“No.” I admitted to her, without shame but without pride, either, “If I were that smooth, I’d have three of you.” I’m honest to a fault most of the time, admitting to my weakness and giving others credit where it is due, but it isn’t because of any particular moral standings. I’ve just learned over the course of this life that the more you lie, the more lies you have to keep straight. Much as I’ve been accused of loving the sound of my own voice too much, I’m really just too lazy to lie. Time spent keeping stories straight is time that I’m not goofing off in a cafe or some weird thrift-shop.
So, I’ll tell you the story leading up to that line as best as I can from twenty-five years hence. No perfect recall, of course, memory being a stranger to all, on our best days. You don’t see yourself in a mirror, anyways, you only see that person you were a split-second ago, while also in reverse. Discrepancies aren’t lies, they’re simple artifacts of pressure and time. Like how diamonds form.
She was meeting my parents for the first time on a college long-weekend off and I was showing her around my parents’ house, the backyard rolling upward into the rocky hills of the Southside. She noticed a glint of light in the grass and pulled out a small, doubly-terminated quartz crystal.
“You put that in your backyard for me to find?” she asked, “You’re such a weird romantic.” No, if I were that smooth, I would indeed have had three of her. But no, I had to explain this wasn’t some odd gesture, it was a function of nature up here. She’d spent most of her life to that point, either on Long Island or in the Hudson Valley, she didn’t know the humble ways of us hillfolks.
I had to explain that while our water-table freezes in the winter, expanding the dirt and the rock beneath it, the inverse happens in the spring and the thaw dislodges a bit of the earth, shaking a few new crystals into my folks’ backyard, every single year. Just as every time some house had their driveway worked on, we’d go over to the gravels and pick out glittering gems, before they could put the pavement back on. It only seems like magic or a practical form of enchantment if you haven’t spent your whole life with your head behind the curtain, knowing how it all works.
Is this what has ultimately defined by life? Ruining things with over-explanation and a tendency to try and tame my giant ego with enforced humility? Knowing the trick and ruining the illusion.
I can’t know if I captured that day perfectly, but broadly speaking, that’s how it happened. I did not understand what it meant back then but wisdom isn’t something we’re born with? It is what we become given enough pressure and time. Like how ‘Herkimer’ quartz diamonds are formed.
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