The Conditions of Will

by Jessa Hastings

One day I’ll die. One day you will.

The idea that it ends—that it all ends—that everything you spend your life doing and building toward one day amounts to actually nothing the second you take your last breath. It’s why people have children. To exist beyond their existence.

You can tell yourself you don’t even really want to be wanted by people like them anyway, but it isn’t true because the same way parents are supposed to want their kids, kids have a genetic predisposition to want to be wanted by them.

But that’s not how pain works… You ignore it and it just sinks down deeper. It lodges itself in the corners of our memories, hangs off tree branches on Callawassie Drive. It hides under the pews in the back row of the church. It gets caught in a pile of sheets no one knew what to do with.

This one”—he points to a flower—“is a magnolia, because there’s a song that changed my life.

It’s a funny part of growing up, actually… Accepting that things that are better for you, healthier—they can still be painful. That the worst, most shameful day of my life to date would in turn become the most defining.

He feels like the kind of memories I wish I had but don’t. He’s like déjà vu. And you know how when that happens, your brain is like, “Wait, we’ve been here before,” and you’re watching everything unfold and you’re waiting for the next thing to happen and you’re like, “I knew that,” and then the next thing happens and you’re like, “I knew that too,” and every time something happens that you’ve been waiting to happen because you feel like it’s already happened even though it hasn’t, you feel this floaty sense of delighted satisfaction—that’s what it feels like to be near Sam Penny.

With everyone else, I like their silence because it talks to me. I trust people’s silences more than their words. I can read the world in silence. But Sam is different. Silence with him is silence. Silence with him is five fifteen in the morning before the sun’s up and it’s still dark but the birds are singing. He’s the heavy quilt you pull over your head when it’s too cold and too early to wake up. He’s the song no parent ever loved me enough to sing. He’s the way water runs and bubbles over stones in a stream. He’s a quiet mind.

I take a photo in my mind, let history rewrite itself for a second. It doesn’t erase it, but it scribbles over it a bit in a louder color.

And I think to myself, wouldn’t it be so lovely if we viewed ourselves through the same lens as the people who love us?