Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness

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Authors: Jennifer Tseng
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wished we had met in a library (one is doubly afloat in an island library, surrounded by water, surrounded by books), in a sanctuary that never arrives late or suddenly, one that never departs slowly, only to disappear out of sight. In its intimacy and safety, a library is the opposite of a train. It is that which remains, that which holds people (children are the exception here) while they are, for the most part, not in motion, that which holds people while they dream, while they resist travel even as they read of other worlds.
    The young man was like one of these exceptional children. He never paused for long in front of any bookshelf, he never sat in an armchair and fell asleep, only twice did I see him sit at a computer terminal for more than ten minutes. To be writing intently while wearing headphones does not compare to being asleep. The beloved’s degree of oblivion dictates one’s freedom to observe. And I, busy with my endless sequence of minute tasks, I, in my furrowed brow and compulsive friendliness, could not have been further from the man who sits idly in his train seat with a smooth, placid face, inspecting alternately and at his leisure the landscape to his right and the sleeping woman before him.
    In fact, it disturbed me to think of having met the young man on a train, for there were no trains on the island. Residents who wished to visit the mainland traveled by ferry or, if they were endowed with wealth, by propeller plane. There was once a railroad but it was destroyed over a century ago, dead before either of us was born. Many islanders, especially the young who cannot come and go as they please, have never seen a train, much less traveled on one. If I had met him on a train it would not have been
him
at all but another version, perhaps a Londoner or a Bostonian. I had no interest whatsoever in meeting any such foreign replacement. In the end, every book I read left me in the place where I’d started: on the island again. In the apartment, in the woods, at the library. No trains, no daily observances, no sign whatsoever of the young man.
     
    * * *
     
    One night in the parking lot, Siobhan finally posed the question that even I had begun to consider but did not want to hear.
    “What if he never comes back?” she asked. I feel a strange tenderness for her now, a gratitude in retrospect for her willingness to be so direct with one so convoluted.
    “I haven’t the faintest idea,” I snapped, sounding haughty and imperious yet feeling bereft. “I’d rather not think of it in those terms if you don’t mind.”
    “Terms?” she queried. “I’m not talking about terms, I’m talking about reality. There’s a fifty percent chance he’ll come in, a fifty percent chance he won’t. All I’m sayin’ is what if he doesn’t? What if that’s the outcome?” She was standing on the asphalt next to her car and I was standing at the opening in the trees that led to the museum garden. We always parted ways there.
    She was trying to take me by the hand and lead me to a precipice, to the edge of a darkness I dared not fall into. The image of my small life without the young man was one of a library with its doors locked, or, simpler and more terrifying, that of a book with half its pages missing.
    “He’ll come back,” I said with false confidence as I moved toward the trees. But then, unable to leave it at that, I stopped and asked, “What makes you think he won’t?”
    “Nothin’. Just that he hasn’t been by in a long time so I’m thinkin’ maybe he’s gone off to college.” His mother must have known but I couldn’t bring myself to ask.
    “But it’s the middle of the academic year.”
    “Okay, or maybe he just moved away. Maybe he got a job on the mainland. I don’t know. I just want you to be prepared for what might happen.”
    “I
am
prepared,” I said, startled by the sound of my own conviction. “I couldn’t be more prepared for his return.”
    As Siobhan climbed into her car,

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