It happens to every living soul on the planet. Life attacks with a cold vengeance, cleaving and ripping away at everything we know to be normal. It strikes without justice, without logic. Your place in the world doesn't matter in the slightest. Your race, your age, your favorite color—life doesn't care. Life and luck, they go hand in hand. And they will get you.
It might happen once in a lifetime for those at the lucky end of the spectrum. Three times, if you're normal. Life gets you down so low you can't even comprehend your next thought. There's no reflection on tomorrow, no ideas for the future, because tomorrow can't possibly come. The world simply cannot continue to revolve. But it does. And you're forced to give everything you have just to keep up.
The lucky ones have no idea. They go to their jobs, earn their steady incomes, and live their fortunate lifestyles. Most of them do so in complete ignorance of the others, the inauspicious ones.
What life feeds to some in small doses, it dumps in bucketfuls on others.
No matter the events leading to ones confrontation with life, the outcome will always be the same. There is a decision that must be made. It won't be easy. It can't be, or it wouldn't be a collision of life and luck and everything you know. There will be change, good or bad, either a reflection of your choice or the cause for it.
You will be changed. For some—the lucky, of course—this change can lead to more delightful days than you thought possible. Sometimes the change is only internal, and life continues along on the exact same course as before.
But for the unlucky, one change can give way to another, which can then spiral into another. Sometimes luck and life bear unfortunate grudges against undeserving individuals. Sometimes we don't stand a fighting chance when faced with what life holds in store. We can't rise above it because we can't even find a foothold to stand back up.
I've seen it happen. I've witnessed, heard, felt the effects of life's unkindness.
My soul is tattered with the scars of these decisions and changes—none of them belonging to me. The knowledge that fair is abnormal and everything is hard came early on in this girl's childhood. I knew the lancet of luck and how quickly it could leave you open, severed and bleeding.
And I knew how to close the wound—for him, at least. Because he always needed me to do it, because he couldn't heal himself, I learned. I learned how that coming decision was the only thing that mattered, and that it absolutely had to be made, because without it, you simply couldn't go on.
For those that cannot rise above, one little change might be ineffective. Sometimes we have to make an alteration so vast that it reaches into every single dark corner and sweeps away the tiniest residual morsels of before. Because the future has to be different, completely different, to be better, we have to take it upon ourselves to make it that way.
When the unthinkable is your only available option, you must grasp it and run. Don't think twice and don't look back.
It's for the best. At least, I hope.
We left Washington on a Wednesday morning. I remember the fog being so thick that everything more than three feet beyond the train's window was obscured. It didn't matter that we couldn't see, though. We could feel the distance grow with each passing second.
It hurt and it felt good all at once. Like the sting of a tattoo, it was self-inflicted—pain with a purpose. This would stay with us for the rest of our lives.
"We're doing the right thing."
It was the fifteenth time I'd heard those words since we took our seats, just over an hour ago. I nodded somberly, showing my complete agreement as I had fourteen times already.
He needed the reassurance. I understood. This had been his choice, after all—I'd only aided along the way. I'd only offered up everything I had to help him.
When the fog cleared and we could see again, the scenery was a vision to behold. Fields of late summer foliage flanked both sides of the tracks and a mountain range loomed in the distance.
The sun was rising, already breaking through the cloud barrier surrounding the mountains. Everyone knows you're not supposed to stare directly at the sun, but I did. It represented just how far from home we'd already come.
"We're doing the right thing."
He wasn't asking for my agreement this time. I think he finally believed it.
Chapter one will be up in a couple days... or sooner, maybe. :)