Recently, I read through some of the short stories I wrote in various classes in college and high school. I discovered how much I am fascinated by lights. Indeed, when I go on a night walk and inevitably get stuck in my thoughts, light sources such as lamps, headlights, stars, or LED lights could easily get me unstuck. My attention shifts from imagination to reality. I would stare at the light source for a bit, feeling relieved as if I walked out of a labyrinth. Under the dark night sky, I am so grateful for them to guide my way through the dark.
But, what if a strong light source directly points at you? It blinds you, doesn't it? What do you do then? Can you find a way to point the light source somewhere else? By doing so, what do you see? What if you blind others? It's intriguing how lights can both guide and blind us. I am reminded of the wave-particle duality, the unique physical property of lights. It's as if lights also have this guiding-blinding duality. You might argue that light cannot really guide you and blind you at the same time so it's not strictly a duality, but think about this: when you see a light guiding you, what don't you see? When you are blinded by lights, what are you being guided to do?
Here are two such short stories that feature lights. I hope you enjoy reading them.
Alvarado Street looks identical to what Gabriella Delmar remembered from her high school years, until she sees the place that used to be the Poke Lab. Inside the concrete wall there’s nothing except for a sign: “for overconsuming fish, this restaurant eventually consumed itself.”
Right, one fucking restaurant killed all the fish. Gabriella ponders. She turns to her partner, Cynthia Yu, and talks about her old days while trying to suppress the frustration, “This place used to be called the Poke Lab. It was where I always went for a quick lunch, also the place where that clingy boy took me on a date before I came out. Anyway, I still remember my order, one scoop each of salmon (I always pronounced the L before that boy corrected me), spicy tuna, and octopus, and for toppings: edamame, masago, seaweed salad, avocado(yes I know it costs extra), with spicy mayo and chili ponzu. Oh, wasn’t it delicious.”
Cynthia chuckles and says, “Ladies and gentlemen, and those who do not identify themselves as ladies or gentlemen. This is Gabriella Lucy Delmar, who still clings onto the time before the year 2030. I’m not going to marry her until there is a time-machine available so I can send her back to her happy times.”
Gabriella laughs as well, but then she then thinks about herself: it’s been six years since 2030, the year when the ocean was officially deprived of life except for microorganisms due to a sharp change in the pH of the ocean. It was also the year when meat consumption was banned globally. Everyone was forced to be a vegan from then on.
But Gabriella wasn’t really nostalgic for consuming animal flesh. Instead, she wanted to trace her memories even further back to her high school years. That’s why she brought Cynthia to Monterey. She went to Forest Lake high school in Pebble Beach, California, just a 15-minute drive from downtown Monterey. The city of Monterey was where she headed to whenever she had time. She went there for shopping, dating, eating, skating, alone, with friends, with parents, with strangers. That place was too important for her to be neglected. Moreover, she never got a chance to visit the most renowned attraction of Monterey–the Monterey Bay Aquarium. She feels that she hasn’t taken the most advantage out of her time in Monterey if she hasn’t visited there at least once. It is another reason why she comes to Monterey with Cynthia, even though the aquarium is just an abandoned place now, despite it holding the last fish on this planet.
“I’m hungry,” Cynthia interrupts Gabriella’s stream of her high school memories, “let’s go eat.”
“Oh yea. We should eat, then we can go visit the deserted aquarium as we planned. I would’ve taken you to Bubba Gumps, but its delicious fried seafood is no more… obviously.”
“It seems that you’ve never consolidated the fact that I was vegan even before the global ban on meat consumption,” Cynthia pretends to be serious.
“Well, let me say it directly. I don’t give a fuck.” Gabriella replies.
“Fine, Anyway, where are we going to eat?”
“Let’s just find a random place. I’m going to search on Yelp or Google.” Gabriella opens up Yelp and checks out the restaurants nearby. None of them has a rating above three stars and negative comments and rants are all over the place. Gabriella knows what’s up. One remains silent when she’s satisfied, but becomes outraged when encountering minor inconvenience. And such rage has to be let out somewhere, aka on Yelp comments. Entitled bastards.
