LAS MENINAS

I remember she was standing in the snow. It was the year's first snow. The day was my birthday, and I was twenty years old. I remember the empty, lonely stretch of rice paddies, the smattering of trees, the darkness outside the window, the bus I was in, clunking down a road on the outskirt of town. We could've easily gone for miles without seeing a single person. Would she be there? I wondered, even as we neared the bus stop and I could glimpse the accompanying sign coming up ahead, misshapen like a scarecrow with a broken arm. A harmonica version of "Auld Lang Syne" was playing over the crackling radio. She'd be there, I thought to myself, my forehead pressed against the cool window. The dusk had passed. The night had finally caught up to us and far outrun the bus. It wouldn't have been strange if we had simply passed the bus stop, but the bus pulled to a stop after overshooting it by a dozen or so yards. She was standing where the shadow of the crooked sign ended in the snow.

The bus took off before my feet could touch the ground. For a second, as I was recovering my balance, I felt as though the ground were moving underneath me. It was moving, and the earth was spinning even in the dark, and now, after all that doubt, we were finally facing one another, as surely as the moon making its orbit.

I didn't think you'd come.

But you waited.

We didn't say those words out loud, but it felt as though we had. There was a faint light, perhaps from the hidden moon. I don't remember what exactly we said. But I recall her hands, robbed of all warmth, and the endlessly long light of a faraway train journeying swiftly across the fields and disappearing into the distance. For a while, we kept our eyes on that light and then, as if on cue, we began walking in the snow. Her breath came out in small white puffs. They were defined by the surrounding darkness, and I felt I could hear the snow collecting in the silence. The snow was desolate and expressionless, like guests leaving a funeral.

I distinctly remember the road, with its naked, sparsely spaced trees, the surrounding rice paddies and dark factories, and the unknown, nameless streams and hills. Winter strips away the names of many things, I thought as I walked. The anonymous trees were rid of everything but their trunks and branches. The road, white and narrow, glimmered in the snow. We walked and walked that nameless road, our hands clasped tightly. Little by little, they grew warmer. The touch and warmth of her hand, the things she must have been feeling—they coursed down her hand and through mine, like water rushing under the frozen surface of a stream. For some reason, I became sad. She seemed to be crying softly. A few snowflakes fell across her blurry face, a face now unclear to me. I wanted to say something but didn't know what to say. Instead, I squeezed her hand tighter and continued walking.

It could have been that I was feeling the real her for the first time. She seemed so unfamiliar, like trees that become anonymous once stripped of their bark. Nothing was for certain: the snow, the road we were on, my hand holding her hand, or the world itself. The trees, with no hands to hold on to, gave up trying to reach out to each other and stood shaking in the dark. People who can hold each others hands should never let go, I thought to myself.

Beyond the trees lining the road, I could see the faint lights of the restaurant Santorini, lonely and forlorn like the lights of a dying galaxy.

"To be honest, I thought you wouldn't come," she said softly, her head bowed like a snowman collapsing under its own weight. The words

I missed you so much

echoed inside me, like a faint hallucination. I didn't say the words out loud or offer any excuses. Instead, I stopped and turned to face her. Gently, I began dusting the snow off her hair and scarf. Gingerly, she also began dusting the snow off my head. We stood there like snowmen, patting each other down. Without a word, I grabbed her and hugged her close. It happened so suddenly, but it felt like I'd planned it all along. Her body was cold like that of a lifeless princess. We stood there in each other's arms in the snow. A weathercock high above us creaked on its iron pole and turned in our direction, its beak cast downward. Gone was the "temporarily closed" sign that had hung over the restaurant's fence a month ago. The fence, its paint chipped in places, was now strung with Christmas lights blinking intermittently like fireflies. Those lights, together with the real, living fireflies flitting around us, were all a blessing.

I still can't forget the sound of her heart beating. It felt as if her heart had slipped into my arms, no, into my body, and become a part of me. Even after we went inside the restaurant and took a seat by the corner window, I felt I could hear it, an echo getting dimmer and dimmer. I heard the sound of wood crackling in the fireplace, the sound of water boiling somewhere softly, the December wind knocking against the window, the wind chime tinkling against the door, and the sound of

her heart beating. The sound of her heart beating. The sound I still hear to this day.

Inside the restaurant, it was dark. We silently sipped our green tea until the owner came with a bundle of firewood and proceeded to untie it.

"Wait just one minute. It'll soon warm up in here," he said.

A man in his forties with a bushy beard, the owner either wanted to go to Europe or had been there and missed it because the place was full of antique furniture and European knickknacks. Feeling slightly drowsy from the warmth, I looked out the window at the darkness, the falling snow, and the glittering snow-covered road we'd just passed. I couldn't bring myself to look at her. She was also looking out the window at the dark, her hands folded neatly in her lap. We tossed a few unremarkable questions back and forth. Other than that, we didn't say much even after we'd ordered food. There was the sound of wood crackling in the fireplace, of onions being chopped, of something frying in a pan. The sudden hug had placed a huge distance between us, worse than when we passed the empty rice paddies and the factory to arrive at this European-themed place. I didn't know what to say. The meal began stiffly, in silence.

"I'm sorry," she whispered.

She spoke in a tiny voice, but I felt as shaken up and unsettled as cracked ice. For what? And why? She began to cry, and try as I might, I couldn't understand why. My mouth was full of salad, but the thought crossed my mind that maybe twenty-year-old guys are like AM radios. We can turn the knob all we want, but we'll never receive that elusive signal called woman. I sat there blank as a dead radio, facing tears as clear as late-night FM radio broadcasts. I felt I'd done something very wrong.

Twenty-year-old girls, as well, are like a radio wave guys can never receive. I learned this much later. She probably didn't know what to do. Youth, really, is like a shortwave radio, and relationships, whether for better or for worse, are ninety percent filled with myth. But these were things we didn't know at the time. In any case, we were only twenty years old, an age in which—for better or worse—we had no choice but to leave the majority of our luck to fate.

All love is founded on myth, the myth that you...