Away We Go - Emil Ostrovski Page 0,30

poetry, birds that mate for life.

“—going for a walk” is how I finish. I start down the path that circles the lake, leaving Marty and Alice to stare after me. The Galloway gardens are up ahead, flowers wilting from the heat, the water in the fountain dappled in the light. I shoulder through the back entrance of Galloway, past students sipping coffee and eating goddamn sandwiches in the Academy Café, down a corridor and then another, past the elevator bank, into the lobby.

I don’t know where I’m going.

I don’t know where I’m going.

I have nowhere to go.

So I stand in the middle of the lobby like the statue of a lost boy.

Counseling, she keeps bringing up counseling.

Sure, there are times when the emptiness is too much, when all I want to do is sleep, or drink. Times when beauty is unbearable. Times when I am in bed with Alice and it seems like I will be in bed with her forever, and I feel forever like a weight on my chest. But these feelings are a manifestation of and a communion with what Foucault calls the great tragic powers of the world, and I don’t want to be medicated out of them. I live on a rock hurtling around a giant ball of fire suspended in a void of infinite nothingness. The only way to transcend that nothingness is through art, love, work, play, religion, what else is there? But transcendence is impossible, it’s a fanciful tale; what is empty can carry no weight. If I ever forget that fact, the great tragic powers of the world remind me of how little I am, how small I am, because as students stream by me, in and out of the lobby doors, I catch intermittent glances of Westing’s walls.

I decide to spend my birthday with the one person I know who doesn’t want to be with me, but I hesitate, pacing back and forth outside Clover House’s multipurpose room.

This is where I bump into Addie. We know each other the way strangers on a small campus know each other—through distant silhouettes, the flash of a passing face, and AwayWeGo status updates. She takes me in with big brown eyes and says, “Oh. I’m glad—he’ll be happy to see a friend.”

Friend. The word echoes in my head as she disappears around a corner, leaving me alone with her label. Now I can’t change my mind, can’t do what I do best and run away, because she’ll ask Zach tomorrow if I came and he’ll say no I didn’t; that’s not behavior worthy of a friend.

At his door, I knock.

He doesn’t answer.

I let my breath out; didn’t realize I was holding it.

I knock a second time, loud, clear. He says, “Come in.”

I edge the door open.

He smiles from his bed. “Oh, man. Long time no see.”

He’s lost weight, but he’s still beautiful. I can think of no other way to describe him. Too pretty to die, because, of course, the right to life increases in direct proportion to facial symmetry, as judged by your friendly seventeen-year-old arbiter of life and death.

“Distance makes the heart grow fonder, so I spent the last week or so in Alaska,” I explain.

His face is inscrutable for a beat, but he breaks into a laugh. “Oh yeah? How’d that go?”

“I wrestled a bear,” I say as I slide a chair over to the bedside and take a seat.

“Hey, wouldn’t you know? That’s what I was about to guess!”

“The bear won.”

His hand is inches from mine.

“You and I, kid, we don’t believe in competition, though,” Zach says. “Oh I know, I know, I know we live in a world where everyone is like ra ra ra fight to the death—”

“What was that?” I said, cupping a hand to my ear. “I didn’t catch that.”

“Ra ra ra fight to the death,” he repeated, “But we, you and me kid, we defy the paradigm that delineates bear wrestling into a win/lose binary in which man must either prevail or be prevailed over by bear.”

“Speak for yourself. I wanted the bear to eat my dust.”

I could take his hand. It’s right there, atop the blanket.

“I believe that’s a racing metaphor. Not suited to bear wrestling.”

“Name me a bear-wrestling metaphor,” I say.

“I can’t.” He throws both hands up in exasperation.

“Also, if you’re racing, and you use a racing metaphor, it’s not a metaphor then, is it? It’s literal. So bear wrestling might be a perfectly appropriate time to use a racing metaphor and