Where We Left Off (Middle of Somewhere 3)

Milton was enthusiastic and got everyone else on board too. He dragged me to campus plays, choir concerts, dance performances, narrating the reviews of each that he’d compose for the Arts column in the school paper that he’d begun writing for.

Thomas took me to Life Drawing with him, at which I produced one ludicrously malformed sketch after another. Thomas being Thomas tried to encourage me, telling me my style was Picassoesque. But a mention of Picasso just made me think of the day Will and I went to MoMA, and I found myself wondering what he’d seen in that painting Christina’s World that was different enough from what I’d seen that it’d made him kiss me in public.

I wondered what he’d thought the gray thing was between the house and the barn. And, as I sat on the uncomfortable metal stool in the art room while people sketched around me, I had an internal collapse at the realization that I might never know.

Gretchen made sure I went with her to yoga three times a week, pulling me out of my room and throwing sweats at me if I didn’t show up in the hallway to meet her at the appropriate time. Of all of it, that was the one activity that felt like it was helping. For those sixty-five minutes, I took myself out of my own hands and placed myself in Tonya’s. I followed her instructions with a slavish accuracy, desperate to believe that just showing up in good faith was enough. Desperate to believe what she always said: that we were each enough, as we were, and that we could sink into our enoughness and trust it to buoy us.

And if occasionally something she said in class struck my heart or my gut with the precision destruction of a smart bomb—like the day she said, “It’s in the moment that you give up that you realize you could have kept going. It’s also the moment it’s too late.”—then no one said anything about the tears that streaked my skin along with sweat.

Gretchen didn’t talk much about her personal life, but she and Layne were still seeing each other, and from the brightness of their smiles when Gretchen would show up to Mug Shots, things were going pretty well. I never told Layne how spectacularly I had twisted her advice, but I figured Gretchen had probably given her the basics because, though she never brought it up, I would sometimes catch her looking at me with a kind of sympathy that said she’d been there.

But for all that my friends saved me, week after week, I still wanted something that was just mine. I saw my mistake now. That casting Will in that role—as the thing that was just for me—was paradoxical and had set me off on the wrong foot. No, I wanted something that was mine the way theater was Milton’s and art was Thomas’, and… you know, toppling the heteropatriarchy was Layne’s.

Physics was the thing I’d found that I was constantly interested by, so I talked with my professor, and she let me start working in the physics lab. Just helping out for now, but with the promise that if it was a good fit I could potentially be involved in research projects the next semester. I talked to one of the seniors who told me they sometimes let sophomores assist over the summer in exchange for room and board if they declared a physics major before the end of the semester, so since I was technically a sophomore, credits-wise, that’s what I did.

Filing the paperwork made me feel better. As if now that I was affiliated with a department I belonged here somehow. It was the first time I’d felt like I belonged anywhere, really. Even doing scut in the lab was fascinating. Milton always said he didn’t get how I—someone he thought of as being creative—could want to be a science major since they were methodical and unimaginative.

But he was so wrong.

Yes, physics was methodical, but the method was part of what the very discipline questioned. It was incredibly creative. These scientists began, sometimes, from whims and questions as personal as any that inspired a play or a song, running those personal investments through the most rigorous of testing, a gorgeous blend of feeling and thought that produced experiments and theories from the atomic level to the heights of philosophical query.

I was particularly fascinated with the crux of astronomy and physics, and when I started looking at the course catalog for fall semester I heard Will’s voice in my head for just a moment, saying, “Astrophysics? You’re going to study actual rocket science?” I thought he’d be excited by it, actually. One of the things I liked so much about Will was how his creativity and art were crossed with a nearly scientific rigor, his designs as much based in layout and market research as they were in aesthetics.