As soon as I step out of the car, the strong scent of incense hits me and mingles with the humidity in the gray, rain-heavy air. The smell reminds me of citronella, the mosquito repellent my mom would slather on herself early in the evening, only for it to end up caked under her nails after scratching the bug bites that would inevitably dot her arms and legs. This is where my great-grandparents are buried, where my grandparents are now sealed away behind a slab of engraved stone, in a suburb of the extravagantly sunny Los Angeles next to actors and stuntmen, the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz and the former princess of Egypt. This is where home is supposed to be.
The incense drifts up in thick clouds toward the church ceiling as the priest swings some sort of shiny, metal case on a chain around the room. He says the smoke rising is my grandpa’s soul floating to heaven, and I nod politely. All the smoke is doing is getting in my eyes and making it hard to breathe, but maybe that’s not the smoke’s fault after all.
I don’t know much about God, but I do know the act of worship that is moving a pen across paper. It’s how I remember people. People who I will inevitably lose, or have lost, or won’t lose for a very long time but that I imagine losing several times a week or whenever it gets too quiet and I start thinking. If I’m going to tell you about joy, I first need to tell you about loneliness. About how they are two sides of the same coin, as much as I hate that saying. About how they are kin.
***
I am enamored with the subway. I fell in love with those insufferable, screeching trains from the moment I arrived with my two suitcases, rolling chest, and cello in tow. Hearing people lovingly refer to it as “the T,” I wanted to be one of those thousands who were carried along the veins and arteries of this city every day.
I always feel the togetherness of the subway, especially when everything else I am is so detached, independent, solitary.
When I was still writing obituaries for a COVID-19 memorial in New York, I was assigned to write about Robert Herman, a photographer estranged from his family, but who had many loyal friends eager to tell their stories of him. I remember an interview with one of his coworkers and close friends, who told me about his approach to photography and with it, how he moved through life. Robert would walk the streets with his camera in hand, capturing everyday moments, siphoning joy from the great, big, New York City through his lens and into a single frame. He would find connection between himself and the passersby on the subway and take a quick snapshot, an emotion preserved in film and negative sleeves.
Robert Herman died by jumping from the 16th story of his apartment building in Tribeca. It was near the beginning of the pandemic when life was most uncertain, and we were most alone.
***
There’s a certain slant of light in film photographs that makes a picture taken just yesterday look like it could’ve been from 50 years ago. It’s eerie to see myself in film, the sepia tones distorting the image into something entirely new, making me question if I was really there to witness that moment, if it even happened at all. There’s a picture on film of me and three friends sitting at a table with our heads bent over something, writing or coloring, that’s obscured from view. I’ll probably never see any of those friends in person again. And there’s no chance of all of us sitting around a table together, four heads bent as one, one boy almost touching his nose to the paper, writing, or maybe praying.
The photo might as well have been from 50 years ago from how far away that moment feels. Cityscapes, street scenes, a bus pulling away from the curb. Looking at these images, I’m reminded of how they’re gone. And how I’m gone too.
***
What the T really is: a white pigeon pecking at the grimy station floor. A middle-aged man scratching out a handful of lotto tickets one by one. A teenager leaning against the car door with a slice of pizza in one hand and a 7 Eleven Big Gulp in the other.
***
Thursday afternoon sitting by the window at a Dunkin’ Donuts by the Cleveland Circle T stop. A young woman in blue jeans and plastic slippers ties up her long, black hair before taking out the trash. Two men in neon yellow MBTA vests sit across from each other and tell stories about work. I sip my sickly-sweet coffee out of a plastic cup in the corner with my back to the wall and watch the customers come and go.
It’s another brutal summer day, but you would never know it from the icy, air-conditioned store. I delight in catching snippets of people’s conversations as they pass through the store. Two friends in matching platform sandals saunter in right in the middle of a juicy story about one of their coworkers. They come and go in an unceasing stream of words that ends abruptly with the slamming of the front door on their way out. A man with holes on the back of his shirt and dusty work boots stomps in, orders two large coffees (one caffeinated, one decaf) and calls the Dunkin’ employees “bud” at the end of every sentence.
Three girls settle in the opposite corner, building a barricade of backpacks around their table. They don’t order anything but all huddle together over their phones chatting, glancing out the window every few seconds as if they were expecting someone, or were anxious to be seen by someone, both things I have glanced out windows hoping for.
I wonder how they see me–camped out in the corner, my canvas bags filled with groceries and taking up every chair at the table as I scribble away furiously for a few minutes, then stare at the floor or ceiling for a few more. I wonder if they even see me at all or if I just fade into the humdrum rhythm of commuters grabbing their afternoon coffee.
It doesn’t feel like I am in Boston anymore. It just feels like I am.
I feel like I’m floating away.
I don’t see my family as often as I’d like, and I see my friends even less. I fly home for breaks and holidays, spend a hectic week rushing to the airport after class, catching up on sleep, having dinner with my grandparents or meeting up with an old high school friend, then driving back to the airport in the morning when it’s still dark out, back to Boston, back to real life.
