Of Roots and Stars

The end of my cigarette burns dimly against the inky night. The thick smoke rises in tight whirls in the cold air. I take a deep breath, letting the familiar sting singe my lungs—then deeper and deeper yet. As I exhale, I wish the smoke would enfold me, coil around me and hide me. Erase me.

I have always liked the peace and quiet of early mornings, when the night feels like a blanket sheltering you from the mess of other people, when the stars watching over you and the wind softly blowing whisper I won’t let them find you yet.

When I was just a child, I already loved getting up in these small hours of the morning to look at the sky looking at me. These microscopic tears in the fabric of the night felt substantially more real than the world I was evolving in during the day. They hung there, as so many innumerable words to explore, so many soothing friends showing up just for me, night after night.

Silently, so as not to wake my father from his bed of ire in the next room, I would snake under the striped blind hanging next to my bed. Knees sinking into the thin mattress, I propped my elbows on the windowsill, and for a moment it felt like I was truly escaping my stuffy suburban room and entering a forbidden, more desirable world.

Reaching for it, I could almost hear the stars whisper; there you are Joel. And I would whisper back about my day—how the burnt toast had sent a mugful of coffee flying at the wall, how I had scraped my knee as anxious hands had pushed me out on the driveway, and how the scratchy wool from my tartan scarf had diverted intrusive eyes away from the tear-soaked neckline of my yellow jumper.

To these confessions, the stars never answered. But I didn’t need them to. We know, their silence spelled out in slow blinks. We know, and you can stay with us for as long as you need.

Tonight, once more, they know.

“I have to do it that way. Jean wouldn’t understand.”

We know, they shine back.

“Especially not with the girls,” I add after a moment’s pause.

We know, Joel.

Jean was very pretty when we met. Maybe not the prettiest girl in school, but pretty enough that all the other boys joked about how lucky the one she chose would be. I participated in these locker-room speculations by nodding appreciatively, which spared me the trouble of actually coming up with a comment of my own. Deathly afraid of saying the wrong thing and singling myself out, I would stick to grunts and laughs so the eyes of others would skim over me in their search for approval.

Until somehow, some day, it was me she had singled out. In some ways, with a simple gesture, she had destroyed the wall of withdrawal I had striven to put up all these years; and as she took my hand, I had felt the tremendous pressure of being chosen so powerfully that I had never let go.

She was more popular, friendlier, smarter than I was, in every way, and because she was unafraid, I could forget that I was. Everyone she knew was amazed at how full of life she was, how hungry for it—I couldn’t believe it either when she chose to step down to have the twins.

It was bad luck, really it was. But Jean didn’t feel like it was, so I tried my best not to feel like it was either. “I can’t wait for us to build our own family,” she would say softly at night, pulling my hand to her swelling belly; and I tried, I really tried to believe that the crushing weight I felt was the mixture of dread and excitement every parent-to-be must feel. But once she had fallen asleep, I would get up to get a breath of air from the window, my throat closed up as the stars whispered; we know, we know. Through the sleepless nights nursing the girls, hunting pretend monsters under their beds and tucking cherished stuffed animals to sleep, their motherly glimmer never stopped answering.

“I don’t know how to do this.”

We know, we know.

“I can’t turn into my father.”

We know, we know.

“I never wanted this.”

We know, we know.

“I can’t breathe.”

We know, Joel, we know.

I can see the first lights of day bleeding over the horizon. Soon, their dusty beams will land on the pink shades of the girls’ room, and it will be too late. The morning light hitting the outside wall will throw all of the memories into sharper relief and it will be impossible not to cut myself on the edges of their fluffy pillows and feathery hair. It will be impossible not to stay here holding them, bleeding as the stars fade.

I stub my cigarette out on the thick rubber sole of my hiking boot. My body is humming with the insistence of the rising sun. I can feel my blood pulsing in my ears, throbbing, chanting; now.

The shifting of the gravel feels deafening as I pick my bag up and start to walk away from the tidy lawn and the daffodils Jean planted for the girls’ sixth birthday. I have to will my feet to pass them without cradling them, without preening their leaves and telling them there is no other way for them to be happy, that I swear they’ll be fine, that they’ll grow, they’ll thrive, and they’ll be taken care of, that I know it, that I—

“I hope they know,” I hear myself murmur. “I hope they know how hard I tried, how much I wanted to be what they needed.”

Maybe it’s the sky paling already; maybe it’s the crunching of my footsteps drowning it out; but as much as I want to feel the shelter of these words, there is nothing but the grey damp of early dawn as the stars answer.

We know, we know.