Highlight Reel

To remember:

1. The Basement Picnic concert was electric, filling the basement common room of the apartment complex–try not to forget that feeling on stage when nothing else mattered.  Don’t let what happened next ruin the memory of the concert.  It was a beautiful composition of sound surrendered to a mess of love, alcohol, smiles, and dancing–the calm before the storm.

2. Upstairs, Sister needed her hair held back and her stomach to be turned inside out.  She’s alarmingly good at this.  She’d sprinted the first leg of a night that was supposed to resemble a marathon.

3. A crash from outside the apartment where Sister was sobering up, glass shattered and then a loud bang, maybe someone standing on the table had then knocked off a handle of vodka, then came crashing down.

4. Open the door to see and he’s there, bloody face, bloody hand, and a gun.  Holy shit. And the other one on the floor facing the wall. Holy shit.

She told me the scar was deep and her skin still soft where they had sewn her back together, sensitive if you touched it.  She told me that she almost forgot to ask the doctor, an afterthought to a slew of questions that felt more pertinent to returning to senior year of college from a semester abroad.  She told me as an afterthought, we had sat for breakfast for hours chatting about life, catching up on the fall semester and sharing gratitude that we’d managed to stay in each other’s lives even though we’ve both moved away and probably won’t be back any time soon.  

I told her that Brother ended up in the mental hospital, Sister made me sad, and Parents hadn’t checked in on me.  She shared that her sister was enjoying school, she was ready to graduate, she applied for the Fulbright scholarship to continue research in Iceland, her mom wants to quit teaching–a shame really, she’s the one I loved the most.  She told me she’d met a boy and he was older and I said that makes sense, we’ve always been mature for our age.  She told me he was her manager and I said but we’re strong women and she told me that she just really liked talking to him and I said just keep talking, then.

And then I asked how her fall semester was other than the boy who was actually a man (or some semblance of one) and her sister starting college and her mom wanting to quit teaching.  And she said she had to leave school for a bit.  Not long enough to delay graduation though.  That’s good, I guess, why did you leave, I asked.  She said she was diagnosed with skin cancer.  She had found a mole she didn’t recognize.  But she has so many moles, I thought.  And apparently I said aloud because she responded with a chuckle and said she knew, but these were the moles our moms warn against and tell us to get checked at the doctor.

She told me she almost forgot, practically out of the exam room and then the doctor looked and said she wanted to take it and send it to get tested.  I wonder who tests the moles, if they come in a small vial, if they are cured in a little serum, if the lab tech knows anything about the mole beyond the serial number.  The doctor knew right away that she needed to remove it.  Slice and dice and then it was off to the lab and she left the doctor’s office, then went to school.  She said it was on the way back to school that she got the phone call from the doctor, something about it being cancerous and not the benign kind and that she would have to come have it removed.  But not now, they couldn’t fit her in for another few weeks, she’d have to drive home again.  But in the meantime, she was to sit and wait with a cancerous mole on the soft part of her arm, the one she almost forgot to ask the doctor about.  She said she didn’t tell anyone when it happened, except her parents maybe.  Twenty one with cancer.

It’s slow, the way my life flashed before my eyes.  Cancer is the type of slow flash that catches you by surprise when you find the lump or the mole but has been there for months, maybe even years.  What flashed wasn’t the times I’d spent with friends and family but rather the times I had told my mom that I’d reapplied sunscreen, or that I’d put it on at all.  Or that I never wore sunscreen in Wyoming and often didn’t wear it as a sea kayak guide in Casco Bay.  And at the lake I’d stopped wearing sunscreen at age thirteen when I was too fast for Mom to catch me and rub it all over my back before I jumped in.  The times I had not worn sunscreen far outnumbered the times I have, justified by the angle of the sun and Maine summers and Italian skin that browns instead of burns. 

She told me she’d only ever had one bad sunburn and wore sunscreen and did all the things, that it didn’t matter that she was careful because now she had to be extra careful; long sleeves with UPF, wide brimmed hat, and long pants, bonus if those have a UPF rating, too.  Flashing in short images and memories the times that I had chosen not to wear sunscreen, decided to stay out in the sun just a little longer, and the peeling skin from the infrequent but nasty sunburns that served only as temporary punishment.  It wasn’t the way I thought my life would flash before my eyes, I expected it to be quick, as a flash suggests, and only the highlights, the laughs so deep you can’t breathe, the hugs so tight no one can hurt you, and smiles that light up the room.  Instead it was slow and focused and she was still talking to me and I was still listening (mostly).