After a few minutes of browsing, Gabriella feels like she is just searching among the trash can. Well, the trash is actually the comments, not the restaurants. She wants to save time for the aquarium visit, so she halfheartedly says, “Ok, why don’t we go to this place called Pablo’s SteakHouse. Haha, funny, steak house. You call artificial meat a steak. Whatever, let’s go. Let’s fill our stomach with those artificial product of bioengineering, the true epitome of human progress”
“Sure! Where is it exactly?”
“Old Fisherman’s Wharf. Oh wait, it’s no longer called the Old Fisherman’s wharf. It’s called the Lighthouse Harbor now. Funny because I see no lighthouse, but I guess it’s a less controversial name than the Old Fisherman’s Wharf, because nobody likes fishermen nowadays.” Gabriella says sarcastically, but her thoughts immediately go back to her high school years.
Even if there were a lighthouse, Gabriella believes that it would emit no light. Even if there were fishermen, she perceives them as the most apathetic people out there, as how she perceived her parents and the teachers who later punished her severely. A failed conversation between her and her parents shattered the 17-year-old Gabriella’s hope to feel accepted and loved, pushed her away from the campus, and guided her to the Old Fisherman’s Wharf. No light, only darkness. No people, only tears. No fish, only ocean.
She really wishes Cynthia were there that night, not even her presence, but just a mere thought of her. But maybe without that night, she wouldn’t have met and fell in love with Cynthia. She loves how Cynthia always chooses human beings over ideologies, loves how she is smart but not so condescending. They first met each other at UC Berkeley in 2028, where Gabriella has begun her Ph.D program in evolutionary psychology while Cynthia studied comparative literature, also getting a Ph.D. The first time when they went out together, low on budget, they chose a small but authentic Chinese restaurant. Gabriella ordered some spicy and oily beef, while Cynthia ordered mushroom, beans and broccoli stir fry. They talked about diets for quite some time, but Cynthia never judged Gabriella for a nonvegan diet. At the time when any vegan versus nonvegan conversation could be a heated debate, Cynthia and Gabriella simply talked about what they learned and what they loved.
One time, when they went on a coffee date to relieve their stress of constant writing, Cynthia brought up a conversation, “I don’t know about you, but for me, what happens in real life is barely in accordance with my expectation. It means that I probably have to expect the unexpected. But how? Isn’t it such a paradox?”
Gabriella replied, “Well, what you imagine is a certain chain of events. The reality of the future can play out in millions of different ways. If you think about the probability, you are using one divided by a very large number. Of course the chance of reality meeting your expectations is really low.”
“I still expect that human beings will make it past the 21st century.”
“Unlikely.”
They remained silent for a while. Then Cynthia said, “Your explanation actually explains my past love life really well. I always expected other girls and I would have such a perfect date or future and everything would work out for us, but the reality often shatters my hope, and leaves me very disenchanted.”
“Wait, you are into girls?”
“Yea…”
“Does that mean I can pursue you now?”
“Oh my god Gabriella!” Cynthia bursted into tears of joy.
Of course, it was their favorite memories of each other. At Pablo’s SteakHouse, Gabriella tries to reenact it, but Cynthia refuses because she is too hungry. Gabriella lets it be, but deep down she still wishes that Cynthia would heal her scar deep inside her from that lonely night at the Old Fishermen’s Wharf. If they enact that scene right now, it would draw a beautiful conclusion of her years of self-discovery of love, both the love of herself and of others. The timing is perfect. Eventually, Gabriella thinks it’s sort of silly. She’s here and it’s good enough. There’s no need to be haunted by that particular darkness from the past.
