Brenna Marie Sheets

It’s 5:30 in the evening and my coffee is mildly warm. I pick up my mug and hardly any heat transfers to my fingers— rather disappointing to my shivering body. I gaze at the empty chair in front of me. It is a rusting white cast iron garden chair, which many cafes with outdoor seating have taken a liking to for its “shabby and chic” aesthetic. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t like it as well. I hold the mug in my right hand as I write with my left and the space between my pointer finger and thumb aches. This pain is overdue from clenching my bike’s handlebars during the exhausting ride I took this morning. I enjoy biking primarily because, as morbid as it sounds, it makes me heave and gasp for breath the way sobbing does, but this way I can avoid the theatrics of actual sobbing. Some people seem to relish in the theatrics of overwhelming emotions, which I can still never quite understand. The point is, sometimes I cry, but not often. This morning I did not cry. My eyes simply watered from the wind, and it was a purely physical response. When I do have distressing emotional responses, they generally occur in sudden bursts of panic or anguish, and when I do feel these types of intensities, I will, in time, become enclosed in a sunken desolate numbness. This is the place where I prefer to reside.

“Open your eyes.” “Look at me.”

The world right now is a cool blue. I sit still as people shuffle by me with their dogs and their lovers and their coffee in to-go cups. They’ve all wrapped themselves in itchy sweaters and overly decorative scarves, but it keeps them from shivering as I do. Some of them have even layered their dogs in winter apparel. My father once told me the snow season was enlivening. I see this now, that alongside the attempt to avoid the physical discomfort of frigid weather, there is an obvious mental comfort that comes with bundling up to walk down a frozen street. I notice it in their faces, the excitement to relish in, and yet stay protected from, the cold evening that is descending upon us all. I watch their eyes crinkle despite tears from the bitter wind, and I watch their mouths curl into smiles even though their lips are chapped and their teeth are chattering. I watch all of these people joyously walk past me, participating in what can only be paradoxical human nature to search for feeling when life would be so much easier if we didn’t want to feel anything. I watch them wipe their dripping noses, succumbing to the adverse effects of the cold, and I can tell they are as enlivened as he once was.

I think of the cool blue light from this morning, the wind blowing from the east and the shimmer of the incoming daylight. This blue is always different from the blue of the evenings, and I wonder if this is because I, myself, have changed throughout the day — have different emotions throughout the day — or if there is an actual celestial explanation for this perceivable shift in hue. Maybe I just like the idea of being able to change in a single earth’s rotation, of having the ability to be more than what I’ve always been; but I, like the earth, always come full circle to the same thing. Growing up in Florida, at least, every hour of the day was a different atmosphere entirely. The skies there are changing all the time, and there is never much room for consistency. The day I was last there, it rained and shined aggressively at least four separate times. Perhaps the sky itself had made me this way, so predictably unreliable. The sky is always there, and I am always here beneath it. The sky will always go back to a clear state at some point, but it would also have its affairs with thunderous clouds and relentless downpours. I feel this way about myself, persistent in my inconsistency. I think of Joan Didion’s Blue Nights, and my chest begins to ache.

There’s something eerily alluring about the December air. I feel it crawl up my neck and ears, blowing my hair in front of my face. I feel it inch its way between my fingers, numbing them with effortless surety, and I feel at any moment it could enwrap me, engulf me, and turn me into nothing but shapeless autonomous particles. To me, this is truly enlivening: the idea of becoming absent of body, free of burden, bare of thought and breath. The air and its movements ask no questions. It doesn’t ponder its purpose, it doesn’t wonder if it is asking too much or too little of people or life itself. The wind moves freely and moves whatever is around it, and that is all it will ever do, all it was ever meant to do. The wind is like emotion, only perceivable by the way it sways others. As much as I’d like to be the wind, do the swaying, I am simply a victim of it, as I am of emotion. I’m not the wind, no matter how much I long to be one with it. I have fingers that grow numb, thoughts that will never cease until the day my body does, and I am forced, just by existing, to constantly question why I even exist at all. I am a mass of cooperating particles that needs things like meaning, sleep, food and water, so I take another sip of my coffee, and I write down these thoughts here today.

