Those Times I’m Like Magellan

“Go!”
She cheated and started early, leaving me behind to chase after her distancing demand. Sprinting, I felt the wind whipping against my cheeks and whispering in my ears, tales of how one day my mother will fall down the stairs, and there is nothing I can do to stop the process of life. By the time I made it to the end of the field Isabelle was balancing on the stone wall waving a daisy through the air, conducting a symphony of hiding crickets. It was late dusk, that time that bathes everything in a glow of orange and yellow and tricks you into thinking that peace is capable and that one day you will have the perfect job and big house you always pictured in your mind. For Is, dusk was that time when she was infinite, the time she was queen and I was king and the world was ours to grab and shake until all the parts were scrambled into confusion. We liked things scrambled. We lived for mayhem.

I sprawled out in the grass at Isabelle’s feet, basking in what little light still remained awake. Turning my head to face her, I took Is in for everything that she was, an off type of a vision: unkempt hair, barefoot with grass stains on her knobby knees, staring off into the air thinking about the communication between elephant tribes, exactly how she was when we first met, when we were but mere children.
I was only eighteen that day Is appeared, the day I was faced with my first life altering decision that was not a decision at all but life twisting around and shooting off to the right giving me no choice but to follow its lead. Sitting on an empty Greyhound traveling towards Portland at one in the morning, I dozed off. I awoke to discover that I was not as alone as I had thought, a realization that applied to more than just the stale smelling bus, but also to my entire existence up to that point. I found myself suddenly holding a crumpled napkin on which a stranger had scribbled with red lipstick, “Could you ever love an explorer?” and that exact stranger perched in the seat next to mine.
But Isabelle was a fool, because I had been loving her since the day I discovered I had a beating heart inside my fragile ribcage. I had been waiting for her to come along and make my life make sense, to put together the pieces I could find no place for. I somehow knew she was coming, but the minute details of her physical being had been in a blur before then. It was as if that crumpled napkin with the lipstick scribbles snapped my eyes into focus, and suddenly I saw how my life would be for the next ten years. In reality I knew it wasn’t the napkin that made the difference, but it was everything it represented. The napkin was Is, I knew that, and in it she whispered every secret I had ever kept from parents, and she told me how she had never meant to become a vagabond, but being a ballerina never quite works out like one plans.
“I’ve let down my fair share of strange lovers, but you and I will be an epic tale,” her owl eyes told me in an instant. With a blink and a sigh, she told me that with her I was soon going to learn why exactly the Bermuda triangle eats up elderly widows and sailors searching for the earth’s secrets, and that the Grand Canyon is mother nature’s answer to all the lost souls who have asked, “What is the point of this hellish existence?” while sitting at their dinner tables with their beautiful spouses and three perfect children. I could tell from the way she bit her lip that her words were true fifty-one percent of the time. But when she spoke it was just like that Billie Holiday song I was always fond of, and her lies always sounded like truths so I couldn’t help but devour it all. I didn’t want the facts anyways. Isabelle spoke with passion, and that canceled out her fibs; it’s the cardinal knowledge of the bohemian that a life spoken with passion is not a lie at all but in fact is the most truthful thing you could ever say.
That night not only brought along Isabelle with my future in her palm but also washed away my past and my ability to use the past tense. Before that point I might not have even lived, and sometimes I forget that we lived separate secret lives that did not bleed onto the other’s. Those lives didn’t matter, they only shaped us as each other and prepared us for the now, for the destitute and fly-by-night ways we swore by. But it would be a lie to say that my heart has stopped pining entirely for the material comforts of an old suburban town; sometimes I wouldn’t so mind that white picket fence or even that boss I kind of hate but play golf with anyways. But it’s like Is says, the world isn’t going to fall in love with itself. I have the clouds, and that’s enough for me.
Gently, Isabelle nudges me with her toe then kneels to tuck her plucked daisy safely behind my ear.
“This earth’s fucked up,” she says, “but that’s what makes it irresistible.” I don’t remember where it was in Portland I was going to, only that I never actually made it.