reality is a layer-cake

When I came into the world again, I did so with charcoal and paint on my skin, and when I fell again into love I obsessed over drawing him: Loose sketches of lounging about and gesture, as many portraits as he would humor me for—I wanted to breathe every detail of him onto paper. I wanted something to hold on to when his time came. I got damn good at it, too. Our friends and loved ones praised me widely for my talent and the detailed, lifelike quality of it. They would often bother me to capture moments of travel to keep and share, eager to offer encouragement for my artesian’s ego. I even managed to earn a small amount of employment, if you can believe that.

When the time came, though, nothing I had drawn of him felt like enough, and once again I was pitied as a girl grieving the loss of her parent.

Still, I had cultivated a skill for myself, so I did what any sensible and wounded creature would and poured myself into it. It was an unconventional thing for the time but I made my own way for a while. I earned enough off my work to make something like income, and the rest I managed through the charity of the church, though I made certain to never stay in one place for very long.

I made a vow to myself that next time I would be good enough: I would draw so perfectly and so splendidly that in the end I would have the perfect image to hold onto. No matter how long I lived I would never have to worry about forgetting the smallest or slightest of detail.

I promised myself that I would not fall in love again until such was the case.

Eventually my work caught the attention of a man whose wife had come to enjoy painting, and he brought us together eagerly. She was principally a pianist, her love of painting a new endeavor and filled with bright and vibrant color. It was abstract and very far removed from the stringent discipline of art that I practiced, but it was undoubtedly beautiful. I loved how different it was from my own work, how emotional and full of heart. It was never the sort of thing I had want of for my own practice, but in each new technique I taught her I reveled in seeing the ways she would bend it to her style. I delighted in knowing her. In knowing both of them.

They were the most wholly wonderful people I had come to meet in a long time. They played music together and shared in their household a spirit of laughter and expression that was inspiring even to witness. I adored them. In the pair of them I found a home, and I eased into their companionship like a sigh of relief. I believed that I had found for myself a place of fulfillment and joy, free of the threat of affection.

The world has never been so simple, though, and in time I fell between their arms.

I cursed my weak heart quietly, but I didn’t have the nerve to step away once I found a place for myself in their marriage and eventually I, for the third time in my long life, caused the ones I loved to uproot their lives. Once again I found myself introduced as ‘daughter’.

When he died, she stopped playing the piano.

I understood. I had been in this place so many times, but this was the first I had seen another person endure it. I can’t imagine how she would have carried on after his death had I not been there to buy her paints and flowers and encourage her rise in the morning and to bring her to bed in the evening.

One day I bought her a songbird. She smiled and thanked me and told me that she loved it in that soft but far-away voice she’d adopted after his passing. It was for a long time my responsibility, but she would sit with it and watch it every morning and afternoon, so it was worth it. Over time she came to rise in the morning on her own. She fixed our tea and painted with brighter colors, and although she never touched the piano again in time she came to sing along with the bird, and that was enough.

When she died, I attended her funeral as her granddaughter, and she was buried beside the man that we had loved together.

I leafed through countless sketches of them and stared on hours at portraits that they insisted on hanging for their realism, and among them I found nothing that could be called ‘enough’. I settled on a small pencil drawing I had done of them playing together and placed it in a leather-bound book in which I had drawn or written nothing but used as a place for safekeeping my best and most treasured drawings of my first husband, and now too for my second husband and wife.

I set the songbird free, and took my work away from their graves.

Years passed and I made my way in the world one way or another, most often with a pencil in my hand. I moved around often, as was my way, and when I found myself on a whim settled in one place that I had taken a special liking to, a rather well-established gentleman eventually came puppy-dogging after me. Although I found him to be charming and good company, I knew from the outset he wasn’t someone I would love. Still, after such a period of solitude, I found it refreshing to have such undivided attention from someone. It’s selfish, I know, and I did feel a little bad leading him on as I did. I still do to some extent, as I know with a woman who had loved him in turn he would have been a wonderful partner.

