Only In Dreams

Mike Blackwell

Copyright

Copyright © 2023 by Mike Blackwell

All rights reserved.

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

Dedication

To Allaa

1

This books tells of the second worst love story of my life. I grant that it has been a short life thus far.

Before I begin the second worst love story of my life, it seems fitting that I briefly recount for you the third worst love story of my life. This love story takes place in primary school. These elementary years of mine can best be characterized by a series of unrequited (at least to my knowledge) crushes, carried on with varying levels of intensity and excitement, and occasionally overlapping. These were often prompted by a girl saying my name in a particular way, or laughing at a joke of mine. I would lose myself in fanciful daydreams for a short time, generally over a weekend, but upon returning to school the following Monday, I would find the reality of the girl in question somewhat less than the woman I had built in my mind; and like a man disposing of a seemingly practical idea once he finds it uncongenial with his reality, I would move that potential romance into the recycling bin, saving the more original aspects of the fantasy for later use.

Underlying all these capricious whims, however, were a small collection of longer-term crushes. The first was a young woman by the name of Miranda, who attended my pre-school. She had long blonde hair that reached her knees, and a grumpy face retaining much of its baby fat. She appears in a few photographs in the album that sits in my closet, taken during my third or fourth birthday party, to which I had invited the whole class. She wore a pale blue dress with red flowers, and a red ribbon in her hair. It is clear to me now that, despite my best efforts to hide my adoration, it must have been clear to all, as I am stood either right beside or behind her in all these photographs, and even allowed her to assist me in blowing out the candles of my cake, which was adorned with a Pokémon.

Flipping ahead a few pages, we come to the class photo of my kindergarten class, and are introduced to my second crush, whose name was Holly. She is the shorter girl sitting in the middle row, with the awkward smile and the golden-brown hair tied in a ponytail. I can not say much of my crush on Holly, for it lasted only that one year, and there are no other photos of her in my album to rekindle my memory.

But let us not turn the page, for in that same class photograph, in the row behind and two places to the left, we find Sally, lurking in the shadows, waiting for her chance to infiltrate my heart. Sally had an older sister who was best friends with my cousin, and the three of them (Sally, her sister, and my cousin) would often play together in the playground. On days when my cousin would come to my house after school, I would often have to interrupt their playground games to announce the arrival of my mom’s car, at first in the boisterous manner of a young boy, but as time went on, more and more sheepishly and with much fleeting glances at Sally, for it was only a short time before I fell hopelessly in love with her. She had short blonde hair and large, dazzling eyes. I rarely if ever spoke to her, but I remember her voice well. It had a sharp quality to it, and a vaguely Californian twist, despite her growing up in the suburbs of Vancouver.

At the height of my infatuation, my cousin and Sally’s sister devised a truly dastardly game, which they called “Marriage,” the content of the game being a mock wedding between myself and Sally, who happened to be at my house that day for one of those reasons that parents understand and kids never find out about. Sally was vehemently opposed to the game, and I voiced my opposition too, although I protested in perhaps too exaggerated a manner, and even during these protestations could not hide a slight smile. Sally was dressed in my mother’s wedding dress, and I in my best shirt; flowers were strewn across the backyard, and Sally and I were pronounced “husband and wife (for the day.)” A kiss was impossible, so I was forced to settle for a hug, which was given to me with such rapidity and embarrassment that it was not worth much at all.

This was the peak of my infatuation, and while I continued nominally to hold on to the crush for a few more years, the lustre in our romance gradually faded, and my heart and my eyes began to wander. In fourth grade, if you were to have asked me who my crush was, I would of course not have told you, at least not right away, but upon careful insistence, I would have given up the name, “Sally.” But in truth, it had become a loveless crush.

We now reach the third worst love story of my life. We must fast-forward to the fifth grade, finding me sat in the back row of Mr. Kerrigan’s class. Directly in front of me sat a girl named Polly. Polly and I had been in the same class since pre-school, and she lived only two doors away from my best friend, but I had never before thought much of her.

I was a fidgety child, and would often drop my pencil on the floor. It would roll along the ground under her chair. She would pick it up. Turning around, she would place the pencil on my desk. I would say, “Thank you,” and she would smile. This is how I fell in love with her.

It is difficult for me now, even all these years later, not to use the word “love” when describing these feelings. At the time, I thought I was a grown-up, and when I thought of Polly, I used the word “love.” Looking toward the front of the class, Polly’s head was constantly in my view, and like the residual flashes that remain when one looks away from a source of light, her presence would remain in my mind when I left the classroom.

There were days when I would drop my pencil three or even four times. I do not remember making a conscious effort to drop my pencil in order to see her smile, but a statistical analysis would likely find that my rate of pencil-dropping rose significantly during those few months. Regardless, off my pencil would go, and after the third time, Polly’s smile would not be quite as genuine. Occasionally, she would not smile at all, and on those days I didn’t sleep well. Almost my entire mental capacity was put toward determining whether or not she liked me, as if I could look deep enough inside my own experiences and determine the answer. I would ask my friends what they thought of our relationship, whether it seemed likely to them that she felt the same way as I did. I typed our names into online compatibility tests, and would search for flowers with odd-numbered petals with which to play “She loves me; she loves me not.”

Lying on the couch, or on the floor, or on my bed, I would concoct elaborate fantasies in which we had no choice but to confess our feelings for each other. At first, these fantasies would end with our first kiss, but over time, they developed into imaginings of a real relationship, like the ones I saw on TV. Sometimes, we were secret lovers, hiding away from the world; in others, we openly declared our love before the entire school.

She even appeared in my dreams. All of them, in fact. Whether the dream was explicitly about her or not, she would find a way to make an appearance, always smiling, always happy to see me. I vividly remember one in which she was wearing a spacesuit and riding a dinosaur across the dusty surface of Mars. This dream serves as an important reminder that I was, in fact, ten years old.

After three months of relative bliss, greeting her each morning as we sat at our desks, talking to her during group assignments, and having her hand me worksheets as they made their way from the front of the class, the Christmas break was upon us. Two weeks went by during which I could not see her, and my passion evolved into an obsession. Her absence was agonizing, and all I wanted was to see her smile once more.

Eventually, the day came when we returned to school. I had been anticipating this moment, and had even prepared a special joke to tell her. On top of that, I had the feeling that, if she felt the same way as I did, and this break was as agonizing for her as it was for me, then it would only be a short time before we confessed our love to each other, in order to avoid ever experiencing such a parting again.

Before class, I watched her from afar, as I played with my friends and she with hers. She did not look my way. The bell rang, and we all filed into the classroom. I made my way toward my desk, and sat down first. But there was something odd. The edge of the desk was smooth; all the scratches that I had carved over the months were gone, including the large hole I had absent-mindedly drilled with my pencil. Inside the cubbyhole, the notebooks were all stacked in an orderly fashion, and there was not a hint of crumpled up scrap paper. It dawned on me that this was not my desk. This was a girl’s desk.

I looked around the room to find my fellow classmates all sharing a similar experience. Our teacher stood at the front of the class, failing to contain a smile. I began to catch on, and that smile of his took on for me a devilish tint. In my head, I begged, “Please, no,” but it was too late.

“That’s right, everyone,” Mr. Kerrigan said, once we had all turned our attention to the front. “We have a new seating arrangement.” He turned on the projector, and a diagram appeared on the screen. Rows of boxes, each containing a student’s name. I found my own. I found Polly’s. She was four rows back, and two seats to the left. An impossible distance.

I looked for her across the room. She hadn’t even made it to our previous spot; she had found her desk in its new position right away and sat down. She was laughing excitedly, for the new arrangement placed her right next to her best friend. They were turned away from me, revelling in their proximity. Not only this, but directly behind her sat Jake, who I considered many times more charming than I. All was lost.

I wanted to say something, anything, as I passed her on my way to my new seat, but there was nothing to say. That morning, I could barely pay attention to the lessons. My life felt aimless without the back of her head acting as a beacon in the darkness. I tried to imagine that she might be staring at the back of my head now, but it was unconvincing.

I did not wholly give up on our love at this point, but something changed that day. My fantasies became ever more idle and ridiculous, losing any tenuous connection they had to reality. We no longer talked, and I only heard her voice when she raised her hand to answer questions. In gym class, music class, on sports day, and during assemblies, I tried to contrive my way near to her, but I always failed. When we were lined up alphabetically by last name, she was across the room from me, and Jake, with his luck, was right beside her. When we lined up by height, there were three students between us, just close enough to be agonizing, but too far for any possibility of rekindling our love.

We became strangers. I got along only with the Polly that existed in my head and my dreams. The following year, we were in different classes.

Eventually, I got over her. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, yes, but only to an extent. After a time, it makes the heart grow numb. About one year after the fateful day of the desk change, I had a dream. There was a large birthday party at my house, and I was walking among the crowd through the kitchen. Polly was leaning on the kitchen counter, holding a glass of juice in her hand. I walked up to her, said, “Excuse me,” and slipped by. I did not look up, nor try to talk to her, nor feel any nervous excitement at her presence. I woke up thinking, “I suppose that’s over then.”

*

After much deliberation, I have deemed it fit to also disclose the worst love story of my life, in order to develop in your mind a more thorough understanding of my situation.

I mentioned previously that following our estrangement, the Idea of Polly that existed in my head began to diverge somewhat from the real-life Polly that existed in the world. The final result of this divergence was the Girl of My Dreams, who is the subject of the worst love story of my life.

At the time when she first appeared to me, I was in the midst of a strange transition. For whatever reason, I was growing apart from the friends I had made in my earlier years, and increasingly found myself alone. A student by the name of Devon had orchestrated a campaign of torment against me, which consisted primarily of labelling me a “spaz.” I struggled vainly to determine what had caused him to instigate this tarnishing of my reputation, staying up late at night and losing sleep in the process. This mild insomnia only made me more irritable and increased my likelihood of “spazzing out,” as it were.

It was during one of these long nights that the Girl of My Dreams first appeared to me. It was a short slumber, the kind that lends itself to the most vivid and intense dreams. In the dream, she was a new student who was just joining our class. She wore a red-and-black striped shirt and denim overalls, and her hazel-brown hair was shoulder-length and wavy. She was placed in the desk next to mine. When she introduced herself, I noticed her eyes were a crystal blue. We immediately became close, and by lunch time, the rest of the world seemed to have vanished around us. She was jolly and sweet, but in a serious way, as if she knew something the rest of us kids didn’t. She seemed to find in me an equal maturity, and while the rest of our classmates were engaged in their childish business, we were falling in love. Real love, so real that we did not even feel the need to tell each other about it; we just knew.

We walked in the field during lunch, learning about each other’s past and future. I was telling her of my plans, my visions, and my dreams. She nodded enthusiastically as I spoke. We laughed together. Already we knew that the two of us were going to be like this for all time, and that everything we were going to do, we were going to do together. The bell rang, and we turned around to make our way back toward the classroom. And then the bell rang again. And then a third time. But it was not a bell at all; it was a buzzer, and as I realized this she vanished away, and before me were the bright red digits of my alarm clock.

I arose into the emptiness of my bedroom feeling that it was not the dream but this wakefulness that was unreal. That her love, our love, was more vital and tangible than the faint sunlight streaming through the thin curtains. I could not believe that I was capable of inventing such a person and such a feeling, when nothing in my so-called “real” life could even come close. The Girl of My Dreams, a vision manufactured by the various poisons that swim in the human soul, was to me at that moment worth more than any material wealth.

This worst love story of my life is so poor a story that it does not even have a conclusion. The Girl of My Dreams lives with me to this day. For the most part, my image of her is vague and cloudy, but at times, while riding on the bus, walking the halls of my college, or sitting in a restaurant, I catch a brief clear glimpse; in the expression on someone’s face, in the tone in which a word is spoken, in an absentminded gesture, the Girl of My Dreams appears before me. In novels too, and on TV, I see shadows of her, and I fear that perhaps I will never stop.

With this said, it is time to tell you the second worst love story of my life.

2

It was a bright day in early July, and I was walking home from the bus stop after a day of summer classes. I was wearing a black sweater and black sweatpants. When I had left in the morning, it had been mildly cold. Now, it was blazing hot. I had already started to sweat on the bus to school, and upon entering the air-conditioned halls of my college campus, the sweat had dried, leaving my arms sticky and gross. Now, on the way back home, a new layer of sweat was being piled on top. I felt like a goblin, hunched under my heavy backpack which was itself deteriorating, with new holes appearing on a weekly basis.

I was staring down at my feet, ignoring the greenery around, and the birds playing in the trees. I was thinking about how gross I was, and how bad I must smell, and the torture it must have been to sit anywhere near me. I was also thinking about how ridiculous I must look, dressed in all black in the midst of one of the hottest Julys on record.

I looked up as I approached my home, a two-story townhouse in a private complex. One of the many embarrassments of my life was that I still lived with my mom and sister. I never spoke to anyone at school to confirm, but my suspicion was that everyone there was living an independent life full of friends, parties, and everything else a young person might need. A window was open on the second floor, and I could hear a faint hint of Korean pop music wafting through the air.

I walked inside and pried my shoes off with my feet. With heavy steps, I made my way upstairs to my bedroom, where I let my backpack fall off my shoulders and crash onto the floor. I opened the window, closed the curtains, and then sat down on the bed. I removed my sweater, sweatpants, t-shirt and socks, and lay down in just my underwear, in the dark, and let the faint breeze from the window wash over me.

I did not move for several minutes. The air was cool on my skin. I closed my eyes, and let my breathing slow down. I was home, and I was alone. The world constricted to just my bedroom. There was nothing else. Sufficiently cooled, I pulled the covers over my body, forming a protective cocoon. Nothing could get me now. Within my cocoon, tomorrow did not exist, and nothing was ever going to happen. It was soft and fuzzy in this blanket world; warm, but not too warm. When I closed my eyes, all that I imagined became real. I was safe forever in my own little hibernatory universe, with nothing and no one to get in the way of my comfort.

Well, maybe not no one. I thought it might be nice to have one person, perhaps, if there ever was such a person who may want to join me. Someone who would accept me as I am, and love the way I hate the world. Someone who would lie with me in my bed, holding me tight as we drifted away into eternal imaginings. That might be okay, I thought, and that was the last thought I had before drifting to sleep.

*

I found myself sat in a shallow artificial pond in the middle of a forest glade. A light breeze sent ripples across the water. The branches of the willow trees that loomed overhead swayed in the wind. There was a gap in the brush before me, and a dirt path leading through it toward a clearing, where it then branched off in two directions. A young woman was standing at the intersection, looking up into the trees. She was wearing a wicker hat with a light blue ribbon, and a long, grey dress that reached her ankles. Her dark hair, wavy and shoulder-length, gently rustled with the wind. She didn’t notice I was there.

She was watching a small blue bird that sat on a branch high up a tree. It was cocking its head back and forth in a frenetic manner, as if searching frantically for something it had lost. It did a little hop to adjust itself, and then, letting out a squawk, jumped from the branch. The forest was so silent that I could hear the flap of its wings as it flew away.

As it disappeared into the depths of the forest, a strong wind blew through the glade, a damp breeze that chilled my skin. The woman’s hair swirled up, and she had to raise her hand to hold down her hat. She was still looking up at where the bird had been. She lifted her other hand and laid it against her cheek, before letting it slowly fall back down. She closed her eyes, and scrunched up her face. Opening her eyes again, she turned to the pond, where she saw me sitting in the water. “Are you okay?” she asked.

I nodded, and raised one hand in a motionless wave. As I stood up, water dripped from my suit. In a futile gesture, I patted down my jacket. I looked behind me and found a hat floating in the water. I bent down and picked it up. I put it on my head.

My socks squelched with each step I took. As I neared the edge of the water, she held out her hand, and I took it as I stepped over the stones that lined the pond. Her hand was smooth as satin. We stepped out into the clearing. I looked up into the sky. It was a light blue, with small wispy clouds passing gently by. The two of us began to walk down the narrow dirt path. After a few steps, I found that my suit was dry. I opened my mouth to say something to her, but she turned to me with a smile that revealed that she knew exactly what I was going to say, so I just smiled back. We continued to hold hands as we left the clearing and entered the forest.

She began to speak. She was telling me about the bird she had seen. She called the bird, “darling.” She seemed to breathe her words more than she spoke them, and I could see the letters appear before her in the air, leaving a trail of words floating along behind us, slowly drifting away in the breeze.

She stopped walking, midway through a sentence. She stared straight ahead, with no expression on her face. The sun passed behind a cloud. “In this world,” she began, before closing her mouth and standing still for a few seconds. Looking up at me, she asked me my name. I told her it was Paul. She laughed. The sun returned with her laugh, and we began to walk again, as she told me about the sky and about the trees.

The wind had been slowly rising, but now it seemed to pick up in an instant. I could barely hear her over the rustling of the trees and the cry of the wind as it swooped between the branches. Her hair was flying across her face, and she once again had to hold her hat on her head. My hat flew off, too quickly for me to do anything about it. It followed her words as they scattered haphazardly into the thick of the forest. She started to speak louder, and faster, and more intensely. I couldn’t understand the words but they burned with fire as they left her mouth, and her grip on my hand became so strong it was painful. Her gait hadn’t seemed to change at all, but we were travelling much faster, as if she was being pulled along on a conveyor belt, the scenery behind her turning into a blur. I struggled to keep up; she was pulling me along faster than my legs could carry me, but her grip did not let up. I could feel the bones in my hand crunching together.

We soon left the forest and were now walking atop the ocean. We were in the midst of a storm; the sky was grey and rain poured down. Water sprayed from above and below, the waves pummelling me from all sides. I fell over, crashing into the water, but she kept her hold on my hand and dragged me through. The water spilled into my eyes, and I was swallowing large mouthfuls of salty brine with each breath. Through the haze, I could see that she continued to breathlessly mutter her mysterious curses, despite the waves and the rain and the wind. She withstood it all as if she didn’t notice it was happening.

Then, she stopped. We were stood in the middle of the ocean with no land in sight; the world was a storm around us and she looked straight at me — her damp hair streaming across her face — she looked straight at me with her crystalline eyes and she opened her mouth as wide as she could and she screamed,

*

“Paul! Paul!”

My eyes slowly opened. The sun was still poking through from underneath the curtains.

“Paul!”

I heard a knock coming from the kitchen. Slowly, the voice, which had at first taken the form of the mysterious girl’s, transformed into my mother’s. I pulled on my sweatpants and t-shirt and walked downstairs. My mom was stood with one hand resting on the kitchen island. She was wearing her work clothes: a blouse with a long navy skirt. “Were you asleep?” she asked.

“Yeah.” I rubbed my eyes.

“It’s because you’re up all night. You’re all backwards. Now help me grab some bags from the car,” she said, gesturing toward the open front door.

“I suppose I can do that,” I said. The light half-blinded me as I walked out onto the driveway. It was strange to find the world outside exactly as I had left it. I found the heaviest, most overflowing bags in the back of the car, and carried them inside.

When I got back inside, the kettle was rumbling. “Tea?” my mom asked.

“Sure.”

“How was school?”

“It was alright,” I said. “I dressed too warm. Didn’t realize how hot it was gonna get.”

“Well, it is summer,” she said. “Although maybe it’s hard to notice when you’re up in your room all the time.”

“It’s colder in the mornings,” I said, ignoring the dig. “How was work?”

“Oh, you know. Busy. Busy busy busy.”

“As always.”

The kettle beeped, and she poured the water into two cups. “I’m heading out to book club in about an hour,” she said. “You and Jessica will have to handle dinner.”

“Alright, no problem.”

“And don’t ask me for ideas, because I haven’t got any, and the ones I do have, I’m saving for later.”

“I’ll ask Jess then.”

“Good idea.” She finished the tea, and set it in front of me.

As I walked down the hall towards Jess’s door, I could hear ever and ever more clearly the harmonizing voices of her favourite boy band. I knocked on the door. There was no response. I knocked again, and then opened it a crack. I was confronted by a wall of sound, and saw Jess cross-legged in her desk chair, bouncing up and down to the beat, her arms in the air. A textbook was laid out on the tiny desk before her, with a notebook tucked half underneath. A mug of hot chocolate, a glass of water, and a can of soda sat precariously in empty spaces on the desk. Her keyboard was on her lap.

“Jess!” I yelled to get her attention.

She turned her head, and then twirled the chair around to face me. She was wearing a pink shirt with a white heart on the front, and grey-and-pink checkered pyjama pants. “What’s up?”

“Any ideas for dinner?”“What?”

“Can you turn the music down a touch?”

“I’m grooving! Just speak louder.”

I raised my voice. “Any ideas for dinner?”

She leaned down and picked up a half-eaten bag of potato chips from the floor next to her. “I’m kinda full!” she said.

“What about later?” I yelled.

“I don’t know, man!” She continued to bop to the music. “Fried rice? Something easy.”

“Alright. I’m going to start cooking soon. If you’re not hungry, I’ll just put it in the fridge for later.”

“Alright!” She spun her chair around in an instant and began typing maniacally.

I closed the door, sealing her back into her own world.

*

Alone in my room again, I had time to reflect on my dream. The look in the woman’s eyes as she turned to let out that final scream was stuck in my mind. She seemed to hold me responsible for some grave sin that I could no longer remember, as if I had done something horrible to her in a past life. The guilt was palpable, and a knot formed in my stomach as I thought of her piercing, grey-blue eyes. My memory of the softness of her hands and the sweetness of her smile only made it feel worse that I had somehow inspired in her such anger and hatred. But the more I thought, the more the dream began to slip away; the sensations became less tangible, and I found it more and more difficult to remember the words she had said. Eventually, it all began to lose meaning, and only the absurdities of the dream remained.

While I had never been interested in dream interpretation as a psychoanalytical or prophetical exercise, I did have the tendency to expend much energy in meditating upon my dreams. This was a result of my lifestyle, particularly of its dullness. Every morning when I woke up, I felt there was little to do but distract myself until I could once again fall asleep.

As such, dreams took on a vital importance. In my life, there was no drama, no feeling, and no secondary characters. Dreams were my primary means of socializing, and it was only dreams that added any individuality to days that were otherwise indistinguishable. I would dream of my past and my future, ignoring always the present. In my dreams, I would meet strangers, or even people I once knew well, and connect with them in deep, meaningful ways, because the mundane actions of breathing, eating, and worrying could be set aside. In dreams, everything is important, often of life-or-death importance, and in dreams we feel our emotions with an intensity that is rare in waking life. Unlike books or movies or TV, dreams are always deeply personal, coming as they do from your own mind, and using your own experiences as material. They are always strange, always exciting, always new and different. It often felt to me that it was only in dreams that I felt truly alive.

When you live like I did primarily in your own head, dreams are intensely valuable for their ability to pull you out of the ruts your mind may get stuck in. By reliving a past memory, or being visited by a forgotten friend, you may be inspired to look at yourself or your history in a different way, and perhaps even see the world in a new light.

Say, for example, that you have just been passed over for a job you were particularly excited for. You had meticulously edited your resume, written a heartfelt cover letter, and brought your best attitude to the interview. Maybe you had even made it to a second or third interview, and felt that the job was already in your hand. Then, one morning, you receive the e-mail containing the heartbreaking news. For a week, you are sulking, wondering what to do with your life now. Then, one day, you wake up, and there’s a new lightness in your step. On a whim, you head to the arts supply store, pick up an easel and some paints, and get to work on a landscape. Your newfound hobby brings you comfort and joy, and lifts you up from the hole you had been stuck in.

When recounting the experience to a friend, you may say something like, “I started painting because I was sad after failing to get a job I had been interviewing for, and it really helped me out in a difficult time.” But wait, you’re forgetting something. Because during that night before your re-awakening, you dreamed of a beautiful landscape, perhaps a vast mountain covered in lush, green, coniferous trees, with a rushing waterfall and a sparkling river. And it was that landscape, presented to you in your lowest moment by the guardian angel that lives in your subconscious, that inspired your seemingly inexplicable trip to the arts supply store.

In this way, it seems to me that a person’s biography is incomplete without their dreams. Even dreams that we forget can affect us in mysterious ways, and many decisions we think are determined by reason alone are secretly influenced by our dreams. Of course, I have no way of proving this to be the case, unless one counts this book as proof. I know that any account of the portion of my life that makes up this book would be only half complete if it didn’t take my dreams into consideration.

