Sum

Sum - Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman

Read it if you have time. It's mindblowing.

Roses

This story ended up becoming a combination of past blog posts, so don't expect much.
(Edit, 2/10/15: In retrospect, it's really quite funny that the name I randomly chose happened to be Jen).
--------------------------

"Tell me a story."

About what?

"You."

I don't have any stories worth telling.

"Everybody has stories worth telling."

Whether anybody wants to listen to those stories is a different question.

"I'll listen."

Thanks.

"You never really told me what happened with you and Jen."

That's not an interesting story.

"Interesting or not, I know it's still on your mind after all these years."

That ship set sail long ago.

"Doesn't mean you don't remember it."

†††

I never really liked social events. It certainly showed.

"Hi, I'm Jen. What's your name?"

"I'm Ryan, I'm from San Jose, I'm going to study biology or computer science, I live on the fifth floor, and I like it here so far."

She raised her eyebrows. "You have a little trouble with this whole socializing thing, don't you?"

"I'd just rather talk about more interesting things than this silly Mad Libs 'networking' bull we're forced to learn here."

"Well, what do you want to talk about?"

"Not sure. Just curious though, is there anyone here you already don't like?"

"Gosh no, it's only been two days, I'm not going to make those kinds of judgments that fast."

"Sure you won't."

"Okay, well, I just might add a certain Ryan to the list now."

"That's a start."

"Why do you ask anyway?"

"Because I just met someone that I didn't like. She's over there, pouring some soda."

"That's my roommate."

"Oh. Well, in that case, have fun."

"...See you around Ryan."

"Before you go: would you like to go for a walk sometime?"

She didn't seem to hear.

†††

"...So anyway, that's what we've been doing in Music 51. I guess I like it -- it takes so much time though. How's your French class going?"

"Eh, it goes. But no, I think it's all right, even though the teacher definitely cares more about the language than we do."

"Well, the only French words I know are 'love' and 'death.' La mort and l'amour."

"I would think that most people would learn how to say their name or ask where the bathroom is before learning la mort or l'amour." She laughed.

"My sister taught me those two words, actually. They almost sound the same when you say them, don't they?"

"I never noticed that. Huh."

"She brought it up because I was talking to her about this one song, 'What Sarah Said.' The last line is Love is watching someone die. So who's going to watch you die?"

 "And what did she say?"

"Well, she pointed out that every successful marriage ends with someone dying."

"That's pretty depressing."

"You really think so?"

"I mean, yeah. Isn't that really sad?"
I shrugged. "I think it's beautiful."

"I kind of wonder though: it usually only takes a few years for people to decide to get married, right? Say you get married when you're thirty and all goes well. Then you've got another forty, fifty years or so with that person. You only spent one-twentieth of your life making a decision that will affect more than half of it."

She thought for a moment. "I don't know if I'll ever be ready to make that kind of commitment."

"Exactly. I can't even predict how I'm going to be in two years. How am I supposed to figure out whether I'll be happy with some girl for the rest of my life?"

She stopped and looked at me. "I guess you just have to try."

†††

"Huh. Didn't think you would be outside this late."

"This blizzard's pretty awesome, I don't want to sleep right now. And my window won't close, so my room's really cold anyway."

"Ah. Well, don't look over at the statue for the next few minutes. We're going to...yeah."

"Not bad, two out of three in freshman year. Primal Scream, then this...that just leaves the Widener stacks...."

"Yeah, I'm not so sure about that last one."

I made my way over to the statue. " Jen, I'll come look at your window when we're done, okay?"

It was 2:30 AM when I knocked on her door. I stood on her chair and tried to shut the window, but it soon became apparent that whatever I did wasn't going to do any good. We started talking, until we realized her roommate was sleeping. So we went to my room. A few minutes passed with idle conversation.

"I'm going to put my head on your shoulder in about ten seconds."

"You really don't have to announce it like that, you know."

A head on my shoulder soon became an arm wrapped around mine. Then, at some point in the night, she turned sideways, leaning her entire body into my arms. Flirting on the edge of unconsciousness, she sank deeper and deeper, dragging me along with her.

We woke up several hours later with a start. It was 7:00 AM.

The room was silent, but our words and feelings and emotions screamed within our minds. I replayed the conversation that we had just the morning before. I was just thinking/"We" are ambiguous/Do you want it to be clear/I don't know/I'm patient I can wait/I like you but I just/But what/I don't know. I thought about the shirt I gave her for Christmas that had nine adorable kittens on it and how she told me she loved  the shirt but was hesitant to wear it because it would represent "us" being an item, and yet she wore it the very next day. I wondered why she just did what she did last night if she wasn't sure, and why I had let her in the first place. I asked myself whether I could see myself with this girl for the rest of my life, despite the fact that weren't even dating yet. I don't know, I don't know, I don't know.

She broke the silence, saying aloud what we both we knew the other had been thinking.

"That wasn't very ambiguous, was it?" she asked weakly.

"No," I said.

"It sure wasn't."

†††

"You ever read The Little Prince? It's a French book, actually."

"Yup. I thought it was a very beautiful story."