They go on eating, talking, and laughing. Despite that night, Monterey is still her favorite place, full of joy, companionship and good memories. Everything at Gabriella’s favorite town is awesome, except for the food at Pablo’s SteakHouse. Gabriella is absolutely disgusted by the artificial meat she has ingested. A term in competitive eating, “reversal of fortune,” keeps coming into her mind. She really wants to puke and just for curiosity, to see if she has eaten some congealed salty rubber. She decides to maintain her posture and manner in front of Cynthia, even though she knows that Cynthia won’t care at all. After all, she is happy to be not judged, and Cynthia always makes it so for her.
“Are you done?” Cynthia asks,
“Yea, I am done, but I think I’ll buy some Cool Ranch Doritos, a Mega Twix Bar, and a bottle of green-canned Monsters in Walgreens later.”
“I see,” Cynthia nods while smiling. She knows that’s what Gabriella gets when she has had an unsatisfactory meal.
“Let’s walk to the aquarium, shall we? It’s going to be a long walk, but it should be a nice one. Plus, I’m walking with you instead of that clingy boy.”
“Of course!” As they leave the table, Cynthia reaches for Gabriella’s hand, and she takes it.
To get from the Lighthouse Harbor to the Aquarium, they have to walk along the Cannery Row, a sidewalk built for pedestrians, skaters and bikers. They walk hand in hand, with intermittent silence and laughter. To their right it is the grand, but lifeless, ocean. To their left are cars, stores, and people. Gabriella always has a bias that those random people will come up to her and judge her, but she doesn’t feel so when she’s with Cynthia. She is the shield that protects Gabriella from her susceptibility of being negatively judged
Alongside the Cannery Row, they see trees on each side, each of them with artificial light hanging. The bulbs emit warm, yellow beams of light. As it’s getting darker, the light gets gradually more luminous, despite it not actively increasing its intensity. The gentle breeze of the ocean brushes over the tree branches and the hair of Cynthia and Gabriella. Gabriella recalls more of her high school years, while also trying to figure out what Cynthia is thinking. Gabriella tries to tell people around her that psychology is not mind reading, but at this moment she really wishes to know what Cynthia is thinking. Maybe she’s just thinking about how loved she is. Gabriella smiles.
They stop by a tree, look up. A squirrel quickly escapes from their feet and sprints up the tree. It doesn’t seem to care about the artificial light. It’s just a pleasant decoration to its house. Shifting their sight from the squirrel to each other, they stare for a moment, and exchange a brief kiss.
“The least erotic kiss ever!” Says Gabriella,
“Well, it is you who brought me to this unerotic place,” Cynthia winks,
“I guess you have a point, considering how celibate I was when I lived here haha. Ok, whatever. Let’s keep going!”
After a few hundred yards, they see the aquarium. They have expected what they might see, but the scene is still shocking. Protest posters lay everywhere. Graffitis conveying hateful words directly stare at those who come close to them. Vandalism? Substantial. It’s been so bad that the mayor of the city eventually gave up on repairing, knowing that any repair wouldn’t last a day. Gabriella feels a chill arising, but she resists her urge to scream. She holds Cynthia’s hand tighter as they approach the entrance.
There is a sign on the door: here hosts the last fish of this planet. Just come in and our marine biologist John Spiegelman will take you to a brief tour at this deserted place.
Right next to the sign: capturing fish for profit and fame? Shame on you!
Beneath it: Claims itself to be a research facility but secretly sells fish for profit. THIS is the reason why marine biodiversity is annihilated!
One more: Just another toy of those crazy rich motherfuckers.
Blame games are always strong, Gabriella thinks. Regardless, they walk into the aquarium. Darkness pervades, and their hands are tightly squeezed.
“I did my research,” Gabriella says, “Monterey Bay Peninsula is located in a weird geographical location. It’s located very close to a deep underwater canyon which bisects the continental shelf Basically, Monterey is very close to the deep ocean biodiversity. That’s why there is an aquarium here. It’s easy for scientists to conduct deep ocean research near this area, and it’s easier for people to see weird marine lives here. Well, until a few years ago.”