3

My school bag sat near the door, already packed the night before with books and a granola bar. My clothes hung on the back of the desk chair. In the fridge awaited a sandwich for lunch. All these inanimate objects were ready for school, but I was still in bed.

My toes pointed toward the ceiling, my covers half removed from my body, I lay with my left leg jittering restlessly. I tried to talk myself through the day: breakfast, short walk to the bus, bus ride, one lecture, two lecture, bus, walk, end. It sounded easy when put in words, and yet with each step I felt a wave of nausea. There was something fearful in all of it, something that I just could not face. I felt that I would die at some point along the line, or else experience something somehow worse than death. I had this same premonition every morning, and the fact that it proved false every single day did nothing to diminish its hold on my imagination.

I counted down from 5. At zero, I twitched my right arm and flung the duvet fully off my body. I lay like this for three seconds. Then, I rolled over and pulled the duvet on top of me again. Despite curling up as tightly as I could, there was no comfort to be found in the bed anymore. I was in a limbo; I could not leave, and I could not stay. I could hear sounds from the kitchen downstairs. The microwave door opened and closed, and then began to hum. The door to Jess’ room opened, and I heard her stomping down the stairs. There was a murmur of conversation.

On a whim not actuated by any material cause discernible to modern science, I suddenly threw the covers off my body and jumped out of bed. Once out, the rest of the process ran smoothly. I put on my clothes, brushed my teeth, picked up my bag and went downstairs to the kitchen.

My mom was sitting at the dining room table, already dressed for work. She was eating a bowl of oatmeal. Jess, in the same pyjamas as the previous evening, was standing near the stove and typing on her phone. She was poaching an egg. The smell of coffee filled the air. Coffee was Jess’ latest hobby, although the preparation seemed to interest her far more than actually drinking the stuff, as it was rare for her to finish more than half a mug. This was probably for the best, as I found it hard to imagine her with more energy than she already had.

“Morning, Paul,” my mom said. “School today?”

“Yep.” I placed my bag near the front door, and sat down at the table. I generally felt too nauseous to eat first thing in the morning, so I just sat and looked at my phone, patiently waiting for the clock to reach 8:11, which was the exact moment I needed to leave to catch the bus.

Jess sat down across from me with her egg on toast. She dexterously ate the toast with one hand while scrolling on her phone with the other. My mom stood up, placed her bowl in the dishwasher, grabbed her travel mug, and sat down on the bottom stair to put on her shoes. “I’m off now,” she said. “Have a good day at school, Paul. And find something to do, Jessica.”

I said goodbye. Jessica just nodded, her mouth full of food.

“Any plans today?” I asked her.

She swallowed. “Die of boredom, probably.”

“Cool.”

*

I stared out the window of the bus and watched the familiar streets roll by. I could close my eyes now and know each location exactly, based only on my feel for the turns the bus was taking. I only ever travelled through this part of town on the bus; everything outside was nothing but scenery to me. The car dealerships, the McDonald’s, the liquor store, the gas station: all these places I only ever saw through the window of a bus. The idea that I could at any moment step off the bus and actually enter any of these buildings felt as absurd as the idea of walking into a television screen.

I used to listen to music on the bus, but had recently stopped, because I would always worry that I would fail to hear something important, and thereby make a fool of myself. I had to intermittently pause my music and look around to make sure that everyone else on the bus wasn’t hearing something that I wasn’t, and eventually the stress became so much that I had to abandon the music altogether. I kept my eyes and ears open, keenly aware of all that was going on around me. Just in case.

Such was the state of mind that led me to watch each passenger as they climbed the steps, tapped their card, and then walked through the aisle looking for a seat. I was careful to never make eye contact, because if I did, I would have to die.

The bus pulled up to the final stop before it joined the highway, in front of a small complex containing a motel, a daycare, and a veterinary clinic. A young woman was waiting there. She was wearing a blue dress with a white floral design, and carrying a white tote bag. Her dark, wavy hair reached to her shoulders. She stepped on to the bus. As she tapped her card, she quickly turned her head toward the back of the bus, and we made eye contact for a brief moment. Startled, I looked down at my knees and then turned toward the window.

I watched a crow walk along the power lines above the sidewalk. It hopped along a few times, and then flew away. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the woman start to travel down the aisle toward me, before she left my line of sight. I felt a bump as she sat down on the seat next to mine. I figured it must have been the only empty seat. I did not move my head one inch. The bus lurched forward.

We sped onto the highway. After a few minutes, my neck began to hurt from the awkward position I had placed it in, but I was as incapable of moving it as I had been of removing myself from bed that morning. I could feel the woman’s arm mere inches from my own, and squeezed myself tight to avoid contact. Closing my eyes, I slowly turned my head to face the front of the bus, leaning back as if asleep. Finally, I opened my eyes. Looking directly forward at the seat in front of me, I could see in my periphery her right knee, with her bag resting on her lap, and her hands folded on top.

It was at this moment that my imagination overtook my memory, and the glimpse I had caught of her entering the bus began to meld with my memory of my dream. The resemblance was uncanny, almost unreal. It was as if she had stepped directly out of the forest and on to my bus. I became desperate to turn my head and take one quick look, just to confirm, but it was impossible. There was no way to justify such an action, and the consequences could be disastrous. If it was her, I would die. If it was not her — well, I did not exactly have in mind what would happen in that circumstance, but it seemed bad.

I closed my eyes again, and tried to feign sleep. I was so full of nervous energy that it was an effort to keep my eyelids from fluttering open. Multicoloured neon blobs floated frenetically before me, transforming into half-formed faces and pointillistic scenery before being washed away. Concentrating on these muddled images, I attempted a futile form of meditation, trying to contort them into some pleasant and calming scene, such as the view from a helicopter floating serenely over a mountain range. But it kept moving too fast, crashing through mountains that then collapsed into cosmic tunnels, emerging at breakneck speed into some sort of hellish dimension of red cloud. Then, it all began to spin and tremble and I heard a loud gasp and a crash as my head snapped forward and slammed against the back of the chair in front of me.

*

A strange silence held for a few seconds. Then, voices began to murmur throughout the motionless bus. I realized that someone was holding my left hand, with a firm but soft grip. With my right hand, I rubbed my forehead.

“Are you okay?”

I turned to see her leaning over and looking up into my eyes. Her hair had fallen partially over her face, covering her right eye. She let go of my hand to pull it back behind her ear.

“I hit my head,” I said.

“Yeah, I saw. It looked bad. Do you feel dizzy?” She was studying my pupils.

I looked away. “I’m fine. It wasn’t that bad.” But it had been bad. I could feel a bruise forming, and I felt a bit woozy.

The driver got on the PA and started to explain the emergency procedure. His voice was fuzzy over the speakers, and it was hard to make out what he was saying, but I gathered that a car had pulled out in front of the bus while merging, and that we were to stay in our seats unless we required serious medical attention.

“Did you want to get out?”

“No, no, it’s really okay,” I said.

Looking over at her again, I found that she didn’t look anything at all like the woman from my dream. Not only were her eyes smaller and brown, but her nose was a different shape, and a few of her front teeth were slightly crooked. But the concern in her voice was eerily familiar, and she still terrified me. In fact, her being a normal girl, rather than some spectre or nightmare, only made her all the more terrifying.

We sat in silence for a few minutes while she texted someone on her phone. I wondered if I should ask if she was okay, but I couldn’t get myself to do it. I figured that she seemed okay enough that it wasn’t worth asking.

The PA crackled on again, telling us that we could leave the bus and wait on the side of the road for the next bus to come pick us up. There were forms available for us to grab on the way out for filing injury claims.

“Are you going to grab one? For your head?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “It’s not that serious.” Even if my head had been split in two, I likely would not have picked up a form. I had this feeling that the whole incident had somehow been my fault. How I had managed it, I wasn’t certain, but I was certain that it was something I had done that had caused the bus to crash.

We filed out of the bus. The girl sat down on a concrete median along the side of the highway, and I stood a few feet away. I could still feel the sensation of her hand on mine.

“I’m Jasmine, by the way,” she said.

“Oh, I’m Paul.”

She put her hands on the median and leaned back, lifting her feet off the ground. “Where were you headed, Paul?” I felt a strange shock when she said my name, even though I had just told it to her.

“Just school,” I said.

“Guess you’re gonna be late, huh?”

“I guess so.”

“Hope it wasn’t an important lecture or anything.”

“In all likeliness, it was going to be incredibly boring,” I said.

She smiled. “What class?”

“Oh, uh…” The name of the class escaped me completely. I felt like I was having one of those dreams where I was back in high school, but couldn’t remember which room I was supposed to go to. “American Literature,” I said, finally, just picking the first class that came to mind.

“Interesting,” she said.

It occurred to me that my American literature course was actually quite good, and not boring at all, but it was too late now to correct myself.

“It’s a nice day,” she said, staring up at the sky. “A shame to spend it cooped up in school.”

“Yeah,” I said. I kept rubbing the bruise on my forehead, causing it to hurt more and more.

It was not rare, at that time, for attractive women to speak to me. They did it plenty in my daydreams; in fact, I had come to believe that that was the only realm in which they would ever speak to me. I was quite the charming man in those daydreams, but confronted with the situation in reality, I began to realize just how misleading those fantasies were. Much of my charm in them was predicated on my ability to re-wind an infinite number of times in order to come up with the exact right charming things to say, and, since I decided what the attractive girls said to me also, I could steer the conversation toward these most charming sentiments.

In real life, I had no such powers over time or other people, so I had to react on the fly. I felt I was holding up respectably, but struggled to see how I could keep this going for the twenty minutes it might take for another bus to arrive.

“Where were you heading?” I asked, after a brief pause.

“To see my sister. We’re going to head out to the waterfront. You know, spend our summer outside, like you’re supposed to.”

“Ah,” I said. “To be so free.”

She laughed. She opened her mouth to say something, but I interrupted.

“Y-You know,” I said, the words coming out as if beyond my control. “Actually, my head doesn’t feel so good. I might just head home.” I looked around me. “I think I’m going to… go.”

“You’re not going to wait for the bus? How are you going to get home?”

“I think I’ll walk,” I said. “I could use the fresh air, I think.”

“You live near here?” We were on the side of the highway, surrounded by farmland.

“It’s not too far,” I said.

“You sure your head’s okay? Maybe you should wait for a doctor or something.”

But I was committed at this point to my escape, in spite of any logic that could be thrown at me. It seemed to me absolutely untenable to remain where I was, and I needed to move, to feel like I was getting somewhere, and most importantly, to be alone.

“Well, get some ice for your head when you get home,” she said, her face a mixture of confusion and concern.

“Will do,” and with that, I began to walk in the first direction that occurred to me, which, as it happened, was the one that took me further away from the overpass that would have allowed me to cross the highway and catch a bus going the other way. The way I took instead led me toward a small side road, and miles and miles of farmland.

*

It wasn’t long before my relief at having extricated myself from such a difficult situation turned to deep shame. It had been so long since I had held a conversation with a stranger, and I had felt within me a constant pressure building as I had struggled my way through it. Yet, in a way, it had been almost pleasant, and I felt that I could have made a genuine connection with another human being had I only toughed it out. But it was too late now to go back, and the only way ahead was forward.

I was walking along a narrow road flanked on both sides by shallow ditches and unkempt brambles. Long driveways occasionally split off from the road, leading to isolated farm houses. I had only been walking ten minutes or so, but the sounds of the highway reached me now as if from a dream. I was travelling obliquely from the highway at about a 45-degree angle, each step taking me equal parts closer and further from my home. I knew the area only in a vague sense; I could easily have pinpointed my location on a map, but finding a route home was more of a challenge. The forbidden fields of private property blocked my way on all sides but one. I was sure I had driven around here before, or at least been driven, perhaps on the way to some distant family friend’s house many years ago, but that certainty didn’t help me at all.

After walking for another half hour, I started to lose confidence. I stopped near the side of the road, opened my backpack, and took out my phone. I felt embarrassed doing so for whatever reason, as if it was a personal failure of mine that I hadn’t memorized the farm roads in the general vicinity of my hometown. The GPS tracker found my location and plotted a route. By car, it was twenty-five minutes. By bus, it was one hour. By foot, it was four hours and thirty minutes. I laughed out loud. The suggested bus route would take me back where I had just come from, and it seemed a great injustice for me to have to turn back now after coming all this way, so I put my phone away and kept on walking. The fresh air would do me good, after all.

As I continued along, my thoughts turned back toward Jasmine. I remembered her kind words and pleasant demeanour. The narrow limits of my knowledge about her made her an optimal object of daydreaming. She had held my hand and said my name, and often that is all it takes. I was a man whose heart once skipped a beat when a girl at the Starbucks repeated my name to me. It is a pathetic heart that beats in my chest, and one given to being carried away by wild imaginings. If only I hadn’t had to speak so much; if only we could have just sat there, Jasmine and I, in the third to last row of the bus, hand in hand, without saying a word — perhaps we could have fallen in love. Then the bus could have whisked us away to some realm not of this world, where language no longer has meaning, and emotions are communicated exclusively through the looks in our eyes and the softness of our touch. In such a world, I felt, I could experience what we call true love. But in this other world, this world of sense and time, it seemed all but impossible.

I was passing a white, wooden building with a domed roof that looked like a cross between a church and a barn. Above its double doors were the words GREENDALE COMMUNITY HALL in dark green letters. I recognized it at once. Looking around, I realized where I was. Not just in a cartographical sense, but in a real, living sense. Looking back where I had come from, my knowledge of this building retroactively allowed me to recognize where I had been as well. I had come this way before, absolutely. I had been in this exact spot. I had been in a car then, travelling through at a high speed, but I had been here none the less. Back then, this building might as well have been in Germany for all I had understood of geography. But now, it was right in front of me, not a twenty minute drive from my house. I suddenly had this feeling as if I could take a single step and be anywhere; as if all the distant locations we had driven hours to see had actually been right next door this whole time.

As I stood there basking in this strange sensation, a woman stepped out of a car in the parking lot carrying a file folder. She walked to the side of the building, opened a door I had previously failed to notice, and stepped inside. So, I thought, the building has an inside too! An inside into which people can walk at any time as they see fit! I felt almost compelled to head inside, myself — that’s how free I felt — but I held back, for I didn’t know what I would do once I got inside.

Shaking my head in amazement, I continued my journey. A little ways on, a road forked off to the south, back toward the highway, and remembering the blue route from my phone, I took it. The asphalt was cracked all along the sides of the road, as if something was trying to burst through from underneath. To my right, the field was full of the dried remains of what must have been wheat, while the left was empty of anything but grass. I came to a railway crossing, from where I could have spotted trains kilometres away in either direction.

The road terminated in an overpass that crossed the highway. I stopped there, at the midpoint, leaned against the railing, and observed the traffic going by. The sun reflected off the windshields as they shot past at speeds that seemed much faster than I had ever travelled. I wondered if any of the drivers could see me up here. I cast my mind back to the many occasions on which I had driven this highway, and found that I had never once noticed this overpass existed. And yet, now that I was here, it seemed so obvious, and so natural that everyone down there should look up and see me. In fact, it seemed almost stupid that none of them even thought to wave.

It was calm up there above the road, so calm that even the music that blared out the windows of the speeding cars seemed part of the calm. From above — even so slightly above — even the most aggressive electronic hip-hop beat, intermixed with the fierce roaring of an engine, felt like a part of nature. And there I was, not quite a part of nature; somehow above it all, and able to observe it as if it had nothing to do with me. All day every day these cars sped by, constantly pulled back and forth by the whims of circumstance, with no rhyme or reason, no organizing principle whatsoever. But now I had arrived, and in my position as observer I brought it all together. To each of these cars, all other cars were but obstacles on the road. But to me, they were all part of one vast network of cars, each in their own way contributing to the impression made on me by this comforting, elevated, summer view. It gave me a strange sense of power, as if I had created this world all by myself, and for the few minutes I spent motionless on that overpass, all other worries seemed to disappear from my mind.

But I soon enough grew lonely. There was no one to share my joy and power with, and I knew that as soon as I walked away this feeling would disappear, for there was no one to hold on to it for me. Slowly, as I approached nearer to my home and my regular, everyday life, I would forget the beautiful harmony I had seen from that solitary perch.

And somewhere, hidden deep within all of this, was Jasmine. I did not know it at the time, but she lurked surreptitiously behind all these ideas and feelings, like a dream one has already forgotten.

*

Soon after crossing the highway, I reached a footpath that ran along the edge of the bay, meandering in and out of the shade of lofty willows and birch trees. I was now once again following the course of the highway, which carried on parallel to the path a few miles to the north. I had not seen a single soul by the time I stopped for lunch at a bench dedicated to a woman named Joan Elles, who had “brought joy to all of our hearts.” I ate sandwich I had packed for lunch, and sipped from my water bottle.

The sun had been steadily rising during my walk and was now at its full height. I had begun to sweat, and could feel that my skin was going to burn.

In a tree across the path, I spotted a bird. Brown with white plumage, with yellow and black marks across its face, it cocked its head from side to side and warbled a small song. I closed my eyes and listened. After a while, I felt a hand on my own, and heard a voice. I opened my eyes. I was alone. The bird flew away. I finished my sandwich in silence.

Often, when I found myself alone in a park, I would pretend that I had just awoken into the world for the first time. I would try to see everything before me as if I had never seen it before. Crossing to the other side of the path, I crouched next to a bush and watched a dragonfly flutter from leaf to leaf. I began to notice that all the leaves were of varying shades, and grew out from the stem each in a slightly different way. I noticed their perforated edges, and the patterns formed by the tiny veins that travelled across their surface. Looking down at the ground, what seemed a stationary surface was actually teeming with all sorts of motion, as tiny, unnameable insects crawled through the dirt. I stood up, and looked out at the bay. There were a few sailboats cutting across the water, catching the rhythm of the winds.

I heard loud heavy steps behind me, someone running along the gravel path. With the footsteps came a man’s voice. He was singing a Fleetwood Mac song at the top of his lungs. The owner of the voice passed behind me without decreasing the volume of his song one bit. As I turned to see what kind of person this could be, I saw that he wasn’t wearing a shirt, and was red all over. He wasn’t wearing headphones but was singing along to a backing band within his own head. He turned the corner, and the song faded away.

I questioned, for a moment, whether I actually existed, for the man seemed to as little acknowledge my existence as he did the ghost of Joan Elles within the bench. I realized that he had also ignored the fluttering of the dragonfly and the crawling of the mites, and the patterns of the leaves and the boats on the ocean, and in this way I found that I was but one part of everything.

Further along, I noticed a pile of rocks on the side of the path. Someone, some time before, had crouched here and gathered them together. The pile was not impressive in terms of size or construction, but it spoke to me in a playful, whimsical sort of way. All around was quiet. Then, a bird chirped on a branch nearby. He said, “I exist.” Another replied, “Me too.”

*

After a few circuitous paths, an uncomfortable walk along the edge of a stretch of highway, and a strange journey through a part of town I had never seen before in my life, I finally stumbled through the front door of my house to find Jessica in the kitchen, staring into the fridge. She looked over the door at me. “Done school already?”

“I didn’t make it,” I said, taking off my shoes. “My bus crashed.”

“What?” She closed the fridge in surprise. “Are you okay?”

“Just bumped my head a bit.” I rubbed the bruise on my forehead. “Some guy merged on to the highway without looking and the bus just slammed into him.”

“Was anyone hurt?”

“Didn’t seem like it.”

“So how’d you get home?”

“I walked.”

She looked at the clock on the oven. “From where?”

“Uh, you know that overpass with the Tim Hortons and the gas station?”

“You walked from there? What the heck? Are you afraid of busses now or something?”

“No, I just felt like it.” I sat down at the dining room table.

“Weirdo. May as well have walked to school at that point; it might have been closer.”

“I can assure you that it’s not. But it was a nice walk. My legs are killing me, though.”

“Yeah, no shit.” She returned to the fridge, and resumed her staring.

I looked through the sliding glass doors into the backyard. Already, the outside world had become just a backdrop behind a window. “Are you going to make something?”

“I’m not really hungry, just bored,” she said. “Might make a sandwich. You want one?”

“Sure.”

She started piling ingredients on the counter. Jessica had a creativity in her approach to sandwiches that I consider unparalleled. It seemed that no matter how barren the fridge, she could find within it a set of ingredients that could comfortably cohabit between two pieces of bread.

“How’s summer vacation going?” I asked.

“I don’t know, dude,” she said. “I just wake up, waste the day away, and then go to bed too late. Maybe one day I’ll look back on this all fondly, but right now I’m just bored. Like, what am I supposed to be doing? Relaxing? Going out?” She crunched a few salt & vinegar potato chips between her fingers and sprinkled them on the sandwiches.

“Don’t ask me,” I said. “I don’t think I left the house at all between eleventh and twelfth grade.”

“Okay well that’s a bit extreme.”

I laughed. “The days just sort of slipped by.”

“That’s terrifying.” She placed my sandwich in front of me. Then, carrying her own plate in one hand, and a glass of chocolate milk in the other, she hurried up the stairs to her room, saying, “I’ve got to go make some plans before I end up like you!”

4

I was sat in a horse-drawn carriage dashing through the French countryside. I was heading toward the provincial town where we had agreed to meet. We had to meet out here in the middle of nowhere in order to avoid being seen together. Our time was limited. An event would occur in the near future that would prevent us from ever meeting again. I stared impatiently out the window, watching as we passed again and again the same fields and the same collection of cottages. I poked my head out the window and shouted at the driver. “Do you have any idea where you’re going? We’re heading in circles!” There was no response. I peeked around. There was no one in the seat.

Falling back into the carriage, I cried in desperation, “Another one!” It seemed to me that this setback had destroyed all my chances of meeting with her before the fateful deadline. I began to moan and cry the most horrendous tears of my life. Amidst my wails, the carriage came to a stop.

We were on what appeared to be the main street of the village. Women in bonnets and men in blue uniforms wandered together, peering in shop windows. I stepped out of the carriage. The ground was muddy, and the potholes were all filled with water. My boots stuck with every step, but I managed to persevere toward the far end of the street, where a sign above an oversized lantern announced the Lamplighter Inn. Once inside, I found that this inn was in fact a dance club. Disco lights on the ceiling sporadically lit the mass of faceless dancers. The music was loud, the air was thick, and my clothes and hair soon became damp with second-hand sweat. I tried to push my way through to the back of the room, but the crowd was pressed tight, with stray limbs swinging wildly in all directions. An arm caught me across the face, and I fell to the floor. No one noticed me down there, and as I tried to crawl to my feet, I was struck by shoes and knees. I was already seeing red when a man stepped on the back of my knee, sending a shot of pain through my body. I began to clutch at the legs around me, pulling dancers down to the ground. Their falling bodies pulled down those around them, causing a domino effect that turned the entire dance floor into a stampede. Finally on my feet, I thrashed around wildly, a murderous anger rising within me. The heretofore faceless shapes took on a horrified aspect. I screamed as loud as I could, and coming across one final dancer blocking the way, I pushed him back so hard that his arms flew off his body like a mannequin. Alarmed, I burst into a sprint.

I reached the back of the room. Here, behind the dance floor, was the inn I had been expecting. As I ascended the wooden stairs, the steps creaked beneath my feet. I could no longer hear the music, and all my sweat and anger had vanished. At the top of the stairs, a young woman in a plain dress was waiting for me. “Master Bobbins,” she said. That was my name. “She’s waiting for you.” She gestured toward a door at the end of the hallway. I stepped carefully, my boots clomping upon the floorboards.

As I walked, I thought of why I had come all this way. The woman that I loved, the woman waiting for me at the end of the hall, was engaged to be married. But she did not love her fiance; she loved me. We had been in love for some time, but circumstances had kept us apart. We were meeting out here in this far-away town in order to share our love for the first and last time.

The corridor seemed to be growing ever longer as I walked, the door at the end receding further and further away from me. No matter how fast I walked, I couldn’t keep up. Eventually, frustrated, I decided to enter the next door to my left, figuring that it would all lead to the same place in the end, anyway.

And it did. There she was, sat on the edge of the bed, her hands clasped on her lap. She was wearing a white cotton nightdress, and her black hair was tied in an elaborate bun. She had been looking down at her hands, but as I opened the door her crystal-blue eyes fastened on me. She had been crying. The tear marks were still visible on her cheeks. “You’re here,” she said.

