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Thursday, early May. Whispering wind wends across Distantreach Community College's emptying campus. Sunbaked goose droppings over the pavement, their donors making hell for the smokers by the art building's rear fencing. Sun at zenith; cenit from bungled samt ar-ras, the path overhead.
Daphne Nikolaou Bakirtzis walks to her car, parked on the ground floor of a garage that fails to stop growing taller as the years pass.
Three years down, one more to go. Then she'll return to the bakery and settle into the rhythm of the rest of her life. Bread, now and forevermore till death claims her like egg toast sales on weekday mornings. Rise from her bed like the yeast, retire to pray and to sleep for tomorrow's verse is ever the same; bake bread unto cognizant eternity as an unbread automaton piloted by neurobreadmitters.
The car is dull red, dusty rubies or volcanic glass or dying roses; she needs to clean it, within and without. It reflects badly on her, displays inadequacy on wheels due for inspection.
She sits inside and turns the AC on, floating upward into dreamland in defiance of metaphysical earth's surly bonds—
The dreamland rejects her. There is little left to dream, only days and their passing in the river at her knees. She expects to live for another sixty years. Twenty two thousand days for the candlewick of her life to return to ash.
She stares at her reflection in the glass, knots colored of burnt toast and melted chocolate; waiting for her to say something. Anything. Speak.
Speak, scion of unbreadth, give voice to the words that invite and confirm doom in a handbasket for its appointment at nine in the afternoon with omens the size of the moon.
She shakes her head. "Do I have heatstroke?" she wonders aloud.
Daphne, who is bright like the moon in thick stormclouds, waits for an answer she won't get.
"Riiiiight," she continues to say to no one in particular, head hung for herself. "Let's get going."
She regards her high school across the street with the same interest as a bathroom tile while apartment hunting. Out the garage, into the circle, down the road, onto the highway.
She has never been apartment hunting; she'll inherit the house as her parents did, and her grandparents before them.
She has never been hunting for anything but a reason to love.
Sure, she's chased a history degree for three years; today is its twilight as the years left winds to the singular. She has nowhere further to continue this hunt.
One day, it will be over; she will stand with degree and mortarboard, hand in hand.
Then there will be only the scavenging of scraps from the vicissitudes of life; vicissim, charging by turns; weik, vikja, wac; visti as the first of these.
The shape of her life formed before she did, grown into a written Daphne-sized container of surroundings and expectations. There is no uncertainty in her life, no great questions of ownership or profession she need answer.
She need only make herself love her fate like some thought experiment; amor fati, profundity is found in braiding black and white, stretching this single cord in Mauretania, le droit d'aimer sans mesure.
She rolls her eyes, weary of thinking, wondering, bearing these circling thoughts and the speed of their orbit round some locus as they compel her to prattle on about origins, etymologies, the world-scars called history. It's not actually a hit at parties, her peers think her strange and not in the cool way; she doesn't actually get invited unless she's bringing the drinks.
Bread doesn't satisfy her as before. Neither does God and she might argue He never did, reverence aside. She refuses any thought for her parents who don't think to let her finish college before asking about kids. Does she look like she has a man lined up, first off? She's a supermarket grape off from fruit territory.
She attends these things because she's so normal and these are normal things for normal people with normal lives. It's abnormal to neglect these duties, per the inverse.
Or was it contrapositive? Biconditional?
The car stops where a traffic light intrudes on the highway at her exit. Eyes of lambent hazel await her admission in the windshield; what is the axis of her tangent on which this dreary monologue wends?
Tangent, from tangere; touch the cloaked cynosure central to your runaway thoughts. You wish to end this, no? Draw the secant line that severs it; secare, to cut.
How long until she learns to love her life, warts and all, putting aside that warts can be removed and she now has the visceral desire to see thick, unsightly warts scraped and peeled that makes her skin shiver cause she wanted to see them cut and plucked like rancid carrots from keratinous soil.
Longer than that runaway butchery of the English language, certainly. It's been twenty years and counting, two decades of hazy fog too infrequently pierced by fleeting brilliance.
Ah. There it is, a cyclic conclusion reached every semester; cyclus, or kyklos and cakram and caraiti, kwel perhaps.
She's unhappy with her life and she despairs at finding no succor at an oven or an altar.
Traffic slows to a crawl. Yep, Faraway, where the construction never ends. "Home sweet home," she snarks.
Daphne regards her russet scrutiny with weary derision. She has beautiful eyes according to the survey of her and her alone, effulgent sparks possessed of casual, blasphemous gravitas to mock God and anime.
Indulge your wonder twin antics with Bowen. Ask Sunny if he wants to get his nails painted again. Check when Henry's returning, if he hasn't already. Daydream of better times in faraway places.
Repress and avoid and ignore your better instincts by any means necessary. Die running from yourself in this gilded cage scented of cinnamon and sweet, lovely distractions.
Her lungs tighten, as do her fingers and the cords of her arms, wrapped tight round itself or the wheel or against the underlying muscle.
She hits the wheel once. It doesn't soothe her.
She arrives to the aging statues, topiary, and decaying meat sacks piloted by neurotransmitters which are like her neurobreadmitters but less embarrassing to say or type. One sack in particular, dazed in its doomscrolling on a phone in a slumberous haze.