"Well, I finally got around to reading it last night."

"Did you like it?"

"I loved it. I was thinking though: you know how the fox tells the Little Prince that his rose is unique because he has tamed her? What's stopping the Little Prince from taming any other rose? What if two roses showed up on his planet instead of that one rose? Hell, what's stopping him from taming all of the roses in that rosebush?"

She nodded. "I see your point. But if he's already in love with that one rose, I don't get why he would worry about taming any other rose."
"But the Little Prince could have just gone ahead and installed a sprinkler system or something. He could have just as easily killed off those baobabs to save one rose or two roses or twenty roses, and as stupid as it sounds, he could have just built a bigger plastic dome. There really isn't anything different about one rose to the next, and he knows that. The only difference is that she just happened to be the one he tamed first."

"Which leads into why you don't think that anybody is truly unique to all the world," she said.

"Right. There are far too many people on this planet for that to be true. Somewhere, somehow, I'm pretty sure you can find someone else similar enough to take your place in society."
"Well, I think you're very unique. That's why I like being with you."

"I don't feel the same way about that."

"But don't you think there's a difference between being unique to all the world and being unique to a certain person?"

I turned to meet her eyes. "What do you mean by that?"
"Well, I agree that it was just random chance that the Little Prince tamed that rose. Any other rose could have landed there and the Little Prince wouldn't have known the difference. But that's the thing, though; it was by chance that it just so happened to be her. And it just so happened that he was there to take care of her."

"So I guess what I'm saying is, you have to remember that out of all of the infinite possibilities and all the flowers in the world, the Little Prince just happened to fall in love with that one rose. That in itself is pretty special, isn't it? I mean, sure, the people you meet may not be unique. But that doesn't make them any less important."

"I think you're important to me, Ryan."

†††

"So finally I walk in my room, and by now it's 3:30 AM because we had to walk back from Boston Commons. And guess what I see? My roommate is in his boxers with some topless girl that I've never seen in my life, on my bed. I'm beyond exhausted at this point, so I just tell them to do their business in his room. I grab my toothbrush and go to the bathroom, and when I come back, now the lights are off. Someone got up to turn off the lights, but then decided to get back in my bed to do who knows what. Unbelievable."

"Wow."

"Yeah. That night of The Game was pretty insane, but for all the wrong reasons."

We were sitting by the pond in the Commons, holding hands. A massive willow tree swayed its shaggy unkempt locks in the wind, casting its leaves towards the sheet of ice that lay below.

"Why don't we do that kind of insane stuff anymore?"

I chuckled. "What do you mean?"

"I don't know, sometimes I feel like we're just going through the motions, and we're only staying together because it's familiar."

"Familiarity just means stability, and I don't think there's anything unromantic about that."

"It's a lot less exciting though," she said, pulling her hands away.

"You think relationships actually exist that always stay that exciting?"

"It would be nice."

The wind stopped, and the willow tree slowly oscillated to a halt. Near the subway station, a man started playing Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue on his trumpet. It had always been one of Jen's favorite songs. She had played the solo piano arrangement for me before, and I was particularly fond of the slow middle section. It has a very pretty melody of course, but what I think makes it special is how the rest of the piece is so frantic. Somewhere in the urban inferno, that scrambling young man was able to find calm and happiness, however fleeting it may have been.

I closed my eyes for a moment. "You know how every fairy tale always ends with 'And they lived happily ever after.'? Have you ever wondered why they don't ever talk about what happens afterwards? The knight slays the dragon and saves the princess, sure. But that's just the story of how they met. If what you're saying is true, isn't all the good stuff supposed to be about their life together after they get married?"

"Right, ideally marriages can keep getting better and better," she said after a pause.

"But see, I realized something the other day. Those stories always end at 'Happily Ever After' because it's just too depressing to admit that love is a lot harder than just falling in love. The whole point of reading fairy tales isn't because they're realistic and relatable, but because on some level, I think that's how we wish reality actually was."

She looked away, mindlessly running the tip of her shoes along the contours of the sidewalk.

"Do you want to keep walking?" I asked.

"No, not really."

We buried our hands in our own pockets on the way back.

†††

No, I can't keep this. Can't keep that either. No. No. Definitely no.
She wondered as she looked around at her room, the floor strewn with torn envelopes and photos: what does it take to forget someone?
A crumpled slip of paper caught her eye. She walked over to pick it up, momentarily disregarding the mess she had made. It was blank, save for three faded words.

He had lied when he said he loved her.
She meant it every time. 

But then, what was she doing now, falling for another? For in truth, it was none other than him once again; a different face and a different smile, sure, but identical in all the important ways -- the things she had since learned to scrutinize more closely.

So why again?

She wondered as the flames engulfed her frozen heart once more -- does the phoenix possess the knowledge that it will be reborn, or does it relive the agony of dying over and over again?

†††

"I didn't think you would come," I muttered.

She took off her red blazer and draped it over her arms. "You didn't seem to care if I came. So I did."

"That doesn't make any sense."

"When you stop caring, something's wrong."

I looked away. "Let's walk."

