Stardust

The Misfortunes of Gravity and Time

Stardust: The Misfortunes of Gravity and Time

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    The hiss of a draft slithered in through the barely-there crack in the corner of the window pane shrieked with the beads of today's downpour. For a moment, Skylar was relieved that he was inside, safe from the rain that fell like a sea from the sky to swallow up California. But the moment passed when the central air came snarling from the ceiling vent, biting at his skin and piercing every bruise and scar. His legs shivered against the hard office chair.

    The cold reminded him of those winters in Michigan waiting for Jackie in the field, but sometimes he thought that he lost the gravity of those memories when he lost his mother. In that moment, no memory he could conjure, not even the feeling of "home" he knew sitting beneath the stars with Jake, felt like it held any weight in his heart anymore. He was empty, and he was colorless. He supposed that was better than anger, but all of the psychiatrists and therapists he was mandated to attend sessions with in the last couple of days insisted that he develop a willingness to feel something — anything. Although he never talked to any of them — or anyone, for that matter — he thought it was their jobs to understand their "patients," but none of them seemed to grasp the concept that he had no will for anything. No will at all.

    The gusts from the vent sent loose file pages into a short-lived quarrel on top of the desk, where they slid against the shiny name plaque etched with "Tina Wu," Skylar's social worker. Beside the desk dotted with little potted plants and a cluster of family photos, the office seemed vacant. Between the institutional white of the bare walls, the dusty hardwood floors, and the lack of decor beyond the threshold of the desk, Skylar might as well have been sitting in a box. Or a coffin.

    He looked beyond the desk and out of the weather-stained window. Black umbrellas glided across the sidewalks and busy streets beneath the fourth-floor office, but Skylar was sure it was his life's current lack of chromaticism that deceived his eyes into believing they were black. Oh, what he would give to know their real hues...

    When the air of the stagnant office neared too cold to bare, Skylar pulled his frosted bones from the hard plastic chair and took a tentative step toward the door. Most of everything Skylar did these days could be described as tentative. He didn't know what to do with himself anymore, except that he wanted to get the hell out of the cold. The rain beating on the world outside had to have been warmer than this. At least, he hoped.

    As Skylar reached out a palm for the knob, the door flew open with gusto, sending the file papers dancing across the desk like Autumn leaves caught in the spiral of a breeze. The round, smiling face of the middle-aged, Asian social worker stared at him from the other side of the door. He hadn't remembered Tina being so chipper the first time they met. Although, the meeting was brief; only a fifteen-minute car ride to the foster home he had been forced to reside for the last three days, and most of those fifteen minutes Tina spent on the phone arguing with her husband about retracting her Christmas vacation to get Skylar's life situated.

    Tina shuffled into the room. She motioned for Skylar to sit back down as she kicked the door closed with her heel. Skylar sighed, but he sat. Her first order of business was to order the disarray of file papers scattered across her desk. With another sigh lingering on his lips, Skylar watched the barely-there pinstripes of her dark pants-suit bend and contort as she moved. He made a mental note of the way she inspected every leaf of her plants, almost as if she were looking for paper cuts, and how she meticulously scrubbed a spot of dust from the central-most frame of her family photos.

    When all seemed in an order befitting to her, Tina sat as straight as a pole in her desk chair, laced her fingers, and smiled wider at the teenager across from her. "How are you today, Skylar?"

    In the same fashion he treated everyone these days, he said not a single word. He stared at her with an expression as blank as a the office's walls. Only, Skylar noticed the odd crack or two in the white paint, and he thought that maybe these walls knew more about Tina's life than they did about her clients. After all, between her argument with her husband and the subtle hints in her photos and plants, she had enough of her own problems to deal with.

    Tina's smile faltered as she waited for a response she wouldn't receive in lieu of proceeding with whatever business she scheduled Skylar to be at her office for. After awhile of silence, Skylar pulled a cigarette from his pocket. He struck a match on the side of Tina's desk, and sat reclined in the chair, toking on the fumes. His stare persisted on Tina through the curlicues of smoke.

    "Well," Tina coughed into the hazy air of the office, "smoking usually isn't allowed in here, but I can make an exception considering that you lost your only family member just three days ago. Now that I think about it, smoking in a government facility isn't as unusual as other mourning-period vices I've heard of." She chuckled without much humor.

    Skylar took another drag on his cigarette, and Tina could have swore he intentionally blew the stream of smoke in her direction. Her smile fell. Her posture slouched as horrendously as one suffering from the affliction of a hunched spine.

