Mayfly Melodies

Twenty-Nine

Noah

Courage is being scared to death and saddling up anyways—John Wayne

There's a moment right before dawn breaks over the horizon where the world is just quiet. The air is calm and unmoving and life is frozen. No animals scatter about. No plants shift in the wind. The world is still and for just a moment, one single moment, it is as if there are no problems in the world at all. Like there is no such thing as pain or grief, heartbreak or sadness.

But the thing about moments is that eventually they always come to an end and when they do it is often not quietly.

Noah's moment of calm ended with the type of explosion that comes with the shattering of a glass. It was as if someone had dropped a cup on the floor and watched as it shattered into a hundred thousand pieces. Except the glass cup disbanding into shatters was his heart and the floor it broke on was his stomach as his heart fell into it.

He opened his blue eyes to the world above, staring blankly at the ceiling. He felt as if it were all of a sudden very difficult to breathe. For a second, Noah forgot what air felt like when it rushed into his lungs and just welcomed the pain of low oxygen. It sent him back to another day, one year earlier to be exact, where he'd fought against the lack of oxygen, where he'd fought to get away from the flames and the smoke and failed to save almost everyone that he'd loved.

That was what Noah was thinking about as he stared at the ceiling. He hadn't slept. Not really. A few half-hour periods interspersed throughout the night. He didn't think he would have even gotten those had he not been so completely exhausted. For the past few weeks, he'd been losing sleep steadily. He felt dead on his feet as if he might actually just croak at any given moment. But he couldn't evade the sleepless nights no matter how hard he tried. The most he could do was to push himself so hard each day that he was too tired to dream of dancing flames and terrified screams.

He'd been doing as well as he was able but on that particular morning, he felt like he could do nothing at all. In all actuality, the anniversary of the fire itself had already passed. He'd endured that panic attack in the middle of the night, remembering the exact moment he'd come home from Ethan's to see the damage. What he was experiencing now was the aftermath of the worst part. The part of the day where he and Caroline had sat in hospital beds, waiting for news on Aaron's surgery and grieving for their parents who they knew they'd already lost.

Noah felt his throat constrict as he pictured his kid brother's face the last time he'd seen him alive and animated. The image had been floating around in his head all night, appearing every time he so much as blinked. Oddly enough, he hadn't been seeing his parents' faces in his nightmares but it was their voices which haunted his waking hours. In the moments of quiet where he found himself staring blankly up, he could hear his father gruffly reminding him to turn out the horses or hold a more secure grip to his rope before climbing onto a bull. He heard his mother telling him to clean up his room or keep an eye out on his siblings as she ran to the store.

The overwhelming grief was too much for him to handle while lying alone in the dark of his bedroom. He swung his legs off the bed and changed into a pair of jeans he'd deposited on the floor the evening before and an old faded blue t-shirt that was sitting on the back of a chair. Then, as he ran his fingers through his hair to comb it slightly, Noah went to feed the horses.

It was barely before dawn but Rafiki and Gypsy were still sleeping. Noah distributed their feed and water bins and went to fill the trough in the paddock and by the time he returned both of the horses were awake, roused by the smell of food. Noah knew that there were a thousand things for him to do, as there always were, but none of them seemed particularly important.