Meeting

On a sheer peak of joy we meet;

Below us hums the abyss;

Death either way allures our feet

If we take one step amiss.

Edith Wharton, A Meeting

They were supposed to meet on the 8th of October, at 3 in the afternoon, at the place that everybody in the village called the Turkish hill. The stories about the crossroads at the top of the hill were often told during winter nights and family gatherings, but she remembered very little of them. House built on top of the Turkish graveyard where a man killed his wife and two children for reasons unknown to everyone. Or was it a tree where a local farmer hanged himself that brought the restlessness to the travelers passing by, no one could know? It was thirty years since she even tried to bring those stories into memory. Now they were vague and came in the voice of her grandmother that changed often, trying to find the right pitch, the right word, the right form. 

The thought of coming back home after so many years broke and warmed her heart at the same time. Many things changed but she had at least expected to be greeted by a few familiar faces that had been warned out by time and maybe a story or two, like the ones she used to hear. She worked around stories her entire life but none of them came close to those from her childhood. Writers and journalists and prize-winning authors that, back then, in her eyes looked like the most marvelous things, now she was running away from them, as she was running towards them then. 

She said goodbye to the life she lived at home once and never expected to come back. For a while she ignored feelings that surfaced and found happiness in her studies and later in her writing and when that didn’t work out as she planned, in her work. Over time, more frequently at nights and early mornings appeared something haunting that pulled her back. Like a menacing prophecy or a thing from an ancient story, a fortune told by a street clairvoyant about to come true. What was it she couldn’t tell or didn’t want to remember again but it became stronger and stronger with every dream she had, every recollection triggered by it? After some time, she decided that it was enough of the life lead in the shadows of it. To go back was, it seemed to her, the only way she could return to herself. She canceled her classes at the university and said goodbye to a few of her colleagues, left her dog to the family of four that lived next door to her small apartment, and booked the flight.

They didn’t greet her how she expected so she had to go to them. The first few days she spent with all of them, but they didn’t change from when she knew them. They looked at her from the pictures on the gravestones with the same eyes and warm faces, in between dead rose bushes that died in spring and were never taken out. Her childhood home was abandoned but things were still inside, untouched and uncovered, like in a museum exhibition, a time portal hidden in the mundane. Her paintings were still there, in the same place, her piano, a white vase she planned to bring with her when she was leaving but forgot, books in the living room, and a statue of Lady Justice with a broken beam balance. Light still danced through the kitchen in the same patterns created by, now overgrown, magnolias and fig trees, and the floor was screeching. Shadows rearranging as the day went on created silhouettes she knew very well and welcomed warmly. At night she read her favorite book she left behind and as she closed her eyes the voices gather around her to wish her goodnight. The next morning she was woken by the smell of coffee from the old

pot, warm cornbread that meant that breakfast was ready soon.

The longer she stayed there more lifelike voices became, the more she started believing that smells were coming from food that awaited her on the kitchen table. So she had to leave because her peace and her meeting were not there. There was nothing here, only pale footsteps of someone who existed long ago and she walked them enough to know that they are empty. She watched it one more time, slow-motion moments engraved on the walls, her grandmother eating her elaborate dessert pies, her mother talking about work, hug, one last hug, one last note in her favorite melody played by her brother on the piano, laughter from the garden, roses, hydrangeas, one last look through it, one last goodbye. The only place left for her to go to was the house of her grandmother, not far away, only three fields to cross and the farm appears. Her grandmother was gone, like everything else but still a few familiar things if she looked close enough. She took walks to get away from her uncle’s grandchildren taking the books away from her hands, poking holes in her hat, putting pebbles in her shoes. That’s when she saw it, the hill, somewhere in the distance, through rows of new roofs and paulownia trees in endless rows. 

It had been too long, she wouldn’t even dare think about the actual years. She didn’t see him once after their departure at the crossroads. He lost his youngest son who was driven to suicide by the ghost of his supposedly murdered grandmother. At least that’s what she heard around the kitchen that week she stayed at the farm. Her walks now changing directions, every day one step closer to the hill before she turns around and comes back home. Then she wrote a message, then another one and so the meeting was scheduled. 

She was approaching the crossroads one afternoon in October, every step she took was like stepping into a gap in the time, different body, all too familiar thoughts. The landscape morphed alongside her, resuming its twenty-year-old younger shape, wild roses, unkempt orchards, bumps in the road, tall grass looming over her.

