Signal Fires

by Dani Shapiro

But these are only a few possible arcs to a life, a handful of shooting stars in the night sky. Change one thing and everything changes. A tremor here sets off an earthquake there. A fault line deepens. A wire gets tripped.

Hopeful or ominous?

Theirs was a neighborhood like any other, with the secrets and heartaches and lies, the triumphs and moments of grace that weave their way through all communities.

In making the decision to settle in a particular house on a particular street, they had all thrown their lot in with one another.

From this distance, it seems possible that it’s all happening at once: this life, that life—an immeasurable number of lives all playing themselves out in parallel motion.

She has to believe that they’re all here. That they’ve made an indelible mark. That all their joys and sorrows, their triumphs and mistakes and hopes and despair are still as alive as they ever were. That no one ever truly, completely leaves.

She numbs her feelings, because they are bigger than she is. And not just the painful feelings—the joyful ones too.

All of it swells like a wave, threatening to overtake her: happiness, pride, terror, insecurity, and the terrible, terrible loneliness that goes away, however briefly, only after a couple of drinks.

She will wish time away. Check her watch. Wonder why it all seems to be taking so long. Then suddenly—it will feel as if it has happened overnight—there will be no need for bedtime stories, lullabies. No hand-holding. She will lose sight of what’s happening. It will speed up, like the pages of a calendar in one of those old-fashioned movies, flipping, flipping, one day, week, month into the next until, if she’s not careful, she will no longer recognize her child, her husband, her life.

It isn’t misery that loves company—no, no. Happiness loves company, and misery—misery just wants to be left alone.

To fold into himself again and again like an origami puzzle until he’s small enough to be overlooked.

He will move through his life, as we all do, without knowing what has preceded him or what lies ahead.

How long before she would have a moment of awareness, feel the falling of the blade that would forever separate her life—their lives—into all that came before, and now this?

The stars, rather than appearing distant and implacable, seemed to be signal fires in the dark, mysterious fellow travelers lighting a path; one hundred thousand million luminous presences beckoning from worlds away. See us. We are here. We have always been here. We will always be here.

has come to believe that we live in loops rather than one straight line; that the air itself is made not only of molecules but of memory; that these loops form an invisible pattern; that past, present, and future are a part of this pattern; that our lives intersect for fractions of seconds that are years, centuries, millennia; that nothing ever vanishes.

There should be a word for the moment just before heartbreak, when the very air quivers with all that is about to come.

He just needed to survive his own childhood and he would be fine—more than fine.

Maybe all of them are simply a chorus of souls, light touching light.

But the real reason is that they know, on some level they know, that their survival has been simply a matter of good fortune.

It wasn’t exactly like time stopped; more that time had seemed to expand so that they were a part of everything that had ever happened or ever would happen. She would never really be gone.

There are a few people who will feel her touch—a chill up a spine, a hand in the air, a poem recalled—even if they won’t exactly know it.

Life is just a series of accidents, one piled on top of the next like one of those huge highway crashes you sometimes read about, one jackknifed tractor trailer in the fog, and all of a sudden there’s a twenty-seven-car pileup.

The sunshine has convinced them all that this whole pandemic thing is overblown.

He had drifted away from what matters most. And now, here he is. Offering food as sustenance, as balm for the spirit, as connection.

One lesson among many during the pandemic is that plans are mere fantasies. Plans are fungible. We make plans and God laughs.

The atmosphere is weighted with grief as if grief were a tangible thing, a presence rather than an absence.

Maybe it’s all right to risk loving someone.

“If only time could be seen whole, then you could see the past remaining intact, instead of vanishing in the rearview mirror.”

Grief comes in waves. Like the swells crashing against the rocks, it gathers force and breaks when you least expect it.

The sunlight is dancing along the whitecaps. It looks as if the sea were filled with thousands upon thousands of flickering stars. Perhaps each one is what remains of every soul who has ever lived; perhaps time is not a continuum, but rather, past, present, and future are always and forever unspooling.