I stepped forward slowly. Now that she was finally here before me, I wasn’t sure what to do with myself. No words came to me. I sat down beside her, and we embraced. Her hair smelled like strawberries, exactly like strawberries. Her dress was soft beneath my hands. I could feel her warm tears dampening my shoulder, her breath hot against my neck. We sat like this, and I never wanted to let her go. And I thought, ‘The morning is still so far away.’

*

Just as the thought had occurred to me — just as I knew that, at last, our love had become tangible and real — I woke up. Slowly, her breath on my skin and her weight in my arms faded away, and I was left staring up at the ceiling above me. Closing my eyes, I saw only darkness.

The room was bright with the mid-day sun peeking beneath the curtains. A chickadee outside my window was singing its two-toned lament. I lay still, knowing that when I moved, I would lose all memory of the sensations from my dream. It had all felt so familiar, like some sort of phantom nostalgia — a nostalgia so vivid and urgent that it made my muscles tense, as if it was within my reach to return to that lost past. I squirmed beneath the covers, searching for a position comfortable enough that I could drift back to that world. But it was too late. Only in dreams, it seemed.

Jasmine returned to my mind. It felt inevitable to me that all my interactions with people for the rest of my life would go much the same way. There was simply too much fear in me. She had appeared before me as a gift from fortune, actively pursued a connection with me, and I had run away. This had not been just a momentary nervousness; it was inherent in my nature. You could thrust me into that situation an infinite number of times, and the result would be the same. Being who I was, it could never have gone differently. So how could I ever grow close enough to another person to embrace them in the way I had embraced my love in that hotel — how could love ever bloom for me anywhere but in the rich world of my imagination?

There was a knock on my door. It opened a crack. “Might be time to wake up,” my mom said without looking in. I said nothing. She left the door ajar when she walked away. I stood up, closed it, and returned to bed. For some reason, my legs ached.

Jessica was making a ruckus across the hall, opening and slamming doors with wild abandon as she stomped her way around the house. The hopelessness of returning to sleep becoming apparent, I pulled on my dressing gown and stepped gingerly down the stairs. I sat down at the dining table, where my mom had already left me a cup of tea.

Jessica came down the stairs soon after, wearing shorts and a loose t-shirt over a swimsuit. She had placed a bucket hat haphazardly upon her head and was twirling sunglasses in one hand while checking her phone with the other. She began pacing before the front door. Leaning against the wall was a tote bag with a towel pouring out over the top. As she passed the table, she left behind the aroma of sunscreen. Instantly, a million other smells entered my mind, all associated with memories of the beach trips of my childhood. It had been a long time since I had gone to the beach of my own volition — possibly since high school. I remembered that a few years back a distant relation from back east, upon hearing that our house was but a ten-minute drive from the beach, had said, “Wow! You must go all the time,” to which I had simply smiled and moved my head in a noncommittal fashion. I had felt guilty at the time for failing to appreciate the lot I had been given in life, but the simple fact was that I didn’t much like the beach, and especially did not like going alone. Watching Jessica prepare for her outing, I felt that guilt again.

Was this trip to the beach Jessica’s way of ensuring she didn’t turn out like me? It certainly seemed like the activity most diametrically opposed to my lifestyle and personality. I began to wonder whether she even liked the beach, or if she was only going because it represented some ideal of summer vacation. Was she just going through the motions, living out her final summer in such a way that when she looked back later it wouldn’t seem as if she had let it all slip away?

“Hey, mom?” Jessica said.

“Hmm?”

“Do you think you could pick me up later? Martha’s mom is driving us down but she’s gotta go somewhere after.”

“Shouldn’t be a problem. Paul, would you mind driving down?”

Jessica turned to me with a look of part-mortification. But she had no time to object before her phone rang. “Martha’s outside!” she yelled. She picked up her bag. “I’ll phone you when I need a ride!” she said, looking purposefully at my mom. With a sideways glance in my direction, she stepped outside, slamming the door behind her. The house sat in silence.

“Do you have any plans today, Paul?” my mom asked.

“Just homework. It doesn’t seem like Jess wants me to go, though.”

“It’s not her choice, is it? You need the driving practice, anyway.”

“I know how to drive.”

“Well, we don’t want you to forget.”

I saw no reason to argue. The only thing I truly wanted to do was return to sleep, but with that being impossible, any activity was just as good or bad as any other. “Fine,” I said.

*

It was an easy drive down to the beach. I didn’t much like the idea of driving, but once I was behind the wheel I always felt a certain joy in it.

I pulled up to the parking lot near the beach. All the spots were full, so I circled back and stopped in a No Parking zone just long enough to call Jessica and tell her to stand by the parking lot so she could jump in as I passed around again. When I came around, she was there with two of her friends, one of whom I recognized as Martha, whom she had known almost her whole life. The other was some guy I had never seen before with a weird haircut. Maybe it was a normal haircut by the standards of the era, but it struck me as somewhat odd. He was wearing a tank-top, blue-and-yellow striped shorts and reflective sunglasses. When I stopped, Jessica got in the passenger seat while her two friends climbed in the back.

“Is it okay if we drop Martha and Tim off?” Jessica asked. “It’s on the way.”

“No problem,” I said. She said the name ‘Tim’ as if the word held special importance to her.

We drove off in silence. I had paused my music to call Jessica, and didn’t want to turn it back on because I wasn’t sure how these teenagers would react to it. I felt utterly disconnected from their world, although I myself had only graduated high school a few years before. I hadn’t understood any of my classmates back then, and Jessica’s friends seemed like a different breed even from them. I just focused on driving, hoping that a mute aloofness would hide my fear. Jessica connected her phone to the stereo and started shuffling a playlist called “J’s Summer Jams” which included the bubbliest and most colourful pop songs of Korea and around the world.

I could see Martha in the back seat when I checked my mirrors. I had known her too long as my sister’s best friend to ever consider her meaningfully attractive, but I couldn’t deny that she had become quite cute. She had short blonde hair in a pixie cut and small circular glasses which gave her a mousy sort of look. I started to wonder about her absentmindedly as I drove — not because of anything related to her specifically, but just because she happened to be there in the back seat occupying space in my mirrors. She was leaning between my seat and Jessica’s, and the two of them were carrying on a spirited conversation. Tim stared out of his window with a wistful, serious air that didn’t suit him at all. It was like he was trying to prove to everyone that he was comfortable and belonged wherever he happened to be.

We dropped Tim off first. He directed me toward his house in a voice that revealed great pride in knowing where he lived. I realized that he was trying to impress me for some reason. He wanted me to see him as a guy, or better yet, as a man. It struck me as absurd that he should care what I saw him as. I guess my aloofness had really gotten to him.

As soon as he left, Martha and Jess’s conversation slowed down a little, as if he had been their audience the whole time. I drove to Martha’s house, which I knew from dropping Jess off there many times in the past. “See you, Jess,” Martha said as she stepped out of the car. “Thanks for the ride, Paul!” When she said my name, my heart twinged in its idiotic way, and I kicked myself.

5

I created my online dating profile in the middle of the night, using a username and password I had never used before. I knew that online dating, in this day and age, no longer carried the stigma that it once did, but I still could not get over a feeling of deep shame and embarrassment. This was not so much because of the social ramifications, but because it went against how I had always imagined love would enter my life. It had always seemed that I would one day bump into the love of my life, either while out and about, or through a mutual friend, and that after the brief period of will-they-won’t-they that so excites the television audiences, we would confess our love for each other in some dramatic fashion, perhaps late at night after a long and personal conversation.

Online dating felt like giving up on my dream and resigning myself to a more prosaic and clinical form of finding love. We would know going in that we were going on a date, which in my eyes diminished much of the tension that the audience craved.

But it had become clear to me that the alternative was no longer viable. My reaction to uncertainty, as shown in my recent encounter with Jasmine, was to shut down and run away. It was never clear to me whether someone was flirting with me or just talking to me, and it was even less clear to me whether or not I myself was flirting in return. The entire concept of flirting as a sub-genre of conversation was so bewildering to me that I found it best to just avoid talking to people altogether. This made my dream of a fairy tale meeting increasingly unlikely.

And thus it was that I found myself late one night lying on my side in bed, phone in both hands, a dating app open on the screen. As I entered my information, each press of the confirmation button took every ounce of my strength. I felt that I was committing to something eternal, that there would be no turning back. I was terrified of making a mistake. I double and triple-checked my date of birth. If my birth certificate had been on hand, I would have cross-referenced.

I had this overwhelming fear that somehow everyone I knew would be instantly notified upon the creation of my account. That, perhaps this whole app had been developed purely as a trap to embarrass me. The embarrassment would come from the fact that signing up for a dating app would seem supremely out of character for me.

Sometimes, it seemed that the events and decisions of my life up to that point had cornered me. Somehow, at some time, I had made a mistake, or a series of mistakes, and now I was stuck being the way I was, and there was no way out. The World had formed its opinion of me, and that was that. Thus, acting out of character felt like going against the very foundations of the universe.

One aspect of this reputation I had earned was the fact that I would never get a girlfriend. Anyone observing my life from afar would immediately see that I fit neatly into the category of young men who are inescapably alone. The idea of someone such as myself putting himself out in the world in an attempt to date was laughable. Paul Samson, on a date? Paul Samson flirting, making jokes, acting cool, trying to convince a girl to like him? Ridiculous. “Don’t try to be something you’re not,” they would say.

However, inside of me lay this feeling that if I could reset, if I could erase these preconceived notions, then I really could be a much better person. I could go out on a date, flirt, make jokes, and act cool. I mean, why not? I only needed a fresh slate, a new chance, with someone who had never seen me before and who had no idea of what I had done or who I had become. Online dating seemed to provide just such an opportunity. I could create a new version of myself that might, quite possibly, be more accurate to who I truly was inside.

So, I carried on. I uploaded a few selfies: one in which I thought I looked okay, and another in which I looked a little silly. When it came to my bio, I kept it as sparse and uninteresting as possible. If I tried to make myself seem likeable, I was sure someone would call me on it and I would have to admit that I was lying. When I had finished writing, I set the phone down on my pillow and stared at it. My hands were shaking. I pressed Publish.

Immediately I was bombarded with a screenful of pictures of women, staring right at me. I reeled back, as if they could see me through the screen. Paralyzed, I almost dropped the phone. My first thought was that all of these people could potentially be viewing my profile at that very moment. I navigated back to my profile, and re-read my bio. I found a glaring syntax error in the third sentence. My cheeks burned as I searched for the Edit button. I could not help imagining that someone had already seen it — perhaps the Exact Love of My Life — and taken a violent dislike toward me, swiping my profile into the garbage with disgust. A knot formed in my gut. I opened the options menu. I tapped Deactivate Account.

I lay back on the bed, staring at the ceiling. When I closed my eyes, all I could see was those women staring at me, as if expecting something from me that I could never give. I sat up and downed the glass of lukewarm water on my bedside table. I took a deep breath.

I stood up, and looked around the room. It was empty. There was just me. The women from the screen weren’t real. They couldn’t see me. The only reality was this empty room, the dripping of the pipes in the walls, and the empty darkness outside. I opened the window, and breathed the dark summer air. The world outside was still. I was alone. No one could hurt me here.

*

During the next several days, I reactivated and deactivated my account several times a day. It occurs to me now that at no point did I uninstall the app from my phone. Each time I reactivated and opened the app, either on my phone or my desktop, I would manage to scroll through a few more profiles before the panic overtook me. I just couldn’t help the feeling that the people in the screen could see me.

I read every word of each profile I came across. When I found someone I thought I liked, I re-read their bio several times, rigorously analyzing each sentence to find out what exactly it said about them. I weighed every aspect of what I had learned about them, imagining complex scenarios in order to determine how they might make me feel. For example, if they liked Disney movies, I wondered how long I would be able to hold my peace about how much Mickey Mouse freaks me out. Or, if they liked to roller blade, I placed us on a roller blading date, and tried to figure out if roller blading was any fun. This often spiralled out of control, as I imagined our first, second, and third dates, their first time meeting my family, my first time meeting their family, our first vacation, and then finally, our break-up. As I recovered from the shock, I read their profile one last time, mourning all the memories we had made. Then, I deactivated my account.

It took me a while to understand how the app worked. After searching through the menus, I realized that there was no way for anyone to look through the screen at me or even know that I was looking at their profile. The only way they could be alerted to my presence was if I ‘liked’ their profile or sent them a message. This was a great relief. However, I still had the feeling that if anyone tried to talk to me, I would have to die. Thankfully, no one did.

It was strange for me, scrolling through profile after profile. It was compelling, in an anthropological sense, to find out about all these people my age: how they lived, where they worked, what they studied, what they liked. I had always wondered how everyone else lived; whether their lifestyles were categorically different from mine, or just balanced in a slightly different way. Seeing everyone up close made them feel nearby and approachable, and yet when I tried to imagine them existing in real life, they seemed impossibly distant. In the abstract, I could imagine myself talking to them, but that was the fantastical ideal me of my dreams, not the me sat at his desk scrolling through profiles on his computer. The latter me had no business interacting with any of these people. It would be a clash of worlds, like one of those movies in which real actors share the screen with a cartoon.

It took until the third day before I worked up enough courage to ‘like’ a girl’s profile. She had not written much, but what she had written seemed nice in a cryptic, off-kilter sort of way. There was some vague sense of spirituality running through it all, the nature of which was difficult to discern. She did not list any specific activities, movies, or for that matter, things of any sort which she liked, which gave off the impression that she spent all her time simply being — being whatever it was that she was. She used a glowing filter for all her photos, giving them an angelic, otherworldly quality. It all appealed to some strange sense of mine. I figured that if I was going to date anyone, it would have to be someone who wasn’t like anyone else. I took care this time not to imagine a conversation, a date, or even a break-up. I just closed my eyes and clicked the button.

A text box appeared on the screen. If she ‘liked’ me back, it told me, we would be able to chat. In the meantime, I could write her a short introductory message. I stared at the blank form. I wrote, “Hello, I am Paul.” I took my hands off the keyboard and placed them on my lap. I looked around the room. I stood up, walked over to the window, and then sat down again. Nothing more coming to mind, I hit send.

*

In the end, she didn’t message me back. Neither did the two other girls I messaged. This actually increased my confidence, as it seemed my actions had no consequences at all, and thus from then on I was able to ‘like’ several new profiles a day, trying out a variety of messages. Soon enough, I was ‘liking’ profiles of people who I didn’t even like, just to retain the habit. Sales is a numbers game, as they say.

Over the course of a few weeks, I began to grow weary of the repetitive nature of my task. The same hobbies, the same movies, the same TV shows, the same dogs and cats, the same mountains climbed and degrees in progress, and even the same clichéd phrases kept appearing again and again. The excitement of learning what people my age were like turned into the realization that many of them were quite similar, at least on a surface level. This only made me feel all the more alone, as I shared none of these hobbies, hadn’t seen any of the movies or TV shows, and couldn’t name a single dog. I had been on a mountain before, at least, and was ostensibly working my way toward a degree, so I had that going for me.

Dating had become boring, and this before I had even gone on a single date, or talked to anyone at all. The incessant scrolling and writing of perfunctory messages were enough to tire myself out, but not enough to secure myself a date. I could say that I was trying, but the truth was that I was trying in such a way that almost guaranteed failure. In my eyes, presenting myself in a positive light was tantamount to lying, and thus I made no attempt to appeal to anyone. All anyone really had to go on were a few pictures of my face, the attractiveness of which I had no way of judging, and a collection of sentences that included a joke even I didn’t find funny. But at least there were no grammatical mistakes anymore.

I knew all this and didn’t know it at the same time. This distinct method of self-sabotage in which I spent much time and minimal effort in order to achieve the exact mid-point between nothing and something was a recurring theme in my life, exemplified during my high school years when my mom would lock me in my room and force me to complete months-overdue assignments. I would hem and haw, writing a word here and a word there, extending the torture of an assignment that could easily have taken an hour into an entire agonizing day, and by the end all I would have was the first draft of an essay I never wanted to see again.

*

It was evening when I found her. I was sitting in my chair in much the same posture I often found myself in those days, sideways on my chair with one leg sticking through the gap under the armrest, and the other curled up beneath me. The chair was facing away from the desk, with my chin resting atop the back and my right arm stretched around to reach the mouse. It was an extremely uncomfortable posture, but good for the sake of variety. I had been making my way through profiles for a quarter of an hour, reading but not allowing the words to reach my brain. My eyes were beginning to turn dry.

I was seconds away from collapsing onto my bed when a profile appeared on the screen that caused me to let out a small yelp. It was her. There she was, standing beside the sign in front of my college, in the same dress and with the same bag as on that day, looking at the camera in just the way she had looked at me. I felt a shiver, and my heart sank into my stomach. I remembered her voice, and the sensation of her hand on mine, and her words floating away in the forest…

On the screen were three pictures of Jasmine. The first I have just described. In the second, she was indoors in a white t-shirt, posing with another girl whose face was covered by a smiley face emoji. In the third, she was at the top of a mountain in hiking gear. Below the pictures were many words that I would, in other circumstances, have read. But I was too distracted to give them more than a cursory glance.

I stood up and paced around the room. My internal monologue was a confused jumble of meaningless words. No thoughts, just noise. As I paced, this noise travelled in various directions and various colours. A bead of sweat fell from my left armpit. I left the room, making sure to alt-tab the screen away before I left in case someone came looking. I went to the bathroom and sat on the closed toilet seat, just for a change of scenery. The walls swayed around me. I stood up and stared maniacally into the mirror. I washed my hands. I went back to my room. I walked in a circle. I walked back out. I went downstairs.

In the living room, my mom was watching a murder mystery show. The portly English detective was making his final speech before the culprit, explaining the factors that had led to his deduction. He had a self-satisfied, but not arrogant, sort of smug charm about him. I went into the kitchen and opened the fridge. I opened the cupboard. I turned on the kettle. I opened the cupboard again, and grabbed a cookie.

I went upstairs again as the kettle was boiling, nibbling at my cookie and leaving a trail of crumbs. Without sitting down, I pulled up Jasmine’s profile again. I scanned the words, still not understanding their meaning. I clicked the Like button. The website prompted me to write a message. I rubbed my chin in a pose not dissimilar to the English detective. I heard the kettle click downstairs.

Pouring my tea, I thought of what a potential message might look like. I decided that it should begin with “hi.” “Hello,” I decided, was much too formal, especially considering we had already met before. I tried to think of a few more words, but none of them inspired the same amount of confidence as this initial “hi.” I tapped my fingers on the counter. Then, I bolted up the stairs two at a time. Jessica opened her door as I reached the top step. “What are you running around for?” she asked.

“I just feel like it,” I said, vanishing into my room. I began to type. I started with “Hello.” I deleted it, and wrote, “hi” instead. I continued: “We met on the bus the other week, when the bus crashed. I was the guy on the bus next to you. Paul. anyway funny to see you on here. How are you doing?” I hovered my mouse over the Send button. I stood up. I went back downstairs.

I took the tea bag out of my mug. I looked into the living room. The credits were rolling on my mom’s TV show. She was asleep on the couch. I went back upstairs, leaving my tea unfinished on the counter. I stared at the words I had written. They were the stupidest words I had ever seen. I devoted my two remaining brain cells to improving the words, but nothing occurred to me. I felt like my head was being crushed from all sides. I walked a quick circle, fell onto my bed, slid off, leaped to my desk, clicked Send, closed the window, turned off the computer, and collapsed back on to the bed.

*

I spent the rest of the night hoping that the message would never reach her. I hoped that I would return to my computer the next day to find that I had not actually sent it, or that the message had somehow been lost in the ether of the internet. I speculated that perhaps Jasmine had found true love and deleted her account just as I sent the message, or that she had given up on online dating a long time ago, and her account remained only as one of those many forgotten ghosts we leave scattered across the internet.

But my message did reach her. I logged in the next day to find a message notification in the corner of the screen. The red circle screamed out at me like a violent warning. My first reaction was to imagine a vitriol-filled reply in which she meticulously delineated all of my shortcomings, failures, and bad habits; admonished me for having the gall to believe anyone would ever want to talk to me; and finally demanded that I delete my account, leave my home, and live out the rest of my days in a deep, squalid cave far from human society. For a moment, it seemed the only reasonable reply.

Having prepared myself for the worst, I opened my inbox. And there, above the mountain of dull, unanswered greetings, sat one shining message in bold, beginning with a proud and mighty “Hello!” and a smiling emoji.

The conversation that followed over the next few days is far too embarrassing and mundane to publish. As in real life, Jasmine online was a pleasant conversationalist, pushing me forward with her gentle and easygoing nature. My strange abscondment after the bus crash didn’t seem to have fazed her; her only reference to it being to check once again whether my head was okay. We soon organized a date for the next weekend.

It all happened so fast and (relatively) painlessly that I found the whole thing hard to believe. Did it bring me joy to know that a girl was interested in me, and that we were going on a date? Hard to say. It was all too overwhelming for me to make any decision as to its joyousness. Perhaps I should have felt some pride or vindication. Finally, I had performed an action of my own accord in an attempt to better my situation, and it had succeeded. But this pride was mediated by the suspicion that I had somehow cheated my way into the whole thing; that I was tricking Jasmine into believing I was a real person, and that soon enough the whole fantasy would go up in smoke. I felt assured that when we met in person I would repeat my previous failure, or else fail in some new and more spectacular way.

I was a man of constant worry for the days that led up to the date. At times, I sat down in an analytical mood and attempted to come up with possible topics of conversation, or answers to common questions, but I soon realized that this was a test for which one can’t study. I would just have to wing it, just as I had winged that first message which had brought me here. I instead focused my worries on more concrete things, like whether I would be able to make it on time, whether I might not get lost on the way to the date, and whether I would have enough time before the date to fulfill the requisite hours of worrying.

*

On the evening before the date, I was sat at the dinner table with Jessica and my mom. The conversation began in its usual way — my mom said, “So,” paused for a moment, and then continued. “Any plans for the weekend, you two?”

“Might be going to Vivian’s tomorrow night,” Jess said. “Not sure.”

“Not sure?”

“She might have forgotten. I’ll double check with her tonight.”

“And you, Paul?”

This was the part where I usually said, “Nothing,” and the world continued on as normal. My mom would bring up something she saw on the news, or at work, or her and Jess would get caught up in some conversation that I wasn’t able to follow. The question had become a perfunctory ritualistic observance over the years, and I could see in my mom’s face that she had already anticipated my answer and was thinking of what to say next. I blurted out, “I have a date,” before immediately shovelling a massive forkful of spaghetti into my mouth to hide my embarrassment.

My mom almost dropped her knife and fork, but quickly tried to hide her surprise. Jess did not. “With who? How?”

They stared at me for about ten seconds while I tried to chew and swallow all the pasta in my mouth. “A girl,” I finally sputtered. My mouth was dry, so I reached for my glass of water. I could feel my cheeks heating up.

“Did you meet her at school?” my mom asked.

“He doesn’t even go to school!” Jess exclaimed loudly. My mom gave her a sharp look.

“No, I met her online,” I said. “But she does go to my school, I think; I’ve never seen her there but one of her pictures was in front of the school.”

My mom was looking at me in the same way she had whenever I got a good grade in elementary school. I kept rambling, “We actually met when my bus crashed the other day. But then I was on a dating site later and just happened to find her there, ha ha.” My laugh sounded exactly like “ha ha.”

“Ah, so that explains your walk,” Jessica said.

“What walk?” my mom asked.

“Remember how he walked home from the bus that day? He was chatting up a girl the whole time!” She cackled. “Why didn’t you just get her number then?”

“Ohhhh,” my mom said, excitedly.

“I wasn’t chatting her up,” I said. “We just met each other, that’s all. She got on the next bus, and I just sorta walked away.”

“You’re an idiot, man,” Jess said. “But I suppose it worked out in the end. You’re a lucky idiot.”

“Sounds like fate,” my mom said. “What’s her name?”

“Jasmine.”

“Nice name,” she said.

My cheeks had cooled down, but I had a knot in my stomach that made it impossible to continue eating. The novelty of bringing a topic of conversation to the dinner table had excited me too much; at the same time, I wanted to relish it a little more.

