Rosie

By: LC

How to remove suffering? I thought of Rosie and wondered if she knew the noble eight-fold path. There is suffering, there is craving which causes suffering, there is the cessation of suffering, which is Nirvana, and then the way leading to the cessation of suffering. What’s the way? Ask Rosie. She should have known, living her bohemian lifestyle. She reveled in that kind of stuff. She always told me she was coming back as a butterfly. Her auburn hair would turn gold in the sun, the fine hairs on her arms shimmering, her jade eyes would soften with introspection voiced outward, laugh wrinkles around her lips. My butterfly.

But maybe if she actually knew she wouldn’t have suffered. She had no reason to worry, to hate life, no reason to panic. She worked hard. It was her job to make people smile. Just off the San Francisco Wharf, the corner of Powell and Jefferson, she would strum on a guitar and sing strangers the meaning of existence.

Why worry about police? She did no harm. Making a little bit of money, enough to get by, to feed a thin frame and keep it from turning skeletal. There was always enough. The entire mess of buy, take, make more money, watch TV—it’s all a joke. I look out at those people and laugh. I’m walking across Lombard Street, the cars speeding past, my coffee hair ruffling in the wind and I don’t care about those cars. I don’t care about the pavement under my feet or the businessman staring at me, busy yelling nonsense into a cell phone. All I care about is a warm breeze, how the sun pours through the clouds, how the flowers are growing out of cracked sidewalks, how a seagull is crying for food. I’ve got no place to go and that’s fine with me. I make a living off of poetic wanderings, kind friends and celebrities who need Zen guidance.

Rosie should have noticed those things around her. She should have known the noble eight-fold path. Right speech (don’t be a smart ass), right action (don’t kick puppies), right livelihood (suck up to people near you), right effort (rehab), right mindfulness (Elvis is really dead), right meditation (sit still and don’t want), right understanding (one plus one doesn’t always equal two), right thoughts (don’t think like a teenager forever).

Quite a woman. If I had gotten the chance I would have asked her to live with me, maybe even marry me, although I don’t think she’d have bought into the tradition and convention. With a spirit as free as mine, we could have been free together. Who needs rings when you can simply exist? Right? The kids would have been adorable. Mixing my blue eyes, her jade, my brown, her red, my tan, her fair white, those freckles—he/she would have been damn sexy. She never gave me a serious chance. I think there was something missing inside that I couldn’t fix. But I would have liked the chance.

I’m finally laughing again.

*

We’re together and it’s raining outside. Little water droplets are caught in her wispy strands of red, pasting them against her skin. Rosie is trembling in the cold, but she’s doing a good job of hiding it. Her body is shaking with giggles too. We’re half in the downpour, half under an overhang, which only makes things worse because more water is falling on us from the canvas cover than if we just gave up. Her guitar’s been ruined but she keeps telling me it’s been a great day. Sunrays are struggling to break through the clouds, their true calling in life to make her glow golden. She’s clutching a half-eaten bagel, now soggy, falling apart in her thin hand. Her purple tank top and jeans are plastered to her body. She’s showing off for me.

I can’t remember what she found so funny about the situation, but she just kept smiling. She closed her eyes—emeralds lost to the world—then opened them slowly. At first, her voice was quiet, words taken away by the wind, but she spoke up, “I’ll tell you a secret. No one else knows this secret so you’ll be the very first person to know this about me.” She paused. I held my breath.

“Now don’t laugh at me Charlie. You’ve gotta promise.”

“I won’t, I promise.” My one lie to her. I’m never able to suppress a smile, but if need be, I can hold in a laugh. Her cheeks are starting to burn red. I don’t know if it’s the chill or embarrassment, but whatever it is, I’m thankful because she’s so damn adorable.

“My whole entire childhood, my whole entire life, I wanted to be a clown.”

Oh God…

“Stupid, yeah, I know, but it’s the thing that every kid dreams of—other than being a doctor or superhero. All I wanted to be was a clown and to make people laugh. All I wanted was to make people happy—to make people smile. I wanted to go away from each performance knowing I brightened someone’s day.”

“And why can’t you?” I’m curious now. Inside, my heart is laughing away, but I’m calming it because she’s got this concerned look on her face.

“I’m just not funny.” She crosses her arms. “No one laughs at my jokes.”

I’m using all of my will power, but the wall begins to crumble. A chuckle escapes my lips. I break my promise, reveal my lie, and suddenly I’m doubled over in laughter. You’ve got to be kidding me. This has to be some kind of joke. She’s playing the clown she wanted to be, she’s got me laughing, her dreams come true.

