Between Two Eternities || Travis Hamonic

Between Two Eternities

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

-Holy Bible; 1 Corinthians 13:4-13

I remember when I didn't believe in love like that. How good can something found in this cruel earth really be? The problem was: I didn't understand that that kind of love is a gift, a gift from someone much bigger than any human...

Cold air always felt good against my skin. My skin never chafed or reddened as a result, not in the early years.

The feeling of a class ending early, and being able to walk to get a steaming cup of coffee made my toes curl. I'll have to wait a few more minutes until the anticipated ending of this lecture.

I was a normal college student, with a few friends here and there and an optimistic approach to life. Sure, my boyfriend had left for California (some 3000 miles away) but I was happy.

I imagine snow ball fights taking place just outside the door, but the dark windows conceal me from seeing. I imagine girls running inside to take cover and I imagine guys shaking out their soaked hair.

It's just my imagination, because I cannot see for sure.

I hear laughing and I hear winter all around. Even though it's the first week after Christmas break, and everyone should be moping around about the end of vacation, no one is. New York University is filled with all sorts of excitement. Art students parade around with their work, even painted the dreary cement sidewalks so even walking couldn't grow boring. Music students serenaded strangers with guitars and alternative voices.

As I walk around the corner, completely leaving the Biology Wing of campus, I see one such student up ahead. And he sees me as well. He starts singing when I get close enough. He's got a good voice, and is great at making eye contact. He could go places.

"You know I woulda love you anyway.
It ain't just something that I had to say.
Don't let them tell you that you're not my kind.
Sally, Sally, Sally tell them that you're mine, mine, mine"

I giggle and stop until he finishes the chorus. It would've been perfect if my name was Sally. "How'd you know that's my favorite song?" I ask and laugh. He keeps strumming on his guitar, beginning the run for another song. "Isn't it everyone's?"

I shake my head and step around him, eyes set on the dorms up ahead. A hot shower is calling my name. "It should be!" I call back. I wonder if he would play it again.

My phone vibrates in my pocket and I answer it with a smile. It's an unknown number but I am in such a good mood, that I could talk to anyone. No one is going to ruin my mood.

Because I'm Sally, and I'm his kind.

"Hello?" I sing-songed. I trace the design on my styrofoam coffee cup, held in my free hand, as I listen for an answer. The cup is empty, so I toss it.

"Arden Sinclair?" A deep man's voice answered and my smile faded unwillingly. Unknowingly.

A fading smile shows a lot.

A deep voice like this doesn't call to ask me how my day is. This voice breaks lives. I've never heard this voice like I am now. I've heard it on the news and passing a scene on the street. I've heard stories about it but never had it came to me, and at a perfect afternoon like this.

So I stand still, hike my purse up higher on my shoulder, and clench my phone with both hands.

"Yes?"

I guess that was when my life changed.
But that sounds so cliche.

I wish I could put into words
just exactly what it did to me.

His name was Officer Plouff. He was at the accident, the first one on the scene...

The funeral for both my parents was ridiculously sad. They died in a head on collision with an eighteen wheeler. The church was filled - they were young, after all. I found it ironic because the last time I remembered being in a church with this many people I knew was when my little brother Matthew was baptized. I was nine.

He cried into my shoulder. I didn't cry though.

Why didn't I cry?
How did I sit in utter emptiness but not cry?

Our Aunt Molly, my father's younger sister, sat beside me on the other side. I didn't accept her comfort, because she was a blubbering mess as much as Matt was. And I was in the middle, staring faceless onto the alter, where two caskets were set.

How do I deal with the loss of my own parents? The very people who are responsible for my very being. If I asked a hundred people, I would get a hundred different answers. So it's better to just keep to myself, grieve in my own twisted ways.

My own life had always caught me in bad places. When I was four, my best friend was killed by her own father. We were in preschool.

And then I had no friends. As if everyone thought I was the reason she was dead. As if me, Arden Sinclair, choked her myself. At four years old. The force field.

There was a boy as well, years later. He's another story. But there were no boys after him. The force field was back; because I must have been the one to push him on the plane that took him away from the city that loved him.

I never thought of anything other than how I got stuck in a rut between life and death. How one minute I can be in class like a normal nineteen year old girl and then the next minute I can be contemplating a freak death.

I still don't know what to believe, after all this time.

Three years passed like rain on windows - slow but fast all the same. The days disappeared like the puddles that evaporate into the sun.

Nothing sticks anymore.

I have been swallowed up by everything that used to make me whole.

If my still being breathing counts as getting through it,
then I guess I am doing okay.

It would take a miracle to get me out of this. A miracle I don't even pray for anymore - it's been too long.

Practically useless.