    "Please say something," she huffed. "You haven't said anything to anyone since your mother died. Even the people at your foster home haven't heard a peep out of you and they've had to share a house with you for the last seventy-two consecutive hours!"

    If one of those therapists or psychiatrists had been present in Tina's office on this rainy Christmas Eve, they would have been proud to see Skylar showing a willingness to feel something, even if it had been anger in the form of flicking his lit cigarette at Tina's head — purposely missing her by a very narrow margin —  and slamming his fist down on her desk, knocking over two of her potted plants.

    "Why don't we talk about you for awhile?" he said.

    Tina shrunk into her chair in surprise. All the color dropped from her face. This was the first time she had heard Skylar speak, and the first time she had seen anything on him save for his lethargic disposition. She had been in attendance to one of his one-sided therapy sessions, and she was genuinely frightened at the prospect of his anger not being as constructive as screaming into a pillow or taking a series of deep breaths per suggestion of the therapists. She didn't know how to deal with the reaction he was displaying, and now she wished she had kept her vacation time and sent Skylar's file to another social worker.

    "You've got four kids, three boys and a girl, but from the arrangement of the photos, you the love the youngest, the girl, the most because her picture is in the middle. To make up for your neglect and feelings of failure as a mother towards your sons, you compensate in the excessive nurturing of your potted plants. There are a lot of cracks in the walls—"

    Tina shot up from her chair. "Stop that!" she howled. His harsh, scrutinizing words rattled around in her head like nails in a china bowl, and although she recognized her faults within his statements, the last thing she wanted was to listen to opinions about her life coming from an orphaned juvenile delinquent.

    Skylar pressed on. "—which reveal that there were many other decorations, but you thought of them as being in conflict with your family photos, so you took them down to make yourself look like a more loving parent. Your chair is new, but the cushioning of the seat is worn down to a flatness, suggesting that you immerse yourself in your work to take your mind off of the eventual divorce you and your husband are heading towards after your youngest graduates from high school. And your childhood was probably—"

    "That's enough!" Tina shouted. Her eyes swelled with a resentful dampness. It took every ounce of her professionalism not to throw him out of her office with his cigarettes and his bad attitude and his entire case file, which was nearly as thick as a novel.

    Skylar scoffed at her intolerance of discussing her own life when he was expected to discuss every moment he spent with his mother and the consequences of her absences in the rooms of strange, frozen-faced therapists that claimed to be compassionate. "I'm sorry," he said, lacking any remorse, "did I offend you?"

    Tina spun on her heels, her dark ponytail swinging around and resting on her left shoulder. She stared out of the window for a bare moment. She thought back to what one of Skylar's therapists said about needing to avoid partaking in negative and/or nonconstructive forms of intense emotions, and so she expelled the remnants of her anger through the crack in the window with three deep breaths. Then she closed her eyes. When she opened them again, she was looking at Skylar's spiritless face with the most compassionate expression she could muster considering the circumstances.

    "What's the cause of this outburst?" she asked, dropping back into the flat seat of her three-month-old chair.

    Skylar scoffed. "The reason for my 'outburst' is your lack of understanding."

    "What am I not understanding?" she asked.

    Skylar's eyes flashed with annoyance. He shook his head, pulling another cigarette from his pocket and taking a drag so long that he could have finished the whole cigarette in one go.

    Despite Tina's own pitfalls, she decided it was good to talk these sorts of things out. She waited until he exhaled the thick cloud of smoke from his lungs, and said, "Tell me about what happened to your mother."

    Skylar's eyes narrowed. "What? You don't have that information in your files and shit?"

    "I do, but it's good to talk about these things."

    "She overdosed," he hissed, but kept his cigarette tucked between his fingers and both hands at his sides this time. "What more do you wanna know? She was a doper and she was sad and she couldn't stand herself anymore, so she overdosed. There's nothin' else to talk about."

    Tina leaned forward, her elbows on the desk and her dark eyes staring directly into Skylar's. She felt that, if she looked hard enough, she could see his soul. His soul of frayed edges, thoughts and emotions he couldn't live with, and seams as ripped as the jeans dangling off of his gaunt body that hadn't eaten in three days. In the glimmer of a moment, she saw it staring back at her behind his kaleidoscopic eyes, and she knew he felt the same way his mother felt, and that he was only a breath away from giving up like Jackie had done.

    Her voice was just above a whisper when she asked, "Are you sad, Skylar?"

    He bitterly laughed. "Besides my mom's death, my dog's scheduled euthanization at the pound, the court wanting me in jail 'cause my piss test was dirty, and my anxiety being through the roof, I'm just peachy fuckin' keen."

