A mile off the trail, at the top of the hill, in front of the forest, east of the ravine, was a stacked stone fence in a state of disrepair. Three feet high in the spots where it was still intact, it guarded a square plot of land fifty feet across filled with old tombstones.
This was Morrison Hill, named after the pastor of a pioneer church that used to stand just outside the woods, now long since gone. The river which gave life to this area in the 1700s dried up after the Franklin Dam was built in the early 1900s. Consequently, it was too far off the beaten path for frequent visitors. The headstones stood at odd angles in overgrown grass – their faces worn nearly smooth by years of wind and rain.
“Well this is unexpected,” Winnie said, having no knowledge this cemetery existed.
Rowe just smiled and led her in. He’d been here before.
Winnie scanned the tombstones,
A dark stone, some type of slate, read,
JOHN WILLIMUS 1690-1731
A beige limestone read,
SARAH RYCART 1681-1700 AND HER SON CHRISTOPHER 1700-1700
A double tombstone made from a white marble that had long since lost its sheen read,
JONATHAN AND ELEANOR MORRISON 1670-1722, 1677-1725
There was a poem underneath Jonathan and Eleanor’s names. Winnie knelt on Eleanor’s side to read it, voicing the last stanza out loud. “And so it fills my heart with glee to be with you for an eternity,” she read. She exaggerated an “aww” look and shot a glance at Rowe.
He nodded, as though he was familiar with it.
Winnie scanned the tombstones, one by one. “I can’t believe all these people, every single one, had so many hopes and dreams, think of their laughter, and tears, and loves… they raised kids…. got jobs, had affairs, and some days, they’d probably just go for walks in the forest… and now all of them gone.”
The feeling she described was that of sonder, which is likely not found in the Oxford dictionary. To discern its meaning, one would have to leaf through the pages of The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, as it is a novel word – perhaps borne out of the oppressive anonymity that an interconnected world of 7.6 billion produces. It is the realization that those random people we pass on the street and glimpse for but a nanosecond live lives as full and complex as our own –their hopes and dreams and emotions are every bit as strong as ours and that we are constantly surrounded by stories of epic proportions in any direction we look.
It applies, of course, both to people we see on the subway and to school teachers from 1710 – of whom we only know their name, date of birth, and death from an old tombstone.
Rowe nodded, it was a feeling he was familiar with; he had been to this cemetery many times and had the exact same thought.
“It’s odd to think of lives so rich now disappeared,” he said. “And there’s really almost nothing they could have done to be remembered. I mean we’ll remember George Washington for a while longer, but who was the eighth president?”
“You mean Martin Van Buren?” she said with a playfully smug look.
He smirked.
“I forgot who I was talking to.”
“You did go to school, didn’t you? In America?” she teased.
He grinned. “My point is that no matter what we do in life, we will be forgotten. Except by nerdy girls from Yazoo Mississippi… Really all of humanity could be forgotten.”
He grew wistful. “Humans have been around like 50, maybe 100 thousand years. We’ve been on Earth one one thousandth of the time of dinosaurs. They ruled the planet for 100 million years. That’s 1000 times longer than humans have existed, and nothing is left of them but a few inches in the geological record.”
She thought it over.
Rowe sat down, stretched out his legs, and laid down directly atop Jonathan’s grave.
Winnie just looked at him, unsure what he was doing – not objecting, but not understanding.
“Try it,” he almost whispered. Winnie was uncertain. “They enjoy the company,” he said in an encouraging tone.
She looked left then right – they were utterly alone, save a few bees buzzing around a nearby flowering bush, and a rabbit sitting still at the gate of the stone fence, eyeing them, as if wondering who had disturbed her favorite spot to eat.
She relented and laid down on Eleanor’s grave.
There they laid in silence – the breeze rustling leaves above them, the fragrance of lilac and linden trees accented the sharp grassy smells of the earth.
“Is this something you did with your goth girlfriend,” she whispered as if not to disturb the dead.
“No… not exactly”
She waited him out.
“Not in the… day time,” he smiled sheepishly.
“You did this at night? Okay, that’s pretty weird… are you gonna turn me into a vampire or something?”
“No promises.”
“You’re not trying to turn me into her are you?”
“No,” he said, trying to sound encouraging, as if that was nonsense.
“I don’t think I could do the whole… goth thing” she said.
