How High We Go in the Dark

by Sequoia Nagamatsu

“We try to stop it from getting out or we prepare people,” he said. “We get the world to wake up and pay attention to the fact that all this ice melting and the millions of years of shit it contains has to go somewhere.”

I was happy for the update, but I didn’t have anything else to say.

Dear Clara, It’s strange to think I’ve started to build a life in the same place I saw as your escape from home. But you saw something else, and I think I understand now why you never could rest. It wasn’t about us or a job or all the little things we call a life. You saw a future of dead soil and dead oceans, all of us fighting for our lives. You had a vision of what life would be like for future generations and acted like the planet had a gun to our head. And maybe it does. I was always so proud of you, but it took Siberia, a quarantine, and the mystery of a 30,000-year-old girl to help me realize that. Maybe tonight I’ll look at the stars and make up a new constellation for the both of us, a woman standing at the precipice of a great chasm. I’ll be here with you. Love, Your father

I stood there debating who she needed me to be at that moment.

“Opportunities are like little seeds floating in the wind. Your life is there. Some people have a big net to collect them all. Other people need to pray that the right seeds, the best ones, make their way to them with just enough bad ones to appreciate the good.”

My engineer father once told me that marriage and who you fall in love with are largely a matter of chance, chemicals, and how far you’re willing to drive.

Somewhere out there near a star we’ve never seen is where we’re really meant to be.

And I realize we could go on, peering through our windows, avoiding each other, or you could come to my block party before we lose ourselves completely to the illusion of who we used to be.

As you know, I never showed up to anything back then. I was never one to connect. I’ve been that way my entire life. I went to work, kept my head down, and came home. I let old friendships fizzle. I orbited my family and all of you like a distant planet—there and yet nearly impossible to reach. I know I can’t survive alone. Maybe this will be lost in a stack of your unopened mail; maybe you’ll read it and throw it away, saying it’s too late. Or maybe you’ll peek out your window and wonder about coming over and saying, Hey, me too. I’m hollowed and cracked and imploding. All I do know is this: I will continue to wake up and tell my family I love them, something I never did enough when they were alive. I will go grocery shopping at midnight. I will tell strangers online that I’m sorry for their loss, and I will eventually wash the bedsheets and their clothes and be okay with a quiet home. Maybe, with help, I will wave at you when you cross the street. I will begin setting the table for one.

We choose to be blind to each other’s suffering. It might make things easier to bear, but our hearts are cold.”

He imagines people on the street looking up from their phones and into each other’s eyes—Hello, how are you? Why are you so sad? How can we do better?