what is essential is invisible to the eye

antoine de saint exupery followed me around the train station in lyon, france. he has been dead for many years, but that day, he fell in love with me and told me so. he insisted upon it, he wouldnt let me convince him otherwise. our time together was brief- he followed me through the train station and to the ticket booth. he never offered to carry my bags, and i had many of them, one exploding with chocolates and a small plastic garden gnome named sham that i had bought in geneva.

i met antoine in the unisex bathroom. you have to pay a small woman sitting behind a desk in order to get in, see, and i had no francs. i was terribly hot, wearing my jacket and my scarf and my hat, and i was flustered, and uncomfortable from holding it. he came in after me and grabbed my arm as i rooted around my purse.

it is you, he said, his accent thick but detailed, like a doilie.

i didnt know what he meant, so i didnt say anything back.

he handed the woman enough francs for me and i ran into a stall. he stood outside of it, and i found this awkward. i heard him saying, to every person who walked by,

its jessica!

no one understood him; no one cared. he could have said it in french and more people would have responded im sure, but i dont think he wanted that. i especially dont think he needed it.

when i walked out of the stall i looked at him curiously and asked his name. his voice did sound familiar, maybe we had known each other before. he told me that his name was antoine de saint exupery, and i understood then that he was the antoine de saint exupery who had written my favorite book, the book that made me look forward to growing up, and that his plane, the one he was flying because he was a pilot, was shot down exactly 60 years ago. i was flattered that he recognized me, but i still had a train to catch.

you are the queen of my life, he said, his eyes pleading, like two balloons wanting their ribbons cut so they can drift upwards.

i probably blushed but i dont quite remember. we were still standing in the white tiled unisex bathroom that cost francs to use.

thank you! i replied.

no, no. you do not understand, you mustnt leave, i need you to stay here with me.

i wondered if here meant literally here, if he lived within the confines of this train station, or even this unisex bathroom. i weighed the options.

well, i have a train and then a plane to catch, see. its really not practical for me to stay here.

it pained me to say this, considering that his imgaination had allowed me to dream about queens and foxes floating in space, and that what i felt for him lived in a place much deeper than love. i began walking to the ticket booth. he sidestepped so that he could be always facing me.

i am desparately in love with you, he said once i had put my bags down to wait in line for a ticket agent. do you have any idea what that feels like?

i thought for a moment about his question, without looking at him. i wanted him to understand that i was really untying the knot of it in my head, that i wasnt going to placate him with an easy answer. i wanted him to see snow in london when being in love had, so far, only meant waiting. i wanted him to see how it looked like flaky skin. i wanted him to see subway cars passing as quickly and violently as memories did, knocking me out with the force of them, flattening me with their weight, their momentum. i wanted him to see mornings that were carried out as if by wrote, as if it was a scene in a movie being shot over and over, the scene where the sad girl with the half full heart gets out of bed and turns the stereo on goes to the bathroom turns the light on looks in the mirror and doesnt cry gets in the shower and does washes all of her with soap and nice smelling things puts on clothes and walks with one foot in front of the other to school where she writes the alphabet in his geometric handwriting in the margins of her paper.

yes. i do.

ive always known you would, he said, and walked back into the gossamer layers from whence he came.

room was scarce in esther's heart

esther fell in love with everyone she met. she didnt know it as such, she only knew the tingle in the inside of her cheeks, the magnets in her feet keeping her near the person. she only knew the way they lingered in her thoughts, their words echoing in her head like the catchy chorus of a song, their faces floating in her dreams like ancient family photos, familiar and haunting.

she fell in love with the librarian because she had a huge bag of jellybeans under her desk and snuck them out one by one so secretively, like it was a crime, like it really was the worst thing she did all day.

she fell in love with her exboyfriend when, years after they had broken up, he took her hand on halloween and said "youre too hard on yourself."

she fell in love with naomi over and over again, every time her handwritten letters arrived in the mail, honest and grasping.

