Her movement only announces itself at my counter. She has 3 little moles on her cheek that sit like they are positioned like the Bermuda triangle. I navigate around her image, trying to find slithers of myself. But this exploration can’t commence without letting you know who she is and perhaps, who I am.
She’s a woman, an ordinary woman, who frequents my job at the liquor store. I started off making up stories about her life to pass the time and amuse myself. Then, after the charade subsided and she started to abandon her routine, I started to realize that she was becoming much more than some invented character. She was becoming the reason and the need for me to escape from the reality of what my life was. Over the years, I have rationalized that my life could be worse, and I’ve tried to deal with the actualities of grief by referencing it to time. When I translate time into seconds, into minutes, into hours, I feel a sense of control, similar to the control and direction that I take when I watch this woman routinely buy her nips of Smirnoff red.
She purchases her 2 nips and then leaves. Her routine at the onset showed me that she understands the reality of time. We have 24 hours in day. I started to wonder why despite this, I never have time to do anything. I divided the number of hours in a day by 3 and that meant that I had at least 8 hours to do something of my choosing, 8 hours to get work done, and 8 hours to sleep, but these numbers never work out so magically and they never divide so even because time melts like that melting clock in Salvador Dali’s painting. Her frames are there to separate us. They are there to separate reality and imagination. But from that moment that she broke predictability by purchasing wine instead of her usual 2 nips one day, I realized we can’t be victim to routine, we are not built to follow every plan. And the truth about life is things never go according to our plan.
As I stare at her, time stood still for a moment and I begin to think back on the 3 moments in my life that nearly took my breath, nearly suffocated me, like the reckoning ship between this woman’s 3 moles. I was 22 and set to give birth. The doctors informed me shortly after delivery that there was an issue with her lungs, they were not fully developed and so she would not live beyond an hour. Time was wicked, but in seconds, I knew she would at least live 86,400 seconds. I could hold her for 86,401 seconds and hold on to that last second.
A year later, (525,600 minutes), my brother passed away from meningitis. No tragic accident, a somewhat curable infection took his 26 years of life. I remember all the little fights Norman and I got into as kids. We toyed with religion because it was the safest thing for us to do ruffle beyond drugs and alcohol. I remember the day that we found a vial of holy water in our mom’s things and we dared each other to drink it. We grew scared that we would grow wings and morph into Lucifer’s distant cousin or worse, nothing would happen to us physiologically, but our mother would whip us into godly submission for medaling with her things. My brother and I grew different as we got older. Is this the nature of siblings? He became that out-going theater person, I became the quiet, does her homework when she gets home from school, quiet girl. And as annoying as we were to each other, I grew to appreciate our differences but sadly this realization was augmented when he was no longer here to share time with me.
The third and final chapter was the death of my best friend 26,280 hours later. When I thought that God could not be any harsher, Laura was struck and killed by an Amtrak train after getting off at a stop that was unfamiliar to her routine. We shared the same path, we wanted to become doctors, we were feminists who feared becoming old scientists with horrible brown shoes, and clearly did not take ourselves too serious. We were jaded and optimistic in the same breath, sucking up all the fairy dust that the hashtag #blackgirlmagic could afford us, her from Uganda and me, the Jamerican suburban kid.
All of these events seem so tragic. What is sadder than losing people, is succumbing numb to their passing because of their frequency. One would think I would abandon religion, become a zealot and curse everything around me. But the only realistic threshold is time. Grieving was not an option (it would only subtract time countdown). I could sit and sulk in the horror of these three people gone from my life, or I could be thankful that I lived in their moments, their seconds, their minutes. I decided I would stay anchored to these 3 navigating poles because when I think that I’m close to capsizing, they are there to steer the ship.
But what do these 3 navigating poles have to do with this woman? There’s no direct correlation, but I suppose that I’ve started to live by the mantra, that you have to laugh in order to stop yourself from crying. I have to amuse myself to live in the moment through imagining what she does after she leaves the store. I have to shift these 3 poles and transfer them into something meaningful. With this discovery in mind, I start to imagine them and how this woman is pulling from each of them. She shares the quietness Anora did as she laid still for 86,401 seconds. I start to envision that she is secretly a thespian. She watches Dreamgirls over and over again like my brother always did, and argues that Jennifer Hudson is more talented than Beyoncé by far. She now has a penchant for taking her glasses off, throwing on 5 inch heels like Laura did, club in New York City at wee hours. She retreats back to her apartment, just like Laura did into her Christian Ugandan home in Watertown, pretending to have spent the weekend reading 1st Corinthians Chapter 3 like we did. I took her, ordinary her, and framed her like the 1st law of thermodynamics. Energy can be transferred from one form to another. It cannot be created or destroyed. So who am I? I am a believer that that those 3 lives are matters of energy and that they never died. I can be ordinary myself, just like her. I can be quiet. But these 3 energies that orbit around me, make me feel magical and so now the next time I look at this woman, I’ll see life and not just imagine it. I’ll see her, and she will no longer need to wear her lenses, her frames, or stick to her routine. She is allowed fluidity because time motions and never ceases.