Left Over

Rock

"It's the leftover humans. The survivors. They're the ones I can't stand to look at, although on many occasions I still fail."

-Death in The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

One of the many millions of things I have learned in my studies is that our bodies tend to shut down to protect us from feeling the worst pain just before it strikes. You pass out, you go into a coma, you don't feel. In my personal experiences, I have found this to be only partly true. I'm just glad that my brother never felt the kind of pain that your body doesn't allow you to remain comatose through. The kind I'm dealing with.

Now, as I mentioned, my body did try to aid me in this process. While the most important person in the world was running into an inescapable inferno to squeeze one last selfless act into his short, helpful life, I was unconscious on the ground just outside. I had hit my head on the concrete after he had torn free of my grasp. But, looking back, that bump couldn't possibly have been hard enough to knock me out. No, I think that my brain decided to give me a hand. 'Here, Hiro. You've been good to me and fed me so much information over the years. I will repay you now, by taking a nap for the first few minutes of Tadashi's absence.' Wishful thinking. The truth is, you can't power off for the worst part because the worst part is that it lasts forever. You will never stop missing someone you love when they leave for good. You will never stop regretting every stupid remark you made out of anger over petty things. You will never stop seeing them in everyone and everything around you. But your body knows that you cannot stop feeling forever. Your body's job is to keep you alive as best it can, and you are not alive if you are not feeling. Your body is smarter than you and it knows, even when you don't, that this illness, this wound, this hurt, will slowly subside and stop, much like physical pain. Your body knows that pain is also an important feeling, and you are not alive if you haven't felt it.

--

I wake up at one point. I see a lot of orange and smell a lot of smoke and my head spins and I am out again. The next time I wake up, a cluster of mine and Tadashi's friends are hovering over me, some crying, some shouting into phones, some staring intently at me, some with their eyes fixed on the dying glow of the burning college. We are now a safe distance away from the smoldering building. Firemen have arrived, and it is difficult to tell smoke apart from the steam of the quickly evaporating hose water that rolls lazily towards the sky. Although the flames have been quelled, the air is still hot, like when you stand too close to a bonfire, and it burns my eyes. I close them.

"Gogo, he was awake for a second, you missed it! ...No, I'm sure. Hiro? Hiro?" Soft hands with long, slender fingers pat my check. I open my eyes halfway.

"Yeah, I'm... I'm up. Just resting." My throat is dry and my voice sounds like I swallowed microbots. Many faces crowd my vision.

"Hiro!" "Are you alright?" "Did you get burnt?" "Where is your brother?"

"Yeah, yeah, I'm okay, really." I sit up to prove it. "What do you mean, 'where's my brother'? He-" I spy the ash-coated baseball hat lying beside my hand. Memories flood back to me, of an argument and a professor and a harsh shove to the chest. "He didn't meet back up with you guys?" Silence. "...He didn't come back out, did he?" Confusion.

Honey kneels beside me. "Hiro, what are you talking about? Can you please explain?" But I can't explain. I am confused, too. For another moment. Until I remember an important detail, the last thing I saw. It had not been Tadashi that shoved me away from the fire, but the force of an explosion.

Have you ever seen the face of a boy who just realized that their brother is dead? My friends saw it.

"He went in there after Professor Callaghan, I couldn't stop him, oh my God, Tadashi is still in there, Tadashi is-"