You Are the Everything

by Karen Rivers

Your head seems to be facing your own chest and your voice isn’t working. You’re wearing your favorite orange T-shirt. You’re going to die in this T-shirt that you love that reminds you of Orange Rabbit, the stuffed toy that you slept with every night for the first ten years of your life, the one that still sits on the shelf by your bed. You wish so hard you were on your bed, holding Orange Rabbit. You want your mom. You look briefly at the freckled skin on your arm between Josh’s beautiful fingers and you think, “Well, goodbye.” Your BE BRAVE tattoo is mostly washed off, but you can see crumbs of ink, clinging on. You’re almost glad that you’re dying with Josh’s hand on you, like that. This is the best of your last moments, falling in a plane, but not alone. With Josh Harris!

  You are aware of not thinking big enough or serious enough thoughts and also that you’ve had an awfully long time to think them, so maybe none of this is happening or maybe it’s all a dream. You feel fleetingly good about the fact that it’s a dream. It’s not a great dream, but at least it will end, all your thoughts coming as hard and fast as plate glass that’s been shattered by a bullet.

  Then the mountain rises up and crashes into the plane with such unimaginable force that it’s impossible that anything is happening except that you are being physically torn apart, every molecule of you tearing away from every other molecule of you, raggedly. You wish you couldn’t feel it. You are jarred entirely out of yourself, and then you are still strapped into your chair, but also you are on the ceiling of the plane, deciding. There is a lot of blood everywhere, and an eerie silence.

  You are aware of deciding.

  Live or die.

  Which one?

  Choose.

  5.

  A lot of things hurt. The word hurt is not even close to being enough. What you’re feeling isn’t pain; it’s more than that. It is nothing. It is everything. It is a scream, deep inside you, echoing against the walls of every cell of you, burning.

  Death is right there, beckoning, cool and bright and quiet, like soft sheets on a perfectly made bed.

  Your bed. You can practically see it, glowing there.

  Inviting you to rest.

  Except it’s not your bed in your room at home, it’s somewhere else. A room imagined at another time. A perfect room.

  Safe, you think.

  Then there is a smell of something burning. It smells like hair.

  You retch and retch and then instantly you are back in your body and unbuckling your seat belt and something is sticky all over your face that must be blood. You can only see through one eye and even that view looks wrong, like you’re looking through a kaleidoscope, a blurry one, but no point worrying about that now.

  There is only this moment.

  There is only getting out.

  You know you must get out, but that’s made easier by the fact that the part of the plane where you are sitting seems to be separated from the rest of the plane. In front of you, there is nothing. There is open space. This may or may not be a dream, you think. But you have to think it isn’t. It can’t be. Dreams don’t hurt.

  You unbuckle and you fall forward, as though you are diving off a diving board and into a pool, only there is no water in the pool and it’s awfully far away, but you can’t think about that, you are already falling. How is that happening? The air rushes by you and chides you for making this stupid choice.

  Your leg makes a distinctive snapping sound that you feel as much as hear when you hit the ground, and you begin to roll. The ground is a slope. There is an imperative to get down the slope. You don’t know why you know this, but you do. You roll and roll. It hurts so much it almost doesn’t hurt, or rather, you have become pain, so adding more makes no difference. You have nothing left to lose. There is literally nothing but you, the ground, the excruciating agony of everything, and the fact that you know you have to get away from the plane, down and away.

  Luckily, the slope is steep. You used to roll like this down the hill behind your house. On the green grass, freshly mowed, blue sky, green grass, blue sky, green grass, laughing. You think about root beer popsicles and the way the sun made rainbows in the sprinklers and your heart breaks into a million pieces. You think of how bees sometimes landed on your sticky fingers, their feet taking small, ticklish steps.

  You aren’t laughing now.

  You have to roll.

  Faster, faster.

  Hurry, hurry.

  Escape, escape, escape.

  The ground has some snow and patches of ice and some rocks and lots of pebbles and some tiny branches of shrubbery that scratch you. The scratching reminds you that you’re alive.

  The rolling goes on and on. There is so much pain. There is the smell of jet fuel that is so strong it is closing your throat. You are going too slowly, it is taking forever to make your body move. You will still die whether or not you keep fighting. You can’t breathe. So why are you still rolling? You can’t give up, that’s the thing. Your only remaining purpose is in the rolling. It’s hard work. Your leg screams into a great stretching pain that is all over you, spandex-tight, refusing to let go. The grass passes by your face in ragged clumps.

  Grass/sky/gravel/grass/sky/life/death/life/death/now/then/now/then.

  There is a sudden heat.

  A huge heat. It is so big, you feel engulfed. It is searing. Searing is a word you understand better now than ever before.

  The impossible heat is also a sound, out of tune and too loud, and then the broken pieces of the plane become a sun and you are free-falling again, this time down a ravine, cool dirt walls rubbing smoothly at your skin. Above you, a ball of fire whooshes by, enormous and red.

  What the actual fuck was that? you think.

