I wouldn’t describe my experience as a flash,
and I certainly wouldn’t describe what I saw in that flash as my life. If anything, I only saw a few specific moments from twenty-two years worth of memories. On top of that, I didn’t even remember much that was remotely significant, or, at least, significant at the time of its occurrence.
I did remember the wind.
God, did I hate the wind. Its incessant gripping at my dress and hair drove me insane. I always felt violated by the wind, as if being handled by some disgusting man who leapt from the shadows to attack me. But, despite how the wind used to vex me with its fondling fingers, I always admired the way it shaped the body of tall grass that grew by my home in Matson, Missouri. The grass never minded how invasive the wind’s touch was, and every blade would bend to its will in unity, swaying back and forth in a green ocean. A windy field was a recurring, subtle memory, a subliminal message woven into my life’s fabric, and I used to believe that its persistent yet delicate presence taught me a valuable lesson.
Watching the waves of grass was an activity I often engaged in as a child, though I mostly did so unconsciously. It could be seen through the window of my bedroom, a place I visited several times to contemplate my insignificant life. Every time I went to my windowsill and peered into the outside world, my mind busy with worry over trivial details, it wouldn’t be soon before my eyes would be drawn to the field beyond the fence. It was the beauty of those rolling tides of grass that would surpass the irresistible lure of my thoughts, its movement transfixing me. The wind gave that field life, a dance to perform, and I don’t understand why the wind never made me look as beautiful. At best, it gave my hair the volume it needed, though I could have done without the tangles.
When I grew older and too stubborn to be coaxed out of my contemplations, I no longer watched the grass dance on a windy day. I became consumed with school, unreciprocated love, and myself. I was a selfish person. However, when I left Matson for St. Louis, the damn wind followed me and would occasionally enrage me by lifting my skirt in the middle of a busy street. Reflecting back on it now, I’m glad it had, and I wish it had pissed me off more often, for it caused me to pay attention again.
The wind worked mysteriously and rather patiently on me throughout my life, an invisible but powerful force. Sometimes I would drive through the country and feel my car strain under the push of the wind’s blow, and I would pull over immediately. I remember thinking that there was something wrong with me for acting so abruptly for no apparent reason. Only now do I recognize my subconscious desires, my need to see that wind’s current run through a field again.
This desire of mine surfaced every now and then, though I’m still unsure of why I possessed such a powerful yearning for something so seemingly irrelevant. There must have been something else I desired, something associated with this image of a windy field. So far, I’ve only identified my longing to be for something of the past. Maybe that nostalgia was for the simple and natural aesthetics that calmed me in my times of distress. Maybe that vision made me nostalgic for my childhood home. I don’t mean to take an existential turn, but maybe there was an even deeper purpose behind my strange wanting. During those many years spent in the city, I was so absorbed by my life and the thoughts constantly running through my head, but I no longer had a field of tall green grass waiting to free me from outside the window of my apartment complex. I had lost access to that constant in my life, and through that disconnection I lost access to someone I used to be. So, perhaps the nostalgia was for a missing piece of… myself. I can’t help but find this ironic, considering how I shouldn’t have lost touch with myself if I was so self-absorbed.
I guess that’s what made the wind so mysterious, if it helped me to remember who I was before I became a cynical, closed-minded woman who didn’t bother to look beyond the walls of her own mind. I once care about the world and the people in it, and, despite the wind’s attempt to warn me, I didn’t come to terms with my bad habits until the one thing I loved most in the world was taken from me: me – or whatever was left to take, I suppose. I had more than a foot in the grave by the time Death caught up to me. My departure from the living wasn’t much of a shocker.
Anyways, maybe I was compelled by the wind’s effect on a grassy field because a primitive part of me was nostalgic for the Earth from which I was birthed or something poetic like that, though technically that can’t be true. However, I do believe that we all eventually return to the Earth when we die, and if that reunion is what I subconsciously desired when I felt the wind tugging at my hair, then I’m glad that Death fulfilled my wish so soon.