“We’re going to New West to eat,” I said.

“Have you ever even been to New West?” Jess asked.

“Maybe once or twice. A while ago.”

“Are you nervous?” my mom asked.

“Of course. But also, not as much as I thought I might be.”

“Well, no matter what happens, it’s nice to get out there and meet people. Even if you don’t end up liking her that much, it’s good experience. It’s good that you’re putting yourself out there.”

“I’m proud of you, son,” Jessica said, with a serious look on her face. She reached over and patted me on the shoulder.

“Oh, shush.” My mom said, slapping Jessica on the arm. “Anyway, I hope she’s nice.” And with that, the conversation moved on.

*

That night I lay in bed, unable to sleep. I imagined many beautiful and terrifying scenarios, all fuzzy and fantastical. I simply could not realistically imagine myself on a date. Whenever an uncomfortable thought occurred to me, I would turn over, as if a physical change in position would make the thought go away. In this way I tossed and turned for most of an hour.

Eventually, I made an attempt at meditation. Usually, these attempts met with failure. I would end up focusing too much on the idea that I’m not supposed to be focusing on anything. Then, I would start to think about the way I’m breathing, would feel my heartbeat growing ever louder and louder in my chest, and begin to wonder whether it’s all working correctly; that is, whether enough oxygen was getting into my blood, or whether I might not be vitally ill in some unknown way, my body ready to shut down at any moment. My heart would begin to beat faster, and I would feel strange pains all over, until eventually I felt the need to stand up and do something else.

However, on that night, perhaps due to the exhaustion I felt after the excitement of the last few days, I managed to reach some semblance of serenity. I don’t know if it necessarily met any definition of meditation, but I did find myself fading away into the remembrance of a memory.

I was remembering the slope behind the playground of my elementary school that led up to the soccer field, an innocuous space home to but a few memorable events. This location, which I hadn’t visited in years, suddenly appeared vividly before me in its entirety, as if it had been lying in wait the whole time. And there with it came the laughing face of Devon, my fourth-grade arch-nemesis. My enmity toward Devon came from him being a stupid jerk, and, even worse, a stupid jerk whose stupidity and jerkiness seemed apparent only to me. Everyone else at school laughed at Devon’s jokes and went along with his whims, even though his jokes were mostly less funny versions of ones I had told previously, and his whims were inane and generic. He was always partnered with whichever girl I happened to like in group projects, and was always given the role I wanted in class readings. In short, the universe seemed determined to shove his stupid jerkiness in my face at all opportunities.

The conflict between us on this particular day came about during a game. We had collided, or come together, during some ball-based sport, and Devon, being the whiny baby that he was, was sure that I had broken some rule or otherwise behaved in a malicious manner. This offended my honour, and I became angry. We disputed for a time, until finally that infernal tortuous word came out of his mouth: that word that I could not help hearing day after day, no matter how I felt or what I did. This word had followed me now for months, slowly becoming a self-perpetuating label that in its very utterance actuated its truth. “Paul,” he said. “You’re such a spaz.”

And that was that. For what happened next, I hold no responsibility.

“I’m not a spaz,” I said, clenching all of my muscles at once.

“You are!” he cried. “You’re a complete spaz!” It was winter, and Devin was wearing a bright red jacket and an orange toque. The air misted around his mouth as he spoke.

I screamed to force away the tears. “I am NOT!” The final word exploded into a high-pitched screech as my body overflowed with anger. The world was about to end and I was about to die; my skin burned with the fires of injustice. I knew that I was not a spaz; I knew this for a fact, but I could not prove it to anyone. The democratic process had been carried out; the referendum had passed — every boy in the circle unanimously agreed to collectively declare that I, Paul Samson, was a spaz. The jeers seemed to come from all sides. My tears partially blinded me, but I could still make out Devon’s orange toque, shining like a beacon atop his head. I ran toward him, but he had a head start, and was a faster runner besides. Everyone else ran off too, laughing in delight and fear. The ball-game was over and a new game had begun, a game that all games carried within them the potential to spontaneously transform into — a game called “Run Away From Paul.”

Devon was too fast and too far away, so I turned my attention to a smaller, slower kid running in another direction. I couldn’t even tell who it was. I tackled him to the ground. We collapsed onto the damp grass, and I held him down as he struggled to get away. “Paul, you spaz!” he muttered as he squirmed. “Get off!” I let go, and he ran away.

I stayed on the ground and wiped away my tears. The other boys were re-gathering in another part of the field, glancing and pointing in my direction as they animatedly discussed my overreaction. I couldn’t do anything. I definitely couldn’t say sorry. If I attempted to go over there, they would just run off again.

Whether this was true to the memory or not, I could not tell, but as I lay in bed re-living this moment on the grass, I thought of the Girl of My Dreams. I wondered whether it was truly possible for someone to pull me up from the ground, shake off the dirt, and love me for no reason; for someone to look past the anger and the tears and see that I wasn’t really a spaz, underneath it all; that I was just a lonely and sad kid, a lonely and sad kid desperate for affirmation and validation and all those things everyone agrees that people need while withholding them all for bad behaviour. I couldn’t see why anyone should love me, or how they could, or what it would even look like if they did, but I hoped someone would anyway. I really hoped someone would.

6

I was at the SkyTrain station fifteen minutes early, sitting on a bench at the foot of an escalator that descended from the train platform. I had told Jasmine that I was punctual; this was only true because I found waiting to leave my house so tortuous that I tended to head out early just to spare myself the misery. I was tapping Feliz Navidad on my knees in double-time. All year round: rain, shine, or snow, Feliz Navidad is the song with which I express my nervous energy.

The station had been built in the middle of a mall, or a mall had been built around the station. On the upper floor were small restaurants, cafes, and a movie theatre; the ground floor, where I sat, was a concourse that ran beneath the rail line. It felt empty down here, and aside from the sound of trains rushing in and out, strangely quiet. As people walked by, I could hear their footsteps echoing off the walls.

I kept glancing up at the escalator. Whenever I looked away, I thought that perhaps she might have arrived just as I looked away, so I would look back. I knew that she was arriving on a train, and thus she would only show up soon after a train had pulled in to the station, but this knowledge did nothing to change my actions.

I was worried that I might not recognize her when she showed up. I had only met her once; at this point, I had seen her more in my imagination than in the real world, and it was quite possible that the image I held of her in my heart might not correlate at all to how she really looked.

A train roared in above me. I looked up at the escalator before it had even come to a complete stop. I looked down again. I didn’t want her first sight of me to be me staring gormlessly up at her. I had to look cool. I stared straight ahead, keeping the escalator in my peripheral vision. People began to stream down. From this angle, almost everyone looked like Jasmine, at least for a second. But as the stream turned to a trickle, it became clear that she had not been on this train. I looked at my phone. There was still ten minutes before the time we had agreed to meet. I put my palms against my face, as if about to do a fish impression, and let them gradually slide down to my chin, where I pressed them together in a strange prayer-like gesture. I interlocked my fingers, and performed an inverted elbow stretch. Then, I placed my hands on my lap.

As I did so, there was Jasmine directly in front of me, as if my stretches had been an elaborate ritual that summoned her. I stood up, but then couldn’t decide whether to walk toward her or stay where I was, so I took two steps forward, then a step back, and then just sort of hovered. She quickly made up the distance between us.

“Hey, Paul!” she said, in a cheerful voice. She was wearing a light green summer dress, with matching Vans sneakers.

“Hello,” I said.

“I went down the wrong escalator.” She gestured somewhere behind her with her thumb. “Were you waiting long? Usually I’m the early one.”

“No, I just got here,” I said. We were standing about a foot apart, facing each other. I was holding one of my arms in the other in a posture that I knew gave away how uncomfortable I was, but I couldn’t figure out how to get myself to move. I was wary of every possible movement. They all seemed imbued with hidden meanings that I didn’t understand.

“Shall we get going?” she asked. “The place is only a couple blocks away.”

“Oh, uh, yeah,” I said.

She started walking, and I followed. I quickly remembered that I shouldn’t be following, so I caught up to walk beside her. “I don’t think I’ve walked around here before,” I said, in order to say something.

“Really?”

I couldn’t think of a reply to that, so I didn’t say anything.

“I used to come down here all the time,” she continued. “I had a friend who lived just down the street. It’s nice! If a little, you know, old.”

We emerged from the train station onto a sidewalk lined with brick. Across the street was an olive green building with chipping paint and streaky windows, and the building number written above the doors in giant print that resembled a digital clock. Next door was a computer repair shop with an awning above its entrance and a sign for a community chapel upstairs.

“How’s your head, by the way?” she said, leaning over and glancing at my forehead. “Is there still a bruise?”

“Oh, it’s okay.” I rubbed my forehead. “It wasn’t so bad.” Even speaking these tiny sentences my voice was cracking. I had been on edge for almost forty-eight hours, and now I was over the edge. Even walking required conscious thought. I was hyper-aware of all these outward expressions of my nervousness, but my attempts to suppress them only made them more noticeable. It was impossible for Jasmine not to have noticed, but she pretended everything was normal. I felt a bead of sweat dripping down my side. “It’s funny actually-” I began to say, preparing to tell the story of my walk home after the bus crash.

“We’ll turn left here,” she said, as I nearly walked through a red light.

“Ah.” I wheeled around. She didn’t ask me to continue my story, so we crossed the street in silence. I still wanted to tell her the story, because I thought it was funny, and it was the only funny story I had prepared, but once we had reached the other side of the street, I thought it had been too long now since I had been interrupted. There were a few other people who had crossed the street with us, and for some reason I didn’t want them to hear the story. However, I then began to think that perhaps one or more of them had heard me begin, and were now thinking that it was awfully strange that I hadn’t bothered to try again. I became so tied in a knot regarding all this that I momentarily forgot where I was and what I was doing, which in a way actually diminished my nervousness.

Eventually, Jasmine spoke again. “I love this restaurant we’re going to. I was hoping you’d let me pick. Best ramen in town, for sure.”

“Great,” I said.

“You like ramen?”

“Yeah, but I don’t go out for it much. I’ve made it at home a few times, though.”

“Like the instant stuff, you mean?”

“No, like, the real thing. But I don’t know how my version stacks up with a restaurant. I didn’t have all the ingredients so I just kind of winged it.”

She laughed. “That’s cool that you can cook.”

“I suppose so,” I said. “I have to cook for me and my sister sometimes.”

“Here’s the place.” She pointed at a sign a few stores up the road. “Ooh, I’m excited,” she said, rubbing her hands.

Inside, a young woman in a black apron was sitting at one of the tables, staring at her phone. She looked up as we came through the door. “Two?”

“Yep,” said Jasmine. I inadvertently held up two fingers.

“Okie,” said the waitress. She got up and gestured toward the back. “You can sit there .”

The dining area of the restaurant was a large L-shape, surrounding the kitchen in the far back corner. I sat down facing the kitchen, with Jasmine facing the wall. I remembered a friend of mine who refused to sit with his back facing the entrance of a restaurant. I think he had learned it from a mobster movie. I looked around, and the first thing that caught my eye was a sign pointing toward the bathroom. This was pertinent information. “I’m just gonna use the bathroom real quick,’ I said, stumbling over my chair as I left the table.

I actually did need to pee, despite having gone just before leaving, but more than that, I felt the need to be in a small enclosed room for a period of time. I know public bathrooms have a poor reputation, but they have been a steady source of comfort throughout my life. Of course there are the obvious issues of odour and hygiene, but these can be mitigated if you pick your spots right. Restaurants and indoor malls are usually your best bet.

This particular bathroom was cluttered, but clean where it mattered. Cardboard boxes lined the wall, filled with paper towels and cleaning supplies. On top of these were a few nondescript pieces of fabric, a broken toilet lid, and a frazzled metal brush. A mop and bucket sat in the corner. The light bulb emitted a faint buzzing noise. I sat on the toilet and ran my hands through my hair. I took a few deep breaths. Here I was, on a date. On a date with Jasmine, a real human being. A date I had suggested and committed to by my free volition as a rational actor. And yet I still could not shake the feeling that I hadn’t really done any of this, that it had all in fact been done to me, by someone or something. It was the bus crash that had started it all, and Jasmine who had started talking to me, and the website which had brought us together again. I had only followed the path presented to me, a path which would either lead me out of the lonely muck that was my life, or else thrust me ever deeper.

I remembered that Jasmine was waiting for me, excited for food and conversation, as I sat on the toilet running my hands through my hair. I quickly snapped back to reality, washed my hands, and returned to the table. Jasmine had her purse on her lap, and was lightly drumming on it as she looked around the room. It was perhaps only a product of my imagination that I recognized these taps as the melody of Feliz Navidad.

I sat down. We looked each other in the eyes. I successfully maintained eye contact for a single second that felt like an eternity. I looked down at the menu.

“So, you’re taking summer classes?” she asked.

“Yep.”

“Doesn’t it suck sitting in school all day during the summer?”

“Well, it’s not all day, but yeah, kinda. But it was either that or get a job,” I said to the menu. “And I really didn’t want a job.”

“Fair enough. Ah, I’m gonna miss summer vacation. I mean, I’m taking one class, but it’s a pretty easy one. I guess this is my last summer break, though, since I graduate next year. I can’t believe they make people work all year round! Maybe I should become a teacher.”

“What’s your major?” I asked.

The waitress came by before Jasmine could answer. She asked if we were ready to order. Jasmine looked at me. “Have you decided?”

“I forgot to look,” I said. I had had the menu before me this whole time, but hadn’t actually read it.

She laughed. “Can we have a few more minutes?”

“Alright, just call me over,” the waitress said, returning to her table and taking out her phone.

“Shoot,” I said. “Sorry if you’re hungry. I completely forgot to decide.”

“It’s okay.”

I started at the top of the menu, and scanned downwards until I found an item with a green leaf beside its name. That, I decided, would be my lunch. I continued to run my eyes over the other names, if only to buy myself a brief reprieve from the conversation. ‘It’s going well,’ I thought to myself, ‘so far.’ I reached for my water glass, only to find that I had already emptied it. I felt the need to pee again.

“Found anything you like?” Jasmine asked.

“Yeah, I think I’m gonna get the vegan black garlic,” I said.

“You’re vegan?”

“No, I just don’t eat meat.”

“You didn’t mention that in your bio.”

“Am I supposed to?”

“Most people do. I suppose it can be controversial. You don’t mind if I have meat though, right?” she asked, apologetically.

“Of course not.”

She called the waitress over, and I managed to communicate my order. She re-filled my water glass and took away our menus.

With my menu gone, I was like a child without his blanket. I looked around at the Japanese beer posters around the wall, trying to piece together the writing from the single Japanese course I’d taken in high school. On the wall to our left was a bulletin board covered in pictures of the restaurant owner visiting ramen shops across Japan. In all of them, he was stood next to a chef during some stage of the ramen-making process, smiling wide and giving a double thumbs-up. In one, for example, he stood behind a man in a blue uniform who was threading noodles through his fingers, and in another, he sat at a table while a chef placed a giant bowl of soup before him.

“He seems like a pretty cool guy,” I said.

Jasmine laughed. “Yeah. Seems like he loves what he does.”

“Definitely doesn’t need a summer vacation.”

“No, not at all.” We both gazed at the pictures in admiration. “Oh, you asked me what I was studying, didn’t you? I’m training to be a social worker.”

“Wow,” I said. “That’s great.”

She looked down sheepishly. “Yeah… I’ve always looked up to people who can take care of others. They just seem so strong.” She turned the question around, looking embarrassed. “What about you? What are you taking?”

“English,” I said.

“So you like to read?” She was the first person I had told this to who didn’t ask if I wanted to be a teacher.

“Yeah, I like books,” I said.

Our food arrived sooner than I had expected. Jasmine did a little excited dance in her chair as the waitress placed the bowl in front of her. Then, she gave me a double thumbs-up.

*

I had eaten with chopsticks before on numerous occasions, but never had the task been so fraught with difficulties as it was on that day. My hands were shakey and unresponsive, despite my pleading with them not to embarrass me. I awkwardly snatched at the noodles and tofu cubes, the broth spilling out into a splash zone that radiated a few inches from my bowl. My clumsiness, combined with the heat of the soup, made my cheeks start to burn. I had previously thought that there was no elegant way to eat noodles, only more or less inelegant ways — my own being nearer to the latter — but Jasmine was proving me wrong, as I saw that her side of the table was spotless.

We had, up until this moment, been alone in the restaurant, having arrived after the lunchtime rush. I had not noticed this fortuitous circumstance, and continued not to notice it until our solitude was disturbed by the chime of a bell, signalling the arrival of a group of customers.

I looked up at the door to see a pair of men walk in, roughly my age. They were directed to the table just a few feet away and perpendicular to our own, being closest to the kitchen and thus most convenient for the waitress. The man facing our table had close-cropped hair and a beard, and was wearing a bomber jacket. His friend was bearded also, but with long hair tied into a bun. They were chatting noisily, as if nothing else in the world existed. I accidentally made eye contact with the bomber-jacket-wearing man, before I returned to my noodles.

His eyes didn’t leave my mind. I felt them on me as I ate, dissecting my every move. Whether he wanted to or not, this man was forming an opinion of me, and deciding whether or not I deserved to exist. Although I had never personally deemed another person unfit for existence, I considered this a consequence of my own inferior position; it seemed to me perfectly within their rights for the average person to take one look at me and determine that I deserved annihilation. And that was clearly what this bomber-jacket-wearing man must have decided, watching me, a dark, dour and unkempt individual, silently fumble with my chopsticks while across the table was a perfectly normal and attractive woman, exuding elegance and charm. He must have thought it a shame and a pity that a girl such as her was stuck with a guy such as me, when she could have been doing anything else in the world.

And who was I to disagree? And what reason was there for Jasmine herself to disagree? It would be an insult to her intelligence to assume that she did not see the clear discrepancy between us. What could she possibly gain from a conversation with someone such as myself? Anything she learned about me would be useless, as I was a non-entity of no importance to the Earth. She would have been better off talking to anyone else; for example, either of the two gentlemen at the nearby table. They knew this, she knew this, and I was just beginning to know this.

The long-haired man was talking to his friend about his recent trans-Pacific travels. He was telling a long and winding story about a festival, and a girl eating and subsequently spitting out a takoyaki ball that was frightfully hot, with accompanying gestures and charades. It was the kind of story one could only tell if they were already sure they were going to be listened to, and it was, quite frankly, annoying and inane, in the way that every overheard conversation is annoying and inane.

I couldn’t think over the sounds of his story, and as the silence at our table extended, I began to feel myself fading away, sinking deep into myself. The world around me seemed all of a sudden to drop a few feet, and I experienced that weightless feeling one gets when a roller coaster crests the hill and begins to descend. I seemed to shrink as everything else in the world expanded, and it seemed that in a few moments, I would cease to exist entirely.

“How’s your food?” Jasmine asked.

I nodded, my mouth full.“Good, right? I love this place.”

And with those words I began to taste the food for the first time, and it was delicious. And the colour seemed to return to the world, and I grew back to my proper size, and I looked around the room like I belonged there, because I did, because I had as much right to be there as anyone else. I looked up at Jasmine and saw that she had been so focused on her noodles that she had noticed nothing, and that she was smiling at me. I looked down at the table and said, “I’m making a mess.”

“Just means you’re enjoying yourself,” she said, and laughed. “Did you want to walk around a bit after we eat? There’s a bubble tea place nearby, and then we could go to the pier.”

I nodded. “Sounds good.”

*

We left the restaurant and walked out into the open air. “Ah!” Jasmine exclaimed, slipping on a pair of white-rimmed sunglasses. “What a day!”

I squinted. I hadn’t worn sunglasses in years, for fear that they all made me look stupid. I realized in this moment that the constant squinting probably made me look stupider.

“Those guys were pretty loud, huh?” Jasmine said. “I couldn’t hear myself think. The food was good, though.”

I nodded in agreement. The bubble tea shop was only a few doors down. Ramen and bubble tea tend to stick together in this world. Inside, the walls were a wavy pattern of purple and orange, with stark white benches and tables in the back. Beside the door was a spreadsheet-like billboard displaying the myriad combinations of fruits, teas, and bubbles available in prominent Chinese characters, and then again in English in a small font underneath. I stared at it with my mouth slightly open and my brow furrowed. I scratched my head. No matter how long I looked, I couldn’t make any sense of it.

“Hard to choose, huh?” Jasmine asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve never actually been to one of these places before.”

“Really? Oh, well, just get something simple. You want something fruity or more tea-y?”

“Tea-y?”

“Like, if you get a milk tea, it’s just milky tea but sweet and with pearls. Or you can get any of these fruits,” she pointed at one section of the billboard, “with either black or green tea. The rest is just specialty stuff you don’t need to worry about.”

I narrowed my focus to the small section she had pointed to. “Alright,” I said. “I think I’ve got it.”

“Cool! I’ll order first.”

It was too loud inside for me to hear the particulars of Jasmine’s order. I went up after her, and asked for a strawberry green tea. The girl behind the counter asked me four questions that I wasn’t prepared for, so I just said no to the first two, and then, feeling bad, yes to the last two. We sat on one of the pristine couches while we waited for our drinks. The store was packed. Most of the clientele were Asian girls in their teens or early twenties, many of them accompanied by boyfriends. The groups of girls chatted excitedly; the couples sat quietly on their phones, sometimes pointing their screen toward the other to show off a picture or a video.

I felt somewhat out of place, and not only because I was the only white person in the store. I felt out of place no matter where I went, as if everyone else had the right to be wherever they were, and I was always intruding. This was true whether I was in a bubble tea shop or just walking down the street in my own neighbourhood. In fact, I had even occasionally felt such a feeling inside my own house. But no one here was looking at me, or noticing me, or telling me to leave. It seemed that with Jasmine beside me I could go anywhere, that her social immunity guaranteed by her self-assurance transferred at least partially to my person. I felt the world slowly opening up, and realized that I too, was just one of many people inside of a bubble-tea shop. “So this is what all the people my age are doing,” I thought. “This is where they all go.”

In time, our drinks were ready, and we burst out of the bustling store into the sunlit streets. “What sort of tea did you get?” I asked.

“Taro root milk tea.”

“I didn’t know such a thing existed.”

“It’s the best! You should try it next time.”

“Is taro root like ginger root or something?”

“No, it’s… like a weird potato. But the drink is sweet and nice. I don’t know how it works.”

I sipped at my strawberry tea, and sucked up a tapioca pearl. “Oh!” I yelped, involuntarily. “That’s fun.”

We crossed an overpass that led to the pier while we talked of school, and graduation, and guesses at our future.

“How long do you have left in school?” she asked.

“Oh man,” I said. “I have no idea right now. It’s become kind of complicated. Maybe two?”

“Did you switch majors or something?”

“Something like that.” The truth was that I had failed out of a semester by means of not leaving my bed for the final month of classes and missing all the drop-out deadlines. With my mom at work all day I had managed to keep up the charade of attendance for a few weeks, before the pressure of the lie reached the point of confining me to complete immobility and muteness around her, at which point I broke down and confessed. She had taken it well, all told, and I had taken a few semesters off before returning the previous Spring.

“How old are you, by the way?” Jasmine asked.

“20. I took a few years off after high school,” I said, always feeling the need to justify why I wasn’t already graduated and pursuing a massively successful and lucrative career.

“Same age as my sister,” Jasmine said, wistfully, as if this was only meant to be heard by the audience, and not me. We had reached the pier, and were leaning against a metal railing, staring out at the river. The river was empty aside from a single tug-boat puttering its way down the other side. We were silent for a little while, listening to the sound of seagulls, automobile traffic, and clattering trains. With Jasmine on my right, I was looking out to my left, still somewhat scared of looking directly at her, in the same way that someone watching a horror movie might focus their attention somewhere off to the side of the screen.

For whatever reason, I found myself fascinated by three bridges, all crossing the river right next to each other. The first was a concrete suspension bridge, with tall diamond-shaped towers that reminded me of a science-fiction temple. Behind it was a bridge with an arced web of steel girders, orange on top and a light blue underneath. But what caught my attention most was a third bridge, laying almost flat against the water. It was really only two-thirds of a bridge, the middle being a narrow boat that could detach itself and rotate in order to let other boats through. When I looked over, it was just manoeuvring itself back into bridge position. I felt the need or desire to say something clever or amusing about this bridge, or at least call attention to it in some way, but words failed me.

