The Blessed Gift

(This story, a work in progress, appeared near the beginning of my flash fiction journey. Slightly rewritten, I offer it again. It still resonates for me. I hope it does for you as well.)

I was born. I'm told I did not cry. Rarely are we aware of the silence between the noises, the dark energy that creates light, filling the universe.

My name is Martin Dalwinnie. A name in all of its fullness is like thunder, a remembrance of light. Yet what is a name? No more than a sound. A low rumble. Or perhaps ink on paper, not even spoken.

A memory: I am a boy of seven standing on a pier, watching the sun sparkle on the waves of a lake. Adults chatter behind me but they're easy to ignore. My senses begin to fill me with what could become my soul. Light on the water and a gentle lapping sound and an odor of rotting fish. All of this, the smells especially, fills me with a longing for something I can't identify. Perhaps for my future self, remembering this day.

There is a splash and I turn to my right. I see a circle of water where something has been thrown in but I don't see the thing. I can see at a glance that none of the adults have done this. As I watch, something appears in the center of the receding circle of waves: hair. Then I can see the arms of a child rising beside it. I jump in next to her. My feet hit rocks and mud on the bottom and I push up. When my head breaks the surface I see her, face still under the water, eyes closed, a calm expression on her tiny face. I grab her arm and pull toward the shore. It's harder than I expect because the water is so deep. I keep pulling. Then there are two other splashes and there are men next to me, one lifting the child from the water and the other my father carrying me to the shore.

The child lives. I am a hero for a moment. I have forgotten during all this that I have not yet learned to swim, but I realize it too late to be afraid. Later, inside our house, a white haired man tells my father that my family is now under his protection. This will not be forgotten. For some reason this news makes my parents quiet for days. My father had a new job after that, and we lived much better.

I felt fully alive for the first time in the moments it took to see the girl and jump and try to pull her to shore. For those moments and for a short while after, I felt expanded, filled with a power and a longing that dazzled my senses and seemed to leave a metallic taste in my mouth. My body was filled with adrenaline (I learned much later) and I felt somehow new and more alive. This data point on my graph blazed, burning a marker into my sense of self.

I was still young when my father died in a hail of bullets. He was not a fallen hero. He was a criminal cut down by other criminals. He fled from his fate, as we all do, not understanding that the deliverers of his destiny had no personal interest in the message. They were merely acting out the data points of their own stories, just as he and I, and you, are doing.

Our memories are fragile and unreliable fractions of the whole of our timeline. But they're all we have. My father's death was one data point on a short curve on an imagined graph. One that intersected and defined part of the arc and scope of my own curve. Memory leaps like stones shaken from the earth in a quake, side to side, forward and back, up and down. Though we pretend to know future from past, this is an illusion. That may be one of the secrets revealed at the end of a story if it is a good one and well told. I don't know yet how my story is to end, as naturally I have not yet ended it. You, of course, face a similar puzzle.

You are no less (and perhaps no more) than life remembering itself and birthing continually the illusion of your form. But your biography (and mine) amounts to little more than a sense of self caught in the muck of partial remembrance, as a child in boots may be caught by a mudslide on a hill during a storm. This is the nature of our perception of reality: that we exist only by deluding ourselves. We are like an animated movie: stop the film and you will see a single blurred image. We are, each moment, no more than the illusion of a persistent self.

An example of this illusion: at a certain moment in every story, events contract to a point. I stand in the doorway of a small airplane, twenty-five hundred feet above the earth, wind whipping my pants into wings that slap my raw lower legs as I cling for my life to the sides of the door. Then a push on the pack on my back. I fall; fear fills my mouth with the taste of gun metal. I am on fire with adrenaline. Somehow my story continues: I pull the rip cord. I land hard, exhilarated. This moment burns its marker into my being. This is my life: moments of terror followed by silences; spring, tuck, roll. I must be satisfied, because it continues. I do not die.

Such moments define us, releasing more of the chemicals of which we are composed and to which we are addicted. Through these means we convince ourselves we must be alive. Our bodies at least. Perhaps that is enough. Perhaps that is life.

So you see. I understand nothing. I can teach nothing. Nothing is my blessed beginning and assuredly my blessed end, and it is from silence that I have learned all that is most important. It is the best and maybe the only thing I have to offer you: nothing. It is a gift I urgently suggest you consider accepting. How will this story end? It ends when this page falls from your hands. As you know it will in the end.