Page 48 of All That We Never Were

“Let’s do something on the list. Let’s walk barefoot.”

“It’s nighttime,” I said, still confused.

“Who cares? Come on, Leah.”

I stopped talking when I realized Axel wouldn’t let go of my hand as we left the porch steps behind and walked onto the trail. In theory, I should have been concentrating solely on the little stones I felt on the bottoms of my feet or the delicate sensation of the grass when we went a bit further, but in practice I couldn’t ignore his hand, his fingers, his skin. My heart skipped a beat, as if inside my chest there weren’t enough space for it, as if it were longing for something at the same time as it was shouting for me not to do it.

“Tell me what you feel,” Axel whispered.

I feel you, I wanted to respond. “I don’t know…”

“What do you mean, you don’t know? Leah, don’t think. Just try to concentrate on this moment.”

We walked slowly. He was a little ways ahead, pulling on me softly, not letting go of my hand.

What was I feeling?

His fingers, long, warm. The carpet of damp grass tickling my feet. His skin against mine, rubbing softly with each step. A rougher section of trail, dryer. His soft nail under the skin of my thumb. And finally, sand. Sand everywhere, heels sinking into the warm surface.

Only then did I understand what Axel was doing. For those minutes our walk lasted, I had felt everything. Being present. I felt the reality of this moment, not through the broken window of a car that had left the road.

I sat on the sand. Axel too.

The sound of the sea embraced us and remained with us awhile, until he sighed and started to play distractedly in the sand. “Tell me something you’ve never told anyone else.”

One day I told you I loved you, but all you heard was “We all live in a yellow submarine.”

The memory stunned me, as if it had been asleep for years and was trying suddenly to break through, dragging with it countless instances I had tried to forget. And sometimes, when we find boxes covered in dust, we discover photos that still rouse old feelings, that stone shaped like a heart that used to mean everything, that special wrinkled note, that song that would always be ours even if he didn’t know it.

I sank my fingers into the sand, trying to ignore that memory, and sank into another, harder, more painful one, as if all of them were connected, and awakening one was like pushing a domino and making all the ones next to it fall.

“You want to know what I felt when I got outside after it happened?” I asked, uncertain, and Axel nodded. “It was sunny. I remember it as if it were yesterday. I stood in front of the door to Oliver’s apartment, looking at everything and trying to absorb it. A man passed by me smiling, tripped, and excused himself before continuing on his way. Out front there was a woman pushing a baby carriage with a shopping bag in her hand. I know because I couldn’t stop staring at the carrots sticking out of it. There was a dog barking far away.”

I don’t know if Axel was aware that just then I was sharing something I hadn’t shared with myself, hadn’t even thought over in solitude. Because it was easier like that, with him, with those feelings welling up when he was near me mingling with others, more complicated ones I didn’t even want to look at.

“Go on, Leah. I want to understand you.”

“I just…I just saw all that and asked myself how it was possible that nothing had changed. It didn’t seem real. It was like a joke. I guess that’s what happens when the world stops, not just because of something like that, but with a breakup, an illness… It’s like feeling frozen while everything else is moving. And I think…I think that all of us are living in a bubble, all focused on our own thing, until one day that bubble bursts and you want to scream and you feel alone and no one’s protecting you.” I swallowed to try and get rid of the knot swelling in my throat. “It was like seeing things from another perspective, distant, blurry, with everything just black and white.”

“And you always paint what you feel,” Axel whispered, and I liked how he could get inside me, understand me, decipher me even when I didn’t know why I was doing things. Like that, like that absence of color, my need for it to be that way.

44

_________

Axel

After that night on the beach, Leah closed up again. She didn’t want to tell me why, and I didn’t push it. Instead I let her be for a couple of days. In the morning before school, she still went surfing with me. And in the afternoon, when I was done working and she was done studying, we would spend a while together on the porch, reading, listening to music, or sharing the silence.

We weren’t avoiding each other, but we hardly talked.

Leah started painting on Friday night. I was taking my last sip of tea with a book in my hand when I saw her stand up slowly and approach the blank canvas. I watched her out of the corner of my eye, lying in the hammock a few feet away.

She grabbed a brush, opened the black paint tube, and took a deep breath before letting whatever was in her head come out. I was amazed as I watched her, attentive to the soft movements of her arms, the strength with which her fingers grabbed the brush, her tense shoulders, her furrowed brow, that energy that seemed to push her to paint one line, then another, then another. I held back my desire to get up and see what she was doing as I saw her mixing paint to come up with different tones of gray.

I had felt that way before too, but so long ago I was incapable of recalling the exact occasion. It had been in Douglas’s studio, on the afternoons that I spent there with him, feeling…feeling everything, maybe because back then I didn’t think too much and the final result didn’t matter much to me, whether I did a good or a bad job. It was enough to talk with him for a while, drink a beer, and let it all flow.

When Leah finished, I got up.

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