A Dateless Unending

A flurry of gray ash flakes floated from her eyelashes to the cracked floor, covering the last centimeter of chestnut she could see. And it felt like 1,200. It had been 1,200. 1,200 blinks since she stood up, disoriented and alone. People say an hour goes by quickly -- that it all goes by quickly. But as she stood there dazed, trying to piece together what had happened, realizing she was alone, her perspective on time had changed. An hour no longer took 60 minutes, it took the agonizing pain of 1,200 time loops where she opened and closed her eyes to the same unmoving devastation.

Absent-mindedly, she ran her fingers through her hair, placed her left hand on the floor and pushed herself up. Scanning the room, she did not know what she wished for her eyes to land on, until her ears did it for her: the point of unequivocal silence. The cream walls that had always held the integrity of a home now held the charred remains of her mother’s orchids. She traced her finger across the ash tombstone suddenly feeling the weight of her mother’s watering jug in her hand. Taking a few steps forward, she saw that the pages of origami paper her grandfather had folded for years to color her home were gone. Only the aluminum strings remained from some. How careful he had been when choosing the things that would hold up his art pieces. Funny how the nourishment of one becomes the phantom of another.

When she looked down she realized that the only color in the living room was the front of her high tops, where her teardrops had cleared away the grey snow. The government news alerts from over 1,200 blinks ago had warned that the latest series of fires would rage on without control. The previous ones had swallowed the remaining supplies of the scattered fire departments and hospitals. She thought about how her mother had been working at the region’s last hospital. She thought about how instead of offering to join her and help, she had stayed home with the ghost of a grandfather whose passing she could not yet reconcile with herself. She had not thought that the fires would reach her home before her mother could, though it was all she could think about now. And while she had not heard from her mother since she regained consciousness, she felt within herself, that she was alone.

Twirling the cross on her necklace, she swallowed down the cry building in her throat. Closing and opening her eyes for the 1,201 time, she resolved to gather whatever could be salvaged from around the house. Guided by the incomprehensible instinct for survival, her feet carried her when her mind could not. They spun her up the stairs and towards the room she had shared with her little sister. Hundreds of thousands of words in the English and Spanish languages, and yet none could accurately define how unbearable it was to have her sister’s laugh silenced by the ashen walls. She felt her body slowly collapsing on her. She felt the ash reaching into her throat and plucking her voice from her. And then, she felt her ears twitching forward as something broke the silence for the first time in her new eternity.

Was she going insane? A low tuba and piano began to lay out a path for her. She made her way down the stairs, the melody slowly rising. The steps she took now made small dents in the floor’s color and tormented silence. As she planted herself against her grandfather’s old doorway, the dissonance between her movements and her reality was augmented. How could she possibly keep going?

The answer to her question came in the form of one of the world’s most inexplicable phenomena: a memory. It was a memory brought on by the timber of the man’s voice who had joined the song. Dean Martin’s Quien Sera was fading in and out of consciousness on the small antique cassette player her grandfather had kept on his nightstand. And suddenly all the ash fell away. She was blown towards the cassette player and caught by the gentle brown hands belonging to her grandfather. He twirled her and smiled, shuffling his feet across the room with the determination of a man who had been told he would soon cease to dance and the strength of a grandfather who wished his granddaughter a life of dances. She rested her head on his shoulder and buried her face in his shirt, but when she looked up, he was gone and she was holding onto the only thing in the room left to support her -- an old nightstand.

The cassette tape slowly stopped spinning, its last few notes pushing her to pry the nightstand’s drawer open. As she opened it, she noticed a dull shine coming from the back of the drawer. Reaching forward, her fingertips felt a tarnished chain and when they pulled on it, a guttural cry escaped her hoarse throat. Her grandmother’s gold and emerald heart-shaped locket lay in her hands, open to a picture of the last Christmas they had all spent together. As the screams escaped her and met a stampede of tears, her ears were filled with the voices of the people in the picture. They were laughing tenderly at her strongly worded opinions, whispering proud comments at an award ceremony, opening her college acceptance letters with her in rejoice, but above all, they were battling through the guise of nostalgia to tell her that they forgave her.

It was the old bark of her dog coming from the corner of the room that cut through her trance and warned her to leave. To notice the embers smoldering by what once had been the closet. So she grasped the locket in her hand, turning to run, but she hesitated.

A film had tangled her feet and enchanted her eyes. An older woman stood in front of two laughing boys, the sharp edges in her face softened by the warm touch of a man’s lips on her forehead. That same woman sat at the bedside of an older gentleman, her ears attentive, the lines on her forehead eased for his benefit, a gentle smile appearing, and sadness overwhelming her eyes in a way that could only reach someone who had lived this scene before. A twenty-year-old closed the door behind herself for the 364th time, tied her battered converse, and set out across the rubble calling out, not for anyone to find her. But so she could search for any who might need her. In a different home, a tan 40-year-old woman cracked a mischievous smile and called out “Ready or not here I come,” pretending not to hear the melodious giggles of her foster children. In an evergreen patch of an otherwise smoldered field kneeled a 19-year-old, sobbing and setting down the numbered orchids she had drawn. And by the coffee-colored nightstand of a loving grandfather stood that same 19-year-old girl, closing her eyes and welcoming the fires that would encircle her until she too, was an eternal flame. They were stills developed by the cunning hands of Possibility, Future, and End.

She would lift her eyelashes up and watch as the room exploded in a blast of blue, orange, and white. The flames in her eyes materializing for the final curtain call. But the scene would fade when she brought her eyelashes south. And only through the star-crossed telling of another’s story may the physical realm ever discover the decision she made.

So when the world ends for those around us, and a wave of souls put on azure evening gowns and suits speckled with spessartine and marble white heels; when they stand together and engulf the pretense of nothingness, can we pay the ticket vendor, take our seats, and bear that reflection in our eyes? The reflection of the stars we have known who made the show great. Or have we led our lives in a way that makes the payment impossible? Did you dance; did you cry; did you admire ladybugs and the stars in the night sky? Have you accumulated an empire of wealth to present to the admissions officers standing by? Because when you look at the end and feel the tumult inside, if you have done all of this, you will recognize the explosive feeling Grief stands behind.

The price of love is often grief, can you pay it? And if you answer yes, do you have it in yourself to stand from your seat at the end of a show and live with it?