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CHAPTER TWO
There was silence.
There was darkness.
It was like this for a long time.
It might have been like this forever.
If not for the light.
___
It went from left to right. The light was blinding; the shock of it made me recoil backward like I’d been hit with a bolt of lightning.
Left, to right. And it disappeared.
There was nothing, once more. I sat in the nothing, and knew now that this was not all there was.
I waited for the light.
___
The light came again. As it made its way across, I made it to my feet. The light was gone, just as I found my balance.
I took one step in the darkness. Another.
And I began walking towards the light that was defining my world.
___
It was another few hundred steps before the light came again. I was ready for it, and it wasn’t quite as blinding. It felt like there was a heat coming from the light. Subtle, barely noticeable, but with the nothing that was everything else, it was perceptible. Like wearing a sweater on a cool day. Like–
stepped out across the threshold onto our front step. Snow was still just beginning to fall, only a light covering across the ground in our front yard. The chill hit me hard without my jacket.
The car door closed behind her, and she did a little leap over the steps leading to our front door, smiling her goofy little smile. She collided with me into a hug, which turned into a kiss. She pressed into it, and I pressed back. We shared our warmth, and with it, we shared our souls.
When the light was absent, the nothing felt colder than it had before. I continued walking towards it, and the next time the light revolved in front of me, it seemed higher than it had.
I was getting closer.
___
The next time, the light shone directly on me. Like a spotlight had been turned on. Or like the light was an eye, and it had suddenly noticed me. I stopped, lifting a hand to block it from my eyes.
The light stayed on. The heat felt a little warmer, maybe. In the silence that had become a relentless ringing, something began to take shape. A combinatory sound, a nonsense sound, a thousand different sounds blending together into something new, something alive. It drifted in, barely perceptible, and if it hadn’t been silent before this, I wouldn’t have noticed it.
It was coming from the direction of the light.
I took a step, unsure what the light would do.
It continued shining on me. Watching me. I took another step, and another. If the light, whatever it was, was going to watch me, it was going to see me moving. To see me moving forward.
I don’t know why, but that seemed important.
___
She sat down on our couch next to me, curling her legs up so that they rested slightly on my own. She held the bowl out in front of me without having to ask, and I took one of her chocolate pretzels. She rested her head on my shoulder, and I could feel the muscles in her temple contract as she chewed.
I looked at the tv, and realized I didn’t know what any character said in the last minute.
The snow fell relentlessly outside, but here, in our home, it was warm, and it was perfect.
___
The light was getting closer, and the sounds were getting louder. The light and I were coming closer together, and it seemed to be happening quicker than the pace I was walking. Like, at the same time, as I was moving toward the light, the light was moving toward me.
Like when the light was revolving, it had been looking. And now, it had found what it was looking for.
I walked faster.
___
The road was rough, and the snow fell heavy. I had gotten home before it was too bad. She worked later, was on her way home now, and it was worse.
I sat by the front window, watching the snow fall. Watching my breath fog the glass.
The house was cold.
I sat for a long time.
___
I could pick out individual sounds in the garble, now. There was a constant barrage of honking, with rarely a beat in-between. A ding-ding would go by every now and then, starting on one side and speeding by on the other. A soft little song sang beside me, and walked with me for a while before it turned off to my right and went away.
The light grew closer.
___
I closed the front door for the last time. The snow melted a week ago, and there was a hint of heat in the air now, cutting through the cool like a threat.
I walked across the porch, and walked down the front step in one stride. My foot touched the ground.
My gut fell with it.
I sat on the driveway, knees folded into my chest, and wept.
___
They started taking shape slowly. I didn’t think they were really there, at first, but the closer the light and I got, the more defined they became.
In front of me wasn’t just light, but dark shapes, silhouetted against the backlight like rectangular giants. There were dozens of them, hundreds of them, all different sizes, some closer and some further. The light came from somewhere above them, in the center.
I walked to the first of the shapes, and reached my hand out toward it.