As I flip through my journal I see the words, “write what you know,” bulleted in between notes from class about being a good writer. I don’t know why I wrote this down because it’s already been embedded in my brain by my teachers and mentors and professors and god knows who else. “To be a good writer, you have to write what you know.” My problem with this statement, this succinct “write what you know” phenomenon, is that I don’t want to know the things I know, let alone write about them. I know, from experience, that people are overwhelming, and I am overwhelmed, and I know, for a fact, that I do not want to write about these things. I wish I didn’t know how people are so often broken by the world around them, and then they go on and break others. I wish I didn’t know that some people’s chests have never ached this way and I’m just supposed to be happy for them, or that so many people have felt this way and I’m somehow supposed to be comforted by the idea of a communalized suffering. If these are the things I know, then I know close to nothing, and I cannot willingly and proudly write about them.

So I write down the date instead. What is today’s date? Today is December fourth. The fourth, I think to myself, and my mind lingers on the idea, the fact, rather, of today being the fourth of December. It is the fourth of December, and I tell myself this over and over and over again because I have been subconsciously dreading this day. It is any other day except it isn’t, the same way any person is like any other, but to certain people they are not. I stare at the number four I just wrote down, and the rest of the world simply starts to fall away from me. Today is his birthday, and as I reach this conclusion, the page I wrote the number four on disappears. The people walking past me begin to shape-shift and my coffee mug starts to melt around my fingers like a shackle. My hands are no longer my own because I hold this pen, but am I really still holding this pen?

When he would arrive here at this cafe, my coffee would still be mildly warm because it was never really hot in the first place. He would be thinner, paler, and seemingly taller than I had last remembered him being. His hair would still be blonde but whiter because of age. Knowing what I know now, I would stare at his eyes intensely. I would analyze his entire being, in fact, and grasp at nearly every single detail I could, and I would embed them in my brain for the rest of my days. These are the things we think we can do. We think if we had only tried a little harder, paid a little bit more attention, that things could’ve been different for us, better for us, but this is simply not the truth. We do what we can while we can at that moment, and that is all we were ever capable of doing. Retrospect is nothing but a perception of ourselves that does not exist and will never exist. If I had been the person I would’ve liked to be, if I had been this person that “would’ve” done all these things, I would’ve remembered his watch, his clothes, his sentence structure, his sunglasses — which were probably made for women, but he never cared for those things — his shoes, his walk, his mannerisms, his cellphone at the moment — because he was always breaking them — and his hands, the fingers I used to wrap my whole hand around as a small child. Where would remembering these things have gotten me? Remembering wouldn’t make him here. Remembering can't bring anyone back, this I know. Maybe I ask too much of my younger self. How was I to know all the details I would beg to remember later on? I was so young, but I knew enough to recognize what was deteriorating before me, and I did nothing about it.

“Open your eyes.” “Look at me.”