We turned towards the statue and made our way towards the gate. A middle-aged woman stopped in front of us, her feet stocked on four-inch heels and her face plastered with powdery insecurity. Her husband scampered along after her, appearing less like a partner and more like a suitcase, slouched over from the burden of her purse and her unspoken frustrations. She gestured to her husband, and he obediently took the lid off of his camera to capture the scene that surely wasn't going anywhere soon.

"Did you like it here?" she asked.

"Why are there always tourists? I don't understand. It's not even that pretty."

"You don't have to take photos of only pretty things."

"It's a statue of some rich schmoe that everyone mistakes as some other famous guy. And you'd only know that if you had paid some tour guide to read you a script from the Wikipedia page, or you're a student here."

"Well, I think it looks nice."

"I hope no one thinks I'm nice."

"That's a strange thing to hope for."

"If the only word you can use to describe the sum of all of my thoughts, experiences, habits, and mannerisms is 'nice,' then you're just calling me boring."

"Believe me, you're not a very nice person, so don't worry."

She briefly tilted her head towards me, and our eyes met. I tried to casually pan my gaze over to the right, as if my eyes had only momentarily rested on hers. 

"How are you?" she asked.

"Fine."

"Okay, but how are you?"

"If you're trying to incite some 'deep, meaningful' conversation from me, we should just stop now."

"Look, I'm just asking how you're doing."

"But are you really? When I used to pass by that cute girl on the first floor while walking to the elevator, the only words that we ever said were Hi, Hello, How are you, Good, See you. Sure, there's a question mark at the end. But I'm not so sure: is she actually asking or just saying that?"

"Well, seeing as you don't feel like talking about yourself, I'm doing rather well. Thanks for asking."

We continued on our way across the yard. I tried my best to keep my eyes glued straight ahead, walking with perhaps a bit too much confidence to seem believable.

"I forgot, what did you say you want to do? You keep changing your mind."

"I want to sit at home and just watch television all day."

She laughed. "I meant for a career."

"Something that will let me retire early so that I can sit at home and watch television."

"You don't think you'd get bored of that?"

"I probably will. Why do you want to be a doctor?"

"Well, because I like knowing that I would actually be helping people."

"Conveniently, those same people have to pay you a lot of money too."

"Seriously Ryan, do you have to be so cynical about everything?"

We came to the intersection that separated the rest of campus from the nearby river. The red light flicked on and the little orange hand stopped blinking as we set foot on the pavement. We kept walking forward.

"I mean, I'm sure when you were younger, you didn't want to just sit at home and do nothing when you grew up."

"I wanted to be an orthodontist when I was in middle school."

"Any reason?"

"It looked like a stable job with good pay."

"And what happened to that?"

"I realized there were lots of other ways to make a stable living that didn't involve cashing in on people's insecurities and fumbling with crooked teeth."

The familiar opening arpeggios of Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" rang through the plaza. Some four years ago, I had gathered the ignorant courage to perform that very song for a fundraiser. I was still too embarrassed about that performance to enjoy listening to that song now.

"Let's sit over there."

"Is there a reason you asked me to come walk with you?"

"Because I wanted to. I'm sorry, do I need a reason to go on a walk?"

She drew her hands out from her pockets. "You know, I used to like talking to you."

"So did I."

"There's a sign on the wall but she wants to be sure
'Cause you know sometimes words have two meanings.

In a tree by the brook, there's a songbird who sings,
Sometimes all of our thoughts are misgiven."

"Ryan, do you hate me?"

"No. You're not important enough for me to hate."

I thought about all the other times we had walked and talked. I thought about the arguments and fights that had slowly severed our friendship. I thought about the silly inside jokes we had made and shared. How she made fun of me for always getting two cups of water at breakfast when I could never finish one. How we had talked about The Little Prince and all those roses in the rosebush. How she had gone to lunch twice just so she wouldn't have to tell someone "No, I already ate." How she had set afire my frozen tin heart, refroze it, then thawed it once more.

"But I used to think you were."

"What am I to you now?"

"You're one in a million. But there are seven billion people on this planet, and there are seven thousand people just like you. You're just one rose in a garden of beautiful flowers."

By now we had reached the river, and after a couple seconds of silent deliberation, I chose to head towards the left. She went to the right and we bumped into each other. I remembered how I used to "accidentally" bump into her while we were still getting to know each other, just so that I could find a few moments of fleeting joy from her physical contact. But then again, accidents were all I had ever known. Just like our first meeting, or how we became friends, or our relationship of three years, or the end of that relationship, or now our outward appearance of just being acquaintances. It had all been an accident, a freakish chain of random chance. How else could I explain it all to myself?

She paused. "Ryan, I have to go now."

"Thanks for coming."

"See you."

"Maybe."

I wondered whether I would ever build such a strong connection with someone ever again. I wondered how things would have been different had I not gone to that freshman social that August afternoon. I wondered if the Little Prince and his rose ever had the chance to live out their own 'Happily Ever After.'  And then I remembered the answer.

They didn't.

I sat down on a bench by the river and threw stones at the sky.