she fell in love with the man coming down the stairs as she was walking up, because as they passed he said "hi" like he didnt mean to but couldnt help it.

she fell in love with trevor because he went to specs every night and never drank, and because he sat with her in a windowsill and commented on her kneecaps.

she fell in love with the little girl crossing the street with a man so feeble he could barely walk, because she looked up at esther and smiled, unafraid.

she fell in love with the woman at the grocery store because she took minutes to help esther find a mango that would be so good she could taste india.

she fell in love with doug marsch because he walked out on stage and disappointed her, and it didnt bother him at all.

she fell in love with david because he fell in love with her.

she fell in love with her 6th grade writing teacher because he hated her favorite poem, "this is just to say" by william carlos williams, and he let her argue with him and make him laugh, and when she graduated six years later he gave her a tiny framed copy of it.

she fell in love with sarah becuase of the bags under her eyes that would appear only when she had gotten a lot of sleep the night before.

she fell in love with the boy at the party with the beard because he let her blow smoke in his face and told her that she took him to a place he had never been to before.

esther was waiting to meet someone who she could not fall in love with.

There was a day.

there was a day when audrey came to understand it all, when what she had needed to know all of her life came into focus, tiny pixels blending in with each other, revealing the part that she needed in order to figure the rest of it out. she wasnt looking for answers then, on that day. she wasnt walking around campus questioning herself, doubting every step, curiously analyzing the way other people walked, the way they talked to people they barely knew, the way they looked at her. she wasnt tugging at her shirt that day; she wasnt hungry, or too full. she wasnt angry at the plasticness of the day, by the way the weather refused to reveal anything other than pleasantness, agreeability. she wasnt particularly aware of how the weather on this day like all the other days, was how people want other people to be-- steady, calm, pleasant, easy. people will move if it begins to rain all the time. especially when it rains in the middle of the day, when its the most inconvenient for you. especially when the rain is accompanied by screams of lightening and thunder so loud you feel it in your shin bones.

she had woken up that day without needing something to look forward to. the day was enough, she decided as she went about the routine of her morning, the carefully crafted routine. she still hadnt heard from him- it had been over a month since they talked, but what she was doing didnt feel like waiting. she was glad for it, glad for something all her own, some way of keeping time, some way of living that was completey foreign to anyone else, completley sacred. if there was something that people couldnt see, if people didnt know, then she was separate, then she lived somewhere else that couldnt be touched by any other mind but her own. that, to her back then, was what forgave her shortcomings, what pardoned all her faults. that she had this perfect capsule inside of her, this one unflawed thing. maybe her legs could be compared to the long tan pair in the short skirt, and come in last, but no one could hold this up to something else and see which wins because no one knew it was there.

she was sitting in class, in the front row, next to a girl named marissa (she knew this by her neatly printed headline on her notes "Marissa Monde: PSYCH 361"). marissa had these long, oval fingernails with dark pink nail polish on. her fingers were smooth and sinewy and she was picking incessantly at a tiny sliver of skin sticking out like a weed from her cuticle. even her tiny fingers were too big to grasp it, too slippery to yank it out. audrey watched her. her nails and her hands were pretty, like a girl's should be. perfect for rings, for holding hands, for using silverware, waving, putting hair behind ears, touching someone elses face. audrey was jealous. her hands were large, she had long fingers but they didnt look like it becuase they werent slim. they had always reminded her of flatworms, though she couldnt remember if she had ever seen one or even if such a thing really existed. she had very small sqaure nail beds and nails too weak to grow out past the mound of her fingertip. she had desparately wanted, since she was a child, to have long, painted nails. she tried to grow them out frequently, and a few weeks ago had grown them so long she could tap them against her desk so that they made an impatient noise. but once they were that long she became a little scared, because her hands stopped looking like her hands, and she realized that she was spending all of her time just looking at them. with her arm straight ahead as if she was admiring a ring, with her palm facing up and her fingertips curled in, on every surface she could find. she remembered how in high school she could recognize anyone's hands, even the people in her class of fifty that she didnt know that well at all. and everyone used to tease her about biting them, and about how short they could get. and she liked that, that they too could recognize her hands.

