Page 180 of Only After We Met
Subject: RE: RE: Maybe…
But sometimes it’s worth the risk.
From: Ginger Davies
To: Rhys Baker
Subject: RE: RE: RE: Maybe…
What if that place isn’t everything you thought it would be when you finally reach the top? Everything you hoped for? What if it doesn’t make you happy?
From: Rhys Baker
To: Ginger Davies
Subject: Practicing
I’m learning not to ask myself things I can’t answer. It doesn’t make things worse; it just demands more courage, like learning to jump even if you have vertigo. Maybe it’ll be okay. Maybe it’ll be the very thing I need right now. Maybe I would let a thousand years pass if I kept looking for the perfect situation, waiting for the planets to align or whatever. I’m starting to be a big believer in living every day as if it were my last. I’m tired of waiting for things that never come and ignoring the ones that are right there in front of me.
From: Rhys Baker
To: Ginger Davies
Subject: Love and madness
I can’t sleep. And I can’t stop thinking about you. About us. Maybe that’s why I just did something crazy. I think it’s worth it though. Because this one time, years ago, I met a girl who was lost in Paris, and she stole my heart, and I can’t forget her. She was a little crazy, she talked nonstop, sometimes she rained on my parade, but still, she was perfect. Perfect in the way that you can talk to a person forever and not get tired of them, and her laugh was the prettiest sound in the world, and everything about her just mattered to me. And she gave me an old book where I found the wisest and most beautiful words in the world: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
So I think I should tell this girl that next Friday at eleven at night, I’ll be waiting for her in the place where we danced for the first time.
And I hope she will remember the boy who taught her to use the ticket machine for the metro and whispered in her ear that if she wanted, she could touch the moon with her fingers.
118
Rhys
Who am I? Where am I from? What am I doing here? Why am I in this world?Those are the questions we should all ask ourselves at least once in life. And then there’s the crucial one, the one that weighs the heaviest: Is finding the answers that important? Do we need to find them to be happy?
One day, I decided I didn’t.
One day, I stopped looking.
Who am I? No idea. Sometimes I’m charming, sometimes idiotic, sometimes selfish, sometimes gentle, sometimes cowardly, sometimes brave, sometimes all of that and none of it. Where am I from? I guess I come from the sperm of some stranger that fertilized the egg of another stranger. But basically, I’m from my home, from sunny Tennessee. From my parents, my real parents, who were by my side every day, through the good times and bad, through pride and secrets and love and forgiveness. What am I doing here? Living. Like a bee. Living, living, living. Why am I in this world? No idea. And I stopped trying to figure it out. I just wanted to be. To lie down in the green fields, fill my lungs with the cold air of winter, see thesea someday, read some book Ginger chose, blast music through my headphones with my eyes closed, eat a giant plate of spaghetti with extra cheese.
And be with myself.
And be with her.
119
Ginger
Not only are we what we do; we’re also what we don’t do. What we say and what we silence. We are the questions we don’t dare to ask, and the answers that will never come and will float there forever, blown about by fear and uncertainty. We are the subtlety of a gaze, the intimacy of a soft caress, the curve of an honest smile. We are sweet moments, bitter instances, sorrowful nights. We are details. We are real.
But beyond everything else, we are the decisions we make. In all their dimensions. With every choice, we take a step forward and abandon something along the way. Or we take a step back, and we abandon whatever was to come. We walk among alternatives, choosing some, rejecting others, and in this way marking our destiny. We always lose something, even when we win, but that doesn’t matter. What really matters is being able to make a decision, and to do so freely: to bet on a dream, for ourselves or someone else, never doubting, never afraid, with willpower, with passion.
Epilogue
(Somewhere between Paris and the Moon)