A Moment To Think

Her fingers reached haltingly. She had to be sure. Was it still there? It had to be there. It had to be. This was the last piece of who she was. Where she came from. The one remnant of another life in a universe that no longer existed. Well, it existed. But it no longer looked like, felt like, or even smelled like what once was.

Thank God. It was still there.

She knew it was silly. Ridiculous even that she cared. Why did this one small thing even matter? It was frivolous. Completely useless in a world where only the things and people that were useful held any value whatsoever. But it was important to her. It held value for her. So right now, she would call it “useful.”

She took a moment to take it in. This was not her normal way. She didn’t like to stop. Didn’t like to take the time to process. To truly and deeply think about her reality. The same reality for the few that were left. Thinking about it didn’t help, did it? It just slowed a person down. Made you soft. Made you care. And those things? Caring? Being soft? Thinking just a few seconds too long? Those things made you a target. And, even worse, those things would get you killed. She had seen it happen so many times before.

She wasn’t even sure anymore why she cared. Cared about living that is. What exactly was there to live for? The Deep seemed to be everywhere. Covering everything with it’s heavy ashen darkness. This life she was living (if you could call it that) was doomed to end far too soon. Destined for hardship and barely surviving. But she was going to try. She was going to fight. This tiny gold heart somehow gave her courage to go on. As if it was a talisman that her mother knew she would need one day. Full of all of the courage and strength and wisdom that she would need to survive.

Of course her mother could have never foreseen the Deep. She could never have imagined her baby girl fighting just to survive. Fighting an unimaginable force and holding on to her very existence with every bit of strength she could find. She probably had just picked out the tiny heart on it’s delicate chain because she thought it was pretty. But maybe…. Maybe somehow she knew that her girl would need it one day. Maybe she had prayed over it. Willed her own hope and strength into it. Knowing that when her baby needed it, she could just brush her fingers over it and pull from it the strength she needed to fight.

Long gone was the delicate chain that the gold heart had come on. That had been the first time she thought she had lost it. It took her hours of digging in the mud. Her vision was obscured by the Deep’s ever present grey fog. But she found it. The heart now hung on a rough bit of shoestring. It wasn’t pretty. But it was sturdy and it was useful.

She didn’t dare. But why not? She had already made the mistake of stopping. Of thinking. Of allowing that soft spot in her real heart to beat for just a few minutes. Why not go ahead? It would just be a few minutes longer. She knew the fight would wait for her.

She carefully slipped the valuable shoestring over her head, holding on a little too tightly. She placed the smooth, cold heart in her hand and began to open it slowly. Her fingernails were so jagged and dirty that she had a hard time popping it open. But it finally gave way, with a soft click, to reveal what was once real. There, inside, were the tiniest of pictures. Placed there by her mother so many unreal years ago.

On the right was a picture of herself. Shiny dimpled face, smiling, innocent with no care for anything. Because she knew that the woman in the picture on the left was there to take care of her. To provide for her. To shelter her world and make it warm and full of everything good. Thank God that, that little shiny faced girl couldn’t guess the reality of her future.

She stared at those pictures for what seemed hours. Not this universe. Not her reality. But tiny life-like glimmers of who she was and what she came from.

Her stillness, her thoughts could not be timed in the reality of hours. It was really just a few minutes. But those minutes gave her the strength that she needed. This tiny gold talisman? This icon of her past? It was valuable. It’s value was not held in the new monetary system of trade for food and weapons. It’s value? It held a dream of undying hope.