...In Your Hands

Mark turns onto the street before Jane’s and puts on the Prefab Sprout song he’s been meaning to show her. He thinks that putting the song on now is perfect, because by the time she gets in the car it’ll be at the chorus, providing maximum impact. 

But Mark didn’t account for how snowy the roads further in her neighbourhood would be. He tests his brakes to ensure he’ll be able to stop smoothly at the snow covered sign ahead that reads S OP. 

Mark looks up at the moon, three-quarters full, and notes how beautiful it is — kind of like Jane. A few nights before, he had made a mental note to get into poetry. For some reason, Shakespeare didn’t seem so lame anymore; Romeo didn’t seem like such a loser for whining all the time. All these poets seemed to suddenly know what they were talking about and it appeared as though he had been missing out all along. Lying in bed, with his eyes closed, he had decided that a mental note wouldn’t be enough — what if he forgot? So he had rolled over, grabbed his phone from under his pillow, and against a bright blue screen wrote in his Notes app: “Get more into poetry.” 

Mark turns onto her street. He had come from the north entrance so that he could pull up with the passenger side facing her driveway. He wanted to avoid having to make a three-point turn in slush. He wanted to pull up, have her get in, and kiss her gently; no, softly; no, gently was fine, as long as it was natural, because this was also goodbye. Mark knew that what was about to happen would be with him for a long time. He knew the moments ahead of him would replay like the trees, the trees that die every year but are born anew in…dew…rain falling softly, like his tears when he thinks about her face…okay, that was enough. 

Mark’s eyes refocus and he sees the song is two minutes in, already deep into the synth-laden guitar solo. He presses the rewind button and the acoustic guitar begins its opening riff again. As he slows down outside Jane’s house, he texts her “I’m here!!”, before changing it to “Here!”

Marks looks up at the moon again and it’s like a sepia sphere of — seepia sphere of? Spelt sepia, pronounced seepia…Her front door’s opening, but he continues to look at the moon. Mark doesn’t want to make eye contact with her just yet or he’ll be stuck smiling awkwardly for her entire walk to him.

His eyes are feeling dry. Will he cry? Maybe this time. 

Now she’s halfway across the driveway, head surrounded by a circle of faux fur like a mane, like…the corona of some distant sun, or probably our sun…eclipsed by the moon which—

The door opens and he turns to her with a sad smile: sad eyes, happy grin. She’s doing the same, but is also catching her breath. The chorus is soaring. “I count the hours since you slipped away…I count the hours that I lie awake…”

“Hey.”

“Hey”, Mark says, leaning in for a hug. Shit. Her door is still open.

Jane gives him a sheepish smile and he thinks it’s very cute. “One sec,” and she reaches for the door handle. The door closes and, “there we go.”

“Hey.”

“Hey”, Mark leans in and kisses her. 

“Thanks for coming. I know the weather’s crazy. Must’ve taken like half an hour to get here, huh?”

Mark would have driven half the day. “No, it was actually pretty quick.”

He puts the car in drive and they cruise around a bend. “Wow, look at the moon” Jane says, as it comes into view behind a row of houses. 

Mark watches Jane watch the moon. “It’s crazy” he says. Now, the synth-laden guitar solo.

Silence descends on the car while Jane looks ahead of her. “I can’t believe I’ll be gone tomorrow.”

Mark feels a pit in his gut, but really it’s less like a pit and more like a black ball of dread that’s tight and with its own gravitational pull. And the ball has a rod coming out of it, maybe less of a rod, and more like vines. And these vines are snaking…snaking? Tangling…tangled together up through his heart. And this rod is moving, in a rhythmic, wave-like motion that makes him sea sick. Like he’s drowning alive, waterboarded by some insane group of something or others who’re asking him to feel more than he’s able to. 

“I can’t believe it either.”

They pull into the lot of a nearby school and he puts the car in park. The next song comes on, and its Hope Sandoval singing: “Well I think I see another side, Maybe just another light that shines…”

Mark clears his throat, but the ball doesn’t budge. “I’m going to miss you a lot” he tells her, and squeezes her hand. “We’ll be together again before you know it.”

