Hunger of the Pine

by Teal Swan

I know you or my heart knows you.

  I don’t know where my love started for you and I don’t know where or if it will end … Maybe in another life. Every night, you come into my dreams and then I have to remind myself that those dreams were only mine and I have to pretend that everything between us is normal. I don’t want to put pressure on you, but I want to be with you. I want you to be my goddess. I will love you when you are a Shakti and I will love you when you are Shiva. I don’t want there to be anything for us to hide. To me, you are like a powerful panther that also has the grace of a fragile doe. I know it’s not considered very good to mention how beautiful a woman is because it usually makes her feel like that’s all you care about, but I am going to take the risk and tell you that I think you are so beautiful that when I’m around you, I can’t breathe. I want to dance and play and be one with you. I think you could become my everything and I want to be everything to you. So if you are open to being my woman, just bring me this hawk feather and I will know it means yes. If not, you can keep it. Wolf said that a hawk feather is a symbol of courage and strength, which is what it took me to write this letter and what it would probably take for you to trust me with your heart. Either way, I want it to keep you safe. No matter how you feel toward me, I want you to be happy and I want you to feel free. I want you to travel the world with me. I want us to live the way that two people in love are meant to live. I don’t want to have any regrets, which is why I am writing you this letter, because if I didn’t say these things, I am afraid that I would regret it for the rest of my life. My love for you is an unending journey. But I’d rather take that journey with you than in my own head. Can you love me?

  With unending love,

  Luke

  Aria read the words of his letter with deep heaviness. She did not think of herself as the kind of girl to miss something as serious as the affection he had so clearly spelled out in pen. She had imagined that her fondness for Luke had been deeper than the fondness that he held for her. But that fondness was like the moonlight as opposed to the sunlight. Moonlight was reflected. It was pale by comparison. The love that she felt for Luke was like the light that was reflected from a greater love calling to her from the other side of space and time. Her love for Omkar, on the other hand, was like the sunlight, hissing hot of its own volition, and she was blinded by that light.

  Aria was silent for a few seconds before speaking. “Luke, this is a beautiful letter. I had no idea you felt this way. I feel really bad now.”

  Luke stood up, still spinning the feather and running his fingers across the blade of it. He already knew the let-down that was coming. He could hear it in what few words she had said. “So that answer’s no, isn’t it?” he asked.

  “I like you, Luke, way more than you probably know and more than I’ve told you.”

  Luke cut her off: “You like me, but you don’t love me! That’s it, isn’t it?”

  She answered him carefully, wary of the thin ice they had wandered onto. “No, it’s that I’ve met someone that I care about so much, I can’t – I just can’t fuck it up. It has nothing to do with you. If you had given me this letter a few months ago, I would have said yes to it.”

  Luke looked up at the sky with anger, as if the sky itself had given him the bad advice to wait so long. “I don’t want this to make you hate me. I don’t want to lose you or whatever else might happen,” she said.

  He sat back down beside her and forced his way past his own disappointment to comfort her. “Nah, it’s not like that. I could never hate you. I mean, I’m not happy, but it’s not like I’m gonna just go from being in love with you to hating you. I’m way too conscious for that stupid shit.”

  Luke didn’t ask her any questions about whatever man she seemed to love so much. He didn’t want to know anything about him because it would only cause him to feel lonelier than he already was.

  Palin was digging a deep hole to their left. She kicked a little spray of wet soil and grass roots onto Aria’s legs. “Palin … quit that,” Luke said, whistling for her to chase a stick that he picked up from his feet to throw for her. They sat watching the river, neither of them knowing what to say, until Luke held the quill of the feather out in front of her, intending for her to have it.

  “I can’t take that, I’ll feel too guilty,” Aria said.

  “Nah, I want you to have it,” Luke said. “Like I said, I want it to keep you safe and if it doesn’t give you courage and strength to give me your heart, maybe it will give you strength and courage for somethin’ else.”

