Out of Body

Mikey captures, in 45.7 megapixels, the moment Andy exits her body.

There is something in her, then a fizzle of electricity, and then nothing.

Legs, yes. A head, shoulders, and beating heart, yes. But in her eyes, vacancy.

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To Andy, she is—

featherlight amongst the trees, tickled by points of rich green pine. The air is fragrant with spring-melt: snow-soaked dirt, thawing riparian loam, a wet river smell.

As she drifts, she finds an enormous calm. The wind is a long exhale. She is a gold mote of dust in a sigh. Untethered and awash with relief.

Then, over the croak of shifting ice and the trickle of emerging waters, past the rustle of waking wildlife and hungry songbirds, she suddenly realises—

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He’s thinking, This is the shot of a lifetime.

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That is my body. 

Her feet are firmly planted on the soil. Her expression is perfectly frozen: slightly parted lips, raised brows, hollow eyes. Distance grows between them, but Andy hears its summons. Come home. It pulls her as a pole draws the needle of a compass. It begs her like the moon does the sea. 

She reaches towards it, but she can’t see her arms in the space between her and her. She panics with yearning, straining and stretching where her fingers ought to be as she tries to hold on.

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Mikey thinks, They’ll be so happy. When he imagines presenting her with this photo–no, reuniting her with this moment–her joy is so loud it sounds like fanfare.

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Help me! She screams, but she has no mouth. The sound is all in her head, compressed like a migraine between where her ears should be. She tries kicking her way down, breaststroking against the cold.

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When he sees, in his viewfinder, that he has captured gold, he imagines the tweaks first (darkening the shadows, brightening the sky) and, immediately after, the glory.

The mountain valley is soft with dusklight. The sun has set behind the peaks, and the sharp points are limned in gold. At the heart of those haloed Rockies, in the tucked-in river valley, the two of them:

Her face has a suggestion of prettiness. Potential hovers like a veil above her features, but the camera captures what is: someone plain. Her hair is pulled back in a low ponytail, and she is wearing a cream Henley shirt with a slate-coloured puffer vest overtop. Her hiking boots are worn in.

His face is handsome and naked, wearing hope across his brow. The rest of him (russet plaid shirt, dark blue toque, new boots) is dull in comparison to the beauty of his wanting. He is a man swayed by love, love, love that would ascend mountains and lift the skies.

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Carter is waiting for her to say something. She chooses his name, over and over. 

He doesn’t hear it. 

He watches her still-parted lips, and a question spreads across his brow. He mouths, Andy?

I’m here! I’m here!

Her body is a dot, a little dot in a vest. Little-dot Carter moves towards her.

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He can tell already this is going to break the internet. 

Of course, Mikey isn’t so far that he couldn’t saunter down from his ledge to hand the photo over, if he wanted. But he understands fame, how fleeting it is, how hard-won and mercurial the limelight.

And especially when everyone is a photographer with their iPhone Pro or, God forbid, a Google Pixel. He is exhausted by armchair experts crashing his comments with a lecture on the rule of thirds. He knows the rule of thirds. He has an expensive DSLR and has been published. The rule of thirds owes him for doing it such justice.

He drafts in his head: @ryanmichaelphotog happened to catch this proposal in Kananaskis this weekend and hoping to get this pic to the happy couple! Do you recognize them?

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Her panic has risen to a fever pitch, vibrating through the impossible, invisible molecules that make up something of Andy. 

Carter.

She wants to wake up, as she has for so many years now, in their double bed that always has traces of kitty litter in the sheets, where they carry it on their socks and bare feet. She wants the familiarity of his breath on her cheek, the slightly sour but not unpleasant smell of him in the morning. She wants him to wake up, his thick boy-lashes fluttering as he focuses on her, and look at her as if there are two suns in this world: one at their window and one by his side. Often when he looks at her like this, he pretends to be too grumpy to talk, but really he will, with his voice rough with sleep, initiate a conversation about her dreams.

What were they? Was I there?

She wants a day like the ones they love best, where they have no plans and wear their pyjamas from morning to night. A beautiful, slothful day, when they will order breakfast from McDonald’s and call dibs on the third hashbrown (she always gives it to him). They will drink coffee in a stuffy, sunlit room and snack on kettlecorn and clementines (he’ll peel hers because she hates to stain her fingernails all orange).

She wants to be in his arms, counting the freckles on the backs of his hands.

Was I there?

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No, too simplistic. 

