Since We Fell

by Dennis Lehane

“A man is the stories he tells about himself, and most of those stories are lies.

“I worry she’ll waste her life searching out things to fill the hole, transitory things, soul-baubles, new age therapies, self-medication. She thinks she’s rebellious and resilient, but she’s only one of those things. She needs so much.”

love doesn’t trump all for you, safety does.

They both laughed it off because it felt like what one did when crucial differences in a marriage revealed themselves in strictly theoretical terms.

We age as the rest of the world watches, she thought, but somehow we’re the last to know.

I’ve grown terrified of people, not particular people, but in general, which is worse.

It made her sharper, funnier, but louder too, and Rachel knew from past experience how quick the humor could turn into self-loathing, the sharpness could dim, but the loud would just get louder.

She just wanted to stay happy for a day. And not the bullshit, shiny happy of a beauty pageant contestant or a religious fanatic, just the hard-earned happiness of a self-aware human being who’d worked on her fears over the weekend with her loving, if often preoccupied, husband.

Happiness, her mother used to say, was an hourglass with a crack in it.

And she knew fine, fine people who’d stood before God and all their friends to profess their undying love to each other only to toss that love on a slag heap a few years later.

A marriage, her mother often said, was only as strong as your next fight.

“Oh, Rachel,” she heard her mother say, as she’d said more than once, “isn’t it sad that you can only love yourself if someone else gives you permission?”

Monsters, her mother had told her and she had learned herself over the years, don’t dress like monsters; they dress like humans. Even stranger, they rarely know they’re the monsters.

If we are this alone, she wanted to know, then what is the point?

In some time continuum, we’re all dead as soon as we’re born.

We are not special. We are lit from within by a single candle flame, and when that flame is blown out and all light leaves our eyes, it is the same as if we never existed at all. We don’t own our life, we rent it.

We don’t own our life, we rent it.

Safety is an illusion we sell to children to help them sleep.

That’s what love is – where once there was one, now there’s two, and that’s so much less convenient and less orderly and less safe.

A good man with a gun can’t defeat a bad man with a gun if the bad man is at ease in violent confrontation and the good man is not.”

If it’s ever within your power to do so, she considered saying aloud to Brian (but didn’t), you have to bear witness to your dead. You simply have to. You have to step into the energy field of whatever remains of their spirit, their soul, their essence and let it pass through your body. And in the passing, maybe a wisp of it adheres to you, grafts itself to your cells. And in this communion, the dead continue to live. Or strive to.