“She’s absolutely right.” A voice from behind.
“Holy shit!” Cynthia and Gabriella scream. They turn and what they see is a middle aged man who looks pretty friendly.
“I’m John Spiegelman. The marine biologist in the aquarium, or maybe the last marine biologist on this planet. The rest of them are paleontologists now, you know.” With a low voice and friendly tone, John introduces himself with slight sarcasm.
“There are better ways to introduce yourself instead of scaring us shitless,” Gabriella complains.
“Sorry about that. Well, I’ve apologized for so many times, but this time I feel like it’s something that I actually should apologize for,” John says quietly, “I’ll take you to see the last fish. This way.”
The last fish on the planet is an anglerfish. When she first looks at it, Gabriella thinks it’s very ugly, but what fascinates her is that the anglerfish emits light. The fish has all the water by itself, but it doesn’t seem to be moving that much. In her memories, Gabriella used to imagine standing in the aquarium, surrounded by water with the color of royal azure, her favorite type of blue. She would see fish roaming around and she would be happy. What she sees right now is still the blue she has dreamed to see, but without an abundance of life, she feels quite disappointed, But, she feels a small sense of hope in that ugly anglerfish, for it emits a dim light. For Gabriella, it seems to her the most luminous light there is.
“That buddy is old.” John says, “I don’t know how long he is going to stick with us.”
“Yea, I don’t really know either. It’s one of my favorite author’s favorite fish.”
“You are a fan of Hank Green!”
“I am!”
“That’s why your research sounded so familiar! Is that from Hank’s video from like twenty years ago?”
“Indeed. I was actually in high school then when I watched it. Forest Lake High if you know it.”
“I do! I actually taught there for a year, but I got fired. Students complained about how I sucked at teaching, but from my point of view, all I knew was that I had a bad first year of teaching, and the kids told the classes next year that I was a horrible teacher. They believed them, so they chose to not pay attention to me and were on their laptops all the time when I was teaching. I didn’t ban the use of computers in class, even though I really should have. Man, I can’t help myself being nice, but being nice doesn’t always give you the best outcome. Look at me now. I’m here with the last dying fish on this planet, and people occasionally would come in and tell me to fuck off. Fuck off from what? I don’t even know”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Gabriella says somberly, but John’s description of his time at Forest Lake High is just another example of self-fulfilling prophecy. For something you don’t know, if someone has described it for you and told you to expect it in a certain way, your behaviors would change to confirm the expectations. She then recalls her undergrad years when she ceaselessly checked professor’s ratings, avoided those with low ratings, and then unanimously enjoyed her time with all the professors with high ratings. She recalls at the beginning of the sophomore year someone said a lot of bad things about her new roommate, which caused Gabriella not to talk to her roommate for the entire first month. Then, they became really good friends. She then recalls what she heard occasionally on media fraught with narratives that the ocean would never be lively again, that people from place X with Religion Y and skin color Z are doomed from the very start, that this policy proposed by that politician will never work because he/she is so ignorant. Those words change behaviors without people even knowing it.
“Don’t be. It’s Ok.” John interrupted her thoughts. “I like working here honestly, because I love it here. I went to Vanderbilt University and I studied marine biology. I know, a perfect place to study marine life. Anyway, I was a big anglerfish nerd. I spent a lot of time studying it and it has become my favorite fish. I actually exchanged a lot of emails with Hank and they still make me happy.” John says, unable to hold his smile.
“Why do you like the Anglerfish?”
“It looks funny and it’s from the deep ocean. And, Hank likes it.” John replies.
“What about the light?” Gabriella asks.
“It’s an interesting aspect of it, certainly a biological miracle, but after all, it’s just a tool for it to survive in the deep ocean.”