“Seven months”, Jane says under her breath. She doesn’t say the rest. She doesn’t say that her program is actually four years, so even when they do see each other next, she’ll be gone before they know it; that she’ll leave again and again, coming-and-going until she’s done school and, even then, any chance of her returning afterwards to be with him was practically zero; as the limit approaches zero, the asymptote…of the horizontal…the x-axis? What? Focus. “I mean that’s almost as long as we’ve been seeing each other, ya know?”

Mark knew that. “Yeah, I know.” 

Jane sighs and covers her eyes and nose with a white wool mitten — glove; it’s a glove because there are fingers. 

“Backseat?” Mark suggests. She nods without removing the glove. After a ten-second delay, Mark makes the first move and opens his car door; Jane follows suit.

Mark looks up at the moon and sees a thin black thread dangling in front of his eyes, a thread that connects down to the bocce ball of despair in his gut. And while she’s getting out of the passenger side, he briefly tugs on the thread to see if it would hold, should he choose to climb up. Because, if it truly went all the way up, he could sit on the moon with a walkie-talkie, or some sort of higher grade communication device and keep watch. He could bring binoculars so that if he saw her plane was heading towards any turbulence, he could call in to air traffic control and say: ‘hey man, I don’t know if you can see this, but there’s some shitty looking clouds up ahead of that euro-bound flight, and there’s a girl that means a lot to me riding in there, so if you could divert the plane, I would really appreciate it. Hey, not to mention the other couple hundred of people on the flight, who are important in their own way to their friends and could also get hurt. Yeah? You will? Great.’ And then, when she’s in her new apartment, he could sit on the moon between night-shifts and wave.

Mark blinks for the first time in a while and lets his eyes come back into focus. He can sense her waiting for him to go in first, so he turns and enters the backseat, shutting the door behind him. After she enters, he leans against the car door and motions for her to turn around. He pulls her into a sitting position, with her back against his chest. They sit in silence for a minute. 

Mark brings his nose down to her head and sniffs quietly enough so that she won’t be able to notice, but then he thinks it might be funny if she did, so he sniffs comically loud and she starts laughing. In reply, he wraps his arms around her and squeezes. 

“I wish there was something we could do.”

“Me too”, Jane says. He knows what she means, which is, ‘Yes, I agree, there’s nothing we can do.’

Mark squeezes her again, but this time he’s outside in some sort of maelstrom. Houses are being torn from their foundations and are spinning all around them — they must be in some rural farmland area because the spinning houses all have this rustic look to them…And now there’s a cow, and he can hear a faint ‘moo’…He’s in the eye of the storm and he’s holding on to her with the understanding that, if he lets go, he’ll be riding shotgun with the cow. A man is now walking behind him, unaffected by the wind, and the man is brandishing a whip. He hits Mark once and the pain is excruciating. The man hits him a second time, and then a third, but Mark won’t let go. The man pulls out a box from somewhere and it is filled with snakes. Mark holds on tighter, squeezing her arms together. The snakes are dumped on him and he is struck with terror. Their hissing can be heard over the wind. Despite his fear, he holds on.

“I’m going to miss you so,” so, so, so, so, so “much.” 

“I will too, Mark.” 

Hey, Jane? I know this is going to make things a lot worse, and you probably don’t want to hear me say this, just because you’re leaving and all and…I’m in love with you, “I mean, we’ll FaceTime often, it’s not like I’m gonna just stop picking up your calls—”

“Don’t joke like that”, Jane interrupts . “That’s not funny.”

