Each One a Nation, page 34
Seth smiles and thinks to himself that Peyton was a clear force all along, and that anyone who missed him must have done so willfully.
“Well, he’s only got himself to blame and only himself to dig out of it.”
“What’s worse,” says Sloan, laughing, “is that he’s now so sure that he loves me. He says it’s the only thing he knows to be true, and that all he’d done before is just because he, and I quote, is not his own. I mean, what am I supposed to make of that?”
Seth smiles the same cool smile.
“He’s religious, Sloane.”
“So am I,” she says.
“No,” says Seth. “You believe in God and apply your love to your belief in God. He thinks he can apply that style of love to anything, to multiple things at once. When he says he loves you, he means it, but he means it in a way that no one person should ever love another person.”
“So what should I do?” she asks.
He stands, pulls his backpack over his shoulders, and holds out his hand for the letter that Sloane has written to her friend.
“Let’s work on one thing at a time, eh? Even though time is something our parents scared us away from, we might come to learn that we have quite a bit of it left.”
Sloane smiles admiringly and hands him the note.
“I’d like to see her soon if she’ll have me,” she says. “I’ll come to town.”
She stands and the two embrace before Seth turns for the parking lot leaving Sloane on her own in the garden to deal with the issue of time.
If he drives fast, and stays low of the GSP, he can reach her in just under three hours. He doesn’t mind the drive and doesn’t recognize her insistence that it must be a burden for him to make it. The sun is only just beginning to drop in the southern sky as he begins his journey. Unlike most people his age, he does not need loud music when he drives, does not need to have any distraction to let him go somewhere else, somewhere where the time will go away and reappear when it’s in-between moments have passed. Seth is able to go somewhere else because he is still very much in love, and when he goes somewhere else it is visions of her that he goes to, of stupid, cliche, blindly-romantic nonsensical things about her manner and way, about her dark eyes in daylight shadows and her dangling legs on carnival rides. It has, the love they share, broken them completely away from what they’ve been and what they were supposed to be, and given them the audacity to sit comfortably in themselves, together, for however long. His mind goes dull to the hum of the engine into the truth that at the end of the road he will be with her once more, that they will smile or laugh or yell at each other, possibly remain completely silent, possibly go out or stay in, but that it will be her next to him. He recognizes this place for the first time in his life, and she’s the reason why. He knows it because she’s told him about the times that she went there, about how during her entire life, throughout her entire life of passion, it was that place where she could go that allowed her to keep from screaming, or crying, or wanting to die. It’s that place that allowed her to go beyond pain, to go beyond her family, beyond the tense waters ahead of her. He doesn’t know if she still goes there, or if when she does, it’s with him like he does with her, but he knows it because of her.
When the drive is over, he pulls into the garage. When he reaches the door, he knocks, and hears her footsteps not walking but running to the door and when it opens she’s there, those same dark eyes and that same head of green-streaked raven hair, and the same cautious face he’d watched all those years, and as she jumps into his arms he is overcome again with the reality that he finally has her to hold.
Devyn has lost weight, has folded emotionally, and looks sickly though she is more of herself than she ever has been. The place is messy, having spent the majority of her time there since leaving her parents’ place, but Seth doesn’t mind. Devyn refuses to admit, against the prodding of Seth, that she has indeed been through a truly traumatic age, and that all she’d been through had been far less volatile than the lives of so many, and considers her upbringing rather average, and in many ways, she is not wrong.
“I spoke to Sloane before I left,” he says.
Something about Sloane has not sat right with Devyn since their family involvement, and the very sound of her name puts Devyn on edge, some strange sort of jealousy springing from within her.
“She wanted me to give you this,” he says, handing Devyn the note. “Maybe we can take some time before you read it.”
Devyn agrees, leaving the note on the counter and leading Seth into the living room where she’d prepared snacks for them. They sit together holding each other close, sounds of the city in early autumn humming outdoors. The light, like the light of all rooms, has disappeared with the day, leaving only the people within it to fill the meaning of it. The meaning, for the two, is, as mentioned, each other. Meaning, so much a thing of youth, so much a fleeting thing, holds no value for the two on the couch, having been stuffed with enough meaning to sustain them until a time when they’ll truly need it again. They hope to never be like the parents that stuffed them with that meaning, hope to never need to use their own children to bask in meaning’s heat once more. They hope instead to rid their lives of it for a while, and to, upon recovery, make it like something that they know as they know air, to bear meaning like they bear their own faces, never making too big a deal out of it but only knowing it’s there, somewhere.
She is comfortable and happy but cannot stop herself from thinking about the letter on the counter and what it might contain. Besides Seth, the person she has thought about the most in the past year has been Sloane Streeter, who she loved so devotedly for most of her life, and who she hopes to one day love again.
“I think I need to read it,” she says finally, with a mouth full of chips. “I need to know how she feels.”
Understanding, Seth goes to the counter for the letter and upon returning, tears the envelope and holds it out to her.
“Do you want me to step out?” he asks.
“No,” she says. “Read it with me.”