“But the light, though not too luminous, fascinates me.” Gabriella turns to look at the fish performing the bioluminescence, then Cynthia, who’s staring at it. Memory just never stops kicking in. She remembers the time when Cynthia urged her to read a philosophical novel, called The Fall by Albert Camus. She didn’t quite like or understand the book, but one quote does stick in her head forever onward: “Truth, like light, blinds.” Gabriella thinks maybe it’s just because the direction of light is wrong. Pointing the light forward, we see through the darkness; Pointing the light straight at our eyes, we are blinded. We still have time to turn the direction of the light. This light is still powerful and it will penetrate through the darkness. This light will…
“John,” Cynthia says quietly, but her voice is trembling, “the fish…”
John turns to the fish while Gabriella tries to focus on the light source. The light is out, and the fish is dead.
A group of sweaty soccer players encircled Georgiana, yelling, “MVP! MVP!” She was happy but felt slightly embarrassed, for all she did was gently tap the ball into the back of the net, once. While the tall and rambunctious Guillaume totally dominated the game: dribbling elegantly through the opponents, passing incisive balls to his striker teammates, and celebrating with his jersey off. Guillaume was the irreplaceable figure of the pitch at the sports complex of the University of Pennsylvania that summer.
It was 7 o’clock in the evening, and the radiant, hot sun had just begun to set. While everyone was talking about the World Cup semi-final earlier that afternoon on their way back to the quadrangle, Georgiana sighed. She supported Italy, but Italy didn’t qualify for the tournament. In front of the television, she cried, so did those Italian soccer players. However, by the time she was playing soccer with people from all over the world in Philadelphia, she had already recuperated from the pain of her home country’s defeat, for it was a relatively minor one after all. Georgiana thought about having an alternate team to support, a team that would bring her the joy of triumph. Staring at the muscular back of Guillaume and Kylian Mbappe jersey dangling over his shoulder, she decided to support France. “Just for this summer,” she thought to herself.
The teaching assistants were kind enough to bring the exhausted soccer players ice-cold drinks and popsicles, which were great stimulants for their already enchanted spirits, but a minor damage to their recovering body. They quickly grabbed their favorite drinks and chugged them. It was only one week into the summer program, and the bonds among the group were already as unbreakable as the numerous strings knitted into a tightrope.
Georgiana decided to be the lonely string, just for that night, though. She didn’t know why people wanted to be friends with her despite her accented English and her distinguishable awkwardness in public. But, she found a place of belonging, a place that’s quite different from her home in Naples, Italy, as well as her 3 years of boarding school in Watertown, Connecticut. What pulled her out of the group with such a great ambiance were the fireflies under the giant old tree in front of the TAs’ office.
It was her first time witnessing the dim illuminations of fireflies. She couldn’t see the insects themselves, but the magical bioillumination, the product of millions of years of evolution, had proudly proved their miniscule, but significant existence. Georgiana began to wonder what if all the artificial light were shut. Would those tiny bugs guide her way out of the darkness? Her thoughts wandered like the peculiar flying pattern of the fireflies. The cicadas’ ceaseless chants floated with the gentle summer breeze. The scattered stars twinkled, but far less luminously than the phones in everyone’s hands. Georgiana’s phone was in her hand, too, but she didn’t look at it. She sensed the buzz, and the sudden artificial light scared away a few fireflies. She received an email from a top-tier American university, but she wasn’t interested in those incessant college emails at all. As she scrolled through her previous notifications, a WhatsApp message popped up. It was from Gianluca.
Gianluca preferred texting over face to face conversation. He enjoyed how texting connected him and Georgiana within the small campus in Watertown. Now he decided to build a such connection from Nanjing to Philadelphia. He liked texting so much. He believed that he had more time to think about what to say in order to avoid potentially embarrassing outcomes. He also believed that it encouraged people to correctly illustrate their deepest feeling with the accuracy of grammar and syntax, something he valued greatly during a conversation.
He was watching a World Cup game when he was about to send Georgiana a text. The losing side had already suffered from 80 minutes of crushing defeat with their goalie picking up the balls from the net five times. The rest of the game seemed meaningless to the players, even to Gianluca, as he fiddled through his phone, switching between applications, and thinking about the arrangement of words to carry out an effective conversation, just like the ones they had constantly that brought him so much joy and inspiration.
