The Poppy Fields

by Nikki Erlick

There is a place, hidden among the sweeping sandy swaths of southern desert, where all you can see is red. From above, it’s a carpet of crimson, but as you lean closer, you see that it’s not one singular sheet of color, but rows upon rows of distinct red dots. Thousands of them. All of them nearly identical. Most of them silent and still. Some occasionally vibrating with movement. Like a wild field of poppies. Except it’s nothing like that. Because the little red dots are not flowers, but people. People who journeyed many miles to get here. People who came here to sleep.

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.

“Grief is an individual journey. Everyone navigates it differently. When determining if an applicant is a good candidate for our sleep, we do not look at the pain itself. We look at the person who is feeling it.”

Kansas oddly reminded Sasha of the ocean at its calmest. The way the grass rolled on, low and unbroken, one expansive emerald sheet, until sliced across by the blue horizon.

“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.”

memories were stored inside music, and sometimes you just couldn’t listen.

And Ava could see it, then, in the desperate sheen coating his eyes; she could hear it in the doubt thinning his voice: That even Ray wasn’t convinced by his theories. That he didn’t really believe the Poppy Fields had killed Johnny. But Ray had been denied the chance to say goodbye, to say I’m sorry, to say I love you. He’d been tossed into the riptide and was grasping at rocks to keep himself from drowning. And Ellis’s creation, the Poppy Fields’ sleep, was the only nearby stone in the water where his fingers didn’t slip off.

we’ll keep on talking, now that I’m able to listen.

Grief and faith could coexist.

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.

“Maybe you’re braver than you think,” he said. Ava smiled at him. “Is that from Winnie the Pooh?” Ray snorted. “You think I just quoted Winnie the Pooh to give you advice?” “Well, technically, misquoted,” Ava said. “The line is actually ‘You’re braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.’” “Damn,” said Ray. “That’s better.” “But I liked yours, too,” said Ava. She realized, in that moment, that she was going to miss him, once they reached the Fields. She was going to miss all three of them, this motley gang they’d gathered.

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. Ray couldn’t really articulate any of this aloud, but that was how he felt.

“Yes, we should feel free to critique the Poppy Fields, like all institutions,” the commenter wrote. “But they’ve received *hundreds of thousands* of applicants. Shouldn’t we be more distressed by the fact that so many of our fellow humans are living in such deep despair? Think of how severely they must be hurting. Think of how badly we must be failing them. Maybe if we found a way to connect with each other more, to give each other a little more compassion and grace, to ask people what they need from us instead of always making assumptions, then maybe no one would feel the need to sleep there anymore. Maybe the Poppy Fields would simply run out of patients.”

“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.”

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.

The reason anyone would choose to sleep is the same reason I never could. Love changes us. It strengthens us, and dents us, and lifts us, and guides us. If we sleep, if we suffer the side effect, if we’re no longer shaped by the people we love . . . who are we?

the next time that Ray saw the wall it would only be as a memory. This wall that was a tapestry of love and loss, a history of joy and suffering. A map of a world that sometimes felt too unbearable to live in. And a record of all the people who chose to build a home here anyway.

But I do believe that, even with the side effect, if you put a scalpel in my grip, my fingers would know what to do. They might not hold steady enough anymore, and I might not enjoy what I’m doing, but they’d still feel their way through the motions. The body has its own way of remembering.”

This was the other side of love. This was the aftermath, the cost, the opposite end of the bargain. This was the dirty, damp confetti and trampled flower petals, stamped into the muddy ground and tossed about by the wind, long after the parade had ended. This was the sad, lonely echo in the hall, now that the dance was over. Here, in this room, was grief. But grief was love in its second shape.

Actually, poppies have a remarkable ability to grow in even extremely poor soil. After the First World War, they were one of the earliest flowers to begin growing again among the wreckage of the battlefields in Europe. They’re often found in places where natural disasters or human behaviors have caused a massive disruption in the land. Their seeds wait in the soil, dormant, until they can emerge in the wake of catastrophe and help make way for other plants to return. Like they’ve been sleeping, just waiting to wake up and bring new life to the earth. Poppies are a ruderal species, which means that they grow from the rubble. If something so spectacular can still blossom in even the most disturbed earth, then doesn’t that mean there’s hope for even the most battered hearts to heal?

But the absence of Johnny still feels like the air: sometimes you notice it more, like when the wind picks up or the sky feels particularly humid and heavy, but always, you’re at least somewhat aware of its presence. You’ll never exist without it.