Evenflow

You rest your head onto a pillow of damp leaves, and your body sinks into the soft ground. All of the tree roots under the surface spread beneath you like fingers, holding you up from twenty feet below. They weave and intertwine, comingling into a masterpiece of ebbs and flows, like God’s spiny fingers. The icy air wakens the hair follicles inside your nose, growing them brittle and tall with each breath in. Your right hand rests just below your pelvis and your left over your fleshy breast, feeling yourself simultaneously sink and float. One, you count in your head as you breathe in deep and out long. Two, three, four, five six, seven. Seven, Seven, Seven. Your savasana heightens, and you immerse into perfect cycle, a corpse alive on the Earth’s floor.

He doesn’t always like it when you lay out in the woods like that. The ticks are bad this year and you don’t need another bite. Lyme’s disease. He bought you a hammock to lay in, which he hung beneath the back porch, but you still wander out instead. It’s really the only place that grounds you, and keeps you safe. And you can think and pretend you’re part of the earth and when you lay there, you kind of are. He was in the shower while you left though, so you figure it’s okay to be here now.

Every moment, 15 pounds of air pressure pushes down on each square inch of your body. All those molecules add up to the equivalent of one ton, or a small car, but you are not crushed. That’s because of dispersion, and how the molecules spread out all over your body like little invisible creatures. They infiltrate your lungs, and inner ears, and small and large intestines until everything is even and you don’t even notice the weight. But the fact that the pressure is 15 pounds and not 17 really matters quite a lot. It just happened to be just the right amount to sustain human life. It’s just enough that you can lay on the ground in middle of the woods and not float off into space or be crushed by atmospheric weight.

You wonder if God made up those numbers and if he did the math when he thought it all up. And you question if he had to make up the numbers before he assigned them to things like pressure and temperature, or if those things came first and the numbers came along with them. You don’t picture him as the stereotypical man with a big white beard up in the sky, or blinding light, or a voice in the clouds. He is an architect, an artist, a mathematician. Your mind starts racing at an uncomfortably fast pace, like when you’re riding your bike down a big hill and the handlebars start to wobble back and forth. The “hows” and the “whys” start invading your mind, marching like soldiers through your ears and into the creases of your pink brain. It becomes a game of what came first, the chicken or the egg? So you go back to your breaths. Seven, seven, seven. 

The number has a calming aspect to it, a certain perfection. Seven is the start of the world. Your mind sinks into Genesis and the scripture prints itself across the insides of your eyelids. Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array. By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work.  Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.

God didn’t create the world in seven days. You don’t even know for sure that he created the world at all, but there’s something comforting about scripture. Even if it’s not true, it’s written down and it gives you something tangible for what you cannot see and what you do not know. But apparently, God made Adam on the sixth day and rested on the seventh. You wonder what it means for him to rest. Your mother used to tell you that God is always active and listening. But what about that day? What were all his creations doing on that seventh day? Did they automatically know what to do and how to behave and who their creator was? And if they had troubles do you think God would have helped them on the seventh day. You imagine God resting, and your mental picture of him changes. Now you see a large man asleep on top a bushel of clouds in the sky. His face is soft and foggy and undiscernible.

The blanket of frost has melted beneath you into a small puddle that traces the shape of your warm body. You open your eyes and watch as your breath fogs the air in front of you, and you feel like a cloud breathing dragon. When it’s cold enough, the tiny water droplets in one’s breath huddle together, condensing into visible vapor. There’s actually no exact temperature at which you would be able to see your own breath. Instead there’s a variable combination of humidity and temperature and pressure and other little things. Non-numerical things like that have always confused you to some degree, but sometimes it’s better to not always have explanations to everything. Numbers are just a made-up concept that are meant to ease anxieties. People want to be able to measure distances and times, like how far we are from someone we love, or how long it will take until pain is over, or how many candles we should put on a birthday cake. They’re really just a way to balance things relative to each other. Ironically, numbers cause more anxiety than they relieve. They tell you if you’re smart enough or fast enough or if you weigh too much. Numbers are your vice, and you can’t stop thinking, counting everything. Seven breaths in and seven breaths out, and somehow after that everything feels okay, even though nothing has changed.

While your body melts the frost, his feet crunch into it, crushing the little bits together into molds of the undersides of his boots. You watch as he inhales the cigar and you remember how your mom used to say that some people just like the feeling of smoke. And you imagine a thick cloud running through his chest, purifying his inners almost like it brought an April rain with it. The smoke-like breath that runs out of your mouth looks different than his actual smoke. Yours is short and disappears quickly in front of you, but his is long and drawn out. His thick smoke cuts through the air from his lips, then rises up into the branches. You can see which way the breeze is blowing by how the smoke moves. Today the air is quiet, so the smoke just follows the line of his breath outward.

