Jeremiah Hawkins


Make Believe

I.

	
Nicole and I were fifteen when we happened upon our fountain of youth. We were young, still in the honeymoon of life, unformed and slightly straddling the unbroken threshold into adulthood. One could liken us to putty, vaguely sculpted, awaiting the hardening hands of values, basic beliefs, responsibility and lasting consequence.
	We fell in love in that fountain we called the creek. And, as dreamy minds do, we swore we’d be together forever. Surely our love would overwhelm any deep currents of contrasting selfhood that flowed dormant below the surface of our budding beings. Surely our enchanted years together would mold us into each other, as if our pubescent blossoming took place within the same unstrained cocoon. 
The art of make believe comes easy to romantic minds.      

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The last time Nicole and I swam in the creek, we were twenty-five and grasping onto the few threads of a weathered and frayed relationship. 
“Has it rained lately?” Nicole asked, her streaked brunette hair stroked back by murky river water. She looked so beautiful to me in the creek-washed purity of no makeup or hairspray. She, however, couldn’t feel beautiful—despite my countless declarations—without the supportive weight of mascara, lipstick, and base.
	“It rained for about thirty minutes yesterday afternoon,” I said. “Why, is the current strong today?” I began to swim from the bank towards her position in the middle where a thin current veined through in serpentine fashion. On a normal summer’s day, the current could only be felt mildly by feet swaying the deep. Following a good rain, however, the current’s slither became quite breezy. 
	Before I reached Nicole, she said, “Just look.” 
	I stopped. She tilted her head back and brought her body horizontal atop the surface. She knew I could discern the flow beneath her by the residual surface draft evidenced by her drift. 
I watched her float slowly away from me. My eyes fanned her body from her watery lips to her small, shapely breasts to her smooth belly to her glistening legs. My stomach told me with a smoldering churn that I needed to touch her at that moment.
	I hovered over to her, aided by that same gentle surface current. Reaching her, my right palm distributed itself with spread fingers around her belly button and my left hand turned her face towards mine to extinguish my lips upon hers. I was gentle so as not to disturb her wavy levitation.
	“You see,” she said, our faces an inch apart, “you don’t want to leave me.” She smiled. But it wasn’t her normal smile. I hadn’t seen that smile in a couple months.
 	“No, I don’t,” I said. My feet worked hard against the current’s unwavering push to afford my hand’s soft rest atop Nicole’s delicate buoyancy. I kissed her again as we floated through leaf shade sprinkled down from overhanging limbs peppering the water like sparse puzzle pieces. 
	“Tell me a story,” she said, rolling her head to face the sky.
	“I can’t think of any.”
	“Come on, use your imagination. I’ll help you. I’m a princess and you’re a knight.”
	I chuckled. “I think I’ve told that one a few times already.”
“Just talk, then. I love to hear your voice,” she said and then closed her eyes.
	It was true. I know this because I would, at times, grant her request for a story with a monologue of anthropology—my college major. She didn’t mind. When I was writing my senior thesis, for instance, I only spoke of it. And, it wasn’t until about the fourth time I explained it that she could say what the thing was even about. As she said, she simply desired to hear me talk, as if I were singing a song pleasant enough to disregard lyrical content. 
	I expressed once that I didn’t know how to take that. I mean, it was a complement and show affection that she enjoyed listening to me speak. But not to care about the ideas and values my mind exuded vexed me. Or, at least, should have vexed me. But the complement along with her amorous eyes washed away any sticky discontent and confused my heart, provoking within it an emotional blank. 
	As we glided together—her feet slumbering on the surface, mine treading the depths—I spoke for the next fifteen minutes about a man and a woman of different dialects. They were in love and met often in a fantastic patch of thin forest that could magically break the language barrier, releasing a pent up flood of loving communication. They were happy there.

-----------

The creek did that to us. In its embrace, we were somehow able to recapture the whimsical days of our beginnings. And so, to us, it truly was a fountain of youth. Its waters held the mysterious ability to soak through our shells of selfhood, soften us, and return us to an age of easy compatibility.  A long forsaken harmony was returned to us in that garden of boulders, terraces, trees and bath. 
Almost everywhere else, I’m sorry to say, served as a battlefield on which to knock each other down so as to raise flags of solidifying identity. The undertows of our nature at some point in our early twenties had begun to pull us apart with increased force, as if playing tug-of-war where our arms were the rope and clasped hands the knot. 
What was once Romeo and Juliet had somehow morphed, over the years, into Montague and Capulet. A not-so-uncommon tragedy, but a tragedy, nonetheless.	