the first time she met him she put her hands on top of the counter as he was making her coffee and he looked at them and then smiled as he stirred the milk.

what? she said, though they had never spoken before. she had been waiting in line, at the coffee shop where he worked. she said it in a friendly way, because her heart was beating fast from the sight of him and she knew she couldnt leave without something. something at least.

i knew thats what your hands would look like.

she was startled and it made her heart beat faster. she retracted them from the counter and looked at them, in the same way she looked at them when her nails were long and she couldnt believe they were hers.

but now she wanted marissa's hands. they were feminine and clean. if shown two pictures of hands, one of her uneven, ragged, reddish ones and one of marissa's tan, smooth, long, manicured ones, boys would pick marissa's.

and this was the moment that it stopped snowing on the television set. this was the moment of the day that changed everything for audrey:

she didnt want boys. she wanted him, and he had picked her.

if she had tried to please boys, he would have seen her hands on the counter and not smiled, because they would have been a lie.

and that, audrey realized with a pang to her heart that made her eyelids flutter, is how it always is.

instinct

she was alone in the house with the christmas tree lights turned off, because her parents were celebrating the new year in vienna and she was waiting for him to call. they had made plans to be together on new years eve, to see each other for the first time in six months, for the first time since the summer when they were finally able to be together.

she thought it would be silly to turn the lights on now, after christmas was over. silly and kind of sad. so she turned on all the rest of the lights in the house, because light bulbs and the din of the television had always made her feel safer, and waited for his call. she had taken the train into the city that day and on the way back at dusk she still hadnt heard from him, but women already had their makeup on; the train smelled of perfume that rarely got tried on.

she knew that she was the only person alive who was going home to an empty house, whose high heels werent clicking on the floor, whose phone wasnt ringing with people telling her to hurry up. she knew that he wouldnt call and that she would spend the night curled up by the fire, watching reruns and talking to her best friend, long distance, about every half hour throughout the night. but she came in and checked the answering machine anyway, in case he had forgotten her cell phone number, and unwrapped the saran covering from a christmas cupcake. she placed it on the counter and called him, her first call of the day.

hi! its me, just calling to see where you are. let me know- talk to you soon! bye-

she hung up and ate the cupcake in two bites.

the next day her brother called her and asked her if she was sitting down. yes, she said, though she was really walking down the stairs. she knew that he had a tendency to exaggerate, and that even if the worst did happen, she wouldnt faint like he would.

opa died today.

it came as no surprise, really. she had seen her grandfather just a week before, in a nursing home in atlanta, and had known that the end, thankfully, was near. she had no tears to cry for this man, this man who had, with his carelessness and arrogance, basically yanked tears from everyone in their family, and then demanded they be put back. it was impossible to put tears back where they came from; she remembered that as she heard her brother's strained breathing on the other end.

oh. wow.

yeah, i know. i know. i think, though, that it was time.

he had a way of deeming useless things beautiful, as if in their very irrelevance they became heroic. this, she had always known, was utterly senseless.

she was scheduled on a flight back to london, where she was living, the next day. her brother, who lived in california, told her there was no good reason she should change her flight, and that him being there would count in spirit for them both.

she wondered if she needed to say goodbye. like in her mind, or on a piece of paper, or through sobs and sobs and the personification of grief. it was over, the pain he had caused. this had to be the last chapter of it, he couldnt go on hurting her if he was gone. she decided realizing that was all the saying goodbye she needed to do.

her brother called her the next morning, hours before the taxi would come pick her up for the airport. he was crying on the phone, muffled, tired cries. he said he couldnt do it, he couldnt step foot on the plane. he had gotten married a few months before, and he told his sister, through the screeches of the airport intercom, that he had this sick feeling that if he got on the plane, he would never see his wife again. he cried like he was defeated, like a hand had reached out that morning and took the very best of him.

its ok. its so ok. i think its always best to trust your instincts.