As Insignificant as Embers
Talitha Jensen
When I’m straddling the space between sleeping and waking, newly aware that my sheets are no longer cool and smooth but warm and rumpled, I can guess how many hours I’ve been in my bed. Usually I’m never more than thirty minutes off, and there’s nothing better than discovering my estimate is half an hour early. The best way to start the day is to shift and wiggle and drift back into comfortable nothingness before my phone begins to buzz and chime, reminding me that I have to get up and make good on the upcoming eight hours that I’ve sold to my employer.
Since my phone was still resting silently on the shelf over my head, I guessed it must be 7:15 before pulling it down to look. Foggy warmth was replaced with horror when I saw that the screen read 10:30, and also indicated a missed call, a voicemail, and a text message from my supervisor.
Twenty minutes later I was perched on my office chair, hair askew and sleep still clinging to the corners of my eyes, having offered an embarrassed apology to my boss. He graciously indicated that he was more concerned for my safety than my lateness, and mentioned that he’d called my emergency contact - my mother. Great.
Shaken and humbled, I started weeding through my emails. “Just a bad start to a perfectly fine day.” I told myself. “Everything is going to be alright.”
By afternoon, I’d almost started to believe it. I’d caught up on most of my work, and the rumbling in my stomach was silenced by a crusty sandwich from the deli across the street. The blue light on my phone started gently pulsing. I tapped the screen to check the message and was greeted by an email from my rental company. Subject: Welfare Check
“Craaaaap,” I muttered. I overslept by two hours and somehow my rental company found out? Had my mother called them? I opened the email to see how much more embarrassment I’d have to endure, then stopped abruptly when I saw my neighbor’s name instead of mine – Philip, a single, retired university professor in his 70s who lived in the unit upstairs, and the only other tenant in my building. The email indicated that he had been missing for weeks, and that his family was unable to contact him. It also said the police would be calling me.
The officer was brief. I explained that the last time I saw Philip, he told me he would be on vacation for a month. I mentioned that his car had been dead in the driveway since last Fall, so that was no indication that he was home. The officer explained that they had already checked the apartment, thanked me, and hung up. I sat at my desk with my phone in my hand. Why was I the only one he told about his trip? What if he’d been hurt? What if he died? Would I end up being the only person between him and his grieving family? Would I have to testify to the police again? And, worst of all, what if I got new neighbors? Philip was half deaf. I lived a happy existence at any volume level, and was grateful for the luxury. “You’d better come home…” I whispered to the ether.
Five o’clock finally came. I tidied my desk, tried to sweep my work out of my mind, and composed myself for the rest of the day.
A couple weeks prior, I’d asked a friend to return a guitar tool that I’d loaned him nearly a year before when he expressed interest in learning how to play. But he reported that he’d lost my capo - a clamp that pinches the strings to the fretboard, changing the key. I had asked him to replace it, and he agreed. I was meeting him at the music store in fifteen minutes.
I pulled up beside the shop, hopped out, and was greeted by a locked door and a Closed sign. I got back behind the driver's seat, turned the heat up and pulled out my phone.
“They closed at 5,” I wrote. “Do you just wanna go to the other place? They’re open till 7.”
“Sure,” he responded. “Be right there.”
I sat idling as commuting traffic bunched and stretched in the street beside me. The sun had set nearly an hour ago and snow fell in sparse puffs. I tilted my rearview mirror to face the sidewalk and thrummed my fingers against the steering wheel. It had been ten months since I’d seen him last. Would I recognize his outline against the night? Then I saw him. Ah, yes. Of course I would. I rolled my window down to catch his attention before he walked past.
Where before his posture exuded power, now I saw a small, awkward man trying to take up enough space in the world so as not to be blown away. Eyes that once seemed to be glowing with the shimmer of candlelight were tired, dim and mossy. He was wearing a crisp new leather jacket. Where I would have secretly admired how it cut across his square shoulders, now he looked stiff and immobile, a mannequin wrapped in thick plastic.
I pulled away from the curb and we made small talk for ten minutes before silence fell. I had resolved not to do the mental labor of keeping the conversation going. He knew me. He could think of some questions too. We sped through the dark to the rhythm of white light approaching, red light disappearing, and the thrum of the tires against the asphalt.
“So,” he mumbled, “What’s up?”
When our friendship had begun three years before we would text and talk nearly constantly, at all hours. My questions and comments were met with long, thoughtful responses. There was a night when he sat with me on the ground in an abandoned parking lot, wrapped in a blanket till three in the morning, talking and laughing and exploring the pauses. On that night I discovered that my greatest happiness was the sensation of his voice resonating in my chest.
When I told him my fears and concerns, he responded with inarguable statements of fact. When I doubted my effort or my worth he told me that I was a woman of honor, that I was discerning and wise, talented and capable. He laid out these compliments as though he was dissecting my body, nipping out organs and bones and handing them to me. How could I argue with the validity of his statements when he had just plucked out the truth and handed me the proof? When I was with him I felt safe and known.
But slowly, slowly he stopped answering my messages, slipping away into silence. I was left with a hundred unanswered questions about his family, his beliefs, his hopes, his opinions and tastes, his traumas and joys. I ached with wanting to learn his spirit by hand, to know the stitches and stretch marks, the scars that folded and puckered. I wanted to set anchor in the gleaming aurora that lit him and moved him and kept him awake at night. My quest for his heart was as obsessive, maddening, and unsuccessful as Ponce de León’s for the fountain of youth.