Instead, I mentioned that I also had a younger sister.

“Are you guys close?” Jasmine asked.

“I wouldn’t say close, but… Well, maybe we’re close. We’re not like best friends or anything, but we get along.”

“You don’t really strike me as the older brother type, to be honest.”

We sat down on the benches behind us, box-like constructions painted in navy blue, that looked like the result of a dare — “How much money do you think we could spend on a bench that’s both ugly and uncomfortable?” They were objects in the most objective sense of the word.

Jasmine placed her bubble tea beside her, and leaned back on her hands. For the first time, I allowed myself to actually look at her. She seemed poised at the perfect angle for the sun’s light, as if engaged in some sort of beautifying photosynthesis. She reminded me of a painting, or a dream, but more than anything I was impressed by how real she was — that she occupied space and displaced air. I could have leaned over right then and touched her hand, or kissed her. I wasn’t going to, but I could have.

I sat down on the bench beside her. Now that the thought had crossed my mind, I couldn’t get rid of it. I thought of her hands behind me, hands I had already held once before. If then, why not now? I looked over at her. We made eye contact for more than one second. A boat blew its horn. A gull cawed. I looked down at my shoes.

Feeling the silence, I opened my mouth. “That’s a crazy bridge over there, huh?”

7

When I woke up the next morning, I felt transformed. I was now a man who had been on a date. Dating, which had previously existed for me only as an Idea, now took its place in the realm of the concrete. Going to restaurants, sitting at piers, looking at boats and bridges, discussing school and family: all these activities were now part of my internal definition of the word “date.” I spent the day turning the idea around in my head. I, Paul Samson, had gone on a date. I had gone a date, and I had not died. It was almost unbelievable. If I had not been there myself, I would not have believed it.

I didn’t quite know what to do with myself. I kept running through the date in my head, equal parts impressed and embarrassed by what I had said. It had not been a disaster in all the ways I had expected, but neither had it been free of trippings and stumblings. These stung more and more with each remembrance, until the whole experience began to take on a sour taste, and I knew I needed to find something else to think about before I convinced myself to never go outside again. I tried to distract myself with a book, but the author seemed to be talking about love, even when he wasn’t, and every action or object described seemed only to remind me of some aspect of my date. Before I knew it, I was outside, and walking through the forest.

This was always the way with my walks. It was rare that I ever sat down and said to myself, “Let’s go for a walk.” If I did do so, I would generally find some reason not to go: a meal to be eaten, a website to check, a book to read, or a video game to play. My walks had to catch me by surprise, sneaking up behind me and carrying me away, my first awareness of their presence being the thought: “It appears that I am walking.”

It was a beautiful Sunday morning, and the air was filled with golden sunshine. I made my way to Sunnyside Acres, a small urban forest a couple blocks from my home. Bordered on two sides by major streets, the density of trees was such that once inside, one could barely hear the traffic. There was a main trail that formed a loop around the perimeter, but I preferred the smaller trails that cut through the centre. They were less popular, and therefore I was less likely to pass any other people.

The sun passed in and out from behind the leaves as I strode along. In the treetops, invisible birds sang their songs. The trail was narrow and curvy, and the ferns growing along the sides brushed against my legs.

I thought of Jasmine. She was a nice girl, with a beautiful smile and a good spirit. I could tell already that she had the kind of spirit that holds this world together. If someone had asked me why I liked her, rather than a list of attributes or qualities, it was her spirit that I would have pointed to, and I believed that anyone who met her would immediately understand what I meant.

She had listened to the words I said, and heard them. She had smiled at me, and said my name. I liked her a lot. I wanted to love her. I had to actively restrain myself from loving her. It was too early; I didn’t even know much about her. To say I loved her already felt childish, like I didn’t understand that there was more to love than laughing and holding hands. And yet what experience in my life had held as much depth and brilliance as laughing with her, and holding her hand?

Yes, I wanted to love her, and for this reason we can say that I did, in fact, already love her. On my end, the result was decided. However, a unilateral declaration of love is as efficacious as a solitary tango. It was now necessary for Jasmine, somehow and in some way, to fall in love with me, and therein lay the bulk of my trouble.

She had given me her phone number, so that we could communicate outside of the dating app. So far, the extent of our SMS conversation was a “hi” that I had sent during the date in order to confirm I had input the correct digits. The next step was to use this contact information to organize a second date. It would seem that my experience from asking her out on the first date would carry over to asking her out on a second date, but to me it felt like I was starting at square one again.

I wanted to tell her that our first date had been a positive experience, and that I could foresee, perhaps, in the future, the possibility that the two of us could fall in love. ‘Of course, we’re not in love right now’, I would assure her, ‘but the potential is certainly there. Whether the two of us will know when we are in love — or even what mechanisms would allow us to know such information — is difficult to determine, as no songs nor poems spell that out clearly. But at the very least, it would be a shame and a tragedy if we were to let such a potential fall to the wayside. And for that reason, I propose that we embark on a second date.’

So I at least knew what not to write.

I sat down on a bench along the side of the path. I had often sat at this bench and dreamed of meeting a girl on this lonely trail, who would sit down next to me. It felt a perfect spot for sitting together and falling in love. But I had no need anymore for such a fantasy, and in fact the whole idea now seemed silly. What would I say to a girl I met at the park? And who could she possibly be that she would strike my heart more than Jasmine already had?

As I continued on, I returned to the question of how Jasmine could fall in love with me. There was no sense devising tricks or schemes; I had seen enough sitcoms and rom-coms to know that they did more harm than good (even if the couple did often end up together anyway.) There were certainly aspects of myself that I liked, but I struggled to see why anyone else would find in them a reason to love me. There were certainly millions of people out there with similar merits and less egregious faults.

My lifestyle, too, I felt was a major detractor. I rarely did anything exciting, and my hobbies were childish and inane. She would take one look at my life and ask, “What are you doing?” and to that I would have no answer. I spent much of my time distracted by fantasies, idly going about my day without even realizing I was living it. I had no career prospects, no particular skills, no work ethic…

But was love really as arithmetical as all that? Did it follow a formula that collected all these measurable aspects of my life and personality to spit out a verdict: to love me, or love me not? Was there not some magic in it, by means of which someone like her and someone like me might be perfect for each other?

It was nice to think that that might be the case. That she might love the way I dream, and dream with me; that we could slip away into eternity, leaving the world behind, free from eating and sleeping and breathing and working. Just the two of us, complete in each other and in need of nothing else. And I realized that it was no longer Jasmine I was thinking about, really, but just one more Girl of My Dreams.

*

I returned home to find the house smelling of fish. I took off my shoes and wandered into the kitchen. “What’s for dinner?”

“Salmon for me and Jessica; tofu for you,” my mom said.

I went to the living room and lay down on the couch. The ceiling fan was whirring calmly at its lowest setting. I watched it go round and round. At this speed, I could follow the individual blades as they rotated, although doing so made me nauseous. My skin felt hot.

I knew my mom was going to ask me about my date. I didn’t want to talk about it, but if I said I didn’t want to talk about it, it would seem as if it had been bad. I had to develop an attitude that didn’t let on how much I liked Jasmine, but also left open the possibility that I did like her. If I seemed too eager, the inevitable failure of subsequent dates would be all the more embarrassing; and further, my mom would pester me — her way of showing support — to plan a second and third date, an additional pressure that I definitely did not need. On the other hand, if I seemed too disinterested, and then did go on a second or third date, they might think that I’m desperate, going on dates with people I don’t even like.

It all felt just a little bit too complicated. I wished I could keep all my feelings to myself. I didn’t like that people knew things about me. Everyone used the things they knew about me to make judgments and analyze my actions. They developed an idea of me in their head. Every time they thought of me, it was really their idea of me that they were thinking of. I hated that. When I tried to look at myself from others’ point of view, all I saw was a bumbling fool who was also a useless baby. This idea of theirs felt so strong that whenever I thought about it too much, I felt myself acting even more like a bumbling fool and useless baby. It was self-perpetuating, and I couldn’t figure out how to stop it.

The idea that Jasmine might at some point have to meet my family, which had been so exciting in my daydreams, now filled me with dread. It felt impossible; they existed in two completely different worlds, and knew two completely different Pauls. The meeting could only end in catastrophe, like travelling back in time, meeting yourself and causing a time paradox. I imagined a black hole would open up within me as I tried to reconcile the two Pauls I had to be.

“Dinner’s ready. Go grab your sister.” I realized that I had been dozing off, and couldn’t quite remember what I had just been thinking about.

I climbed the stairs and knocked on Jessica’s door. There was no music coming from her room, just the clacking of her keyboard. I knocked on the door again. “Dinner.” I heard an affirmative grunt. As I walked back down the hall, there was one last flurry of typing, and then a squeak as she jumped from her chair and burst through the door behind me. She was wearing a foolish smile. “What’s for dinner?” she said, a little too loudly.

“You’ll see when we get there,” I said.

We sat down for dinner. I ate slowly, my appetite already abandoning me in anticipation of my mom’s questioning.

“So, how was the date, Paul?” she finally asked.

My cheeks instantaneously flushed. “It was alright,” I said. “I had fun.”

“Are you planning on seeing her again?”

“I think so.”

“Good; that’s good.”

Jessica’s knees were bouncing beneath the table as she forked large piles of rice into her mouth at an astonishing rate. So busy was she with this devouring that she had no time to make any comment.

“She goes to your school, right?” my mom said. “What’s she studying?”

“She said she wants to be a social worker,” I said.

“Hmmm,” my mom said, nodding thoughtfully. I began to think that this conversation was equally uncomfortable for all of us, for whatever reason. This wasn’t helped by the evident disinterest emanating from Jessica’s side of the table, for whom it seemed that eating was very much getting in the way of some other thing she wanted to do. She kept glancing at the clock atop the stove, as if counting the seconds.

“What’s the rush with you?” my mom finally asked her.

“No rush. Just hungry,” Jess said, with her mouth full.

“You’re going to choke if you don’t slow down.”

She only had a few forkfuls left, so, in deference to her mother’s wishes, she slowly chewed them four or five times each, before standing up with her mouth still full, placing her plate in the dishwasher, and yelling “Thanks for dinner!” as she vanished up the stairs two steps at a time.

“What’s she up to?” my mom asked me.

“No idea. Maybe she’s playing some game with her friends or something.” We ate a few bites in silence.

“I’m happy your date went well, Paul,” my mom said. “It’s good to see you putting yourself out there.”

“Yeah,” I said, looking down at my food.

“I know it’s not easy for you,” she continued.

Yes, I thought, these things aren’t easy for me. Yes, it’s true that I am incompetent, that I am bad at living, that I have, since the beginning of my adult life, steadily severed any connection I had to the normal, social world. But is it really necessary to praise me every time I perform a basic human function? Can we not pretend for a moment that I am just a normal person going on normal dates, and not some strange creature for whom every attempt to masquerade as human is a herculean effort? I felt condescended to, and, even worse for my pride, I felt that I deserved to be condescended to. I knew she was trying to help. It didn’t help.

I finished my dinner and went upstairs. From Jess’s room across the hall, I could hear her cackling and spinning around in her chair.

*

I dreamt myself on a bench in a park, watching ducks float along the calm surface of a large pond. There were only four ducks in front of me, but I could remember a day, sometime long ago, when there had been more, enough that you could barely see the surface of the water. On the far side of the pond, a woman was playing a djembe drum. The rhythms floating across the pond gave me a sense of inexplicable urgency. I was in a hurry to do something, but I didn’t know what. When Polly sat down on the bench next to me, it occurred to me that I was on a school trip. She was as she had been in high school, long after my crush for her had ended.

“It’s a great beat,” she said, tapping along.

I asked her where everyone else had gone.

“They’re at the water margin,” she said.

I looked around for where that was, but couldn’t see anyone. “Are they coming back this way?”

“They’re not coming back,” she said. “We can go home now. The field trip’s over.”

“Oh.” I thought about which bus or train I would need to take to get home, but I couldn’t figure out where I was. When I looked in one direction, it looked like Sunnyside Acres, but when I looked in another, it looked exactly like the campsite my family used to visit when I was a child.

“I’ve got to go,” Polly said. As she stood up, she added, “I did love you then.” She walked away.

Her words gave me a sense of vindication. They made me realize, all in a moment, that everyone I had ever loved had loved me back, and that if I had only told them of my love, we could have been happy forever. But I felt no regret for all that; I felt only hope for the future. Life felt easy all of a sudden. You love, and you are loved back. And I was in love, I remembered. I was in love with a woman named… Jeremy, or Jacqueline, or something like that.

I stood up, and followed a path into the forest. The edges of the path were cordoned off, and behind the barriers were spectators eagerly watching me walk along, as if I were at the final turn of a marathon. I decided to do a cartwheel, and although I didn’t feel like I pulled it off particularly cleanly, I heard a wave of applause, and as I looked around, everyone was smiling at me.

Further along, I came across Jasmine, who was walking the opposite way. Jasmine! Of course; this was the woman I loved. I needed only to tell her, because she loved me too. But as we came closer, I realized she was walking with another girl, and I became less and less confident. The girl wore an identical blue dress to hers. In fact, they were identical in almost every way, except that this second girl was a little shorter, and her shoes were a different colour.

Jasmine smiled at me as I approached. “Hi, Paul!” she said. “This is my sister. Her name is Jam.”

I looked at Jam, but she just looked down at the ground.

“She’s shy,” Jasmine said.

“I understand,” I said. “Hello, Jam. Nice to meet you.” I put out my hand. She made no response, but continued to look at the ground. Her hair partially hung over her face, but I could tell that she was frowning. I began to feel that she was not shy in the normal way, but instead held a violent antipathy toward everyone, and me in particular.

Jasmine smiled apologetically. The three of us began to walk together, back the way I had come. I wanted to tell Jasmine how I felt, but Jam’s antisocial scowl prevented me from doing so. I could feel the hatred emanating from her, and it felt so unfair and so cruel. I hadn’t done her any wrong, and I had only just recently learned that everyone else loved me. Why did she have to be different? And how was it possible that such a malicious and malevolent being could be related to the charming and radiant Jasmine?

All this confused me so much that I couldn’t think of anything to say, and as I tried to make sense of it all, my mind wandered away from the path and away from the forest, and for a little while it felt as if I was nowhere at all, and soon after that, I was awake in my bed.

8

Jasmine had given me the option to choose the location of our next date. After mulling it over for a while, considering all of the two or three places I knew about, developing arguments and counterarguments for each, I eventually settled on Queen Elizabeth Park, particularly its indoor aviary. It seemed to me that looking at birds together was the perfect way to determine whether we were truly compatible.

Once again, I arrived early. It would have made sense for us to meet at a Metro station and bus together, but the idea of being on public transit with Jasmine and trying to maintain a conversation within that tiny moving room where everyone could hear everything we said terrified me, so I lied and said that I was coming from a different direction. So, I sat waiting alone at the park, sitting on a stone bench near the aviary, a large glass dome that resembled an alien spaceship rising off the ground. It was another bright summer’s day — a Friday, not that it seemed to make any difference to anyone. I had hoped that by choosing to go on a weekday, we would avoid the crowd, but it seemed such rules don’t apply during the summer. There were families abound, with children dawdling around, dripping ice cream on their shirts.

A young couple in front of me were attempting to feed an orange slice to a young child in a stroller. Their backs were toward me, but the child was facing in my direction and staring at me with unflinching eye contact while he failed utterly to get the orange slice into his mouth. He seemed totally disinterested in the orange, slamming it into his face as a matter of form; his real interest being everything else in the entire world. I must admit that I became quite engaged in the whole display, and in fact began to feel a hint of jealousy at the audacity of children, that they can just stare at strangers with an absolutely indecipherable expression and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. And yet it’s not uncomfortable to be stared at in that way, because you can stare right back, and they don’t seem to mind one bit.

So absorbed was I in this strange acquaintance I had made that I failed to notice Jasmine take a seat next to me. When she said hi, I jumped like a frightened animal.

She laughed and put her hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry! I didn’t realize how out of it you were.”

It took me a second to recover from the shock. “It’s okay. I didn’t notice you come up.”

“Yeah, no kidding. You looked like you were in a different world.”

Suddenly, we were on a date. It had happened so quickly that I had no time to be nervous, and I actually felt quite comfortable, as if I was with an old friend.

“Shall we go look at the birds?” I asked.

We crossed the plaza, weaving between groups of people, a few times separating and coming together again. When we came to the glass doors, I held it open for her, and as she walked through she bent down in a subtle curtsy. She looked great, in a white-and-pink striped shirt and a knee-length skirt. And it struck me in a strange way that I was real, and that I was here too, and that in her eyes I was just as much a person as anyone else in this world.

It was humid inside. The man at the counter had a long, curved moustache, and was wearing a heavy metal t-shirt with a bow tie. He handed us each a pamphlet and a checklist for the various species of birds. We passed through a small wooden gate onto an elevated path that travelled the perimeter of the aviary. We leaned against a concrete barrier, and looked out at the environment before us. Tropical trees reached almost to the tessellated glass ceiling, and a cacophony of bird calls filled the air. I could see leaves rustle and branches move, but it was difficult to make out any of the birds from which these calls were coming. “I expected the birds to be a lot easier to see,” I said.

“Yeah!” she laughed. “I thought they’d be flying right into our faces, but I can’t see any of them.”

I looked at my checklist. There were over 40 species of birds listed. “I don’t know how they fit all these in here.”

“Let’s go find out.”

We walked down a few steps to the paved path that made its meandering way through the centre of the simulated jungle. We kept our eyes on the tops of the trees. It became a game between us to try to be the first to point out a bird. I looked down at the checklist, trying to implant in my mind the colours I was looking out for. Looking at the names, I thought of a joke — “That must be a spotted finch,” “Why do you say so?” “Because I spotted it” — and kept it in my back pocket.

Several times the path crossed over a large pond via arched wooden bridges. At the first crossing, we stopped and leaned against the railing, watching koi fish swim about in the still water. “Well, we’ve found fish, at least,” I said.

“It’s a start,” said Jasmine.

I thought I saw a canary in the near distance, and lifted my arm to point at it, but noticed at the last second that it was just a yellowing leaf. Then, Jasmine nudged my shoulder. “Look! Over there!” I followed the direction of her pointed finger, and saw a pudgy green bird with a blue face hopping along the shore. With each hop, it picked up something new from the ground, and after a few moments of hesitation, either ate it or threw it away.

“Nice work,” I said. “I was so busy looking up that I didn’t even think to check the ground.”

“They’re tricky like that,” she said. “Which one do you think it is?”

I opened up the checklist. Jasmine leaned over my shoulder to see the pictures, and I felt her hair fall onto my shoulder. “I think it’s this one,” she said, pointing to the blue-faced parrotfinch. She looked from the picture to the bird, and back again. “Must be.”

“You’re right,” I said, thinking only of the feeling of her hair.

We continued on past the bridge, both of us now spotting bird after bird as our eyes adjusted to the scenery. I liked walking with her; it was much nicer than sitting at the restaurant, where I felt pressure to make eye contact and keep the conversation going. Walking side by side, with much around us to look at, was much better. I felt, as we continued along, that she was growing ever more real, shedding the fanciful characteristics I had attributed to her in my imagination. For one, she was several inches shorter than me, a height much less imposing than her towering presence in my daydreams. In my mind, she had had the wisdom of the ancients and had unlocked the secrets of the universe; in reality, she was a normal girl, and as we spoke I realized that there were even things about this world that I knew and she did not. This diminishing of her grandeur only heightened her esteem in my eyes.

It was a nostalgic feeling. I was reminded of the simplicity of it all; I realized that I had made everything much more complicated than it truly was. I had turned everyone into giants, and imagined myself as small as an ant; I had conceived of dating as a web of formulae and algorithmic decisions, a complex semiotic system it was too late for me to learn, when in truth it was as simple as it had been in elementary school — it was as simple as walking in the park, laughing together, and holding hands.

Of course, we weren’t quite holding hands; besides the obvious reasons of shyness and embarrassment, my palms were simply far too sweaty.

We sat down at a bench at the far end of the aviary, near a post on which two macaws were hunched together. They looked like two near-sighted and slightly disoriented old ladies, harshly casting judgment on all around them, if only because they had nothing better to do. Jasmine joked that they reminded her of a couple regular customers at the café she used to work at.

We talked about how my school was going, and she told me about a friend of hers who was leaving to teach English in Korea. “But you didn’t want to teach, right?” she asked me.

“Not at all,” I said. “I’d prefer a job where I don’t have to see anyone at all. Not sure how many of those there are out there, though. Especially not for people with English degrees.”

“Maybe you could get into publishing? Or marketing or something?”

I was trying to think of a way to reject those ideas without being mean or making myself seem difficult, when a bright-yellow finch landed on a branch just above Jasmine’s shoulder, and chirped. She looked back, and raised her arm as if to comfort it. It stared at her hand, poked its head forward, and then flew off, startling us both.

“Funny creatures,” she said.

“Absolutely,” I agreed.

“What a nice place, huh? Have you been here before?”“No, this is my first time. I’ve wanted to come for a while though, but I guess I never bothered to come all this way by myself.”

“It’s nicer with someone else,” she said. “When I’m alone, I don’t feel like I can truly appreciate places like this. But you said on your profile you like to walk a lot, right? You said, ‘I like to walk a lot and go on little adventures.’ Whereabouts do you walk?”

The modifier “a lot” had been something of a deliberate exaggeration, inserted so that potential dates wouldn’t wonder too much about what I did all day, since I hadn’t listed any other hobbies. It was true in the sense that when I did walk, I walked too much, as evidenced by the bus incident. But I definitely didn’t make a regular habit of walking. And as for the ‘little adventures’ part — well, they were little, at least.

“Oh, just around,” I said. “There’s a forest near my house, and sometimes I drive down to the beach or something. There are advantages to walking alone. You can be a bit more impulsive, stopping or turning wherever you like according to your fancy. Sometimes I just like to stop and stare at a particular tree or something; like, for some reason a tree will just completely fascinate me, and if there was someone with me, I wouldn’t be able to come up with any good reason why I find it so interesting.”

“I suppose.” She re-adjusted her sitting position. “But even if you can’t explain it, it’s nice to share it with someone, right? I just find everything feels a little less real when I can’t share it with someone — if it’s just in my head. Like when we find a bird here, I can point it out to you, and then you see it too, and now we share that memory. If I went home and told someone about the bird, even if I described all its features, they still wouldn’t really know what I was talking about. They wouldn’t have experienced it. It would make me feel a little lonely, to be honest. But I can say to you, ‘Hey, remember that yellow bird we saw?’ and you’d know exactly what I’m talking about, and we could laugh about it.”

“I guess I’ve always thought of it the opposite way. Everything feels more real to me when I’m alone.”

She laughed. “I suppose it would be best to be somewhere in the middle, huh? I sometimes wish I could be more independent, or more comfortable alone, I guess. I get a bit restless when I spend time by myself, which probably isn’t a good thing.”

“Well, I wish I was better around other people, so…” I didn’t finish the sentence.

“Shall we get going?” Jasmine pointed at a white cockatoo on the pamphlet. “I wanna see this guy.”

*

Outside the aviary, we stopped and bought lunch from a stand in the plaza. I got a veggie dog, and Jasmine went for a chili dog. The ketchup dispenser was more sensitive than I expected, and I ended up with a precarious amount of ketchup on my hot dog, which I immediately spilled on to my shorts. I tried to stealthily clean it up with a napkin while Jasmine was turned away, but just ended up spreading it out into a larger red smudge, which she thankfully at least pretended not to notice. But things didn’t get much better from there, and despite my best efforts, by the end of my lunch my face bore a striking resemblance to the toddler after his battle with the orange slice.

I had never before known that there existed an elegant way to eat a chili dog, but Jasmine managed to eat hers with nary a drop seeming to touch even her lips, although she followed each bite with a perfunctory napkin wipe anyway. I began to wonder how I had made it this far in life without mastering something as basic as eating; my ineptitude in this matter had never occurred to me before, and it seemed far too late now to do anything about it.

After I had gone to the bathroom and washed my face, noticing in the mirror a spot of red near my left ear that seemed impossible, we descended the hill toward the park’s famous gardens.