  In real life, you never ever swear. It’s one of your things that makes Kath roll her eyes. So you must be dead. But if you were dead, nothing would hurt. If this were a dream, it would be painless and blurry, disconnected, with no sharp edges and twangs. But it can’t possibly be real. It’s too hard to logic it out. Not death, not a dream, not real, then what?

  Stop thinking, you instruct yourself. Just breathe.

  The heat and the smell and the smoke are suffocating you and the pain is in so many places you can’t tell where it is coming from and the sky is gone and the ground is gone and you are gone. Are you gone?

  No.

  You don’t die.

  You aren’t dead.

  You are the ground and the sky and the burning plane, your cells spread everywhere at once and yet still contained within your skin. It’s impossible but it’s possible.

  You are everything.

  You are nothing.

  You are stuck in yourself with all this pain, the blue sky black smoke red fire all melted into one enormously impossible agony of ugly colors and knife blades.

  But.

  But . . .

  Here is a miracle:

  Josh Harris isn’t dead either.

  You know this, because he is underneath you. You have landed on Josh Harris. Josh Harris is definitely no longer conscious, but he is alive. You can feel him breathing. You know he is not dead. You rise up and down gently in a way that makes you think of floating on the surface of a lake on an air mattress in another life, before.

  Now you are the thing that is between Josh Harris and death.

  You are the leaf.

  “I am the leaf,” you try to tell him, but something is in your mouth: blood and shattered teeth. You retch.

  The sky is nothing but black smoke now. The blue is gone. Pain is everywhere. Somehow you are still breathing even though every breath is scented with smoke and poison. But the air directly around you is below all that. It is wet and smells like clay. You lie still both because you can’t move and because you are the leaf, and that is a job you take seriously. The burning feeling is unbearable but the interior of you is cool and soft and the sky is
bluing again already, forcing the black gray white to dissipate into its greater blueness. Your brain isn’t allowing anything to make sense and is doing something strange and sticky to the word blue.

  Poor Josh Harris.

  You are on your side. Only one eye will open. You look through your one eye and you can see that your leg is bent in a way that isn’t possible. Still a dream then. No, not a dream. Too painful. Everything is very blurry and thick, even the air you are trying to breath.

  You slip in and out of sleep, as though it is a door that you are trying to force open, an elevator door. You want to get in! The door keeps sliding shut, rejecting you. Blue, you think. If you can get a dream to start and catch, then you can sleep and then wake up and this can be over. Josh Harris makes strange sounds, ducks in his throat, velvet on his lips.

  Shhhh, Josh Harris, you say, inside your head, because your mouth isn’t working. You sleep and wake up. Wake up and sleep. It’s not sleep. It is something heavier than that, with more static, a roaring in your ears that won’t stop, like the echo of what just happened. You open your eyes and the roar lessens.

  You watch the smoke gradually filter entirely away, leaving the sky’s blue supremacy to reign again, as though a plane hasn’t just torn through it and ripped it into pieces. It’s strange how there is no tear showing, how it closed itself back up again seamlessly. You don’t know how much time has passed. You can hear someone moaning, which means someone else is alive, or maybe the moaning is coming from you. Who could possibly have survived?

  (Not Mr. Appleby. Not either Max. Not Melody. Not Danika Prefontaine. Not Fitzy. Not Charlie Martin. Not Kath. Not the angry British girl. Definitely not the flight attendant.)

  You think about the people who did not live—you know that definitely people died—although you don’t know yet how long that list of names will be. You imagine them all now holding hands, slipping smoothly between the blue molecules of the sky ceiling, vanishing into an ether of light. You have never been so aware of how the light is there, waiting for all of you. You’ve never understood so clearly how easily you could become part of the flow of that eternal river of endless light. But Josh Harris isn’t going and so neither are you. In that way, he is saving you, too.

  You lie there for a long time, watching the sky give up its hold on blue and fade to gray while serenely accepting their souls, then turning darker from the weight of all of them. It gets quieter and quieter. There’s a wind. It’s intensely cold.

  The absolute silence pours over you like water in an ice-cold creek and you slip into it, crisp and perfect against your burning skin. You let it take you, just for now. You don’t know what else to do. What is there to do? Your mouth tastes like blood and oil and your dream is shattered around the edges like the flickering lights of a migraine and you need a drink of water and you can’t take a deep breath without your lungs crumpling like tinfoil.

  You fall asleep thinking about the sky and why you’ve never properly noticed it before, the stars punching holes in the blackness, showing the people who just arrived in the light a glimpse of the dark, silent world they have left behind.

  part two

  6.

  This is what dreams look like when they come true:

  You and Josh Harris are lying on a blanket on a football field in Wyoming. The blanket is plaid and smooth and smells like fabric softener. The air is heavy with the scent of wildflowers and summer and tree pollen and, faintly, lawn mower gas and sawdust.

  Above you, the sky is clear and warm and star-freckled. There’s supposed to be a meteor shower tonight, which you remember, as if waking from a dream, is why you are here with Josh Harris and a backpack filled with snacks and a tiny cooler full of melting ice and six green glass bottles of beer, which you don’t really like but will drink anyway because tonight, one of the last summer nights before school starts up, the night of the biggest meteor shower in history, is going to be the most important night of your life, so far.

