When the World Tips Over

by Jandy Nelson

There’s an invisible artery joining the hearts of mothers and daughters through which pain is transferred from one generation to the next. Maybe it’s the same for fathers and sons, I wouldn’t know.

If people bear the trauma of their ancestors, doesn’t it follow they also bear their rhapsodies? If there is generational pain passed down, mustn’t there also be generational joy? If there are family curses that drop through time, mustn’t there also be family blessings that do the same?

Sebastian would pivot and tell Alonso that he was only half a man without him, and he didn’t want to half live a half life as a half man.

Do you follow your destiny or your heart when they aren’t one and the same? Which pull is stronger?

“Okay, and around the periphery toward the horizon, there’s a kind of lazy spattering of stars but rushing into the center of the dome there’s this full-on flood of them. Like a river overflowing the banks, like so many freaking stars, dude, a tidal wave of them, which is the Milky Way. It’s dimensional, and the thing is: you can almost see it all vibrating tonight.”

As the years passed, Alonso stopped writing letters to Sebastian. Instead, every week he’d put a blank piece of paper in an envelope and send it to him, knowing with confidence that Sebastian would open the envelope and understand everything that was in Alonso’s broken heart, and in this way, Alonso finally comprehended the wordless poems his ghost father wrote to his lovelorn mother.

So much of the time, I don’t feel like I’m there. I learn you can be sitting next to someone and be in different time zones.

A glisk, I think, tattooed on my wrist, maybe my favorite word of all. Because, ultimately and ideally, isn’t that what life is: a fleeting glance at a glittering sight.

I do believe now that when the world tips over, joy spills out with all the sorrow.