"The Shape of the World" by Anna Oberg
Photo by Kerry Rawlinson, licensed under Public Domain and obtained from Unsplash.
The Shape of the World
Knoxville, Tennessee. My parents and I stroll the Pleasant Hill Cemetery down the hill from their house. It is November. I’m fatigued from the overnight haul, escaping the threat of wildfire near our Colorado home. I’ve evacuated with my husband and three sons.
Maple leaves rattle overhead as I walk the line of graves, camera draped over my shoulder, searching for something. I don’t know what draws me here, perhaps the feeling of goneness. I need to feel at home with what is left behind—the house, the yellow door, the smoke plume marking the distance between there and here. A bright wind scatters bits of silk flowers across the lawn like confetti after a parade.
The only decent photographs I manage are of two concrete cherubs propped on separate gravestones. They are old, aged by lichen, worn by winter. I don’t know why they fascinate me, why something so hackneyed touches me deeply. The gesture occupies me—the act of kneeling, placing a sculpture at the head of the deceased. Those left behind wish their loved one to be watched over, kept safe. The angel signifies, somehow, that bearing witness to absence is an acknowledgment of presence.
It’s only later, while scrolling through photos from the cemetery, that the cherubs remind me of her. And me. And how it is that spring before I leave home the first time. The distance between the two angels brings her to mind. We diverge that year, into our own lives.
***
It’s strange at my parents’ house, studying artifacts of my past, wondering if my current home—with the yellow door and the ponderosa swaying all around—is catching a spark, maybe burning to the ground. I sit on the sofa as morning bleeds in through the half-turned blinds. I’m drowsy, sewing together pieces that may never make sense.
A train whistles somewhere off to the west. When I’m away from here, I forget about the trains that slide through on the edge of day. The sound reminds me of time spent yearning to leave, to dream, to establish myself in the wild, wide world.
It’s true, the way doors don’t quite fit their frames here. They become difficult to close, hard to keep from falling ajar. The gate to the cemetery dangles on its hinge. It’s the moisture in the air, the humidity that rots things, makes upkeep impossible. It is constant, the fight against weeds and overgrowth. The brambles, the bushes make the woods impenetrable. I recall the way this decay makes me feel that spring like I don’t quite fit either. Like I need out, or I will rot before I become anything at all.
***
She is my closest friend from first grade on. We confront life together, all of it. Even when we are apart, we are always together, always in communication, always intersecting. It is the type of friendship that seems charmed, as though it will remain untarnished forever.
In middle school, we tie up the phone lines for hours, laughing over nothing as we prepare food—me grilled cheese, her Stove Top stuffing. We go to camp together, crush on all the same boys, whisper late into the night about every dark emotion rolling in our heads. In high school, we draft letters to each other under the edges of our desks, long handwritten pages feeling through the shit of adolescence. When I start looking at colleges, I can’t imagine leaving her behind, so I don’t. I stay. We both start at the University of Tennessee. When I think of home, hers is the portrait in my head.
Junior year, I am bored. I need an adventure, so I make plans to spend the summer anywhere but here. Just before I leave for Colorado, though, I inexplicably begin treating her as if I’m already gone. It takes me years to understand my behavior that spring as a symptom of preemptive grief. Somehow, cutting the cord before I have to seems like the only way to deal with the pain of a first goodbye.
***
I’m not sure why it’s important, but that spring, I am still a virgin. I ask her every time we go out not to bring it up, but she does. The guys we hang out with already know. It’s a source of unwanted attention. In my head, it makes me seem younger than I am. But she thinks it makes me alluring—so, she tells everyone, even strangers in bars. I feel like she’s selling something.
Somehow, the fact of my virginity comes between us. It has to do with how she is with men, or rather, my perception of how she is with men. Or maybe, it’s just about how I am with men. Like a good Southern girl, I say I will wait for marriage, even though I can no longer say why. My faith is something I think about and disregard regularly. The church my parents attend is a hall of past suffering. Religion, or rather, the brand I've been asked to adhere to for so many years, keeps me from seeing God. I rely on her to understand.
All I think I want at that age, early twenties, is to be the object of a man's desire. For years, I watch how her confidence, her flirtatious aura places her at the center of the universe. She has an energy, an atmosphere all her own. If she is there, men want to be near. That spring, I want to be the one who is noticed, to feel I own some mystery a man wants to unravel.
***
The same narrative applies to a million different nights: we drink at a friend’s apartment, trying to decide what to do next. The scenario never falters. I don't remember what we choose that particular night—if we go out or drift around between the apartments of friends who live in the complex—but we end up at my place, four of us, winding down on my slipcovered loveseat and particle board table in the combination kitchen/living space.
It is late. Somehow the idea of a sleepover comes up, so there we are, an hour later, four-deep in my queen-sized bed under the turquoise duvet, laughing until someone falls asleep. She is with me, as always.
Between us in the bed is her ex-boyfriend. The ex- has just been tacked on that very week. The two of them are in a weird, liminal space, very newly broken-up, testing the water of friendship. In other words, he is desperately in love with her, and she is trying to decide if she wants to be with him. It isn't a breakup as much as one of those dramatic pauses that occur so often in the turmoil of twenty-something relationships.
Our jokes taper off. The room quiets. She snores lightly in the middle of the bed.
We don't say a word, but his hands are already on me. After the other two are asleep, we make out on the kitchen counter for an hour then silently climb back into bed. There is no connection between us. The only thing is her and some invisible point I’m hellbent on proving. Like, even he will have to tread the line of my virginity.
