Abandoned Places (excerpt from a work-in-progress) by Jennifer McAuley
We all think of the west coast as the land of perpetual
grey. Swollen clouds and weeping skies, puddles you can fall into and sink so
deep you end up in an alternate dimension. I think when you grow up there, when
you’re a child, you take it all with a grain of salt. I don’t remember my
formative years as particularly wet, in fact I think, maybe because the drip,
drip, dripping becomes a sort of soothing metronome drumming out the beats of
time, it becomes as normal and reassuring as a heart beat. It’s the blood
softly circulating in your veins, you take the rain for granted.
In 93, David Duchovny was probably hanging out at the Orange,
watching strippers, between shooting scenes for the Xfiles and Robert Pickton
was dropping body parts in the wetlands across the highway from the Ruskin gas
station. I’m sure it rained a lot, like it always does, but I remember that
year as warm and sunny. That was the year I fell in love with Aaron. If there
was rain it was drowned out by the pounding in my chest as we practiced being
together for the rest of our lives, though we didn’t have a clue and didn’t
bother worrying about forever because we were so young.
Aaron wasn’t the kind of guy I usually noticed. He was
quiet, at least until you took the time to get to know him. He dressed and
moved and spoke in a way that made him invisible, nondescript. There are
people like that in high school, when you think back. They don’t stand out,
they blend in. There is a magic and an art to this trick, to this blending. Not
everyone can do it. The bullies and opposite sex miss them completely, it’s as
though they lack some vital pheromone that
alerts predators. When you finally do
notice them, when they reach out, a hand slipping between the folds on their
invisibility cloak to touch you, it’s doubly shocking. Not only because of the
shiver of electric energy ripping down your body, but because all of sudden you become aware of your own festering myopia.
It was like that with Aaron. When I finally looked at him,
really looked at him, it was a revelation. He was blinding and beautiful. He
was the sun. And when you grow up on the West Coast you get a punch drunk on
sun, let’s be honest. On sunny days you skip school to wipe the water from the neglected
park benches and bask lizard-like in the sun. Out of the 354 days each year you
see it, what, maybe 90? Most of the time we were curled up like embryos
listening to precipitative heartbeat of the mother ship but on sunny days we
were born, again and again. Maybe that’s why I remember my childhood as mostly
sunny.
