That Which You Are

"When you realize that eternity is right here now, that it is within your possibility to experience the eternity of your own truth and being, then you grasp the following: That which you are was never born and will never die.” Joseph Campbell.

 

Clara was the bus going home. It was October and while it wasn’t cold yet, the chill made her think of making soup for dinner. Chicken soup, perhaps, something comforting, something her mother would have made. The wind blew the trees so that they were shedding leaves in miniature tornadoes to the ground and caught the eaves of well-worn houses with an eerie tone. The sky was bright blue, the color a three year-old would paint it.

 

No one else on the bus was looking outside. They were reading the newspaper or the tabloids, listening to music or talking on their cell phones to other people going home, staring into space, but not watching the world outside. Clara had been reading until some movement had caught her eye and distracted her. She was an assistant at a school library and she was reading a book one of her kids had recommended. Now the book lay forgotten in her lap and she was thinking of chicken noodle soup.

 

So, she was the only one who saw the woman standing on the street corner. The woman was tall and beautiful, a business-woman, her blonde hair pulled back into a chignon. She was wearing a purple blouse and pearl gray suit and holding a sign that read: “Stop bullying.”

 

The bus was at a stop light. The walk-sign said that in fifteen seconds it would move again and take Clara away from the woman. In those fifteen seconds, their eyes locked. The woman couldn’t see Clara, the glass on the bus was one way like prison glass, but for a fraction of a second Clara was certain the woman could see her. The woman had brown eyes, dark and large, and there was a connection.

 

Getting off the bus now meant walking home a half a mile foot-sore after walking all day. It meant getting home later than her usual 4:08 PM. She wasn’t hungry now but she would be at five o’clock, about the time she and her husband would have dinner ready. If she got off the bus now she’d be tired and hungry and walking home to a concerned husband. It was impossible to get off the bus now.

 

Her hand worked independently of her mind and from far away she heard the bell near the driver’s seat ding. The light turned green and the bus lurched across the street and stopped at the bus stop there.

 

It took Clara a moment to realize it had been her to signal the stop and she, embarrassed, gathered her few belongings and pushed open the pneumatic doors. She stood at the side of the road slightly disorientated with the wind suddenly a real thing blowing her brown skirt around her knees. The sky was suddenly no longer a picture moving passed her window, it was real and vividly so. She squinted.

 

People at the bus stop were staring at her and she became self-conscious. Her feet moved towards the light and she crossed the street back to the woman with the purple shirt and the sign.

 

***

 

“When did it happen?” asked Clara later.

 

Pedra stared into her coffee, her fingers cold from standing outside in the cold for her two hour vigil, and shrugged. They were sitting in a small Cuban restaurant that was close to Clara’s house and she’d called home to tell Donovan where she was. The café smelled of fresh baked bread, the kind that tastes like butter and melts in your fingers before you transfer it to your mouth. It smelled of guava pastry and Pedra’s strong coffee. Clara had a bowl of black beans and rice.

 

“A year ago today,” Pedra said. “After a year, you’d think I’d be over it, but I can’t. Everything here reminds me of him.”

 

Clara placed her hand on the woman’s in front of her. It was all she could think to do but it was welcomed.

 

“Grief is not something you can get over in a day, or even a year,” she said.

 

“I never wanted to come to America. It was his dream from day one. I never wanted to leave Spain but it’s so strict there. There was no room for people like my brother. Not in Spain. But, when we came here, I fit in. I found a job quickly and he struggled, I learned English practically overnight and he couldn’t get it, but he was never so happy than to be here,” she said. She sipped her coffee and put the cup back down. The server came by and refreshed it, speaking in soft Spanish to them both and Pedra answered.

 

Clara let her continue and she finally did.

 

“After Pedro died, I died. My family are all back home and I was alone. We were sharing an apartment and I was left with the bills and everything and I was so angry with him. Couldn’t he have just stopped? Couldn’t he have just pretended? For my sake?” The anger was real again and she stopped, placing her balled fist gently on the table and slowly relaxing. “No. He couldn’t, of course. I realize that now. Even if it was all a choice, even if he chose it, how could I tell him not to? It made him happy. Who cares as long as it makes you happy? And isn’t that what America was supposed to be?”

