Hunger of the Pine

by Teal Swan

  By the time that Aria made it to Griffith Park, she was out of breath and 20 minutes late. Omkar’s car was parked on the side of the street and he was leaning against it. When he saw Aria jogging toward him with the plastic bag containing the clothes she had been wearing before she bought the dress, he bounded toward her. “Did he drop you off outside the park?” he asked, assuming that Aria had followed his directions and taken a cab there.

  “Um, yeah,” Aria said, needing an excuse for why all the money he had given her was spent. It was an excuse that she couldn’t use if she told him the actual truth, which was that she had walked and hitchhiked there. He took the plastic bag from her, tossed it into the back of his car and locked it.

  “Is this place nearby?” Aria asked, surprised that he hadn’t opened the door for her to get in so they could drive to the party.

  “Um, yeah, but they moved the party to later so I thought we could take a little hike up to the Hollywood sign maybe?” he asked.

  “OK, yeah,” Aria said, willing, though less than enthusiastic at the prospect of more exercise than she had already had that day. Omkar took her hand in his and led her toward a trail that carved a swath into the dry hillsides.

  The trail snaked on for ages. To their left, the white letters of the Hollywood sign promised to be just up ahead, only to tease them by always staying just a little bit farther. Some of the tourists who had set off at the same time as Omkar and Aria (determined to reach the same destination) turned back around, making fun of themselves for how out of shape they were.

  Omkar asked to take a rest and Aria teased him, toeing him part of the way up the next hill. With the bed of the entire city laid out below them, a group of horses came past them from behind. Aria wanted to touch them, but restrained herself. Instead, she inhaled their fragrance as they passed. They had a unique fragrance. To Aria, nothing in the world smelled as good as horses, but there was no way to describe their scent. They didn’t smell like anything else because a horse smelled like a horse. The tourists they carried clung sloppily to their saddles as they plodded lazily down the trail that they had been down so many times, they could walk it in their sleep. Omkar, who was uncharacteristically pensive on the hike, tried to read the words of an advertisement being flown on a flag behind a prop plane overhead.

  “Are you OK?” Aria asked him.

  “Yeah, it’s just scary how much money these guys have,” he said, referring to the people who had invested in the advertising method.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “Those advertisements cost like six thousand bucks; twelve thousand if you want them to write something in jet streams or whatever across the sky.”

  Aria laughed. “What are you, a marketing major now?” Omkar smiled but didn’t answer.

  Instead of leading them up to the sign, the trail led them to a gate separating Griffith Park from an upper-class neighborhood. “Let’s just go back,” Aria said, not wanting to hike any further than they already had. Omkar looked around them in search of the perfect place to stop and take a photo. On a hill to their right, he spotted an overlook and coaxed Aria into following him there to a place where the Hollywood sign would be directly behind them. He left Aria standing there and interrupted a jogger who was just about to start his run. The man seemed inconvenienced to be asked to take a picture of them when they could have taken a selfie. Aria watched Omkar whisper to him and hand him his phone before running up to stand beside her. When she posed for the picture, Aria willed the muscles of her face into a tension that she imagined would make her look good in the photo.

  “OK, OK, now turn around and look at the sign so he can take one of us looking at it,” Omkar said.

  All too aware of the annoyance of the man taking the picture, Aria turned around begrudgingly.

  “Now point at it,” he said. Barking orders about how to adjust her body for the picture was just his way of buying time. Eventually, Aria grew fed up with the task of trying to adjust herself perfectly for his liking and turned back around.

  Instead of standing behind her as she had expected, Omkar was down on one knee. Aria covered her mouth with her hands to hide the look of shock that was clearly written across her face. Still conscious of the stranger who had been talked into taking pictures of the whole thing, Aria stood in front of Omkar, frozen, as he began to speak. “Aria, I have loved you since the first moment I saw you. I may be crazy but I don’t care. So many girls, they try to be whatever a guy wants. But you captured my heart just by being you … The sweetest, craziest, most compassionate and wild and sensitive person I have ever known. I thought that I had a good life before I found you. But now I wouldn’t even want to live a life without you. A girl can’t change a man because she loves him, but a man who loves a woman changes himself. With you I can feel myself becoming the man I have always wanted to be, and it’s because I love you. Please would you make me the happiest man on this earth and marry me?”

  Aria lowered her hands from her face and nodded yes, thinking that Omkar would stand up to hug her. Instead, with tears of happiness in his eyes, Omkar reached into his right pocket and pulled out the gold ring that his mother had given him. He held it up for her to see.

  “This ring belonged to my grandmother. In my culture, many families keep their wealth in gold. It is a tradition in my family to give some gold to a bride when she is married into the family. My mother has given me this to give to you. I want you to know that you have a family who will always love you and a family where you will always belong.”

  The tears that Aria had tried to deny began to well up and weave their way down the side of her face. Omkar took the ring finger of her left hand and slid the ring onto her finger. Taking her hands in his, he stood, then cupped her face to kiss her. She encircled his neck with her arms to hug him and when he hugged her back, he lifted her feet off the ground.

  Omkar jogged down to collect his phone from the man, who had in fact been filming the entire proposal with it. The sweetness of the circumstances had washed away his air of irritation. He shouted “Congratulations!” to them both before continuing on his way. Omkar put the phone in his pocket and came back to where Aria was standing, examining the ring on her hand.

  “There was no party, was there?” she asked. Omkar shook his head. Aria giggled and hugged him once more. When she did, he picked her up and spun her twice around before putting her back down again. Instead of walking back down the mountain, they found a spot to sit and fathom the monumental step in life that they had just agreed to take together. It was a spot overlooking the immensity of the city.

  Aria leaned back into Omkar, letting his arms brace her ecstasy. In that moment, she could feel that light had broken where no sun shines. Where no water had run, the tide of love had broken through the bulwark. In the busy breadth of the city, Aria could just make out the whereabouts of the little car lot. She wondered whether Robert had opened the tribute that she had left him yet. She thought about Luke and Palin wandering through the amusement of whatever festival they had gone to. She thought about Taylor zipping through the city in his bright yellow convertible. She thought about the life she had lived before coming to the city that extended out before her farther than the eye could see. A chapter of her life was closing. Aria could feel its last page turning in the tightness of the ring that now adorned her finger.

  Like Aria, no little five-year-old girl or boy sits on the carpet of their kindergarten class during sharing time and says they want to be homeless when they grow up. But the streets had entrusted Aria with a truth. And it was a truth that she would never forget. It was a truth whose whisper reaches all of us in the sweet luxury of a smile, in the grave-grabbing shade of grief. It tells you to look deeper … to look deeper still. To look beyond the space between people and see that you are that smile, you are that grief. You are that man who crawls into his cardboard box for the night. You are that man who owns the high-rise above him. And you are the earth that holds the dichotomy of th
em both. It is not he who walks the soiled streets of the city, repenting. It is not he, who clings to his proud titles of accomplishment, boasting, that finds his place in the family of things and himself with it. Instead, what Aria now knew was that it was he, who was brave enough to see himself … in everyone around him.