Chapter 2: Apropos
“Gregor wanted to drag himself further, as though the surprisingly unbelievable pain could disappear with a change of location”
At this point, it may be appropriate for a brief digression to describe our protagonist, but instead of that, dear reader, please suffer a digression to the digression.
Joseph and Sofia strolled around a small community pond, pausing slightly to take note of a disconcerting sign; “Do NOT feed the alligators.” This sign worried Sofia more than was even its maker's intention, a sure indication they weren’t locals. It wasn’t so much the indication of the potentiality of modern-day dinosaurs that caused such disquiet but the certainty with which the sign presupposed their presence that troubled her. After some thought, she concluded it was the “NOT” in the sign that disturbed her most.
Sofia had long red hair with bangs covering what she called, though no one else considered, an oversized forehead. Her bangs broke right at her manicured eyebrows so as not to obstruct her vision or tickle her long, lush eyelashes. She had penetrating, lilac-blue eyes and a thin nose with faint freckles that faded outwards to her ruddy cheeks and downwards to her full pink lips. She was wearing an off-white, oversized, hollow knitted sweater with shorts and white Allbirds running shoes. Her smartwatch, which she wore on her dominant left hand, had a light pink silicone band. She wore it everywhere she went so as to never blemish her reputation for perfect punctuality.
Joseph’s thick, short black hair was cut and faded upwards and down towards the checks of his beard in the modern style. He had emerald-colored eyes under an ever-furrowed brow with dark circles around his eyes, which had the duel effect of accentuating his sprightly eyes and immersing his entire demeanor in a persistent weariness. He wore a tightly fitted black shirt with dark green shorts, cream-colored Aldo running shoes, and a cognac-colored single-wrap wristband around his non-dominant left wrist.
The setting sun, shining through a thin veneer of dissipating clouds, decorated the sky in a layered array of red, orange, pink, and violet. Each color slowly faded to the next until reaching the stubborn azure blue portion of the sky. The clouds, after the strong torrential downpours of the preceding week, for which Joseph and Sofia were absent for, were painted a light, muted pink. The air was thick with humidity, making the experience more authentic, if not wholly more unpleasant. Small pockets of mushrooms poked out of the dark seashore paspalum grass, giving the squirrels, who were all together much more affable than the cosmopolitan squirrels Sofia was accustomed to, a rare delicacy. The loud croaking of the frogs, which had already started and would continue long into the night, the chirping of the cardinals and cicadas, and the ever-present splashing of the fountainhead of the pond added to the harmonic melody of the fast-approaching night. Not a single one of these observations eluded the perceptive and inquisitive gaze of one of our characters.
“I think we could get the rental pro-rated if you wanted to leave tomorrow,” Sofia said out of the blue.
“What? Why would we do that?”
“I just thought you might want to go early… just in case.” Sofia paused for a few moments, and after realizing Joseph was not catching on, she added, “Because of what your sister said.”
“Oh… Don’t worry about that. That man is as stubborn as a mule. He’ll be fine. Isabella is always worried about something.”
‘What does stubbornness have to do with it?’ Sofia thought to herself.
Walking around the first bend, they noticed a small pothole with an orange traffic cone placed languidly inside the hole so that it was scarcely visible until they were passing it. This especially perplexed Joseph.
“Why on earth would someone put a warning sign in an almost imperceptible area?”
“You can still see the top of it. If you’re dumb enough to fall into a hole, it’s kind of your fault at that point,” was Sofia’s response to what Joseph considered an obviously rhetorical question.
“Yes, of course, but if you’re going to put a warning sign, it should be readily visible, right?” Joseph asked with a slight hint of incredulity and now with no pretense of statement. Sofia, to Joseph’s bemusement, now decided not to respond, acting as though she didn’t hear him.
They were both silent for a few minutes before Sofia, apropos of nothing, exclaimed, “Wildlife!”
“What?” Joseph asked, half bemused, half startled.
“Instead of alligators, they could have just said wildlife. That would have been all-encompassing.”
Unsure how to respond, Joseph gave a sidelong glance and nodded slightly.
Coming towards a fork that diverted two paths away from the community pond and towards two trails, one uphill and one downhill, Joseph motioned towards the uphill while Sofia motioned in the opposite path. Sofia’s path led directly and more scenically towards their rented house, while Joseph’s path was long, winding, and covered by trees.
“Come on, I want to get a little workout,” Joseph said with an upward inflection, indicating a suggestion to a question. A question which he already knew the answer to.
“I don’t want to get sweaty before dinner, go ahead, and I’ll see you at the house,” Sofia said with her high-pitched, slightly nasal voice, which was, at their first meeting, pleasurably idiosyncratic and endearing but, over time, became hardly noticeable, then vaguely grating and finally, painfully insufferable. Being that Joseph was well into the “insufferable” stage of their relationship, though he himself was completely unaware of that fact, he agreed with feigned acquiescence and walked alone towards the hill.
In reality, Joseph was anxious to finish a line of thinking that he had started some time prior, so he suggested the more rigorous hike in order to finish it while walking alone. Sofia, of course, did not appreciate his 1000-mile stares and his bouts of solipsistic pensiveness while they were spending quality time together, so he had been looking for a few moments alone all trip to think.
Joseph had, for much of his adult life, been horribly troubled by a very depressing and terrifying proposition. Since reading Albert Camus at a young age, which is not to be advised, he always had a nagging worry that life was, in fact, on the whole, with all possible externalities accounted for, not worth living. He thought the idea of bringing children into this world a cruel crime against the unborn child. It wasn’t until recently, though, that his sparse and fleeting worries about life began to morph into a more palpable, brooding, and all-encompassing anxiety. Of course, it seems that existential crises tend to plague individuals with too much time on their hands. All the same, staring this void in the face was the source of ever-growing anxiety, which was only amplified with the consideration that Sofia was not so subtle in her ever-growing desire to start a family. Perhaps that was actually what brought it to the forefront of his mind.