Time Traveling, Taylor Rose Elliott

Time Travelling Candide’s The Best of All Possible [Jobs]

by Taylor Rose Elliott

She pours coffee in the yellow kitchen, bright and almost sunny, even though it is cloudy outside. As she stirs in the cream, she splashes it onto the paperwork she was reading and laughs at herself. She hears him waking up in the bedroom. The gray countertop is stacked with file folders, neatly tabbed and clipped. The names on them mean everything, but somehow they don’t hurt her to read; in her youth those names would have brought her down more than she could ever understand. I wish I could have told her it wouldn’t have to be that way forever. Under last night’s reading on the coffee table, there are strewn manuscripts, sticky notes and paperclipped coffee shop napkins. Maybe the manuscripts have been read by some big publisher, and maybe they haven’t. I can’t tell that just by looking at them now. But I’m glad to see that she is still writing, and there are manuscripts put together at all.

Some of the notes on that coffee table look like they belong to someone else. Some of the books look well worn, but unfamiliar, even like something she would never pick for herself. And they are carefully bookmarked instead of dog-eared. She didn’t end up with that drummer who liked math after all. I wish I could have told her then, when I knew her, that it was going to be okay – even when drummer boy picked the worst time to leave. Out of all times, he chose the time when she had no one left. But I wish I could tell her that just because she had no one doesn’t mean she had nothing. She woke up that morning beside the first boy to teach her how to look in his eyes without flinching. She walks back into the soft-lit room, where he is still buried under the comforter. She hands him a cup of coffee, a thank you, because he brought hers yesterday when she had a bad night, and as he sits up she slides back under his arm, fully dressed. She wants to dwell in that light for a moment before she leaves for work. When she walks out the door to leave for work, it’s deliberate and slow; it’s intentional. A few years before in the place she used to live, she’d often fallen down the stairs in her haste to leave. Now, she takes the time to scratch the cat, Simon, under his chin. When she puts on her sweater, her ring gets caught on the wool. She picks up her keys,

her briefcase, and she walks out of the door. In less than a minute she comes running back in, and he walks out of the bedroom and hands her a purple umbrella, kissing her on the cheek. He holds the wriggling black cat in his arms, steadying himself while the kitten runs around his feet while she steps out into the rain again. She walks to work, or maybe since it’s raining she drives. Maybe she decides to take a subway or a train. But she listens to music the whole time, or maybe if she’s on the subway she sings in her head and tries to think about all the reasons to be kind that day. She holds down her skirt as she steps over the grate, and she still wears the same shoes that she used to before she had to grow up. No use changing what is still functional, he told her, as she mulled over a pair of heels before her first day. So in the new job her worn Dr. Martens stayed. Her workplace smells like new paint and old wood. It’s small, but there are a lot of windows, and sometimes in between patients she walks out of her office just to sit in a waiting room chair and look out the big window, where you can see the tops of the old buildings and the rooftop cafés and balconies where the students will study or the restaurants will serve people at round tables. The secretary nods to her while she talks politely on the phone, tapping her pen at the top of the schedule to let her know that, as often, her first patient cancelled again. So she walks into her office, a pang of disappointment in her chest that never weakens even though this patient cancels regularly. So she goes into her office and writes an email to the scared man, trying to paint yellow sunshine and love in-between every professionalized bit of jargon. And the next patient comes in and then another: a teenage boy who always wears a Patriots cap because he keeps pulling out his hair; an old woman who carries around an urn. She forgot her lunch—she’s still as forgetful as she used to be—so she walks across the street to a coffee shop that’s not her favorite but has a good espresso and orders a cappuccino and a roll while she rereads a book with a broken spine. The next patient has red hair and reminds her of her sister, and every Monday, as she gazes at the scars on her arm and the lines on her collarbone, she had to remind herself not to connect the two. Not to reach over and grab her hand and squeeze it, like she did her sister. As she hands the teenage girl a tissue and watches her smear her mascara, she still looks into her kohl-smeared eyes and sees her sister’s, green seafoam and deep blue. But still, she writes her notes and calls her Mom in between patients. She doesn’t tell her mom what happened. But the redhead girl’s mom killed herself, so she takes solace in her mom’s voice, scolding her about being late with her taxes. On the way home, he calls, his voice unfocused and slow, and says he will be home late; he is in his office writing and playing, and he doesn’t think he will run out of words anytime soon. She pictures his hair, falling toward his face as he is bent over in front of his desk lamp and the keyboard clicking or his pen scratching. She smiles at

picturing this, the furrowing of his brow, those little glances he’d steal out the window between every paragraph. I don’t know what he is writing or working on, but it seems like she is proud if it, of him. It is not worth her getting lonely over, either. I wish I could have told her a few years ago that there was such a smile, like this one, that wouldn’t hurt. She went home with plans to cook dinner, but instead burned potatoes on the stove, because by the time they had begun to cook she was engrossed in her papers on the coffee table. There’s and they’re’s and too’s and two’s and inversion and conjunctions. The light faded over the words on the table and, by the time she heard the door slam closed, the cat was curled in her lap, and she had begun to read slower and slower. They ended up eating cereal at the kitchen counter, laughing while they tried to get the cat to eat the food she burnt. Eventually the counter was cleared and the coffee was poured, and they sat at the table and talked about what they had created or done or finished that day. She told him about the redhead girl, and he didn’t mind that she had talked about it so many times before. They sat on the concrete steps, and in her talking she had let her coffee go cold, as she always did. So she replaced the mug for his hands, and they just talked about the moon and the song she used to sing when she first learned how to play the guitar. She fell asleep with the cat sleeping on the hollow of her back, on the right side of the bed, and he took off her glasses, took the book off her chest, and put them on the bedside table. She woke up in the middle of the night as she always did, but it didn’t worry her as much as it used to. I remember the way she used to be, and it doesn’t surprise me that her life ended up this way. It doesn’t surprise anyone that she’s a writer, a counselor, that her job is to understand people and to teach people to understand. It doesn’t surprise anyone that she married someone like him, finally falling into his arms after much trial and tribulation and doubt. It doesn’t surprise anyone that her life is good and that she is happy and that she stayed so free and young and wandered through all the school and internships and underestimation. But I think it would have surprised her, 10 years ago, as she spent her days floating in between hands that were rough and hands that were so soft they let her go, as she floated between warm, big beds and cold, tiny ones. As she looked into the future the way she picked at her skin and tried to make sense of constellations she had not yet learned, or learned to find. As she tried to hide old scars but still made new ones. But I can only hope that these ten years later have been forgetful, and healing, and soft enough to let her grow kind and believing again.