Somewhere Over the Sun

I think of ripples. Visual effects, mostly unmeasurable, of a bygone splash.

It’s in the slight quiver of the hand holding the ice cream, but it’s more apparent in the hand that refuses to lift the spoon to her mouth. The ripples are more visible when the other girl sings and, for once, it seems everyone can hear the lyrics, and their meaning is universal, at least in this backyard. Pictures of him inside smile silently.

I can’t help but see things as a novelist, the people present as characters. This feels like a written scene; an opening scene, a climactic scene, just a filler that leads from one scene to the next, establishes the characters or sums them up nicely, the prologue to an event or its obvious epilogue. There’s such palpable, powerful moments slinking through the generally festive air like black roses in a flower bed; it’d be unbecoming to not novelize it all in my head. It’d be impossible, because the evening feels like a novel being read. 

The tears which don’t get blinked back (and how easily his sister lets them flow makes them contagious to us all). Shared memories and toasts and the dad who looks so much like him. A dance-off and watermelon mint salad because this is not meant to be a somber affair. And it won’t be when it happens again next year.

Books are this on paper, or at least they try to be. They try to measure the visible effects of death on life, they tell the continuing story of the ripples. They explore the unseen ways in which we continue to live with the things that have happened. Books novelize what’s already dramatic, because life’s got enough of what we writers try to capture in ink.

In memory of Tyler Harris.

A husband and wife and their friend walk down the dirt road toward the field where the fireflies aren’t as numerous as they had hoped for. There are two beers between the three of them. Earlier, a storm swung around them as if by pardon, its ominous clouds taking the rain elsewhere, and so they were allowed to grill and drink and watch the sun set over a hazy but blue horizon. They had set fire to wet, sparkling wood and when it all turned to coal they trekked up to the dark field where the few fireflies lit up like stars on break.

Now, the friend is woken up by the married couple, not long after they all watched a children’s movie. “You have to see this,” they say to him, motioning toward the constant lightning. It is as if the sky has swallowed all the fireflies that they had expected in the field. Millions of raging fireflies. The friend wonders if it’s a joke; if somehow his married friends have pulled off the greatest prank in history.

Not a second goes by without lightning. Somewhere over the lake, the sky turns to hairline fractures and what can only be wizardry. It seems the storm is back. What they had thought was an exemption turns out to have only been a raincheck, if the expression might be deemed appropriate. Wows fill the narrow cabin. Surrealism is pleasant from afar.

Then the wind picks up. A neighbor’s tree dances for its right to remain standing. The wooden lighthouse which the husband had served as a cover for the firepit now lays toppled in the lawn, its light illuminating blades of grass crashing in on themselves like waves. In varying degrees only they can know, all three of them wonder how bad it will get. There’s no basement and tornado warnings. Their fates are resigned to the cottage’s walls, which flap as if they are not entirely solid.

The lake in the distance is white with waves. They shouldn’t be able to see the lake through so much darkness, but the darkness refuses to stick around. Everything is lit up as if God is trying to show them something. They take videos on their phones, which they know will never tell the story exactly right.

Tired of competing with the show outside, the artificial light of human power goes out. Before they retreat to the safest place they can think of- the windowless bathroom- the wife rushes into the bedroom for wedding rings. Later, the husband will inspect damage done, the clouds above still flashing like strobe lights. The lighthouse’s lamp still works but it’s in half on the lawn. The container where they keep the lawn cushions has flapped open, tossing its lid-securing rock onto the grass. Water leaks through the air conditioner as if seeking shelter from the storm.

It’s over in an hour. Heartbeats calm to their regular three a.m rhythms.

The more I live, the more I think telling each other stories is why we live.

We look forward to our next breath, eager for life to write us a story that we can retell to the characters that shape our lives. We call each other on little devices that were once the stuff of science fiction and we say to each other, “Let’s meet here or there, now or later.” And then we drink things that loosen our tongues so that we’ll have the courage to tell each other not only our newest stories, but our most important ones, our most heart-expanding and heart-breaking ones. And through our stories, big or small, we undoubtedly prove to ourselves more than to anyone around us that we have lived. Things have happened to us, people have appeared in our lives in noteworthy fashion, stuck around in noteworthy fashion, left in noteworthy fashion.

Every day stories pile on to each other. Strangers tell us stories through television and songs and books, tell us their stories with the looks on their time-worn faces, even when they don’t come leaking out of their mouths a sentence at a time. If this planet ever strays from its orbit and sinks to the very bottom of space, it’ll be because of the weight of the stories we tell and don’t tell each other. Stories about what it means to be alive, a topic which will never be accurately summed up by any amount of written, spoken or lived retellings.

Don’t stories palpably texture the air around you? The fictional ones and the true ones alike, intertwined indistinguishably until who knows which speaks more truthfully about your desires and your needs, your experiences and your self?