I never intended to marry him. To me, he was just a person whose company I enjoyed, who I liked to talk to and draw. I always figured eventually he’d grow tired of me leading him around and would move on. One night, though, when we had stolen ourselves away in the late hours of the evening the way men and women of our time were really not supposed to, as we sat beneath stars drinking wine and I was sketching him, commenting upon how I adored the hawkish ridge of his nose — I found myself breaking down in tears.

Maybe it was the wine, or maybe it was simply that I trusted him, but either way, I told him of my history, of my curse that men dreamed and longed for. I told him how I came to be the artist that I was, that no matter how much I practiced or improved that I would never have something real enough to carry with me into my cursed eternity. I spoke and cried for hours on end, made a proper mess of the grand romantic evening he had planned. Still, he listened. Moreover, he believed me, without my even having to prove my indestructibility to him.

Eventually the sun threatened to rise, and he brought me home. I thanked him for being my friend, and kissed him on the cheek. I figured my lack of loving him aside, he would now at least understand from a intellectual standpoint why he ought to take his affections elsewhere. And, indeed, a week passed without a word from him and I was at peace with where our relationship had found its close. The sketches of him that I had cultivated that evening were far from photorealistic, but I knew that the memory they were attached to would long hold a treasured place in my heart, and so I tucked them away in that leather book of mine and was ready to let the moment go when he came appearing at my door.

He offered me words of love and devotion, promises of loyalty even if I never came to love him truly in return. He asked me to marry him and told me that it was enough in his eyes if I was only ever a friend to him behind closed doors. My heart ached on his behalf. The truth is that in that moment his offer felt like a dream to me, but I knew it to be unfair and was prepared to open my mouth to dismiss him with whatever gentle words I could summon, when he gave me a gift that stopped my heart with disbelief.

In that moment it felt as if he had given to me a breed of immortality that I had never known—a power to pause time and take it for myself.

The morning that boy asked me to marry him, he gave me a camera.

I had known of photography, of course, but it was such a costly practice, I figured it would be lifetimes before I’d have the opportunity to use, let alone own one for myself. I stared at the thing for what must have been quite a while, as when he spoke again I found he had moved to my side without me noticing, and placed a hand on my arm. He reiterated his claim, and I felt in that moment suffocated with the sincerity of his affection—and I hated myself for not loving him in return as I accepted his offer.

We staged ourselves a more respectable, proper proposal. He and his family arranged an afternoon tea to which I was invited, and he proposed to me in the garden with a ring and all those other traditions of engagement. I don’t think either of us ever saw our wedding bonds as a symbol of our relationship, though.

No. For us, that item would always be the camera.

He arranged to have a professional come and teach me how to operate the thing. It was a tricky but not impossible process, and the first photograph that I ever took was a daguerreotype photo of him in his finest suit. He asked after it was finished if the photographer would take one of us together, and he did. I remember looking at it and being struck by how well-suited we seemed to one-another, and again feeling an ache for my lack of loving. I think he knew what I was thinking—he always seemed to know my thoughts better than I did.

In the years that we were married, I often tried to love him. The comfort that I found in his arms and our conversations was real, but whenever I stopped to try to pull loving from them, I inevitably came up empty handed. I pretended to love him, certainly. I would kiss him in the mornings and afternoons when no one was around to see it, and whisper words of adoration. He knew it was an act, though. I liked to think for a number of years that he didn’t, but as time wore on and pressure from his family to have children increased, and I offered in my quietly panicked way to begin, he took the opportunity to tell me what I already knew.

His family began to grow cold towards me for my supposed sterility, but by this time our worries were beginning to lean toward the steeping divide in our appearance. He was clever and well-connected, though, and moved us into the country, claiming that his physician had noted unbalanced or luxurious living to “put the body out of balance” and cause women to be unable to bear children.

After that our relationship changed greatly. Without the severity of his family’s eye on us, I took my own room in the upstairs chamber, one that I dedicated to drawing and developing pictures. We stopped sharing a bed or putting on airs of romance, and lived out our later years together as friends.

