A Promise to My Apocalyptic Crush
Article by Zeke Lloyd Art by Jennifer Martinez
There’s a question I can’t answer.
In the afternoons, I often see a man sitting on the corner opposite my house. Without fail, he’s smoking, his auburn mustache and narrow eyebrows set in a hard-cut, directionless gaze. His wrinkled Oxford shirt, always some variation of blue, hangs off him with the top buttons undone and the sleeves rolled up to his forearms.
I never see him move. But on some days, he isn’t there. I like to wonder about the different places he might be, where he might work, what he might be doing at that exact moment. My mind never tires of exploring the inexplicable . And now, I’ve come to think he’s a better subject for imagining than he would be for interviewing. So on the days he’s not there, I fictionalize. I make up a life and picture him living it.
But most of the time he’s there, stationary, smoking. We’ve never made eye contact. And I’ve never seen him anywhere else. I don’t even know his name.
I pass him so often, I’ve started looking for him. He exudes a strange contentment. I’m fond of it.
I first noticed him around the time my brother left for the second time. It is impossible to draw true meaning from that coincidence—the two men are nothing alike.
My brother is 24. He is stoic and comtemplative, his mind forever occupied by a list of queries which, upon occasion, he decides to discuss with a few soft-spoken, simply-put phrases. He intends to live on every continent before he dies and he continues to wonder about the balance between genuine self-expression and necessary social compromise.
I was 15 when he moved for the first time. It was June or July, a month before he was set to start college two states away. I was sitting on the couch.I started to think about the next year, our five-person house diminished to four.
Abruptly, without warning, I sobbed. He was leaving. It felt like he was going to the other side of the world. So, wrapped under a fuzzy blanket, I cried.
But for the next five years, as he moved around inside and outside of the country, he was never more than a few time zones away.
It’s hard to miss someone. A phone call away is not so far. Mostly I miss dogs, hugs, and home-cooked meals
Sometimes, when it’s been a number of months since my last conversation with a friend, I wonder what they’re up to, how they’re doing, where they are. But in my mind, it sounds like a broken egg timer, a slow crescendo, never amounting to quite enough guilt for me to act.
So I don’t call. Not often. Who does? There’s no rush. Not until they really leave.
I was 20 when he moved to Mananjary, Madagascar.
Lying in bed a few months before he left, the tears came without warning. Suddenly I was 15 again. He was leaving. Really, he was already gone.
I don’t understand much about those moments. I can’t tell you why it comes to me in the form of uncontrollable tears, why they flow so easily, or why it happens at all.
I don’t know what to think about Mananjary, Madagascar. I don’t anticipate I’ll truly understand much about his life there, or how the place is changing him, even with the help of his written and spoken accounts.. But what I feel for him is certain.
Ignorance and imagining paint a barren landscape. It’s insignificant. It’s monochromatic. It’s fiction. But only on that plain can the tiny flecks of truth’s lonely color take on their true beauty.
So I love it all: the distance, the mystery, the circumstances which ripped him from my world. I love the man sitting on the corner opposite my house.
It’d be easier to exist in black and white. We could make it all up and explain everything away. We could mistake intimacy for inadequacy because we are unwilling to accept it. We could dissolve opinions into fallacies because we can’t find the words. Or we could dismiss love as a lie because we don’t understand it entirely. But that’s not living. Living is existing with the questions we can’t answer and appreciating life’s certainties as the precious rarities they are.
I miss my brother. That’s all I need to know.