He’s different than you in so many ways. You have subtleties he doesn’t have. Your eyes squeeze tight at the tips when you laugh, and your dimples look like someone took a nail and stuck it lightly into your chin. You always hug people when you first meet them, and you’re insistent with the idea that most people are inherently good. He’s harder than you on the outside. He carries himself like a man, and he’s rather intimidating. He’s tall and dark and smoky, an earthy smell of burnt cedar and weed. He’s the sort of person whose appearance catches you off-guard, with that black hair and tall, muscular build. You don’t see many people with black hair walking around, and it’s so dark it looks like it could be dyed, but his is real like midnight. And the freckles surrounding his nose look like stars, and his eyes like two full moons. 

Even though you are the day and he is the night, your intricacies are paralleled. You both are pulled by the same things. And that’s terrifying to you because parallel lines never meet up, and you worry that you’ll just run next to each other forever but never really intersect. He loves you with every cell that makes up his body and his brain, but you are cautious and afraid of being hurt because you love him the same.

He drops his cigar in the frost and steps on it with the bottoms of his leathery boots. The heat and the icy ground sizzle and you think about the Leidenfrost effect. The cigar is rapidly boiling the frost, turning it straight from frozen to vaporous gas, skipping the melting in between. How quickly things can change is amazing to you.

“I bet you can’t catch me,” he plays, looking at you with that grin.

So you peel your body off the ground and chase him. And when you run you feel the endorphins pumping through your body. You wonder how someone figured out what an endorphin was. Was it before or after they went for a run or had sex or was it more scientific than that? Your feet race after him, and the redwoods part like the Red Sea. You run through the back door and chase him up the stairs and push him straight down onto the black velvet couch. His lips part and you push into him, pressing your juicy lips to his, fitting them together. 

“Got you,” you tease.

“How are you feeling?” he asks. He’s the only one other than yourself that is hyperaware of your anxieties. You want reasons for everything. How things work, why things happen, and your feelings for him are one of those you can’t quite explain. They’re beautifully complicated and no theory or equation could numerate them. He has of the same obsessions and thoughts. You’re paralleled.

“I’m okay,” you respond.

You think about getting that same question at various doctor’s offices and psychiatrists and laying down in long chairs just to spill your feelings to a stranger. But you are not there, and tomorrow you won’t be either. And hopefully not for a long time or ever again will you have to be there. Because the question feels so different coming from him, and he understands your obsessive thoughts and that they don’t need to be treated.

“Actually, I’m good.”

And he looks at you and he smiles. He knows you can’t stop thinking about things like numbers and God and why things are the way they are. It’s all wrapped up in your mind, but he doesn’t call it a disorder. He says that people are in love with their vices. They’re actually just part of the sum of who a person is. Maybe it’s cracking a bottle every night, or keeping a cigarette tucked behind your ear, or counting, but whatever it is, there’s some pleasure in it.

“Did you know parallel lines can actually meet?” he asks.

“No they can’t,” you reply. “That’s what makes them parallel. They go on forever without ever touching.”

He takes a magnifying glass and a piece of his architectural graph paper, the kind with all the tight parallel lines on it. He sets it over the paper and you’re sitting there wondering what he’s going to do to actually prove his point. That’s mathematically impossible and you can’t prove things that are just not true.

“See look,” he points at the middle of the glass. “These are all parallel lines, but then look at the edges of the glass.”

You look and he’s right. All of the lines bent and condensed to meet at the edges. They were still parallel lines, but they broke the rules of parallelism.

“It’s a Euclidean theory. If you have two parallels and you add a point at infinity on each line, like the edge of the magnifying glass, the added points share their position at infinity. See, the glass is a Euclidean plane, it’s curved at the top, so the parallel lines actually meet.”

Your thoughts from earlier about the two of you being parallels that will never actually meet up brush away. And the fears you have of being so closely in line with someone melt. Fears of loving someone deeply or being hurt. Maybe it’s fine to have him be your parallel, and maybe the two of you actually do link up.

“I like that,” you say and smile softly. The dimples on your cheeks dig in deeper as he pulls you in. You lie down on blankets spread out next to the fire, and now you’re just two bodies pressed together. Two parallels meeting up into one line. He is your Earth. That type of gravitational pull is not one that you can count. So the numbers, and the counting, and the sevens just melt away. The feeling becomes you. Unquantifiable, unparalleled.

December 2019