To our left, a waterfall crashed down a into a stream that gently flowed between beds of tulips, daisies, and all manner of other flowers whose names I will never know or remember, all organized into picturesque configurations as meticulous and extravagant as Kubla Khan’s stately pleasure-dome. The grass was green and manicured, the soil dark and uniform, and the air was replete with the richness of summer. I became carried away by the atmosphere, and neither of us said anything for a while.

Jasmine broke the silence. “Am I the first person you’ve met from the site?”

“Yeah. How about you?”

“I’ve gone on a few dates. This is my first second date, though. I mean, the first time I’ve been on a second date with someone.”

“Ah.”

“It’s kinda crazy,” she continued. “All this online dating. There’s just so many people out there, and everyone has such confusing expectations. The first few people I met were… not what I expected.”

“To be honest,” I said. “I feel I’ve been doing the whole thing completely wrong. I can’t tell exactly what I’m doing wrong, but there’s definitely something. You’re the first person I messaged who replied, and it kind of felt like cheating, since we’d met before. Like I gamed the system, or something.”

She laughed. “I don’t think anyone knows how to do it right. Or even if there is a way to do it right. But, and maybe this is a weird question, I was sort of wondering why you signed up in the first place? I mean, you seem to like being alone quite a bit…”

“It’s a bit lonely being alone all the time,” I said. “I kinda wanted to find out what other people were up to. And get myself out of the house a bit.”

“So, like, looking for friends? Or?”

I blushed. “Well. Just… No, like, finding a person and, you know, dating.”

“Right, sorry, stupid question. We’re on a date right now.”

“I sure thought we were.”

“We are! We are.” We walked a few steps in silence. “It feels like everyone has such different expectations that it’s hard sometimes to figure out where you are with someone. So I just wanted it out in the open. This may be kind of up-front, or maybe not, but I am looking for something long-term. I don’t want to get into one of those relationships where people pretend they’re not in a relationship, or something like that.”

I was reminded of the confused hesitation I felt when asking her out to a second date. That feeling of trying to talk about the possibility of falling in love without confirming or denying the feelings that you don’t even know if you have. I struggled to come up with words in response. “I… That’s what I’m looking for too. Something long term. It’s not that easy for me to— ” I waved my hands in front of me as I tried to find the words, “—open up to people. Or be comfortable with people. Well, but I feel pretty comfortable with you already.”

“Good! Sorry, I’m making things a bit awkward, I think.”

“No, it’s fine.”

It struck me, as I said the words, how comfortable I really was with her, how much I had been able to open up over the course of only a few hours spent together. It was strange too how much she seemed to understand me, when I considered myself incomprehensible. But, I reckoned to myself, she still didn’t know the half of it yet. I was putting on a show, to an extent; there was still a darker and stranger side to my life that she knew nothing about.

It wasn’t until after the date, on the bus ride home, that I began to think of all that still needed to be revealed to her. And it became clearer as the night grew darker that at some point she would find about my black-hole of a future, my periodical months of total shutdown, my academic failures, my fear of all and everything, my laziness, my idiocy — everything that I felt made me truly me, and what had kept me all this time from unleashing myself upon the world. And I felt that once she knew all this, she would surely turn away, and curse me for inviting her into the mess that was my life. She wouldn’t understand any of it, of course. She would call me a fool, and a coward, and she would ask me ‘What are you doing with your life? Why are you here?’ and I’d have no answer for that at all.

But as I was thinking all this, a more hopeful chain of thoughts ran parallel, somewhere deep in my mind: a little voice kept repeating, “But perhaps… But perhaps…” But perhaps she would understand it all; perhaps she could love the way I fear the world, and little by little, help pull me out myself and into someone new; and perhaps we could even disappear from this world altogether, this world of breathing and sleeping and eating, this world of fear and hate and misunderstandings, this world of time and space and contingency, and slip into eternity together, hand in hand and arm in arm, floating on a cloud and skipping across the sun, and…

I had fallen asleep, and into dreams.

9

Jasmine and I were on our third date, walking along a trail in Sunnyside Acres. We had been walking for a long while and had just reached the furthest end of the loop and turned back toward my home. The birds were singing their pretty songs, and there was music in the air.

“I have an uncle who lives around here,” Jasmine said, looking around at the trees.

“Ah,” I replied.

I realized that we were holding hands. I hadn’t noticed when we started; I only noticed now. My hands weren’t as sweaty as I supposed they would be. In fact, they were a little cold. I felt that I was holding her hand but, at the same time, I wasn’t.

There weren’t any other people on the trail, and even though we were near the edge of the park where one would usually hear the faint hum of traffic, I didn’t hear a single engine. The sky beyond the treetops was cloudless, with an unnatural tinge to its blue that made me wonder. But why wonder?

Jasmine was telling me about a movie, or TV show, or book, about a robot who was trying to become human. I could picture it all quite vividly as she said it, watching the robot move around, but also sometimes I was the robot, myself. The robot lived in a small town, where everyone was suspicious of him. There was only one family that liked and cared for him, particularly a young girl who didn’t get along with the rest of the kids at school. Jasmine said that she felt sorry for the robot, and I did too, and I wanted to help the robot somehow.

“I’ll show you a picture,” Jasmine said, and we sat on a bench so that she could pull out her phone. She held the phone out in front of me. The image on the screen was of a gecko crawling up a leaf. The gecko was white, with black spots and large yellow eyes. I tried to tap the screen, maybe to zoom in, but my tap made the gecko disappear. I took the phone from her and tried to find the gecko again, but before I knew it, we had reached my house, and were walking up the stairs.

We entered my bedroom. Jasmine sat down on my bed. I couldn’t decide whether to sit with her or not. I wanted to, but something held me back, like my legs were stuck in the ground, so I ended up falling over onto my computer chair. I spun around in it a few times. I had the unnerving feeling that someone was outside the door, listening in. It wasn’t Jessica, and it wasn’t my mom. Whoever it was, they were waiting in case something happened, at which point they would burst in and stop everything. I was afraid of them, a little bit.

There was a map of the world hanging on the wall beside my bed, and I wanted to find Italy and point it out to Jasmine, in order to answer some question she had asked a long time ago, but I couldn’t find it. It wasn’t where it was supposed to be. I kept following the coastline of the Mediterranean, but Italy never showed up. Was I wrong? Was it near India? Australia, maybe?

Jasmine was growing impatient, so I gave up. I sat down on the bed next to her. We were both looking at a cardboard box in the corner of my room, near the door. It was the size of a microwave, and looked as if the top had been hastily taped shut.

“Did you move recently?” Jasmine asked.

“It’s… old papers,” I said. “There’s just a lot of papers in there.” I didn’t actually know what was in the box, but old papers seemed as likely as anything else.

I thought that I should kiss Jasmine, because she was there on my bed, and had sat down there so that I could kiss her. So I kissed her. It felt kind of like kissing a ghost, and I could tell that whoever was outside the door was watching us. I couldn’t quite tell where my arms were.

*

Years later, I was sitting alone in our apartment. I was on a low sofa, so low that it was only inches from the floor, in front of a TV so large that it took up almost the entire wall. The room had hardwood floors and a large window through which I could see that it was pitch black outside. Jasmine was asleep in the bedroom down the hall, and I was watching a movie.

Before I knew it, everything in the movie began to explode. The volume was set so loud that the floor began to rumble and shake, and I was sure it would wake everyone in the building. I reached for the remote, but none of the buttons seemed to do anything. I stood up and wandered around the room, the floor shifting underneath me. Feeling around the wall, I came across a light switch. I flicked it. I flicked it again. Nothing happened.

I left the room and entered the hallway, sounds still blaring from the television. The whole building was shifting from side to side. I wanted to reach Jasmine, to apologize and to ask for help. Leaning against the wall for support, I struggled my way down the hallway. As I neared the bedroom, the wall crumbled beneath my weight, and I began to fall.

I woke with a start. Jasmine turned to me. “Are you alright?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Bad dream.”

Our bedroom was aglow with faint orange light from a streetlight outside the window. The bedroom door was open, and I could see out into the hallway. There was nothing out there but an abyss of pure darkness. As I watched, it seemed to emanate from the hallway and inch its way into the room. There was something hiding in it — something hiding in the darkness, coming toward us, reaching into the bed, trying to get at me. I shook Jasmine’s shoulder.

“What are you doing?” she said, not looking up.

“I don’t know what’s in the hallway,” I said. “I don’t know what’s out there.”

She turned to me with an indescribable look. I felt like I could see right through her, like she was empty, as if whatever had been her soul had been hollowed out. It was a look of total non-existence. And I realized that she was not Jasmine, that she was not anyone, that the last few years of my life had never happened and I didn’t live here. And because I couldn’t tell where I lived, I felt for a second that I didn’t live anywhere, and that while what was happening here definitely wasn’t real, I couldn’t remember anything that was real, and I felt that there was nowhere else I could go. I backed up toward the window as the darkness rushed toward me and I opened my mouth to scream but only a hoarse gasp escaped, and then a muffled moan, as if the sounds I was making were escaping into a different world. I pushed and pushed the air from my lungs, hoping that something might happen, that anything might happen, but for several terrifying and incomprehensible seconds nothing happened at all. The darkness reached me, and absorbed me within it, the whole universe shattering and collapsing around me in a never-ending whirlwind of psychotic chaos. Suddenly, my body lurched forward.

*

I woke up gasping for breath. It only took a few seconds for it to become clear to me that I had woken up in the right world this time. While the bedroom in the dark apartment had felt real in the moment, there is a sort of transcendent reality to the real world that distinguishes it from even the most convincing dreamworld. I was awake. I was alive.

Looking at my phone, I found that I had only been asleep for an hour, and it was still the middle of the night. I peeked around my curtains and looked out at the street. It was dark and empty, but at least visible and stable. As a final confirmation, I scrolled through my messages with Jasmine. She was real, too. I sifted through my memories of her, separating the real events from the phantoms. I tried to picture Jasmine as she had been the previous day at the park, but the details of her face escaped me. I couldn’t even remember the colour of her eyes. This was always the way with the girls I liked: it was impossible for me to capture their face in a single mental snapshot, for what I had fallen in love with was their face in motion, each movement imbued with the totality of their personality. In photographs, they always looked wrong to me; it was as if I was seeing them through someone’s else’s eyes, someone who didn’t care for them at all and to whom they were just some girl.

I took a drink from the glass of water on my bedside table, but it had turned stale and warm in the night. I creaked open my bedroom door and stepped into the silent house. A light was emanating from Jessica’s room, blanketing a section of the hallway. Her door was ajar, and I could see that her computer screen was on, but she wasn’t at her desk, and the sheets on her bed were all piled in a corner. As I descended the stairs, I saw that there was a light on in the dining room. I wasn’t afraid, but everything still felt a little eerie. I was most of the way sure that I was awake, but until I saw another person I couldn’t be absolutely sure. I had that late-night sense that the world may have stopped while I was asleep, and that I might be the only person left on Earth.

Jessica was sitting at the table, lit up by the chandelier above as if by a spotlight. She was resting her head on her elbows, looking half-asleep with a newspaper spread out before her. I went to the sink and re-filled my glass. I leaned against the counter, and said in a quiet voice, “Hey.”

“Yo.” She did not look up.

“What are you up to?”

“Doing the crossword.” She had only filled in a few haphazard squares scattered across the board.

“Can’t sleep?”

“Nope.” There was something in her voice that seemed a little different than mere sleepiness.

“How’s the crossword going?”

“I need a court legend named Arthur,” she said, as if that was the only clue holding her back. “Does it mean, like, King Arthur? Does he have a last name?”

“No, it’s Ashe. Arthur Ashe. He’s a tennis player.”

“But it needs to be four letters.”

“A-S-H-E,” I said.

She wrote it in, then stared at what she had written for a few seconds. “Ahhh,” she said. “I get it.” She focused her attention on the crosses, twirling her pencil in her hand.

I stayed at the counter. I had a feeling that something was wrong. Doing the crossword at all was not normal Jess behaviour. The fact that she was doing it at one in the morning was only natural; she was regularly up late doing all sorts of things. But most of these were done in her bedroom on her computer. There was definitely something off about her being down here.

I felt my responsibility as an older brother. I didn’t feel this often, as Jessica usually acted toward me as if she didn’t know that I was the older sibling. As such, I didn’t quite know what to say or do. Perhaps she didn’t want to tell me about whatever was bothering her. I certainly didn’t want to ask. It felt wrong to walk away and leave her, but on the other hand, how was I supposed to help? I wasn’t exactly bursting at the seams with sage wisdom. I felt that I could barely figure out my own life.

So I just stood there, watching from behind as she filled in a few more letters. It would have been a great relief for me to walk away. But had I done so, the guilt would have kept me up all night, so I sat down across from her at the table. She looked up at me momentarily. This was going to be uncomfortable for both of us.

I drummed my fingers on the edge of the table. “You tired?” I asked.

“Not really.”

“Anything going on?”

“Not really.” She was not making this any easier. Her reticence surprised me; usually, she was forthright to a fault.

We sat in silence for a few moments.

“I really don’t get crosswords,” she said. “I’ve been out here for like half an hour, and haven’t got anywhere.” She sighed, and then asked, “How are things going with your dates?”

“Oh, it’s alright,” I said, taken aback by the question.

“Is she your girlfriend now?”

“Jasmine? Uh, not really. We’re just going on dates right now.”

“Do you want her to be?”

“Yeah, I think so. But I think we’re going to take our time. I want to get to know her properly.”

“So, it’s not like love at first sight or anything like that then? You don’t feel like you’re going crazy always thinking about her?”

“Not quite. I mean, maybe I’m going crazy.” I thought of my dreams. “But I’m trying not to move too quickly. I don’t want to scare her off.”

“It’s complicated, isn’t it?” she said, but didn’t wait for an answer. “It’s like, you can’t tell what the other person’s feeling. You think they like you, but how can you know for sure? It’s like, one day it seems 100% certain, and then the next day you think that maybe you’ve got it all wrong and you’re just friends, or they don’t even like you at all.”

“Yeah. It’s tough. But I didn’t think you were the type to worry about that sort of stuff so much.”

“Usually I don’t! It’s so weird. It’s like there’s this gnawing feeling in my gut. Just all the time. Like, ‘rrrrr.’” She scrunched her hand into a fist, I suppose to represent the knot in her stomach. “Rrrrr,” she said, again.

“I know that feeling,” I said. “That anticipation. It’s like you feel like you should be doing something, but you’re not quite sure what it is. But also you know that you can’t do anything; you just have to wait for events to unfold.”

“Bwah,” she said. “It sucks. We’ve been talking non-stop for like three days now. He wouldn’t do that if he didn’t like me, right?”

“Probably not.”

“Very re-assuring.”

“I mean, I don’t know any of the details of what you’re talking about, but he probably likes you. If I had to guess.”

“Thanks,” she said. “For some reason, it kind of helps to hear you say that.”

“No problem.”

“I hope it works out for you, too. Maybe it’s different because you’re older and weirder, but three dates seems like there must be something going on.”

I laughed. “It’s only been two dates, but I guess so.”

“I’m gonna try to sleep again,” she said. She slid the crossword over to me. “You want to finish this?”

“Sure, why not.”

She got up, and I heard the stairs creak beneath her. I settled down in the chair, and started mechanically filling in clues.

10

The next day, I planned a date with Jasmine for later that week. I felt assured — I felt that, in due time, sooner rather than later, these dates would morph into a relationship. I had no clear idea of how exactly that was going to happen, or what my role in all of it was; in fact, it almost seemed to me that I wouldn’t have to do anything at all, that it would just happen of itself. After a certain amount of dates, it seemed to me, a relationship became inevitable.

This was to be our third date. I kept thinking of the expression “Three’s company, four’s a crowd,” but couldn’t quite figure out how it applied to the present situation. Jasmine was busy with something, so the only time we could meet was after my classes during the week. It wasn’t ideal — usually, after classes I just wanted to get home as soon as possible — but I figured it was better than waiting a whole week without seeing each other. More so than my desire to see her, I was worried that a week was enough time for her to start wondering why she liked me and maybe realize that she never liked me at all. I couldn’t allow that to happen.

I woke up to find it a grey and dreary sort of summer day, ambiguously perched between shorts and pants weather. I opted for pants, remembering the intensity of the school’s air conditioning, and taking the chance that it wouldn’t heat up too much in the afternoon. I was always worried about sweating, as if I was the only person who ever did it, and if anybody found out they would never forgive me. Sweating before a date seemed the worst scenario I could imagine.

I couldn’t focus on my lectures at school that day. I wasn’t thinking about my date later that afternoon, exactly. I was thinking about the fact that I had a date later that afternoon. By which I mean that I wasn’t thinking about what the date would be like, or what I might say, or anything like that, but was just repeatedly thinking the phrase “I have a date later this afternoon.” I wanted not to think of the date at all, but there was nothing else really for me to think about, so my thoughts were left cautiously circling the date like a curious but timid dog around a new friend.

Eventually, my classes came to an end as they somehow always managed to do. I got on the bus and made my way to the nearby café where we were meeting. The sun was out, and it was hot in the bus. I started to sweat.

As I predicted, I was completely drained of energy. I felt that I had already lived through the trouble of three or four dates, without any of the corresponding fun or satisfaction. To part of me, the date had become a burden, just another thing I had to do before I could go home and lie in my bed forever.

Jasmine was already waiting at a table when I arrived. She was sipping at a latte and scrolling through her phone. I said hi, and then went and ordered myself a chai tea. The aroma of the tea comforted me, and I felt this funny feeling, like I could just relax and be myself and everything would turn out alright. This feeling went against every one of my instincts, but I couldn’t fight it.

I sat down, buoyed by this strange feeling. Jasmine looked a little tired and distracted, and the conversation got off to a sputtering start. We talked about my classes that day, and I told her how the droning lectures of my Modern East Asian History course felt like being in an incredibly slow-moving tumble dryer; but when I tried to explain the analogy, I got a bit lost and couldn’t quite bring it all together. “What I mean is that they take forever,” I said.

“Mmm,” she replied. We looked at each other, and then down at our drinks, and then I started looking out the window. I tried to think of something else to say, but some force prevented me. It started to seem that neither of us were quite sure why we had come. With every second that went by, the silence became more and more powerful, until it felt like the only way I could break it was to say something truly monumental. But as the silence grew stronger, I became weaker; my mouth started to dry out, and I couldn’t even think in complete sentences, let alone speak any. I felt that if I let a few more seconds pass, I might never be able to speak again. And then I let the seconds passed. I watched pedestrians pass by the window outside, like a prisoner watches birds in the sky, as beacons of a freedom I could never again attain.

Finally, just as I was contemplating flinging my body desperately through the glass, Jasmine broke the silence. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m a bit tired.”

“Me too,” I said.

We looked at each other again, and she smiled, but we couldn’t just sit there smiling at each other forever, so after a few seconds we stopped smiling, and were just staring at each other blankly.

“What are you drinking?” she asked.

“Chai tea,” I said.

“Ah.” She nodded slowly, as if my answer was deeply profound.

I nodded too, and took a sip. “It’s good,” I said.

She kept nodding, and then laughed. “Gosh, I feel like my brain is broken,” she said. “I can’t think of anything to talk about.”

“Me neither.”

“There’s got to be something…” We spent half an hour trying out several different topics, none of which went very far. We turned it into a sort of game, taking turns to think of something we might want to ask each other. It wasn’t a natural flowing conversation, and it wasn’t particularly informative or interesting, but nevertheless it was our most enjoyable conversation yet. We made each other laugh by coming up with ever more mundane topics, like what time we woke up, in what order we cleaned our teeth, and what we ate for breakfast. In the end, I stymied her by asking how many cheerios she had poured into her cereal bowl.

“This must sound like the worst date ever,” Jasmine said, looking at the tables around us.

I had forgotten we were in public.

“Is there anywhere you want to go this summer?” she asked. “I’ve got an exam to study for next weekend, but maybe the weekend after?”

“Have you heard of the Sun Yat-Sen Gardens downtown? Maybe we could go there.”

“Oh, I’ve heard of it, but never been. It sounds nice.”

“I was just learning about him in class today, and the teacher mentioned the gardens. Some sort of classical scholarly Chinese garden. I’ve known about it for a while, but I’ve never bothered to go.”

“Sounds great,” she said. “Let’s do it.”

We both agreed to get some rest and store up energy for the next date, and promised to come armed with interesting things to talk about. Outside of the café, as we were both about to head in different direction, we stood facing each other, and once again I felt that impulsive desire to kiss her right then and there. But we were on the sidewalk of a busy street. Next time, I thought.

*

But next time was a ways away. Almost two weeks lay between now and then, a length of time that felt as agonizing as the two weeks of winter holidays prior to Christmas were as a child. It was clear to me now that I was in love with Jasmine. All that had before seemed insurmountable now felt irrelevant; every worry and insecurity that had plagued my previous considerations of love no longer mattered at all. I had been only myself, and Jasmine liked me anyway. I had no future or money or charm, and Jasmine liked me anyway. She hadn’t tried even once to poke at my insecurities, or interrogate me regarding my many failings; in short, she hadn’t acted at all like the enemies I imagined for myself.

It all seemed so easy! Too easy, almost. I had found love on my first try, my first foray into the dating world. I hadn’t had to live through the years of rejection that so-called “motivational speakers” prepared me for in their speeches that had paradoxically sent me further and further into my shell. I hadn’t had to change everything about myself, or even learn to love myself, or anything like that. In fact, I had barely done anything at all. Love had just fallen into my lap, almost like a dream.

I thought of Jessica and her boyfriend-to-be. I thought of her anxieties and worries and they all felt so silly to me now. Of course he was in love with her! How could it be otherwise? Everyone was in love with everyone, and all love was magical, and faultless, and invincible. There was no stronger force in the universe.

For the next few days, I looked at everyone I met with new eyes. I walked past students in the halls and thought, “Someday, someone will love you! You will find the love of your dreams!” I watched couples sit together at benches and tables and felt a kinship with them; I wanted to walk up to them and say, “I understand you exactly!” I loved everyone, but of course no one could even hold a candle to Jasmine; the thought was so absurd that it never even crossed my mind. Jasmine existed in a whole other realm from regular people, like an angel or a demi-god.

It was on a bus home from school later that week that I encountered, to my surprise, the Girl of My Dreams. I noticed when I first got on the bus a woman wearing light pink pyjamas, a fuzzy pink bathrobe, and blue slippers. She had straight black hair that fell to her lap, and a face liberally covered in concealer that failed to hide her acne. Her hands were clasped on her lap, and her head was tilted slightly toward her right shoulder. She was asleep. It looked to me like she had stepped on to this bus with the express purpose of falling asleep.

This girl was not the Girl of My Dreams, of course. But as I sat a few rows back, wondering at her, I started to imagine her dreams. What could someone who treats the bus as her bed dream about? And as I wondered, I felt that I could see her dream. She was on a beach in the twilight of a summer evening, still in her pyjamas and bathrobe. She had kicked off her slippers, and was digging at the sand with her toes. The waves were gently washing up just inches from her feet. She was looking out onto the water. There were two people out there, about half a mile into the ocean, standing up to their hips. One of them was the Girl of My Dreams. The other was me.

I saw myself through the eyes of the woman on the beach, and then I was me, the waves tickling my waist and the wind coolly kissing the water on my arms. The Girl of My Dreams was telling me a story about a house whose roof had walked away. It was hard to follow. Her sentences didn’t seem to connect to each other. She paused at the end of a long sentence that hadn’t contained a single verb. I had been looking out at the clouds. “Paul,” she said.

I looked at her. Her eyes were shining.

“I know about Jasmine,” she said.

I opened my mouth and realized I could speak. “There’s some sort of secret,” I said. “I know about it.”

I saw in my mind’s eye some sort of Jasmine. It looked like her, but it wasn’t her, but it also was. In her eyes was some sense of soulless malice, like there was a heart in there but it hadn’t been allowed to grow. It was the Jasmine I knew, but she was hunched over. She didn’t know I could see her.

The Girl of My Dreams calmly stepped closer. “I’m sorry,” she said.

