“Want to go inside?” I ask him as we pause by the giant front doors. You can smell the musty pews inside and the herbal quality of so many offerings coming through from the darkened interior.
He shakes his head. “I’ve been judged enough,” he says, shoving his hands in his pockets.
I give him a curious look but he doesn’t go on. I don’t remember the teenage Anders having any problems with churches or religion. But then again, there was a lot—too much—I didn’t know about him.
I finish taking a few photos with my phone, focusing on the stone statues carved into the front, before we head back to the Datsun and make our way out of the city, heading past suburbs and strip malls that remind me of home. If home was brightly colored with that tidy, modern Scandinavian slant.
We’re silent for most of the drive, which I don’t mind. And for whatever reason, the silence isn’t awkward at all, it’s comfortable.
For once it allows me to focus on the journey, and even though I’m aware of Anders’ presence at all times, I feel my mind wandering blissfully. We pass through tiny towns, villages, settlements. The valleys are so lush and green it hurts my eyes, the mountains and forests rising up behind red barns and white farmhouses. Everywhere you look is a photograph waiting to happen, and when I roll down the window, the air smells like hay and grass and life being born again.
I close my eyes, smile, feeling the sun on my face and the sweet wind in my hair and I think, I’m happy.
The thought almost comes as a shock. I can’t remember the last time I really felt it.
Or maybe the moments have been too far between. That’s the thing about happiness. It comes and goes. There are moments of being happy, experiencing it purely, followed by moments of just being. There’s nothing wrong with being either, putting one foot in front of the other, air in and air out.
But the world makes you think you need to feel happy all the time. I don’t think that’s possible, at least not with me. Maybe true happiness is having moments like this and finding a way to hold onto them for as long as you can. Maybe happiness should be rationed, and when you run out, you need to create your own happiness to fill the gaps.
“What are you thinking about?” Anders silken voice slides into my thoughts.
I keep my eyes closed, the sun on my face. I should have known he’d be watching me. He always had that way about him. I guess that’s the poet in him. Always watching, always observing. Even when he should be watching the road.
I hesitate for a moment, not sure how deep I want to get with him. “Happiness.”
He mulls that over.
“And what are your thoughts about it?” he asks curiously.
I look back out the window at the passing mountains. “I think it’s a myth that people can and should be happy all the time.”
“I agree.”
“I think it’s an emotion that comes and goes.”
“Like the tide. It comes in but it will always go back out. That doesn’t make it good or bad. It just is. It’s life.”
“Yeah.” I turn my head over to look at him. He has his wayfarers over his eyes now so I can’t see his expression, though he is chewing on his lower lip in such a way that makes me want to chew on it too. I look back to the road and clear the image from my head. “Personally, when I think back to the moments where I was really happy, you know, when you’re just floating and you can’t stop smiling and you want to drop everything and do a little dance, it’s usually because some event has specifically happened to you. You’re not waking up like that every day because life is just that damn good, unless you happen to be some crazy lucky person where those events just keep piling up, one after another.”
“It sounds exhausting.”
“It would be. The happiness pile-up.”
“Some might call that falling in love though,” he says, so casually that I’m starting to believe he’s truly forgotten the past. “You know. Every day is just another pile-up until it gets too overwhelming, you can’t even move.”
Sounds pretty accurate, I think. “And then what do you do? Wait for rescue?” I ask softly.
“You get out,” he says simply.
And he got out all right. Without a single scratch to him, leaving me alone in the burning wreckage, leaving me to crawl out on my own.
That’s love for you.
“Unless you’re Pharell,” Anders quickly adds. “He’s got that ‘Happy’ thing going for him.” He glances at me, shoulders seeming to lift, brow softening. “So, how are…tell me about your family,” he says, playing along. “Do you have any sisters or brothers?”
I’m still smarting from his remark about love, but I’m grateful for the distraction, that he’s pretending to not know anything about my family when he does. “One sister, Hannah. She’s older and a pain in the ass. Do you remember…well, no you wouldn’t. In America we have these books called the Baby-Sitters Club Series and I used to be obsessed with them when I was little. There were hundreds of them, all written by ghost writers, something I learned recently that totally ruined my world, but anyway, one of the characters, Claudia, she had this older sister Janine. This complete nerd and not in the cute nerd girl way. She rarely smiled, didn’t seem to have a sense of humor, and spent all her days studying. She was supposed to be this genius, even though she was only fifteen and was pretty much the opposite of Claudia in every way.” I pause and take a