  The best night of your life, so far.

  The most romantic night of your life, so far.

  “I used to be afraid of meteors,” you say. Your voice comes out froggy. You clear your throat.

  “Who’s afraid of meteors?” He turns to look at you and his face makes you feel light-headed. It’s so close to you. So close. And you could kiss him right now if you wanted to, because Josh Harris is your boyfriend.

  Instead of kissing him, you lean up on your elbow. “Not the meteors, but the possibility that they could, like, slam into the Earth and erase all of mankind.”

  “Oh, that.”

  “Yeah, that. No one wants to be . . . made extinct. There’s probably a word for that.” You’re sitting up now, crisscross applesauce, like in kindergarten on the alphabet carpet. You can practically smell the carpet fibers, artificial and somehow chemical.

  “Extinguished?”

  “Extinguished,” you repeat. “Yes. That’s a terrible word.” You close your eyes. You used to Google things like “anticipated trajectory of asteroid Apophis.” (Apophis has a 2.7 percent chance of crashing into the Earth in 2029, when you will only be 29 and won’t really have finished being who you are going to be yet.)

  “But you’re not scared of them anymore, right?”

  “I guess I’m not scared of anything anymore,” you tell him, uncrossing your legs.

  You don’t have to tell him why. After all, if you live to be twenty-nine, you’ll have had thirteen bonus years past the time when you should have died, but didn’t.

  He pulls you down next to him and you land awkwardly on your elbow, which seems to have nowhere to go. You tuck it under your side. “I get it,” he says.

  “I know.”

  “That’s because you get me.”

  “We get each other.”

  He smiles and his smile and the way his two top teeth overlap the tiniest bit is so familiar to you, you suddenly don’t know where he begins and you end. “Cue the romantic music!” he says and he starts humming something sweet.

  It’s like that.

  You didn’t really know Josh Harris Before.

  You had an idea of who he was, who you wanted him to be, but you had no way of being sure who he really was beyond being gorgeous and good at all things. You assumed he was nice, but did you really know? He just seemed like a person who would help elderly people with their groceries at the store, like someone who would risk his own life to save a dog from a river or something. You assumed he liked animals. You assumed he was a good kisser.

  And, well, you weren’t totally wrong. So maybe he hasn’t changed as much as you did, after all. But as it turns out, he doesn’t like animals. He’s afraid of them, he’s told you. Dogs, cats, all of them, but especially horses, which is too bad for you. “Animals are unpredictable,” he says. “I like to know what’s going to happen next.”

  You like that he is afraid of something. (Even though you wish it wasn’t horses.) It makes him seem more human. It makes him seem more like you. Besides, even if he were afraid, he’d still pull a dog out of the rapids, you’re sure of it.

  Now, After, you are a completely different person and probably he is, too, but the ways that you’ve both changed fit perfectly together. Somehow.

  Magically.

  You turn your head away from him slightly, which makes him disappear. The eye on the side of your face closest to him is gone.

  Lost forever. You sometimes imagine it on the side of the mountain, still staring up at that same sky. Sometimes you feel like you can almost see what it sees.

  Of course, that’s not how it was. It was damaged and removed by surgeons, cleanly, in an operating room sometime during the aftermath, a surging tide of time that comes back to you only in tiny fits and starts.

  Being able to see out of only one eye gives you a strange perspective. You’re getting used to it, but still, sometimes you f
all up stairs and bash into furniture when you misjudge the angles.

  But even losing an eye was not the biggest change. The bigger change is inside you.

  You can’t explain it. You are still a hypochondriac and you are still self-loathing, but you are also so much braver and sharper, as though the crash carved off your dull edges, leaving you as glistening and dangerous as a razor. Additionally, you are shockingly pale and wafty, like a Swedish piccolo player. All of your curves and lumps dissolved away while you were sleeping or in a coma or having surgery to pin the bones in your body back together.

  After the crash, your hair fell out and then grew in silvery-white, as thin and transparent as you felt, yet as strong as a cobweb. There is a name for the condition, which is alopecia areata. You know that you are not your hair, and yet because your hair is one of the first things that people notice about you, in a way, you are. You are the girl with the silver hair. You are the girl who was dead and is now alive.

  You are the one who lived.

  You are still short, obviously.

  You still have Junky Idiotic Arthritis and different-but-the-same trying-too-hard glasses and parents who fight more than they dance (they never dance) and you still feel like you are better at drawing your life than living it.

  So actually, you are the same.

  But Josh Harris is your boyfriend.

  You are Josh Harris’s girlfriend.

  So you aren’t the same at all. You used to be someone who yearned. And now you’re not. You’re someone who already has what she always wanted.

  It’s taking some getting used to and it’s hard to figure it out sometimes because your brain does not work quite the same as it did before. And of course getting what you always wanted came at an impossible price.

  You can’t think about the price.

  You just can’t.

  7.

  When you first got back to California, there were reporters everywhere everywhere everywhere. It was surreal, the way they kept popping up, in front of you, microphones outstretched.