I turned away. I could still see Jasmine, except now she had turned and she knew I was watching her. She started to laugh. She stood up and put her hands on my head, then on my shoulders, and then she kissed me. Her kiss told me that this kiss wasn’t true, and that she wasn’t kissing me, and that there was some great lie within her that I couldn’t quite figure out. I didn’t trust her anymore, and she even scared me, because I wasn’t sure what she would do or what she could do. No, I couldn’t trust her at all. She wasn’t Jasmine, and she wasn’t anyone.

I tried to open my eyes, but the Girl of My Dreams caught me in her arms. “Jam,” I said, remembering her name.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

I struggled to understand. I was crying. I was utterly disconsolate. Something had been revealed to me, and it had destroyed my world. I tried to fall into the water and die, but Jam held me up. “I’m dead,” I said.

“You’ll come back,” she said.

“I’m dead,” I repeated, annoyed that she couldn’t understand what I was telling her. I meant that I was dead. I was lost in this unfamiliar beach, and there was nowhere and no reason for me to go. I couldn’t move any part of my body. There was simply no energy. And so I started to sink.

I woke with a start, glad there was no one in the seat next to me. I looked around to see if anyone had noticed me, and hoped I hadn’t been moaning or doing anything strange in my sleep. The girl in the bathrobe was awake now, too, and looking at her phone. She pulled the cord, and the bus stopped. She got off.

I couldn’t remember the dream exactly, but all of my muscles ached, and I felt the world had changed a little in my absence.

11

The day was already halfway through beginning when I woke up the next morning. I had slept, somehow, for thirteen hours, yet when I woke up it seemed that no time had passed at all. I slipped on my dressing gown and wandered into the kitchen, where I found Jessica already fully dressed and eating a bowl of cereal. “Going somewhere today?” I asked.

“Already been somewhere,” she replied, with her mouth full. “There’s a whole world out there while you’re asleep.”

“Never occurred to me.” I poured myself a glass of water and looked out into the backyard. The sun was fully up and out. “Where’d you go?”

She didn’t say anything, so I looked back at her. She had a stupid-looking grin on her face, as if she wanted to tell me something and not at the same time. “I met up with Tim,” she said.

“Who’s Tim?” As soon as I said it, I realized who Tim was.

Jessica looked at me like she didn’t understand the question. Tim had become as central a figure in her life as her own self, if not more so. The realization that there existed a person on Earth who might not know of Tim took some time for her to get used to.

“Ah, Tim,” I said. “That’s the guy you like, right?”

“As of today, he’s my boyfriend,” she said, unable to contain her beaming smile. “We were up all night last night talking. He had to leave for a trip with his family today, but we met up real early before he left. It was so funny. We just looked at each other and started laughing.”

I nodded.

“Love,” she said, with a sigh. “It’s the real deal, Paul. You’ve gotta ask that Jasmine girl to be your girlfriend. It’s that time of the year; love is in the air.”

“I’ll think about it,” I said.

Jessica’s phone vibrated, and she began to text furiously. I poured myself a bowl of cereal, and began to wonder about Tim. He must have been the guy at the beach the other week. I hadn’t liked the look of him. This wasn’t because of anything particular to him, but just because of the fact that he was a teenage boy. I knew how stupid teenage boys could be; I knew, because I had been the stupidest of all of them. They were always putting on airs, and clumsily struggling to keep them up. I felt, now, that I could see right through them. I supposed that Jessica couldn’t.

What could a boy like Tim know about love? And further, what could Jess know? I thought of myself at that age, and the ridiculous sorts of ideas I had entertained. I thought of my crushes and my dreams, and deemed them scoff-worthy.

What had changed? The question popped into my head as I crunched my cereal. What, if anything, was different about Jasmine and I? I tried to ignore this train of thought — I had been doing so well recently at not thinking about such things — but it was a thought that could not be un-thought. I claimed, at least to myself, to have fallen in love. So what, exactly, did I mean by that?

Love, real love, to me implied a certain level of sophistication. It implied a mutual adoration between two parties, based on a foundation of knowledge regarding their personality and lifestyle. Love was a decision two people made when they realized that they were the right person for each other via a series of unspoken tests and examinations.

This was one of my definitions of love. It wasn’t comprehensive; most notably, the question of what determines whether someone is the “right person” or not is left unaddressed. This was troubling, because in order to allow myself to truly fall in love with Jasmine — true love being different from mere infatuation — I had to, first, determine that she was the “right person” for me. All previous attempts at conceptualizing a “right person” for me, via a careful analysis of my personality and lifestyle, had left me with the suspicion that such a person did not, and in fact could not, exist.

Further, in my darker moments, I often wondered whether such a person exists for anyone. In my life, I had seen many relationships fall apart, from high school friends to cousins to my own mom and dad. In those cases, everything had seemed fine and dandy, until one day it wasn’t. Later, I would find out that in fact nothing had ever been fine and dandy, or at least, not for a while, and that the whole thing had been one gigantic struggle, which everyone was much better off now for it all being over. This led me to wonder, lengthily and seriously, whether this love business was worth getting into after all.

For a time, my image of every romantic couple had been a pair of jigsaw puzzle pieces that look like they probably fit together, but when you actually try to attach them it feels kind of awkward and wrong, and takes a bit more force than you’d expect. Then, when you lean back and look properly, you realize that the sides aren’t actually aligned, despite the tab fitting properly into the hole. And so you try to take them apart again, but that too feels awkward and forced because they’re stuck together now in this strange, improper, and unsustainable embrace.

And yet, there remained a less logical but far more powerful conception of love in my mind: love as a kind of magic. This was the kind of love I read about in books and saw on TV. This was the kind of love that appears in an instant, and in that instant overwrites every feeling that had come before. This was the kind of love that caused two characters with nothing in common and in fact mutually antagonistic personalities and worldviews to seem like they were “fighting against the odds” and “embracing the true power of love.”

This latter was the kind of love I had always hoped for and dreamed of — the kind that seemed to exist in a realm outside and independent of this worldly world. The kind that would pull me out of this dreary life of mine, that wouldn’t have to interface with my boring habits or uneventful daily routine, but would wipe all that away and allow me to start anew. The kind of love that would let me become that different and better person I always imagined I could be.

Was such a love possible? And was Jasmine the girl who could make it all happen?

*

The Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden had come to symbolize that idealistic love and that newer, better me. I had never visited it before — I had only seen it in passing — and knew little of its actual contents. I knew of Sun Yat-Sen himself in only a cursory sense, and had little historical context for the concept of a Classical Chinese Garden. I filled in the blanks of my knowledge with fantasy.

So many of my hopes and goals required there to be some other world waiting for me with some other life. I felt I had exhausted the possibilities of my own character and my own situation. I had dug myself into a hole, and saw no means of escape.

Like many lonely people, I liked to believe that my loneliness and reclusiveness served some higher purpose. I felt that in another world, I could have been an esteemed scholar. I couldn’t tell why exactly this wasn’t possible in this world, but I was sure it wasn’t. I couldn’t even get a job. I couldn’t even try to get a job. I couldn’t even think about trying to get a job. I needed someone to just give me something to do, and then leave me alone forever until it was done. Perhaps they could provide me room and board while I did it.

For some reason, I often imagined my ideal job as sitting in a little hut and copying down ancient texts. My hut would be in the middle of a large courtyard, with a pond full of fish and trees full of birds. I would wake up in the morning, walk to the table in my hut, and get to work. At lunch time, someone would drop off a tray of vegetables, and after lunch I’d walk around the yard. Then, I’d get back to work again. In the evening, I would read books. No one would ever ask me about the ancient texts or when they would be done, and no one would ever pay me — they’d just allow me to live. I fantasized about this way of life often, usually while commuting to school.

I think I got the idea from a short story, but I can’t remember which. When I heard that the Sun Yat-Sen Gardens had an area named the Scholar’s Courtyard, everything suddenly clicked. That was the place from my daydreams. I wanted to go. I needed to go. But I didn’t go, because I didn’t know what it would do to me to see it. It’s not like I could settle down and live there.

Because of these mystical associations, my upcoming date with Jasmine took on a magical air, and I felt that it would somehow change our relationship entirely. I imagined the two of us silently walking hand in hand through this tranquil landscape, free from the stifling pressures of modernity, like two figures in an ancient poem. I imagined that there our common-place love might take on a new form, elevated beyond words and beyond the petty concerns that weigh down the average couple, beyond timetables and lifestyles and interests, and into true love. And once there, we would never have to return; we would be free, and from then my life would truly begin.

*

All I could do was sit and wait for the day to come. Nothing else was able to hold my interest for long; I kept returning to thoughts of love, and Jasmine, and myself. I didn’t want to distract her from her studying, so I just lay in bed and scrolled through our prior messages.

At one particular moment of one particular day, I felt optimistic. I decided that Jasmine was interested in me. Yes, I’d said and done some silly things, but perhaps there was a certain charm to them. I didn’t like the people I liked because they were perfect, after all.

This assertion, being contrary to the very foundations of my worldview — namely, that I was unlovable and strange and uniquely unfit for the world — didn’t carry with it much conviction. I could certainly think it, but it was difficult to actually believe it.

Worse than any possible conclusion I could come to regarding our relationship was the knowledge that there was no way for me to determine any of this on my own, and that it could only be solved rightly and properly by further dates with Jasmine, of which the next had just been delayed by an excruciating one and a half weeks. It is one thing to be myself, and quite another to have to live with myself. I knew that until the date began, I would continue to torment myself with doubts and misgivings, and this fact alone made me less and less able to avoid succumbing to them. It was easier to give myself up to hopelessness than fight a continual battle during every waking moment of the day.

Slowly, through excessive ruminations, the awkward and uncomfortable moments of our dates rose to the surface, like oil in water, hiding beneath them the nice, pleasant memories. I re-lived every time I had flubbed a word, every time I had said something that made little sense, and the image of her looking at me in confusion haunted me. I remembered our first meeting. Surely, she could not have forgotten how abruptly I had run off down the highway and disappeared into the fields. What a strange thing to have done! In what world could a man do such a thing and still deserve love?

I came up with as many possible reasons as I could why Jasmine had gone on three dates with me, despite the impossibility of her liking me at all. Perhaps she was too nice to say no; perhaps she was researching a book; perhaps she was planning to kill me… The list went on and on. None of these reasons were particularly convincing in themselves, but when I put them all together it started to seem likely that at least one of them may be true, despite most of them being mutually contradictory.

I spent an entire evening imagining how she was going to break it off — and then it occurred to me: maybe she already had. Maybe the exam was a lie, and she had already blocked my number, thrown away her phone, and maybe even fled the country? This idea felt like a scientific breakthrough, a revelation. It struck me with its incontrovertible truth. I fell onto my bed, and let it sink in.

I lay there for about an hour, covers over my head, curled into a ball, and not moving a muscle. Then, I peeled the covers back, and looked out at the ceiling. Everything was as it had been before. I sat up. I felt a little better. I wasn’t dead.

Worse things have happened, I thought. I’ll get through this. I don’t need her, nor anybody.

Did I truly love her, anyway, or was I simply chasing after some ideal? Or trying to indulge some animal passion for companionship? What did I even like about her? I couldn’t put it into words. Since I couldn’t put it into words, I decided that it wasn’t real, and that I was lying to myself. No, I didn’t love her at all; I was just desperate for someone, anyone. I could have gone on a date with anyone on Earth and fallen in love.

I decided that another person couldn’t make me happy. They’d just get in the way, in the end. Was I not happiest when alone?

I thought of sitting in bed alone forever, and frankly it didn’t seem that bad. No more awkward encounters, no more obligations, no more worrying what other people thought of me. Just me and a bed. Perhaps I could even find some sort of pit or cave in which to hide myself away, where no one could ever get at me.

With such pleasant notions occupying my mind, I fell asleep.

12

I was lying in bed, in a large room with concrete walls of faded pink stucco. There were no panes in the windows, and I could see mosquitoes flying in and out of the room at their leisure. On the dirt floor beside the bed, two people were talking in whispers. They thought I was still asleep. I couldn’t tell exactly what they were saying, but I knew that the conversation was, in some way or another, about me.

One voice made a joke, and I heard Jasmine’s distinct laugh in response. I turned over, still feigning sleep, and opened my eyes for a brief second to try to see who she was talking to. But the bed was quite high, and they were sat almost underneath, in a blind spot.

I heard a man’s voice ask, “Is he awake?”

I closed my eyes, and inhaled deeply. They continued their whispering.

I felt someone crawl into the bed from the other side. They slipped under the covers, and I felt their warmth as they snuggled up behind me. I wasn’t scared, or even surprised. As her arms reached out and she embraced me from behind, I understood that it was Jam, the Girl of My Dreams. I didn’t move. She nestled her head against the back of my neck. All my hair was stood on end. It felt comfortable, and entirely natural, and at the same time shocking and thrilling.

She whispered in my ear. “They’re talking about you, Paul.”

I nodded. I still didn’t want them to know I was awake.

“Just listen,” she said, and the words of the two on the ground became more clear. I heard my name, along with several other words that didn’t quite make sense. The two of them stood up, and as they walked to the door I opened my eyes and saw distinctly that it was in fact Jasmine I had heard, and that the man with her was also familiar, although I couldn’t quite place who he was.

When they had left, Jam turned me around to face her. There was a childlike enthusiasm in her smile. “You wanna follow them?” she asked. Without waiting for a reply, she jumped out of the bed, ran to the door, and pressed her ear against it. She was wearing a white nightgown, and her hair was tied up in an intricate style. She kept her eye on me while she listened, and her grin grew wider and wider. “Come on,” she said, beckoning me out of bed.

I got up, and she led me toward a corner of the room, where she felt along the wall and pulled open a hidden door. She took my hand, and led me through the low passageway. We ended up in a narrow tunnel, with wooden framing and exposed insulation along the walls. I had to duck under beams and step over piles of tangled wire as we made our way toward where the tunnel abruptly ended. Dim light from an uncovered lightbulb revealed a wooden table with a small CRT TV on top. It was displaying a grainy black-and-white image that I couldn’t quite make out at first. I looked over at Jam. She was staring at the screen intently. She glanced at me, and said, “Watch.”

I leaned forward, and the picture became clearer. I saw a man and a woman sitting in an empty movie theatre. They were facing away from the camera, and I could only see the silhouette of their heads against the screen. On the screen were two other people, sat at a table in the corner of a restaurant. One of the restaurant-goers was shaking, and he kept grabbing a glass of water from the table and taking short sips. The woman across from him looked bored. She would look around the room, then look back at the man and smile in a condescending way.

The TV turned to static. Jam was bouncing beside me, covering her mouth with her hand. I could see in her eyes that she was holding back a rapturous smile.

A new image appeared on the TV. It was the same scene, but from a new angle. I could see Jasmine’s face clearly illuminated by the screen. She was curled up on the seat, covering her face in mock embarrassment, pointing at the screen and laughing. The man kept poking at her in a jocular way, trying to force her to look. He was wearing an orange toque.

Beside me, Jam couldn’t hold back her giggles. She removed her hand from her face and let out a series of cackles and squeals. She wrapped her arms around me and squeezed me tight. “Paul!” she cried.

I felt a surge of anger rising within me. Still wrapped in her embrace, I kicked at the table, knocking the TV to the ground. Jam stopped, stunned for a second, and then smiled again and let go. “Yes!”

I picked up the TV and slammed it against the ground. The screen smashed into pieces. I started stomping atop the wreckage as sparks flew all around and Jam shrieked with ecstasy. Once the TV was nothing but a smouldering heap, I grabbed the table and swung it against the wall, then flung myself shoulder-first at the dent it had created, almost falling through to the other side. I pounded at it with my fists and kicked at it with my feet. I noticed now that I too was screaming, a guttural inhuman sort of growl that seemed not to come from my mouth at all, but from some deep and hidden place within me. There was so much energy and rage within me that I didn’t know what to do with it, and the TV and the table and the wall weren’t enough. I needed to destroy something more essential — whatever was at the core of all this pain and torment. I clawed at my face, pulled at my hair, and then grabbed my left arm with my right and tried to pull it off.

Suddenly, it all left me. The rage and the fury disappeared as fast as the rain after a sudden storm. Everything was quiet. I let go of my arm, and looked around at the hole I had made in the wall. It opened into the movie theatre I had been looking at in the TV. And there was Jasmine, sat by herself now and staring at me in shock and disbelief.

I smoothed down my hair, patted down my shirt, and walked toward her as calmly as I could. I sat down on the seat next to her, where the man had so recently been. “Well,” I said.

She poked me on the nose. “That was silly.”

I looked back through the hole in the wall and saw the mess I had made. I ran my hand through my hair. “What do you see in a guy like me? Why do we keep going on dates?”

“It’s practice,” she said.

“Practice?”

She smiled. “For my career.” she said. “I like to help people. Haven’t you been getting a lot better lately?”

*

Jasmine texted me the next day. “Hey Paul, turns out I have some family stuff this week… my aunt and uncle and all my cousins are coming by from Alberta. Totally forgot… looks like Sun Yat-Sen will have to wait.”

I stared at the screen, unable to come up with a response. I couldn’t tell which of my many contradictory suspicions this text confirmed, and therefore couldn’t tell whether it should make me hopeful or send me further into despair. I didn’t respond.

The previous week had already been a torment — it felt like my entire life was in her hands, that I was sitting here on death row awaiting her judgment. I needed to tell her how I felt, but I didn’t want to, because I didn’t know how I felt. Everything was such a mess. I had taken Love, that most simple of human emotions — at least, as it appeared in the stories I read — and made it hideously complex, all tangled up in a confused, unbreakable knot. That knot sat like a rock in my stomach, and as I tugged at its ends, I only pulled it ever tighter.

It was impossible, now. I had come so far that I could not return. I had lost my dream romance. I felt that I could never even look Jasmine in the eyes again, because all I would see would be these doubts, these fears. She appeared to me now as some inscrutable object, like a man attempting to comprehend the machinations of a malevolent deity. I had invented the deity through my own fear and weakness, yet I could not understand it, let alone make it go away.

Later that day, I was lying on the couch in the living room, watching the ceiling fan whirl and studying the patterns in the stucco of the ceiling. My fatigue weighed on me like additional gravity; I sank into the cushions, my arm splayed out toward the floor. It weighed even on my ideas and my dreams, and I was unable to think of or imagine anything at all. My mind was devoid of anything but a vague yet oppressive misery.

I don’t know how long I was lying there before my mom came through the front door. I heard her go about her normal routine: removing her boots, placing her keys in the key tray, and switching on the kettle. She noticed me on the couch. “Hi, Paul,” she said.

I made a noise that would resemble a hello only to someone that was already expecting one.

“Were you asleep? Watching TV?” She stepped into the room, and saw that the TV was off. “Waiting for me to come home?” she said, with an ironic smile.

“Just bored,” I said.

“You alright?”

“Just bored. Where’s Jessica, anyway?”

“You want to hang out with your sister? You must be bored.”

“I was just curious.”

“She’s out at Alicia’s. You didn’t hear her leave?”

“Guess not.”

She left to go change out of her work clothes, but I had a feeling from the tone of her voice that she would continue the conversation once she returned. It was impossible for me to hide my mood, and it was impossible for her to see me in such a mood and not want to help or at least figure out what was going on. I wanted to run upstairs and hide, but couldn’t get myself to move. At the root of my fear was the knowledge that I was going to start crying, and that I wouldn’t be able to explain why I was crying because I didn’t know.

As soon as she stepped back into the room, I could feel the tears emerging. I sat up to make room on the couch.

“Did something happen?” she asked, as she sat down.

I shook my head.

“Something wrong?”

“Uuuuuuh,” I said, looking up, hoping that by some combination of movements I could hold back my unexplainable tears, but it was already happening — already I could feel the warmth on my cheeks, and with that I completely lost control. I was completely overcome, as if every cell of my body was being devoted to the production of tears. I was no longer a person but a machine built for crying. “I don’t know why I’m crying,” I explained in a choked voice.

“It’s okay,” my mom said.

“I don’t even think I’m upset,” I said. And it was true that in that moment I no longer felt upset or weighed down or anything at all; I was completely empty, as if the tears were carrying out with them the layers of dirt and grime and fear and doubt that had built up within me. It was like the moment when your nose unstuffs after a long cold, and you breathe that first refreshing breath.

My mom put her arm around my shoulders. I cried until I couldn’t anymore, and then my mom stood up to make us some tea. From the tips of my toes to the ends of my ears, I felt a sensation of total weightlessness, as if I had been reborn. Nothing looked quite as bad as it had before, partially because I had forgotten everything I had ever felt. At the same time, I was exhausted, and a part of me felt that I still had more crying to do but just couldn’t bring myself to do it.

My mom returned with the tea. She placed the mugs on the table. “Thanks,” I whispered. Slowly, the world returned to me, and the refreshing high the tears had brought on began to dissipate. The clarity had been an illusion; I was just as confused as ever, but at least I felt a tiny bit lighter. I still couldn’t pinpoint what exactly I had been crying about; it seemed to me that my emotions had little to do with anything that had happened, and that there was more dream than reality in my tears.

Without asking for an explanation, my mom turned on the TV, and we spent the evening watching detective shows. I watched as if in a daze, not surprised at all by the final reveal because I had forgotten not only who the suspects were but who had been murdered in the first place. But I wasn’t thinking about Jasmine either, really. I wasn’t thinking about love or dates or anything at all.

*

Within a week, I had fallen so low that I was no longer even pretending to try to go to school. I told my mom that I was sick, which was partially true. I had quite literally worried myself sick.

As I lay in bed each morning with an acidic nausea in my stomach, it became clear to me that I was a doomed man. I was doomed for more reasons than I could count, but what doomed me most was that I could recognize, in my brief moments of lucidity, that things were actually going quite well, and that despite that, I was still doomed.

It no longer mattered whether Jasmine liked me or not. In fact, it was worse if she did, because it would mean that I had dug this giant pit and then fallen headlong into it for absolutely no reason at all. I recognized this tendency in myself of digging pits and falling into them, but usually I was able to come up with some external explanation for why I was forced to do such a thing. Now, I realized that I was simply an intransigent pit-digger. I would dig a pit in Eden and fall right into Hell, and at no point would I be able to tell you why.

So, more than love, more than the cruelties of the world, and more than the machinations of Fate, I was doomed by virtue of being myself, and this was a bitter pill to swallow. I had believed that love would change me, would unlock for me a new life and a new world, but everything seemed much the same. I was still Paul Samson.

But why? Why was I Paul Samson? How had I become this way? Could I have done something differently? Was there a moment where I could have changed my path? I cast my mind back during those bed-ridden days and came up with nothing. It had all turned out exactly as it had had to go. Call it fate, call it karma, call me Ishmael — do what you like; it won’t change a thing.

Love had seemed so complicated, and then so easy, and then so complicated again. I looked back on those few days when my whole body had seemed imbued with love, emanating out in all directions, as a temporary mania. It had as little to do with reality as my current nadir. My emotions seemed to come from nowhere and correspond to nothing; thus, I had no way of controlling them. I was entirely at their whim, cast about like a ship at sea.

I wanted only to be as alone as possible. I rarely left my room, or even my bed. I kept the curtains closed and the light off. The darkness comforted me. I was able to pretend that my bed and my bedroom were the only things that existed in the world. I wanted to enclose myself in as tight a space as possible; I even spent a few hours curled up in the closet.

I didn’t sleep much, despite being in bed. For me, night was the most comforting time, when the world outside quieted down, and I felt totally free. I was free to not be looked at, and in this way, to not be a person. And this was the greatest freedom of all.

Jasmine saw me as a person. In this way, she was completely wrong. I was not a person. I did not belong to the realm of personhood. I didn’t even belong on this planet. I should never have been given a body, or become conscious at all. The idea of going out with her again and pretending to be a human being exhausted me in advance. It was just too much.

13

I was woken up by the sound of my mom knocking gently on my door. She opened it a crack. “How are you feeling today?” she asked.

I didn’t reply.

“Thought it might be nice for you to get some fresh air… Maybe a little walk?”

“Maybe,” I said, meaning no.

She left, leaving the door ajar. I stared at it, hoping I could channel some sort of telekinetic power to close it without standing up. I was unsuccessful. I got up, hurried to the door, closed it, and then rushed back beneath the covers. But it was already too late. I was “up” now. No matter how hard I tried to sink back into the mattress, I could not undo my being “up.”

