Since We Fell

by Dennis Lehane

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

He’s happy. And isn’t that the worst of all possible outcomes?

She felt like an emotional beggar, going from door to door her whole life, asking perfect strangers to feed her. Fill her. Fill her again.

The dead have names and grave markers. The expunged never existed.”

“It’s like I’m in a beautiful library but none of the books have titles.”

When Rachel compared it to Hell, Greta disagreed. “In Hell,” she said, “someone’s in charge.”

I want the capital-G God the televangelists claim moves tornadoes out of their paths. The one who cures cancer and arthritis in the faithful, the God professional athletes thank for taking an interest in the outcome of the Super Bowl or the World Cup or a home run hit in the eighty-seventh game of the hundred sixty-two played by the Red Sox this year.

After all this suffering, the faces seemed to ask, are we to accept that suffering is the point?

She couldn’t tell if the sadness in his smile stemmed from pity for her or if he just possessed a sad smile.

A person could be photographed every day of his life, she suspected, and still hide the truth of himself—the essence—from all who came along in pursuit of it.

“It’s been a complicated decade for me.”

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

We live in a world of disposable memory. Nothing’s built to last, not even shame.”

I am still afraid. But I am not terrified.

There seemed to be little rhyme or reason as to why one day snatching the correct words from the ether was like opening a faucet and other days it was like opening a vein,

“It was hideous. Because if someone can be that happy? That perfect? What’s that say about the rest of us?”

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

Her thoughts didn’t wander; they marched in a straight line.

There’s darkness in this world you can’t learn about watching TV and reading books.”

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.

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

“Where’s a Scientologist when you need one, uh?”