  When he would arrive, he would probably greet me, rather ecstatically, by saying “my girl!” This is at least how I had been greeted by him last time. The last time I saw him he was different than how he had always been before. Judging off of that moment, he would probably brush his hands roughly through his hair, flick his head quickly from side to side, and lay his glasses on his head. Sometimes he would wear two pairs of glasses at once, one for when walking in the sun and one for seeing up close, and he would alternate their positions on his head depending on which he needed at that instance. He would embrace me and squeeze me tightly, but it would not be a long embrace, and he would be mumbling about how much he missed me rather frantically. Last time I had seen him I was about 17. He could hardly contain himself, as any father would be, after not seeing his daughter in so long. Last time he had kissed my forehead. I was so much smaller than him; I had always been so much smaller than him. He was excited but restricted, so as not to frighten me too much. He had teared up. He used to call my mom “crazy lady.” This is a random fact of his diction I can never seem to forget, especially considering how much context lies behind it now that I am older. As I grew up, I began to piece things together. It was obvious the last time I saw him that his mind had been altered. His eyes looked clear, but his brain was scattered. He was probably sober at the moment, but what was sober anymore? The things pills can do to people I will never be able to wrap my head around. The last time I saw him, I had reluctantly let him hug me due to simultaneous guilt and resentment. This time I would hug him back immensely. I would hold him for as long as I could and I would bury my head in his chest and I would breathe into his shirt and inhale his cologne as if it were my last dying breath and not his. I would grab his hands and I would probably cry. These are the things we do, or wish we did, to make missing people easier. We grasp for pieces of their existence in hopes that they will suffice life without them, but that is simply wishful thinking. Still, when it comes to these things, we rely on wishful thinking because it is all we ever really have, and I was so young. How was I to know to grasp for these things?

When he would arrive, it would be the first time I’d seen him in three or four years. Everything about the encounter would be incredibly surreal. I would immediately dissociate, as I often did when I caught a glimpse of him at a distance. This would alter my perception of reality, seeing him in person. It did last time I saw him, and it would undoubtedly happen again, if not more intensely. If I were in the same mindset as the past, my mood, which I couldn’t help, would be overcome with hard feelings and sorrow. I would gaze upon him with frustration for how things had come to be for both of us. Knowing what I know now, there is never time for things like this. There is no time for bitterness and frustration with loved ones running on borrowed time. I learned this the hard way, by having all of that time stolen from me. What a cruel thing to do to a child. I felt like just a child, but I was actually 19.

When he would arrive, he would sit down in the chair in front of me, this rusting white cast iron chair. He was a large man with a large face and an undeniable presence. I actually didn’t know if he ever drank coffee or not. Did he like coffee? For some reason, I feel he liked Cuban coffee, but I am not sure why I think this. He liked eggs. He liked milk. He made fantastic pancakes. He, like my mother, loved anything I loved. He treasured anything I treasured. He thought anything I did was worthy of undying admiration. This is how I remember him when I was a child, and I took this point of view for granted. Growing up meant seeing reality more clearly, and it became a very difficult thing, to love a sick person. In whatever way someone is sick, all sick ever means is a series of trials and failures, but it doesn’t mean a lack of care or a lack of love. This was a hard thing for a child to understand. This is a hard thing for anyone to understand. I think I expect from people what he expected of me at just 17 years old: to give care and understanding when it can simply not be retrieved properly.

I remember one time he picked me up from school. He was perceivably high on something because he was awfully drowsy. He had started to mumble about a huge horse he had seen off of Federal Highway and Hallandale Beach. A gigantically tall horse at the racetrack, he explained. Tall as a building, he said. He was flailing his arms around lazily as he drove to demonstrate how enormous the horse was. His voice was low and slurring words together, and his face looked so emptily in awe. This threw me into a panic. I began to cry, hearing the bizarre series of words coming from my father’s slurring mouth. This was the man who was supposed to protect and secure me. The man who, as a child, had debunked my fears of monsters and ghosts, seemed to be turning into one right before my eyes.

I thought about how I once received a monkey balloon for my eighth birthday that was as tall as I was. It crept and floated into the hallway in front of my bedroom, and at night I saw its tail silhouetted through the cracked door and thought it was a pirate’s hook creeping down from the ceiling. I screamed, and my father came in and pulled the balloon into my view and revealed I had nothing to be afraid of. We laughed together, and I felt safe. Now this man was here, recklessly driving me home going on about some unrealistically gigantic horse on the street. I told him he was acting crazy. I told him he was crazy. I told him he was so far gone. My chest ached and tears flew off my face and all I wanted was for everything to stop happening all at once. I wanted everything to vanish into the air. I wanted my body to disintegrate and fly out of the window in small particles of dust. I was so young.

