What Kind of Paradise

by Janelle Brown

Probably I had felt the global temperature shift, despite my attempts to disregard it. Once you’re aware of something’s existence, you can’t will it back into oblivion, no matter how hard you try.

“Every living thing on this planet, including human beings, are products of nature, squirrel,” he said. “Humans may believe that we are in charge, but we shouldn’t be, because we can’t be trusted with that power. We need to acknowledge the things that are still wild, the things that have survived us. We need to remember that this”—he gestured at the trees around us, the falling snow, the vanished deer—“is what we are supposed to be part of. Instead, we’ve manufactured these precarious societies, ruining the earth with our so-called technological advances. Our guns and our biological weapons, television sets and computers. Making ourselves obsolete in the process, even.” He wiped away the last of the tears. “Left alone, nature takes care of itself. But all we humans do is destroy. That’s where this all goes eventually, you see? Apocalypse.

My life was bucolic and happy; or it was bizarre and lonely. Which is true? Is it possible it could be both? The more I seek clarity, the more entangled and confused my recollections become.

“Inevitability is the most important foe to fight,”

But that night, for the first time, I realized that the one answer he’d never given me was the answer to the most pivotal question of all: What happens after survival? What does it mean to survive, when you’re not quite sure what you’re living for? What do you do when you start to realize that you want more than just…existence?

I sat wrapped in a blanket, watching the mist rise off the frozen ground as the sun began to warm the earth below, creating a soft low fog that clung to the forest like a dream.

I sat there until the coffee in my mug was as cold as a stone. I sat there until the frost melted off the trees and I lost all feeling in my legs. I thought my heart might break from all that beauty, which felt like a gift just for me.

Life was a party to which I had not received an invitation but hadn’t missed at all until I was made aware of the event.

Never underestimate the power of love to lead you down the path toward willful blindness. Faith in the people you adore doesn’t disappear slowly, with each tiny disappointment; instead, it collapses all at once, like the final snowfall that triggers an avalanche when the weight suddenly becomes too much to bear.

I’ve spent the last twenty-eight years hating myself, wondering whether naïveté is really a valid excuse for blindness. All these years later, I still don’t have an answer to that question.

It felt like some subterranean geyser of emotion—all the rage and frustration I’d spent so many years sublimating—had finally broken the surface.

“I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.”

“Well, we’re all strangers to each other, when you get down to it. It’s just that we sometimes choose not to be.” He shrugged. “I’m choosing not.”

“I have a thing for underdogs and outcasts,”

This is where you land when you don’t fit in anywhere else. It’s a wonderland of weirdos.”

If I felt pangs of homesickness on occasion—for the frozen dew dancing, diamond-like, on the tips of the wild grass; for the tawny spring fawns, tripping down to our pond; for the smell of woodsmoke in my father’s hair, his hand on my shoulder—I buried these feelings under an avalanche of pop culture. Toy Story. “Macarena.” Smashing Pumpkins. Scream. SimCity. O. J. Simpson. Frappuccino. Paul Frank. “Wannabe.” People’s Sexiest Man Alive.

“Life is amazing. Right? It’s easy to forget it, but then you have these moments that remind you how incredible it is that we even fucking exist. The rest of it—all the crap we worry about, the cerebral contortions we go through to try to make meaning of existence—is nothing at all compared to the miracle that we can do this. Just being together with other human beings. Dancing. Alive.”

And I gazed over my new life and felt like an overripe fruit, about to burst out of my skin. This was a happiness I’d never experienced before. Joy is always sweetest when loss lurks just below it. Like that orchestra on the Titanic, playing their final arrangements while knowing that everything would be gone by daylight. You fiddle as hard as you can, close your eyes to what’s to come, obliterate yourself in now because it may be all you ever have.

We all grew up weird in some way, the kids who stood on the edges of things and just watched the other people who seemed to have life all figured out. And then the internet comes along, and it’s for us—the freaks, not the normals; the kids who got into computers because we had nothing else to hang on to—and we are suddenly the ones in charge. It’s our world. Our rules. We get to build it the way we want it to be. And it’s going to be so, so much better than the way the rest of the world is. We’re going to create utopia for people like us.”

But speculation is a fool’s game, like pressing on a bruise to see if it still hurts.

Sometimes love manifests itself as a kind of amazed awe, as potent a feeling as any other form of connection: the shock of knowing that you are desired just as you are, no matter how broken you might feel.

We are undone by the specificity of our dreams. Reality can never live up to the shining edifices we forge inside our fantasies: Life, in all its confusing complexity, is destined to be a disappointment in comparison. The lottery winner discovers that the riches don’t equal happiness; the longed-for baby is colicky and sour; losing fifty pounds still doesn’t bring you love; winning the election doesn’t trigger societal change. Life is a constant emotional calibration, then: the tiny adjustments we make every day as we come up against our discontents. We ride this seesaw, between hope and disenchantment, seeking some sort of equilibrium.

“Revolutions aren’t built on rational thinking. They are built on strength of conviction.”

I wanted to stop fretting about the future and just think about the now, but I was quickly learning that this was a luxury that the modern world wouldn’t allow. Today lives in the shadow of tomorrow. And the shape of that shadow is circumscribed entirely by your willingness to hope.

It was all very austere, and it struck me that my mother must be quite rich in order to own so little.

Now that I knew how much else there was to need, I couldn’t help wanting it all. But there was never any going back.

We still chose each other to be members of the families that we needed, as opposed to the families we were born with. It is no small thing to have the ability to make that choice; in fact, it’s probably the most important decision we get to make in life.