This Impossible Brightness

by Jessica Bryant Klagmann

The running part was accurate enough, but the truth that was impossible to explain was that she was running toward her grief and away from everyone else.

It was a hard thing to do at times, striding headlong into memories that caused her heart to implode. But it was far easier than letting go.

“Welcome to Nowhere,” Theo said. “Or Everywhere,” Alma said, immediately feeling silly.

It wasn’t logical. It followed no science. Love rarely does.

“I always wonder, Isn’t being a good listener worth anything? Can’t you do something good for the world without standing in a crowd or shouting from a podium?”

Alma read the words: Rien n’est éternel. Bea traced her finger over the tattoo and said, “It means ‘nothing lasts forever.’

For all the times they’d argued about what was true art and what wasn’t, at the very least his father had done what he loved.

Nothing, nothing, nothing in this world was actually permanent—he finally understood this truth—not even, when it all came down to it, the granite beneath him.

Who knows, maybe the other Echoes will have stories they want to tell, too, and it could be a way to remind people of who we were.”

Alma spared him the complicated equation she often used herself, in which energy equaled distance between herself and other humans added to the time between interactions, minus interruptions and life’s social obligations, and multiplied by the volume of fresh air per day.

And who didn’t want to rewrite their own history, at least a little? At least the parts they regretted?

You write and you tell stories and nothing changes. You wonder what makes something worth the attention—how much of a disruption one would have to create to be of interest to science. To be of interest to the world. To be enough.

A matter of perspective, Alphie had written. Plummeting through the air, the soaring body looks no different to a spectator whether the Falling One tripped and fell or chose to jump. It is all the same. The Falling One alone possesses this secret knowledge of intent. So, can one change his or her mind on the way down? Can one who has accidentally fallen turn the act into an intentional one? As you somersaulted toward the earth, you caught sight of the ocean lit by the rising sun. It was such an impossible brightness that you thought you were glimpsing heaven. It was then that you changed course and decided you hadn’t fallen at all—you had leapt.

“You think you can rely on someone else to tell you where your own trail is? Is that what you’re telling me?”

“It is agonizing, the disposition of the human mind to construct obstacles in one’s own path, when the world itself has given us none. Life is so much easier than you think, Hayden MacKenna.”

Alma caught up, breathing deeply. “Everyone else seems to think I should. Like it’s the only way out of grief. Like wanting to be alone is a problem. Means I’m avoiding reality and there’s something wrong with me.”

“I read,” he said, “that often, when people get lost in the woods, they’ll come to a main road and they’ll just walk right across it. Or they’ll turn around and go right back where they started. People who’ve done this have said it was because they didn’t believe the road would take them in the right direction. But I tend to think it’s just easier sometimes to be lost.”

PS Remember your dad’s old car? Did you know “88” is Morse code for “love and kisses”?

Sure enough, the distant statue of Esmée Taylor was clearly leaning toward the beach. It had been a drier summer, and the river still rushed past the statue, but it was low, the waterfall reduced to a trickle tumbling over the cliff.

“What are you grateful for today?” she asked. “History,” he said. “There’s a time for everything to leave the present and become history. We play our part, and then we step the hell out of the way and let whoever comes next build on whatever artifacts we’ve left behind.”

As they parted ways at the statue of Esmée Taylor, Theo said, “We’re all responsible for our own happiness.

Is all of life, she wondered, simply one long journey narrowing in on those particular people who bring you peace, only to have them taken away?

“They just . . . ,” Birk began. “They just lost their way, terribly. It happened slowly, over many years, but now they’ve forgotten. They’ve forgotten how it used to be, and how it could have been different. Earth has stories, but nobody remembers them.

I wished I could say something to her, reassure her in some way that what she’d done had meant a lot. That her life had meant a lot. That people leave in the middle of a path sometimes, and we have to keep walking. That small things done with great love become great things.

We kept looking for fragments of history because that was a necessary part of the process. We never forgot, but we always moved forward.