Wish You Were Here

The other day we enjoyed one of those perfect Saturday mornings together, where everything just flows, unrushed and light. We walked into town where we took turns browsing through the second-hand bookshop, a dreamy little place with a storefront reminiscent of different times, and a tiny interior as unorderly and welcoming as the one owned by the fictional Bernard Black, manned by someone as peaceful as the ever-friendly Manny. As my index finger glid over the spines of modern classics, my eyes scanned the biography section, and my mind made mental notes of titles and authors to look up at a later point, I felt suddenly overwhelmed by the thought of all the great love stories this little shop was home to. And I’m not talking about the ones seemingly penned by the same marketing company that created Valentine’s Day – the red hearts and cupid feathers of which already lined every restaurant and bakery we’d passed on our way to this corner of town. I’m talking about the ones that have little to do with Hallmark’s concept of romance and everything to do with the realness of the day to day.

With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, I had been thinking about something I wrote for Issue 71 of Little White Lies, Call Me By Your Name. Focused on love, what it means, and how this is best depicted on the big screen, staff writers and contributors were asked to share the films, shows and scenes that had the greatest impact on them. I wrote about Paul Verhoeven’s adaptation of Turks Fruit, and a scene from HBO’s Six Feet Under; a show that captures so much of what it truly means to grieve – i.e., to love – and does it beautifully, articulately and yes, morbidly. I’ve probably watched more than a hundred other shows since going into mourning over the Fisher family after the series’ finale, but nothing has come close to speaking as honestly about the concept of love – and what it truly is – across all relationships. Which is why the quote I offered to the above-mentioned magazine was one of my favourite lines from a fly-by character in the Fisher Funeral home: “Some pretty little thing catches your eye, and the next thing you know, it’s been 56 years. And you shit all over yourself in a movie theatre, and she’s the only one that’ll clean it up. That’s love.”

I wholly understand that this is not the kind of thing most people want to think of when fantasizing about or actually contemplating the definition of love. It is, however, crudely put, the truest. These are the real stories I’ve always found myself drawn to, with Jan Wolker’s Turks Fruit being the one that impacted me the most. I first read it in my early teens, and have read it at least twenty times since. I find the ugliness, the obsessiveness and immaturity, the ignorance and self-centeredness, the sheer honesty and humanity with which this story is told indescribably beautiful. That kind of commitment to the unconditionality we all want and hope for, but rarely give or receive because we’re looking for perfection where there is none, lies where there is only stark-naked reality. It’s so easy to get caught up in the want for the instantaneous – like the cup-a-soup: take two people, add a common interest or two, a mutual right-swipe, et voila. But what happens months or even years later, when life swats you in the face and there are no algorithms to hide behind?

*

I left the husband behind in the bookstore, giving him the time to get lost between the crowded shelves, curved under the weight of worn paperbacks and practically pristine, and previously unappreciated hardbacks, and made my way to a nearby plaza with the daughter and the dog. A momentary feeling of nostalgia for former days spent roaming those bookstacks and libraries at a leisurely pace, followed by an immediate sense of relief for reaching open space where my daughter and my mind could finally run wild without worry of causing an alphabetic avalanche and a literal paper-trail. As we approached the fountain that stands amply framed by benches under the shade of vines climbing and twisting their way through cheap metal structures, we were both taken by the large tree towering above it all – the plaza, the people, the town. As if it wasn’t majestic enough already, as if it weren’t already capable of drawing the attention of everyone passing by, it had been decorated with paper hearts and strings and a swing, big and strong enough to hold two.

The daughter was not in the least bit interested in swinging from the tree – unlike the Mama – and took to collecting its leaves from the floor, throwing them into the fountain and watching them float. Observing her on her little mission, the entirety of her being lighting up my heart in much the same way the sun illuminated the plaza, I went back to thinking about all those different types of love and their stories, knowing right there and then and always, that she is my greatest. And I smiled, realizing that the daughter had recently discovered her own favourite and that, strangely, I very much approved of it – only because she had chosen one particular element of the story and had ditched the rest. A bit like how, some months ago she only ever listened to/watched Belle and Sebastian’s Tiny Desk performance, she will only look at/”read” two pages of The Beauty and the Beast: the one where Belle and the Beast meet on either side of the staircase, then join together at the bottom of it in a candlelit ballroom dance. She’s not interested in the before or after, just that one moment. In her two-page version of this love story Belle only knows – and will only ever know- her Prince Charming to be dark and imperfect. Perfectly imperfect.

Breathing in the moment and the juxtaposition of cold, crisp air against bright, sunny skies, my heart opening further, expanding, bigger, wider, fuller, as it does daily, high on the essence of my daughter, I squinted up watching her shadow dance across the marble platform surrounding the fountain. I felt it then. The sound of a distant helicopter travelling across the horizon, unhurried, almost purring with ease. I couldn’t see it, and I’m not sure it was actually there, but I felt its vibrations surge through my belly, tickling the back of my throat with happy tears. It takes me back, every time, to the big lawn bordering the small forest behind my grandparent’s former home; where I lay, sprawled out on a blanket, my place in life and the world a giant question-mark, answered and quietened only there, in that space, in that block of time and that strict routine, in those small kitchen-quarters and its breakfast table, and those knuckles, swollen like my heart is now, sweeping the hair from my face and tucking all that uncertainty behind my ear every night. And I wondered, once again, how my grandpa had gotten my bathtub to overflow with entire mountains of bubbles.

