Best Part of Me [Emma/Vasco]

[marguerite harvard d2a (zori)]

i've got time, i've got love
got confidence you'll rise above
give me a minute to hold my girl

I’d been struggling to stay awake, my head listing over to rest against the window of the train, only to be rattled awake by the vibrations. Emma slept with her head on my shoulder, sepia hair scattered over my leather jacket. She made a soft snoring sound that cut through the noise of the train groaning across the tracks. It was a quiet little wheeze that crept up to my ears. I pulled her in a bit tighter, our bodies nestled in the wooden pews bolted to the floor for folks with seats traveling across districts.

She doesn’t know it, but this trip isn’t really about meeting Althea Perch. Not that I don’t think Mayor Perch has some important things for us to talk about. But this trip has always been about the love of my life, no matter what deep red stamp across the official visa letter said.

You see, the woman snoring just ever-so-sweetly across my shoulder is my best friend. She’s stars that gather overhead, leading us the direction we’re fated to go. She’s stitched up and somehow whole, having gave away parts of herself so that we could fit together. A pair of eyes that have cried enough tears we could fill the river by our little farm; someone that’s known the same sort of sadness as I have, nursed it and made herself full again. Strong enough that I know her shoulders are next to steel. Even while holding her own sadness, something separate and valid, and wonderful, she has let herself be all that she needs to.

That’s not to say we don’t know what it’s like to fail. We’ve seen the darkness, gotten lost without light. Except I’ve had the benefit of holding her hand, of knowing that even as endless as the night might have been, she was still there, beside me. When she’s broken apart, I’ve put her back together; and when I’ve gone to pieces she’s standing over me, sweeping me up and rearranging me whole. Neither of us come close to perfection, but more than anything I want her to live the life that she wants. Sometimes exciting, sometimes quiet. But altogether, something that we could always build together.

She knows good as any that our tragedies didn’t brought the world into better focus. It was our commitment to love that lit up the darkness of grief, that beat back whatever anger, or sadness that existed. Tragedy has a way of hollowing us out so that folks are empty and fragile, hardened but ready to crack.

This has been the fate of our children: to learn not to love out of fear that all they’d ever have was loss. How else could they feel after all the sadness, the pain, the listlessness and uncertainty over their future?

I think it’s what’s wrong with our world, that the thing we celebrate above everything is how much pain we have to endure in order to find some sort of happiness. People like to think that cutting each other down with words, or worse, makes others into the kind of people that they should be. How many of those boys and girls, all those people, grow up with pain in their hearts, thinking that they have to carry it alone? All because we celebrate this rugged, unapologetic hero. The victor.

There’s a great deal more that a person can be when they decide not to go it alone.

Maybe I’m strange that way. I’ve always thought kindness was better than contempt.

But then, some people can’t imagine who they’d be, and those same sort of people don’t mind how they treat folks so long as they come out on top. I don’t think those people would know who they could be without having to look down on someone else.

Emma taught me that no matter what, it’s that we don’t let each other, or our children, get hollowed out. No matter the pain or the emptiness, you aren’t alone. Those feelings of pain and sadness, of grief that coils across our skin like vines up a wall, to show them isn’t some terrible weakness. We’re a great many things, and one of the greatest is our capacity to grow, especially through one another.

If we couldn’t lift each other up, and build a world that brought each of us together, well, what was all of it for, anyway?

When I saw her twenty-five years ago, I’d been just on the edge of seventeen. I’d thought about love, because I’ve always been tangled up in its edges, but I’d not known what it meant to be loved, I think. There’d been the boy a few years prior, but his love was chalk and sawdust. Easily blown away, and useless, other than something to hold in my hands.

The McClaine girl had taught me to love, but not the way that it should’ve been. All the wrong lessons, and all the wrong answers. Love for the sake of not being alone isn’t quite love at all; duty isn’t to a person, it’s to a heart.

I met Emma on a warm August morning. The humidity was high, and the cicadas were setting out their call. Aresti chattered with Druso as we ambled, already late for our morning assignment in the fields. I spied her as one of a group of girls that were idling on the edge of a fence on the way to the fields, the three of them talking about how the other day they’d stayed late to pick up the dropped blueberries that littered the walk of bushes. I remember hearing her as we passed, the way she countered about how production could have been made easier, that the folks here broke their backs for lack of resources, not for lack of trying. Not chatter about taking the berries to eat, but that there was enough left over they could’ve shared between their families. I must’ve idled a little too long, listening to her crystallize each point. I liked the way the sun caught her eyes, the sound of how she carried on for something good. Something that would make the rest of our lives better.

