Carnations

“What are your plans for today?”

I lift my duvet over my head, trying not to groan into the receiver at being woken up so suddenly. Rena was never one for preamble. She doesn’t waste a moment of her time beating around bushes.

“I don’t have any. Is everything okay?”

The voice on the other line pauses, as if reconsidering her reason for calling, and I can almost see her worrying her lower lip between her teeth as she does. “It’s just…I don’t want to spend my birthday alone. I thought maybe we could hang out for a bit or something. You’re in town, right?”

“I pay too much in rent to ever not be,” I reply, kicking at my blankets until the open air hits my face again and I can breathe a lungful of fresh air. It’s the fourteenth already? Five years I’ve known Rena, and in that time I’ve never once forgotten her birthday. I pick at the nails on one hand, feeling a niggling guilt, deliberating in the light pouring through my cheap blinds. “Want to go to the market?”

“Beats staying here alone and drinking!” She laughs. “Meet me at Cleo’s at ten, we can walk.”

She hangs up before I can agree, and in the ensuing silence my own heartbeat seems to fill the empty room.

________

In half a decade, the only thing I have learned to expect from Rena is constant change. I spot her from behind as soon as I arrive by the curve of her shoulders, the tilt of her head; her usually dark hair, now bleached a brilliant silver, reflects the emerging sunshine like a mirror. She leaps up to greet me with a smile, and memories of years past flood me immediately. When she hugs me, I hold her a little too tightly, clinging to her like a memory. I want to tell her I’m sorry I hadn’t called in the last few weeks, that I missed her more than I had realized, and time had seemed to stretch on and on forever. I want to say that I’d been so busy, doing what, I can hardly remember now, and that life’s felt like trying to balance on the center of a seesaw to the point I’d forgotten how it was supposed to work. What I say instead is, “I missed you. Happy Birthday.” I release a long shaky breath and feel her pull away, then remember what I’m holding.

“What’s this?” she asks with a laugh, accepting my gift as I offer it.

“The lady by my building had those striped carnations you like,” I explain, hands wringing nervously. “I realize they’re maybe a little bright…”

“Don’t be ridiculous! They’re gorgeous, thank you.”

“Yeah, of course. Happy birthday.”

She pushes me a blueberry muffin on a ceramic plate and I suggest we split it, saying nothing of my dislike for blueberries as I sneak scraps of my half to the sparrows hopping around the legs of my chair. Rena sits unaware, picking distantly at the red-tipped petals of a flower as the birds seek our attention with sharp chirps and violent flaps. The forlorn look in her eyes sends a pang of worry through me, and I sit forward to speak.

“Rena?”

“Hmm?” she doesn’t look up from her flowers.

“Are you sad about something?”

Rena’s laugh is like ice being poured down my shirt. “Am I sad? What kind of a question is that? Aren’t we all sad?”

“That’s…not really an answer.”

She sighs, shaking her head. “It’s an answer for me. I don’t know, okay? I don’t know. Maybe I’m sad. Maybe I’m just thinking. I don’t know yet.”

A frown tugs at the corners of my mouth. All the time I’ve known Rena, she’s been a thinker. She considers the world more deeply than people were intended to, wrapping her mind in circles while following trails of thought like tangles of yarn. Even when she’s with me, animated and laughing, I see her hover over the earth, her feet never quite touching the ground. I thought she knew everything.

“We can go anywhere you’d like.” It feels lame to even say the words; they are some poor consolation for however she’s feeling – sad, or maybe not.

She brightens a little. “Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. It’s my birthday, and you’ve bought me flowers, and the sun is coming out, and there’s no reason for me to be feeling down.” She shakes her shoulders, silver hair falling over her back. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” I say. She doesn’t seem to hear.

“The market sounds perfect. I need new jewelry anyway, nothing I have matches my hair.”

“Okay. But whatever you want is on me, okay? It’s your birthday and I hate to see you down.”

“It’s a date.” She smiles, and this time it reaches all the way to her eyes. It’s strange how such a simple response can make sunbursts go off under my eyelids, how much better it is to see her smile after knowing she’s been sad. I was sad for a moment there, too; I can’t remember ever not feeling what the people I love are feeling, reflecting their emotions like a mirror. She is happy, I am happy. Sometimes life is that simple.

___________

Clouds are rolling in over the bay when we duck inside the glass-roofed atrium, noses red from our brisk walk and the wind coming off the water. Inside the market, paper hearts hang on cords from the wiring overhead, pirouetting like dancers in the wake of passing shoppers. The flower-sellers have moved to stalls surrounding the entrance, and a large painted bouquet of daisies stares us down from the first stall, every other white petal colored red, evocative of a children’s game – she loves me, she loves me not. Rena clutches her carnations closer to her chest, like she might use them to fend off the merchants.

The market goes on for several blocks. Over the hours we stroll lazily between the stands, dodging vendors who hover in the aisles. Rena stops beside a jeweler’s stand dotted with all varieties of recycled, hand-set pieces. She delicately lifts a silver bib necklace between thumbs and forefingers and presents it questioningly. Tiny shards of reflective glass wink out of the settings like a mirror in the process of shattering. When she moves it, the glass slings lurid pinpricks of light across the room.

“It’s beautiful,” I tell her. She smiles.

“I’ve never seen anything like it before.” Rena holds the chain around her neck, thoughtful. “Does it suit me?”

I think the necklace looks far less spectacular resting against her collarbone than it does on the stand, but I say nothing of it. “It’s yours. My treat.”

Rena shoots me a withering look. “You already bought me flowers!”

“Yeah, well, maybe I’d just like to see you smile again.”

Her face splits in a wide grin. “You’re way too good to me.”

“I know,” I agree, plucking the necklace from her hands on my way to the cashier.

