Joy Campbell
“The thing about heaven is, if you were good you never make it there,” she tells me. “The people in charge give you the option of spending eternity in paradise, or sacrificing your soul to help others. Only the selfish choose paradise, and are immediately cast down to hell — those who choose sacrifice are sent back down to earth as rain. Sometimes as thunderstorms, depending on the burdens they carry.”
I met Joy Campbell late one night at the laundromat.
Maybe “met” isn’t the most accurate way of putting it, since I had drunkenly stumbled in to “do” laundry after walking by the window and seeing her angelic face under the harsh fluorescent light. I didn’t actually have laundry to do, so I proceeded to take my socks off and throw them in the machine, in hopes that it would buy me time to strike up a conversation with her. I racked my brain thinking of the best opening line I could come up with, and eventually just blurted out, “colors shouldn’t mix.” For the next couple of minutes I sounded like a bumbling idiot trying to explain to her that I meant her clothes in the washer, and not people in general. She broke the tension with a giggle, and ever since then I started doing laundry on Thursdays at 2:15am.
That night, Joy sobers me up with the sound of her voice trying to get me to understand her beliefs about what happens to us when we’re gone. “Eventually that water makes it to our toilets, and so now we’re urinating, defecating, and occasionally vomiting on people who were probably wonderful individuals during their residence on Earth,” I say. “Well I guess I have something to look forward to,” she shrugs and says as she unloads her soggy clothes onto a laundry cart. I laugh as she reassures me that she’s not that type of girl. “I guess I didn’t think the afterlife through well enough.”
Sock-less, I sit down on the bench and watch her fold her clothes into neat little piles, listening to her hum a song that made me both sad and happy simultaneously. She finishes while I’m still waiting for my mismatched socks to dry, so we sit on the bench watching them tumble and dance around each other’s confined existence. “Colors shouldn’t mix,” she says to me.
***
The next Thursday night we’re sitting on the folding table together watching the clothes in the dryer put on a show, in silence. Not because we had nothing to talk about, but because we both realize the comfort that quiet brings and what it means to be alone together. The machine stops spinning just as I’m turning my head to ask her if I could buy her a cup of coffee one morning. “Clothes are done,” she says, “but I’d love to buy you a cup of coffee in a couple hours.” Between jokes and sneaky glances we fold our clothes, and since Joy has more than just 3 t-shirts, a pair of jeans, and a handful of socks, she keeps unmaking my folded pile until she’s finished with hers. At the door we say good morning, and see you in a few.
There’s a tiny coffee shop around the corner from the laundromat, where I swear to god I fall in love with her teeth while she’s using them to tell me to stop saying swear words. “They’re not meant to be ugly, they’re meant to complement and spice up sentences. Try it sometime,” I say.
“I would friggin’ never,” Joy says while suppressing a tiny smile that eventually grows into a full one, and reaffirms that I’ve once again fallen for another pretty face, pretty fast.
I’m running my finger around the lip of my mug as I tell Joy that every day I wake up to new aches in my joints. Some days it’d be bumps, bruises, or the chemicals in my brain being unbalanced, that kept my existence occupied. She asks me if I have scars to show for it, because she’d love for me to see hers. After coffee we go back to her place where she lets me graze the scars on her inner thighs with my fingertips while I press kisses onto her sternum, where they linger and cling the way a pair of mismatched socks in a washer would at 2:21am. We’re laying in bed afterwards when she turns to me and asks, “have you ever been in love?” I tell her too many times but love just wasn’t into me, so it had yet to work in my favor. “You’re never truly in love unless you stop seeing faults in your person. Until bad habits just turn to habits, you are by love. You are around love, under, and above love, but not in love,” she says. That morning turned into night and our conversation burned late, against the paper-thin walls of her one-bedroom apartment in a nondescript brick building sitting off a street that had something to do with a plant in its name. Elmdale? Elmwood? I was too in love in love to remember at the time.
***
Some time after I had found Joy I stopped feeling blue enough to take all the red lights home. She was everything I was not, filling the negative spaces in my life with her radiance and kindness that gave me hope enough to see the world for what it was: a giant rock hurling through space where we woke up every day and made good or bad decisions that would have absolutely no impact on the rest of the known universe, just the other beings we happened to coexist with during this period between mass extinctions. And what was the point in making life miserable for anyone, including ourselves?
She calls me her little cactus that thrives in the darkness. I call her lightness.
***
The night I lost Joy to her battle, an unrelenting storm flooded the street. I stood at the edge of the driveway watching the coroner’s van drive away, almost floating. Holding my palm out in front of me I watched the raindrops form rivers on the lines, reading my misfortunes. Drenched, I walk up the stairs into her apartment and curl up into a ball on her bed. Her scent lingered on the sheets and pillow, and only served to remind me I’d never get to smell her the way I did when I would come up behind her to kiss her neck while she cooked, or when she would curl up on me during those late-nights we would talk each other to sleep. I reach for the pillow to hug for something to hug tighter while her ghost wandered down the hallways of mind, when I feel a piece of paper folded several times over.
The note begins:
“Dolores, in my lifetime I’ve flirted with death far too many times.”
