The Poppy Fields

by Nikki Erlick

Because they have each been told, over and over, that the only way out of a hardship is through. But nobody ever told them that they had to stay awake.

The experimental sleeping treatment was certainly gaining traction, but many people still saw it as just that: an experiment. A place where human lab rats disappeared for months at a time. A place that preyed on the grieving. A place for only those eccentric enough, reckless enough, weak enough, to accept the many consequences in the hope of healing from loss.

Patients at the Poppy Fields enter a long-term state of dormancy, akin to a medically induced coma, that typically lasts four to eight weeks and is designed to help those recovering from a devastating loss.

He was grateful to anyone eager to listen, but he wasn’t ready to speak.

She could travel the globe or travel through history, feel love or hate or envy or hope, any day she pleased, any time she checked out a new book.

You will hurt less. You will cry less. You will anguish less. But you will always miss the lost person in some capacity, as there will always be an empty space where they once stood.

“Grief. The moment when you realize that your world and the world are entirely separate.

It was a prolonged act of losing him, of coming to accept it as immutable truth. Of canceling plans bit by bit, rewinding all the tapes of their future she’d been playing inside her head. She felt like her whole body had been hollowed out, as empty as the years to come.

She knew, perhaps better than most, that there was simply no arguing with the logic of grief.

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.

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.

Ellis knew that some people liked to feel small, that the immensity of the world was a comfort.

But grief was love in its second shape.