THE THING ABOUT DEPARTURES | TASHA COTTER She first felt something might be wrong on an airport’s breezeway in the Midwest. It was there she began to realize what she would miss. She was already missing everything, but was too busy closing a part of herself off very tightly. Everything was a sign of weakness. It was at this point she changed the song and changed her focus so that she was no longer looking at a couple poised for paradise, but an older woman, seated apart from everyone else, staring deeply into her empty lap. A discarded bottle of water lay at her feet. Someone working the counter said her row was boarding. After several years pass she realizes she got on the plane simply because a stranger told her it was time to board the plane. The woman and the plane have a shared mission: they each want to reach a destination without crashing. Within minutes she fails and blinks hard behind big black frames. The flight attendant is walking by, making sure everyone is buckled in. The woman in tears is noticed. Seeing her tears, the flight attendant asks “Is there anything I can get you?” but the lady replies “It’s just the sound, the departure. That’s all. I don’t need anything.” The thing the flight attendant doesn’t know is that this passenger needs everything. She is aware of the initial struggle and surprised by how relentless the force of separation is. This struggle is only the start of all those to come. Weeks later she is busy filling her journal with quotes by great men. She makes each page hold exactly one thought. She likes the French poet Alain because he made a point of reading only a limited number of books, which he reread constantly and knew in remarkable depth. He spent his life in the company of a few great minds. She thinks of all the books she knows deeply and ends up with several tragic love stories. She realizes she desires the newly released too much to get invested in the classics. She realizes it’s a quality she doesn’t like about herself as she opens a window. Locating the similarities in dissimilars becomes easier and easier. Loss opens her up. The grief and heartbreak fuse to make one solid thing she can’t see. She feels an electric current born in her fingertips. Her brain locates the target and she is aware of how foreign she has become. Grains of sand seep into her heart. When she drops a juice glass she lets the shards rest on the floor and studies the broken glass. She is aware that the large pieces are the easiest to dispose of. It’s the smaller bits you don’t see that turn out to be the most stubborn. She recalls how when she had a headache as a foreign exchange student, the French woman she lived with recommended various kinds of bottled waters for ailments. Evian for migraines, Volvic for stomachaches, and Contrex for weight loss. She begins buying expensive mineral water in bulk thinking it will transform her. After a week of drinking liters of the clearest water she can find she steps on the scale and learns she’s lost a pound. The problem is that she is being consumed by a break in muscle she can’t see. Still drinking water sourced from foreign mountains, she cuts a stiff baguette up into pieces, placing it on a platter for a local chipmunk. Hours later the chipmunk shows up to eat the prepared meal, not understanding what it is or where it came from. It sees her moving quickly through the thick pane of glass and soon leaves. She goes looking for self help books and can’t see any of the titles because she is moving too fast, moving through the aisles, not making eye contact, only looking briefly at the covers. There are no colors in the world of self-help, she thinks. Basically fine anyway, she thinks. She goes home, to her bookshelf and begins to read all the underlined passages of her favorite books, beginning with the highlighted portions in On the Road. For once, a smile as she recognizes her old glitter pen signature inside the cover. She lands on page eighty-one where she had highlighted “A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.” She reads the words and then re-reads them, this time saying them out loud. She stops reading and takes a drink of the expensive water then closes the book. She feels as though she’s just returned from a long trip. She prides herself in these attempts to defeat what she refuses to name. At the office she gets distracted thinking of all the people walking past each other, never saying anything. She unties the sweater from around her chair and puts it on. When someone asks her if she is cold she smiles and says she is just fine, thanks. Evenings are spent watching an empty bird feeder sway in the wind. She takes down a book on apple trees. Quietly, sounds and voices begin to escape from the pages. Memory is like this. One minute we are reading about the texture of apple seeds and the next minute we are in search of our pasts, the book on apple trees already fallen to the ground . No seeds, no apples, just a face that starts to move like water and sometimes we can see it more clearly from the air. Sometimes the image appears whole. Often it is only a partial likeness and we know we have failed ourselves. We like this trouble, though. She is thinking about the orchard. How when she was a girl she was chasing some boy in an orchard or was he chasing her? A full moon was out that night. It was a game or was it? She looks at the book on the floor and tries to rekindle a few broken pieces of a face, but it’s all shaky. Still, something in her is getting fed. The breeze from the open window reaches her. She pulls a blanket closer and takes a drink of water and remembers the game. How she was playing tag with the others, hiding behind an apple tree. How she almost won the game until that boy found her. With one clap on the shoulder, she had lost. She watches herself turn around, already understanding what that one touch meant. Tasha Cotter’s work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Confrontation, Sleet, Hanging Loose Press, and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago. To read more of her work, please visit her website at www.tashacotter.com.http://www.tashacotter.com/shapeimage_1_link_0
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