The next day, he tells her.
***
When it comes to ways women hurt each other, this is the most basic—this thing I do that lights the fire, burns the house of our friendship down. It’s the most obvious. Let the unlatched door swing open, let jealousy come in and do its work. Let a man come between—and it is hard to get him to leave, even long after he’s gone.
I strike the match, set the blaze in motion. For me, it may have been a long time coming, but for her, it is like returning after a trip to the post office to find her home engulfed in flames.
***
I apologize several times that spring. Then, I leave for Colorado, some tiny town west of the Continental Divide. We don't communicate much that summer, though I take in a few sunsets as I make small talk with her over the phone whenever it’s convenient to drive the thirty miles for cell reception. There’s nothing to these conversations. I try to bridge the distance, but a sinkhole remains open beneath our feet. It’s a deeper conflict than a silly fight over a man she no longer sees. Anything I say seems inconsequential, too small to convey my regret. From far away, as the smoke plume dissipates, I wonder how to build back what I have destroyed.
***
Knoxville, Tennessee. A breeze jostles the curtain by the bathroom window. Dust mites dance in a beam of light. The motion reminds me why we’re here, why we’ve come east, left our home behind. It’s the possibility of flame driven by the autumn wind that makes me panic.
We are told the fire has stopped just over a mile from our home. A snowfall arrives just in time. Eventually, the snow will melt, evaporate to nothing in the sun. Should the wind rise, with it will come sparks, embers. The fury will return. We are told—be ready to receive what the wind brings.
Fire consumes its own setting. It is its own sense of place, its own geography. The map is a ruin. As soon as I see it, it changes, becomes obsolete. The blaze inches east. The gray area indicates fire. It encroaches— beyond this mountain, down that drainage. Color marks containment, broad areas of falsity. It is what is burned, not what is burning. Place becomes artifact.
***
Estes Park, Colorado. We return. The house with the yellow door stands. Our evacuation ends.
In the house, there is ash—a thin layer of burned matter coats the kitchen table, the coffee pot, the counter. Remnants of gone things seek asylum here. I vacuum the rug, dust the windowsill. Some substance—scorched forest—collects in gray drifts, drab confetti on the floor, the shower curtain, the far corner of the closet. I think our home is weatherproofed, airtight, but the trees find me anyway.
***
I stand at the gate photographing the burn line. Singed grass rolls out a black carpet, up into the crease between mountains. The trees are stripped bare. It is true, what this landscape has done for me. It has laid down its life. Perhaps it will grow back more holy, but it has suffered so that I may not. Am I to learn, over the coming days, years, about resurrection? Am I to learn a new story, reread a redundancy of how life comes back, circles around, starts over, even in the direst circumstances?
***
When I think of this story, my leave-taking that spring, I think about what it is to dive into deep water, how the surface opens briefly in the shape of your body. You are gone, beneath the waves, the surface. And the door you enter through is gone. You can never find it again—you can’t leave the way you came in. It’s covered, perfectly hidden. Or rather, it is no longer there at all.
Fire, too, swallows everything in its path. Everything that is not stone. It seeks fuel, choking on boulders, spitting out rock. As I survey the aftermath, I find I need to prepare my heart for its own disappearance.
This land I have seen green and gold is blackened and raw. Its flesh is burned to bone. And I also have done this to someone I love. I imagine the future the same way I see the past, and I’m broken by my capacity to cause pain. Even back then I cannot act as if what I do does not matter. It is a small thing, a tiny spark when placed against all the ways she will be hurt—but it is not irrelevant. Neither is my shame. This is the burned place.
***
I still see her. We are friends, but it has taken years to let the hurt of our early twenties go. One day I meet her at a coffee shop a few miles from my parents’ house. She still lives there, in the town where we grew up. She has a beautiful family now. We talk for four hours about how it used to be. How we used to be home to one another in a way we aren't now. A way we've outgrown, because we've found new ideas that fit us better than the old ones. As we sip coffee, I feel the intervening years—the childbirths and miscarriages, the marriages and near misses—and I understand for the first time what it is I do that night when I jerk the rug from under our friendship.
It is never about a boy, but which of us can love the other enough to say goodbye. Let our child selves grow up and move on, let our friendship change. Let it survive something. Let it burn up so we can see the wildflowers come back in the spring.
***
Estes Park, Colorado. I think about what it takes to carve this place—the years and ages. What has to melt and freeze and crack and shatter so I can love the space where sky comes down to baptize the emptiness, the burned space between mountains. And I think of water and ice and stone turned to gravel, to sand. The thunder and hail that become the river, and how everything that is breaking is also mending. And I think about myself, too. And her. How we are being formed, chiseled out like a thing left behind. A remnant. I understand erosion by wind or fire is also accretion. That I am becoming. She is becoming. And there we are, cherubs facing each other across the distance.
I have to relearn everything I know. The shape of the world. How weather arrives. That not every cloud on the horizon is a plume of smoke, threatening to burn everything away. But the shape of the world has nothing to do with the curve of the earth. I bend my ear to the grass to understand what has happened. I remember the trees.
Anna Oberg is a professional photographer based in Estes Park, Colorado. When she's not arranging family portraits with the perfect view of Long's Peak as backdrop, she focuses on writing tiny memories and small stories. She has been published in Cleaver Magazine, Pidgeonholes, The Maine Review, decomp Journal, The Festival Review, and Split Rock Review, among others.