emotions swell to colossal size. A blue and ruby rush of clouds start their prowl, and in their presence the whole of the landscape takes in a shuddering breath. A thing wild, and secretive, this rain. It falls like snow, and clings to my clothes in delicate individual droplets. Its touch is not a true embrace, but its airy precursor, and thick with the anticipation of a sensual downpour. In this weather, my body too has become an artifact of passion. I imagine myself as a sword hidden in a chest. A rusted blade. A scabbard of silver thread. Imagine the stillness of the temple where I lay, shrouded in vines with velvet-like blooms.

On my way to the door to answer the sudden ringing of the bell, time stills as I button my blouse, make myself presentable, and then buckles hard under the pressure of a rapidly forking forever. My minds travels to the people I adore, across dark cliffs and cherry red deserts, to the thyme and lavender bushes of a childhood street. My mother lighting a candle. Alexander, asleep. Strawberry by the ocean, the soles of his feet skimming the water. Every bit of real love I know will meet its end, someday. It takes everything in me to hold that pain against me, like an infant animal with its rosy eyes half-closed, and then set it gently aside. Imagine waiting all spring in fear for a message from faraway, only to forget it, and then find it unexpectedly on your doorstep, unassuming but unmistakable, and cradled by moonlight.

What’s most striking about the campus is that its buildings are tremendously, fascinatingly ugly. My new favorite activity is walking along the main promenade, red backpack in tow, and taking it all in, leisurely, comfortably, like I’m wandering through a museum of the grotesque. Muted black steeples and clouded cement blocks densely veined with moisture damage. Off-white tiles lining the indoor walls and flooring. Carpeted elevators. Flat roofs unattractively combined with harsh angles. There’s a touch of Brutalist chic in the squat, rectangular, dark brick structures that are distinguished from one another not by name, but by number.

Thankfully, I’ve always been the type to enjoy ugliness; mismatched clothes, uncoordinated colors. But even if I wasn’t, the campus would be fully redeemed in my eyes by the fleet of cypress trees that shroud the area in an immense, touchable green. The tiny nubs of moss threaded through softened bark. Opalescent pools of rainwater like scattered mirrors of divination. The sky through the trees, dotted with constellations of sea green leaves. Tropical rain thudding against the dome of a hastily borrowed umbrella. The dusky shadow cast by my body onto damp, verdant tree trunks, moving to a rhythm dictated by nature.

I read a headline recently about the several degree rise in temperature the planet will experience by the end of this century. I don’t know how to deal with my existence, and therefore my participation, however innocent and involuntary, in this plot to kill and consume Gaia. But, if I am as ashamed I claim, it’s a million times worse to pay lip service by admitting the guilt without committing to action. I find myself discussing how every form of being is a form of violence, and in vain I look for a way to live like a pacifist. And yet, there can be no such thing as a peaceful Anthropocene. To examine the solution to the damage I’ve inflicted on the Earth is to also, necessarily, to envision a world without me in it.