The Life You Save

I remember the first day I knew.  It was just like any other day; the alarm went off at 6:25 and my hand slapped the sound out of it.  I lay there for a while, pretending to still be asleep, hoping it was true and knowing it wasn’t.  My feet mumbled across the floor toward the bathroom, hands helping to disrobe on the way.  I didn’t care where my pajamas went; my eyes weren’t open just yet so it didn’t matter.  The water turned on, too cold, then too hot, then just right.  I remember washing my hair first, or maybe it’s only a memory because I always wash my hair first, then condition, then tie it up out of the way.  I rolled my head around to stretch the kinks out of my neck.  As the steam raised my face, I just knew.  It wasn’t clairvoyance or a premonition or anything.  It was certainty, the way you shut the car door and know you left the keys in there without even seeing them.  You search your pockets and purse anyway, but they’re in the car, in the ignition maybe, or on the seat.  I am going to die, I thought.  And then reached for the soap. 
It’s a beautiful thing, that certainty.  It makes you walk a certain way, hips straight and legs strong.  It makes you alert to jingling change in pockets, feet stepping to a hidden rhythm, the emptiness of polite words in the subway.  I could feel my hand on the glass of doors and really feel them, the skin, the glass, the life coursing through everything.  It made me awake.
I handed in my notice at work.  My boss thought I was crazy; I told her to think of it as retroactive abortion and she laughed.  They get jokes like that at the clinic.  “Where are you going?” she wondered, and I did too.  “To find my self,” I said.  She winced at the cliché.  “I’m lost,” I said.  “You’re right here,” she answered.  “Not anymore,” I replied.  I left work that day. 
I found myself in a strange city.  The people wore forced smiles and formal faces, like they were at a stiff cocktail party where everyone was a stranger and the booze had run out.  They glanced nervously over their shoulders.  A man would turn his head, making the woman next to him peek too, and the uneasy feeling would spread like a virus.  The children played solemnly, as if they were adults with weights on their shoulders pushing them back into the size and shape of childhood.  The balls bounced with dull thuds.  Skipping ropes slapped thickly.  The laughter sounded forced, false.  The chorus of the city went like this: “I’m fine.  Fine.  Great.  I’m fine.  And yourself?”  But no one really cared to hear the answer.  It was a question asked in passing, the kind you throw over your shoulder as an afterthought then walk away from the response.  “I’m fine.”  “I’m lost,” I said.  “Not here,” they said.  “Everyone’s fine here.  Everything’s fine.”  “I’m fine,” a little girl said, her eyes on the hills.  They were spilling over with red as the earth turned away from the sun, and she watched the blood spread over the city.  Her eyes filled with it.  “I’m fine,” she said as she watched passerby avert their eyes and clutch their briefcases.  “I’m fine,” as the gates slammed shut over shop windows and the people locked their doors.  And when the last shutter closed she whispered, “Do you hear it? It’s crying again. They always close their doors when it cries, but they can’t drown it out.  They just pretend.”  “I know,” I said, and we walked away from Omelas. 
I found myself in the woods.  The trees were stunted from the wind, though, and a river rushed furiously near by.  The bus behind us watched it all through glazed eyes.  “The first thing they do is lie to you,” he said. “About everything.  Politics, wars, love, sex, money, success.  Lies,” he said.  He threw a stick in the water and watched it wash away.  “They can’t get at you out here, though.”  He nodded to himself.  “It’s safer.  Keeps you clean.  Out here you don’t need anything but a sack of rice and a couple books to keep your head on straight.  Out here you can really find yourself, you know?”  He started pacing, arms held rigidly behind his back.  “Really, it’s the only place you can be free.  God never meant for man to live in a 10x12 yard with 2.5 kids and a fucking dog.”  He kicked a stone over and watched the worms squirm deeper, ants scrambling out of the crater. “Fucking dog,” he muttered.  “Not here.  No swimming pools, no pets, no cigarettes.  I’m free, you know? I live off the land, from a backpack, anywhere I want.  I don’t have to worry about anyone, and I sure as hell don’t need anyone to worry about me.”  His hands grabbed the opposing elbows, and he continued marching in circles.  He grew thinner with every step; skin stretching over bones so tight I thought he would fly apart in a minute. “Sometimes I think I’m the only one in this whole fucking world with his head on straight.  If people were awake they would grab the essentials and leave everything else.  They would experience real fucking life! Instead they just sit there with their televisions and their plastic.” He sat suddenly, swaying back and forth.  “They buy security with their money and let their brains atrophy until they forget what freedom is.  If they ever knew.  I experience life.  I am awake, you know?”  “I know,” I said.  And I walked out of the wild.
I found myself under a pear tree.  The buds were bursting like fireworks before our eyes, pollen sifting through the air to cover us in fairy dust inches thick.  We’d either suffocate or fly, I thought.  “Think happy thoughts, then,” she giggled.  She rolled over onto her back, plucked a blade of grass and rolled it between her lips.  A falling leaf brushed her face and she shivered.  “I want to know life,” she said.  “I want to be moved.”  I wondered what would move me, and she nodded.  The coins of her eyes glinted.  The bees shook a curtain of pollen between us.  “If I lived my whole life never doing nothing but what I wanted,” she smiled “I don’t s’pose folks will take to me too much.  They’ll think I’m some kind of strange, but maybe I don’t care.  Maybe I don’t even care if I don’t love but one person in this whole life, if it were a good one,” she said.  Her bottom lip pulled down to show snow-white teeth separated by a gap.  I wanted to crawl inside and hide from the world between that gap, under that lip.  She bit it back up and said, “Maybe there isn’t even such of a thing as love.  Maybe there’s just one thing that any body wants in this whole wide world.  Want it so much that we tuck it inside of ourselves, between our legs, to keep it safe.  No safer thing in this whole world, no, not more dangerous either.  Or maybe it’s even deeper, the dangerous part.  It’s so inside that you can’t see it or even know it until you can see Death and he crushes it with his square toes.  That’s the part that wants love, even if there isn’t any, even if we’ll never find it.  It’s the part that keeps us awake at night, staring into cool light and solid shadow.  It’s what makes us wander into the muck and back out again, keeps our backs straight when the wind tries to blow them over like reeds in the shallow of a lake.  That want makes the base of our neck curve in to try to fill it.  What if I can’t never fill that?” “I know,” I said. 
I found myself beside a brook.  It spoke to me in words that peeled open my heart and held it up so I could look in it.  I saw Janie who wanted love so bad it made her heart ache and her throat curve in at the base.  I saw her fill up with golden pollen and muck, so full that it filled that empty space and cushioned her overalls and the soles of her feet for the walk home.  I saw Chris pace into nothing, so sure he was right until he knew he was wrong.  I saw the cold through his transparent skin. I saw his eyes fill with tears of joy when he saw the end.  I saw the one who walked away from Omelas; her blonde curls brushed back by the wind.  I saw her speaking to an old man on the street, a man who used to be fine but now knew better.  I peeled off my layers and waded into the brook, let it sweep my feet out and floated. Water buoyed the way of the world that had been trapped inside my skin.  Life washed through me, and I knew I didn’t really have the answers.  I abandoned hope; I had certainty instead. There were answers to be found, but they weren’t stationary.  They were permanent, transient, absolute.  They were waiting for me to be ready, and maybe I would be some day.
The alarm went off.  I slapped the sound out of it and rolled over.  It was 6:25.  My feet mumbled to the shower, pajamas scattering on the way.  My eyes weren’t open just yet.  I washed my hair, then conditioned.  Lathered up, rinsed off.  I went to work.  I gave notice and left.  I found myself.