He smiled and studied the leaves above them, then grew wistful, reflective. “I don’t really even like goth, I mean I liked that she was different, she had a singular look, and a unique way of thinking, but physically she was like the opposite of what I’m into.”
“What’s the opposite of goth? Angels with halos?”
“In, like, purely sexual terms, I have like a ‘good girl’ fetish.” he admitted.
She snuck a glance at him – squinting into the sun with one eye open. “So like… what’s that mean? Like Sandra Dee before her black leather jacket?”
He sighed, raised his eyebrows, and nodded, staring wistfully into space as if she described it perfectly.
They lay in silence for a moment until Winnie said, “So you have a thing for “prim” girls is what you’re saying?” she eyed him with mirth, but he refused to give her the satisfaction by returning the look. “I don’t think you’re gonna like my skull and crossbones tat on my back…” she teased.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yes, on like a spider web background… my mother had a fit… I mean my old lady… as I like to call her.”
He pushed some air out through his nose.
She studied him for a moment and then stared back up to the sky.
“So is this like a ritual where you sacrifice good girls?”
“Close your eyes.”
“Okay, but if I hear chanting, I”m outta here.”
“Trust me.”
“Okay.”
“Are your eyes closed?” he asked – his own eyes now closed.
“They are.”
He waited. He was clearly in no hurry.
They laid in silence for a while, side by side, next to Jonathan and Eleanor’s tombstones – a relic of people long gone. Winnie thought about how they were just two humans, in a city of fifty-four thousand, in a state of seven million, a country of 328 million, a world of 7.6 billion, revolving around a hundred million stars, in one of a billion galaxies.
She imagined a future in which two young would-be lovers might stumble upon her tombstone, worn and weathered in a city of the future. Would they be overcome with sonder and try to imagine her life for 10 seconds, and then move on?
She soon became cognizant of the breeze in the leaves. It was the second time she noticed this today and that made her happy. In the distance, two squirrels chased each other. By the time he spoke, it nearly startled her.
“Imagine you’ve lived your entire life, You’re ninety-five, and now, here you are at the end, in a box… and all you can think of is wanting another chance… just one last chance to go back and fix all the things you did wrong. All the mistakes you made, all the leaps you never took. If you could just rewind your life and play it back again, everything would be different. And then, boom, all of a sudden, here you are… back at age nineteen again. You have your youth and your entire life in front of you. only this time, you’re gonna do it right”
Winnie did not respond–with words at least. Her mind was set running. She did, indeed, feel young. She seldom had a sense of proprioception, but somehow at this moment, she was aware of every part of her body and how it didn’t ache. ‘Youth is wasted on the young,’ her mother used to say. “You don’t know what you have until you lose it,” somehow, Rowe’s words made her appreciate her health and her vigor.
At length, she spoke. “You know, when I think of Jonathan and Eleanor, I feel happy… It’s not them in these graves, it’s their bodies. I mean I know they’re together, forever. Doesn’t it make you sad to think that’s all a lie? That they aren’t together? That they are really underneath us right now?”
“I don’t think they’re underneath us,” he said. “I agree it’s only their bodies.”
“But where are they?”
“They are no longer… they don’t exist,” he said.
“That’s so sad to me I can’t even think about it.”
“We didn’t exist before we were born, it didn’t bother us then, there was nothing sad about it all.”
Winnie thought about it.
Rowe waited and finally spoke again. “Eternity doesn’t make any sense to me. I mean think how long it is. A million years is nothing, ten million years and you’re just getting started. Like eternity in heaven is a movie that lasts ten billion years and your life on Earth is a single frame at the beginning…. not even a single frame, a single pixel of a frame is your entire life on Earth and the movie is 100 trillion years long.
She thought about it. Not bothering to object.
“I think viewing life as all we have,” he continued, “makes… helps us appreciate it more. It’s not like we have another life. This is it. Just like we can’t get any day back. Every day only happens once and then it’s gone forever. None of us know how much time we have left. So why waste it on things like anger or jealousy? Here we are healthy and safe. There’s no war in our homeland, there is no mass starvation, we aren’t senile, we can still walk and talk, we don’t live in a broken state where we fear for our lives, ready made food is available at our fingertips. Hundreds of institutions want to educate us, and we still spend days fretting over nothing, inventing things to feel bad about. We don’t have to, we won’t want to once we realize we’ll never get these days back.”
