In which Jon remembers Maggie. 

Chapter 1: Saudade

Saudade – the feeling of intense longing for a person you love but is now lost. A haunting desire for what is gone.

Jon stepped into a twilight world.

    Through the window, he could see that the sky was its natural, prosaic blue. Its cloudlessness, its clarity, its cleanness, appeared to mock the formless, foggy fragments that lingered in his ribcage. Angry redness superimposed the inviolate blueness, yielding pungent purples that shrieked at him: how could you let this happen? No answer. The colors rose in treble parabolas of sound, heightening his heartache. He sought excuses and was given the final responsibility: fault.
    Without sensation, Jon dragged his brush across the canvas. He worked urgently, trying to recall every quirk, every facet, everything he loved about her. Those freckles, spaced out like constellations on her brown skin, that jewel color in her cheeks that bloomed whenever he told her how beautiful she was. And that hair! That aureole of curlicue corkscrew curls, constantly falling into soft blackthorn eyes. Oh, and seashells! She loved seashells. She had wanted to go to Jeffreys Bay.
    Oh, Maggie.
    Covered with sweat, he put his paintbrush down. He had finished.
    Oh, how he had failed.
    With supreme revulsion, with exceeding panic, Jon become acutely conscious of exactly how long it had been since he had seen Maggie Foss alive. Had a year ever gone by so fast? Was it possible to forget the palette of her face, the dulcet tones of her voice, the tenor of her very being? But how could he? He feared the answers.
    Jon stood quickly, wiping his hands on the old jeans that he purposely used for painting. His angst was pitted against him, again and again. He didn’t change his clothes, but left unhesitatingly; in all states of dress and undress, people didn’t much care what one wore in the city.
    He hadn’t known where he was going until he got there. Muscle memory, and all that.
    The house stood at the end of the street, affable enough, but for Jon it was bare. A red Audi was parked in the driveway, and the light was on in the living room. It was Sunday. Maggie’s parents always watched I Love Lucy reruns on Sundays, after a habitual dinner of meatloaf and ice cream sundaes.
    Jon guessed they wouldn’t be so eager to invite him inside, and while this is all speculation, he bet that they never even went into Maggie’s room, that in fact her door was locked, and her room undisturbed. As he thought about this, he was confronted by the amplitude of his pain. When you love someone who is lost, you are transposed into facsimile oblivions. That absence immures you, and life goes stagnant for awhile, until you take any and all risks to be with them again, in some impalpable way.
    Jon took the risk.
    He slunk around the rose bushes, finding her window. He found the small opening, wedging his fingers in between, and pushed the window up. It rasped and scraped, but because Mr. Foss was almost completely deaf in his left ear, Jon placed hope (perhaps too much) in the television’s high volume.
    Jon landed in the room with a heavy thud, and cringed. No TV could stifle that.
    Heart beating wildly, he pulled out some drawers; her clothes still smelled like her, and it made the corners of Jon’s mouth twitch to see how unmethodically she had grouped clothing with comic books. She was like that, Maggie was. She hated pigeonholing, even when it came to inanimate objects. A stack of papers and journals were unfolded across her writing table, and he picked one off the top. As he was about to crawl through the window a second time, he caught sight of a lonely roll of film on Maggie’s top dresser.
    The sound of inquisitive footfalls roared in his ears; he had to leave. A lump rose in his throat, and he picked up the film and made for the window. A key turned in the lock; Jon slipped away, and ran.

*    *    *

Dear Diary,

    Not to feed the stereotype of the average philosophy major, but I kinda am your average philosophy major. I don’t know if I even want to be a philosopher (or whatever this degree is supposed to prepare you for), but I guess I ended up choosing philosophy because I want to know how to live. That sounds weird, right? Well, it’s not as weird as how many times I just wrote the word “philosophy.”
    Anyway.
    It’s just, it’s so unusual, that someone would try to define the absolute “right” way to live. Is there a “right” way to live? And, you know, if there is, does this supposedly “ideal” system ensure happiness? Because I don’t think it does. Even if you live your life the way you’re supposed to, even if you do all the right things, happiness eludes you.

*    *    *

Dear Diary,

    While it may be trite of me to question every little thing, I can’t help but wonder what it would be like to be a leaf. It’s irregular, I know, and probably it wouldn’t feel like anything because I wouldn’t even be conscious of my existence, but I just wonder. In some ways I imagine it to be painless, but for these same reasons I feel it is every bit as bleak. Be you human or deciduous organism, winter always comes.

*    *    *

    Jon stops reading, or rather, was unable to continue. How had he missed it? Maggie was unfussy about it, but she was practically wishing to be a plant! How did her sadness go unseen? He was supposed to notice these things; he loves her. Or is it loved, now?
    Closing the notebook, Jon flings it angrily at the wall. The wasted whys and wherefores were not wasted on him, spurred by an organic self-disgust that would not abate. Twelve months had gone by and the weight on his heart would not lift. Time had merely fanned the flames of his guilt and made her his cross to bear.
    When his hands stopped trembling, when his breaths evened out, when the world slowed down just a little, Jon allowed himself to look at the roll of film.
    It was Maggie at the beach, Maggie lit up by rosy crepuscular light, Maggie surrounded by a string of seashells, knotted in between her fingers. It was Maggie, open and shut, smiling a smile that did not quite reach her eyes. It was Maggie, speaking silent words whose depth pierced him like two-edged swords:

    You cannot help me.