Nonfiction by Lillian Anderson
We arrange to meet up at this kitschy hole-in-the-wall tiki bar off Victory Boulevard. I haven’t seen Ben in over a decade, but that doesn’t stop me from recognizing him instantly. The contours of his face have changed subtly, more angular perhaps. But then again, so have mine. He’s an apparition from my youth, back when I wore roll-on body glitter and scanned the radio for existential meaning. My middle-aged self is austere by comparison, free of artificial fragrance and parabens and God.
We find a corner booth and discuss what makes this a tiki bar, settling on Polynesian appropriation. I look down at the menu, studying the list of tropical rum-based drinks as if there’d be a pop quiz on it later.
“Why the protective body language?” he asks over the music blaring from a corner speaker. I realize that I’m hugging myself. I drop my shoulders and release the tension that I carry in my pelvic floor, where my physiotherapist tells me women store their stress. I think of being in utero where my mother stored hers, and her mother before her and so on, like a Russian nesting doll.
“This is strange, isn’t it? Life feels like a choose-your-own-adventure book sometimes,” I say, only you can’t go back a chapter when you fall knee deep into quicksand. We could’ve made it in another life.
“It’s weird to be human,” he says, and not for the first time, as we order drinks. Over Mai Tais, he tells me how he scattered his father’s ashes off the coast of Hawaii, making swirling patterns in the ocean with them, even putting some under his tongue.
“Isn’t that carcinogenic?” I ask, somewhat aghast.
“Not in small amounts,” he says evenly, as if consuming our loved ones was entirely natural. I nod in agreement, an ash-eating convert.
I confess that I’m agnostic, but my son believes in reincarnation. “He wants to be a butterfly in his next life,” I say, the way some mothers brag about their kid wanting to be a doctor. “Maybe we all come back as butterflies. Makes as much sense as anything else.” I imagine us resurrected as two delicate insects with paper-thin wings.
I swallow down the last of my drink to temper my nerves, ice clinking against the glass. Ben calls me a primordial attraction, and I balk at this disclosure, my cheeks flushed with embarrassment. He remembers me at sixteen with thick wild hair in a green shift dress. It was purple though, wasn’t it? An iridescent mauve the color of twilight. That’s the thing with memories, they’re malleable like wet clay.
We leave the bar after running out of things to say, our eyes adjusting to the punishing late afternoon sun. Ben reaches for my hand and our fingers interlock as he walks me to my car.
“I always liked your hands,” I say, turning them over to admire them.
“They can’t look the same as they did 20 years ago,” he says.
But they do, I think. We’ve time traveled.
I close my eyes, and I’m a teenager again, sitting on a beach towel in Santa Monica with Ben stretched out beside me, lying prone in the sand wearing red swim trunks. The summer neon sun is reflecting on the waves like shards of shattered glass.
“Walk on my back,” he says.
I let out a nervous laugh. “What? NO!”
“You’re all of what, ninety pounds? Come on, you won’t break me.”
I adjust my bikini and step gingerly onto his lower back, my heart racing. I can feel the topography of his back beneath my bare sandy feet, his skin slipping over muscle and sinew and bone.
I open my eyes to find two grown strangers standing in their place. I steady myself for another goodbye, but no one says it properly anymore. Instead, it’s a truncated bye or see you later or take care, as if people were made of porcelain (aren’t we?). I think of my dead brother and father, whom I never said goodbye to, wondering if I’d eat their ashes too to keep a part of them. Letting go of the living feels riskier, like walking away from a boiling kettle as it sings. Some endings are like that.
Lillian Anderson is an emerging creative nonfiction writer from Los Angeles. Publications include Scary Mommy and Beyond Words Literary Magazine.
