By Serafina Smith
It’s not a place. It’s a feeling.
It’s the feeling of driving with the windows down, the huge starlit sky like a dome above you, at once magnificent and terrible – the Sistine Chapel in its darkest hour. It’s the wind that gushes through the windows, hot and dry and almost cool as the heavy hand of summer lifts its oppressive hold for the brief respite of night. The wind that passes over dry grasses, stiff and scraggly and lonesome, growing out of cliffs stained orange and ochre brown. Small gatherings of houses crouch in the valley, almost all dark now but for a few stray patio lights flickering out as the town lulls itself to sleep. But we don’t sleep. There’s a freeway that goes through the forest and on the side of it we sit, resting our bare legs on the asphalt, feeling it refract the day’s heat back up through the soles of dirty sneakers. Exhausted, the coolness of the summer night refreshes us, at least enough for one more drink. One more drink before another night of fitful sleep under damp sheets and the soft hum of a box fan working overtime. A summertime ritual. All the best memories are outside. We crave the fresh air, sunlight on our skin, cool summer nights under the dome of stars. These are the times I choose to remember, the moments we got to sit and take a deep breath. Times like this and times of silent walks in the woods, even in the winter when the mud would squish under our shoes and the trees would stretch into the darkness with all the stillness and majesty of the grave.
“Come outside and see the stars.” It was your last winter. There was a dusting of snow on the ground, and the air held a crisp chill. You shuffled slowly down the stairs, dressed all in black, fleece-lined pants hiding your now narrow frame, a vague attempt to mask the way your body was destroying itself from within. A wool scarf was wrapped around your neck and up over your chin, a leather-brimmed hat perched on your head. Slowly we crept outside and tilted our heads to the sky, that same sky that twinkled in the summer, but now felt cold and distant, a thousand frozen diamonds in the velvet above; cosmic snowflakes dancing a slow dirge.
We stood there, looking at the stars, and you said something I never thought I’d hear you say. “How lucky we are to live in a place as beautiful as this.” It was a beautiful place, but it took you saying it for me to hear it. It was the place I grew up, and as reluctant as I am to admit, the place that shaped me the way all children are molded by their homes. The cradle of pine trees left an imprint on my soul in the shape of rivers and valleys and evergreen forests that stand strong and tall come spring, summer, fall and winter. This place was special – the way the air always had that smell of fir and wood smoke and teenage angst; the joy in the small things; the old hangouts, the familiar faces, the unexpected kindness of strangers.
But I always wondered what brought you here. While I was born into it, you chose this place – chose it for me. You always seemed to merely put up with it, however, while you pined for the shores of the ocean. There was nothing like the salt on the air and the crash of the waves for you. I was a daughter of the mountains and you were the son of the sea, but in your final hours you craved this place – the ashy sunsets, the black stillness of rural nights, the daffodils that bloomed by the freeway in spring.
Somehow a Brooklyn boy found himself here, away from the city lights and museums and culture, where the only art was the way the wind shaped the rock faces and the sun lit the sky on fire. Somehow in the end, it was here that you stopped and cherished every moment, here that you found your peace.
Maybe it was that Brooklyn boy in you that always loved the stars. As I lie in my own New York apartment now, just a fleck of dust under a universe of concrete gray skies, I’m starting to understand. There’s something divine about the stars. There’s a divine privilege in seeing them pierce the sky in those special places left in the world where we haven’t diluted them from ourselves.
“How lucky we are to live in a place as beautiful as this.” How lucky I was to live in that place with you in it. How worth it it was, all the nights of cheap whiskey in parking lots, of sleepless trials with the devils of growing up, of being lost in the world and finding myself in those gold-studded hills. And how empty it is without you in it.
The streets are empty. The valleys hiss with a wind that is eerie and lonely, and the steady rush of the river is menacing, a reminder of the lives those waters have claimed rather than of summer days spent in their cool embrace. Even the stars seem empty, winking back in the cruel coldness, orbs of blue fire millions of light years away, smirking at me out of the crushed blackness.
That last night in December when we admired them, they were still alive too, little flecks of gold close to home. They welcomed us, and your eyes filled with such wonder, such sorrow, such love. You would have stayed there for hours or days or years. Some people say you’re up in those stars now, but I don’t know.
You made me stop the car as we drove over a ridge, just a regular road coming to a crest over a basin of shops and small-town folk. You climbed out of the car, lit a cigarette with deliberate care, and stood there, smoke curling from your lips as you breathed in the pink and red hues of the setting sun. You found such beauty here once your days were numbered. You looked death in the eyes, and you let him come to you. It crushed me the way you saw the inevitable and reached out with open arms. I prayed to myself for you to be a fighter; be strong.
But you were a fighter your whole life. First for yourself, and then for me. You fought to be a better man than your father, to give me a better life. You knew what it meant to come home weary, to drag your feet along the floor, to clean your bloodied hands with orange iodine in the workshop sink. And you were strong. There was the strength of a thousand suns in your acceptance. There was grace in letting go, even if it felt to me like the world was ending. The very bedrock beneath me was no longer strong enough to stand on; you were the glue holding it all together and without you, the fault lines would open up and the ground would shake; the sun would no longer shine and the stars would surely go out.
When the final hour came, you took your last labored breath, and I felt you let go. In that room where I stayed with you every hour, the sun shone through the window. It was high noon, and suddenly the room was quiet; where before there was your breath, there was silence. The room was stuffy, but it was full. Full of love and relief and letting go. I stood up and opened a window. The winter air came in cold, but the sun streamed in bright. It was the first day the February mists had lifted. I felt the sunshine on my face even as I felt the tears come rushing hot, and an emptiness crept into the air as I felt something escape out that window. Your hand grew cold in mine, and I wept. When I finally let you go, something beneath me did give out. But it wasn’t the earth.
It was my own body, my own two legs unable to stand as the sobs welled up from somewhere, the blue-blackness of despair rushing in from every angle. There were no thoughts. The people and the room around me disappeared. Someone caught my fall, but I kept falling. I’m still falling.
I couldn’t believe the stars still shone that night. The sun still rose, the water in the river still rushed on, and the great sugar pines bent in the wind; woefully they creaked in a February gale, but they bent and didn’t break, and still they existed, their roots strong in the same ground that I was sure would fall out from under me. They existed, and I found that I too, miraculously, still existed.
Maybe you’re in those stars. Maybe you’re on the wind. Maybe that’s you I hear in the pines – but that’s too easy.
If death were as easy as that, then what would life be? If death were so easily solved, how would we appreciate the wonders of the world, like summer nights on sun-soaked asphalt and sunsets of vermillion red?
But maybe it is so easy. Maybe you’ve been all around me all this time, in the winking of the stars, in the refraction of the heat on the Brooklyn pavement. Maybe there is no circle of life, no timeline of birth and death. Maybe there is just the beauty of this world and those that pass by to see it – those lucky enough to live in a place as beautiful as this.