Then Rosie’s sobbing, her small frame convulsing in on itself. I can’t tell which are tears and which are rain droplets, but water is pouring down her cheeks, rolling over the anemic landscape. She crumples to the curb, face in hands, bagel rolling into the gutter’s little river. I feel like I’m floating down that canal, my arms tied together, the water sealing over my head and the current pushing me out toward the sea. I’m being forced under and I can’t find air. I’m always at a loss when girls cry.

So I drop to my knees, mud soaking through my jeans, and I pull her small frame into my arms, onto my lap, imitating the cradle my mother used whenever I was hurt. Her breath is ragged and choked, her lungs begging for air.

“Shhh…”I whisper into her ear. My hands are running over her wet hair, rubbing her back, my body rocking slightly. Her face hides in my shoulder, burrowing into my t-shirt, her very being attempting to absorb into me. So fragile—Rosie’s strong smile always made me forget, made me think otherwise.

I don’t mind that people are staring—it’s never bothered me. I hate myself for breaking my promise and even more for thinking at least I get to touch her…

“I…I can’t bring joy…I’m useless.” Words escaping from between her chattering teeth, lips parted, nose running, and I want to steal back time and never laugh if it means she’ll smile again.

“Rosie, listen…” But she’s ignoring me, refusing to look up, eyes closed tight and face pushed into my chest once again, trying to make it all disappear. “Look at me.” I place my hand on her cold cheek and force her to look up. “You make everyone happy. Everyone. You hear me? Baby, you don’t need to be a clown.”

I mean the words yet they sound so stupid to me.

She jerks herself away, slipping out of my grip and falling off the curb onto the pavement. Hard and cold. There’s an angry and wild look in her eyes that I’ve never seen before and it scares me.

“You haven’t grown up,” the words begin to tumble off of Rosie’s pale lips. “You reach a certain age when reality grabs you by the scruff of the neck and shouts in your face: ‘Hey, look, this is life!’” She stands now, her thin arms sharply gesticulating her sorrow turned anger. Fingers splayed opened, hands slicing the steady rain, eyes wide, her body unsteady with outburst. “You have to open your eyes and look at it, listen to it, smell it—people who don’t like you, things you don’t want to do, fear and pain, questions without answers, feelings you don’t understand, feelings you have no control over. It’s reality and it’s never hit you Charlie!” She mocks my laugh, now pacing back and forth, arms crossed tight, failing to sniff back tears.

She pushes my reaching arms away, color coming into her cheeks as she shouts, the unrelenting rain and wind throwing her off balance, thunder reflecting her fury. “One day, you’ll gradually come to realize that all that stuff in books, movies, television, comics—it’s all garbage! It’s got nothing to do with anything. It doesn’t happen like that. It means nothing.”

Rosie is out of breath and so am I.

Words aren’t grasped. Nothing escapes my mouth. I am stunned.

I’ve never seen her like this. For the past three years, she was my life. She grew up on the East Coast in West Virginia. At nineteen she ran away from a picture perfect home and I met her sleeping on the streets. Rosie said she was an artist. She played the guitar, sang, performed on the sidewalk, in coffee shops, wrote lyrics and poems. She found her calling in making others smile, but in the process, she forgot any upward curve in her own lips. She used to tell me God gave her advice through the wind. Shit, what did He tell her?

Her chest is still heaving, fire burning inside of her. Her voice reaches the octave of a scream. “Reality is looking outside the window of a bus: harsh faces, sad and temporary lives, metal, bricks, glass, rain, cruel laughter, ugliness, dirt, crippled pigeons, homeless men!” She trails off, muttering, telling me over and over that I’ll never understand.

I don’t.

Rosie disappears into the rain.

*

One plus one was supposed to equal two. It’s logical and predictable. It just is. But what happens to someone when one plus one doesn’t equal two? When all the predictable laws, everything you were ever taught, is wrong? There is chaos without logic. Without pattern there is no order.

As I grew up, more and more often it seemed as if my life was becoming chaotic. But that was okay. I found a comfort in the unknown, the infinite possibilities. I like to think that my one plus one can equal anything I damn well want it to equal. But it wasn’t that way for Rosie. I think she needed the logic. She saw the flaws and wanted to fix them, but didn’t believe she could. She didn’t realize we were just two specks of nothing. Life still functions when one plus one doesn’t make sense.

There is beauty. And the world is blind.