Now, I wouldn’t have imagined that the first memory to emerge in my life review would be a stupid field. Nevertheless, what – or should I say, who – I remembered next didn’t strike me as much of a surprise.
Though I’m not obligated to take back anything that I mentioned earlier, because there is no one here with me in my subconscious to judge my credibility, I do want to revisit the part about what I love most in the world. There is someone I loved (and still love) more than myself, someone who encouraged a second desire within me, a desire for more time.
He was my best friend. It was very intimate relationship, so much so that at a time we were romantically inclined to each other. We lived in a blissful medium of friendship, until we became so close that it felt almost unnatural to not be dating. However, once we became a couple, we began to resent each other and our romantic phase was swiftly shut down, in order to protect our friendship. We were not the same after, despite hopes to return to how we once were, for we had become tainted and at times one of us would be tempted to want more. It was a confusing love we shared, one I probably would have been better off without, especially if I was as independent and narcissistic as I claim to have been. Nonetheless, I needed him and the emotional tolls I suffered during our brief time together. I might even be so bold as to suggest that our relationship was like the wind in that field: aggravating yet beautiful, capable of extracting me from my ego, and indisputably desirable for some God-known reason.
Well, after I envisioned the image of Missouri’s breezy countryside, a very special memory of him and I appeared. I saw the two us together under the white duvet of my bed. His arms were wrapped around me, pulling me into his chest, where I kept my face buried as I cried.
This moment in particular took place during my final month. My health was rapidly deteriorating, the end of my life was approaching, and I was reluctant in the acceptance of my condition. I had refused hospitalization until it was absolutely necessary; when the time came for me to move locations, they literally had to force me to enter the damn institution. But until that point, I was bound to the bed of my childhood home. The field outside my window was still there but had been trimmed, thus robbing the greenery of its lively magnificence that was once so captivating. No longer did the grass perform a dance for me, nothing more than a shiver when the wind touched it.
Around that time, I had also apparently peaked in my cynicism, and I was very weak in spirit. The night of the specific moment I revisited in my “life review” was painful from every aspect, as the not-so-desirable effects of my medication and the bleakness of my situation had completely overwhelmed me. My head was swimming with dark thoughts, and I was torn between wanting it all to just end and wanting a few more months. I don’t think I had ever cried so much before. Despite courageous efforts, my mother was unsuccessful in calming my severe distress. But, she was very intuitive, and she summoned my “friend” with haste.
Seeing him again caught me off guard and added to my emotional distress, as I had not seen him in quite a long time. While we had been inseparable during our time together in school, we grew apart when I abandoned my comfortable life in Matson for the hectic infrastructure of St. Louis. I had missed him terribly but found it relatively easy to distract myself from the hole in my chest by keeping busy with work and new friends. Still, from time to time, a song or a movie would remind me of him, and I would suddenly feel the gravity of his absence. I never had the willpower to forget him, yet I barely recognized him when he came to see me that night. The scene I witnessed while my “life flashed” began with him stepping into my bedroom:
He had striking characteristics, from his dark hair to his great height to his strong jaw, which was usually taut, unless he was laughing. His laugh was wonderful. Well, it was obnoxious, but wonderful regardless. Of course, he wasn’t laughing then as his eyes took in the sight of my puffy eyes, paper skin, and grief-stricken expression.
“Hey,” he muttered, apparently unsure of how to act, considering my fragile state and how long it had been since we had last spoken.
“Hi,” I replied, my breathing shallow as I tried to compose myself. My head hung low, so that he wouldn’t be able to meet my eyes, to see how weak I had become. What little dignity I had to appear so broken in front of him, after all this time.
