Maybe is the Most Beautiful Word in the World

Aleatoric: Solely dependent on the throw of a dice or on chance; random.

There’s something barreling towards me. Hulking. I can feel it closing in. It’s starting to envelop my future body, which will be my now-body, which will be the body I might want to live in one last time. Shhhhh. Can you hear it rumbling somewhere off in the distance, like some kind of relentless locomotive tearing away at the distance between us? It feels infinitesimally close, but I can’t make out its borders.

Mom texted me last night while I slept. She said she hopes my heart starts singing again. I want to ask her what she meant. Instead, I scroll back a few days and hover over a series of photos of an empty living room filled with towers of cardboard boxes nearly bursting with the guts of my childhood home. She’s downsizing. I haven’t been home in years but not having the option to come back feels strange. I don’t need any of it, I told her. The only thing I’ve kept with me since I moved out is a shoebox filled with the paper slips from nearly 15 years of fortune cookies.

I don’t know what to say to her this morning. My AC stopped working in the middle of the night and I’m sitting here on my couch sweating, trying to figure out when this thing will pass (I feel like it never will) and, separately, when it was that my heart stopped singing (implying that it did, that it can). Maybe that barreling thing is sheet music, voice lessons for the big, thumping, chambered fist in my chest. Or maybe it’s a fucking semitruck ripping straight through me after I’ve parked my car and stepped out into the street without looking.

There’s something barreling towards me. Hulking. I can feel it closing in. It’s starting to envelop my future body, which will be my now-body, which will be the body I might want to live in one last time.

Sometimes when I step outside, to drag myself to the station to give the day’s weather forecast, or to watch the dogs at the park wrestle in the dirt, the world opens up big and cavernous and incomprehensible, leaving me alone with that crushing presence that looms over the day. It’s coming the moment I’m conscious of it not being there. It warps the dry, oppressive New Mexican air as it swells in all too close, until I am reduced to a wet, cornered animal left with no real option but to freeze, do nothing, be nothing, because that semi has no chance of hitting me if I never step out of the car.

I’m trying to rid myself of the crippling ritual of judging my prognostications to be good or bad—whether they will sustain me forever or gore me into the dusty earth—because what if they’re ultimately the same?

But I’d be lying if I said that I don’t read the greasy slip from my fortune cookie three times over in my lap and shove it into my pocket for safekeeping, that I don’t try to sew up the seams between the living now and the limpid and unsullied future with wishes and prayers, that I don’t search for and collect talismans as a way to construct hope or prepare for the worst—I think they call that magical thinking. I once believed in decimals, lucky numbers, loaded dice. My head was spinning, drunk on the minute omens folded into living, and still it barreled towards me. I was no closer to understanding it, no closer to making out its edges. Making decisions began to feel like a matter of life and death, and I found myself fighting off bouts of insomnia. Sometimes tomorrow felt apocalyptic.

Because this big, thundering it trudging towards me could look like many things, things I haven’t imagined.

It may be an almost instinctive move to Chicago in the trough of winter, where I become a botanist at a local botanical garden during the day and a whiskey-flushed, providential gambler by night. My wife wonders how we can afford trips to Paris, Phuket, and Vienna. After every seedy gambling victory, I lie and say that by some great stroke of luck, I have discovered yet another species of plant with incredible medicinal properties able to cure corporeal sadnesses and the sickness of nostalgia.

It may look like me, physically aged beyond my years and onboard a deep-sea fishing vessel in the northernmost waters of the planet, miles and miles away from the craggy shorelines of Greenland, swapping lies with honest drunks and self-styled womanizers. I’ll return with only callouses and tales of narwhals playing in our wake.

Or maybe, when it gets here, it will be a Wednesday night when the world ceases to make sense, when I collapse on the sofa after a long night at the weather station finalizing the next day’s forecast and calibrating sensors. It would be clear, calm, and scorching, just like today. I’ll wake in the middle of the night to a call from my boss. An EF5 tornado touched down while I slept. All of Albuquerque was being ripped away from the earth. Mistakes happen, but my hands are tied here … I have to let you go, he’ll shout over the roar. I’ll drop the phone in shock, my teeth falling bloodlessly from my mouth. When I go outside looking for help, it will be as if Albuquerque never existed.

Maybe it’ll take the form of a shared smile with a stranger also half asleep on a midnight train trudging towards what will be home. The shapeless, parallel beginnings of our dreams will be jolted to an end by the screaming of brakes around a bend, like a scene of resting birds evaporating at the sound of a gunshot. Our eyes will meet in between the fluttering of eyelids. The sinuous threads we follow will intersect and then intertwine for some indefinite amount of time and this stranger will shed their strangeness and I will come to know them as someone deeply familiar to me in what will feel like all lifetimes.

Or it could very well be a life filled with runaway horses, destitution, and so many beautiful things now gone that once seemed just out of reach.

It’s possible that it will look like the death of a parent, friend, or childhood dog, or the surprise birth of a child. It may be every possible polar extreme or what lies humbly in the middle, utter desolation or buckets of raw gold and silkworms, perhaps both in increments and varying amounts.

Or maybe it’s a future among a multitude of futures all existing simultaneously, where through a kaleidoscopic nexus of choices and inactions, events and nonevents, love and grief, divinities and self-contained cataclysms, foundations and upheavals, and lucky mishaps, I am exactly where I am supposed to be.

Maybe that’s what makes living gorgeous, not knowing what hand you’ll be dealt but playing anyway. Maybe allowing the jaw to slacken, letting the spine curve the way it wants, and laying yourself out like a two of clubs is how you meet whatever trampling or token of grace there might be barreling towards you with curiosity and care.

What if, instead of being a rigid animal in the face of whatever it may or may not be, I make my body out of ash and mud, something soft and yielding? I’ll be a warm beach for whatever it is to break on, a little house on the hill with a fireplace already comfortably purring for it to come home to. In this way, I might be able to find home within it.

The heat index is above 110 when she sends me, Last call son, I’m getting rid of those boxes today. Are you sure you don’t need any of it? I found another box of those fortunes you used to save.

When I think about it, I’m not sure if any of the vague promises, printed on strips of paper that still faintly smell like fried dough, ever came true. And if any ever did, what did it matter? Things change and happen every day, in small imperceptible ways, and nothing is different until it is.

I’m sure Ma. The heat makes it easy to give up. Still, I can’t help myself. I take the shoebox out of the closet, lay it on my bed and lift the lid. It could’ve been a heat-induced hallucination—or maybe they were printed with incredibly cheap ink—but inside the box was a flock of perfectly blank slips of paper, hundreds of them, without a single thing to say.