At lunchtime, we agree neither of us are particularly hungry, even though I haven’t eaten all day. Rena likes the musicians that come to play in the square by the market, so I follow her outside into the chilly grey air, zipping up my jacket to my throat. Despite the breeze coming off the bay, we sit together on a bench to watch an old man with a clarinet perform, huddled under our wool jackets like grey sheep, a pair of shivering storm clouds. The man plays a mournful melody that makes Rena sniff beside me, eyes and nose red. “I’m always amazed by how much music can make you feel,” she murmurs. “He sounds so sad.”

I am starting to wonder what sadness means to Rena. I wonder at her understanding of this man and his hardships and if she’s considered them at all, or if sadness for everyone strikes her as a copy-pasted version of her own. I wonder, then, which of us is sadder by her definition – her, alone in the world inside her head, or me, alone on this bench beside her.

Rena wants to take the long way home so we can walk along the water. Okay, I say, even though I’m starting to get uncomfortably cold. After some time spent in silence, she breaks away and springs deftly onto a low wall lining the walkway, stepping heel-toe along its length like a performer on a tightrope. I watch her walk, following along on the flat paving stones, ready to catch her if she falls. Rena alights and crosses the walkway to gaze across the harbor. The boats look strange like this, sails reefed and tied, clustered together like conspirators with their heads down. Rena watches them intently as if trying to determine their secret.

“You want a boat? Sadly, that’s a birthday gift I can’t afford to get you.”

“Doesn’t everyone dream of having a boat?” she asks. “You know, a way to escape everything for a while? Like the first step of your own little adventure.”

I want to point out to her that not everybody likes the water, or that these boats weren’t made to travel distances like that, but she looks so happy with the ghosts of some fantastic imagining playing out on her face, that all I can manage is, “that sounds pretty lonely, sailing off by yourself.” Then again, maybe things like that don’t make a difference to someone who lives, predominantly, in her own world. “I’d bring you, then. Of course.” Rena turns to me, beckons me closer. Inviting me into her world. “Can’t you imagine it? How much we would see and learn? The world as our oyster?”

I can imagine it. With me there to listen to her musings, to heap my undivided attention upon her, I know I would keep Rena from feeling lonely. We could take over the ocean like pirates, sailing night after night over a mirror filled with stars. Both of us contemplating the world as it pertains to her.

“Let’s head back,” I say, head aching.

By eight it’s fully dark. The cable cars are full of tourists and couples on their way home from evenings out, so Rena and I walk the rest of the way back to her apartment. We take the stairs to the fourth level, paint flaking onto our hands from the ancient railing. Inside her apartment is not much better. The ceiling is bloated with water stains, tiny cracks running through the off-colored paint, and the floorboards creak with age under every footfall between us. Rena has done what she can to make herself comfortable. The living room is lit with dozens of round-bulbed fairy lights tacked precariously overhead. The floor sports an excess of dupion blankets and round pillows that form a haphazard, lurid mockery of a bird’s nest. She invites me to sit and we both lie and look up at the lights above, allowing the stiffness to fade from our bones.

“You ever get bummed out about Valentine’s Day?” she asks after a moment of silence. “I feel like I shouldn’t since it’s my birthday and all, but it’s still hard, you know?”

“That’s what you’ve been lying here thinking about?” My fingers find my phone charm inside my pocket, and I rub the glass between thumb and forefinger. “I don’t really worry about it.”

“Oh.” I hear her sigh beside me. “Well, what do you do? To keep from getting lonely?”

There’s a soft click as I retract my hand from my jacket pocket. I reach for her palm, curling her fingers closed around the charm as I place it in her hand. She peers at it in my periphery, lifting the tiny cluster of pink beads to the light.

“Hearts?”

“Count them,” I tell her. “When you worry about being alone, count the people who love you. Appreciate them all, whoever they are. Don’t take any kindness for granted. One person for each heart.”

Her eyes grow round as she twists the glass of a heart bead, peering through it like a kaleidoscope. “I don’t think I have that many people. I can hardly think of any.”

“Love can mean a lot of things,” I say. “You don’t have to be in a relationship to be loved.”

I can see the gears in her head turning as she considers this for a moment.

“I suppose I can count you then, huh?” She asks this teasingly, waiting for me to smile.

“Sure.”

She looks briefly content, smiling at the charms as she turns them in her hand. Suddenly, she frowns. “If I have this, what about you?”

“What about me?” I ask.

She sighs. “You’re sure you don’t get sad on Valentine’s?”

“There’s worse things to be sad about,” I say.

For a while we say nothing, supine on the carpet with our heads together as we seek out constellations in the fairy lights above. They wash Rena’s hair white, a stark contrast to the remains of the afternoon’s lipstick staining her mouth in red patches. She looks like a flower unfolding under a thousand tiny suns, like a carnation soaking in the light.

“If these were stars,” I ask, still suspended in the surreality of it all, “what would you wish for?”

Rena blinks up at the swirling lights above her, reflected in her dark eyes a hundred times over. “They’re not stars though, are they?”

“Don’t think about it so much. They are. They can be.”

She sighs, seeking deeper into the safety of her cocoon. “I’d wish not to be alone next year,” she says. Her voice shakes, brittle. Like she’s made of glass. Like I could breathe on her and she would break. “I’d wish for someone who loves me. To spend next year with a boyfriend.”

I admire the cracks on the ceiling, wondering at how the light obscures them. Wondering how they can hold up so much weight without breaking.

“Sofia? What would you wish for?”

I glance out the window. Clouds slip along through the dark sky, close but not quite touching. The world is silent except for the loudness of my own heart, reverberating in my ribcage like an empty room. “Yeah,” I agree. “I guess you’re right. I would wish to spend next year with someone else, too.”