The Question

The question coils around your throat as you walk alongside Ben. It is yet another Sunday in March; the two of you have left the over-warm seclusion of your apartment to bask in the sunlight, which you are sure will not be here tomorrow, this being mid-Michigan, where the sun is always a visitor, never a permanent resident.

As you walk, you try to knit together the question that is insistently coiling itself around your throat. Usually, you enjoy knitting: you like the weight and the tension of braiding one long string of words through others; you cherish the effort of it, the deliberate task of making words mean. And when you are done, you hold the tenuous fabric of words in your hands to admire it.

This question, however, is bulky: once asked, you imagine that even the leaves and the birds will be grounded by the woolen silence. You know that the birds and the leaves don’t really care, but you’d like to believe that someone else worries about the questions that weigh you down. Sometimes you imagine that you are in a fellowship with the birds and the leaves: that, like you, they are also waiting for a chance to ask their own heavy questions.

In the past, you’ve introduced the same question into other conversations with Ben: sometimes, you are like a dramatist who carefully sets the stage for the entrance of the awkward question, quietly poking for openings in the conversation. At other times, you present the question in the hushed tones of a funeral-goer: you whisper it to Ben so that you don’t upset him, so that the very weight of the question doesn’t knock him down. And then, there are days when you can’t contain yourself: when your need to know overwhelms your need to be tasteful and delicate. On days like these, you drop the question when the two of you are compiling your grocery list or in the middle of a romantic dinner. You drop the question abruptly, as if you had suddenly decided to throw an entire stick of butter into a boiling pot of water-based soup; you imagine that the question makes a plop sound when dropped, curling its incongruent self around the other ingredients in the conversation. And then you wait for Ben’s response: you have heard it before, but you nod your head when he replies, “I am sure something will come up.”

This has turned into a ritual: this awkward question and its predictable response. You take comfort in it; you can be sure when posed with this question, Ben will respond in a way that will make you feel better for a few hours (or a few days if you are lucky). You wonder if Ben knows that this is a ritual; that his role in it is always fixed, his line already written. And really, it doesn’t matter to you if he knows, just as long as his response is always the same.

So on this spring day, as you walk through the back streets of your college town, you take a deep breath and let the cool air pierce your lungs like a long needle. And when you can no longer hold your breath, you slowly cast the question on.