22nd
Circles
(From my journal, Feb. 7, 2007)
I was the only member of my family with perfect vision. I could’ve used my gift to become an artist, a pilot, perhaps a dentist. But instead I find myself kneeling in front of a window, staring at you through a scope, my index finger resting on a trigger, my thumb ready to release the safety switch.
And you. You could’ve been a poet, an English teacher, a journalist — an inspirational figure devoted to something larger than yourself. But instead you decided to use your way with words and devilish good looks to become the talking head of the most hated man in this small village in northern Spain.
“You can’t kill the mayor,” one of them explained to me. “The authorities would be all over the place. What you have to do is you have to kill someone worthless, I guess, but close to him in an unobvious way, you know? He’ll get the hint. He’ll be scared that way.”
And so they told me about you. They didn’t give me a name — I never want to know names — but they gave me an address and physical description. And of all the women with black hair, brown eyes and oval faces in all the world, you had to walk in between my cross hair.
What are you doing here, Leila? I remember seven years ago when we were fresh out of college and chatting in a coffee shop in our home state, California, you said you realized how important it was for your work to be meaningful.
“I can’t stand the idea of my life being meaningless,” you said to me, your eyes infused with hope and utter confusion. “Death isn’t scary to me at all. What’s scary is the thought of my impression, my impact, my effect on this world, disintegrating after I die. I think I have to gain meaning by doing something that leaves a permanent indentation.”
Your words shook me that day — I never imagined that someone who barely uttered a word in class could be so full of thought and ambition. We saw the world in the same light — a grimy, miserable landscape inhabited by monsters that had nothing to leave behind but cracks. Happiness and the absurdity of existence were our everyday topics of discourse.
You had a lover at the time. Although when you spoke of him, you didn’t seem to hold much love for him.
“He talks as if my unhappiness is something I have to correct,” you said, the flat sound of melancholy escaping your lips. “I don’t want to be fixed if it means being corrected — as if my outlook on the world were wrong.”
I realized then that you and I were almost the same. We were content with being miserable because, given the sheer pain of living, we felt it was the proper way to feel.
My chest tightens as I release the safety switch.
I say we’re almost the same because our main difference, I recall, is your fearlessness of death and my inability to cope with its inevitability. Remember when I told you about the late nights I’d suddenly awaken, horrified by the notion of nonexistence? Those nights recur even more often now. I never understood how you grew comfortable with death staring you in the face. That single difference is what prolonged our friendship: I felt there was something I could learn from you that I could learn from no other.
We headed separate ways when you left the country. To where, exactly, you hadn’t decided yet; you just said you had to embark on a quest. For what, you didn’t know. You just knew that you weren’t finding whatever it was you were searching for in the sickly hamster wheel of American capitalism. I find myself here, too — trying to cope with my fear by getting as close to it as I can. Have you found what you were searching for? Is this your way of leaving your mark? I thought you meant a positive one. You were always a difficult one to read.
Your hair was longer when we were friends. You let it stream freely over your shoulders. You once told me you wished you lived as a Native American before the whites came and trampled on everything. You wished for a life of pure simplicity.
Perhaps you’ve realized, like I am realizing now, that no matter where you go, you travel in a sphere that encapsulates all your thoughts, memories and beliefs, so that every place morphs into a shape that fits your outlook. Perhaps by now you’ve realized your search is futile. Perhaps you’ve given up.
You live alone in a modest house, cluttered with books that serve as a fire escape to your imagination. You have Christmas lights hanging in June. You look beautiful in this mess.
I let out a soothing sigh as I take dead aim. I will not miss. My vision is more perfect than ever before.
