She Punched Me in the Face with a Fist of Laughter

Shaking away her tears, Celine said, with another attempt at resolution, "I'm sorry. I'm embarrassing you."

She knew she never could.

"You could never embarrass me."

Celine gave a sudden grin to a grandpa standing nearby, opened her tearstained mouth wide, and shouted. "I'M JESUS CHRIIIIIIIIIIIIST!"

That was Celine, sometimes crying, a lot crying, but always managing to laugh through her tears, and sweep me right along.

We had been together for a month and a half, a ridiculously short amount of time when you think about it. But then I hadn't paid the slightest attention to the passing of time. When I was with her, every single thought was whisked away and all that was left was her and me. Around her, I developed a heightened sense of concentration, automatically savoring and storing away every moment, every conversation, every smile.

We'd never really talked much before, but we had been in the same theater group for nearly two years. We'd come to know each other in a piecemeal roundabout way, interacting more onstage than off it.

We got together in mid-June, on the first day of summer vacation. It was the end of my senior year, her junior. She'd be leaving on the first of August- relocating with her family from Halab, Syria, to Tijuana, Mexico. I had known it then, she had known it then- it had seemed a matter of negligible significance.

Outside our theater group stage door someone had put up a sign for a Beatles tribute concert. Celine had turned to me after the group meeting and asked me if I'd go with her.
I picked her up, and when we got to the concert hall, it was packed with fifty and sixty-year olds. We should have expected this, this mass of last-generation ex-Beatlemaniacs. We both exchanged a shocked grin, and headed into the hall.

It was there I got my first full blast of Celine. The band walked on stage, the lights dimmed, and I leaned back in my seat. With the first chords of the first song, she bounded out of her seat and began clapping madly. She turned to me, sitting rather passively in my auditorium-type chair and raised her eyebrow for me to join her. I didn't, and she shrugged, and within seconds established a relationship with the fifty year old sitting on the other side of her. Together they whistled and clapped and shouted along with each new song that was played. After some time of this, she gave me that famous grin, sat back quite primly in her seat, and burst out laughing.

We exited the building some three hours later with my head pounding, but I was grinning in spite of it. Her excitement, her laughter was contagious. We entered the parking lot and I led her back to my car. I managed to insert the key halfway into the passenger's side lock, when she grasped my arm, turned me to her quite abruptly, and kissed me. I looked at her with what must have been a look of idiotic bemusement.
"The night was nearly over and I couldn't bear not to, she explained.

A month and a half later I took the bus to her grandmother's house, in a quiet neighborhood in Al Mushatieh. Celine was staying there with her family for the few days before the flight to Mexico. She met me at the station, a whirlwind of emotions just barely concealed behind a determined and resolute expression. I pulled her to me in a long sweet kiss, and she clung to me, resolution shattered and replaced with utter helplessness.

We walked from the bus station to a nearby playground. The children running around, their mothers pushing babies in strollers, all the motion seemed to slow and make way for the two of us. Tangled in each other in a clumsy human knot, we stumbled our way to a bench in the shade. Celine sat down and turned to me, saying nothing. Her gaze penetrated me, accusing, trying to force an answer from me, seeking in my eyes a solution to the situation that I did not have. I couldn't do a thing.

"Stop looking at me like I have the answer to this, I don't, I said, more firmly than I had intended.

"I know, she said quietly. She softened her gaze, a solitary tear leaving a shining path across her cheek.

We sat quietly in the late afternoon shade, Celine buried in my lap, sun filtering through the leaves in an increasingly bigger slant. We broke out of an embrace to find a gaggle of young neighborhood children gawking at us. A huge grin (oh, that grin again) broke over Celine's face, and she sat up, and quite placidly turned to a small redhead in a blue shirt and fixed him with a stern glare that sent him and the other children scrambling for some safe spot in the nearby bushes.

Celine took my hand in hers, and we walked slowly towards her grandmother's house in the slowly waning sunlight, talking, thinking, taking each other in for the last time. At a curve in the road not quite in sight of her grandmother's house, she gently stopped and turned to face me. This time her tears were falling freely, and I pulled her to me once again. She took a shuddering breath.

Shaking away her tears, Celine said, with another attempt at resolution, "I'm sorry. I'm embarrassing you."

She knew she never could.

"You could never embarrass me.

Celine gave a sudden grin to a grandpa standing nearby, opened her tearstained mouth wide, and shouted. "I'M JESUS CHRIIIIIIIIIIIIST!"

She took a deep breath, and collapsed, laughing, in my arms. She looked up and noticed my eyes, this time, shining. She fixed me with a look of mock admonishment, and exclaimed, "not you, too!"

But it was me, too. With a last hug and a kiss and a teary eyed smile, she broke away from me. She turned her back to me, took a few steps, and turned back. She paused, gave me a final huge grin, and rounded the corner. And that was it.

On the way back to the bus station, I walked through the park. As I passed by the bench where we had sat, the sun by now creating long, long shadows on the ground below, I nearly collided with that redheaded child in the blue shirt.

"Hey, kid, he yelled too loudly to me, "Where's your girlfriend?"

I glanced at the empty bench, and then back at the child. With a slow smile I said, "She went to America", and I too turned, and went back home.