We’re finishing brunch, dozing on Divya’s porch, two pups weaving in between our legs. All of a sudden, Sydney is pointing at something in the sky and we’re all squinting, craning, crumpling our noses to see it. I spot it next. It’s a white speck, so far away from our corner of the earth that it’s almost swallowed up in the big blue ocean of a cloudless Los Angeles day. The three others are yelping that they can’t see it, while Sydney and I are giggling, mystified. We ask if we’re crazy, but no. You’re not crazy if there’s just one other person in the world who can say yes, I saw it too, you’re not alone.
There was something delightful as one by one, my friends found the speck in the sky. By then, it had moved (in relation to the powerlines, our makeshift compass). And there we were, all looking up, thinking out loud about what it was, and for some reason, a balloon and a UFO seemed all the same and equally as fascinating right then.
Delight has been something I’m befriending, one of those friendships that you have to put in work for. A lot of it is owed to Ross Gay’s “Book of Delights,” naturally, which I’m currently reading, and also to my therapist who tells me to remember that people are good. She told me about the end of the final Hunger Games movie that she watched with her two boys, a movie that I don’t have any intention of watching. But the final scene is Katniss in the meadow with her baby, who wakes up whimpering. She says:
Did you have a nightmare? I have nightmares too. Someday I'll explain it to you. Why they came. Why they won't ever go away. But I'll tell you how I survive it. I make a list in my head. Of all the good things I've seen someone do. Every little thing I could remember. It's like a game. I do it over and over. Gets a little tedious after all these years. But there are much worse games to play.
The games are loud, but I like when quiet competes. The vines on my neighbor’s fence spiral up, looping their spindly arms together, like the linked ones of professors who are forming human chains around their students. Hands squeezed a second longer, kissed lips hovering, eyes closed as you taste the soup for salt. I saw two seniors sitting on either side of a low wall on a weekday at noon, the wall separating her lawn from his driveway, playing cards spread carefully on the brick barrier. They leaned forward in their wheelchairs, waiting for the next move that would change the game.
On a Friday afternoon, I’m on the I-5 in the backseat, for once, only along for the ride. I’m watching the cloud shadows slink over the green hills, and for a moment, our movements are the same speed.
incredible closing line