Keep it Safe

By Maia Boboia 

I. Winter

We were safe for one winter. That season held us close, and for four months, we didn't age. Each week was the same as the last, and it felt like those days would never stop coming. When your sister got sick and you had to go back to Alaska, I tried to imagine you up there in that great white North, but I couldn't. You seemed too delicate, too small, to exist somewhere that was so far away from me. The night you left, you called me on the phone to say goodbye. I tried to sound sad about your sister, sad about you leaving, but I couldn't find those feelings inside me yet. After you hung up I spent the rest of the night getting drunk at the park. I punched a brick wall by the basketball courts and when I got home, I washed my knuckles in the sink. Bright blood spiraled around the drain and I felt like I wasn't inside my real life at all. I was too embarrassed to cry.

The first time I saw you, you were wearing all white, singing in someone's basement. You looked so honest and sweet that I swore I loved you right then. And at the end of the night you were all alone, sitting in the stairwell with your hands folded in your lap. You saw me and smiled as if you already knew me. I looked right past you, walking back into the night and disappearing into its rowdiness.

Now, after all of these years, you are married with a baby. The rest of us are scattered all over the country, living in shitty apartments and still trying to figure out how to move on and grow up. You filled up that emptiness inside of you faster than all of us, and I marvel how you rose out of the ashes, like a phoenix, stronger and more beautiful than I thought you could be.

II. Alaska

We drove through the wilderness for thirteen hours, never seeing another person. You liked to point out every fox on the side of the road, every little stream, every pretty waterfall. We laughed about how often we called things 'fucking beautiful,' as if those two words were good enough to describe anything. We stopped to camp by a river, somewhere in the Yukon. Ana and I sat by its banks, taking long pulls from a whiskey bottle, feeling tough and getting drunk. You braided our hair and looked for arrowheads and the sun stayed low on the water. It never turned to night. We whooped and hollered into that vast and untamed space, calling out to the wilderness, but nothing answered.

After two more days of driving deep inside the thick of it, we arrived at your father's house, disheveled and exhausted. And finally, for the first time, I was seeing it. The place that you had always told me about, the place where you grew up and became who you are, I was in it now. Just a house off a long dirt road, your dad waiting for us with a fridge full of beer and hotdogs. It was mythical, almost biblical, how ordinary it was. And I loved you more because of it.

That first night after everyone went to bed, you and I sat out back in the yard watching the fire die. It was late in the night but it never got dark. Everything just became enveloped in shadows, waiting to be uncovered again. We didn't look at each other. We didn't talk. A loon called out from across the lake and it’s sound spread out all over us and this place and then was sucked back in again, back into the darkness from where it came. Back into the enormous stillness of the night. I looked at you and felt like I was hearing all your secrets for the first time.

We played one of our last shows in Homer. Before we went on stage, Ana and I drank a bottle of cheap whiskey, then walked to the liquor store and drank another one. The boys tuned their instruments and climbed in and out of the van, telling dirty jokes to kill time. Ana and I stood at the edge of the parking lot, chain smoking. You stood alone, looking out at the ocean. I watched the wind on your face and I knew that you were really a stranger. I felt a cold and ominous sadness growing inside of me.

On the drive home everyone was too exhausted to talk. You fell asleep against my shoulder and I watched Thomas in the front seat, looking out at the road disappearing slowly past us. For a moment when he looked back at me I think that he knew what I was feeling. There was a low murmur coming from the radio and the wilderness joined in it’s whisper, a soft and quiet hymn that was only for me. All I felt was your steady breathing and the quiet hum of the world. I tried to breathe it in and make it a part of me. I tried to let that night find a home inside of me. I tried my hardest.

The day we left Alaska it was raining. You stood outside in it, getting wet and watching us pack up the van. I didn't want to say goodbye to you and when the time came we hugged and that was it. I didn't look back as we drove away. I didn't need to. I already knew that something inside us was starting to change and that the girl that stayed behind that day had already left a long time ago.

We drove a long way without stopping, and all through the night I passed between sleeping and waking. We were driving through the heart of an immovable darkness when suddenly, the single stroke of lightning flashed. For a moment, everything inside the night became illuminated; the road, the flat fields all around us, the mountains in the distance, the trees, the rocks. I could see everything around me as clear as if it was day. But then the darkness returned, and we were all plunged back inside the depths of it. I waited for the next strike. I waited for the unseen to make itself known. I waited. But that lightning did not flash again.

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