The tip of a finger brushed against it, and a cacophony of screaming tore my head into pieces. Not just screaming, but writhing. Anguished, blistering thoughts shot through me with physical force. My hand stuck to the building like a magnet, and I hung there by my hand.
choice
Not a word, but an idea echoed through me, ringing in through the rest of it all.
choice
My hand fired off of the wall like it’d been shot, and I fell backwards away from it. I scrambled away on my back, pushing with my feet. The screams left a mark in me, like a wound. But the idea rang around in me along with it.
choice
It was early, or it was late, and it didn’t really matter. I sped down the road, and I hated. I hated the moonlight peeking in through the open sky, I hated the leaves that were falling from the changing trees. I hated my eyes that were filling with tears, and I hated that I hated. I didn’t know what to do with the hate, I didn’t know how to use it up, it just kept filling me and above all, I hated that I was still here with all this hate, half a person and filled with more hate than any two people could manage together.
I knew this road. I knew what was on it, and I knew where it led. In twenty seconds, my parents’ house would be on the right. Like a boomerang, I’d left, and I’d come back. But I’d come back a broken, shattered husk of what I’d been.
And I knew where this road ended. A t-junction. A bridge to nowhere on the left. A road to nowhere on the right. I knew where I was, but I didn’t know where I was going.
I was moving faster than I thought I was. Going nowhere fast, quite literally, and that seemed like as good an idea as any other, so I went faster. The trees were losing their definition, becoming a streak of color through my teary eyes–
She was in the road in front of me. I don’t know why she was awake. I don’t know why she was walking down the road. But I was going too fast, and that, I knew.
My mom turned and noticed me right before I hit her. I tried hopelessly to swerve, to miss, to wrap myself around a tree or launch myself into a house, to do anything, anything else. I turned the wheel, slid sideways down the road, and I heard a krunch in my driver’s side window right before I started flipping sideways down the street. When I stopped flipping, I slid on my roof for forever before I finally stopped, the car rocking back and forth, a hissing sound escaping from the engine.
I hit my seatbelt, and fell up into the roof of the car headfirst. Straight out the passenger side window, I could see her. Lying on her back in the street. There was something wrong with her middle.
I crawled across the roof of the car, dragging myself forward with my elbows, out the broken window and onto the street. There wasn’t much shattered glass here. Most of it was further up the road.
Most of it was near her.
Her head laid sideways on the street, a crown of broken glass decorating her hair. Everything from her hips down was misshapen, odd angles and points coming from the wrong directions, bones or glass or gravel poking through her skin. Most of the blood came from the back of her head, but it wasn’t leaking fast, because she was dead.
I sat on the sidewalk as I heard my father come out of the house. He took a few steps forward, and stopped. He made a sound, a sound I’ve never heard a person make, and he ran toward his wife. He knelt on the ground beside her, making his sound, and her gaze stayed the same, because she was dead.
It was still dark when the police and paramedics arrived. Red and blue lights reflected off her dead eyes staring at me. The paramedics looked at me, and deemed me a miracle. I was whatever the opposite of a miracle is. People asked me questions, and I answered them. I don’t know what they said, and I don’t know what I said. It didn’t matter. None of it really mattered. My father didn’t say anything. Not to me. And that mattered, but not in a way I really understood. Not yet. That wouldn’t hit me until later. Until the bus ride.
I got to my feet, and I started walking. I didn’t know where, but I knew, as I was walking, that she was still staring at me.
___
She was standing in front of me. Dead, and staring. Inside the wall in front of me, somehow, just below the light. She wore no expression on her face, and her eyes betrayed no emotion.
She just stood. And stared.
As I knelt. And stared.
choice
Behind me was the cold, dark nothing. Back there was no pain. No hate, no joy, no anguish, no love. Back there, was nothing, and that nothing couldn’t hurt me.
But in front of me, there was light and there were buildings and there were sounds and life and hate and joy and sorrow and pain and love and death and I knew, somewhere in front of me, there were stars. That those stars were my stars, and that if I turned back right now, I’d never find them.
I looked at my dead mom standing in front of me.
And I got to my feet.
Choice.