  Aria took the quill from him and smelled it. The guilt she felt made her arms feel heavy. She put the letter and the feather into her backpack and sat with her chin on her knees, watching Luke throw the stick as a distraction from the discomfort that both of them felt.

  When they walked back toward the car lot, Luke tried to erase what had been said between them with small talk. He told her stories from his various travels. At one point, he stopped her to look at a dull bronze-colored chrysalis, which he told her contained a painted lady butterfly. “Did you know that a caterpillar doesn’t just sprout wings and turn into a butterfly?” he asked. “Actually, if you opened this thing, all that would come out is this primordial soup. The caterpillar decomposes and it gets totally reorganized back into this whole other thing!”

  Aria felt the impact of his statement. As fascinating as the fact was, she knew that he was talking about himself just as much as he was talking about the caterpillar. She was unhappy to have become one more part of his story of things that had made him feel like he was dissolving.

  When they got back to the lot, Robert was taking a nap. Palin ran up to him and licked his face, startling him out of his sleep. Darren had changed position, but had not come out of the vortex of his self-destruction.

  Luke caught Aria by the shoulder. “I’m gonna go back out there, I think,” he said, gesturing back toward the woods from which they came.

  “OK,” Aria said, flustered and not knowing what to say to repair the rupture between them.

  Luke pulled her in for a reassuring hug. “I’m here for you whenever you need it, OK? I really like you as a person, not just as a girlfriend or whatever else,” he said.

  Aria hugged him back, letting her top hand slide up and down the muscles of his back to indicate her regard for him. He whistled and called for Palin. Aria grabbed the scruff under Palin’s cheeks and lifted the velvet of her muzzle to kiss both sides of it. Palin snuffed and trotted off to lead the way. Luke took a few steps before turning around and saying, “Hey, if you ever change your mind with whatever-his-name-is, you know where to find me.” Aria smiled and waved to him, touching the fingers of her right hand to her lips to indicate a blown kiss. Soon she could no longer see either of them beyond the web of the woods.

  Standing in front of Robert, she could smell the hint of ammonia from his breath. His kidneys were not working in his old age with quite the same vigor that they had in his youth. “So are you gonna just stay here then?” she asked him.

  “Prob’ly, you know me, I ain’t got no place else to be,” he said. “What abou’chu?”

  “I’m staying over in East LA,” she said. “Look, would you mind if I came and saw you sometimes?”

  “Hell no, I wouldn’t mind, though I can’t work out why you’d want to hang out with an old geezer exactly,” he said.

  “I just do,” Aria responded, not able to bring herself to explain her actual need for him or the amount she had grown to care about him.

  “OK then, suit yourself. I can’t promise I’m gonna be any fun, but you know where to find me.” Robert grinned up at her, squinting against the sun. She knelt down in front of him and hugged him. The smell of his clothes was sour with neglect and city grime. He patted her back. Her embrace muffled the words he spoke to end their meeting.

  “You go and take care of yourself,” he said. Robert was not a man to make his sentiments known. His mutual affection for Aria was not something that he made k
nown openly to her that day. Instead, he kept it for himself. He let his own being kindle it, like powder swallowed by flame.

  Aria waited for Omkar for hours on the berm to the side of the road he would eventually drive down to find her. The tides of life that had brought her there had never warned her about the way she would care for the people she would meet. They did not warn her that a person could grow fond of a place which most would consider rock bottom. The fire that had cremated her time there had not burned the memories away. The flames could not reach them. The sovereign fingers of those that remained refashioned their existence on top of the ash because they could do nothing else with themselves.

  Despite the flood of emotions she felt, there were no tears to cry. She couldn’t let them fall, being so lucky compared to all of them. To cry would be to kick them twice. She was not deaf to the spring that had offered a second chance for her without offering one for the rest of them.