II.

	Burdened by the day’s syrupy humidity, Nicole and I arrived late to a luncheon with her Uncle and Aunt and two single-digit children. We had just concluded a fight over my attire. Apparently, what I was initially wearing said, in so many unspoken phrases, that I didn’t take care of myself, that I was lazy, that maybe my head was in the clouds too much, that I didn’t care about the things I should care about.
	I could see that.
“Sorry we’re late,” Nicole said to her family with her smile spread full. 
They weren’t upset. But even if they were, how could they remain so after being lighted by that smile? I’ve seen it so often I know it better than my own face, and still it heals my emotional ills once it appears. 
Though, since that mid-April day I told Nicole I was planning to leave for Pennsylvania for graduate school, that smile, when aimed at me, became starved. It tightened, thinned and, soon, shrunk to downright emaciation. Others received the full, hearty version with its intoxicating rewards. I remember wishing, as I beheld it from the side that day, that there were such things as contact buzzes in romance.
There aren’t. It’s quite the opposite, unfortunately. 
	
	The restaurant Nicole’s uncle chose carried the young family theme to its pinnacle. Our tabletop was a dry erase board with permanent tracings of animals and forests and oceans and balloons awaiting the breath of life from the arrays of markers held loosely in the overexcited hands of children. The servers were all adorned in costumes of cartoon characters. We were served by a big SpongeBob with a trail of children behind him itching for a hug or a joke or an autograph, and, if they got one, would frantically bounce about like kernels popping in a pan. 
	“Richard, sorry again for being late,” I said after we ordered and SpongeBob departed with his train of children, acquiring two more from our table. “I called, but got no answer.”
	“That’s okay,” Nicole’s uncle said. “We were entertained.”
	“And,” Nicole’s aunt, Liz, said, “even if we had our cell phones we probably wouldn’t have heard them here.”
	“What happened to your phones?” Nicole asked. 
	“Oh nothing,” said Liz looking at her husband affectionately. “It’s our new Sunday tradition.”
	“Sunday is family day,” Richard said. “We’ve decided to unplug from the world once a week and just be with each other.”
	Nicole, with a look of surprise, said, “What if something happened and someone needed to get a hold of you?”
	Richard shrugged and said, “Well, I suppose the same thing that would have happened when we were newlyweds in the early ‘80’s, or before.” 
	“Nicole,” Liz said, “I thought the same as you at first. But, you know, I spend too much time worried about all kinds of things. Sundays I have my kids and my husband, and placing my cell phone in the drawer is my way of putting away all the drama and worry, and just be with them.” 
	“I think that’s really great,” I said. “Seriously.” I placed my hand on Nicole’s thigh and gave a slight squeeze.
	“Sounds weird to me,” Nicole said.
	“And it feels weird at first, trust me.” Liz looked from Nicole to me and said, “But anyways, Alex, when do you leave? It’s really soon, right?”
Nicole’s leg twitched beneath my hand.
“In a few days,” I said and then coughed my discomfort into my hand. 
The truth was that I hadn’t fully decided to go. No one knew this. Well, Nicole knew, but not because I had told her. She just knew me that well. She could see my indecisiveness in every facial fidget and distant expression. And she saw many of these, for she was the hinge on which I swung, dangling between here and there, pivoted in the present as my mind probed the past for the future, trying to figure out the rest of my life.    
	Nicole shifted in her chair, her gaze pasted to a tracing of a grinning elephant on the table. I took a deep breath and ran my hands through my hair. Liz, apparently recognizing the effects of her question, reddened.
	“So,” Richard said, puncturing a growing silence, “what do you guys think of this place? Pretty whacky, huh?”

-----------
	
If only we could live forever in the creek. Or, take a piece of the creek everywhere with us and have it work its magic like fairy dust fusing our very separate sensibilities. As long as our pockets seethed with the sands of the creek the frog would always remain the prince, my kisses could always awaken my sleeping Beauty from her far away slumber, and my Beauty would never tire of her Beast. 
	If only.


III.
	