More to remember:

5. Four hours everyone sat and waited.  Pressed to the edges of the cleared common room of the apartment and the image returns of my first ever lockdown.  

6. It was only a drill Mrs. Cooper told the class, don’t worry.  We huddled in the dark in a corner of the classroom, about the size of the room we are in now.  She pulled down the shades because, she said, if anyone were to shoot into the second floor classroom they would stop the glass from spraying over us.  Don’t worry, it’s not real, only a drill, she said.  

7. Twenty four people emerged at once from the bathroom.  They had sweat through their shirts, cried through their eye makeup, they looked spent.  One girl went to the hospital with a pre-existing heart condition.

8. During those four hours the police came and went, telling little of what was going on.  Guns in faces, more likely they shoot at the black kid guarding the door.

The older I get, the more I wonder if your life ever does flash before your eyes, or if it is just a figure of speech to cue the montage of a character’s life, giving a brief recap of the most beautiful, most important, most most parts of life.

It’s only in the last week that my most most clips of life have aired in my minds’ eye as I fall asleep–or try to.  I haven’t quite been able to decide what goes on my highlight reel, and I find myself listing those I know would be sad if they had to bury me, those who wouldn’t know they were sad until years later, those who wished they’d said goodbye, those who wouldn’t be sad to see me go.  Perhaps instead it’s not about them and rather the people I long for, the ones I wished I had worked harder to keep in my life, the ones I wouldn’t miss.  It puts shit in perspective.  Text him, call her, ask them to hang out, but only if you want, if you’re lucky it might make the highlight reel.

Maybe I wasn’t actually faced with the end of my life when I opened the door and that’s why my life didn’t flash like they said it would.  Or I’m too young and haven’t thought–even subconsciously–about what ought to make the reel, that seeing the boy on the floor, the blood, the gun, the glass was only enough to freeze with no flash to speak of.  It was in the aftermath–after closing the door and hiding for hours, after calling Mom and texting Sister, after the police came through with guns held in our faces–that my life flashed by slowly, compiling into one highlight reel becoming more than the times I did or didn’t put on sunscreen to include the laughs, the hugs, and smiles.  

I also watch myself the night that maybe I wasn’t actually faced with life ending circumstances.  And I imagine how it might’ve looked if it actually was the end.  I would’ve said stop, he’s hurt.  Are you okay?  You look hurt.  But with any more attention on myself and instead the eye contact could have been down the barrel of a gun rather than with the boy on the floor in the fetal position, or the boy with the bloody face standing over him.  And maybe he would’ve pulled the trigger, or maybe not, but maybe then my life would’ve flashed and then I’d know which laughs I should remember, and hugs I want to feel again, and smiles that illuminate.

More and more

9. Then they all filed out one by one, through a crime scene opened and shut.  No tape, nobody died.

Some would say that there was no real danger and that if there was my life would have flashed before me.  Instead I have dreams.  I have dreams that I am looking down the barrel of his gun, that his aim was better, that I am stuck in a loop of where is Sister and where can I run to and where can I hide.  And the people in charge think that he wasn’t an active shooter because he didn’t come with the intent to shoot and kill.  Rumor has it he was there to sell coke, probably just a rumor though.  These dreams feel like a flash of my life, they happen and then I am awake, not sure of the details and not scared anymore but feeling the adrenaline drain from my veins.  It is not sustainable.  Perhaps this is a slow flash, making a deep scar that is always soft like the inside of your arm, that becomes part of the highlight reel.  Slow over the course of days and weeks and maybe months, thinking and rethinking the scenarios of the night and rearranging my life around this moment.  Before and after and reconfiguring and remembering.  

Re collection I: the night

• After four hours I walked down the hall and the cop asked what did you see and I said what I saw, the gun, the blood, the glass, the boy.  

• What did the boy look like?  
  • Shorter than me, small in frame.

• Could you tell what skin color he was?  
  • What? He was covered in blood.

Re collection II: the self

• After four hours I walked down the hill, leaving the night behind and welcoming the sunrise.  The sky splattered red and orange and pink and purple.

And what exists between the lines you write just to be remembered, is the chance.  The chance that mole went unchecked, you found one of your own, you said stop he’s hurt, you were staring down the barrel of a gun.  And then there’s a chance your highlight reel is written by someone else.