Requiem [COMPLETED]

Lost and Found, Part 2

Remembering that afternoon, it still seems unreal: Sven sneaking us through back hallways and down stairs casually, as if he weren't bailing without being discharged, lunging into supply rooms once or twice when a familiar heavy step seemed close behind, along with the bustle of hospital staff; the eventual receipt into Chuck's dry, steaming car parked outside of loading dock # 4 after a plunge into the cold of an early March laced with snow drifts. It felt like play-acting from when we were children, evading the unseen pirate or gangster in pursuit as we climbed trees and ran through the woods. 

We were all complicit; even though I didn't believe everything I couldn't bear to let go of him. I knew if I waited for grandpa I'd be grounded for good—or at least the rest of my junior year. If I didn't come with now, I didn't know when or where I'd see my brother again. I needed Sven. I wouldn't give him up, not after loosing him once already, so I went along with the horrible act of running away from home without even a letter to let grandpa know I was alright. Sven wouldn't let me leave him anything, said it would just become evidence for the police. And at the time it hadn't seemed real, so neither had the consequences. It never occurred to me that without a note my disappearance could be construed as anything other than of my own choice. It was like trying to hold your breath indefinitely underwater, chained like Houdini thinking it's just playacting; you don't realize how hard it is until part way through when you realize you can't tell anyone that you've changed your mind. The commitment is final once you've begun.

It was sunset already and Chuck and Sven talked in low voices, driving with the headlights off as if we were escaped convicts hiding from patrols. I was hidden in the back seat laying in a blanket on the floor, looking up out of the back windows. I recalled again and again my uncertainty, felt like I'd made a horrible mistake I couldn't undo. I knew what it was to be abandoned. And now I'd done it to someone else. I was a terrible child, a terrible person.

The street lights blinking on into yellow cones of light glinted dully off of the dirty remnant snow. The twilight was past us now and close to the western horizon, thin red lips pressing ever more tightly together. That night which delivered us quietly out of Fargo was clear of clouds, biting cold, and full of stars. I knew that darkness could feel so empty and look so full; but at this moment it hit me strangely, as if I'd manifested something larger than myself in the moment. The night sky deceives like that; it shows you so little, omits so much, and yet you're overwhelmed by the tiny bits thrown your way.

Looking at the night sky was like looking at our lives: When I looked at it I was only looking at what once was, rather than the now; it was relatively empty of things but full of time, full of images and the stories we made up to explain ourselves, to justify our actions. I had been telling myself once Sven was gone, "Live in the present; only the present is valid, since we can't change the past or guess at the future." That was how I got through the day, hour by hour. But as my research started to unfurl dates and names and stories I began to realize that my present existed because of many overlapping pasts. 

It was just like how the sky I was gazing at defined not a single moment but multiple overlapping pasts of different depths; the now resulted from how they'd all interacted in the past. A star's image from 10 minutes ago and a galaxy's image from 50 billion years ago may reach me at the same time, even though one might have destroyed the other by then. Or both might have burned out. So many things ricocheting and reacting to each other and creating the tableau I saw, but I had no idea how to understand the complexity of the process.

This is just as the happenstance of another's birth many years ago led to them eventually crashing into our lives, changing their course, may be, such as Charlie becoming Sven's best friend, and years later because of it helping to 'rescue' me. Or how enough secrets built up for me to finally recognize that I was being misled, that more lingered under the surface that was going unsaid. All of those foliated "thens" defined the same "now"—which is a now I judged based on layered impressions of moments already gone by. I acted in the now, but I lived in the constantly receding world that was. I was was walking in kaleidoscope; a fractured reality of past present and future, only seeing small bits reflected over and over again.

So where was I in time? Where was I, and how far in the past were the people and things and memories that I was finally discovering in the now? Some of the names still floated, unclaimed, undefined by connection to me. I didn't even know if they were all important to the story yet—Cee, mom, Per, Vivian, Clifford, Severn, Marie... my family was much like that sky of shimmering, shifting past realities, fathoms of deep secrets, spinning out and cascading from each other into unseen falls and combustion that I only now was becoming aware of.

It seemed like there was an insurmountable silence between the distant objects, the space between me and these people who held all the secrets. It felt like I only now had become aware I was waiting, but I didn't know for whom or what.