Things You Save in a Fire

by Katherine Center

She’d gone too far, she suddenly realized. Tried too hard. Violated the essential rule of human relations that if you chase too hard, everyone eventually runs away.

All the sorrow you absorb in that job makes you funnier. You have to balance out the pain somehow, and joking around is one of the best things about the job. There’s so much death in that world, but laughter is life.

The job hardens you, there’s no question about it. That’s the only way to survive. You take in too much. One horror after another soaks through your skin, swirls in your lungs, echoes in your ears. You can’t think too hard about what it means, or how anybody feels, least of all you. You can’t help them if you become them—and the only reason you’re there is to help.

“Forgiveness is about a mind-set of letting go.” She thought for a second, then said, “It’s about acknowledging to yourself that someone hurt you, and accepting that.” Done, I thought. “Then it’s about accepting that the person who hurt you is flawed, like all people are, and letting that guide you to a better, more nuanced understanding of what happened. Flawed, I thought. Okay. Check. “And then there’s a third part,” she went on, “probably the hardest, that involves trying to look at the aftermath of what happened and find ways that you benefited, not just ways you were harmed.”

But here’s something else I know. You can’t make people stay if they don’t want to. People leave all the time. They look around one day and say, ‘You know what? Never mind. I’m out.’

“Everybody hurts everybody,” I said, “eventually.”

Love could heal me. Not the rookie, not some guy, but love itself—and my impossibly brave choice to practice it. It really did turn out to be power, not weakness. The power to refuse to let the world’s monsters ruin everything. The power to claim my right to be happy.

knew too much about life to pretend that it wasn’t half tragedy. We lose the people we love. We disappoint each other. We misunderstand. We get lost and lonely and angry. But right now, in this moment, we were okay.

Maybe nobody got a happy ending in the end. Maybe all happiness could ever hope to be was a tiny interruption from sorrow. But there was no denying what this was. A genuine, blissful moment of joy. It couldn’t last, but that’s what made it matter. And that just had to be enough.

I’ve spent so much time wishing that what happened never happened. But it did. And the question I try to focus on is, What now?

human connection is the only thing that will save us. I do it because I believe we learn empathy when we listen to other people’s stories and feel their pain with them. I do it because I know for certain that our world has an empathy problem with women, and this is one brave thing I can do to help fix it.

Sometimes I wonder, if I’d been able to tell someone sooner about what he did, if I might have been able to protect the women he harmed after me. Maybe. Maybe one brave voice could have stopped him. Or maybe, just as likely, I’d have been blamed and humiliated and ignored—and he’d have gotten a pass. I know why women don’t speak out. It’s hard enough just to survive.