  She wanted them so much to be happy. She wanted the wolf inside Wolf to stop its howling. She wanted Anthony and Luke to each find a woman to love again. She wanted Robert’s kindness repaid. She wanted Mike to hear the childish trumpet of Aston’s voice playing in his own backyard. She wanted to see Taylor’s face on the billboards littering the city. She wanted to see EJ clean and sober. She wanted a man to walk into Ciarra’s life and quiet the bonfire within her that continued to burn up everything and everyone in her life.

  Aria wanted to celebrate the luck of her life, but the festival of it could not compete with the sorrow that she felt for all of them. Despite the hope she tried to hold for them, she knew that the odds were stacked against people like her and people like them. She knew that so many of the wishes she had for them were like waves that would never break against the shore.

  CHAPTER 32

  Though she didn’t want to completely ignore it, Aria hated her birthday. She didn’t want to plan something special to do for herself any more than she wanted someone else to. There was always this pressure to do something fun and to be happy on her birthday when no amount of pressure could change the conditions that made her unhappy year after year.

  Omkar would have been upset if he’d known that Aria intentionally hadn’t told him that her birthday was today. He would have been less upset with her than he would have been with himself for not already knowing. Aria had been staying with the Agarwals for a little over a week and helping Omkar with customers in the store during his shifts there. Despite Jarminder’s constant urge to feed her, Aria had not wanted to feel in debt to her generosity, and so she had made an excuse to leave the house every day to preoccupy herself and to take advantage of meal programs around the city.

  Aria had been to the church near the store nearly every day for the past week. On this day, she found herself there again, standing in line and waiting for Imani to hand her a sandwich. “Hey girl, how you be today?” Imani asked her before she was done serving the two men standing in front of her.

  “Good,” Aria said, not wanting to fully engage in conversation until there was no one in between them. “How are you?” Aria asked her once the men had dispersed to their sitting place on the lawn.

  “I’m OK, I’m OK, just doin’ ya know,” she replied.

  “You doin’ somethin’ special today?” Imani asked her, expecting that her answer would be no.

  “I don’t know,” Aria responded. “Actually, it’s my birthday today so I don’t know yet.”

  She didn’t know exactly why she decided to tell Imani and no one else. Probably it was because there was no risk of her trying to do anything about it.

  “How old you be?” Imani asked, her long and freshly manicured acrylic nails pressing divots into the plastic wrap around the sandwich that she handed to Aria. Though they were painted bright purple, they reminded Aria more of claws than of nails.

  “Eighteen,” Aria replied. Imani’s suspicions that Aria had been underage were confirmed but she made no obvious reaction.

  Imani did not share Aria’s relief about the fact that she had reached adulthood. For Aria, it meant that she could get a job and she would no longer be a target for the cops. Imani couldn’t be sure whether Aria was part of the system, but she knew all too well that once kids turned 18, they aged out of the system. Aging out of the system was a nightmare in and of itself. Without a family and without any of the skills to make it on their own, the chances these older kids would graduate from school, much less college, were slim. The chances of them finding good employment were just as slim. It was like kicking a bird out of the nest when it didn’t know how to fly. So many of the kids who aged out of the system just ended up right back where they started … back in the clutches of substance abuse, back in trouble with law enforcement, back in poverty, out on the streets and with no social support. It was a vicious cycle that no one seemed to be able to stop.

  “Well, happy birthday, girl,” Imani said. “I swear on my mamma you don’t look a day over fifteen.” Aria smiled. “Let me tell you what you’re not gonna do. What you’re not gonna do is do nothin’ … Lemme see what I got here.”

  Imani started looking around, unbothered by the other people waiting in line. She grabbed an extra Rice Crispie treat and handed Aria two instead of one. Then she opened a purple plastic binder and took out a slip of yellow paper from the front pocket. She pointed at an address written on it in white lettering. “This here’s a voucher. If you take this down there tonight, you can at least get a warm meal. I think they got a two-piece chicken meal and I think they even got cake some nights, but whatever the case may be.”