She clears her throat. "Bowen."
"Buh?" No, it's Daphne. "Oh. I didn't hear you come in. Done with your semester?" But January to May isn't six; cursus semestris, sex mensis— menses; sex sunt, non unus.
"I am, and with life besides."
"Mood."
She shuffles over to the kitchen for the cupcakes that fail to be there for her when needed yet again, just like her parents. "Mikhael ate them again."
Beat. "Wait, they were yours?"
Another beat, foreboding Bowen's in the next two minutes. "Bowen."
"My bad."
She slams the fridge shut. "I desire sugar."
"Hero's coming back on Saturday." He has neither sugar nor salt, for smugness is not a… is sugar a spice? Where is everything nice and the black chemical for creating superpowered children?
She doesn't know how to respond to that reference or to Bowen, so she weakly nods. "Anyway. We are now seniors."
Huff. "Can't wait. We're just going back to the bakery. What's the point of school?" Didn't he say this to Sunny last summer when he finally came out of the house?
"It's a holistic experience. We wouldn't want to be fools. Idiots. Jesties." So twue.
"In case we kill the family tradition? Pfft."
She tilts her head. Bowen has less patience for life, thimblefuls fit only for ants and their waterboarding in the name of ineffectual insect interrogation.
The flooring is eggshells, the redecorating went awry and somewhere a cruise ship breakfast buffet is serving linoleum tiling next to the sausages.
Fuck it. "You intend to, no?"
The house is silent with the clangor of the gauntlet she's thrown down.
Bowen looks at her with unamused eyes, oaky brown like hers, spawned from the same gametes.
"And if I am?" Then he makes like a tree and leaves.
Leaves the family. "Do you have somewhere to go?"
Leaves all the comforts of generational wealth and certainty in life behind for nebulous daydreams of freedom. "I do, actually. I have three potential apartments and enough for a deposit on all three at once if I want."
Leave her alone with their parents and her own seditious thoughts. "You still have college to finish." Betrayal; sedicion, sed-ire, to go apart; bitrayen, be-tray, trair, tradere from trans-dare.
Silence. There's no unpoisoned fruit to pick from this prickly tree and they know it; Jesus will be here to extirpate it for a parable shortly.
He moves on. "How do you feel about wine? I'm thinking Sauvignon Blanc."
"For Hero?"
"Man needs his welcome. Medicine is a hellish calling for a heavenly man such as him."
Daphne stands in her backyard and stares at the crescent moon solitary among the diamond speckled black velvet of the void through which the Earth speeds as a tiny speck in a titanic, vast, horrifying ocean of empty space.
Sleep will not come for her, despite her entreatment.
She should be playing something. Online, offline, by herself, with friends she doesn't have, with random strangers whose slur output scientifically rises should she speak.
They draw her to sit at her desk where caramel eyes stare back with piteous, miserable gazes lost for joy. But they don't draw her to pick a game or look forward to one, only the idea that she might find something to while away the seconds and minutes and hours.
What is an hour? Hora, from yor-a, yer? But is it temporal or sidereal? Is it a season?
But it's night and wakefulness; wakjan, weg though she feels neither powerful or vigorous; wacches of wodnesse though Hero isn't here and she has no liquor in her hands that compel her to bad decisions; quattuor vigilia, shlosha? ashmoreth, tesera phylake or five sometimes suppose it's mood; I will stand vpon my watch, and set mee vpon the towre, and will watch to see what he will say vnto me.
Daphne closes a limp jaw, draws tears from dry eyes left unblinked for too long.
School. The weight of assignments and exams is lifted and her newfound gait is unfamiliar and prone to tripping on pebbles and hardened grass stumps. Her brain remains warmed and ready for preparatory work the summer does not have and it scrambles unto the slightest tangent it can find.
Tangere— no she's been here before!
Before; bi-forana, bifara, bevor, per if the root exists though she has doubts among many.
Daphne consciously regulates her breathing, fingers run through neglected hair as she cradles her head in her hands. Bronzed eyes stare down from the firmament, as many judging gazes as grains of sand or bones in the earth.
"Everything's going to be okay," she lies to herself. "Everything's going to be fine. I'm not wasting my life. I'm going to stop thinking about this, because I have an overactive imagination and too much time on my hands."
She lets go of her head. Stares at firm fingers on taut palms acquainted with ovens and feeding them.
"I. I…" She wills herself to breathe evenly. This is unbecoming of her. People are what they repeatedly do; this isn't who Daphne is, to herself or to Bowen or Hero or Sunny or her parents or anyone else.
She makes fists of her hands, teeth grit against each other. "This is stupid. I'm going back inside."
Daphne returns to her unloving bed, awake behind closed eyes as sleep arrives late.
She'll sleep on this; today's been a bad day which is messed up since it's the end of the school year and she really shouldn't be.
Fortune permitting, she won't remember today in two weeks, one bad band of memories consigned to the river of memory and quantum uncertainty.
In a fortnight, she'll have no recollection of these doubts and they'll be shelved into the archives of her long-term memory, forgotten until next semester's end dredges them up ever so briefly.
A transient disruption of the rhythm of the rest of her life.