People say that when you’re in love you enter a new parallel universe that runs alongside our everyday world – a small universe where nothing else can intrude – a republic of two, hypnotic, exclusive and bubbly, like you’re living inside a punch line that just won’t end. But I don’t think this is true. I think that being in love simply makes you feel even more connected to the rest of the species – it makes you belong to the world as fully as do birds and animals and flowers. I think that the real other universe is the one that erupts when the love goes away – what remains when the world crumbles and you’re left floating with nothing real to grab on to, and this is the world I’m living in right now. It’s a place where the rules are different. It’s a place where the only things that make sense are gestures that frighten or confuse people who live in the real world.
For example, this afternoon I could see a squall coming in off Vancouver Island, black and inevitable like a cartoon warlord’s empire. And then an hour later the rains came. I got to thinking of the hot tarry smell of roads just after a shower that follows a drought. So I walked up to the highway, four lanes each way, just before rush hour, and began to walk backwards along its shoulder. If you were driving west and you approached me, you’d only see the back of my head, dripping wet, and my legs taking me the wrong way. Seeing this, you’d know that I was a soul in trouble, a soul obviously headed in the wrong direction, a soul who lives in this different loveless world.
But then the sun came out and I looked to my right, off the highway’s edge, and there were all of these trees – birch and alder and vine maples – glistening, as though varnished. Because of the drought the colours hadn’t changed the way they normally do. The wet leaves looked brittle and transparent, like glassy candies, and they lured me off the highway and into the woods.
And then I felt wonderful. I felt the way I feel after I’m halfway through my third drink, which is the way I wish all moments in life felt: heightened and charged with the sense that anything could happen at any moment – that the reason being alive is important is because just when you least expect it, you might receive just what you least expect.
Then the woods felt as though they were made of glass shards. I had this feeling that all these coloured shards ought to be tinkling like wind chimes and my head got all tickly on the inside, and then the world went silent. I had to sit down on a rock. I had this feeling that surely the early pioneers must have felt about the beauty of the New World, that the only way to explain it was that there had to have been an eighth day of creation. What else could have generated such an astonishing world?
And sitting down I also began to think about life, and about how our lives can seem so plotless and formless, and this makes us desperately need to feel as if we’re a part of a grander story. And I got thinking about writers – how all writers know when they’re about to finish a book – the last chapter, the last paragraph, the penultimate sentence, the final sentence and then the final words, THE END. And I got to thinking that there has to be some sort of psychic compression that happens in a writer’s brain when they know they’re about to hit that final wall. Surely all writers must compress something out of themselves that they hadn’t expected – that a diamond has to be left behind, even a microscopic diamond.
And so I walked back to the highway, got in my car and drove to the library. I went into the fiction section, got one of those little book carts, and then I selected a hundred novels at random. I took them to the photocopier and copied the final two pages of each. I stapled them together and then took them home and I read them all.
Did I find any diamonds? I don’t know. I did find that the one thing many story endings have in common is that when they end, the narrator is moving either towards or away from light or darkness – literally – carrying candles into dark rooms or running a red light at an intersection.
And so here in my parallel universe I think about you and I think about the light and the darkness that defined us back when we lived in the real world – the way you burned your fingers on the kerosene lamp at the lake two years ago; the way you made me go shoeless and walk through the sea foam full of phosphorescent organisms up the coast last year; the way you always had to duct-tape over the one chink of light that drilled into your eyeballs every morning from up near the curtain rod; and the night we shone flashlights through our fingers to convince ourselves that we’re made of blood.
And so now I live alone in my parallel loveless world, looking for light sources and patches of black, hoping for a signal or an omen, wondering whether it will be a spark or a flame or a shadow or a tunnel, all the while feeling utterly unsure of which direction I’ll be headed into once that signal arrives.