Breathe For Me

CHAPTER 4

GABRIEL

Before I left Bristol, I checked up the figures for the amount of people that would be stuck there after the sanctions were placed in the wake of our shipment. The rough estimation came out three hundred and twenty-three thousand people. Three. Hundred. Twenty. Three. Thousand. And I would get out scot-free. I felt vaguely nauseous. Why did I deserve to leave while they were left to face possible death?

Katie, who would volunteer at the old age home in whatever free time she had because she "hates how lonely I would feel if I were old and had no one left." Mum, who works every spare second because she wanted "to give the kiddos a fighting chance" and paid for our private school education. Crazy Al from the bike shop, Mrs. Applebaum the candy lady, Mike my beer buddy, Celia the sweetheart from apartment 2B, Mr. Carbom my boss....The list goes on forever and I'm swamped by a sea of faces I feel obligated to remember. Each person as vibrant and alive in my memory as the next. I decide right then that I can't just let these people go- I can't just "move on" while they're left at the mercy of PoMast.

I run the numbers through my head again. Three hundred and twenty-three thousand. There are sixty minutes per hour, twenty-four hours per day, one thousand four hundred and forty minutes per twenty-four hours. One moment of silence for three hundred and twenty-three thousand people would be two hundred and twenty-four days of silence. It's the least I can do, I decide. A little under a year of holding my peace is the least I could give to all of those still stuck in Bristol.

I'm hit by a sudden memory of something I once read. It was an article on a certain religious sect that considered silence to be one of the universe's highest vessels of power. They believed that in keeping silent, one can reach a certain spiritual clarity that was rivaled only by the prophets of old. In pursuit of this clarity, they would become recluses and go into hermitages. They did this so that when the spiritual clarity came, they could become closer to God. I never really contemplated God. Never thought It to be relevant. But right now, I wish for someone or something that I could scream at for allowing us to destroy the world the way we did. For forcing my family apart the way it was. I wish to be close to the being that could take care of Mum and Katie now that I no longer can.

I check the time. It's 3:45 pm, October 24th. I think my decision over again. A vow of silence. It sounds so cliche' in my head. But it's a vow I'm willing to make. On October the 24th, at 3:45 pm, I promise myself to hold a two hundred and twenty-four day moment of silence for all of those that could not be saved the way I was.