She considered his words and rolled over on her side to face him – planting her elbow in the grass and supporting her head. “I think the idea that it can last forever helps me enjoy it. The idea that there’s a god makes it better, not worse. I feel like it all means something. Like it’s not… written in sand. I mean a world with no God, no souls, no afterlife, no purpose, what do humans have left?”
“We have each other.”
It was just a whisper from his lips. He rolled to face her. “And that’s all we need. We could spend a thousand lifetimes studying humans and end up with more questions than answers. Life’s not about the destination, it’s not even about the journey, it’s about who we take the journey with.”
She thought about his words. Rowe was exceedingly skilled at eliciting conflicting emotions in Winnie. She needed a Dictionary of Obscure Joys to go along with the one of sorrows, and perhaps a third book that described the feeling of experiencing a sampling of each in concert.
Currently, she could not decide if she felt impossibly small and insignificant – 2 humans amongst billions – her entire life not even warranting a footnote in the history of the world. Or if this notion that all we have is each other made her feel impossibly large and important: one half of a relationship that for this entire day had become the entire world.
Before today, Winnie would have suggested science had a way of trivializing humans: Treating our species as infinitesimal motes of dust in a vast universe. But for every astronomer comparing us to a supernova, there is a physicist comparing us to an atom. Her opinion as to how science viewed humans might have changed had she taken physics instead of chemistry to fulfill her science credit.
From the physicist’s point of view, even single-celled organisms are impossible giants. Each composed of trillions of atoms. Every cell is a bustling city of organelles and cytoplasm with mind-boggling size and complexity. This was the pinnacle of life for over a billion years. It was not until they managed to combine that the tree of life exploded and created humans. In the eyes of the physicist, we are giants of unfathomable size: made up of trillions of cells, each made of trillions of atoms.
Thus, to this day, there is some debate among scientists as to whether humans are “large” or “small”. That is to say, is the difference between the smallest known thing in the universe, (a quark) and a human, greater than the difference between a human and largest known thing in the universe (a galaxy) .
As it happens, both the physicist and astronomer can claim a victory of sorts, for we are almost perfectly in the middle. There are roughly 18 orders of magnitude in size between us and a quark, and roughly 19 between our bodies and a galaxy. So the overwhelming awe we feel when looking at the Milky Way would be quite similar to the feeling a quark would get looking at us. From the quark’s point of view, we are the size of galaxies filled with stars too numerous to count – indeed, too numerous to comprehend.
So it may not have been only her newfound recognition of sonder that made her see Rowe in a new light at this moment. She may have been – like an astronaut traversing the galaxy at light speed – finally seeing the world through a physicists eyes and appreciating how “large” humans are. Like her exercise in studying blades of grass, she had begun to notice things about him. Just little things, like how the hair on his legs was blonde, or the way he always gave her his full attention. He had magnetic eye contact, but it wasn’t oppressive. He knew when to break it, and when he did, he glanced downwards, into the grass – not to the left or right as if he was preoccupied. She liked that about him. She liked that when he spoke something that really meant something to him, his eyes showed it. He had a good look of concern.
These revelations were not limited to the present moment. She found if she closed her eyes, she could summon a whirlwind of memories she had already made:
She recalled him holding the door open for the lady coming into The Toast as they left. The way his shirt was translucent in the sun when he walked in front of the lake this morning and how his muscular torso was silhouetted against the water.
Her thoughts were not even limited to what she knew about him but encompassed all she could guess. She could see him as a child, with hope and dreams – striving to win at backyard football. She could imagine his fears and insecurities. She could instantly see him in those private embarrassing moments he didn’t share – checking his breath or smelling his armpits before putting his shirt on.
It occurred to her that even though their lives had been completely and different: born hundreds of miles apart, and guided by seemingly antithetical philosophies, they both led them to this exact same point: lying side by side, in Anderson Indiana, in a long forgotten graveyard from the pioneer days.
In short, he had become more than the man out the window. He was fully human.
He was a galaxy.
And she was one as well.
And now their galaxies were colliding – their stars intermingling. They shared the star of the 5th floor dormer window in the library – of joking with each other at the fuse box before sunrise, of reading quotes on coffee cups… of studying blades of grass and lying next to one another on a summer day.
All of these thoughts ran through her head as she studied the stubble on his cheek and chin, leading her eyes to his lips.
