I clung to my coffee cup, feeling its warmth in my cold palms. I looked out the foggy window and realized that I must have conjured up today's forecast. It had been a week since I saw my father's cold lifeless body, his face was hollow as if somebody took a vacuum and sucked out his very essence. That man lying there was not my father. My father was invincible. He was a self-made man who insisted on doing things his own way. This man lying here was a slave to fate and terminal illness. Each raindrop that fell and dissipated into the ground reflected each tear that I had cried. It reflected each drop of hope that there was anything beyond this life, and brought to me the realization that I would never see my father again.
I wasn't mad anymore. I had come to peace with it, and the less I held onto that false hope, the more at peace I felt. I was no longer hoping for something that was never going to come.
The bookstore was pretty empty that day, and that was fine with me. I really didn't feel like company anyway. As far as I was concerned, the world stopped the day he took his last breath. I picked up Darwin's Origin of Species. Not because I wanted to piss off the right-wing Christians that got all up in arms because of the "monkey theory," or that I wanted to impress anyone. I was just in a logical, knowledge seeking mood. I wanted truth. That's all. Just research-based scientific truth.
I'll admit, the passages were not easy to read and I am by no means a scientific mind, but in a weird way this heavy dose of theory was an escape for me. There was no talk of heaven, hell or purgatory as I heard in my father's service. There was only scientific theory and it was refreshing. I was a philosophical person by nature and always tried to derive some sort of deep meaning from something that may have had no alternative meaning at all. Then my eyes fixated on this passage "It seems pretty clear that organic beings must be exposed during several generations to the new conditions of life to cause any appreciable amount of variation; and that when the organisation has once begun to vary, it generally continues to vary for many generations. No case is on record of a variable being ceasing to be variable under cultivation."
In my mind I was not thinking of evolution whatsoever. I was thinking of the experiences that we have and the exposure to ideals that are different from our own. And that's when I saw him. These piercing blue eyes looking up from the opposing view of a leather bound variation to my logic. It was titled The Genesis Flood, basically a biblical rebuttal to the Origin of Species.
I quickly turned away and immersed myself back into my book, but at this point I wasn't even reading the words. I was just thinking of how asinine it is to believe in something that isn't even proven. Of course, my mind reverted to my father again. He isn't coming back and I'll never see him in the afterlife. His soul didn't ascend to heaven and he is just ash, part of the earth from whence he came, and that's okay with me. It really is ... It really is .... It really ... is? I turned up to see him again to express my disdain with a shake of the head or a roll of the eyes, but when I fixated my eyes in his direction, the table was empty with just a wooden chair pulled out and not tucked back in. Figures! Those types of people don't have the patience or intellect to read anything straight through. They just believe what they hear or are told. And he didn't even have the decency to push his chair back in. Careless!
I went back to my reading. Then I felt a slight tap on my shoulder. It came as a total shock, so much so that I wasn't even reminded of how much I actually hate that. I looked up and saw his crystal clear blue eyes staring down into my opaque pools of chestnut brown. I was paralyzed. All the thoughts that previously went on in my head suddenly disappeared into oblivion.
"Darwin," he said with a smile.
"Celeste," I responded.
He laughed and continued to stare at me. Oh my gosh. I just realized that he was talking about the book and not introducing himself. My face turned bright red and I couldn't say anything else.
Then he continued, "Doesn't your name mean ?"
"Heavenly," I interrupted, "Yes, I know" as though I had heard it a hundred times.
"Then why?" He paused and nervously laughed. "It's just interesting that you're reading Darwin."
"Why?" I asked defensively.
"Well isn't that a contradiction?"
"To what?"
"Well, you know ..."
"It's about natural selection. You know? Survival of the fittest."
"I know," he said.
"I bet you haven't read it," I said somewhat condescendingly.
"You'd be correct in that assumption."
I figured. I knew it, he probably didn't even ...
"I definitely will though."
Huh? I must have heard that wrong. He probably realized how I felt by the way I looked at him.
"Are you surprised?" He asked.
"Well yeah," I answered as I looked at his book.
"Oh this," he said. "Well you know ..."
"No, I don't"
"Well, I like to keep a door open."
I didn't say anything, but thoughts were flooding my head. Of course he would say that. Looking at his pristine pupils, he hadn't suffered or lost someone. It was easy for him to believe.
"Well, I know the truth." I said, trying to brush him off and go back to my book.
He now kneeled and put his head to where my book was.
"Do you?" he smiled. "Do any of us really?"
"You're not going to try to get me to join your church, because ..."
He laughed, "I don't go to church."
He paused, and then continued, "I mean I did as a kid, but not now."
I made a tsk, tsk sound and then added "You're a bad Christian."
He laughed again.
"I'm Damian."
"Damian?" I asked very unapologetically.
"Yeah, yeah." He said. "I'm evil."
We both laughed.
"No wonder why you don't go to church." I added with a smile.
"May I sit down?"
"If you want," I added nonchalantly although my heart felt as though it would beat out of my chest.
I didn't say anything following that. I just went back to my book, as I could still feel the weight of his stare. When he saw that I did not make eye-contact, he began reading his book.
It got awkwardly silent for a moment, and then I just blurted it out, "What do you mean?"
"Um, what?" He said, completely confused on what I was asking.
"Well, you said you keep a door open. What does that mean?"
"Well," he said. "Just don't close the door entirely."
"The door to what?" I asked, acting oblivious although I knew what he was talking about.
"On hope," he said.
"What if you have no hope?"
"Well, that's sad."
"Is it? What if it's just realistic?"
He paused. I got him this time. I knew it.
"What if it's this?" he asked.
"What?"
"Well, what if this is it?"
"Huh, I'm confused. What are you talking about?"
"What if this is hope?"
"What?" I asked, getting annoyed now.
"This," he pointed to the both of us. "Right now. Right here."
I laughed out loud.
He smiled.
"Uh, no." I said still chuckling.
"Why not?"
"It's just happenstance."
"Really? Me, you, Charles Darwin," he looked down at his book "Henry M. Morris?"
I laughed.
"Okay, it's coincidence."
"If you say so," he said.
"Yeah."
"So you don't think that our lives are enriched by different experiences and different ideals other than our own?"
Wait. What? Did he just read my mind a minute ago? I had to hide my surprise.
"I suppose."
"Well, here we are," he said and smiled.
I didn't know what else to say. I turned away from his gaze. Just then I looked outside the window as I did only a few minutes before. This time my view was crystal clear, the rain had stopped, and just a glimmer of sun peeked through from the clouds.
"I guess so," I said with a smile, placing my book down right on my coffee cup as it spilled over onto both books.
"Well, I guess we're buying these now," he laughed.
And two decades later, the rain still falls, the sun still shines, the leaves still die, the grass still grows, and two opposing views still sit side by side, but this time on a wooden bookshelf which contains a glass door ... that is always just slightly open.
