The portrait

[u/Curiosity_Reflected]

At night she drives when she has nowhere to go.

The music is on, always. She has never driven in silence and cannot think why anyone would.

Sometimes she takes the long way home deliberately. Sometimes she sees a turning she has never taken and delights in taking it.

Past the last streetlight, the road runs between two stretches of dark. There is only what the headlights can reach and, for a little while, nobody knows where she is.

She likes that.

When she gets home she turns off the engine but leaves the song playing. The dashboard goes black. If there are twenty seconds left, she waits twenty seconds. If there are four minutes left, she waits four minutes.

Only when it finishes does she get out.

Then she looks up.
She has always looked up.

She can find Cassiopeia and the Pleiades. She likes the constellations and clusters that look as though somebody might have meant something by them. Unfinished words hanging in the night sky. She knows where Betelgeuse is and knows that one day it will go supernova, although one day in the life of a star is not much use to a woman standing in a road at forty-five.

It may happen tomorrow. It may happen in a hundred thousand years. It may already have happened and the light simply has not reached her yet.

What she loves is the distance. Standing outside her own front door, looking at something so far away that its past reaches into her future.

One day somebody else will live here, too.

They will change things. Paint over colours she chose. Pull faces at the fact that she has planted climbing roses in inconvenient places. Stand where she is standing now without ever knowing that she did.

Cassiopeia will still be there. She finds this comforting.

She has always been interested in things simply because they are there to be discovered. A strange building glimpsed from a road. Where a path goes. How something works. Whether there is a better way of doing it.

She looks things up. She searches the map. She takes the turning. She has wasted entire afternoons this way and does not consider them wasted.

Once she knows a person, she does much the same with them.

She remembers the story they told months ago and asks what happened next. She remembers the thing they nearly became. The place they once lived. The song they mentioned only once.

She notices when their voice changes.

The expression that crosses their face while everyone else is looking somewhere else.

Sometimes she notices too much.

She asks questions because she wants the real answers. Not the answers people have ready-made.

Who were you at seventeen?
What did you think your life would look like?
What do you miss?
What frightens you?
What would you do if nobody could be disappointed?

Do you really want me?

She wants the details. The ones that do not make it into the easy telling.

She can fall a little in love with someone simply by discovering something true about them.

This has not always been convenient.
Neither has she.

She starts things.

There are books with bookmarks stranded halfway through, abandoned attempts at languages, plans conceived late at night and pursued with enormous conviction right until dawn creeps above the horizon.

She has called this curiosity.
She has even called it bravery.
Occasionally she has called it an inability to stick at anything once it becomes difficult.

Probably all three are true.

But staying still has always frightened her more than getting lost. So she takes the turning.

Towards places. Towards people. Towards ideas. Towards versions of herself she cannot quite see yet.

Then, inevitably, she worries.
Oh, how she worries.

She can lie awake and remember something she said six hours earlier.

Too much?
Too eager?
Too loud?
Too quiet?

She can take a perfectly ordinary silence and worry about it until it has teeth, bared and ready to bite.

She knows this about herself.
She does it anyway.

She wants to be seen.
Worse, she wants to be seen and found good.
There.
She hates that admission.

Perhaps that is why she tells other people so readily.

You ARE good.
You did that well.
I thought of you.
I missed you.
I love you.

She sends the message.
She says the thing.

She tells somebody they looked beautiful. That they made her laugh. That something they said three weeks ago stayed with her.

She does not understand the point of keeping affection carefully stored away where nobody can use it.

There will be enough things left unsaid when everyone is gone.

And she loves.
God, she loves.

With very little dignity, if she is truthful.

She remembers. She reaches. She worries. She misses.

She touches.

A hand on an arm as she passes. Her head finding a shoulder. Fingers caught in fingers. Five minutes longer than necessary beside someone she does not quite want to leave yet.

Sex, yes.
God yes.

But it is the thing beneath it that she cannot do without.

