The Poppy Fields

by Nikki Erlick

She was wary of moving too fast, of inadvertently rushing through life.

“It’s a clinic where they put you to sleep for a month, and then hopefully your broken heart is all patched up in the end.”

I’d been wishing my life away instead of actually living it.

How Ray hoped that all the clichés were true, that we

see our full life before our eyes. That we’re able to look back and remember the beginning and the middle and the end, and that it doesn’t feel like a series of distinct events, but that it feels like a story, a journey, that now makes sense as a whole. Everything you learned and felt and experienced, all the people who shaped your life, all the people whose lives you shaped, the difference between the old world that once existed before you and the new world you now leave behind, the world that is irrevocably changed because you were a part of it.

“After he died, I just had to think . . . if it hurts this much now,” Donna said, “then I must have been pretty darn lucky.”