One of the girls turned to ask what I was doing standing there, and all I could do was let my mouth hang open, and shove my hands in my pockets. I did what any self-respecting seventeen-year-old would, which was give a shrug and mutter nothing in reply. Druso gave a whistle from up the way and I walked as quick as I could, hands still stuck in my pockets. I snuck a glance back at her, though.

I think I spent three days dreaming up how to talk to her. I wasn’t exactly the boy at the top of our class. I didn’t have the same command of words, didn’t weave them together so neatly as to create what she could. Or the passion about how the world could change; I spent more time thinking about how lovely Saturday afternoon would be, sipping our mixed wine and cola, playing cards until the stars came across the sky.


What could she have wanted with a boy whose family was poor enough that they homespun their clothes, took turns to skip meals, and collected rags and scraps to sell for pocket change? His heart was just about the only thing he’d be able to give her, and even then a piece of it would stay with those who carried his name.


When I get to this part of the story with little Yani, I remind her that finding love was not a game of luck. This was work, the sort that takes a full heart, one that’s not exhausted, or broken. That to be in love was a matter of finding someone else that would make her feel at ease; that they would know she could exist as the sort of person with her own wants and desires, without having to feel as though she were less for it. Love was less a fairytale and more true. Not written in the stars, but the quiet nights awake, lying next to one another, not fearful of the morning because she was there, in my arms. A whole collection of little moments that built each other up, and made us whole - that was our love - one that’s lasted a quarter century.

We set foot in district four well past midnight.

Soft yellow lights warm the train station, illuminating a vacant concrete platform that runs up against a wooden planked boardwalk. A slow breeze drifted in and hinted of salt. I yawned and exaggerated a stretch above my head. I slouched across Emma, forehead leaned against hers, whispering estoy cansado como she didn’t feel the same way. A pair of boys approached across the platform, one holding a white sign with the name Izar stitched across in black ink.

We walk arm and arm along the boardwalk, set back from the road and up along a sandy hill with bits of green. Light posts dot the way forward, and let us catch views of the world over the dunes. Long stretches of land lead up to the water, now crashing in a gentle rhythm. One of them mutters about what Mayor Perch has planned, but all I can focus on is the sight of the water. I wonder what it takes like, or how cold it must feel in the dead of winter. Or if they know how lucky they are to see the ocean each and every day.

Our home for the week is a wood panelled cottage, flushed up against the dunes and facing the ocean. A deep red door that leads out to a walkway connecting to the boardwalk. Two long windows let in light for the living room, housing an old plaid couch and a tiny little television. The kitchen sits with filled with brass pots and a humming refrigerator, stocked with a bottle of white wine wrapped in a bow. Our bedroom was decorated with seashells in a vase at the nightstand, and a painting of a sailboat. The whole place painted a sunshine yellow, it feels a home that welcomed those lucky enough to be passing through. A long wood deck connected at the back, leading out to the sands of the beach.

It took all I had to contain my excitement; I’d written Althea of our desire to meet but - pressed for arrangements for this, too. I wasn’t sure what I might have been able to do for the district’s mayor, but all the thank you’s couldn’t have been enough. That we could have something special for our anniversary, that I’d pay the majority of my mayor’s salary for the year for a gift my wife wouldn’t forget. And I couldn’t help but imagine how it could’ve worked better, than to have such a cozy little slice of district four to ourselves for a while.

Emma snoozes then, after setting aside our meager collection of belongings in the dresser, and me, saying I need to review some things before the morning. Not that I didn’t contemplate waking her as she slept, giddy as I was, thinking that to kiss her neck was all I’d wanted since the walk from the train station. But then, I would had to have kissed her shoulders, and down her arms, her stomach -

So in the early hours of the morning, I start down the wooden stairs and set foot in the sand. Barefoot, of course, so I can feel the earth between my toes. I start to sketch out a line with my foot, moving to make a giant shape of a heart in the sand not far from the deck connecting to the house. I move up and down the groaning stairs to get a better view, making sure to pile on sand to erase or fix it until at last I’m satisfied. Of course - I started along the sand to collect bits of white shells to place around the heart - which took another hour or so. Not that I minded walking close to the waves, and feeling the sea on my skin. I scooped them up through the sand, and pressed them down along the edges of my tracing.

I carve out the letters of our names in the center of the heart, Emma y Vasco, making sure she came first (she would always come first).

The sky was fading from indigo to maroon when I heard the door at the top of the steps creak open. I’d taken a seat on the bottom stair, to rest my eyes and listen to the waves.

“Te estaba esperando, mi cielito,” I turned to cast a glance over my shoulder with a grin, and tap at the space next to me on the step. Sunrise awaits, but for now, it’s just us. I smile, “Happy Anniversary, Emma.”

crowded town or silent bed
pick a place to rest your head and
give me a minute to hold my girl

george ezra — hold my girl