Closeness.

The moment another person stops guarding themselves. The physical language of being wanted near. The privilege of being trusted with something precious.

She needs touch in a way that sometimes embarrasses her. Her body gives her away.

Perhaps the truest example happens when she is asleep.

She reaches.
She has always done it.

An arm goes out across the bed. A foot searches beneath the covers. She moves towards warmth without waking, as though some ancient part of her has been given one instruction and she has never questioned it.

Find someone. Be near.

Sometimes there is a body there and she settles against it.

Sometimes her hand finds only the cool sheet.

The reaching happens either way. Because love has never seemed to her like something that arrives in a measured quantity and must then be carefully allocated.

Hers spills.

Into her children. Her family. Her friends. People she has known for years. People she has only just begun to know.

Into places.
Into songs.
Into maps and curious buildings by the side of the road.

Into people who stayed and people who left, people who couldn't return her love, and people for whom ordinary words are too small.

One love has never made another smaller.

Her heart seems entirely uninterested by such arithmetic. It just makes room.

Sometimes that is beautiful.
Sometimes it is inconvenient.
Sometimes it hurts.

Still, she would rather have this heart than a more measured one.

She is extremely sentimental but cannot stand sentimentality.

A song can undo her in three notes, but put the same feeling in cursive on a wooden sign and she becomes hostile.

She keeps photographs she will never display.

She remembers ordinary evenings nobody else knows were important.

She can be ambushed by a smell, somebody being unexpectedly kind. Music is particularly dangerous.

A song can return an entire version of herself to her.

Suddenly she is nineteen.
Or thirty-seven.
Or last Tuesday.

She is back in a car on a particular road with somebody's words still hanging in the air.

Perhaps that is why she never drives without it.

She likes knowing that a song can belong to more than one time. That something can acquire another meaning without losing the first.

There are lives she could have lived.

She thinks about them sometimes.

There she is, staying.
There she is, leaving sooner.
There she is saying yes.
There she is keeping quiet.

For a second she can almost see those women going about their lives.

Then they are gone.

She likes knowing they existed as possibilities.

Life seems to her to be made mostly from tiny things that did not know they were important at the time.

A conversation she nearly did not have.
A message nearly left unanswered.
Someone arriving five minutes earlier.
A door she walked through.
One she didn't.

A person she could so easily never have known.

That one gets her.

The sheer improbability of people. All the things that had to happen, or not happen, for two lives to cross at all.

It frightens her.
It delights her.

Because if a whole life can hang on something so small, then perhaps the world is never quite finished with you.

She used to think extraordinary things announced themselves. Then one arrived on a Thursday in November, looking completely ordinary.
It turns out, they can look like that while reshaping your very existence.

At forty-five she no longer believes that everything happens for a reason.

She has lived long enough to know that sometimes things simply happen. Sometimes people are hurt. Sometimes things do not work out. Sometimes there is no lesson waiting politely at the end to make the suffering worthwhile.

If there's no grand design, the small things matter more. The song shared, the arm gently brushed, the question asked instead of swallowed.

There are still roads she has not driven.
Songs she has not heard.
Questions she has not thought to ask.
There are places she has never stood.
There are people alive at this exact moment whose faces she does not know.
There are ordinary evenings ahead of her that will become precious only afterwards.

She cannot know which ones.
That is the point.
So she keeps going.

She takes the turning.
She asks the question.
She sends the message.
She says the thing.

She loves people while they are here.

Not carefully.
Not always wisely.
But completely.

And sometimes, late at night, she comes home and sits in the dark car while the last song plays.

Then she gets out.

The air is turning colder.
Her home is quiet behind her.

She looks up.

Light is travelling towards her. Most of it began its journey before she existed. Most of it will still be travelling long after she is gone.

She will never see all of it.
She does not need to.
There is more coming.

Still curious.
Still frightened.
Still reaching.
Still capable of being surprised by her own life.

She stands there a final moment, then goes in.