The Forgetting Time

by Sharon Guskin

Pull yourself together, Janie. It was like pushing a yowling cat into a bag, but she did it. She quelled the sobs, let them roil in her stomach, and stood.

Wasn’t that the lesson of adulthood, of motherhood? You had to be where you were. The life you’re living, the moment you’re in.

Mental stress caused physical ailments: that much was certain; but why did some people emerge from trauma resiliently while others became plagued with night sweats and phobias?

Could the suicidal urge pour like a phobia or a personality characteristic from one life to the next? Could there be grief so unresolved and potent that it continued on, flowed into the next life as powerfully as a birth defect or a birthmark, where still it could not be shaken?

“How did you do it?” she said quietly. “Do what?” “Lose someone? How did you bear it?” “You take a breath,” he said. He took a sip of water. “Then you take another.”

But surely we all carried some little piece of each other inside of us. So what did it matter, whether the memories belonging to her boy existed inside this other one? Why were we all hoarding love, stockpiling it, when it was all around us, moving in and out of us like the air, if only we could feel it?

Her heart was cracked open now and the whole world could come on through.

You Only Live Once. That’s what people said, as if life really mattered because it happened only one time. But what if it was the other way around? What if what you did mattered more because life happened again and again, consequences unfolding across centuries and continents? What if you had chances upon chances to love the people you loved, to fix what you screwed up, to get it right?