The Measure

by Nikki Erlick

There was something both comforting and unsettling about the fact that every adult on earth suddenly seemed to be sharing the same surreal experience, the ubiquity of the boxes both a terror and a relief.

It was part of Nina’s job as an editor to keep herself informed, but the sheer number of apps and outlets had grown with every year in the role, and it sometimes overwhelmed Nina to think that she could spend an entire lifetime reading and never keep up.

Flying, to Ben, always felt like sidestepping time, the hours on an airplane existing outside the normal continuum of life below. But never before had he so clearly exited one world and returned to another.

“But we can’t just act like it’s not happening. I can’t keep teaching them history and pretending like we’re not living through it right now.”

They weren’t insane, Nina thought. They were heartbroken.

Amie and Maura often asked her to be less controlling. To loosen up. To let it go. But Nina couldn’t let go. Not when she lived in a world of betrayal and heartache, of mysterious boxes and painfully short strings.

“They’re a reminder that sometimes we screw up, and sometimes the system screws with us, but if you live your life with enough passion and boldness, then that’s what you’ll be remembered for. Not the crap that happened along the way.”

There were few places where she felt more contented than a bookstore. She had a sometimes overwhelming tendency to disappear into her daydreams, so Amie took comfort in being surrounded by the equally prolific dreams of others, preserved forever in print.

There’s no way to ever go back to the time before. I know that sounds cliché, but it’s true. Once you know something, you forget what it was like to not know it.

But Ben was curious. “So, if it wasn’t about the shooting, why did you quit?” “I think I was tired,” Hank said. “Tired of seeing people come into the hospital crying, scared, completely desperate, and begging me for answers that I couldn’t give them.”

“You know, I watched a lot of people come to the end, and everyone around them kept begging them to fight. It takes real strength to keep on fighting, and yes, usually that’s the right answer. Keep fighting, keep holding on, no matter what. But sometimes I think we forget that it also takes strength to be able to let go.”

That version of myself who lives in the Van Woolsey has everything settled on the inside, too. She looks at her life and simply feels satisfied. She doesn’t need to spend time on fantasies anymore, because she’s already living in one.

Amie found the words of E. B. White engraved in a thin sheet of metal atop the wood panel behind her: I arise in the morning torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to savor the world. That makes it hard to plan the day.

“We humans have an impulse to mark our existence in some way that feels permanent.

If, after fifteen years of chaos and fear, the world had seen enough strings—short and long and every measure in between—to know that any length was possible, and so, perhaps, the length didn’t matter.

That the beginning and the end may have been chosen for us, the string already spun, but the middle had always been left undetermined, to be woven and shaped by us.