Imeros

by Paul Hina

her as love at first sight, even though it certainly seems that way in retrospect—only through the benefit of knowing now what was to come. He is reasonably sure that he saw her look over at him and finding her immediately attractive. Not just in a physical way, though she was pretty, but also in that mysterious way that pulls you toward a certain type of person. He might as well have been pulled toward the empty seat behind her.

  He still remembers that day with astounding clarity. He can see her looking over at him that first time, and he likes to believe that she saw him looking around the room for a place to sit, and that she, too, wanted him to come to her. And he can still remember how nervous she seemed when she saw him coming her way, how fidgety she became after he sat down.

  Then again, he was all but certain that she wasn't an English major. There was no way to know this for sure then, other than the fact that he had no memory of seeing her before, and was certain that she had never been in any of his previous classes. But, since she wasn't an English major—which he was to learn for certain later—her nervousness could've simply been first day jitters. It is intimidating to enroll in a high-level class—particularly in a discipline as subjectively cerebral as literature—with people who you presume will know all the tricks better than you.

  Either way, it's not as if that day was some storybook beginning for them. They didn't speak a single work to each other, and though he can remember wanting to ask her about the copy of Sartre's Nausea that sat atop her bag on the floor, he never got up the nerve.

  And this first day's quiet didn't change for several weeks. Day after day, class after class, silence was heavily passed between them. And it was an agonizing silence. He sat there everyday trying to conjure the right words to say, and after the first few days, the first words he would speak to her began to take on an incredible significance, which made actually speaking them that much more difficult.

  Still, he was able to quietly watch her in class, and he did. She had long black hair, and had a way of pushing it off of one shoulder that left the back of her neck partially exposed. And since she rarely tied her hair up, he can remember spending an absurd amount of time tracing that soft line of her neck. From head to shoulder, it was a perfect line.

  A long time passed before he ever heard her speak. She was obviously shy and didn't often volunteer to participate in class discussions, but, when she did, she seemed smart and suddenly confident.

  And the more days that went by, and the more words that went unspoken between them, only made him want to know her more. Fantasy conversations, and imagined run-ins with her, began to dominate his thoughts. Not only during class, but before class, after class, and most any time of the day or night. He was getting his hopes up for her, building her up, making her magical. But this attraction was being plucked largely from thin air. He had no idea if she would have any interest in him, or if, when he got to know her better, he would still be as interested in her. But he just had a feeling.

  Still, it was difficult to ignore the fact that she wore an engagement ring.

  But he tried hard to ignore it.

  After those first few weeks of frustration, he finally got up the nerve to speak to her before class one day, and though the conversation is not as clear to him as he would like, he can remember how she turned her body's whole attention to him, looking at him with a remarkably clear-eyed focus. She had a way of engaging with him eye-to-eye that no one has been able to emulate, before or since. But those intense eyes, that look of determined listening on her face, suggested to him that she had also been waiting on this conversation between them to begin.

  The bits and pieces of conversation they shared that day are only ghosts of words now. And he wonders how much to trust his memory. Accuracy in memory can be misleading when it comes to days that have, for years, been faded by the color of future days. Has he pulled parts of their relationship from one place and pasted them over another place? Does the mind fill the holes of a faulty remembrance to makes a more seamless quilt of memory? Do we mend our memories from snaps of old mental portraits, placing them end to end in a sort of hurried animation? If so, he finds that he wants to believe these jumpy cartoons of memory, depends on their accuracy for comfort.

  He thinks he brought up Hannah Arendt's relationship with Kierkegaard. He can't quite remember what it was in reference to, but he seems to recall that she was reading Arendt. He may have even brought up Arendt's quote about the banality of evil, and, in retrospect, it was probably followed by the sort of pontificating you might expect from a college-aged guy trying to impress a pretty girl that he sensed was smarter than almost any girl he'd ever met.

