The visit

I go to visit my sister at her dorm in Cambridge. By the Dunkin Donuts in the train station I spy a former classmate from afar, she doesn’t see me. Not a real person, I think, neither one of us is, albeit for different reasons. At my most snooty then, I am disappointed in what has become of my sister, she knows this. Like a person who does not see, so beholden to the whims of the throng. Absorbing all their pent-up neuroses, their imposed conventions and dictates. Golly, to be like everyone else. A few years later she will show me her sea sponge dance, I will understand what has really been absorbed and by then, perhaps transmuted. Her purpose within a particular fray. In a silent request for her forgiveness, I will smile and for the first time in some years, in her presence, laugh.

Meeting the brother of my sister’s friend who is visiting as well, I begin my j'accuse, I say, don’t you feel they are rather metallic here, at this school, as in, they’ve absconded with a portion of their souls and he nods in half-agreement. He says, yes, I know what you mean. This boy is a stranger in his own sense. His conversation, genial but brief, is not enough to keep me there; distressed by most of my sister's friends, I take a long walk to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and depart for home a day early. A year later the boy dies in a big incident, the stuff of national drama and communal anguish, and a year after that, war breaks out over similar events. Except, I tell my sister, war was always going to break out, just as this boy had needed to go away anyhow. 

Through my mother, I relay a message, received a few days after the boy’s death, looking at his photo, my sister’s Instagram memorial: don’t worry, he wanted you to know that he had to leave, in order to diffuse and become one with you all, he wanted to return to source, he couldn’t live like this anymore. But he needed a cover story, he needed a means of leaving—an explanation for it—that would be accessible to you but also seed forgiveness, something generative, an exit strategy that would bring your throng together rather than render it sundered, torn apart. You see, such things are, to an extent, a matter of choice. There is violence, abuse, devastation, genocide; and simultaneously, humans have contracts. Free will. He couldn’t do for you what he wants to do for you in physical incarnation. To which my sister says, oh yes, his sort-of girlfriend had told her the same.

We are at the Sarah Sze show on the top rung of the Guggenheim, walking down towards the cafe, when she asks me to elaborate. A few months have passed already since the boy had gone. And I, too, will be leaving—though not like that, at least not for a while, yet. My sister says, I hear you are going away again and I say, yes, I don’t say, leaving is how I diffuse, too, how I live as he would not, in oneness here on terra firma, where only a flap of wings of heart can lift a heavied head.