Love
The next day Alex was ready to go. He had packed everything he had for camping in the back of his station wagon, and he loaded the backpacking backpack Loki had picked out for me. I had packed warm clothes, cozy pajamas, a tea kettle, and far too many books into the pack and he hefted into the back along with along with his ample supply of camping gear.
“I’m an expert camper, Autumn.”
“I can tell.”
“No, seriously. I’m a total pro at it. I’ve been doing it since the dawn of time.”
“Yeah, no kidding!” I said, and remembered the story he told me about how he died in that primitive canoe. Alex had been part of some sort of hunter gatherer society but he had been so curious about Hel when he had arrived that he had moved into each new neighborhood as it opened and learned and studied the new things that were coming in. No one knew he was so old until you really became friends with him and you heard his story one night over a beer or a bottle of wine.
“I’m afraid of water.” He said to me, simply, as I buckled myself into the passenger seat. "I will watch you learn to surf.”
“Alex, just because I died smacking the pavement doesn’t mean I’m afraid of sidewalks.”
“Humor me, Autumn. The way you die never leaves your system and I hate water. I hate it because when I get into a lake or an ocean or a river or whatever I feel the suffocation of drowning and of the force of it smashing you on the rocks as you bob and float downstream.”
“Yeah, I get it. I really do.”
“Yup, you’re on your own with this one. I’ll be on the beach cheering you on, though.”
Alex and I talked a lot more than Loki and I did on the train. Alex was a fantastic conversationalist. He was smart and knew so many things, and we had worked so closely together for so many years. We discussed the Botanical garden job, and how stupid it was, and how people had just too much time on their hands here and came up with idiotic ways to fill it that we sometimes got involved with. We talked about the books I was reading, about the new reading room in the library that I hadn’t seen yet since I had decided to lock myself away, and just about everything he had done in the last few weeks. I knew he wanted to ask what had happened, why I was so isolated all of the sudden, but he was cautious and careful, and polite.
The first day's drive was smooth. We didn’t hit any traffic and we found a great campsite off the road. Alex set up the tent, threw a couple of sleeping bags and pillows inside it, and began to build a fire. I pulled out my tea kettle, hoping we could heat water.
“What is that, Autumn?” He exclaimed, looking at that. “How do you intend to heat that thing up?”
“It can go on the fire?”
“Yeah, and get melted.”
“How do you think I should make a cup of tea then?”
Alex rifled in the trunk of his car and brought out a silly looking cooking pot and a gas camp stove and a tiny canister of fuel.
“Here you go.” He said, glibly handing it to me. “This’ll make you some tea.”
“I don’t even know what to do with this.”
“You screw the stove into the canister, put water in the pot, and light it up and boil it.”
“Yeah, okay.” I said, trying to get the stove screwed into the canister. I turned the gas on and it came out invisible, whooshing. Startled, I immediately turned the gas off again.
“Don’t be scared of it. It’s not going to hurt you.” He threw a book of matches at me. “Turn it on and then quickly light it up.”
I tried turning on the gas again and successfully lit a match. I touched it to the stove and the tiny blue flame sprung to life in the dusky evening.
“Perfect!” he said. “I knew you could do it.”
“Yeah, now tea!”
Alex continued to work on setting up a very elaborate camp - he had collapsable chairs, a little table, a cooler full of food, and even some flags that he set up saying it was tradition and he needed to declare the campsite ours.
Later, after dinner, we sat around the fire he had built, and watched the sparks fly upward into the quiet, warm darkness.
“Autumn, what happened on that night?”
“When?”
“The night the glass broke in the storefronts, that flash of light.”
“I don’t know.”
“Something happened to you that night. You ran off into that crowd and you haven't been the same since.”
“Oh, you mean about me. I thought you were asking about the flash.”
“Yeah. You. What happened to you.”
“Do you remember love, Alex?” I started, hesitantly, unsure of how to explain my way out of this one.
“No. But I know a lot about it.”
“Academically speaking, I think we all know about it here in Hel.” I said, turning the concept over.
“We know it was complicated. We know it caused a lot of problems. We know it is or was a huge part of life on Earth” He trailed off as a log fell over, sending a shower of sparks up, cracking the silence of the atmosphere.
“Yes, but it was beautiful. It inspired artwork, poetry, people who loved each other had children, people who were unloved spent their lives searching for it.”
“You know some people remember what it was like to be loved."
"They pull that forward.”
“And they are the most miserable.”
“Or the most happy.” I stated bluntly, surprising even myself.
“Why?”
“I think it’s because being loved, I mean being loved well, is having a place that is safe. Somewhere you can come home to, in a sense. And because you are loved and that part of your heart is settled you can go searching for all the other missing parts of your life and know that even if you don’t find them on that go you can try again another day and have the courage to go on, even if it’s hard.”
“That’s very philosophical of you, Autumn.”
“Yeah. I think we spend a lot of time studying love here, as we know it. We all have the facts of it but once we come back to Hel we are incapable of actually loving anyone else. We might care for them, like you and I do, and be friends with them. But my disappearing, forever, while concerning to you wouldn’t reduce you to a puddle of tears.”
“No, it wouldn’t.”
Alex’s face flickered in the firelight. I could see him thinking and processing what I had said. “In all my years hear no one has described love like that.”
“That’s what I learned.” I said. “And it’s reduced me to a mess.”
“Because you want love?”
“I don’t even remember what it is. How can I want something I don’t even know?”
“Then why has it turned you into a mess?”
“Because,” I stated, “all of the sudden I realized that I could never be who I was meant to be without love.”
“So you’re saying that because you are not loved here, because that’s not a possibility, we’re not wired that way any more, you’re half of what you should be?”
“Exactly. Think of all the things I could do, be, create if I were loved!”
That thought hung in the air, unanswered by Alex.
“Anyways, I read something that made me consider it.”
“You sure did.”