He had transcribed the words from his brain into the digital text, which he often admitted as something fairly difficult to do. This time, however, he was confident that she would be so impressed with the depth of the topic and his intellectual facility that she would infuse her wit and innermost feeling into her responses. And this exchange would persist until they inexorably fell in love. The referee had blown the whistle. He turned off the TV when a player from the losing side covered up his face with his soaked jersey. He switched the light off. His house became dark and lonely. Gianluca’s parents had gone for a family reunion, leaving their son alone in the house because he was about to leave for an exhausting trip from Nanjing to Shanghai to New York then finally to Penn.
He was both excited and scared about the summer at Penn. Suddenly, he saw his dog’s eyes reflecting a ghostly light that scared him too much and forced him to turn the light back on. His heartbeat slowed down when he again saw the lovely golden retriever sitting in front of him, tongues dangling, smiling, his big and lively eyes looking directly at Gianluca. He stared back at his dog, thinking about what to do. Since he refused to go to bed for he believed it made it harder to deal with the jetlag, he would simply allow any impulsive decisions to command himself in the next few hours. And the decision was to leave his house and take a bicycle ride around the city of Nanjing in the middle of the night. Also, his impulsive decision told him that he would bike a length of a marathon.
Gianluca pushed his bike out of the house, pedalling out of the main entrance of the residential complex, while trying to ignore the distinctive barking of his dog, a disturbance to the silent midnight. He decided to go all the way south, trying to explore the quiet, but still luminant city. The light came from the buildings, not the stars, not the fireflies.
He biked like he was in a race, on the concrete roads that were as empty as his mind. He checked his Fitbit on his wrist once in a while to make sure his speed was above 20 kilometers per hour. He didn’t know why he treated a solo ride in the midnight as a race, but subconsciously he assumed he was going to share this wonderful experience with Georgiana. She seemed to listen to whatever he shared with him, and he would be as delighted as he could ever be.
His bike rushed through the empty streets under the starless sky. He passed by a group of tall buildings. Gianluca lived in a developing area of the city, and then he saw how those buildings were constructed: It was the work of hundreds of construction workers, building them when the future occupants were sound asleep. A truck full of construction waste speed by Gianluca, and he coughed violently. He had explored enough of the city’s development and rose a feeling of excitement of how amazing both the city and he would turn out to be. At a cross section of the road, he decided to turn around, headed to the commercial center downtown, where he usually hung out when boredom overwhelmed him.
When Gianluca was bored at his boarding school, he had wasted his time to its maximum potential: He couldn’t do much at a place that has the most extreme Uber policy. He overplayed all the games on his laptop, binge watched the YouTube video from his favorite YouTubers, wandered around the campus a couple of times. Then, one day, an impulsive decision made him pick up his phone to ask Georgiana which program she would be attending at Penn.
Georgiana later recalled how he had quietly picked up that information at lunch one day: he sat down, munching over his food, without saying a word. She had seen him before on the soccer field, and she didn’t quite get how an Asian boy ended up picking an Italian name. So during that lunch, she kept an eye on him: He wore a bright red T-shirt that day, with a male face that grew a distinguished mustache. Underneath the face, the phrase “Hammers and Pickles” confused her even more. Georgiana reckoned that he was Chinese, but he was actually pursuing knowledge in a capitalist country. Even the phrase itself was wrong. “Maybe he just likes pickles,” she thought to herself.
Gianluca, on the other hand, did pick up that piece of information of her attending Penn that summer and quickly realized the coincidence with his summer plan. He didn’t care too much at first, but he couldn’t stop thinking about her. She possessed that kind of visage that’s impossible for him to dislike even with only the tiniest possible glimpse. On that day, few people did point out the ridiculousness of his shirt, but he shrugged them off. The man on that shirt was his favorite YouTuber who always emphasized the importance of actual human beings over their derived ideologies.
