Carrying the Fire

           “You’re still crying over that book? It’s just a book! And aren’t you supposed to be at work?”

            When I enter her apartment sobbing, she’s on the couch with cookie crumbs and a box of Chips Ahoy on her chest. She’d messaged me earlier: shingles on my ass. staying home from work. what am I doing with my life? 

            I’d also arrived hysterical Tuesday afternoon with only three pages left to read of Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic The Road, which I’d been trying to finish on my walk over. I’d been so devastated over the father’s death that I hadn’t even looked both ways crossing the streets to prevent my own. The poor little boy! What would become of him in the last three pages? And after those pages? Poster child for Sensitive: twenty–seven year old woman on one knee, clutching the fence around a Little League baseball field while reading the part of a book where the little boy begs his father to let him die beside him, and the father refuses because he wants his son to “carry the fire.” I don’t know where it is, says the boy. Yes you do, says the father. It’s inside you. It was always there. I can see it.

            “I’m not still crying over the book,” I say –– whipping her with my words, then trying to nudge aside her legs to sit on the couch too. And wiping my nose with my sleeve –– paranoid since working at an ice cream store in high school and dripping snot on a customer’s Mint Chip when I had a cold. To my surprise, I wasn’t fired. Worked there on and off seven years: my first job and the one I've held the longest.  “Although you’d cry over that book too, you know,” I continue. “You’d cry too if you read that book.”

            “Get the chair,” she says, pushing me aside. “I can’t sit, remember?”

            I shake my head.

            “My shingles. My shingles on my ass.”

            I remove her basket of unfinished knitting projects from the chair beside the stove. The only chair in the studio apartment, and she’s got no kitchen table because I’m the only one who comes over. The place cramped like a liquor store that can’t pay rent for another square foot.  None of her OkCupid dates have worked out, and she’s deleted her profile. At least for twenty–four hours, which is usually the case. He should have put on his page that he had a wooden leg was the first thing she’d said when I answered her call the other night.

            “So what’s you’re deal?” She rolls onto her side –– reaches for a mug of coffee she’s placed on her “coffee table” (an antique child’s desk turned upside–down) beside a coaster from her ex-husband. Always beside, not on –– as if making a statement that she doesn’t give a hoot about ruining table–surfaces or her ex-husband ruining their relationship. And yet keeping the coaster anyhow, which she won’t explain. She drinks her coffee in one gulp like it isn’t hot, and it isn’t. “Cold and tastes like shit,” she says.

            “Put sugar in,” I say, again wiping my nose with my sleeve. I’ve quit the crying –– now only intermittent shaking and gulping air like a fish out of water flopping its tail as it dies slow.

            She throws the Chips Ahoy box at the wall. “Sugar’s like crack. And last night? Ordered a pizza and ate the whole fucking thing. He should have put on his page he had a wooden leg. I mean, not that there’s anything wrong with a wooden leg, but he just should have put it on his page." Then: "What I am doing with my life?” 

            “I like sugar.”

            “It’s like crack,” she says again. Then, touching my knee: “Really though, what the hell happened?”

            I groan, lean my elbows against my knees –– rest my forehead in my hands. At last, looking up:  “So I’m standing at the office door fumbling to figure out which key belongs to the place so I can turn it in,” I say. “And they’re all just watching me. Harder to figure it out while humiliated than it was that time in the blizzard.”

            “You didn’t know which one it was?

            “No.” I reach down and pull a broken cookie from the box. Chewing: “Usually I try them all at every door before getting it right. I mean they more or less look the same, and I’ve got keys to most yoga studios in town and then ones I forgot to return to apartments . . .”

            “Don’t know how you get away with stuff like that . . .” She shakes her head: “But wait, why were you turning in your office key?”

            My eyes brimming with tears from choking on my second cookie–bite, I’m primed to cry again but don’t. I swallow a sip of her coffee and repress the sobs with the conviction of a woman sucking in her stomach at a high school reunion. Not that I need to repress my emotion around this dear friend, but I’m sick to death of looking like a fool. Those fucking keys. In the end, I’d handed them over to my boss for him to try them all while I put on my sweater inside out and backwards. Now, I start: “He said I wasn’t good enough at business writing.” 

            She shrugs, reaches for a cookie from the box on the floor –– displaying the same impulsivity as when texting one of those OkCupid guys she doesn’t even like and said she'd never text again but does anyway after watching her fourth Gossip Girls re-run and wanting to die. “Well you’re not a business writer,” she says.

            “I never told him I was. I thought I was gonna be just answering the phone and selling Internet packages. I’m good at answering phones and convincing people to give money. I was top alumni–donation solicitor in college, you know.” I snag another cookie too.

            “So you can’t write letters threatening to disable peoples’ Internet, and you lost a twelve-hour per week gig that supported your bubble tea budget.”

            “It’s not really about the money though.” I’m staring at my key ring on her “coffee table.” All those silver and gold keys I can’t tell belong to where. Always standing outside every locked door fumbling to get inside –– an outlier like those historical figures in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, which has yet to make me cry because its subtitle is The Story of Success.  In the end, not even the alternative thinkers who stand outside “normal experience” fail. They achieve great things. For example: The Beatles. Bill Gates. At least that’s what the book–jacket description says.

              The keys.  The keys . . . Which one would open the door to Success for me, and would it be on the thirtieth or three hundredth time I at last get it right and step inside wherever it is?

            “Hey, look at me,” I hear my friend say. “You’re good with the yoga teaching, right? You said you were good with the yoga teaching –– people returning to your classes and the students and studio owners giving you great reviews. And you know what? You help people. You share your gift and passion and watch people lose weight and get stronger and feel better about themselves. My job pays great, but I don’t help people. I don’t even help myself. But when I can get off my ass, maybe I’ll come to one of your classes too.”

            For now, I look away from the keys. Meet my friend’s eyes. Smile.

            “The truth is, I don’t have shingles,” she says. “I’m just depressed and don’t want to go to work. Can’t stand that girl who says she’s allergic to tea bags or my boss who says I’m not professional enough. I loathe myself for acting desperate around guys, but I don’t want to spend the rest of my life knitting and eating whole pizzas alones. But I also can’t just give up like this, right? I need to make some changes.”

            I remember the father’s words in The Road –– telling his son not to give up because he has to “carry the fire” even though he can’t see it. “The fire,” I say. “We have to carry the fire.”

            “What?”

             I shrug. Shake my head. Laugh. “Just something from a book that once made me cry.”

            “Oh. That book. It’s just a book. Remind yourself: JUST A BOOK.”           

            I laugh again.

            She laughs too: “And you know what I have to remind myself when I think I have it bad? At least I’m not my Aunt Ursula spending Friday afternoons at the Dollar Store with terrible gas.”