Chapter 7:
*
Sometimes I think I'm nothing more than dust and God's breath and my whole existence was perhaps a fluke, an experiment even, but rather than be thrown away, I was put upon the solid earth, beneath the hovering clouds.
We all have a worth, a value, a purpose. Many, and I suppose, most of us even, hope to make something of ourselves, make a lasting impression.
It happens though that we tend to drift, to lose sight of those things we always say really matter when we have to write essays and autobiographies and describe ourselves to people so we sound important and worthwhile. It happens that those things, those important things, become little things, and soon, maybe...nothing.
Until we become, in fact, nothing more than that dust we started as, blown away in the breeze. We fade into the background, blend into the seamless stitches in the fabric of time. We become what we never wanted, what we always hoped we would never be.
We become forgotten.
And all our life scatters away.
And that is all we'll ever be.
I want to be worth more. I want to be remembered.
*
"It was her birthday today."
There's a moment after she says this where I fight to breathe.
"Mrs. Miller --"
"Samantha, I never -- I never told you how much it meant that you -- you were there. That you were trying to save my Annie."
"I was just doing my job."
It's funny, that expression. Just doing my job. As though it makes everything all right. I've heard people use that line in clumsy defense of a mistake they made, knowing within that it was wrong, but wanting to be safe on the surface.
I use that line when I have nothing left to say; when all the words you could think to use become small and obsolete.
Because you reach a point in life where there are just no words left to say. Annie Miller was and is, still, one of the points. Just as I suppose...all of them are. Because I remember their names like they were an old friend or relative perhaps that I haven't seen since that Fourth of July barbecue back in 1983 when I was toothless and naive and just a little touch of idealistic in a town where people stayed or people escaped. There was no middle ground.
There isn't now.
This life -- this job -- there's nothing simple about it. You can't be good at it, truly good at it, unless you give yourself completely to it. If you don't, if you get used to it and shrug off the disappointment and the pain, become immune to it, then there's nothing left to fight for.
But when you give yourself wholly, it fuses to you, all of it.
You have to keep going, you have to make sure there's always something to fight for.
I don't know what else to say. I just don't know. So I think of Annie, of how this birthday, this day, to most other people, means just another workday, just another school day, just another day to wake up and muddle through and make it through to the next; I think of how it will never again be that simple day for me that it once was. This day won't be November 7 anymore; this day will be Annie's birthday.
September 11; Nicole Mashburn, Ted's cousin, the people, the faces that lay buried in ash mere minutes away.
October 17; Becky Radowski
October 24; Andy Deaver
November 21; Anwar Samir
January 30; The day we finally found Sean Collins
May 8; Barry Mashburn, Ted, Fran, Libby...
"Mrs. Miller?"
I pause, not quite sure how to word this, not sure how it will come out and how she'll react and how it will mean what it never can.
"Tell Annie I said 'Happy Birthday' -- when you see her."
November 7.
The day Annie officially became immortal.
She'll never age, never cry or laugh or even fall in love.
She'll never be more than that carefree girl waving happily at the video camera to an unknown audience.
She's 14 years old and she'll never say goodbye.
I'm 32 years old and still trying to say hello.
*
There's a point you reach when you realize enough is enough. Maybe I've been standing still since it happened because I never felt I had anywhere left to go. Maybe I have to say goodbye to the past; always remember it, but leave it there.
You can't continue living until you bury the dead.
So I find myself here, in front of the place I've been trying to escape for six months. It looks the same from the outside; the same blinds, the same golden letters displaying the name, the same bell jingle as you step inside.
I hesitate a moment on the threshold and the memories assault me in rapid succession as I propel myself slowly forward.
I look for a stain or some reminder that I had once lain on the carpet, bleeding, waiting for a release. I look for a reminder of a death I felt would come around the shelf with all the books about Russian history and Alexander the Great.
The carpet's unblemished, however, free from that marker of near-death. It smells differently now. It's cool inside, not the awful, sweltering heat of mid-afternoon on the eight of May that I remember still so vividly. I exit just as quickly and quietly, without so much as a glance in my direction from the unattentive employee distractedly reading a magazine as he leans against the counter.
It's funny how things change.
*
When you move past something, any major event or turning point in your life, it's not a gradual departure. You don't just leap off, you kind of build your wings as you near the edge of the cliff. I'm not ready to jump off just yet, but tonight, the sky doesn't seem so dark, and for once, I'm not afraid to take that first step.
He's quiet and I don't know whether I like it much. Sometimes I appreciate it, and other times, like now, when his face is impassive, I worry about his thoughts. Maybe he's decided to put the past behind him as well.
So I sit next to him on that couch where we've come together and drifted apart in my own mind more times than I care to remember, and hazard a question I'm not sure I'm ready to hear the answer to yet.
"Are you still mine, Jack?"
His sweatered arm reaches behind my neck, his fingers playing lightly against my skin and twirling a stray strand of hair between his fingers. A smile, genuine and slightly mischievious, forms around his lips and he finally shows a hint of something in his previously indifferent face.
"I always was."
I had never known what real love was until I met Jack Malone.
I have never known it since.
*
It's easy to forget the simple act of living when our own lives become so routine and predictable. It seems only when times of struggle arise that we face the challenge and look within ourselves to realize our full potential, our full worth.
It's easy to forget the value of the lives around us, when their faces become so normal and ingrained that they too, are part of the daily routine. We laugh, we joke, we cry, we smile, we live, and love, and forget to take a look around once in a while. We forget the value of a kiss, a hug, a sweet profession of love whispered across the barriers of right and wrong and the social constraints that often divide us.
We forget to be who we are.
It's easy to forget what really matters when we get so consumed by the petty mishaps of normal existence.
It's easy to forget life in the broadest sense.
Happiness is love. Love is life. And life -- life is best remembered.
*
[ end ]