Sometimes you realized, too late, of course, that you had fallen in love.
What makes you realize it?
Something simple. Like waiting for the bus and you see someone wearing a T-shirt of the bar where you were talking to that friend you had known for years and that you were saying goodbye to. You didn't realize it then, when she smiled at you for the last time, and that you were too wrapped up in the sentimentality of the farewell, among friends, that you had fallen in love. Now you want to write to her, but you won't because you know it's too late.
Or something simpler. You are walking, and you see a small, yellow maple leaf in the middle of early summer, on the pavement. You remember that day when you spent the cool autumn afternoon with this young man who told you his childhood and listened to you speak about your philosophies. That little leaf is like your love for him, present now, but soon, inevitably, will be swept into oblivion.
Or something more complicated. You are alone in your bedroom, in your unmade bed, you're in tears for one of the simple reasons we find ourselves drowning in our own tears, and besides you is your best friend, who merely caresses you and reminding you, in the caress or in the gentle voice, that you aren't alone, and drifting in that river of tears, unwilling to abandon ship, is that flame of connection to your best friend, wanting, suddenly, to claim the road of eternity.
But all this sentimentality doesn't mean much in the present when it's all in the past. That is what Sandra is thinking as she goes through her grandfather's scrapbook. Her mother mentioned it to her one time. She had never seen her grandfather, but this scrapbook was one of the few items he had left behind. He didn't have many things at the end of his life. He spent his last ten years traveling, as an octogenarian that caused not little worry for his family. He had always traveled, but never thought it was enough. And he didn't do wild things like climbing Mt. Everest. Sandra's mother, his daughter, said one time while slicing cucumbers in front of the attentive eight-year old girl, that the old man didn't believe in doing extraordinary things. He said, "Every extraordinary thing we think of is done by someone, in fact a lot of people." It's true, a lot of people have climbed that blasted mountain. Even quite a few have gone to outer space, and grandpa was never interested in going to the moon.
What he was interested was, according to Sandra's mother, "doing what was extraordinary for me." "Me" being the old man Sandra never had the opportunity to meet. Funny how "extraordinary" didn't mean meeting his one and only granddaughter. They said he disappeared in the Amazons somewhere, while "hanging out" with one of the tribes, according to his journal found later.
The scrapbook had every small thing one can imagine from the most mundane journeys. Bus tickets, ski-lift tickets, lots of boarding passes, museum passes, advertisements for shows. The scrapbook could not have given a full picture because it relied on things that were printed, and there were surely places he visited that didn't have printed material. But what caught Sandra's eyes were the brief inscriptions next to some of the items. Next to a metro pass for Paris was "she posed in the submarine." Next to the brochure for eco-tour in some volcano in Costa Rica was "we played hide-and-seek." Next to a card for tango lessons in Buenos Aires was "I sang, she danced, sort of." Sandra's mother said the "she" wasn't the same woman. Grandpa divorced quite early, and Sandra's mother claimed that the reason was the wife wasn't such a traveler and didn't like his inattentive heart. Sandra could relate. Still, she imagined further. She imagined the different women Grandpa was with on these journeys. Like the one next to a plastic display of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, "I cried, she comforted me." Probably he didn't cry because of the game. He might not have even been in Beijing during the game, but Sandra imagined he was suffering, like all men were capable, and he indulged in the comfort of a woman he had trusted, somehow.
It's too bad, in some sense, that he didn't leave any letters that might betray his personal life a little more. His journal from the Amazons was a fresh one, and all his previous journals had disappeared from his apartment, or had disappeared with him. The rest of the family didn't seem to care. At least Sandra's mother had always been resentful of the divorce, blamed it entirely on grandpa (after, of course, she stopped blaming herself). She never mentioned that grandpa expressed regret to her. Sandra imagined that that's what men do, at least apologize to their children torn apart by a divorce. At least at some point. Her father did that, several times, over many years since divorcing her mother. But Sandra's grandpa never did, she imagined, or if he did, it wasn't enough for his daughter to mention it, to consider it with enough weight.