    "I'm sorry," Tina said, her stare crestfallen. Despite his outburst, she meant it. "I can't imagine how difficult this is for you. Everything seems to be hitting you at once, and although I don't know you as much as I'd like to, I would gladly take the burden of that pain if I could."

    Skylar snuffed his cigarette on the bottom of his shoe. He let out a heavy breath, releasing the residue of his anger in the form of cigarette smoke. The smoke slithered through the window's crack and dispersed into the rain like Tina's had.

    When Skylar spoke again, he was very somber. "You have enough to deal with. And I'm sorry for the shit I said about your family. I just wanted you to understand..."

    "It's okay, Skylar," she nodded.

    The office was silent for awhile. The air was tense, and Skylar's chest felt heavier the longer he sat there. For the span of a second, he felt like crying, but he didn't think he could. He wasn't the type of person that cried often or made a habit of victimizing himself. After watching the paramedic's zip the bag over Jackie's face, he decided that he wouldn't cry again. He didn't know if it was his pride or his unwillingness to feel another pain as great as the night on Jackie's old porch or the event of three days ago. All he knew was that he needed to talk to someone because the words in his chest weighed a ton. He didn't like the feeling. The feeling of being so heavy that he thought gravity was working against him.

    "The therapists told me to call them if I decided that I wanted to talk about stuff," Skylar muttered, his eyes staring into his lap, "but, if you don't mind, I wanna tell you about my mom."

    He looked up. For a second, there was a glimmer of hopefulness in his eyes.

    Tina nodded. Then she propped her chin on her hands and smiled.

    "My mom had a lot of problems growing up," he began. "She had good parents, but they worked a lot. Her dad was in the army and her mom did a lot of volunteer work at homeless shelters. So, my mom, her older sister and brother spent a lot of time on the streets... When my mom was thirteen, she watched her sister get shot in a drive-by, and her brother go to prison for murdering the guys that killed their sister."

    Skylar's hands were shaky horribly. He was tempted to smoke another cigarette, but that wouldn't help. The only thing that would help was that little vile of white powder that stung as sweetly as the cold of a Michigan winter, but the feeling of being so physically and emotionally dependent on it disgusted him now. He used to think it was amazing until three days ago. No matter how colorless life seemed, he knew deep down that he didn't want to end up like Jackie. Unlike her, Skylar wanted to shed himself of the despondency they shared. He hadn't felt that way the night she was carted away on the stretcher, and he didn't know what brought it on, but he felt that he would find his colors and his willingness if he kept talking instead of letting the despondency fester in the middle of his chest, weighing him down and draining every last drop of who he was and who he wanted to be.

    "My mom got really into drugs and sex after that. She got pregnant a few times as a teenager, but she said she wasn't ready to be a better person yet, so she got a couple abortions, and put one kid up for adoption. She got pregnant with me when she was only twenty, and she didn't know why but she felt like she was ready to be the person she was meant to be... She said she was always meant to be my mom."

    If Skylar knew five minutes ago that he would cry, he wouldn't have started talking. But as the tears rushed down his cheeks like the raindrops on the window pane, he didn't feel so heavy anymore. He thought just talking would be enough to rid him of the burden in his chest, but the more his eyes clouded with the brewing of pain from everything he'd ever went through, he could see a wider spectrum of colors through the teary blur. The small daisy peeking through the leaves of Tina's potted plant was as bright a gold as the sparks of sun on the ocean at noon.

    "She got off drugs when she found out she was pregnant with me, and started job searching to support me. She got a really good job as a used car saleswoman. She said it was her favorite job because if she knew anything at all, she knew how to talk to people," Skylar smiled for the first time in what felt like eons. He leaned forward with a faint chuckle brushing passed his lips. "I swear, if you ever met that woman, she would talk your face off. She said her talkative nature got even worse after I was born because she would carry pictures of me around with her wherever she went and she'd gush to complete strangers on the bus or in the grocery store about everything I did as a baby. From sticking my fingers up her nose, to breaking through the baby gates, she thought everything I did was amazing."

    Tina smiled, glancing at her family photos. "Every mom thinks her kids are amazing."

    "Yeah, I guess so," he said, scratching the back of his neck.

    Skylar glanced over Tina's shoulder, through the rain-streaked window pane. His eyes lit up like the reflections of Independence Day fireworks at the ability to see the colors of the umbrellas. The one crossing the street was bright red; the one getting out of the taxi was blue; and the little girl holding her dad's hand was shielded from the elements with a purple umbrella. Skylar kept talking.

