The Poppy Fields

by Nikki Erlick

“Grief. The moment when you realize that your world and the world are entirely separate. When your world has come to a grinding halt, when you’re drowning and flailing about, and the world just rolls on without you.”

“My friends asked me how I could possibly let myself sleep for such a long time—could I really allow the world to just move on without me? They had no idea that the world was already moving on without me. And that’s precisely why I wanted to sleep.”

We may never know if there’s a god out there helping us or hurting us, but we know that humans trying to play God are more than capable of doing some damage.”

Life and death, love and mourning, should be treated in certain ways, they thought. Sasha knew that her parents, and her grandparents especially, felt that the grief and traumas of history—both personal and communal—were meant to be carried, not discarded. Like weights to be worn all our lives, something to recognize, not to be rid of. To them, the Poppy Fields was an attempt to sanitize the most brutal, and yet most essential, elements of life.

Heroes are bulletproof, heroes are fearless. A hero would never call a mayday, never acknowledge defeat. It’s humans who are vulnerable, fallible, mortal.

But I’ve learned that the heart is a very big place, with room for many loves inside. And when one of those loves is lost, sometimes it’s too much to ask all the other loves to make up for the one that’s missing. The heart needs time to reassemble itself, to learn how to beat again when a part of it is gone.

“Why are you so brave?” “What do you mean?” Sky couldn’t help but laugh at how serious Ava sounded.

“I mean . . . how is it that you’re out in the world, so young and all alone, and you’re not afraid of anything?” Sky stared at the slender neck of her bottle, swishing the question around her mind. “Well . . . I guess it’s actually because I am afraid,” Sky confessed, sliding her thumb up and down the side of the bottle, slippery with condensation. It was perhaps the first time Sky’s playful confidence had dropped. “You know, one of the last things we studied in class . . . or, well, one of the last things I paid attention to in class . . . was this week on Greek mythology, and I remember learning about the Fates, these three

powerful women, who gave every human a length of string that measured how long they would live. After their string got snipped, that was it.” Sky shook her head. “And it finally hit me that I was already, like, at least twenty percent of the way through my string. And this is the good part of the string. The part when I’m luckily still young and healthy and unattached, and I can do whatever I want. I guess I’m af...

Our love is ours alone to give and ours alone to mourn,

Love makes people do wild things, things they can’t understand, things they may have sworn they would never, ever do. So, were they ever to lose that love, I imagine they might do just about anything. But here’s the thing: They haven’t lost that love. They’ve lost the physical, the visible, the tangible layer of love, but not the love itself. The love itself endures. The love itself is baked into our memories. The love itself is what slips across our cheeks when we cry, it’s what tugs at our lips when we smile. It’s the yearning pit in our stomach, the urge to make them proud. It’s the gratitude in knowing we were gifted something real.

Love changes us. It strengthens us, and dents us, and lifts us, and guides us.