I often hoped that he might take a lover, some sort of affair that I could feign ignorance about, but he never stopped loving me, in the gentle and kind way that he did. Every now and then I would invite myself into his bed; I felt as though it was the least I could do for him, all things considered, but it was never an offer he took me up on. Occasionally he would pause and take me in his arms and hold me for a very long time, kiss my head or my shoulder—then to step back and bring up some gossip or comment on the weather, and I knew how it must hurt him, so I would pretend not to notice, and carry on that conversation, too.

I never loved him really, and I imagine had things played out differently, we both would have carried on with our lives in a way that was meaningful and fulfilling without one-another. On the day that he died, though, I stared at that photograph of him in his suit from that first year we were married, and was so glad that this was how things turned out. He was my very best friend, and I would not have traded our lives together for anything.

I like to think he felt the same.

Having left his worldly possessions to me, I found myself in a place of financial security that was very new to me to experience on my own. It was refreshing to have the time and space to mourn, but in time I grew restless. When the Kodak camera went on the market, I made the decision to collect one for myself and leave the house and everything in it behind. I had started over plenty of times, but leaving the camera that he had bought for me to be sold remains one of the hardest decisions I have ever had to make.

I traveled anywhere that I could get myself to. Almost always on the move, I rarely stayed in one place for more than a year or two, and by the time the year 1920 was upon me, I was living in the American south, with hardly the time to catch my breath in the midst of prohibition.

As we all did back then, I eventually found an establishment to my liking and frequented it. I fell into friendly terms with some of the bootleggers that operated it, and one day the bartender asked if I would be willing to take a photograph of the gang, and I agreed. It had all been very light and casual friendship until then, but on the day that I went to take their picture, I was introduced to the head of their operation. He was a very distinct gentleman, a dignified persona with a bold and enthusiastic fire and liveliness in his eyes that seemed utterly unique to me. He was in some indescribable way more fully and fiercely ‘alive’ than the rest of them.

I forget how it happened exactly, but in some way I outed myself and my strangeness to that man. As I rushed to fathom excuses and explanations, though, I began to realize that the awe in his eyes came not from confusion, but recognition.

We connected instantly. The joy and relief we found in having discovered one-another, in having at last found a person we would never have to lose—it was such an experience I could never hope to find the proper words to articulate in language. Within weeks of our meeting he proposed. It seems so abrupt and stumbling now, how it all happened—we had hardly gotten to know one-another, after all! But in the rush of finding someone else like ourselves we were too caught up in our own excitement.

We were—for the first time in our living memory—intrepid and foolish children again.

The Great Depression came and passed—we got along better than most without a need for food or medicine, did our best to help our friends and loved ones get by. We garnered a reputation of extreme generosity that never felt truly earned. The world recovered and promptly fell into war, made a habit of doing so. He was inevitably conscripted into the military, and I had little reason to worry.

Eventually, as our lives settled together comfortably once more and we made a life for ourselves in the north—something more conventionally respectable than bootlegging—he told me that he wanted to have a baby.

I had never considered having children, wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to. He eventually came to persuade me, though, with dreams of a lineage we could always share our friendship with: A line of descendants to know and cherish and love for all of our many lifetimes. He liked to wax on poetically about family lineage as mortal man’s own incarnation of our gift.

It was a nice thought—but it turns out immortality cares little more for insemination than it does injury. And, eventually, he left.

I carried on as I had before him, meeting and falling in love with new people. I took photographs and kept them in that old book of mine. I remember wishing briefly that I had taken his picture at some point, but I supposed that should we ever meet again, he was certain to look just the same.

After the death of my fourth wife I moved to Amsterdam. Grief is never easy but in all my time I had learned my own way of coping with it. One day in that city, I saw him again. We passed each other in the street, marveled a little at how small the world was or perhaps at the inevitability of it, given the odds and given our nature. Despite the strange and difficult buzz of seeing each other again after the way everything had ended (or perhaps because of it), we decided to go for coffee.