He sits next to her as she pulls the paper from the envelope. It falls out in the form of multiple pages, each full of text. She starts with Seth reading over her shoulder, starts there with the first correspondence from her friend since it all went wrong, since it all broke down, starts and scans until she realizes what she’s reading and before she knows it she can feel the tears rolling down her face, can feel the empty gas of sadness heating and exploding in her gut, can feel the strength and the dignity she’s tried to maintain now for years crumble and fall and die, right there on the ground in that old place that belonged to a younger and happier version of the parents who made her that way. Seth holds her when he sees the tears only he is crying too and he doesn’t know why; crying like she is just the two of them there with their eyes on the same page bodies pressed together and tears running in unison. The weight of the years falls over them both.
“…and what my dad had always said to me,” wrote Sloane, “was that it was all done, there was nothing left for our family to forge, that if I wanted to have it all, all I had to do was stick to the program, to follow along, to smile at the correct people and dress the right way, to make myself up the way I ought to and keep the right friends. I’m not sure I ever stopped to think during our entire friendship about why we were friends, but I’m thinking about it now. Turns out, we probably were friends because our parents set us up to be, but I’m writing to you now, dear Dev, concerning the friends that we could be some day, that we ought to be some day. With all that’s happened, I feel myself to be, and I hope you do too, on the cusp of something brave, fearful and new. I don’t know the world we used to live in like I thought I did, and what is it these days anyway? It sure isn’t what we knew it to be and since we no longer see it as it was, I propose that we strike out and make this world, the one we’ve found ourselves in now, and to make it into what we think it ought to be. I propose that we figure it out and not break away, not fade away like friendships tend to do, but to rebuild and rebuild forever until it’s more perfect.”
Made smaller and younger by the honesty of a friend, Devyn weeps into her lover’s arms and neglects her own breath, wheezing and moaning into the collar of Seth’s shirt. She lets go of years of frustration, agony, and dragging independence as she considers nothing at all. She goes to that place. It’s now only the second time since she walked away from the pool that she’d done so and this time she recognizes it. This is where fear begins. What she recognizes about the place is that she no longer understands how to get herself there, realizing that she no longer can, but that she arrives there having been delivered, having been shoved. This, in a girl learning to manage herself truly for the very first time, not to govern herself, but to manage, to regulate, to exist as a being that knows itself to be a being rather than a creature. First humanity, coming often in the dawning of adulthood, comes like glass to a kitchen floor; there is a shatter, and then everyone looks, and then everyone looks away, and what makes it difficult for people like Devyn, for people that have spent their entire young lives striving to hold that attention, is that doing so begins to seem a little ridiculous, and then one must look around for what’s left. What her friend is saying to her in the note, she knows, is “I am still here. I am still around and so are you. We have dropped the glasses at the same time, but we are still around.”
Seth continues to hold her through the damp convulsions. He wouldn’t let her go before an army’s rumbling march. When the sobs settle and her dark eyes return their gaze to him, he asks her what she wants to say, knowing that the question has been asked of her so little by the people that mattered before.
“You know what the truly fucked part is?” she asks. “It’s that I always listened to adults talk about how being young was the best time of their lives and I always felt like that was so sad. I always thought to myself, ‘how pathetic is that?’ And now here I am wondering if the best actually is behind me. I’m a different person, Seth, and I’m not sure if it’s a good thing or a bad thing.”
Seth smiles and runs his sleeve across her cheek.
“Well, you are,” he says, “and it is pathetic. But everything is pathetic to people who have neither seen nor experienced anything.”
“That’s just the thing,” she says. “I don’t know that I want to experience anything either. It’s like all along I’ve been preserving this perfect form of myself, but now for some reason I can’t preserve it anymore, and I know I can’t, but I also can’t bring myself to expose it anymore.”
Devyn continues to cry late into the night. She just can’t stop reading the note. Somewhere, she hopes, on the other end of the night, her friend is somewhere bawling too. She imagines Sloane at a Statesboro frat party, standing in the kitchen with a few guys who are kind for now, crazed little kings who feel themselves as objects of power for the very first time. Sloane begins to cry and nobody can tell why. She tells them she’s sorry, it’s only that she’s tired. Devyn’s thoughts are dominated by the fear that Sloane might actually just be fine.
“Seth,” she whispers. “Seth.”
Seth groans and spoons a satin body pillow.
“Seth, I have to call her.”
ELEVEN
They meet precisely in the middle, between their two campuses on a day where everyone around them is thinking about the same football game, at a retail wing joint with massive TVs and loud music; Devyn, in her Tech gold, Sloane in her navy and white. When Devyn finds the table, Sloane—already sitting—jumps up violently toward her friend, smacking her thigh against the table, utensils clanging. Devyn is slower. She creeps into their hug and then slinks out of it, reeling from the site of her friend. Pulling away too, Sloane keeps her hands on Devyn’s arms and remains holding her as she steps back. She stands there like an aunt proud of how one’s grown, and then she pulls her friend back in, packing the air between them into non-existence. She holds Devyn tight for a moment, and then lets her go. The two sit down across from each other in the dizzying yellows and blacks of the room’s walls, blinded by flashing logos and deafened by the blaring call of the GSU vs GT nooner. To Devyn, being part of the excitement has remained incredibly important for the state of her being. She cannot remember a time when she was last without a team and uniform and she hopes to never have to know what it’s like.