  Aria took the slip of paper from her, conscious of the impatience of the people behind her in the line. “Thanks,” Aria said, trying to enhance the gratitude in the word with the look on her face.

  “You have yourself a good day now, OK?” Imani said. Aria nodded and walked away from the table. The sky overhead looked like boiling cream. To the west, the white was turning an ominous purple. Aria could feel that the plants nearby had settled into an eerie stillness, like they always did right before a storm.

  By the time Aria took the bus to the address written on the meal voucher, the streets of the city were more like black rivers. Each raindrop that hit the surface splashed as if it was hitting the surface of a lake.

  Aria sat at one of several long rows of tables with a plate of rice, carrots, tortillas and salsa. Just as Imani had suspected, they were serving vanilla sheet cake that night. The frosting, which had been over-beaten with shortening, was almost waxy. Still Aria savored the square of it that they had given her.

  She was glad that no one would be singing the happy birthday song to her before she ate it. Even though there was no candle, she made a wish inside her own mind. The wish was to stay with Omkar forever.

  “Do you think any o’ these poor saps know how much this shit they’re feedin’ us actually costs?” the man sitting next to her said. Aria had been chatting with him for well over an hour now, since they’d stood together in the line to get in; long enough to remember that his name was Mark. Aria smiled to acknowledge his question, but didn’t answer it.

  “You know some o’ these places, they get companies to donate food or clothes and what-have-you and they charge what to most people seems like a small amount, but what they don’t even realize is just how much fuckin’ money these guys are makin’. You realize if someone gives me this coat for free and I sell it for six dollars, that’s a six hundred percent profit? You’re either the devil or a fuckin’ genius to think up a business plan like that.” He laughed to himself, pulling at the leather of a fruit roll-up with the front of his teeth.

  Mark was one of the strangest people that Aria had ever met. Most people who didn’t have a place to live or food to eat were preoccupied with money. But Mark took it to a whole new level. He was financially obsessed. Money had dominated the majority of their conversation and much of it was financial advice about 401Ks and IRA accounts and other things Aria had never even heard of before. Aria
took what he said with a grain of salt, given that he was giving advice about how to be a millionaire when he himself was out on the streets. Despite the length of his unkempt brown hair and the swell of his weathered face, even Aria had to admit that he looked more like a man who belonged in a corporate corner office than a man who would be on the receiving end of a charity dinner like this.

  Mark had been a self-made man. His mother was a single mom who had raised four kids on a $250 welfare check each month. He considered himself an entrepreneur at the age of ten, when he and a buddy of his had realized that all the kids at school loved reading comics that their parents wouldn’t buy them. They saved up their money and bought as many as they could. Every day at school, they would charge the other kids money to read the comics they had bought. The profits they split from their little venture proved to be enough to buy himself what his mother could never afford. From that day on, he had harbored a secret love affair with money.

  The first product Mark sold was investment-grade diamonds. From there he did private placement stock. By the time 2008 came around, Mark had become a banker.

  In the late 1990s, banks had started taking huge risks. People were buying expensive houses with big loans that they couldn’t afford because of how easy it was to have good credit. It caused the price of homes to rise and also an economic bubble. Because they had a lot of money, loan companies made it easier and easier to get loans, even to those with bad credit. They called them sub-prime loans. Many homeowners during this time refinanced their homes, which changed their mortgages and gave them a lower interest rate. Many of them took out another mortgage on their house and used it for spending money. The companies loaning the money changed their terms so that the borrower would have low interest at first and higher interest later. They called them adjustable-rate mortgages. They often used these initially favorable terms to convince people to take their loans in the first place. Unfortunately, many of the people who accepted were those who also had sub-prime loans. As long as the price of housing was high, investing in sub-prime loans would make the banks and other loan companies a lot of money on top of allowing them to offer even more sub-prime loans. But in response to the economic bubble, the housing companies built too many houses.