She had to remind herself that she had promised not to touch him today. She knew full well of his powers of seduction and that the idea of them together would be a bad idea.
This is an atheist. She told herself, and yet her fingers reached out – not to him, but to one of the many blades of grass between them. It was colonial bentgrass, with soft, fine blades and it reminded her of her yard in Yazoo County. Her fingers traced a single blade and finally picked it, caressing it between her thumb and forefinger.
Rowe studied her as if the act piqued his interest and he, too, reached out, absently caressing the tops of the blades until he found his choice and picked it as well.
Her eyes acted as though they studied the grass in her hand, but they were looking past the grass in her hand, poring over his body. The first two buttons of his linen shirt were undone revealing a hint of his chest. The bottom button was undone as well, revealing just a sliver of his taut stomach disappearing into his shorts.
Somewhere in the back of her mind she mused at how wildly impractical it was to lay on the grass in a white linen shirt, but he didn’t seem to care. She wished she could be more like him in that regard. If she thought about anything long enough, she could always come up with a reason not to do it. She longed for his effortless “don’t give a damn” confidence and wondered if it was a byproduct of his world view.
“Do you think I’m timid?” she asked – her eyes glancing down to the grass between them, suddenly unable to meet his.
He studied her, as she studied the grass. She wasn’t wearing her glasses – they were sitting on the tombstone above her. She supported her head at an angle – her elbow on the ground. She set the blade of grass in her hand down and with her free hand, tucked the strands of hair falling into her eyes behind her ear.
“Yeah” he said in a whisper. “That can be a good thing. My mom’s timid… shy really” he continued. “It’s in my blood, my brother’s really shy”
“Glenn?” She asked, almost embarrassed that she remembered because he only told her once, not long after they met, and she didn’t want to reveal that he meant enough to her at the time that she’d remember such a small detail.
“Yeah,”
“The genius?” She asked. This was why it made an impression on her. Rowe had insisted his older brother was smarter than he.
“Yeah… but he’s.. I think he’s on the autism spectrum… like maybe asperger’s.”
She didn’t say anything, just let him speak.
“He’s four years older. So I was a freshman in high school when we dropped him off at Northwestern. We got him all set up in the honors dorm and he came back out to the van to say goodbye. And right when we were about to leave I could tell he was getting a bit agitated. I remember my dad closed the van door, and I think he thought he was alone outside the car but I hadn’t gotten in the back yet. And I see him clench his fists and his jaw, it’s like a nervous tick he has and I heard him say under his breath,”
Rowe opened his mouth to reveal his brother’s words, but a sudden wave of emotion caught his words in his throat. He smirked it off and swallowed hard, embarrassed. He studied the grass for a moment as he gathered himself.
“He just whispered … ‘there’s no turning back now’
Rowe’s eyes were obviously misty. He blinked hard, fighting it off and clenched his own jaw.
“It was just the fact that I wasn’t supposed to hear it… it was just by chance that I was still outside the van. He should have someone to share those feelings with. He’s the smartest guy I know, but he’s never had the emotional intelligence. Even though I was the younger brother, I always felt like I had to protect him. When we drove away I stared out the back of the van window at him walking away, every step so tentative and unsure. He just looked so alone and before I knew I realized I had tears streaming down my cheeks.”
Winnie’s demure lack of eye contact just moments ago had evaporated. Her eyes were glued to his. He wasn’t crying, but his eyes were wet and glossy and she found it almost impossible not to reach out and caress his cheek in anticipation of catching a tear.
I promised myself I wouldn’t touch him. She told herself – but if she leaned forward any closer her lips would be pressed against his.
She caught herself – as if on the edge of a precipice and began to lean back.
“He’s lucky to have you as a brother” she said, rolling on to her back and looking back up at the sky, then crossing her arms as if to prevent them from reaching out to him. She stroked her own arms as if somehow cold on this warm humid day. Fidgeting nervously until she glanced at her arms and declare “I forgot my sunscreen this morning”
She could talk herself out of anything if she thought long enough about it.
They sat up. It was as if time had once again restarted. The intimacy gone, the world came rushing back in their ears – breeze in the leaves, a chattering squirrel and a woodpecker in the distance. Her eyes met his for an ephemeral moment as if to say goodby to the Rowe she lay side by side with and hello to the one with whom she was out for a walk.