Take What You Can Carry

and to walk the crowded paths of a bazaar, breathing in twists of spices and the honeyed glaze of pastried treats. It’s shocking, his world. And splendid. But also, she realizes, possibly incorrect. Because when he speaks of home, he speaks like someone in love, someone blind to faults and entranced by the mundane. Someone whose heart has learned to lie.
This is a hazard she’s familiar with: when you love, you see what you love, not necessarily what’s there. The artful blur of affection. For her, in relationships, it was always a matter of time before someone was left faltering in a less-than-forgiving light and truth was exposed, connections built upon a desire for true love rather than a presence. An eager heart’s ruse. Certainly not the trajectory of love’s lasting arrow.
You worry that if you really love someone, they will be taken, her father used to say, the only person who didn’t view her parade of short relationships as the result of unrealistic expectations. It happens when you’re not looking. An infuriating cliché, made even more infuriating by the fact that after two years of living platonically with Delan as roommates, she was indeed not looking when everything changed. When in a still and silent garden, she’d felt his hand.
Is what she has with him the real thing? She’s convinced it is but is aware that her past determinations have led her down broken roads. For now, the only certainty is that they’re at that brink. The five-month mark, her longest relationship yet. And here, in this new territory, a new and significant worry has risen: they are from different worlds. Not just in the details but in the weight.
Only months ago, she’d walked in to find him and his friends watching the nightly news, a colorful, choppy map of the Middle East and a monotone newscaster who wrapped up a segment that had to do with two Kurdish groups. The empty bottle of gin was closer to Delan than the others, and when the news switched to a commercial, Olivia asked what had happened. Clashes between the Kurds, his friend Alan said when Delan kept quiet. So much to fight for but they fight each other. No wonder he’s fucking depressed. When Delan looked up at her, he stayed silent, and she saw, like a shape on the horizon, the fact that the friends he’d had for more than a decade, who’d been with him when the fighting back home was bad, might know him differently than she ever would. Because they’d lived through rough times with him, and since those times were not something he wished to conjure again, they’d since been swept to the corners of his conversations. The fact was, she realized, he would tell her tales of mountains and wildflowers, but there was a chance he would never talk about the rest.
The rest: the space between them. The weight of his past.
Is it possible to truly know someone if you cannot comprehend that which made them who they are? Can one truly love another without that understanding? She wondered then. She wonders now. In the past, she dated men from Texas, from New York, from Idaho, and once even from France. In all cases, she could close her eyes and picture their homes, their mothers, could ask them what their Christmases or birthdays were like and see the same celebrations in her mind. But with him? Their differences are profound. His is a world where men cherish their Brno Rifles, Fridays are a holy day, and war has never just been fought on foreign soil. And though his words have painted magic and bravery, there have always been omissions. The starts or ends to stories he tends to swallow down, leaving behind only a silent aftermath.
All he’s left unsaid, the why of him, that’s what she wants. Why she’s on this plane. To truly know him. To prove that they can work, and different does not mean over.
To pass time during the flight, Olivia entertains herself with imaginations of her own hidden magic. Daydreams in which she’d be at work, lost in the chaos of the newspaper’s bullpen, when suddenly she’d sense the jumble of something in the air and drag her coworkers to safety before the earth begins to shake. In her mind, she sees the looks on peoples’ faces. The way they’d turn to her, glimpsing power in someone they’d thought powerless. It’s ridiculous, she knows. Both the daydreams and the feeling within her, a joyous lift from a force she doesn’t have. But it doesn’t matter. The crux of these daydreams is a righting of wrong, those who’ve underestimated her pausing and seeing their mistake within her strength. Just as often, she imagines the photographs she will one day take, images that will make people stop as they’re about to turn a page, fingers letting go as they lean in closer. Lately, those fantasies have happened more frequently, ever since a photo contest was announced at work in which the winner is promised a position within the department. No one expects her, a secretary, to enter. After all, her one job has been to make sure someone else lives up to his greatness, her own just a quiet stirring offstage.
Suddenly, an announcement jolts her back into the present. Eyes around her open. Words are spoken by the captain in French and Arabic, two languages Olivia doesn’t understand, so meaning for her is gathered by the change in people around her. Newspapers are put away and seat backs straightened. Hand-rolled cigarettes get mashed into metal trays. The mother in the aisle next to them finds her daughter’s shoe and wrestles it onto the small, still foot, her face unreadable under the overhead light.
Almost as an afterthought, the captain remembers his English. “We will be making a landing in Switzerland.”
Switzerland. Olivia glances at her watch, still set with the Paris time. At some point they changed course. There must be a reason. A