 

Clara nodded.

 

“Unfortunately, we, too are only human,” she said.

 

“Yes. But, after being angry with him for so long after he died, and after being so heartbroken, I had to do something. I needed to do something. Then, I realized that this is so much larger than me, than even my brother. This is something all over America, all over the world. It needs to stop,” she said. Her eyes flashed with a passion that was tangible and it swept Clara up like nothing ever had before. She felt her heart swell as Pedra talked and felt a lightness.

 

Clara was in her mid-twenties and had lived life according to plan. Her parents weren’t wealthy but they had been secure enough to help her with her first car and to pay for some of her college tuition. She had to work for the rest but that was okay. She’d met Donovan her second year in World Religions class and they’d fallen in love. After college they’d gotten married and two years ago bought their first house. The only thing missing, so far, was kids, and they were working on that. Life was perfect, except that Clara had started wondering, just a little, if there weren’t something more to be done.

 

She’d never felt passionate about anything. Her parents had enrolled her in dance lessons because it was good for her and she had been a fairly decent dancer but she’d lacked the desire to pursue it longer. Same thing with her flute and the scrap booking class and her education major had only brought her some joy.

 

Here was a woman who had passion. It sparked from her eyes like fire and flowed from her mouth like gospel. This woman, Clara could see, was a poet. She could stand on a stage in wild flowing white robes and her presence would be too large for the theater. In her, Clara found some part of herself she hadn’t known to be missing.

 

“My brother was bullied by the students in his class for being gay and it killed him. But, there are people being bullied for everything all over the world. For being Muslim, for being black, for speaking Spanish, for a thousand reasons they’re being bullied and put down. It needs to stop. We think that bullying is something that only happens in schools but where do those kids learn it? And it doesn’t go away when they grow up, it simply becomes more subtle. So, I’ve started a protest. It’s only me so far, but it’s a start.”

 

The sun was going down and the café’s shutters were half drawn to cut down on the glare. It cast the two women in an amber halo as if they were two ants trapped in resin. And for a moment they were captured together and held.

 

“Yes,” Clara said.

 

***

 

It was easy to be angry. More than that, it was easy to be scared. Once Pedra had opened her eyes, Clara saw it everywhere and was shocked that she hadn’t noticed it before. The hatred was only thinly veiled as humor or as common knowledge.

 

She saw it when she went to work at the school. Not too long after meeting Pedra, she saw a girl, Nor, being teased to tears by an older boy for her headscarf.

 

“Are you some sort of dirty Muslim?” he said. He snatched the pretty pink scarf from Nor’s head who tried, in vain, to snatch it back.

 

“Give it back, Rodney!”

 

“No, it’s mine now, I’m going to use it to wipe my a*s,” he said. He laughed and the two boys

with him laughed, too. Nor was tiny and no match for the boys. She folded into herself and started to cry.

 

“Oh, look,” Rodney said, mockingly, “she’s going to cry. Well, too bad.”

 

Clara got to them at that point and took the scarf from Rodney’s hand. He whipped around and backed down as soon as he saw who it was. He liked Clara, all the kids did, but now she had the look of an avenging angel and it scared him.

 

“Rodney Blount, if you don’t apologize to Nor right this instant, I will call your parents and explain to them why you have been banned from the library. Michael, Kevin, this goes for you, too,” she said.

 

“We were just kidding,” Rodney said. Then, he mumbled an apology and left with his small entourage. Clara watched them go, then kneeled next to Nor who was still crying.

 

“I’m not a Muslim,” she said. “It was just pretty.”

 

“It’s okay. Even if you were a Muslim it’s still okay. And, yes, it’s very pretty,” Clara said.

 

She handed the headscarf back to Nor and the girl stared at it. “Do you need my help to put it back on?”

 

The girl looked at Clara and shook her head. She balled the scarf up and put it in her backpack and then left. Clara watched her leave.