I loved Nicole—of this there could be no doubt. 
	The last couple of weeks with her resembled no other except the first—that spellbinding beginning at fifteen. Just as my stomach fluttered back then with a hundred flailing wings shortening my breath and muddying my mind, it did so again. When around her my hands roamed restlessly, like a drug addict seeking release in powdery skin, inhaling her soon to be absent presence.
	With just a couple days left, I arrived at a stunning conclusion: I couldn’t leave. I just couldn’t.
	If I left, it was over. We both knew that. Without the commonalities provided by our history—our mutual friends, favorite hangouts, nostalgic reminisces of shared adolescence, and, of course, the creek—we had nothing. Outside of these commonalities we could agree on nothing.
	Still, I couldn’t leave.
	I couldn’t leave even though I knew we weren’t right for each other. I knew as surely as the sun would rise tomorrow that if my last name replaced hers, a contradiction in terms would ensue. But only my brain knew this. My heart held a different story altogether, and held it in pounding iron grips.
	School could wait, I told myself. And on the day before my scheduled departure I decided to tell Nicole. 
	I planned a picnic. I chose a location in a park that bore no place in our history up to that point. I wanted a picnic in that place to chisel itself as a monument in the intertwined timeline of our lives. A new beginning of sorts, a new covenant, a new commitment I would offer, and I would do so atop a quilt that could become our magic carpet ready to fly us together into our shared future, no longer living in the past. It would replace our fountain of youth that we bathed in as a mystical crutch. We no longer needed to look backward.
	It was to be a special picnic, indeed. I wanted her all to myself so I could give my all to her.
	I insisted we leave our cell phones at home and, in so doing, leave the world behind, just like her Aunt and Uncle. I mean, I couldn’t allow our magic carpet to be tethered to the ground by pestering phones lines, transforming carpet to kite to toss us haphazardly in airy currents, going nowhere.	
	
Nicole wore a sultry sundress and sandals, her streaked hair pulled back in a ponytail. As my eyes journeyed and shuddered along her small, subtle curves and fluent skin, I wondered how I had ever won the heart of such a beautiful woman.
	I was surprisingly nervous sitting across from her beneath a large oak tree as a breeze periodically poked her ponytail, sending it rocking side to side like a floppy pendulum. 
	“How are the sandwiches?” I asked.
	“Good,” she said, her eyes momentarily meeting mine in fleeting acknowledgement. Was she nervous, too? No, she was more likely sad, maybe even a bit bitter.
	“I’m really glad the weather cooperated,” I said with a nervous chuckle.
	Nicole looked around us, blank faced, scanning the open field of ankle high grass and infrequent trees. I observed her with needy eyes, for she seemed to be out there somewhere, far away.
	“Yeah,” she said and raised her iced tea to her lips.
	This isn’t good, I thought. We had been together long enough to know when something was wrong. Her terse responses and scant eye contact reflected a barrier between us slicing our quilt in two, allowing indecisive winds to propel us in differing directions. How easy this was to do! 
	“Nicole, I want to tell you something,” I said, hoping to bridge the distance with my good news.
	“Okay,” she said with a hint of what could have been impatience or maybe agitation.	
	“Um, you know how much I love you. You do something to me that no other woman can. And, I know we’ve had our problems, but everyone does, right? I mean, when I’m around you, which is almost all the time, I have trouble keeping my hands off you.” Nicole shifted uncomfortably and I continued. “I can’t imagine a future without you in it. So, I’ve–“
	Nicole sighed and I paused. One would think my words would begin to squelch any sadness or bitter sentiments over my departure, that they would nullify the currents separating us. I was confused.
	“What’s wrong?” I asked.
	“Nothing,” she said without hesitation. “I just, you know…”
	“What is it?”
	“I…” 
	She sighed again, breathing out her contagious agitation for me to inhale.
	“Tell me.”
	“I don’t understand why we’re here and not at the creek,” she said, staring into my eyes. “That’s our place. That’s always been our place and that’s where we should spend our last day. And I don’t know why we had to leave our cell phones at home. It doesn’t make any sense to me. What if something happened and someone’s trying to call me?”
	“We’re here because it’s different,” I said, failing to keep my irritation from spilling over into my tone. “I thought we could do something new. And, we left our cell phones so we could truly be alone.”
	“We’re alone a lot, even when we have our cell phones.”
	“No, not really.”
	“Yes, really.” 
I paused, looked down and shook my head. All the fight in me dissipated in a rush and flood and permeation of understanding.  “You don’t understand.”
	“No, I don’t,” she said.
	Just then—in that one moment—that single, tiny quarrel opened my eyes to a panoramic vision. 
I saw a storehouse, and all our differences were contained within, as well as all the fights our differences caused. I could see disagreements we had dating back to when we were fifteen. There were few back then and didn’t take up much space. Unfortunately, they grew in size and frequency. In fact, in the last few years they multiplied exponentially. I saw them all, compounded and displayed. I saw it all, and the vision was strong enough to send the sentiment forcefully from mind to heart. My hope and my denial—my fantasy—dissolved and disappeared as a result, swept away by the epic currents of a final day.
“Are you done eating?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“Okay, let’s pack up and get out of here.”
We gathered everything together, and I rolled up the magic carpet.



