3.

I cannot see out the window. My eyeballs—which I’d never so much as noticed before aside from when a bug or a mote of dust landed on one of them and chafed—can move only vertically. Among all the dimensions of the world that have been shut out of my life, my left and right sides have vanished. Gone is the luxury of rolling my eyes, so mercilessly exploited in the past, gone is the spherical sense of being wrapped in images; the world has shrunk down to the ribbon of reality visible right there in front of me. Or above me, depending on how I’ve been positioned. I see the most when they put me in a special wheelchair and prop me up on all sides like a rag doll that stubbornly refuses to sit properly. They turn me to face the window: in its rectangle is the day. If they fix my head well so it doesn’t tilt too much to the side, then the narrow ribbon along which my eyes stroll, scamper, or stumble becomes an endless path leading into the wild greenery of the park. I live in a castle, repurposed at the turn of the last century to become the Provincial Hospital for Ailing Children—as it was then named. You’ll always be my little one, she tells me while she strokes my cropped, slicked-back hair. Today this baroque phantom building serves as a temporary or permanent home for people trapped within the vestibule of death, also known as the Special Hospital for Continuing Treatment and Palliative Care. Most of those here are elderly patients brought down by heart attacks and strokes. Convinced they’re doing their patients a good turn when the weather’s nice, the nurses sometimes wheel them twice up and down through the lush trees and bushes of the grounds, and then park them by the entrance to a building that has the words “In Knowledge Is Salvation” carved over the door. Most of the courtiers in the castle are short on both. This reminds me of those bizarre marathon runners who come together all over the world in springtime. I have never understood these earnest runners who dedicate their efforts to people in wheelchairs or patients in the clutches of disease. There is something deeply ironic in such actions. I don’t find anything particularly merciful about taking the seriously ill elderly out into May’s untamed nature. The chasm between the garish greenery around them and their clouded cataracts can only inflict even greater pain. I came late to a love of nature. For a long time, I found it tedious, and I preferred to go headlong into the fray and flee to the company of people. I loved being close to others, I longed for them to look my way with a friendly, if brief, glance, send me a nod. Once, when I was five, I danced before a gathering of family friends in our living room, wiggling my bottom. I wasn’t aware of how suggestive my movements were, I was proud of the bugging eyes and fixed attention of the guests, until Mother, discomfited, hissed, “Enough now, out you go to play.” Nature was indifferent to me, paid me no mind, in our youth we don’t understand air or water or leaves, we just hurtle into relationships.

It was with you that nature touched me and right away we began escaping to it precisely for its indifference. That’s when I realized that indifference is a good thing, indifference is not out to do us harm. The first time we went out we met at a park on the edge of town, again—early summer. The dark was coming on, its contours pearly and blue; we sat side by side on a bench and if this were one of those stories, I’d say we conversed in intimate, hushed tones, but since I cannot speak, I’m condemned to the truth. We did not converse. We didn’t know how. The time passed between us painfully, haltingly. Still, we gazed into each other’s eyes with hope, stubbornly seeking answers there, any sort of understanding. Conversation eluded us, we weren’t using the same language, from different times and planets, we stammered, attempting to reach the meaning of the encounter, the futility was poignant. Meanwhile, something deeper than thought and more real than the words uttered nailed us to one another. I was captured by the space at the corner of your mouth and the flash of white tooth that broke through while you laughed, I don’t know what about, I don’t remember. Even before that bench, after we’d gone out together only a few times, I leaped into the dimple on your cheek and fantasized that I was running the pad of my thumb over your shiny, black eyebrows and that I was pressing the space between them with my lips and feeling the tiny, invisible hairs. I surprised myself, but I was still feeling playful, still steeped in simplicity, still more or less intact. As the pearly hue of twilight slowly quieted, we relaxed, our conversation faltered and we moved imperceptibly closer. The smells are what I’d like to retrieve but they simply won’t come back. Everything else does. Your smells were not alien to me, they were tender, silken; it was almost as if they were mine and so there was no need to fear an unfamiliar abrasive tang. And besides they were tucked into your lotion for nourishing dry skin. The next day at the drugstore I tried all the lotions on the shelf, hoping to find yours. We leaned cheek to cheek without pressing too hard, I don’t know where our arms or legs were, I can’t remember, I know we spent a long time moving our faces, somehow honoring one another, we touched with the tips of our noses, lightly along the edges of skin and hair. We didn’t kiss; that, we agreed, we’d leave for later, another day. Without a word, this was the degree of our understanding and why we stayed together. When we stood up from the bench the day was already dark, we ambled off slowly toward the center of town. We strolled along the main street and noticed something odd at almost the same time. People edged away, they circumvented us far more than necessary. Though we weren’t even holding hands, I do think we were glowing. It’s easy now for us to pretend we know what that was, but I’d say it was our story. Our shared future. We radiated potential that was thwarted from the get-go. Misfits. We betrayed decorum, and decorum is to most of our lives what water is to an organism. Our desires spilled over the limits of the permissible. Our bodies betrayed us and the leaking commenced in all directions. People edged away. We were unbearable. This is where nature came in. Parks, lone spots in the woods, a hill above the city where a tree grew out from the ruins of a church. This is where we liked to lie, right under that tree. By then we’d started talking. You noticed a special insect that was always flying in place, we adopted it straight away, ours. So much effort and struggle, the flapping of wings, sound, energy, all just to stay in place. We always looked for it when we stopped by there and we always found it or its offspring. This species, ours, expending all its energy to stay in place. I’d love to see it again, but that tree is far away, the bug is small, and my eyes are getting tired.