love was a cosmic disaster

a short story

We’re all having trouble making it work with the people we know from other lives. We want to link up but our souls have been changed by the world and that keeps getting in the way. I walked to the big wedding tent by the beach, where everyone was making calls across time. When you answered, we both laughed awkwardly and I put you on speakerphone. It turns out you’re in love again, with a pixyish lesbian who is always cheating on you. It just makes sense for me to be with a man, she says. She’s a Jeopardy contestant, you say. Three time winner. I patiently nod. 

The world has been slowly fracturing into “before” and “after” for several years now. I knew you in the before, when love was a cosmic disaster that bound you infinitely and not a series of chess moves or even a contract. In the before, I couldn’t go out for a sandwich or get my haircut or move to another state without looking up to find you there. It wasn’t about me being good enough for you, and it wasn’t about how you made me feel. We were just supposed to be together. As the world fractured, it got too hard, due to “compatibility.” That was the word I used. I wanted to kill myself before, and I still do after. It’s just the details that are different now.

How did she get so good at Jeopardy? I read this story once, called “Little Expressionless Animals,” about a girl who wins Jeopardy over and over for three years straight. When I was a child, I read constantly to deal with loneliness; the girl in this story did the same thing, except she studied an encyclopedia. There are things I now innately understand about the world because of all of the books I read growing up, but most of the things I know aren’t considered useful. Looking back, I probably should have studied an encyclopedia, like your girl did. She isn’t the girl in the story, but they have a lot of similarities. Facts come naturally to her. She knows how to bend them to her will, a lifetime of pain alchemized into cold hard cash.

I don’t mind that you’ve moved on but I do mind that you’ve been whittled down somehow. A bald man in a Hawaiian shirt sits next to me at one of the picnic tables under the big tent, drinking a beer from a sweating glass. He stares slackly ahead, he’s thinking about the logistics of his wife. I take you off speakerphone, to protect your honor, as your tales of heartbreak begin to spiral pathetically with details of your lover’s transgressions. I feel around for my love for you, and find it’s still there. I feel around for your love for me, too.

Your girl left you again recently. You’re smoking a cigarette in your car, eyes darting wildly around the city as you devise the best way to Win Her Back. Every person a sounding board for your machinations to Win Her Back, including me. You are caught in a pattern now, but the pattern has no real feeling attached. When we lose the people we know from other lives, it’s difficult to leave the patterns we made with them, the specific words we were always saying to each other and the particular blend of emotions we made each other feel. It makes sense to keep driving down the same roads, smoking and devising. If you left the pattern, you would notice you’re alone.

I am listening patiently. I want to ask if I’m still worthy of protection, but you’ve put me on speakerphone while you drive, and your sister’s in the car. How to win her back how to win her back. I had planned to tell you about all the ways I’d changed, all my improvements made and experiences gathered. I fell in love with one man who was the captain of a ship, and I thought you would want to know about that. He was someone I met here, not in a previous life, just like you and your girl. These new people are luxuries, is what I had planned to say to you.

It is unsettling to reconnect with someone you knew in the before, because everyone in the after has been changed by it. I loved you for your forgiveness, the way you let me be an entire person even when it was of no benefit to you. Now, like everyone else, you seem to see people in terms of cost-benefit analysis, and I am not useful to you outside of my listening ear. We take for granted, now, that relationships are supposed to be short-lived, and that people exist to be experienced. In this way, the after is decadent, so full of entropic novelty that the higher-ups can’t manage all of it, and the world’s organizing mechanisms have descended into chaos.

A few weeks ago I listened to a podcast detailing a scandal spanning organizing branches across the globe wherein it was discovered that we were years behind on processing the world’s paperwork. This made sense, considering I knew there were countless unprocessed forms in my case file alone, most of my relationships from the past few years still marked as pending on the website. Investigators had found paperwork hidden behind ceiling tiles, stuffed under carpets, and tucked into folders stowed away in employee’s cars.

Could this be the source of the overwhelming sense of stagnation currently plaguing large swaths of the population? The podcast host wondered. Is it fair to say that an excess of unprocessed emotional paperwork could be contributing to the ennui that has come to define an entire generation?

Listening in, I privately disagreed that all the affective trends described by the podcast host could be singularly chalked up to one bureaucratic mishap, but I understood the impulse to weave together a neat narrative from the facts at hand. After all, it was hard for anyone to diagnose exactly what the after was and what had produced it. It was easier to focus on the effects than try to name the cause, which seemed to be complex, diffuse, and interconnected with a constellation of institutional and interpersonal dramas stretching back centuries. Academics, cultural critics, politicians, and other public figures scrambled to diagnose the new paradigm we all found ourselves in, but given the newness of our situation, most, for now, fell short.

I can imagine the bureaucrats complaining over their lunches about how little time they’ve had to adjust to the avalanche of data we’ve been creating for them. Nor do they see they point, they must mutter to each other privately, when all the new paths we invent are so short-lived and meaningless in the grand scheme of our countless lives. Take us, for example. Two people with lifetimes upon lifetimes of intertwined data. We expect them to throw out our entire file, so you can be with a Jeopardy contestant and I can be with a sea captain? All I’m trying to say is, I get why they would be tempted to throw in the towel.

The line is starting to go fuzzy, but I don’t want to hang up yet. I continue listening even as your voice pops out of focus every few seconds, as ambulances gallop past you and your sister turns up the radio. The problem is, I find that I have very little to offer most people in the after. Even if I can offer you history, understanding, and love, I assume you now want PLEASURE. THE GOOD LIFE. SUCCESS IN THE EYES OF THE WORLD. And I want you to have all of it—it would be selfish not to.

And, let’s not forget, the fracture changed me before it changed you. A sensitive person by nature, I’ve always been a bit of a canary in the coal mine in that way. I believed my desire for an optimal life was a sign of self-respect, and that my powers of discernment were keenly developed and incapable of leading me astray. We tried to broker a deal, but even then I only felt powerful when I was saying no. In the after, all we have are our small slivers of occasional agency, manifest in the power to negate. I am so autonomous now. And yet. Here I am giving you a call.

I’ve broken so many laws here and God has abandoned me because of it, I guess. It doesn’t feel good or bad, just factual. Raw data like the kind your girl was raised on. She has the right kind of knowledge, but we were always connected by our knowledge of the wrong things, weren’t we? You’ll keep chasing after her and I’ll keep running away from everyone. Until one of us breaks that pattern I’ll assume you haven’t chosen to brave the cosmos with anyone else, and that you still love me implicitly, the infinitude of your love untouched somehow, by the after.