In an Instant

by Suzanne Redfearn

nobody looked after your children the way you looked after your own.

an apology is only worth something if a person means it.”

docent

She’s very pretty—gold hair, gray eyes, big boobs. It’s only when she opens her mouth that she turns ugly.

But if there is a God in this new world, he is as invisible as when I was mortal, and there is no answer whatsoever to my plea.

These are the wounds that can be seen.

avoiding him the way some people avoid their reflections, not wanting to see what the world does.

For the first few hours this is how we remain, until, near midnight, the world gets impossibly colder, and the differences of how each suffers diminish until they all endure it in a uniform state of survival.

Regret is a tough emotion to live with, impossible to move on from, because what’s done is done. Only delusion can protect you from it, somehow altering history into something easier to accept,

She nods and turns away, locking out the future that will be haunted by this moment to focus on the horrible present as she prays for no more regret.

Like soldiers who fought beside each other, once the war is over, they return to their separate lives, their only bond a tragic shared memory all would rather forget.

There are some things time can’t heal. She and Aunt Karen have been friends twenty years, but in a lifetime, this moment won’t be forgotten.

her face so hopeful my heart aches with the cruelty.

Not allowing her hope to be obliterated completely—not yet, anyways.

Her only crime is not having the energy to fake it,

each so terrorized by what happened they avoid sleep for fear of remembering.

I think of the deer in the road, his startled marble eye blinking through the windshield, and I wonder if he is aware of the damage he caused, or if he is oblivious, ignorantly going about his life completely unaware of the price that saving his life has cost.

and I realize we are not meant to see ourselves so plainly, without the guise of ego and ignorance, not meant to have our true characters revealed.

I cannot be sure how Chloe remembers things, only that her altered view leaves no room for forgiveness.

listening for which direction the other went and avoiding the path.

unable to accept that the grotesque parts belong to her.

All the joy that was swirling around her and her big day has been sucked away and reduced to a guilty indulgence she needs to hide from everyone.

the desperateness that drew them together evaporates in the bright glare of the morning and the awful reality they face in front of them.

Their voices were hushed but heated, the way their arguments always were: angry rasps that lashed and slashed and filled the house with tension that lasted for days, until eventually the tension faded into deafening silence that made you almost miss the fighting.

there’s not a dry eye in the house, the audience united in their love and their sorrow, and I have to remind myself it is for me, that I’m the one who died and that this is their goodbye.

resting from the toll it takes to pretend she’s exactly who she was and to survive without me, the one person she was always able to be exactly who she was with.

He keeps this side of himself hidden, plodding forward as milquetoast, and I wonder if it’s for self-preservation.

I realize how awful people are to each other, how a pervasive cynicism exists in most of us that stops us from seeing the best parts of one another.

Chloe holds up her own wounds, and Mo frowns and nods when she sees how much Chloe’s decision to follow Vance cost her.

“And it’s like it is all around me all the time, and it sucks away all the light and absorbs all the sound so everything is less bright . . . less fun . . .” She sighs, lowers her face, then lifts it again to return her gaze to the water. “Less, I don’t know, less everything.”

I wish they could see the fullness rather than the void.

Don’t just try to be happy when you think of me—be happy. Look at the ocean and smile. Inhale the scent and celebrate. Remember me. Remember that I was never sad for more than a day, rarely for more than an hour. Remember the amazing times we had and what a goofball I was. Remember that I was scared of anything with more than four legs but fearless of adventure. Remember. Carry me inside you as a light that brightens your world and makes everything better. I don’t want to be a void, a hole, a shadow. REMEMBER ME!

It’s strange and wonderful, the things we do that we don’t realize we’ve done.

completely lost in the confession she’s refused everyone who’s asked.

“The ocean is going to miss her.”

I knew they were unhappy, but I had no idea the depth of their misery.

God’s way of protecting the young, a unique decibel of desperation reserved for babies that is impossible to ignore.

the very pitch itches his brain.

Her coping mechanism seems to be based on the theory that the past can only hurt you if you let it, only if you stop long enough to consider it.

no one but me noticing the distress in her eyes from the toll it takes for her to keep up the charade.

not a woman designed for loneliness or sadness.

Is goodness only true if it is at a personal cost? Anyone can be generous when they are rich; anyone can be selfless when they have plenty.

Are we born with our strength? If so, then should we condemn those who don’t have it?

And I forgive her for tonight, and I hope she forgives herself. Like everyone else, she is stumbling forward, one foot in front of the other, not always in the right direction but staggering on just the same.

a battalion short on limbs, fingers, and sanity—

We really only know the parts we know.”

I’m sick of every memory of me being discarded, avoided, or embalmed in a shrine.

Being dead sucks, but watching them destroy the life I had is worse.

The way I view alcohol is that it makes you more of whatever you already are.

“everyone deals with traumatic events in their own way, and sometimes it’s not really lying when they tell it different than it was so much as remembering in a way that allows them to live with it a little easier.”