Gianluca paused for a while from biking. Not only because the bridge across the Yangtze River at night was decorated with luminous blue light, but also an unhealthy diet had severely hindered his ability to persist an endurance sport. After he took a few blurry pictures with his IPhone 6, he subconsciously opened up Whatsapp, scrolling up to his very first conversation with Georgiana.
Georgiana’s response to his question regarding the summer was, “Oh yea, I will be going to Penn this summer. But, do I even know you?”
In fact, they hadn’t known each other. They didn’t have any classes together. They would occasionally pass by each other, merely smiling. They sometimes saw each other on the soccer field when they had practice. Obviously, their interactions were negligible.
“I guess you don’t,” Gianluca said, “but I think it has to start somewhere.”
Georgiana typed out a laugh-out-loud emoji, and asked, “Why the hell do you have an Italian name then?”
“I had a choice between Gianluca and Tyler, and come on, Gianluca sounds a hundred times better.”
And that was how it started. Gianluca scrolled through their lengthy conversations. They talked without worrying about the legitimacy of their topics: from what’s the secret within our brain that often causes us to subjugate to procrastination and distraction, to what each other’s Chipotle order was (Georgiana never added rice to her bowl, which to Gianluca was unacceptable); from discussion about if girls bathrooms sometimes smell like a detonated bomb of feces like boys bathroom often times do, to the point that imagining future is nothing but only a kind of nostalgia.
“Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia.” As Gianluca finished reviewing the chat history, he recalled that line from the book Looking for Alaska by John Green that Georgiana recommended. That line didn’t stand out to him at first, but later he often closed his eyes and thought about it for a while. He reopened his eyes, watching the humongous bridge across the silent, but mighty Yangtze River. The blue light was reflected on the surface of the river, but he couldn’t see through the river. The sky was still dark and starless. Gianluca slowly trailed along the river, completed the last mile of his 30-mile ride.
After a shower, he took his clothes off, and stretched his bare body on his bed. Despite the two bottles of Monsters he drank before the World Cup game, he felt dizzy, tired and somehow hallucinated after that exhausting ride. He glanced at his smiley golden retriever and returned a smile to him. Then, his phone buzzed. A WhatsApp notification popped up: It was from Georgiana. When he unlocked his phone and saw the extremely long texts he received, he knew that Georgiana had provided him an answer to his weird question that he asked her earlier on: “You know as a Tunisian that your World Cup journey would be brief when you end up in the same group as Belgium and England. You also know as an Avenger (say, my favorite Dr. Strange) that Thanos had already collected all the infinity stone and he’s basically invincible. And here comes the existential crisis: what is even the point of being alive when you end up in such a world of imperfection and injustice?”
Georgiana thought about that question in the shower. It was really an interesting question to her. She typed and retyped carefully in her single room, by her dim desk lamp:
“You always have some weird questions on your mind and it’s really funny to see how you like to ask them to me so spontaneously. Think about this: suppose you are wandering around the woods behind the school at night, because you know, I suspect that’s what you want to do secretly:) You suddenly find an eternal fire source. Its warmth and brightness draw you in and somehow its energy transfers into you and empowers you. You don’t want to leave, at least not until that fire suddenly extinguishes itself. You are disappointed that it’s not eternal as it claims to be, but you decide to find the sources required to keep that fire burning.
“In this hypothetical life scenario, I guess you will find the meaning of life during your process of searching for the fire sources, instead of by sitting next to the magical fire doing nothing. Just like how the Avengers still choose to fight the inevitable and invincible Thanos, and how my fellow old Italian soccer players (I’m still sad that Gianluigi Buffon couldn’t make the World Cup) fight until the last moment of their qualifying campaign, the meaning of life isn’t something you find but rather something you do.
“Didn’t you tell me that your flight is today? Well, safe flight. I can’t wait to see you!”