I remember sometime later passing by the Pegasus and Dragon statue while driving with a few friends. It is real. It is a 100-foot tall statue of Pegasus defeating a dragon in Gulfstream Park, Hallandale Beach, Florida. It is the third-tallest statue in the United States after the Birth of the New World in Puerto Rico and the Statue of Liberty in New York. It was a statue. It was being built at the time he had said these things to me. Why couldn’t he say that? Why couldn’t his mind realize he had left out a huge detail, that the horse wasn’t a living horse? Did he think it was real? Did I just assume the worst? These are questions I’ll never get answers to. When I saw it in real life, I threw myself into a dissociated panic. Nobody noticed. Nobody could notice because I didn’t move, I didn’t say a word, I just gazed out the window. My eyes were fixed on the bronze metal. I was in the car with friends but in my mind I was in the car with him all over again. I wish I had known then that he was not as far gone as I had perceived him to be. That he had not completely lost his mind, maybe only just a little.

“Open your eyes.” I used to say to him. “Look at me.” He’d look away for as long as he could before gazing back at me. His eyes would be bloodshot red if he could open them wide enough. A glazed look would take over him. Everything was probably moving very slowly in his mind. His breathing was slow, he was falling in and out of consciousness, and he couldn’t hold a comprehendible conversation. This is how I remember him before he moved out. Everything he did was with half-consciousness. I never saw the actual pills. I never saw the actual bottles. I never saw the actual drugs. I didn’t have to. All I had to see were his eyes, and my chest would ache. I would want to cry but had wanted to cry so frequently I soon began to never cry. Because of these things, I had gone most of my life trying to forget his eyes, but I couldn’t. His irises were always so crystal blue and cracking, like broken glass still upright.

When he would arrive, I would look into his eyes. If he were well, I’d be able to see into them. They’d be bright and crinkled. If he were unwell, they’d be red, hardly open. It ruined me, it crushed me, to see him move and breathe so slow. Or then, oppositely, to see him jitter and frantically move about. There were never in-betweens from what I can remember. When he would arrive, I’d lose all feeling in my fingers. I’d embrace him and hold him until the end of time. There would be no concern at all, no reluctance, no resentment, no frustration. I know better now. I didn’t know better then, but I know better now. Why had it happened then, when I hadn’t known any better? If I had known, if only I had known, I would have done better. I was just a child. I’d bury my head into his chest and ball my eyes out. I’d just hold him and hold him and hold him as I hadn’t ever done before, so tightly I could barely breathe. I would barely be breathing anyway, knowing everything I know now. When he would arrive, I would do everything I didn’t get a chance to, simply because I didn’t know better. How come we only know better after we were supposed to know? I know better now and what good does that do? He would never arrive. He couldn’t ever arrive.

I don’t know what time it is now but my coffee has gone ice-cold and the top layer has frozen over. The blue evening has turned pitch black, and the strangers passing by are just ghosts that surround me, taking seats in the chair in front of me and then condescendingly vanishing. Tears stream down my face and my lower lip is quivering uncontrollably. The world is moving fast and I sit here, immobilized and frightened. My whole body begins to quake as I stare at the seat, the forever empty seat for a ghost that would never be him, and even if it was, wouldn’t be real. It would not be filled by him, I knew this. It was impossible for it to be filled by him. It was impossible for the seat to be taken by anyone that wouldn’t dissolve if I reached out to grab hold of them and I knew this. For him to come and take this seat was not a possibility, yet I could not stop myself from building upon all the things I would do if he could come out of the grave and take this seat in front of me, all the things I would do if I could reach out and grasp at his existence and clutch onto it in every way I had never before understood that I should’ve. How was I to know? I was so young. I am still so young. Why didn’t anyone tell me this was the way the world worked? Why didn’t anyone prepare me for the vanishing and disappearing and the fact of no return? Nobody told me that I wouldn't get time back, and that moments in time are also people in time. Only now do I understand that the wind never blows the same way twice.

