Fruits of the Unknown

Beneath the warmth of the setting sun, holding the hose just above the rich soil at the pear tree’s foot, she wipes the water falling from her face. The jasmine has already begun to bloom, and its scent fills the air around her. She has placed a single flower in her raven braid that stretches down her back. Six months have passed since the crash. Dutifully, she has adopted caring responsibility for the pear tree, a job which has only since become hers. The buds bursting from the leaves will soon bear fruit the color of cobblestone streets, and she must do something with them lest they go to waste. The tree, which stands at the center of our garden in a small plot behind our home, reminds her of me. I, who planted the tree when we bought our first house together, this house which became our home, tended to it, pruned it, watered it, and picked its fruit for us to eat. I strained its juices for us to drink in the heat of summer and baked them into almond tarts for dessert we shared with our neighbors. Standing beside it now, she wonders whether trees grow where I am.

When they told her the news, her body went limp and she dropped the phone. The screen cracked when it hit the blue kitchen tile. She lay next to it on the ground, wailing like an ambulance siren. For the first week afterward, she couldn’t sleep a single wink. She lay in the hole I left in my side of the bed and shook with tears. And when there were no tears left to shake, she stared at the wall. She threw her phone at the wall. Her mother came to stay with us. She cooked her meals, bathed her, and read to her. For the next few weeks, all she could do was sleep. My mother came to visit often, too. They cried together, held each other, occasionally walked through the garden, hand in hand.

When we first met at the department’s holiday party, she told me my haircut made me look ten years older than I actually was. The way it lay lifeless across my head seemed like I was mimicking the other professors in our department in order to blend in. This wasn’t completely untrue. It was only my second year of teaching, and I couldn’t help but feel insecure amongst the seasoned faculty of the physics department. She pulled up images of men’s hairstyles on her phone and we scrolled through them, deciphering which would not only best fit my face shape but also achieve the hip and cool professor look we decided I should pursue. I drove home that night thinking about her cackling laugh and full gaze.

I once sat in on her class after we had begun dating for a short while. She zipped around the blackboard like a vespa through traffic on fire. She engaged with her students as though they were purveyors of deep insight that she earnestly longed to hear, a room full of Platos and Aristotles and Kants and Newtons. She lambasted the myopic tendencies of contemporary physics pedagogy, singing to her pupils about the magic of our universe that lies just beyond numerals and equations. The unknown, she believed, was not just to be unearthed, but to be felt.

And she felt much often. She weeped and shrieked reading fiction in bed before sleep, yelled at dinner parties over politics and capitalism, lost her temper at times like Mt. Vesuvius, seldom and murderous, only to be followed with remorse and contrition. When we fought, I would leave the house and take my moped for a ride around the lake. She hated when I rode at night, I know, but she never told me not to. She never requested I quit anything she knew I loved. Like smoking cigarettes, playing futbol with friends on the weekend, or going out on my bike too late at night.

We fell in love from a high cliff, and we sank deep into its waters. We dreamed of a home we would build with children we would nurture and share the most confounding wonders of the world. It ended sooner than either of us expected with a pair of blinding headlights and a force too swift to calculate.

A few months passed after the crash, and she began to take long walks around town. She would visit the grocery store that sold our favorite produce, the freshest anywhere in town, and stop by the bakery around the corner from home to buy the prettiest sourdough loaf which she would rip apart and dip in olive oil and spices. She replanted the jasmine and the basil and the oregano that she tore up from the ground around the first week after the crash. She began to cook roasts and stews and pastas seasoned with juice from the lemons in the garden. She invited our friends over for dinner, waved hello to the butcher and the neighbors, sometimes with a smile, too.

She doesn’t think herself ready yet, though, for the pears to come. The pears, which were my job, my impulse and muse, are on their way regardless of her grief. Although she wished that by the time they materialized from the small buds before her, she would be prepared for them, this hope always disintegrated as fast as it appeared. Never one to go against her word, she felt the unknown as intensely as anything she had ever felt. When it became overwhelming, and she lay writhing in pain, she prayed to whatever it was out there that she could plug me into some equation and bear me into the world of the known. Give language to me to grasp at the dark and empty space. And hold me again, and never let me go. But death is too vast for language, my dear. But for you, I will try.

In my dispersed elements, I have found myself at the spine of life. Between the world and you, find me in all things. In the clouds at your head and the soil at your feet. I am the bubble that holds you. I am always holding you. With you. In the coming and going. Find me wherever it is you turn. So you must smell the jasmine. Pucker at the lemons, feel the wind in your dress and your long, thick hair. For this is urgent. It is of the utmost importance. There are trees here, my love. And pears that bear the sweetest flesh. My moon. My life. My almond tart. If you ever miss me, take a breath — and there I am.