Next to a corner of an envelop with canceled stamps from Serbia (when it was just Serbia and no longer some fake form of united Yugoslavia), it was "she made it, but I'm alone in the sands." "In the sands," she imagined a desert. In the Sahara? The Arabian peninsular, or back here in the US? Or more exotic, like China. The Gobi. Who was she? A different woman. She imagined a train station, one of those really old and dilapidated ones in old movies, except that it was in modern times in a corner of the world that still hasn't woken up to modernity. She didn't even know what grandpa looked like, for no picture of him was kept, or probably taken. He must have been a handsome man to be with all these women. He was smiling. He was the one leaving, because he's always the one leaving. And she, a beautiful but subdued woman, was on the platform, waving goodbye. It was probably a train station in Dhaka. Do they even have trains in Dhaka? And where is Dhaka anyway? Just sounds romantic, and cruel.
He smiles, almost belittling her suppressed tears and roiled face expression. They had a fight but they made up. They held hands in the waiting room before, where the fan was trying to cool the room in vain. It was hot, even though there weren't many passengers. And he was doing what was to him extraordinary: "connecting with a human being", which was written in red, the only time, next to a small cutout from a magazine of a little boy and a little girl, both dressed like adults, holding hands, black and white. She imagined that was what he meant by "extraordinary." At some point they stopped holding hands. They were, in her mind, not lovers. Grandpa actually didn't have many "lovers", or if he did, it was all very carnal. It was only after the train had left the platform, after it had traveled many days, weeks, months, even years, that it had occurred to grandpa that it was more than carnal, or that a simple late night conversation, the last of its kind with a given woman, was more than just a conversation, that he had fallen in love and that it was too late to savor it fully. She imagined him tasting the best honey in France, would it be in Provence? She read somewhere that the lavender honey was amazing there. He would be tasting it while running to the train, no, the tram, something cool, and that he would not have the time savor it, and the the most minute taste of it returned only later to make him regret not taking the time to savor the whole tablespoon given to him by a beautiful French woman.
But she wouldn't just be someone he had met that afternoon in a beautiful French countryside market. She would actually be a friend with whom he had spent all his entire week in that countryside talking. It was another extraordinary experience.
She knew he had a camera; one of the entries, which was next to a restaurant receipt in Berlin, a cafe, was "her eyes finally captured on digital." If he was like her, he would appreciate the power of eyes, he would be able to pierce any eyes and see the soul of the human being within. He was in this Berlin cafe, during the day time, of course, and it was a cool cafe, like the many she had seen in postcards and travel books. He was trying to take a photograph of a woman with whom he had amazing philosophical conversations. She had dark, red-dyed hair, white but not pale, dressed extremely artsy, and she, too, didn't know she was in love with him, a man who could pay dear attention to you but not when he isn't looking at you. She would feel the pain of regret the night she went home after seeing grandpa the last time.
The scrapbook was always a passage to her imaginations. They weren't wild imaginations. They were her own "extraordinary" imaginations. She did it only in her bedroom because, although her mother knew she had it and went through it often, she didn't like it. Sometimes she would vent on her and reminded her how cruel a man he was, and then often it would end up being a tirade against men in general. Sandra understood by now that her own view of men had been shaped by her mother's views and her own sentiments have entered a perverse harmony with her mother's. Sandra's own life with men, though not long since she was still in high school, has been rocky, even though she hadn't realized at that point that it was perfectly normal for teenagers to have relationship troubles.
Still, she had a strange mix of loath and love for this man she had never met or even heard from. Or even seen except in wedding pictures she had managed to dig out somewhere. But what he looked like after that she had no idea. But she felt a yearning to meet him. Sometimes she even wondered if he was possibly still alive, and perhaps she would travel out of her cocoon of the Connecticut suburb and travel the world to find him. She smiled just at the thought of her mother's reaction, losing her only daughter to a man who started all the troubles in the family.
Other girls rebel against their mothers by getting in trouble with boys or drugs or at least come home late. Sandra's rebellion was subtle, quiet, a cold rebellion like the cold war, her desire to get to know the biggest and oldest black sheep in the family. And since she had no resources to travel the world to find at least his grave, she had to content herself with going through the scrap book over and over again.
