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.”

Ray had been gifted many physical skills, but the best he could do with a paper and pen was still the line drawing of the Superman “S” he’d learned in elementary school.

And the other three—old and decrepit as they surely appeared to Sky—knew that anyone who declared themselves an adult was still so terribly young.

They believed they were fighting for the world. But the world doesn’t always reward its fighters.

“So, maybe you should get a little more experience before teaching someone,” said Ava. “But all the stuff from driver’s ed is never gonna be as fresh as it is right now!” The prospect of any driver’s knowledge diminishing over time struck Ava as quite disturbing.

but I can’t keep listening to other people talk. You know, those well-meaning but completely infuriating people who say, “Everything happens for a reason,” and I just want to shove them down the nearest flight of stairs, because there are no reasons that would even come close to being acceptable. Why does there have to be a reason? Why do I need to search for a purpose in something so horrible?

Ava had lived in her own country of grief, and Ray was now living in his. No two were ever the same. Ava felt like she’d managed to earn some sort of dual citizenship, in which she could visit the country of grief whenever she thought about Mae and then return to the life she’d worked to build beyond that country’s borders.

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 afraid of looking back on these years and feeling like I wasted that time. I’m afraid of missing out on life.”

‘You’re braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.’”

AA Milne?

Isn’t that what everybody wants, in the end? Just to feel a little less lonely?

“Losing someone . . . it’s not like a sickness or a temporary rough patch you’re trying to deal with. Even if you sleep for two months and wake up and feel less awful, the work isn’t done. This doesn’t end. This is the rest of your life. There’s no getting over, there’s just . . . getting on. Figuring out who you are now, because you sure as hell aren’t the same person as before. But maybe that doesn’t have to be all bad.”

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

Ellis had already come to believe that we all grieve on our own. Our love is ours alone to give and ours alone to mourn, and in the end, at the Poppy Fields, everyone sleeps alone.

There is only one reason anyone would sleep at the Poppy Fields. Love. 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. But the love itself is fragile, and it’s put at risk by the sleep.