“Sorry, you know I’m kidding.” Mark doesn’t want her to be upset, he just doesn’t know how to actually say what he wants to say. It’s like he’s overflowing with these things that he could say, but if he says them then they’d become less than what he says, and…he doesn’t think there are words for this…he just doesn’t…but he wonders if, when he presses his head against her head, like he’s doing right now, if he is able to transfer his thoughts to her…if he can transfer these warm colours and shapes that fly through his head when he thinks of her. “I was just joking around…it’s all so shitty.” He wonders if she’s picked it up yet. He wonders if she can feel his overwhelming desire to orient his aspirations towards her. He wonders if she can see this red box of light that’s all rage directed towards some sort of, any sort of outside force that would want to hurt her. He wonders, “how long can you stay out for?”

“Well, my family wants me home for dinner and then they’re driving me to the airport.” Jane tilts her head down. “I’m really sorry but, is five minutes okay?”

On the hood of his car is a large digital clock, counting down the minutes in bright red numerals. Mark feels as though, in these five minutes, he has to convey to her the sum total of what he feels. Like, with his words, he could maybe anchor her to him; anchor her with some sort of microscopic thread, like the one to the moon; a thread that would weave through power lines and underwater telephone lines so that, at any moment, with a tiny pull she could feel the reverberation. 

“Yeah, that’s fine. Let’s just sit here a minute.”

Mark looks out the window and up at the moon. Its faint glow is now covered by a cloud. When he looks back at Jane, he realizes she’s crying. Her head is shaking and there are tears streaming down her face. He turns inwards but his black ball stays put and his eyes remain dry. Suddenly, he is convinced that he will watch his baby daughter or son come into the world and not cry then either, and that he will just feel nothing because he’s dead inside. 

Jane leans forward and turns. She wraps her arms around his neck and places her head on his shoulder. She presses her cheek against his, and he can feel how hot and feverish she’s become. 

Mark pets her hair and, with his other hand on the back of her neck, holds her close to him. Mark suddenly thinks that, maybe if he held her long enough, they would fuse into each other and that if they did, that would be nice. It’s the same feeling he gets when they’re lying in bed with their legs twisted together like a pretzel. He doesn’t think there are appropriate words to convey his ideas about fusing and pretzels so he says, “Don’t cry.”

“I can’t help it!,” she sobs.

Mark doesn’t want her to ‘help it.’ He looks at her crying and sees a roof caving in, but the rubble falls only on his back as he stands over her; he sees a vine that’s about to snap and, just before it does, his arm shoots down and he catches her by her wrist; he sees a train, moving at full speed, and with only a second to spare he pushes her out of the way so that he is left — 

Jane wipes her eyes and says, “We need to go.” Mark nods his head and they both exit the backseat from the driver’s side. Outside, there are no snakes caught in hurricanes. 

They hug and, in right before they part, Mark keeps her there for an extra moment. 

“Call me when you land?”

“Yeah.”

When Jane says ‘yeah’, Mark is reminded of last night, when she was underneath him and also said ‘yeah’. That time she had been smiling and looking into his eyes. 

Clouds rumble from above and a lightning strike, that somehow spells ‘yeah’, directly hits the weak spot of a dam protecting an entire village. Cracks shoot through the structure of the wall, with small jets of water spurting forth in different spots. Moments later, the wall shatters and water rushes forth. Practically a tsunami, it begins to wash away the village — which is deserted, so no one is actually hurt. Mark can see the houses filling and falling apart; he can see the currents push through deserted alleys and into an empty market square; he can see the water level rising and rising, until nothing can be seen but blue. But then the waves start to take on a rhythm. This rhythm is no less powerful than the initial torrent, but it feels warm and its movement is hypnotic. There are waves pushing ahead of him, and they are crashing again and again on a distant shore he cannot see. No matter how hard he looks, he cannot see where they land, and he is left with a problem. Towards her, he feels everything, but there will never be the words. 

“Hey, there’s so much I want to say to you, but I’m not really sure how. Can you just trust me that I feel a lot of intense and good things about you, and that I will think about you all the time?” 

“Yeah.”

Mark looks up at the moon and with his right hand reaches into his chest. He feels around for a few seconds before closing his fingers around it, and when he does, he can feel the rhythm of its beating. “Jane, open your hand.”