“I just want to…”
“Hold on,” says Devyn, “we need to eat first, all right?”
“Okay,” Sloane says, “I’m sorry.”
“And Sloane,” she says roughly, “you don’t need to apologize so much.”
“I know.” Sloane begins to cry. She cries ugly while the rest of the room cheers, and the worst part for Devyn is that she can’t actually hear Sloane’s cry over the roar of the crowd, but can only watch her experience it, to go through the dramatics of a massive release of emotion. When the roar dies down, and the sounds of the cries can be heard from behind Devyn’s trench, the real emotion of experiencing a true friend cry, the real pain of it. After another moment of the squirming and heaving and howling, Devyn reaches a hand across the table and puts it on top of Sloane’s and tells her,
“I just need to eat first.”
…
“But that’s the thing,” says Devyn. “I’m shedding a version of myself that’s existed for a very long time, and I know that there’s pain that accompanies that, but this pain, unlike any pain I’d known before, doesn’t lessen when you acknowledge it. It doesn’t make it less painful to address it as pain, to lean into it.”
“Spirits die, Dev. But that’s what belief is for. That is what believing in something consists of.”
“I’m not a Christian, Sloane, we’ve spoken about this.”
“You don’t have to be a Christian to believe, Dev.”
“I won’t be any of the Abrahmics, at all,” says Devyn.
“Devyn, I’m not going to ask you to go to church with me, I’m just trying to get you to remember yourself.”
“Okay, but Sloane, when you like, come at me like that, it just kinda feels like you’re going down that path. Because you just have this way of setting it up like that and it’s very unsettling.”
“Well you know what, Dev? At least somebody still believes in you. At my count it’s down to two, and I’m one of them, and you’re not.”
Devyn nods sarcastically as she wipes White Chili wing sauce from her face before collecting her thoughts and breaking into a spiteful slew.
“Okay,” she says. “Okay, Sloane, let’s go to that place.” She takes a violent sip of water and slams her glass down, shaking the table.
“All right, Sloane,” she says. “You figured we would just show up here and I’d rib you about the game and we’d laugh and then we’d cry as we hugged each other goodbye in the parking lot. Wake up, Sloane! Look around at what’s happened to our lives! Look at where we are on this planet and not the one we used to live on. Our parents made trades. They’ve treated our lives with them like they were commodities. They got every fucking thing they wanted by the time they turned forty and threw it down in a gamble like they couldn’t blow it for the rest of us. Well here we are, Sloane, left to decide whether to leave it behind or stay to rebuild it. And guess what else? They haven’t even stopped yet. They are still out there, at large, doing the same shit.”
“Devyn, they’re still our parents. You know that.”
“I know that?” she says. “I know enough to realize that they don’t do not deserve our belief. Because, they don’t, Sloane! Can’t you see that?”
“They’re our parents, though.”
“My dad is a criminal. Your dad is a racist. My mom is pathetic and terrified. Who knows where the fuck your mom is.”
With the employment of her mother’s memory, Sloane cracks and again begins to cry. This time, though, she is poised, still sitting tall and straight and holds just the whimper of a positive smile. One slow tear roles out of her right eye, down her rosy cheek and onto the cotton shelter of Georgia Southern blue. Devyn doesn’t even flinch.
Sloane reaches to the table to take up a napkin. She blots her face with great composure and holds position for a moment before finding the breath to tell Devyn, “All right, fine. Here’s something to tell you. I’ve been communicating with my mom for years. I’ve never told anyone but I’ve been doing it the entire time. She’s doing great, actually. She’s clean and has a job and was living in Atlanta for a while, trying to duck away from Dad’s papers for divorce. So I suppose now you know enough now to stop believing in us both.”
“Wait, I thought your Dad said he was the one who wouldn’t sign.”
Sloane nods proudly and says, “If nothing else he’s a man of honor. He would never say an unkind word about her.”
“What does she do?” asks Devyn.
“She doesn’t specify.”
“Where does she live now?”
“Missouri,” she says, “with her father.”
“I’m so confused,” says Devyn.
“So am I.”
The two begin to laugh lightly before they both, at the same moment, look up and watch the game on a massive screen for almost the entire second half of the first quarter without saying a word. When the quarter ends, and an insurance commercial blasts through the place’s speakers, Devyn finally leans across the table at her friend and says, “Do you really think I’ve lost belief in myself?”
“You believe in Seth now,” she says, loudly. “Which I get because we all probably believed in Seth at one point but you’re dating him now. Your only belief is in the person you’re dating and that’s not a good thing.”
“Are you serious? You know Peyton kissed me, right? Like, while you were together. It was a long time ago and I never told you.”
“I know he did,” Sloane says, without flinching. “He told me the next night. I never even had to ask him.”
“What?” Devyn says, concerned instantly by how much like her father she sounds.