@ryanmichaelphotog Love is not an everyday miracle. We get out of bed expecting it, wanting it, and feeling, in so many ways, entitled to it. We think that it is ours, a just dessert for having lived a good life, or a hard life, or any life at all. When those of us not in love see it, we wonder what we’re missing–not just in terms of worthiness, but in fondness. What would it feel like for him/her/them to look at me like that, with those eyes, with that longing? What would it feel like to laugh with them? To fight with them? What is worse, in my life, because I am not adored like that?

When I snapped this photo this weekend, I saw the kind of breathtaking, staggering love that knocks the wind out of your body. I’m so proud to have captured this special moment completely unplanned, but I don’t know who the happy couple is! Let’s get this trending and make sure it gets home to the lovers!

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Brisk against the idea of Andy, wisps of cloud as thin as candyfloss. Shredded mist suspended in the grey-blue evening. Below: birds, slight as freckles. No amount of wishing has helped her.

Passively, she thinks. Funny. She’s felt this way before.

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It’s weird, how the man standing in front of his gal keeps saying her name, over and over. Andy. Well, Mikey will pretend to forget that detail. Better for them to be anonymous, to milk the story for all it’s worth.

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What were they? Was I there?

She thought it was so funny at that moment. She said, Thank God, it’s you! And flattened her hands on his shoulders, feeling his sleep-soft tee shirt beneath her palms.

Feeling him stiffen under her touch.

Who else would I be?

Still wanting this to be a joke, still thinking it could be, she said, I dreamed about Ted. LOL. She said LOL phonetically back then.

He lurched away from her, so hurried he half-ripped the sheets off of her when he stood up.

She felt an electric shock ripple through her. The air was suddenly charged.

What?

Why the fuck are you dreaming about Ted?

She learned fear feels hot and cold. Love too.

She apologized to his face, to his back, and through the door. It was the first time but not the last. She said things she had not said before but would say over and over again: It didn’t mean anything. I wasn’t thinking. I’m so sorry. I love you.

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The guy had said, “I love you more than anything in the entire world. You are my moon, my stars, and my rock. I love you forever. That’s why I’m asking.”

She was supposed to happy-cry, to shriek through her fingers and her sobs, A thousand times yes.

She’s still just standing there, and the guy is yelling now. ANDY!

Is she having an aneurysm? A stroke? Mikey briefly thinks he should call 911.

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She used to want to be seen.

Before she felt complicit, like she had not chastised him enough, like she had not suggested therapy enough, like she had not made herself small enough or neat enough or easy enough or kind enough or understanding enough.

Before she had stayed too long. 

She would go out with other girls, baiting someone to ask the right question and hoping somehow they would still ask the wrong one. When she heard tell of a lover’s spat, she was the last to ask questions, but the hungriest for answers.

When he’s ridiculous, do you laugh at him? When you laugh at him, does he shout? When he shouts, do you shout back?

The girls call her a gawker. Stop looking at our train wrecks, they laugh. We can’t all have a Carter.

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THIS ISN’T FUNNY, ANDY.

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The casualties of their relationship:

nights out with friends / spilled drinks / broken plates / cracked lightbulbs / heirloom tomatoes / the frame with her degree in it / I love you / that night he said she should stay at her parents’ but didn’t mean it / her parents / her peace of mind in an empty house / her peace of mind in a house with him / I love you / her first and only time living alone / her first and only time living with a man / I love you

The ways he made it right: 

breakfast in bed / tickets to that stand-up show she wanted to see but they both hated in the end / holding her like a precious stone / I love you / holding her like a fragile ceramic / holding her like he had never cherished anything in his life until she came along / that blissful trip to the Dominican where they ate cantaloupe in bed and laughed til their sides hurt / I love you / cooking dinner for both of their families at Christmas / Was I there? / I love you

This isn’t funny, you fucking cunt.

That’s funny. There he is, past the clouds. His voice over the din of jet engine. 

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The man is stomping across the clearing now, and he whips around, pitches the snapped-shut ringbox at her legs.

Mikey doesn’t see if it flies past her, or if it hits her and she just doesn’t react. He is not going to call 911. He is going to pack up his camera and start his descent. This couple is both the gem in his crown and the turd in his shot. He will decide which later.

Andy, baby, the guy is whimpering as Mikey zips up, What is it? Baby? Help! Somebody help us!

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The longer she drifts in the sky, the more she likes it. Her body is out of sight; when she looks down, she can only see toothlike mountains biting through the clouds.

She feels a brush of the same relief she felt when her spirit abandoned her body. The relief that she did not have to answer him yet, did not have to promise forever to someone who would bruise the word.

It is a peace that trickles over her red-hot fear and black-blue love affair.

Maybe, Andy thinks as the jet turbine slices the air around her, as she passes through the blades and out the other side, she will stay out of her body a while longer.