One day, I’ll fly home and my friends won’t have time to meet me after their full-time jobs. I’ll fly home and my parents will have sold the house and moved some place tropical like my mom always talked about. I’ll fly home and my grandparents will no longer be there. I’ll fly home but home will no longer be there and where do I fly to now?
Just as I’m gathering my things to leave, three children walk in with their mother to get donuts after school. The youngest boy jumps up and down to catch a glimpse of the neat rows of chocolate, glazed, maple, sprinkles, chanting yo quiero, yo quiero, yo quiero.
I want, I want, I want, not exactly greed but unadulterated joy for something he can’t even see but trusts will come to him.
When did we lose the certainty that joy would find its way to us? That we innately deserve joy and that it deserves us?
***
When I get lost in the chaos and constant motion of this city, I remember the lake and the forest that surrounded it and the birds that lived there. For three weeks, I lived in a tent about a mile’s hike from the largest lake in a rainforest in north western Madagascar. I remember waking in the pre-dawn light, the cooking fire casting shadows and painting everything either red or blue, what was touched by the fire and what was not.
Every morning we’d walk through the knee-high fields of bemanevika, the long, fast-growing grass that rippled up and down the hills like hair in the breeze. No one spoke English there and the other guides only spoke a few words of French. The four of us would sit around the fire at night, the cook telling jokes and playing the same three songs he had downloaded on his flip phone over and over again as the other two field techs were deep in conversation. I would try to understand their rolling, animated dialect with my five-year-old-level grasp on the language, but most of the time I would just sit quietly watching the fire die down until it was only embers.
Once, a few of their friends stopped by to deliver supplies, bags of rice, beans, dried fish, and stayed long into the night talking and laughing like old friends. At that moment, I would have given anything to see one of my own friends again. To have a conversation with someone other than saying what time are we leaving tomorrow 5am should I bring the binoculars no no I already have them. I was in the most beautiful place in the world and I’d never been so alone.
I’d been planning this trip for the past two years. As soon as I came to college, I knew I wasn’t far enough from home. The scrape of the T had become too familiar, the well-worn path from my apartment to campus too recognizable. I had become too recognizable.
Maybe I’d even been planning this since freshman year of high school. Or was it middle school? That day in sixth grade when I walked in late to Madame Erickson’s class, already lost, already behind. But I kept coming back for the next six years, making this language my own through brute force.
I didn’t know it would be Madagascar. I did know it would be far away, a different climate, a different language, where no one knew me so it was alright if I still didn’t know myself. This trip was years in the making and here I was at last, living it, everyone telling me how brave I was, how driven, how independent. Am I these things? Am I? Who am I?
Who do I think I am coming here, calling it adventure to be constantly moving, untethered, unknown?
***
Toward the end of our stay, we got caught in a storm on our way back to camp. The other field tech and I tromped along the trail that was quickly turning to mud and ducked our heads against the oncoming sheets of rain. At first, I tried to take cover under the leaves of the lowest branches. But once I saw the river, now up to my waist and overflowing its banks, I knew there was no hope of staying dry.
After we finally cleared the tree line and emerged back onto those grassy plains, the rain decided to stop. Completely and all at once, it packed up its bags and was gone.
We stood on the largest hill overlooking the floodplain, throwing off the hoods of our not-so-waterproof raincoats. As my guide paced in circles on the hilltop searching for a signal, his phone high in the air, he left me alone with the puddles and the enormous sky.
There comes a time when you are too drenched to the bone, when you take off your boots, turn them upside down, and have water pour out for several seconds, when you remember you left all your clothes hanging on the line to dry that morning, when you couldn’t possibly get more wet than you already are so why not go splashing through the puddles, giggling like a little kid, when you are entirely, hopelessly full of joy.
It feels like coming home again.
***
I remember the moment, always at the same time every day late in the afternoon when the sun was tiring, when my eyes stung from staring through binoculars for hours and I was already dragging my feet on the hike back to camp. From where they perched hiding in the reeds, all the dragonflies would fly up at once like they heard their own national anthem or like the bride was beginning to walk down the aisle. The Malagasy word for dragonfly, angidina, is the same as the word for helicopter, my guide tells me with a laugh. I ask where they are going and why now and how do they all know to fly away together, and he smiles like he doesn’t understand the question.
How do I tell you that this is what it felt like? That I was floating, but not away from anything at all. That I too didn’t know where I was going or why or if anybody would be there with me or if anybody would be there when I returned. That joy and loneliness are not two sides of the same coin at all, but each a pair of wings on a dragonfly. Both of which it cannot fly without. In perfect silence, we watched the blue, green, red, yellow iridescent bodies hover above the reeds, then all at once decide to move on, drifting up like smoke toward the ceiling of the sky.
Rachel Paz Ruggera (she/her) is a research technician in a developmental biology lab and holds a BS in Biology from Boston College. Her work is published or is forthcoming in Atticus Review, The Writing Disorder, and LEVITATE.
Idle Ink 