Station Eleven

by Emily St. John Mandel

The bright side of the planet moves toward darkness And the cities are falling asleep, each in its hour, And for me, now as then, it is too much. There is too much world. —Czeslaw Milosz The Separate Notebooks

In art school they talked about day jobs in tones of horror. She never would have imagined that her day job would be the calmest and least cluttered part of her life.

I am heartless, she thinks, but she knows even through her guilt that this isn’t true. She knows there are traps everywhere that can make her cry, she knows the way she dies a little every time someone asks her for change and she doesn’t give it to them means that she’s too soft for this world or perhaps just for this city, she feels so small here. There are tears in her eyes now.

She’s always found the house beautiful, but it’s even more so now that she knows she’s leaving. It’s modest by the standards of people whose names appear above the titles of their movies, but extravagant beyond anything she would have imagined for herself. In all my life, there will never be another house like this.

The disorientation of meeting one’s sagging contemporaries, memories of a younger face crashing into the reality of jowls, under-eye pouches, unexpected lines, and then the terrible realization that one probably looks just as old as they do. Do you remember when we were young and gorgeous? Clark wanted to ask. Do you remember when everything seemed limitless? Do you remember when it seemed impossible that you’d get famous and I’d get a PhD? But instead of saying any of this he wished his friend a happy birthday.

First we only want to be seen, but once we’re seen, that’s not enough anymore. After that, we want to be remembered.