Above zero

On hope

It’s the first day of the year that is above freezing, which means there is hope back in the city. Seasons have always and will always continue to change, so there is always something for people to look forward to, and always something for writers to write about: begin, afresh, afresh, afresh. It is generic and yet I cannot blame the clichés. You scoff at the thousands of poems about sunsets until you, too, are watching a sunset that compels you to write about it. The seasons will change, the time will pass, and everything will be different someday. There is no need to wear a scarf, but I wear one anyway.

There is a man on the subway sleeping, occupying three seats to himself. He is not bothering anyone and no one bothers him, but I pre-emptively come up with retorts for anyone who might sneer at him just in case. I’d respond to this imaginary interlocutor, angry and defensive on this man’s behalf. I would say something about how you could probably use the time to stretch your legs, you probably work sitting at a desk all day anyway, you sedentary freak. But there is no vitriolic interlocutor to argue against, there is just this man. I want to believe he is having a good dream.

I notice a boy around my age in trousers that cut off right above the ankle, and I can see a thin strip of pale flesh beneath. He must have picked his outfit after a cursory glance at his weather app, overconfident in his thermodynamic capacity. It may be above zero but that’s still no weather to be having exposed ankles. I have the urge to wrap my hands around them, pinning him in place so he is forced to reckon with what he is missing out on, so he can acknowledge his mistake, that he was forcing something when it wasn’t yet time. I want to tell him to be patient, that the time for ankle socks will come soon, but in the meantime, he should enjoy the opportunity to wear the crew socks his mom got him for Christmas.

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I took a course in the first year of my liberal arts degree where we had to listen to trees, and I remember feeling like a caricature of a liberal arts student. Here I am five years later and I’m still that caricature, but more embodied now, because I actually believe it. The older I get the more open-minded I am to the idea that, maybe, we are all part of an interconnected network of nature. My period somehow always aligns with the full moon. Perhaps, I am part of something bigger than myself.

No one prepares you for the spiritual journey that may or may not accompany your post-grad life. I’ve always simultaneously been a skeptic and a believer. I told my friend in the second grade that I didn’t think God was real and he tattled on me to the teacher. In the third grade our entire class ganged up against one girl who said that Santa Claus wasn’t real. That same girl told me ghost stories about our school’s bathroom. She said that Bloody Mary haunted girl’s bathrooms and that I should be careful. Well, she was right about Santa Claus so I wasn’t about to take any chances. It gave me a bad habit of keeping my eyes open in the shower. I’d pry my stinging eyes open through soapy water because I was afraid that if I closed my eyes, Mary would somehow appear in the shower, there with me. I wasn’t ever sure what exactly she would do, though. My fear never extended beyond her mere apparition. I’m not afraid of Bloody Mary anymore but I still feel uneasy when my hotel bed is near a window because of a deep-rooted fear of being shot that I’ve harboured since watching a clip of JFK’s assassination when I was far too young. I do not need to look to the supernatural to find the most frightening creatures. The boogeyman already exists and he is under my bed and in my phone and on the tv and in the movies.

I have a dentist appointment and the same dental hygienist who saw me when I knocked my front teeth out when I was six is now asking me whether I’m pregnant so we can do an x-ray. I am told that I need to take out all four of my wisdom teeth, and I take a brief moment to mourn this loss. I’ve been growing since the moment I entered this world. I am 163.5cm but two years ago I was 163cm. Even long after puberty, my body had not finished growing. My wisdom teeth were still coming in, I still had time. The fact that there was a part of me that continued to grow, meant that I had not yet reached the apex of my life yet.

There is always movement, either upward or downward. If you’re not moving up then you’re moving down, because stillness is hard to come by. I’d spent my whole life growing up, getting taller, growing teeth, losing teeth, growing more, but with this pronunciation, I’ve reached a zero point in my life. I will start to get aches and pains, my skin will stretch and wrinkles will form, as I begin a downward trajectory towards deterioration.

As I get my teeth cleaned, I imagine myself drowning as my mouth fills up with un-vacuumed saliva build-up. They say we’ve only discovered 2% of the ocean, so what lay in the unknown of that 98% used to frighten me, but not anymore. I care not for the dragon at the bottom of the ocean, for he bothers no one and keeps to himself. And anyway, everyone who drowns in the ocean becomes a mermaid, and along with the other sirens and beasts and fairies and ogres, we would listen to the trees, and we would hear in their voices the whispers of a girl. We would whisper back and tell her that in the other 98%, there is an unimaginable wealth of love.

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In statistics, there are interval variables and ratio variables. While ratio variables possess a meaningful zero, interval variables do not. If it’s zero degrees, that does not mean there’s no temperature (interval), contrary to the belief of an overeager boy, but if I have zero money in my bag, then I have no change to give the man who asks for some on the subway (ratio), and if the news says there are zero deaths then what they mean is there are zero meaningful deaths, and so this ratio variable becomes an interval variable where relativity is judged by men who think themselves God.

But God, too, has given us yet another non-meaningful zero. It is the year 2026, and yet life persisted long before Christ, and life will continue to persist long after we stop counting, and the seasons will keep changing long after the poets are present to observe it, and throughout it all, you will have been too rushed to have even enjoyed it.

I talk to the trees on my way to the city and they whisper back to me. They tell me that the seasons are changing and to not lose hope. I tell them it’s hard, all things considered. The trees are resilient, I am less so. I send love through the grapevine, mostly, but a little hatred cannot help but get caught along the way too, reserved only for a select few. I am generous and empathetic most of the time but there are other times that I hope that the cursed feel the weight of my disdain in the way their upper traps are perpetually tight, or in the way they get migraines. They blame it on their coffee withdrawal but it’s really Mary, pressing down on them with the weight of all the fearful girls shutting their eyes in the shower.

I’m still wearing my scarf and I am overheating and feeling utterly uncool as I walk past stylish and beautiful pedestrians in their trench coats and I wonder if they’re cold and just deal with it, or if they’ve unlocked some strategic layering strategy that I’ve yet to discover. I am beautiful too, but only sometimes. I’m sure these men and women are also only sometimes beautiful but I am not omniscient, I see only their beauty.

What would have been snow any other day is now rain, so my socks are soaked through but yours are too, and what starts as a negative experience turns into a relatable topic of conversation, and thank goodness too, because you are cool, and stylish, and funny, and kind, and I am those things too, but perhaps a little too eager, although I like to believe that what I lack in swag, I make up in sincerity, and so I talk about my wet socks in a little too much detail, but you can relate, and so we laugh together, and it is a joyous sound, but even more beautiful is the silence between your laughs, as you gather yourself, thinking it’s over, before bursting out yet again. Life is a series of patterns forever repeating and though I am on a slow descent towards nothingness, so are you, and so somehow we’ve turned this line into an asymptote, the zero unable to reach us in this infinity we’ve created. The night breeze leaves you a bit cold, and suddenly the burden I was carrying around all day feels like a blessing, as I hand you my scarf.