I put on the pair of shorts and t-shirt that were hanging on my chair, and went downstairs. My mom was waiting in the kitchen. There was a sandwich on the counter, wrapped in plastic.

“I knew you’d come around,” she said. “Here’s a sandwich.” She put it in my backpack.

It seemed strange advice, telling a supposedly sick man to head out on a long walk. “How far are you expecting me to go?” I asked, noticing that she had also placed a full bottle of water in the backpack’s side pocket.

“Oh, just as far as you like,” she said. “These are just in case.”

We looked at each other for a few seconds. She looked right through to the back of my skull. She knew exactly the nature of my sickness. And, in her way, she was trying to help.

“I suppose I’ll go then,” I said.

Moments later, I was out in the open air. The trees were swaying in a slight breeze, and although the sky was blue and the sun was shining, I was a little chilly. I reached the end of the path and stopped on the sidewalk. I rubbed my face with both hands. I looked around. I was on Earth. I was alone. I was hungry. I was, as I just mentioned, a little chilly. I couldn’t think of where to go. Anywhere seemed as good as anywhere else. I began to walk, and let my legs decide.

The bus was just pulling in as I reached the bus stop down the street. Without thinking, I stepped in. I rifled through the pockets of my backpack for my wallet as the bus accelerated beneath my feet, and almost fell over. The bus driver was in a rush. He must have been behind schedule. I found my transit card, tapped in, and made my way to the back of the bus

We passed the familiar scenery — the car dealerships, the McDonalds, the liquor store. We passed a bus stop in front of a small complex containing a motel, a daycare, and a veterinary clinic, where no one was waiting.

We were heading out onto the highway. The sky here was overcast, the sunlight poking through like blades of grass in cement. The bay was empty and quiet. I’m not sure at what point during this trip I realized what my final destination was. By the time I became aware of it, it had already been decided.

*

I walked through the gates of Chinatown, past the world’s narrowest building, and turned into an alley. To my left, three men in tattered clothing were huddled under the eaves of the building. I felt their eyes on me, but when I turned to look, they didn’t seem to even notice I was there. I approached the red, wooden doors of the gardens. They were closed. I tried pulling. I tried pushing. They wouldn’t open. I looked at my phone. It was 9:52. I was too early.

I continued down the alley, where I encountered a bust of Sun Yat-Sen with a grand moustache, slicked back hair, and a dignified yet benevolent expression on his face. I gave him a small nod as I passed through a circular hollow in the wall and emerged into a small public park. Ahead of me was a large koi pond, green with algae. Looking over the low, wooden railing, I saw two turtle heads poking out of the water, nuzzled against the wall. They were clambering over each other to get a look at me.

Approaching me on the path was a young mom pushing a stroller. Her and I and the baby were the only three people in the park. The baby waved at me. I waved back. The mom smiled. I looked away.

There was a Chinese-style pavilion further down the path, sitting on the cusp of the pond. Inside, I leaned against its sloped edge, half-sitting and half-standing. From this position, I could see the outer walls of the Sun Yat-Sen garden across the pond. On an arched bridge, under which the pond’s water flowed, a bearded man was sweeping the floor.

The woman and her baby had left the park. I was all on my own. A collection of invisible birds chirped away. I cast my eyes over the quiet morning park, imagining that it was my own backyard. “This is all mine,” I thought. “This all belongs to me.”

At two minutes past ten, compensating for the possibility that my clock was fast or theirs slow, I made my way back to the wooden doors. They were wide open. The alley now had an entirely new aspect; even the men beneath the eaves now looked more friendly and welcoming.

I stepped inside. Behind the counter, a man with wisps of frayed grey hair was having a conversation with a middle-aged woman. She was telling him that one of their co-workers had requested an extended lunch break. The man looked utterly taken aback. He spotted me out of the corner of his eye and beckoned me forward, his face still wearing an expression of bewilderment. I felt guilty for interrupting.

“Are you open?” I asked.

“Yes, yes,” he nodded. “Sorry to keep you waiting! You’re a student? It’s twelve dollars.” He thrust the card machine in my direction. He handed me a brochure and pointed out all the locations labelled on the map, all while the woman beside him just looked at me with a stern expression. “Please, take your time!” the man said.

I thanked him, and continued into the garden. It was not large, probably less than an acre. In the centre was a large koi pond, the same one that flowed out to the public park outside. In the middle of the pond stood a rocky tower, topped with a pagoda. A ten-foot high stone wall surrounded the garden, adorned with intricately latticed windows. The floor was tessellated tile, made of small hand-placed stones with jagged edges. Small shrubs and tall trees of many varieties and colours were scattered around, shining in the morning sun.

I made my way around the perimeter. Through a hole in the wall, I found a small area where an array of bonsai trees sat in stone pots. I crouched before them, admiring the intricate care that had gone into their growth. Each pot resembled a miniature landscape, the moss and small plants evoking larger plains and trees. I imagined ancient scholars lounging beneath the trees, composing beautiful poetry. I made a poem of my own, which went:

Big tree, small tree

All trees are equally

Just the size that suits you best

When you set your mind at rest.

This made me chuckle to myself. I had already forgotten that I was stood in the middle of a dense city. I was in my own world, populated by no one but myself and the phantoms of my imagination. The beauty of this interior world astounded me. I wandered around the garden in awe, feeling as if the phenomena within it sprung directly from my own mind. I watched the light from the pond reflect on to the walls, forming strange, transient patterns; I revelled in the composition of the colours of the leaves; I marvelled at the way each window framed a unique scene, making this small space seem as if it contained a multitude of distinct settings, each vast enough to encompass a whole life. I became lost in these reveries, treading silently and slowly through the garden, often stopping for long stretches of time just to stare and absorb all that was around me.

I was pacing grand circles in the Scholar’s Courtyard, imagining that the adjoining study — with its leather-bound volumes of the Chinese classics on the shelves, hand-written mottos hung on the walls, and large scroll open on the desk — belonged to me, and that I was taking a break from my scholarly duties for a short amble around my estate. The distinctly audible sounds of traffic coming from beyond the walls could not reach me, but another set of noises suddenly collapsed my fantasy. They were voices from across the garden. And they were not reciting Chinese poetry; no, they were speaking our modern English vernacular, and making the sort of banal comments one makes when confronted by beauty while with another person.

I was back on Earth. I was not alone. All I could think of was how I appeared: some dishevelled white guy stood agape in the midst of an empty garden, pretending at peace, pretending at serenity, pretending to appreciate a world I could not possibly understand. I did not belong, and I could not allow myself to be seen.

I hurried toward the Hall of One Hundred Rivers, the last location listed on the brochure. I passed through an arched doorway into another courtyard, cut off from the main garden. The other visitors must have entered some other alcove, for I could no longer hear them.

A few steps led from the courtyard to the hall itself. Colourful paintings of rural landscapes and black-and-white photographs of Chinatown lined the walls. I poured myself a cup of jasmine tea from a machine along the wall. The warmth of the tea comforted me, even in the heat of a late summer’s day.

I sat down on one of the benches that formed a semi-circle facing out into the courtyard. Against the far wall, amidst a few shrubs and flowers, there stood a strange rock structure. It was shaped almost like a chair, with a large crag poking from the middle, and a bizarrely eroded rock at its top, curved and full of holes, like the skull of some unimaginable animal. Like the bonsai, it was its own landscape in miniature — natural and spontaneous, and yet not in a way that could ever be found in nature itself.

Everything was silent. A single drop of sweat rolled down from my right armpit. I found myself smiling.

The world is a beautiful place, I thought. I truly believe that. The trees and the bugs and the birds — they are all wonderful. But while I can view this beauty from afar, I can never be a part of it. I can not blow with the wind, grow with the trees, or flow with the rivers. I can not fly with the birds, swim with the fish, or scurry with the squirrels.

It is the same with people. I know, deep in my heart, that they are beautiful, and I know that it is me who is wrong. I can not be a part of the beauty — I can only be alone. I wasn’t made properly. There’s just too much fear in me.

When I look at other people, all I see is a new lens through which to see myself. When I consider all these lenses, all these various Pauls that exist within all these pairs of eyes, it makes me afraid. I don’t know what anyone expects of me, but they expect something, and I know that whatever it is, I can never provide it. I screwed up somewhere. I don’t know where or when, but I screwed up somewhere, and now, here I am, alone in my world of dreams.

I tried my best. I really did. I tried reaching out for love and it’s made me sick. It’s made me sick and strange and more afraid than ever. It’s just too much. I wasn’t made for this. I wasn’t made for happiness; I wasn’t made for love. I realize that now. I don’t need anyone to lie beside me anymore. I can dream my dreams alone. Everyone else can be the beauty of the Earth; I will stay here, and dream my dreams.

In my dreams, I am alone but not lonely. In my dreams, I watch without being watched. In my dreams, I can love without worrying. Only in dreams can the two of us float together in our limitless space, away from friction and away from pain, away from constraint and away from the many sets of eyes and their many Pauls. Only in dreams can I make for myself this happiness that they say is promised to all of us. And perhaps, it is only in dreams that I can truly live.

*

I sipped at my tea. It was delicious.

Everything I had done in my life — all the mistakes, misdeeds, and misgivings — had led me here, to this courtyard on this summer’s day. I had renounced the world, and yet here I was, still in it, and it felt nice.

I set the cup down on the bench beside me, and stretched my arms above my head. The voices outside were gone, and so was the voice within my head. I was living as if in a dream, as if free. I stood up and strolled around the room, admiring the paintings. They were so full of vibrant colour, almost childlike in spirit, accentuating the simple beauty of the rural landscapes. I walked around a few times, appreciating the minute movements that composed my specific gait. The particular way I walk seemed unique among all the people of the world — there was something of me in it.

The tea had cooled down, and I took larger sips. It was better than anything I had ever tasted. It was imbued with all of the beauty of the day and the location and the world. It was the most beautiful tea in existence, and I got to drink it.

I closed my eyes, and listened to the sounds of the Earth. A faint hum emanated from the tea machine. In the distance, there was traffic. And those voices from before, they were back, and coming closer. But they were no longer an intrusion — they were but some of many sounds. I opened my eyes as the owners of the voices stepped into the courtyard. They entered the Hall.

I nodded to them, and said, “Hello,” with a smile on my face.

*

I was on the Skytrain heading home, my head still in the clouds. I had made one more circuit of the Gardens before leaving, greeting the people I saw, knowing that it no longer mattered what they thought. I had given up on appearing as anything. I had given up on wondering why I didn’t belong. I had decided that as soon as I got home, I would begin a new life. This new life would be similar to the old life, with the exception that I just wasn’t going to feel bad about it anymore. I felt totally justified in completely abandoning myself to dreams and fantasy. Love had only made things worse; therefore, it was best left alone.

I was eagerly imagining how much fun I would have now, how even the most mundane activity would be given new meaning by my renunciation. My loneliness would no longer be an accident; now, it would be a choice: the conscious decision of a rational man! This world was nice at times, but so chaotic, so meaningless, so painful. Dreams always have meaning; they always feel important, like your life is on the line at every moment. I could walk around town all day and never end up anywhere, but in my dreams, I always ended up somewhere I wanted to go: some location from my past full of powerful memories, or somewhere new never before seen by anyone in the history of time.

I passed a few stops in this way, fully unaware of my surroundings. But when pulling into the next station, something caught my eye. On the platform, among a group of people I didn’t know, was Jasmine. It must have been her aunt, uncle, and cousins who surrounded her, for I noticed a family resemblance. Immediately, I felt feverish, and my skin began to itch. I looked down at the ground, hoping she would not recognize me, begging that she would not board via the doors right in front of me. I felt a rush of guilt, finally realizing at this moment how strange and terrible it was that I had not responded to her messages, or made any effort to contact her in weeks. I remembered our last date, and I remembered her smile, and I felt the shame of total idiocy — at once realizing that she had clearly liked spending time with me, and that if she saw me now on this train, saw how I was hiding away from her, then it would all be over, and I would have thrown it all away: my happiness and hers alike. And yet this explosion of epiphanies could do nothing to keep me from huddling in the corner of my seat, staring at the ground, and trying to disappear.

The train stopped and the doors slid open. I didn’t look up. I closed my eyes. Like a child, I thought that by doing so I could prevent myself from being seen.

Some time passed, in which I thought that, perhaps, nothing was going to happen. I opened my eyes.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the jacket of the man I had determined to be Jasmine’s uncle. He was facing away from me, on opposite side of the car. I couldn’t help but look around for Jasmine. She was sat in front of him. I couldn’t see her face, only her right arm and leg, but I recognized the outfit she was wearing. It felt like seeing a ghost, or a celebrity. I couldn’t look away. Faintly, I could hear her voice, explaining something or telling a joke.

The train stopped. The doors opened. As a few new passengers boarded, Jasmine’s uncle shifted to let them by. They passed behind him. When the doors closed, I was staring into Jasmine’s eyes. Neither of us moved for a long second. She looked up at her uncle, and then back at me. I can’t imagine what my face looked like at that moment. I had no control over my body. I just stared.

She said a few words to her family, and then she stood up and walked toward me. This couldn’t be real, I decided. I was supposed to be done with this. It was supposed to be over.

“Hey Paul,” she said, as she reached my seat.

“Hi,” I murmured.

“What’re you up to?” She looked a bit uneasy, like she was pretending this was less awkward than it was.

“Oh, just…” I looked around, as if my immediate surroundings explained everything.

“I haven’t heard from you in a while,” she said, sensing that I wasn’t going to finish my sentence. “Busy with exams?”

“Yeah, sorry, I just kind of become a mess around this time,” I said.

“Exams’ll do that. As you can see,” she gestured behind her, “my family’s here.”

“Yep.”

“I think I should be able to get away tomorrow evening… are you free?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“Cool. Maybe we can get some ice cream or something.”

“Sounds good.”

“Well, I’ll get back to them, then. I’ll text you later. See ya.” She turned to leave.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “For not replying before.”

She turned back. “It’s okay. I get it.”

14

I was back in the forest, and we were walking side by side, the wind roaring, the leaves rattling, her hair flying around her head. My hat flew off, and disappeared into the trees. I looked over and her eyes were burning with anger as she spat out her unintelligible curses, and I knew I had been here before and that something was about to go terribly wrong, but she was dragging me along by the arm with a force I could not resist. I tried to think of what I was supposed to do; I felt that I was back here again because I was supposed to do something, but I had no idea what it was. We crashed into the ocean, and once more we stood amidst the typhoon, her soaked hair swirling as the waves pounded our bodies, and she looked straight into me with her crystalline eyes and she opened her mouth as wide as she could and she screamed, and the violence and the volume of the scream was enough to kill me, and I had to get out somehow or another so I began to scream too and pound at my head and toss my body this way and that until finally I awoke.

In the darkness of the night, I could still hear the roaring waves and the screeching wind, although the scream had vanished. I tried to sit up, but I couldn’t move. The ceiling was fuzzy; the whole room was fuzzy, not just from the darkness but as if there was a film in front of my eyes, and there was something in there with me that I wanted to see but I couldn’t quite focus. I really needed to see it, because it was growing bigger and I got the sense that it wasn’t up to any good. No, no good at all. No, it was something terrible and I needed to get out of here as well because this wasn’t where I was supposed to be either and I screamed again and then I awoke.

The sounds of the ocean were gone now, too, and everything around me looked a little clearer. I sat up and picked up my phone, but when I tried to turn it on I realized that I hadn’t picked up my phone at all and I was still lying down. So I sat up and picked up my phone. There was an odd device next to my bed, towering over me like the overhead light on a dentist chair. I leaned over and fiddled with some dials, trying to turn the light on, but none of them seemed to do anything. I kept turning it around and finding new sides each way I turned. It had more sides than was possible, and as I was turning it it became more and more inexplicable, and then I heard a child’s voice call my name and I jumped.

The light from outside was illuminating my room when I woke up this final time. The child’s voice still rung in my head. I picked up my phone and found that I had a new text from Jasmine. As I went to open it, more messages came in, pushing the older ones off the screen too fast for me to read them. The words I could distinguish were incomprehensible — they were all over the place and didn’t seem to apply to anything. I got the impression that she was trying to confess something to me, and that it was vital that I respond quickly and correctly, but when I opened up the keyboard there were no letters, just tildes and carats and ampersands and then some other symbols I didn’t recognize at all, and I thought that maybe I could combine them all into some sort of message, but halfway through the first word I heard a knock at my door.

Everything vanished as I opened my eyes. My mom was peeking her head around my bedroom door. “Paul, it’s almost five o’ clock” she said.

I sat up, and looked around the room. I lifted my arm, and then my other arm, and then my legs. They all moved exactly like I expected them to. I stayed there for a few minutes, half under the covers, breathing slowly. It was amazing to me that I existed at all. It was as if I had survived some near-death experience.

Five o’ clock. I had fallen asleep in the middle of the afternoon. I was meeting Jasmine in less than an hour.

*

The world still did not quite feel real as I sat on the bus heading toward Jasmine’s neighbourhood. The bus that had picked me up was different from the one I normally took to school: the seats were in an entirely different configuration, and I ended up on a seat facing the back of the bus, making me feel as if I was being dragged around against my will. The bus driver hadn’t looked at me when I got on, which was not altogether abnormal, but to my state of mind made me think that I might be invisible. I began to wonder if I hadn’t woken up into some alternate universe where I wasn’t supposed to exist.

I alighted from the bus in a quaint shopping district that reminded me, in a way, of a seaside town, although we were miles from the coast. I passed under the canopy of a produce store before crossing the street and setting myself down on a white lattice bench. Dusk was approaching, and the shadows of the low buildings behind me were creeping across the street. On tables outside the produce store, bags of green grapes shone in the evening sun. I watched a family walk by, their two children exclaiming in delight and dragging at their parents’ arms at the sight of fresh, red strawberries. The parents shared a glance before the father picked up a box and walked inside.

Jasmine showed up wearing jeans and a button-up plaid shirt. Her hair was tied in a bun, and she was wearing glasses that looked like they didn’t often leave the house. This was a different Jasmine than I had seen before; I felt like I was seeing behind-the-scenes footage from a bonus DVD. She looked at me, and I could immediately tell that she was tired, and that something was riding on her shoulders, but she still greeted me with the same spark of bright energy as always.

“You’re so punctual,” she said. “It almost makes me feel bad.”

“Just the way the bus schedule worked out,” I said.

“You wanna grab some ice cream or something? There’s a DQ down the street.”

The streets were almost empty, like we were walking through a closed film set.

“So, how’s the family stuff going?”

“Yeah, it’s fun. They haven’t been here for years, so we’ve been going out and showing them around. Doing all the tourist-y stuff, you know. We were at the beach today, and yesterday we went to Stanley Park.”

“Sounds fun.”

“Yeah, but… they’re a lot.” She laughed. “I kind of needed to get away. I told my mom I was just going out for a walk to get some air. I think she’d be offended if I took off for a date while they’re here.”

“Secret rendezvous,” I said.

“Yeah, exactly.”

“Very exciting.”

We sat down on a bench at the side of the road. Half of my mind was still wondering whether I was inside of a dream. There was something about the evening sun hanging over the silent, deserted road that made me feel like a nightmare was about to begin. I watched a crow on the other side of the road, hopping around the rim of a garbage can, dragging out plastic bags and take-out boxes and throwing them about. I could hear the bags crinkling in his beak.

“How’s your ice cream?” Jasmine asked.

I looked down. I had a cup of ice cream in my hand. “It’s good,” I said.

The sense of unreality was starting to overtake me. The dark shadows looming over us seemed to increase in size, and I felt like I was about to start shaking.

“You know, I had a dream where you had an uncle who lived right near me” I said, thinking that if I could talk about dreams, it would prove that I wasn’t in one. “You told me about it in such a matter-of-fact way that, up until just now when you were talking about your cousins, I thought it was true. But I think you told me in a dream, and I just… you know, sometimes something like that just sneaks into your mind and you wouldn’t even think to question it. Do you ever have that?”

“I think so… I can’t think of an example, but I know what you mean.” She swirled her ice cream around with her spoon. “You live in Surrey, right?”

“Yeah.”

“I do have an uncle around there, actually. He’s kind of estranged from the family, though. I haven’t seen him in a long time. In fact, I’m not even sure if he’s still living there. Either way, I definitely never would have mentioned him to you.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“That’s kind of eerie, isn’t it?” she said.

I opened my mouth, looked around, and then said, “Huh.”

“Was there anything else to the dream? Maybe it was a premonition or something,” she said.

I thought about everything else that had happened in the dream, and decided not to mention it. “I don’t remember,” I said.

A little ways down the street, a man with a ginger-brown beard stood with a toddler and a medium-sized dog. Jasmine and I kept glancing over during our conversation to watch the child play with the dog. The man pretended not to notice us, although I accidentally made eye contact with him once or twice.

When we had finished our ice cream, Jasmine suggested we walk to a nearby sports park. Our path took us around the back of a recreation centre and onto a large field with soccer nets on either side and a baseball diamond in the corner. We took a seat on the top row of a set of bleachers. We were alone in the park. I stared up at the clouds in the sky, streaked with yellow and pink. A breeze crept beneath my shirt and brushed against my skin.

We had been talking, as we walked, about the future. Jasmine was explaining to me the certification process of her social work program, and a possible career path. It was all very complex and convoluted, but she seemed to have a decent grasp of it. I thought it strange how many loopholes she had to go through when it seemed to obvious to me that she was perfect for the job.

All the time, I dreaded when the conversation might turn back to me. I had kept the non-existence of my future a secret from her for so long, and I was terrified to let it slip.

Yet, as Jasmine continued to explain, she seemed less and less sure of herself. She had doubts about the final exam, about finding a job, about the possibility of advancement. “I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing,” she said, reaching down and playing with the hem of her jeans.

“You seem to know what you’re doing,” I said.

“Yeah, but… sometimes I feel like everyone else has it all figured out, and I’m missing something, you know? Like everyone understands something about the world that makes it make sense to them. And I never learned it, for whatever reason.”

In that moment, something collapsed inside of me. I looked at her, and was as if a filter had been removed from my vision. She looked nothing like she had looked before. It wasn’t just that her hair was tied back, revealing more of her face; it wasn’t that her glasses made her eyes look smaller; it wasn’t that she wasn’t wearing make-up, or that she was playing with the hem of her jeans. It was that, in that moment, all of the idealistic notions I had built up around her suddenly disappeared, and I saw her as a person I could understand, and who could understand me. It wasn’t that I was seeing her as a person for the first time — it was that, for the first time, I was understanding that I myself was a person: that the things I felt were the things people felt, and the parts of the world that scared me were the parts of the world that people found scary.

Jasmine, folding and unfolding the hem of her jeans, with her tired eyes and tied-up hair, emanated a sort of mundanity — a living, breathing, sleeping everyday — that made her more beautiful than she had ever been before.

I wanted to look away, but I didn’t. “I believe in you,” I said. “You’ve got a good spirit. I know you’ll do well.”

She looked up at me and smiled. “A good spirit?”

We looked at each other for a few seconds that felt like a few eternities. The meeting of our eyes had eradicated the rest of the universe — nothing else existed, and time had no meaning. There was only her smile, and some mysterious force that seemed to link the two of us. I understood, without understanding, that this was a Beautiful Moment. But just as this occurred to me, I felt it slipping away. Time returned, and with it came gravity, and air, and everything else. I was on Earth, and I was falling, and if I wanted to keep whatever it was I had just attained, I needed to act right now. I needed to do or say something. What was it? I hesitated. I wanted to run away, to leave it all undone and unsaid. But I had to hang on. This was it. This was that time I had been waiting for, that moment at which everything could change forever, and it was entirely up to me.

“Y’know, I really like you.”

Acknowledgments

Thanks to everyone who read the novel prior to publication and provided helpful feedback. Particular thanks to Kyle Hoover for acting as chief editor. Also thanks to Edward Rathke ( radicaledward.substack.com) for advice regarding preparing the novel for publication, and offering to help with the formatting.

Thank you to everyone who has supported me at any time throughout the process. I will continue to do my best.

About The Author

Mike Blackwell regularly publishes non-fiction online at balckwell.substack.com, and runs a literature podcast known as Balckwell's Books. He lives in the beautiful city of Burnaby, BC, where he enjoys reading and writing books.