My laugh is now a sigh. I’m walking past Pier 39 and all the noise, the people shoving through each other, it’s all fading away. San Francisco can be harsh. Rosie had carried the burden—from skyscrapers to little struggling sidewalk stands. I’m beginning to feel the weight. How long has it been since she left, handing me responsibilities I’ve always denied? Forcing me to face a reality I’ve always hated?

For a man who despises math, I’m suddenly remembering all the numbers.

24 days since she died.

31 days since I last kissed her.

116 days since the rain, her in my arms.

1,095 days since I first fell.

Rosie disappeared for a while after that day in the rain. I think she was mad at me, pissed because she couldn’t get her numbers to add up right. When she came back, I tried to help her. Listening, holding, smiling, cooking, warming, and loving. I gave her myself. But she needed so much that I couldn’t give her.

The ringing of a trolley breaks my thoughts. Speeding by, bodies are lingering dangerously close to the edge. I shudder. What did she think when she looked down? Did she laugh? She was a clown from the moment she was born, bringing the world so much invisible laughter, and it killed her. When the unsteadying wind shifted, tossing her hair across her face, did she fear the drop? It was so far down. The police said the fall probably lasted five seconds.

1 + 1 = 5…?

She died on impact.

Head first.

Can a lifetime really speed through your mind in five seconds, or is there only room for a single thought? Regret? I hope she didn’t think of me. I hope she had something better to fill her mind before she shattered. Maybe she saw beauty in the fall. The sky had been clear that night, a full moon, millions of burning stars looking down at the city’s mimicking lights, polluting and casting shadows over the truth. It was spring. Plenty of flowers. Even in the city, you could smell them over the garbage.

She always smelt like lilacs. I’ll never forget her smell. The first time we made love, my bed absorbed her scent for weeks. It was painful to wash the sheets. We would have been something. But it was all running watercolors. I was the green earth, everything solid and real, planted, everything (apparently) in control. She was the blue sky, unreachable, breathtaking, and surreal. Air, sky…it just seeps through your fingers. You can grab the earth, you can hold onto dirt and grass. I wanted sky to bleed into soil. I wanted blue to mix with green.

Whatever love I possessed of Rosie’s was uncontainable. I could never hold her. She was a constant state of return and retreat, always within reach yet just beyond my grasp. I wrote her a poem during her absence, when she was angry with me. I gave it to her a week before she died. I handed it to her, she laughed. After she read it, she cried. We made love on my living room couch, and she fell asleep in my arms.

I threw up at the sight. The police called me to identify what was left of her. She had erased all numbers in her cell phone except for mine.

For days, I kept going back to that dented, stained mark on the sidewalk.

*

I meet her parents. They are kind, sad people—and quiet. I tell them about their daughter. We clean out Rosie’s apartment. There isn’t much.

I find the poem I gave her. On the back, she had scrawled her own reply:

World water cuts back quartz flake sand,

frogs in the little brook keep croaking at the oddest times

As long as the sun shines then blinks and shines again,

Each tiny frog that speaks up, each smash of a wave, each step on the sand.

We wander and don’t even realize the gold dust below our feet.

Each second,

The chariot awaits,

Our Lady watches above,

Water laughs at our stupid worries,

400 miles stretch into a curving, endless path through trees, meadows and reflective mountains,

Walking, your feet press a hundred flowers,

just covering the ground, clothes off,

while everyone is trying to live with what they got.

Something inside me breaks.

Did the 400 miles she spoke of have to be in another world?

I want our bare feet to press the flowers as we walk through open meadows, the air lifting, freedom…

This city crushes.

Rosie needed a trip to the mountains. I would have taken her there. That place calls me. The air is so clear it’s like breathing nothing, refreshing your insides as you gaze upon skies and fields that wave at you, a never-ending Nirvana in itself. Butterflies flourish out there. My eyes scan the concrete, my feet itching for the solid gray to shift into soft green. I look up at the glass buildings and feel their push. If I stay here any longer, I’ll end up like her.

I’m leaving—packing my bag and heading for pine. Going up and down mountains, you can then take on the world, no fear of sorrow, no fear of living, you can drop and run on down. You don’t fall onto concrete sidewalks where the mindless wander past your bloody shattered body, shaking their heads in shame, not even the thought that they have caused this.

I’m leaving this place, and I’m taking you with me, Rosie.

I should have done this sooner.

I guess it takes one kind of courage to live, and another to die.

We were always opposites at heart, weren’t we?

I’m sorry I let you wither.

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