After she sent her text to Gianluca, she put away her phone, turned off the light and hopped onto the bed. She threw her head on the pillow, but the moonlight outside had kept her eyes wide open. The crescent moon radiated bright light, outshining the intermittent beaming on the tower next to the tallest building on campus. Georgiana’s earphones played “Afire Love” by Ed Sheeran. She couldn’t think about the attractive Guillaume or the eccentric Gianluca. Instead, she thought about her recently deceased grandmother. She remembered back in Italy when she was little, she gently patted her head and while singing sweet lullabies.
When she woke up at 7:16 in the morning, she heard the Beatles gently chanting the song “Yesterday” in her ears. Apparently noticing that sleeping with music directly rushing into her ears were detrimental to her homeostasis, she reached out to her phone and paused the music. She checked her Whatsapp first instead of Instagram. There were only two messages: a friend request from Guillaume and a text from Gianluca: “deep”.
After he texted that 4-letter-word to Georgiana, Gianluca left his house and dog behind at 6 o’clock in the morning. He called for a ride, humming “the City” by Ed Sheeran along the way. His body demanded sleep from him for his thoughtless decision of biking around the city in the middle of the night. On the bullet train from Nanjing to Shanghai, on the tiny seat on his flight from Shanghai to New York, and again from a much slower train from New York to Philadelphia, his consciousness usually was unaware of the changes happening around him, but rather led him in a dream full of light: the stage light concentrated on him, which signified his rather ordinary figure. He was happy in those dreams, and he was happy when he confidently strode onto Spruce Street with his heavy luggage.
On a humid Thursday night, Georgiana found herself in front of the giant ancient tree again, with fireflies flying in a pattern that Georgiana began to figure out. A downpour had swept through Philadelphia that day, with an unusually powerful wind blowing Georgiana’s long hair in all directions. She was standing underneath the main entrance of the quadrangle to avoid the rain, ignoring her friends calling her name. The rain stopped around 6 o’clock in the evening and she finally could gather her thoughts about the things happening around her.
The night was getting darker. Georgiana wanted to see the vibrant plants striving with magnificent green, a part of her trade-off for not being able to play soccer on the field due to the downpour. Under the shades of darkness, she could hardly see the green she wanted to see, even when the artificial light from the building provided a great light source. Instead, she focused on the fireflies, still not able to compete against the powerful electrical light from the building or the cosmic light above. Maybe they didn’t aim to compete in the first place.
“Light, the visible sign of the invisible light.” She heard a distinctive voice. Even though she didn’t know that line was from T.S. Eliot, she would imagine that Gianluca would say something like that. She turned around: he was there, smiling with hidden intention, with an Italian jersey on him.
Georgiana stared at Gianluca, immobile. She somehow saw his face petried with hesitation. She suddenly felt disenchanted. She didn’t let all of the fun conversation she had with him bother her anymore, especially when she recalled that Gianluca only used one word to reply with her thoughtful interpretation of life, a word that coined a person’s lack of originality, a word that drew a line between enlightened thinkers and banal commoners. Georgiana quickly wiped her skin beneath her right eye, which couldn’t tell if that was raindrop or tears. She turned around, jogged down the stairs disappeared into the dormitory complex.
What was gone along with Georgiana’s confidence in Gianluca was his will and courage to follow her down the stairs. He was confused and disillusioned. He sat on the stone bench, pulled out his phone and texted Georgiana, “I don’t know why you left me so suddenly. It made me unsettled. But I’m sorry for what I have done. Please, don’t leave me trailing alone in this ominous place.” Later in his life, he would still subconsciously opened up the conversation tab with Georgiana, wait for a response and looking for reasons behind her disenchantment.
The fireflies were still there, between Gianluca’s back and the old tree. Within their little universe, they had lit up the dark, just for themselves, though. For people who noticed them, it was just another inexplicable aspect of nature, which hardly would they spend any time to figure out the fundamental causes behind that miracle.