my Charles Wallace

I just finished reading through A Wrinkle in Time Trilogy. As I moved pagepagepage through each book, I found myself hanging on to pieces of the previous. I hung on to the magic in A Wrinkle in Time and the way that it awakened my imagination, poking at the long unused sections of my brain like the soft and gushy meat in the grocery fridge.

(Vegan aside: despite my meat-free diet, I have never been able to help myself when passing the vacuum-sealed meat in the grocery. My mom always told me not to touch, but it was so squishy and unfamiliar--and to think of its source! And how different it looks cooked. And that somewhere inside us, in a different, but similar, form, we are that!)

I'm still hanging on A Wind in the Door. Charles Wallace is to Meg what Derek is to me. My brother. We could kythe (a form of telepathy in the book) and understand each other in ways that others couldn't. We knew each other's needs without saying them out loud. In this second book in the series, Charles Wallace becomes quite ill, his lungs weakening, the farandola failing to "deepen". All along, all that I wanted was to become Meg, to be taken under the literal wing of a cherubim and delve into Derek's being and encourage his muscle cells to keep fighting the Echthroi, convince them to deepen.

Part of me wanted Charles Wallace to die in the book. I wanted there to be some realism to the fantasy. I wanted to know that even if I could have done the impossible, things would have still happened this way.



On Friday, I fell asleep on the bus. I had gotten up at 4:30am to go to work early, which ended up being much earlier than I anticipated because as I got ready, I soon realized that getting up at 4:30 was ridiculously unnecessary to catch the bus. I arrived promptly at 6:40, and counted down the hours until I could go back to bed.

At 3:30, I made my way home. I sat, book in lap, trying to finish A Wind in the Door when I nodded off. I awoke suddenly. A few seats over, a man was staring at me. I tried to shake off the sleep but couldn't keep my head up. At each stop, my eyes jumped out the window to catch the name of the bus station. I managed to not miss my transfer, and rejuvinated after my nap, my eyes were locked in that lefttoright repeating line like a typewriter's paper roll--so locked in that I was entirely oblivious on my second bus.

There was a sudden turn and sharp incline. I've ridden this bus plenty and don't remember this road... "Next stop, Newell Street". Not one I remembered. I waited one more stop and noticed that we were on 9th avenue. My stop is several stopped prior along 10th.

"Did you already stop at Halladay?" I asked the driver. I was the last person on the bus.

"Yes."

I laughed and stepped down to the sidewalk. Can't be too many blocks. Surely it wasn't, and the sun was unusually bright, especially for my way home from work; I've become so used to leaving in the dark and coming home in the dark. I passed children walking home from school with their parents, and I thought how funny it is to be a child. A little girl cried to her mother about the mean kids at school. That used to be me--how I would cry and whine. What shamefully funny beings we are as children. I thought of Meg in Book 1 and how she would stamp her foot as if she were younger. But we all are that--strange little learners with a developing sense of emotion and very little grasp on why we're thrown into it all.

The wind has been particularly strong. As I walked, my hair tossed across my face, and I squinted my eyes to avoid the chill burn. It was an autumn wind--the late afternoon kind that brings a cold front and fallen leaves.

The only thing on my mind was A Wind in the Door. Why that title? Why Charles Wallace? Why Derek?

The past year, wind has represented a voice. At Derek's funeral, I first learned of the offering of wind chimes to the deceased's family as a token to hear that person through untranslatable tingdings and clinktinks. Dawnna and I would sit on the porch and cry because sometimes, the wind chimes sung without a breeze.

This wind is audible with chimes. It whooos and whooshes like a washing machine. It's the kind of wind that pushes you forward and slams the door behind you.

It's the kind of wind that embraces your tired bones when you're walking, silent, home from work and wondering why Meg can save Charles Wallace but you cannot.