*

The night before, I had opened a paper folder full of recuerdos – some of them mine, some my mother’s, some surely fragments of a collective memory. In it, was a copy of a German magazine dating back to 1984, to three years before I was born, when, judging by the contents of the article I am about to reference, the (male) world was still reeling from the after-effects of the sexual revolution. Titled, Is Love Just a Word?, the article’s front-page extract states that, in a time of technology and arms race, love and feelings seem vital – which felt quite weird, reading that now, thirty-nine years on, Alexa sitting next to me waiting for commands, while all around the world real humans continue to command the death of others. I flipped through the yellowed pages, delighted on the subtleness of vintage advertising campaigns, a mix of black and white and matt-coloured images and eighties fashion, until I finally landed on the piece that was supposedly going to explain the era’s perspective on love to me. It didn’t. It merely introduced me to a male writer who had obviously just gone through a bitter divorce. As part of this feature, there is a one-pager titled, What did the term “love” mean to our great-great-grandparents?, taken from a dictionary entry from 1870. This made me think of my own (great)grandparents.

When I think of my maternal grandparent’s wedding picture, it’s hard not to see the romance in it, with my grandpa holding the umbrella over my grandma’s head, as she’s climbing out of the car on a miserable, typically British rainy day. Her entire face, her whole body is smiling and you can tell from the expression on my grandpa’s face – stoic though he was – how absolutely and totally smitten he was by her and her warm, kind and funny nature. They stayed together and loved each other until death did them part, but that doesn’t mean that it was always smooth sailing. I’d go as far as to say that there were probably many times in which the voyage that was their relationship likened that one volatile English-Channel ferry crossing that traumatized me for a lifetime. But they stayed the course – not because they felt they had to, but because they wanted to. Because they understood the complexities and layers of human nature, and the work it took to keep the vessel that held this commitment afloat even through the stormiest of weathers. They weren’t – and wouldn’t have been – fooled by the pretences of year-round sunny horizons.

My grandpa had a deep voice that was punishment enough when you returned home two minutes after curfew or misplaced one of his many tiny radio gadgets you’d been repeatedly told not to touch. But it could just as easily break that tension again with a laugh that was as genuine as it was bridled, used sparsely and therefore all the more memorable. He had a passion for home-movies and filmmaking in general, and explained all the surrealism and, at the time, avant-garde camera trickery of Pippi Longstocking and Superman to me with great enthusiasm. In some attic, of some family member, there are dozens of videos of little sketches we acted out together, more than one attempt at Monty Pythonesque comedy and our family’s greatest hits – performances, Christmas and birthday gatherings, random Sunday afternoons spent together. There is also a film he made of my grandma, soundless, filmed on a wind-up camera and inspired by Bewitched. I’ve only ever seen it once but I remember it vividly. How beautiful she looked; how the camera captured her spirit. Through its lens, I got to see what my grandpa saw; what he felt.

*

Standing in that plaza, helping the daughter gather the leaves she was now using to throw up into the air and dance under, I momentarily left the present to get a quick overview of the very near future – dinner, bath-time, bedtime. And just as that helicopter had appeared through the sunrays earlier to remind me of those cosy mornings in my grandparent’s kitchen, the view of the forest through the window, the small space heated by the dutiful toaster and the steaming pot of water that had just heated the eggs ready to salute their soldiers, I now felt the softness and safety of that giant cave of bubbles embrace me, hugging me tightly into its memory. Suddenly, I was in my grandparent’s spacious bathroom again, sitting on the heated floor, watching my grandma draw my bath as my grandpa excitedly fiddled with whatever he used to turn that tub into an absolute feast of bubbles that popped all my worries and made them disappear for the night. I could feel that weightlessness, the dimmed lights, that quiet interval between day and night, and my grandma’s proud, loving eyes on me. How I felt in that tub, and how I never wanted to come out.

I pull my phone out of my pocket, wanting to capture the daughter in her leaf-play, and as I do so, I am surprised, again, by the urge to call upon those voices that no longer exist in this realm; only in my memories. I just want to ask, how they did it – make those bubbles turn into these fantastical landscapes that distracted me from the real world and kept me focused only on them, and the haven they had created for me. That’s a whole other kind of love; timeless and engrained in our DNA. The people we continue to converse with through the sights and sounds and smells that forever keep us connected. As I look at my screen, the keypad empty of numbers to dial, I can hear my grandma laughing, recalling that memory, engaging in it with me. And as my imagination allows us both to settle into the backdrop of that particular era for a moment, we lock hearts and I can hear what she’s telling me. I already know the answer to the secret of those bubbles.