21st Century

Alice didn’t like to get high. But here she was, dragging in and out the same smoke the Indians used to breathe into the sacred tunnels of her nostrils. She knew this was the only time the metallic ringing in her head would calm away to a peaceful buzz. The bright neon lights and foreign sounds of the robotic world had always made her blink and laugh because she knew that she and her mechanical brain belonged.

This was the 21st century, and she was a prophet of her generation: desensitized to all around her, numbed in the core by logic and scorn. The days she lived in were heatedly debated and yet she saw the world and its problems and its joys as if through a looking glass. Or the darkened windows of a car that reflected midnight with no stars. Or the dazzling distorted reflection in a pond.

No, she took that back. Ponds and other harmonious things of nature had been usurped long ago by roads and airplanes and government—man’s imitation of the thing that had birthed him, like Adam mocking Eden. Nature was heaving away, and on long road trips Alice couldn’t help but imagine what the cities would look like as they had once been without the destructive love of humans, and felt guilty. That was long ago. She was older now and knew that only the latest fads could survive.

And she knew that the world went round and round in a circle and that the gods frowned upon the puny ants who crowned themselves as kings and carved disaster into the homes given to them. She knew that karma was real, like the moon and the tides and how she made sure she did nothing to affect the vicious and justified cycle of pain and love—so she stuffed herself in her room. Alone and dignified, she was addicted to her sacrifice and the computer sitting by her bed.

If she was in a time more innate and primal than this cold, metallic era, Alice would have been a seer; a messenger of that beautiful force that connects and transcends us all. When she was a child she felt the irresistible pull of the Wild, of adventure, of never letting go. She read lots of fairy tales and enacted her own: the same Creator and Creature of her own miniature and delicate world. Although Alice was sociable with other kids, she always preferred spending time on her own. She understood herself completely then. She’s spent quite a lot of time trying to get to know herself just as well as she had in those halcyon days of youth.

The world held endless possibilities in which having a normal job and life were not a part. She was always some special person, different even in a different world. Her dreams were more reality than the life she was actually living. Alice would find on incredibly sunny or rainy days that she could not discern whether she was awake or dreaming: it had the same irrefutable and ephemeral quality to it. She thought quite a lot about what was real and not, who God was, and why. Nothing satisfied her pursuit of the quiet, throbbing call she heard in the woods or in her sleep.

Alice didn’t know how the world really worked then. She knew that there was love and loss and she hoped with all of her might that there was magic as well. Maybe magic can only be found in true love and loss. Your spirit shines through then: your skin is paper and your eyes empty sockets of god-like light.

Take for example the time she was rushed to the hospital to her aunt, cold and swaddled in her father’s old college t-shirts. There was her aunt, her heart lit up as a display for the whole hospital. Every beep on the monitor let Alice breathe a little deeper, and every silence took it away just as quickly. Who cared what her aunt actually had, Alice knew only two things: she loved her aunt as much or more as she had loved her parents, and that she would never see her again. She was seven years old.

Loss had afflicted her early in life, too early for love to take over just as strongly. It had taken root in her heart like a poisonous vine coiling its dark tendrils around the other vegetation of Alice’s soul, suffocating those straining towards the light. And, as seer-like and visionary as Alice herself, Matilda had foreseen the darkening. So there Alice was, in the beat up backseat up of the beat up car listening to her mother’s Cat Stevens tape and clutching the silver pendant necklace Matilda had passed into her hands as the fluorescent hospital lights dimmed and the noisiness of death became insufferable. The chain left a doppelgänger mark on Alice’s palm that would not leave her for weeks, but not even near as long as her heart throbbed and struggled just barely to survive in the wake of the monumental loss.

But Alice survived. Her parents tried different ways to bring her back: many sunny days, puppies, hugs, and cakes. Alice still retreated into her books and fairy tales and numerous fabricated lives and persevered this way. Even as she encountered the worst, Alice looked towards the future, still bright and hopeful in her childish mind. Again, let it be repeated, Alice survived—but she did not overcome. Deep down inside of her, that darkness that first infected her heart at her aunt’s death still lingered like a disease or some slowly rotting corpse. She did not know how careful she had to be, how easy it was to trigger that darkness. It was as easy and as involuntary as falling asleep.

So she walked carefully around the cracks on the sidewalk as if they were the cracks in her life. “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back” 1, 2, 3...oh, how her mother’s back has been broken. Not because of Alice carelessly stepping on cracks in the sidewalk, but for splintering of her life into pieces. Because of the alcohol, because of the drugs, because of the hopelessness, because of a broken heart. The same you innately know it is going to rain is the same way you know that someone is going to break your heart. Oh, and how Alice knew it. He had come in her life like an earthquake, literally earth-shattering. His arctic blue eyes splintered her soul just like an earthquake can crack the surface of cold, hard granite. Instead of healing her, he broke her. He promised, “Baby, I’ll always be here for you”, and he was right. He was always with her, but this is not the way Alice wanted him to stay. His raw presence would always loom in the flesh of her mind, like an old wound that only scabbed over with brown blood and pus and would not fully heal, and so would the day when he broke her heart.

They had always talked about him leaving for college. But then the subject would change, and an old-school record would be played, and they would smoke the cigarettes together that he could buy for her. Maybe that was the problem with their relationship: he could do things as an eighteen year old that she could not. She was a part of that mythic and intrinsic vulnerability, that naivety, that comes with the dewy youth of sixteen.

A cigarette smashed beneath the entrapments of the hard pearls of her top two teeth and her furious clenched jaw, the angled bones under her thin, pale skin tighten to form new harder, sleeker lines, hazel eyes narrowing in distrust and disgust in the memory: thinking of him, she seemed more canine than human--which probably explained her new reputation as a bitch. One by one, boys had approached her after he left, and wordlessly she turned them away, unable to explain that she would never be able to hear those three most important words, and be able to say them back. Her heart was an empty cage that used to be filled with the beating of a working heart. The regular tha-thums soon became irregular and every time Alice saw a boy on the twilight-darkened street who was tall with sapphire eyes, she could swear her heart stopped. Then the light would shift and he would turn and the one person Alice so desired to see and never wanted to see again, transformed into a complete stranger. Stuck between disappointment and relief, she would shrug her slipping coat over her shoulders and furiously wipe away the torrent of unwanted tears.

Deep in her heart, as vainly as it did struggle to overcome the cycles of hurt and love, she knew that she would never get over him. Late at night, her dad would reminisce about his first real love, and Alice could tell that he still loved her, even then. This one girl, after all of the others that her father must have known and loved and raw and present in his content marriage to her mother. The way he talked, he was still seventeen, in love, and heartbroken; still watching for when he will casually bump into her once again.