 

***

 

“And it just keeps happening,” Clara said. She chopped the lettuce for dinner with so much anger that Donovan took the knife from her. “Today, I overheard one of the teachers talking about how the Spanish workers need to speak English or get out of America. When will it stop?”

 

Donovan put the knife down and shook his head.

 

“Honey, this is the way it is. There’s always going to be people that believe s**t like that. There’s always going to be those people. You can’t change the world.”

 

He smiled and wrapped his arms around his wife and gave her a hug. His wife was a different person than the one he’d met and fallen in love with five years ago. He wasn’t quite sure who this passionate and energetic creature was but he was beginning to think that she was a welcome presence. He worried about her, though, running around with Pedra with their signs and posters but he’d helped them out a little and the campaign was gaining some ground.

 

He was proud of her. In six months, she and Pedra had started something. It was a kernel, yes, just something small, but it had grown. Pedra had quit her job working as a bank teller and had rented a small office, living off of her student loans and a part time job as an English as a Second Language teacher. The risk had paid off and now New Perspective had a

headquarters in a strip mall between a Chinese restaurant and a pizza joint.

 

“That’s what Pedra says,” Clara said, “but if I can’t change the world, what’s the point?”

Donovan leaned back and kissed her.

 

“You started to.”

 

***

 

The darkness behind the stage was energetic. Clara could hear the people in the audience getting to their seats and opening candy wrappers, coughing, talking, laughing a little. They saw the stage with its red velveteen curtain closed, a great thing at rest. But, behind the closed lids there was energy and Clara was caught up in it.

 

The last few months, since meeting Pedra and starting their organization, had been non-stop hectic but she’d found a source of energy she’d not known before. She wasn’t tired when got home from work. She wasn’t tired after campaigning for three days straight, doing projects with her kids at school, or blogging on the New Perspective website. She was never tired anymore.

 

Their grassroots campaign to stop bullying had grown. It was now a campaign to stop bigotry on every level, to make the world one world, and it had caught on with a lot of people who felt it was time. People came out of the woodwork to help and suddenly Pedra and Clara were the nucleus of something huge.

 

They had decided to hold a huge panel discussion only a couple of months ago. There had been a lot of work getting leaders of the major religions, of the gay community, of the atheist community, of the immigrant community in Immokalee, and others all together for one night.

 

Talking to people whose names had graced the set of Oprah made Clara nervous. She’d felt certain that they would laugh at her and simply tell her that they were too busy but they hadn’t. They’d jumped at the chance, most of them giving her ideas on who to talk to next.

 

All of what had happened in the last few months was new to her and frightening with its newness. Booking a hall, publicizing the panel, talking to people, writing a speech, all of it was outside her comfort zone. Yet, she’d done it. She’d ordered the champagne and roses.

The house lights in the theatre were lowered and the darkness enveloped her like a well-worn quilt.

 

There were now fifteen seconds between now and the rest of her life and she had to make the decision. The events of the last year, from pressing the button to get off the bus exactly one year ago today, accumulated in this one night. She could walk away. The nerves in her stomach told her to walk away. This was impossible. She was an assistant at a library, no one special, and yet she was about to walk on stage with Pedra and hold a panel discussion with the most influential people alive today. Impossible. She could simply allow Pedra to do it. Her friend and colleague was better at public speaking, more confident and sure of herself, she could handle it.

 

Fifteen seconds to make the decision. Yet, there was no decision to be made.

 

Pedra walked up behind her and smiled in the darkness. She mouthed “are you ready?” and Clara nodded. They waited together for the announcement to be made that would allow them to walk, arm in arm, onto the stage in their matching black dresses.

 

In that second, a calm stillness settled on Clara. The nerves were gone and she was able to take Pedra’s arm without trembling. Pedra, too, was calm. In that instant, Clara was struck with an unearthly feeling, a feeling of being outside herself and looking down, and into the future.

 

It wasn’t about her. It wasn’t even about their campaign or about making a difference. She was lifted. The light from the stage was a soft amber glow and it wrapped around her and she was glowing. The emotion was indescribable but powerful. It humbled her and made her powerful.

 

She stepped onto the stage.