I’m cold and shivering but I’d still be shivering if I wasn’t cold. I run inside the cafe and haul open the bathroom door. I barely make it in before collapsing onto the cold tile. My cries are silent heaps and gasps for breath: the theatrics of actual sobbing I’ve gone so long avoiding. My body is currently the heaviest thing I’ve ever held up, which is why I have no choice but to plunge down onto the floor. I think about how I’m supposed to write what I know, but is this what I know? I don’t even know what this is. How would I contextualize this? How could I make people understand this when I don’t even understand this? I only know that I don’t know anything. I don’t know why people make the decisions they do. I don’t know why I make the decisions I do. I don’t know why people collapse on doorsteps or in cafe bathrooms or on living room couches or in crowds at concerts or on the sides of roads. I don’t know why I came to get coffee and ended up waiting for someone who would never show up in this lifetime. I don’t know why I resent myself for not knowing how to handle things that are bigger than me. I don’t know why I resent others for not knowing how to handle things that are bigger than them. I don’t know why the blue of the morning is different than the blue of the evening. I don't know why I expect so much of myself and others. Why are we even here? Why do we even stay? Why would they build a 100-foot statue in a city that’s going to be underwater in a few decades? Why sit outside alone in Boston on a freezing December evening? Why take a bike ride instead of just confronting the theatrics of sobbing? How does anyone write what they know? Does anyone and everyone in the entire world who has ever existed know exactly what they’re doing and why they’re doing it and how they’re doing it, except for me?

I don’t know if I should even pick myself up off of the cafe bathroom floor but I do it anyway. I pick myself up and I stare at myself in the mirror. My face is flushed and my nose is bright red. Tear streaks stain my face and I cannot believe this is who I am at this very moment. I rub my eyes aggressively and brush off my jeans. I pick up the broom leaning against the wall, and I hold it like a baseball bat, gripping it real tightly. I feel the sway of every single emotion pulse through me and heat up my fingers. I turn around and, without a second thought, charge at the mirror with the handle of the broom like it’s a battering ram. I smash the broom into the cafe bathroom’s mirror with all the weight and force of everything I don’t know. The glass shatters around the corner I hit but nothing falls. Not a single shard of the glass falls down. Fragments and fractures of glass overtake the edge of the mirror I hit but they just stay in place tauntingly. I look at my reflection through the distorted pieces and never before have I seen a more accurate depiction of myself in my entire life. This mirror in front of me, in all its wonkiness and contortion, knows me better than I will ever know myself. I lay the broom against the wall and turn around to walk out the door, and as soon as I reach for the door handle I hear the entire mirror collapse behind me, chips of glass cutting at my ankles, but I don’t dare look back at it.

I walk out of the bathroom, and I start to sprint into the pitch-black darkness of the night, and the faster I run, the more I begin to disappear from myself, from everything I am and everything I don’t know. I become one of the strangers in their itchy sweaters, and then another, and I jump from body to body and being to being. One second I am one of the strangers, and the next I am their lover, and then I am their dog and then I am the scarf around their neck and I bounce and mesh with each piece of matter until I start to evaporate into the crisp December air. I fall apart by each individual molecule, and every separate part of me is picked up by a different gust of wind, carried with unrestricted motion. My disintegrated body swirls in the whooshes and circles of the breeze within the dead leaves. Only under the street lamp lights could you catch a glimpse of the atoms from the being I used to be, billowing and churning in the frost and light snowfall. If I know anything, anything at all, it is that my existence, if it hasn’t already, will soon become one with the fallen snow, and the snow will blend with the slushy water and dirt on the ground. Ice will form and my remnants will settle and freeze over by morning. Come daylight, all the strangers with their lovers and their dogs will walk over me to get their coffee in to-go cups, and when they walk over me I will crack beneath their shoes for I have finally, at last, become one with the place desolate, and this is where I prefer to reside.

Brenna Marie Sheets is a senior English major with a minor in mass communications at the University of Florida. She enjoys writing short stories, film analyses, essays, and satire pieces.