IV.

I cried that night.
The following day I loaded up my car. I loaded it with possessions saturated with the scent and unique memory of Nicole. My favorite shirt, for instance, that Nicole gave me that said, “Lost in Thought. Please Send Search Party.” My favorite pen engraved with my name on one rounded side and Nicole’s on the other. My favorite flip flops I found floating in the creek and decided to keep despite Nicole’s funny banter that far out lasted the day.
Et Cetera.
“Well, that’s the last one,” I said, cramming a box into my box of a car. 	
	“So, you’re on your way, huh?” Nicole asked with a lean of disbelief.
	“It’s time.” My hand raced over to hers and cradled it. 
	“I guess,” she said, her hand lying limp in mine, “it is what it is.”
	“It is.” My head sunk and my eyes rested on our disparate, though joined, hands. I ran my thumb along the back of her knuckles.
	“Why?”
	“Why what?”
	She sighed and then said, “Why is this happening? It doesn’t seem necessary at all.”
	“What? Me leaving?” 
	“Not just that. Everything.” 
She paused. 
“We love each other, right?” she asked, piercing my eyes with hers.
	“Yes, definitely.” I squeezed her hand.
	“Then why?” She looked up to the sky deploringly, and my eyes dampened.
	“I...I don’t know.”
	“Yes, you do,” she said, dropping her head and then peering down at our hands as her fingers finally embraced mine back. “You know, and it’s why you’re leaving.”
	Struck by this, my eyes suddenly blurred from flooding moisture. I inched towards her and said, “You’re so smart.” 
	“No, I’m not.” Her head still down, shaking it slowly.
	I placed my free hand under her chin to lift it. Then, I kissed her. 
	She pulled her face from mine and dropped her gaze again.
	“I’m sorry,” I said.
	“It’s nobody’s fault. No one’s to blame.”
	I brushed away the hair dangling over her downward face. “It is what it is,” I said.
	She sighed as a tear broke the threshold of her lovely lower left eye’s rim. I wanted to hold her so bad, but I knew I had to let her lead this now.
	“Yes, it is what it is,” she said, wiping away her own tear.
	Once the tear was gone, her face hardened and she slid her hand out from between my fingers and thumb. She reached for the car door and opened it. 
	“It’s time,” she said. “You should go. You have a long drive ahead of you.”
	 I inhaled deeply and wiped my wet eyes before they could run lines down my cheeks. Pulling out my keys, I neared the car’s opening. 
	She stopped me. She kissed me. She held me tight. I held her tighter. 
	“Make me believe,” she said into my ear with unexpected calmness.
	“Believe what?”
	“That things will be okay. That this won’t hurt forever. Alex, make me believe.”
	“We’ll be fine,” I told her, and then slowly pulled my shoulder from her head so my eyes could find hers. Once our eyes met, I said, “You’re my family, Nicole. You’re a huge part of who I am, as well as everything I will become. We’re going to stay in touch. We’re always going to be in each other’s lives.  Everything will be fine. Don’t you see? You’ll always be my princess and I’ll always be your knight.” A subtle grin graced her face, and I said, “Do you believe me?”
	Following a small pause, she said, “Yes.” 
	I descended into my car seat and Nicole shut the door. I turned the ignition and rolled down the windows. Nicole stepped back.
	She then said, “When you come back, Alex, meet me in the creek.”
	I took a deep breath, taking in the moment as a tear rolled down my cheek. My lip quivered its way into a grin. And I nodded. 
I put the car in drive and drove with a gentle wind at my back.