  He remembers feeling that he wanted to talk to her all day long, wanted to spend the day caught in the light of her stare. But eventually class began and the spell was suspended in the air between them, hanging above them with expectation and anticipation. And when class ended, they went their separate ways, but not without a last, knowing glance at each other. A glance that lingered long enough for him to hang his hopes on the rest of that day.

  He knew then that her engagement ring was looser than it appeared.

  It's dark, but the moonlight is bright, exposing the waist-deep water that surrounds him. The light—the pale blue light the moon makes when it skates across night water—is so startling, its electric slivers arcing over the surface, that he becomes dizzy with disorientation. The water seems to spin around him like some vertigo flash, and he reaches his arms out to regain some semblance of balance when he hears a voice.

  She is calling his name.

  "Jacob," she says from somewhere off in the dark distance. It's not quite a shout. Not quite a whisper. And, outside of the whisper of the water flowing into his body, there is no other sound.

  He looks up across the surface for her. The outline of her head and shoulders is faintly apparent—like a shadow floating atop the water—about thirty yards or so in front of him. She is definitely there, and, yet, he can't quite bring her into focus.

  "Melissa?"

  "Jacob, come out. The water's nice."

  He dives under the surface and swim's for what seems like awhile under the water. He rises toward the moon, breaks the glass ceiling of water, and looks out for her, but she is still too far away. Maybe further than before.

  "Melissa!"

  "Jacob, swim out."

  He dives down again and swims for as long as he can. He comes up, gasps for air, and spreads his arms out to glide over the surface, watching the moon bounce off the water like a thousand silver fish bouncing into, and away from, his body. When he looks out now, he can barely see even the silhouette of her head and shoulders. Now, what was an obscured shape of Melissa is now made indistinguishable by the swell of the darkness.

  "Melissa, I can't see you."

  "Jacob, come closer."

  "Melissa! I can't... I can't reach you," he says, gasping for air. "You're too far away."

  She says something, but now the water has grown louder. He turns and sees that he's coming up to the shore. He hears a sound something like her voice again, but when he looks up, he can't see anything other than the spotlight of water that shines from the suddenly more limited light of the moon. Her shadow is gone. A once obscured silhouette has been swallowed in the night.

  Now, absence is the only thing that surrounds him. Even the moonlight only orbits his own body.

  "Melissa!"

  No answer. No more sounds. Not even the whispering of water.

  "Melissa!"

  "Jacob! Jacob! Wake up."

  It's Rachael. She sits up and turns on her bedside lamp.

  He looks at her. "Sorry," he says, wiping his hands over his face.

  Rachael leans down, places her warm hand on his chest and caresses him. "Are you alright?"

  "Yeah, I'm fine. Sorry I woke you."

  "You were calling out for Melissa."

  "I was?"

  "You were."

  "Sorry."

  "Do you want to
talk about it?"

  "No. It was nothing. Go back to sleep."

  "You sure?"

  "I'm sure," he says, and then turns away from her.

  She switches the light off and sinks back into bed.

  And out of the room's descent into darkness, the moon shines a breath of light through the window, bathing his face and shoulders in the cool blue shine of deepest dreams.

  "I said her name last night in my sleep."

  "Who's name? The new girl?"

  "No. That would be worse."

  "Melissa?"

  "Yep."

  "And Rachael heard this?"

  "Yeah. Apparently, I wasn't particularly quiet about it."

  "That's not good."

  "No, it's not."

  "You were dreaming about her?"

  "Yeah."

  "Do you remember the dream?"

  "Yeah. We were in the water. That wasn't unusual. Whenever I dream of Melissa, were always in the water. But it felt different. It was dark—darker than I ever remember it being before—and I could barely see her. She was pretty far away and was calling out for me, but no matter how hard I tried to reach her, or how far out I swam, I just couldn't reach her."

  "So, you started calling out for her."

  "Right."

  "What did Rachael say?"

  "Nothing. Not really. She woke me and asked if I was alright."

  "And this morning?"

  "She's always gone by the time I get up. She goes swimming."

  "Swimming?"

  "Right. She goes to the aquatic center every morning."

  "What do you think she's going to say?"

  "Honestly, I don't think