I sensed him coming closer, and then, I felt his fingers rest under my chin, which was wet with tears. He turned my face up and I swear he saw straight into my soul with his worried green eyes; for an instant, it almost felt as if nothing had changed between us. I was extremely embarrassed, despite the fact that I had no reason to be. He knew me better than anyone else did. So, I continued to let those emerald pools bore into mine until his entrancing gaze steadied my mind and fixed my breathing.
He sighed and stroked his thumb against my chin to remove some of the tear residue there. Only two words had been articulated between us after years of silence, yet, in an unspoken agreement, I made room for him beside me, and he positioned himself there, his face still as solemn. He took the covers, which I had thrown off myself during my fit, and drew them over us. Carefully, he watched me with his back against the headboard, while I sat up with my arms tightly hugging myself, as if my grip was the only thing keeping me from falling apart.
The tension was uncomfortable, as if someone had taken the distance that was between Matson and St. Louis, between our new and separate lives, and then compressed it into the foot of space that was currently between us on my bed. Fortunately, the tension, along with his somber expression, finally cracked when he realized that my emotions were about to consume me again.
“Come here.” He said, reaching out to untangle my arms and pull me to him. By the time I had rested my head on his chest, my body was already shaking, even with his arms around me to still the tremors. I turned my face into his shirt and inhaled, and his scent lingering on the fabric restored a sense of security that I hadn’t experienced in a very, very long time. Though I had been residing in my old house for the past few months, it wasn’t until I was with him again that I felt like I was truly home. I belonged in his arms, and I wasn’t ready to leave again.
In that moment, the pain, the fear, the weight of our separation, reunion, and impending separation, which had been suppressed for so long, at last escaped in a series of uncontrollable sobs. I told him repeatedly – and rather pathetically – how sorry I was for pushing him away, for convincing myself that we were better people without each other, for not finding him when there was more time. I didn’t look up from his chest, but I think he was crying, too. I wanted to tell him that I loved him, but I was torn between knowing that it was too soon and knowing that it was too late. In the end, I suppose it didn’t matter, because time was never on our side.
Anyways, that was the moment I saw after the vivid trace of a windy field. What I would give to have woken up differently just a day earlier in the past year, to have felt the pain in my breast a day earlier, to have visited the doctor a day earlier, to have known my timeline a day earlier, to have moved home a day earlier, so that I could have had twenty-four more hours with him.
After watching the replay of him and I together, there were glimpses of my mother, a trip to Alaska, the first play I wrote but never shared, my first experience with chemotherapy, and the one time my father made an appearance after eight years of nonexistence. Then the flares of color ceased, and I couldn’t see Alaska’s flourishing landscape, my reflection in the bathroom mirror after vomiting, or the title page of my secret play. My mother’s smile and greying hair vanished, replaced by the piercing darkness I am currently blinded by.
If I am in Heaven now, which I surely doubt, I really hope that they take requests on how one would like to haunt the people on Earth, and I hope that they take requests on who one would like to haunt. If that is an option, I would like to file a request to visit my best friend as a strong breeze on a windy day in Matson. I want to captivate him by moving through the tall grass, to remind him of the beauty in the world. I want to pick his hair up and disrupt its placement, to touch him invasively as the wind once touched me. I want to slap his face, kiss his cheek, and feel as though I am holding him again. Most importantly, I want to piss him off, so that he will pay attention and then acknowledge a profound and strange nostalgia within himself, as I once did. I want him to feel my presence and not understand his desire to feel my presence once more, and I want him to be confused about this subconscious desire until he joins me here and finally understands what he was longing for his whole life. I want him to notice me when he forgets what matters, when he becomes self-absorbed and neglects to appreciate what is worthy of appreciation, and then I want him to remember why he is alive.
I want to visit him as the wind, in order to warn him of how life passes by when you let yourself become consumed in the trivial details. I want to give him the desire to spend his time on Earth wisely, to be kind to others, and to prioritize a purpose over a paycheck. Essentially, my request is for him to live as I should have lived.
But, before he can live, he must remember the wind.