And now, only a year later, for all the times I’d gifted him portions of my life and time and art, for all he knew me, all he cared to ask was “What’s up?”
The trip to the store was short. I pointed out the capo I wanted, then wandered away to look at something else. He hurried out onto the street after finishing at the register, thinking that I was waiting for him outside. Did he ever know me? Thinking that a musician would not explore a treasure trove of shining lacquered surfaces adorned in ebony and mother-of-pearl?
The drive home was as stilted as the trip there. He offered unhelpful advice to problems I didn’t elaborate on. White light. Red light. Red light. Green.
The closer we got to his house the more restless I became. I wasn’t going to do it, but I couldn’t help but feel that I was running out of time to break the silence, to open again, to draw him back in. I had also begun to itch from a pang of guilt. He had just replaced something of mine while I had something of his hiding in the compartment between our elbows. I heaved an involuntary sigh.
“What?” he asked.
I paused. I didn’t have to tell him. I didn’t have to give it back. But every time I saw it, I was snagged in the memory of the intensity of his attention, leaning close, solid and warm into my words. Only to remember the following silence, the slip, the crack, the bottomless fall. It had been a while since the forgetting hurt more than the remembering. The words fell out in a jumble.
“I stole something from you over a year and a half ago.”
“What?”
“Your hat.” I reached into the latching box between us and handed him a soft knit slouchy beanie.
“Oh, I forgot about this… How did you get it?” he asked.
“I saw it on a chair at a party and put it in my bag and walked out.”
“Why?”
“Because,” my voice cracked. “I was hyper-aware that I was losing a friend and I wanted something to remember you by.”
I pulled up against the curb in front of his building. He unbuckled his seat belt and dropped the hat back into the center console.
“You keep that,” he sighed, opening the door and swinging his legs out. “Goodnight.”
The door shut gently behind him.
My glasses were tear-stained and didn’t sit on my nose comfortably from having stepped on them a week before. I left them on my kitchen table before rummaging through a basket of junk by the front door. My fingers closed around a package of cigarillos and a lighter. I shrugged my coat back on and shuffled into the cold darkness of my backyard.
I blew a stream of white smoke into the grey night - the city winter that never really darkens. Holding the smoke in my mouth was no fix, but it calmed the panicky restlessness brought on by the acute knowledge of being insignificant to someone who had been so significant to me.
I glanced down and noticed boot prints in the skiff of snow. I stepped over and set my foot next to the print, leaning down and squinting against my blurry vision to compare, when I heard a sizzle and saw red embers. A lock of my hair had fallen in front of my face and touched the glowing end of my cigarillo where it was writhing like a live thing. The cigarillo tumbled from my lips into the snow and I grabbed at my burned, curling bangs.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!” I yipped, coughing on the smoke I hadn’t meant to inhale. "Damnit."
I stamped out the butt on the ground before turning my attention back to the footprints. They were much larger than my feet and disappeared behind the house. I regarded the shaded yard with suspicion before remembering that the police had been there earlier in the day to look for Philip. I sighed and walked around to the front of the house when I heard the thump of a screen door.
"Hello!" called Philip from his porch.
"You're back!" I nearly yelled in my surprise and relief.
Philip drew himself up to his full five feet, framed by his front door. “Reports of my demise have been greatly exaggerated!” He expressed his frustration at the powers that be, explaining that he’d stopped his mail and told a family member that he was going away. And yet, somehow, he’d still been reported missing.
"I'm glad you're okay." He had no idea how much I meant it.
I stepped down the stairs into my apartment, kicking my shoes off by the door. I found a pair of scissors and trimmed the singed edges of my bangs, letting the charred ends fall into the bathroom sink. I examined my reflection in the mirror. Lips peeling from the winter cold, puffy eyes, uneven fringe around my face. I rinsed the hair down the drain and wiped warm water over my eyes. I rummaged through my coat pockets for my phone and was met by the soft fabric of the hat.
I shuffled into my bedroom and plugged my phone in after double-checking the alarms. Sitting on the twin-size bed in the dim light, I stared at the fabric in my hands. What did it mean to me now that he knew I had it? Was it something like a gift? Or a reminder of just how little he cared? I folded it into a compact rectangle and set it on my headboard shelf. I stripped and crawled under the blankets, checking my alarm again, just in case.
Wrapped in the sheets, I breathed. I listened to the ringing in my right ear. The fridge groaned and popped. I kicked a blanket aside. The desktop computer powered down. I repositioned a pillow around my neck. I breathed.
I reached up and patted the headboard, searching for the hat, found it, and rolled out of bed. I opened the bottom drawer of a dresser and slipped it in with a collection of unworn belts and scarves. I closed the drawer, got back into bed, and closed my eyes.
Tomorrow would be better.
Talitha Jensen is a native of the Pacific Northwest and a graduate of the University of Idaho, holding a bachelor's in General Studies. She calls the Palouse hills home. When she isn’t brewing a pot of tea or some other magic potion to share, she can be found playing her instruments, creating things that weren’t there before, and otherwise misusing her degree.