In that gap, he was 19 and she was 21, and like most people of that age, they believed that they will live forever. Nothing in their lives thus far had proven them otherwise. Every road that stretched from that hill seemed shorter and less steep, every tree smaller, the sky bluer than they were. They were larger than all of them every moment they spent by each other and life was preparing to push them down. If they knew what was planned for them they wouldn’t dare do it but how could all those conversations that brought the type of joy that stops the time be a bad omen. With each one, they seemed bigger than all the things around them and slowly reached the point where everything felt infinite. It was the feeling that they cultivated throughout their meetings, it didn’t matter who they were just what they could be. People are only who they could be. That is the only thing that matters and to let go of it is to lose oneself, to allow the crack to open, to allow it to continue growing until its shadow sways over you like a rope of a hangman.

But thirty years ago, as she said her half-goodbye at the top of that hill, she allowed it. That’s where they met for the first time and that’s where they departed a few months later, on the same spot at the top of the hill. That is where the crack opened and starting gradually pulling everything in. And she let it, she let the days pass and the days were pulled in, years, lives, unsaid words that choked her every night until she got used to all the pressure and pain. Every tear held back became deep and deafening, like a deadly stab in the chest. It was a creation of Pandora’s box, hope, the first thing swallowed, kept all the chaos together, the seed of its existence. And in that swirling kaleidoscope of all the stories that could’ve been, she found their infinity. 

He saw her once again after that last encounter, she was sitting on the square in front of the university, reading a book. He wanted to approach her but so much time had passed that what had left of his memory of them was better left untouched. They were strangers now, even more than they were before they met. So he walked away.

The thought of leaving home crossed his mind every morning, but he couldn’t leave his two almond trees and his father, then his dying father, then his wife and then children, the hill where crossroads sit on top of each other. So he had to stay, every morning he had to stay and time passed until he had to bury his son, take out one almond tree that survived, admit that this morning he will stay. Until the message, until he took a walk to the Turkish hill and saw her again at the place where that time that took everything away didn’t exist. He was 19 and she was 21 again. 

Nothing had changed but the impending feeling they shared that filled every word they exchanged. Life was ready to push them down again but the pain didn’t matter this time. To feel it again, the closeness to never-ending things, the warmness, and comfort, a single, breathless moment that exists outside life. Somewhere in the crack that ran along their intermingled paths they isolated this moment, saved it from life, and in it found their infinity. 

She was telling him about Jung with the excitement of someone who read something life-changing for the first time, with the same love and enthusiasm in life she had back then. He told her about stars and physics, the same things. As if the world hadn’t changed in a bit, like they saw nothing, were nothing else apart from two young people they left there. They took a walk and listened to few songs and they were again not what they were or what they are but only what they could be. 

’’ I would wake up early, as I do every day, and read, something that so very much reminds me of myself, Jung perhaps, or Virginia Woolf, The Secret History. Then three pages in my black journal, last indulgent introspective thoughts, grand philosophies about life and existence and society that I would forget by the time of breakfast. Make them sweet today, really warm. Eat oatmeal, peanut butter and blueberries in it, have my coffee, play piano, write that last sentence in the novel I am afraid to finish and leave behind, make a pumpkin pie, I would like my last day to be in October as my first was, walk at the top of the hill and watch wind take away the sun. ’’

’’ Elaborate. I only have one wish. The last song I hear, to be played at my funeral. Would you do that for me? If I die first of course.’’

’’Gladly’’

’’And if I don’t, I get to enjoy the pumpkin pie.’’

The evening was closing on them and they resumed their real shapes as the last streak of sun left the trees. They sat in silence just a minute longer and departed, agreeing to meet next week at the same spot. Everything is going to be okay after that.

That is where he waited, a week from the day the first meeting was arranged. He sat on the same bench and listened to the music he enjoyed when he first met her but it lost its charm without her presence and made him feel old and resentful so he just looked at the road. The sun changed its colors as the day progressed and as it was nearing the autumn now this happened gradually and then everything disappeared in a single moment. He waited a little longer and when he saw the first stars appear in the sky above the hill he got up and started the road back home. He smiled to himself and started humming a song he knew too well. It entangled in front of him like a ball of red yarn, showing the way ahead through the crooked paths of the labyrinth. And in that song, he found their infinity.