He told me that afternoon that he had been living in Russia and had married another woman, and that their child had been only half way between mortal and immortal:

It could never age—but it could die.

I wondered if the opposite might be possible, and he told me it was not worth the risk. I asked what had become of the mother, and he told me he did not know. He assumed that she had probably died, “just as they all do.”

I took his picture.

. . .

We lived together in Amsterdam for a while. We lived comfortably, but he was tired. Tired in that deep down, complicated way that is difficult to look directly at. His look grey and haunted with a hollowed-in silence, empty of dreams and of fire. The world and his long life had robbed him of that light I had once seen in his eyes, had left him a mournful and delicate-hearted creature. He confessed to me only once wanting to die, saying in that soft and tired voice that perhaps it was the fate of man to long always for the unattainable. I didn’t say it at the time, but I couldn’t help thinking that, in his own way, he had died.

Eventually he learned to smile again, came gently back into the world of the living. He had changed for the quieter, a solemn hook in his heart that would forever remain a part of it. I gently broached the idea of adoption to him, and he declined in that newfound way of his. We never spoke again of children.

He began to close away from mortal men, but I still longed to connect. I embraced technology and kept my treasured mementos backed up to hard drives and cloud services to assure their safekeeping. It was an obsessive collection, and I was determined to keep it—to keep them and their memory—safe. It hurt, sure, but I still had want of humanity and connection, even for all the fleeting nature of it. The more time wore on the more I longed to connect and the less he wanted to do with ‘humanity’. It had never occurred to me to think of us as something other than human, before. I could understand, though, his desire to close off from the vulnerability that loving mortals inevitably wrung.

He decided to take work in Antarctica to “finally foot himself on every damn continent of this planet!”, or so he put it. It was an easy façade to see through, but I did my best to feign ignorance. He did his best not to notice.

We parted with an exquisitely unique and tender sadness. You can't imagine the difficulty in letting go of the only thing you never have to lose, but we supposed that the world was a small enough place that we would probably find each other again in time.

In a way, we were right.

As it turns out, though, time, too, struggles with the idea of death.

Eventually Earth met it’s close in that natural progression of life into death that all but ourselves were bound to, and there was nothing I could do to preserve it. There was nothing I could do at all.

It was torture for a long time, but it is a marvelous thing, really, the way the mind adapts. Eventually the pain and asphyxiation became the norm, and I was able to think and focus past it. When my mind drew back into focus there was an immeasurable sadness in me. I grieved for the Earth, for my friends and loved ones, for every soul I ever loved all over again. The agony in my heart overshadowed every ounce of pain my body experienced in its constant state of destruction and reconstruction.

I wondered if I ought to have given myself over to the alchemists and scientists of my home that I had so feared. I had feared torture then, but it was clear to me now I could endure anything—perhaps if I had allowed it my world would have been able to be spared its fate. Then again, perhaps it all would have all been for naught, as it seemed everything had been, anyway.

I thought of him often, wondered if he felt the same grief, if he shared the same heartbroken paranoia and regret. I wondered if he was suffering greatly, drifting out in the frigid and scalding void.

I don’t know if it could be called a miracle or mere eventuality of our scenarios, but eventually, somewhere in the great and terrible vacuum of space we found each other for the third and final time.

We can never speak or confide in one-another again, I will never know how he lived out his final years and lifetimes on Earth—but we’re together, clutching hard and stubborn and desperate to each other.

I like to think of us as gods, sometimes, in a small and silly way. Or perhaps as incarnations of Earth itself—that it had somehow known the end that it would meet and so created indestructible beings to carry on the memory of it and the people who had for a time inhabited it.

I don’t believe anymore that it had all been for nothing. Even if it all had to end, and even if I have to suffer now in my mourning it all. I don’t regret having been a part of it: Having created so much, having known and loved so many people. Even if it ends, there is meaning in that it happened at all.