A Tale of Two Survivors
Her tears were cold on my bed by the time I arrived back home. Every part of my body screamed for the certain relief it offered my exhausted muscles, but for a second I could only stand there; staring at the stains on my pillowcase. I wanted to cry but my body was too tired. Wait for morning it said, that’s why they call it that. I couldn’t really bear the thought of that though, let alone the possibility of overdue sobs. I was only beginning to kill the unrelenting loop in the back of my head urging me out of my one month success in quitting cigarettes. In the remaining parts of my brain not fried by hospital fluorescents and bad news I saw her laying there on my bed in a cocoon of sheets; quietly sobbing. Long after the ride to the hospital and the ‘where were you’ stories are all forgotten, I’ll still see her laying in that cocoon crying without making a sound.
There was a detachment in her eyes, but I felt it all around me too. The world felt somehow like a giant dream and she and I were the only ones onto it; and in that, she found beauty beyond that which I’ve ever seen. Her naturally curly hair, loosely pony-tailed, with ringlets falling out perfectly, she wore no make-up and sweatpants, a combination I would, under any other circumstances, find perfectly irresistible. Today, though, we battled the guilt of being alive. Only love can really succeed in that fight, and I guess somehow we knew we weren’t holding those kinds of weapons just yet.
When her hand found mine from time to time, as we sorted through and boxed up a life, it was cold but held tight. She was wearing a t-shirt she had bought at the mall lifetimes ago. I wanted to tell her we could do this later; I wanted to drag her out and make a scene, tell her I love her, and that every thing’s going to be alright, but I couldn’t lie. Especially to someone who’s gotten bombarded by nothing but truths, she’d see right through it.
She showered like she had lived in my home for years, and left after barely touching a cup of coffee. We didn’t talk much, only a few notes on the weather. When she was preparing to leave something seemed to occur to her, and she stopped halfway through a step. I held my breath for no good reason, but she didn’t say a word. I can’t say why, but it looked like she had been about to apologize, though I really can’t be sure for what either. Something in her eyes, maybe it was in the clearly complete effort given for only a half smile, it said ‘neither of us will ever forget this, and I could never apologize enough for that.’
It’s the things we can’t seem to remember to forget that drag us down most it seems, but trying to pick up the pieces of a life lost taught me a valuable lesson or two about living life, and the value of forgetting. We’re so much more than the things we see from day to day, the things we touch and the things we create, the things we do and those we connect with, it’s a shame that they’re only ever summed up in death. Some days, though, when I see pictures of those guys, the pictures that I’ve managed to hold onto, I still feel guilty. If it had been me not them, would the world be better? Who am I to waste a boring April afternoon when it’s something so many would have given everything just to see?
I pass her now and again and she always smiles at me like she knows something about me that I don’t. It’s not an angry smile, or a smile of ill intention, but rather seems like she’s remembering some comforting truth. I still can’t begin to fathom what that truth might be, but I’m hopeful that one day I’ll find the courage to ask her to show me. Until then, I pass that empty house, and wonder whose stories are going to paint its walls next. We’re all tales of survival, every last one of us; it’s what we manage to make with the time we’ve snuck past that seems to make us into these beautiful, indispensable, irreprehensible, unwittingly magical moments in the making.
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