Isa Garcia

Like Lines on a Map is all about the beauty and fragility of human connections. It’s about how I love, how I’ve lost, and how the geography of my heart has been shaped by different encounters.

There are 30 essays about 30 people that touch on a hodgepodge of the human experience: romance, friendship, family, home, endings, beginnings, tiny somethings, obvious nothings, and how each of these somehow turned me into somebody loved.

Like Lines On A Map

Claudine

It’s scary to think how fragile human connection truly is. Time, it seems, erodes love until we're lett with just a solid few. What I hope now is that the people l know and love today will be the same people l know and love ten years from now. This is the only part of me, ever hopeful about the future of friendship, that has truly stayed sixteen at heart.

l'd like to think that's not impossible. l'd like, for once, to be sure. I'd like, most of all, to be right.

In the beginning there was you and I, faith like a child's and hands lifted up towards the heavens. I was a young girl just figuring out the story of my life when they told me not to worry. When they told me that you were the ansvwer. But l grew up and found that you weren't really an answer. You were more like a poem, something beautiful that I kept trying to understand. You weren't an answer but you were a torch in the darkness. You lit my way. You kept me warm. I couldn't always get your rhythm or your cadence but I knew I felt safe. I felt safe and that, to me, was everything.

I could believe in the miracles. I could believe in the stories, in the burning bush and the raising of the dead. But a grace big enough to accept the worst parts of my self how could that be anything less than the most beautiful fiction you've ever heard?

This is the revolution you bring: you turn fiction into fact. I came home to a love that spans a distance my heart cannot map. I believe in grace now but I know it's less of a story and more of a table, welcoming all sides of me, even the ones that aren't pretty. God, you are not an answer. You are a hundred million questions that won't resolve in this lifetime. 

On some days, when my heart gets tired from all this waitin. remember that some of God's best work happens slowly. We live in a world that worships at the foot of immediacy, that believes so ardently in the power of now. A world caught up in speed, that glorifies the hustle, that seeks to make us citizens in constant motion. I, for one, live in a city whose heartbeat is so quick there are days I can't even seem to keep up with it. 

And so I find solace in the fact that some stories come trom a gradual unfolding.

Some things are for now and some things are for later and the person who can honor this is a person I can trust. There is something beautiful in the withholding, in the courage it takes to say "no, I want to save some for tomorrow". To deny one's self of that which he can get now, to abide by the unfavorable principle of slow and steady, has become, hands down, my favorite act of rebellion.

I have this image in my head of people leaving flowers where I lay. Then, eventually, time will erode the memory of me and even that will stop too. There is a certain kind of freedom in knowing that I will one day become absolutely irrelevant.

My friend, Mikka, was telling me about the movie Casper. It was a hit in the ‘90s starring the adorable Devon Sawa and Christina Ricci. I haven’t watched it in years. She talked about why the ghosts stay. They keep the house haunted because they have unfinished business, because they still have loose ends left to tie. 

And I thought about my dream and that person and all the other ghosts still roaming the hallways of my mind. And I thought about Einstein and what I should change because I don't want to live the rest of my life in quiet insanity. 

What I am learning now is that there is no two-step program, no mental exorcist who can magically chase away the dead. There are only choices.

This is the resolve beating inside my chest: I will not sit by old tombstones anymore or lay flowers at the grave of unnecessary sorrow. I will chase after spring, after newness; think less about death and more about life. I will hold what breathes close to me because it's only when your atoms and my molecules take up the same space that the nightmare finally goes away.

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