    "My grandparents died when I was three, and that's when my mom got back on drugs. She loved her parents a lot, and she couldn't deal with losing them. She really tried, though. She continued working and taking care of me, but she lost her job when the dealership went bankrupt, so I guess that was the final straw. That's when she started leaving. She was prostituting all over the state, and then she started going out of state, so I spent most of my childhood raising myself. When I was really young, she didn't want me to know what she was doing, so she'd always say that she was leaving to find God," he paused, wiping away the remnant of a half-dried tear on his cheek.

    "As naive as it might sound, I hope she finally found Him," he said very quietly. "I just wish she didn't have to go so far."

    As Skylar sat there beneath the attentive stare of Tina and the chilly air seeping from the vent, he thought that maybe the real reason Jackie became the person she was was because her youth conditioned her with a heart that was so unbelievably hard to fill and a spirit that couldn't be still. She tried to fill her heart with a job and Skylar and God, and she tried to be still for Skylar's sake, but a part of her was still vacant. So she tried to fill it with drugs and traveling and "selling love," but that surely wasn't enough. Then Skylar thought that maybe he was the same way, and that was why he was slowly killing himself with the drugs and cigarettes and his tolerance of inheriting Jackie's despondency. When he glanced at the bruises coloring his inner elbows, and when he thought back to all of the starless nights that he substituted with syringes full of heroine, he resolved that he would be better, that he would try his damnedest to fill his heart, and that started with removing himself from the wrecking ball that was his mother's life. Although the feat was small, he pulled the carton of cigarettes from his jeans' pocket and tossed it in the trashcan beside Tina's desk.

    Then Skylar looked Tina in her eyes. "I know you and everyone else might think that she was a bad person or a bad mom, but she wasn't. She was just one of those people that needed her whole life to find out who she was and what she wanted. Although she'd beg to differ, my mom wasn't ready to be a mother or to be burdened with the great responsibilities that came with it, but she tried really hard to be there for me... Harder than most people try at anything in their lives. I hope you can understand that... my mom was just a victim of the misfortunes of timing."

    Despite the preconceived notions Tina formed about Skylar and his mother from the stack of uncompassionate file papers littering her desk, after talking with him for awhile, she understood. His 'outburst' wasn't meant to be hurtful. It was an act of commiseration; it was Skylar attempting to help her understand that she was a fellow sufferer of the misfortunes of timing. Tina never wanted to be a social worker. She wanted to do so many things with her life. She wanted to earn multiple degrees, travel the world, meet new people, learn everything she could possibly learn about the world, and then settle down well into her forties. Unfortunately, she met her husband in her freshman year of college and got pregnant with their first son not too long after. If anyone knew about the concept of unfortunate timing, it was Tina. She internally cursed herself for not understanding Skylar's intentions sooner.

    Tina wanted to tell Skylar about all the things she wished to do with her life before her husband and children, and she wanted to tell him that she finally understood what he tried desperately for her to grasp, but the clock on the corner of her desk dinged repeatedly. It was almost five o'clock. Someone from Skylar's foster home would be coming to pick him up soon. Due too another misfortune of timing, Tina was forced to repress her wants and get to the gist of why she called Skylar to her office.

    "The reason I called you here today was to discuss the efforts I've made in finding you a legal guardian— "

    "I can take care of myself," he said with a confident stare.

    "I don't doubt that," she chuckled, "but as a minor with no means of financial support, you must be in the care of a guardian until you're of age or decide to pursue emancipation."

    "Can you get a hold of someone I know?"

    "Well," she croaked, nervously picking at the corner of her file, "your mother didn't leave a will with the specification of whose care you would fall under in the event of her death, and considering that both of your grandparents are deceased and your uncle is in prison, there's no family or friends on your mother's side that I could contact. In order to keep you out of juvenile detention, which is where the court wants you, we need a prospective guardian's conformation within the week. We've only got a few days left before your next court hearing... But I did manage to get a hold of someone else..."

    Skylar scooted to the edge of his seat. He really could've used a cigarette to subdue the anxiousness fluttering around inside of him, but the reminder of his hatred of being codependent on something insisted that he deal with his feelings like any normal human being would. So he swallowed down the thrashing waves of uneasiness flooding his being, and he muttered, "Who?"

    Tina was silent for a moment, glancing at all of the papers on her desk whose text didn't seem to matter as much anymore. When she looked up at Skylar again, the words flew from her lips like a bird who'd spent its entire life in confinement,

    "Your father."

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