They are the moments that define us. Those single ones who define who you are and who you will continue to be. Are you a hero or are you a coward? We all say we will be heroes. We will rise to the occasion and we dream that when that one terrifying moment occurs, we will be the one to save the day. You. Only you. And you will lead them and they will listen and together you will save the world. You will come out a hero. She won’t.
It is a regular day and she is happy. She won’t be though, not for very long. Because someone will come in here, come to her, to her co-workers, her friends, with guns blazing and several people will die. It will be a tragedy and people will mourn and she will survive. She will live, long and healthy, and she will not, under no circumstances, die here, die today. She will live. And they won’t. But before, before they all die, before her life becomes a blazing hell of noise and blood and pain, before that, before all of it, there will be a moment. It will be short and it will be defining and it will be the moment when the true heroes step forward. Only no will. The moment will exist and it will be clear, it will be so painfully clear to them all, to her, that that moment is happening, that that special moment which comes only once in a lifetime, that the defining moment is there. She will know and they will know and no one, no one will step forward. The moment will wither and die. No one will be willing to sacrifice themselves and no one will be brave and heroic and magnificent. There will only be fear, and then death. They will look at the moment, feel the moment, realise it has come and they will turn their faces away. She will close her eyes and she will hide and she will not do anything to save anyone else. She will save herself and she will hide in fear and there will be gunshots, bam bam bam, only more times, bam bam bam bam bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. The gunshots will signal the end of the moment and it will signal the end of an era, the beginning of death. She will not come out a hero.
They will tell her it is okay. That what she did was natural, normal, survivor’s instinct, gut. No one else tried anything, did they? They will call her feelings “survivors’ guilt” and maybe they will be right, maybe they truly will be, but that will never change what happened. She will not be a hero. So after that moment she will be weakened, she will have a new, brand new and terrible, realization that maybe, just maybe, she isn’t cut out for that hero thingy. But it will be after months and months of pain and guilt because who wants to know that in the moment which allows heroism she backed out, she was too weak and scared and frightened to do anything? Not her. She wants nothing more than her blissful ignorance back. So she will dream again. It was a onetime thing, she will tell herself. If it happened again she would do it all different. It wouldn’t happen that way again. It will become her truth because she, like all of us, wants to be a hero.
It will be a lie.
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She is a lonely girl. For years and years she has had no one to confide in, no one to keep her secrets. So she writes. The words become her savior, her shining beacon in a world consisting of little but darkness. There is something special with words, she decides. Something special about the way the blue ink fills the white, untouched pages in her book with its purple exterior. There is something special about it. Something magical. She cannot quite describe the way she feels about it because even though she has and always will have such a special relationship to words and the written language, she has no one to say them to. She is all alone.
Her greatest fear is that one day the words will disappear. That she one day will not have spoken with anyone for so long that all her words will be gone. And so she reads. She uses an old, tarnished dictionary that fills her with warmth every time she sees it. It is blue. Therefore blue, a dark navy blue, has become her favorite color and on her way to school she listens. She likes to ride the subway because so many words live there. Angry words, happy words. Sad words. Words disgracing. All of them. She loves them all. She knows that words are not always kind. She knows that they can be cruel, mean. Meant to hurt. To cause suffering. Still, they are her best friend. The way she uses them make them better. She is careful, thinks. She does not mean to cause pain. All she wants… what she wants is merely a dream.
They help her. Together with her words and her writing she dwells in wonderful happy countries, idyllic pictures that never appear in her real conscious life; on magical islands where the sun will never set. Where the darkness will never catch her. The darkness remains her enemy. It keeps her from what she loves the most and is hard, relentless. She does not understand when she hears someone describe it softly, with gentle voice. The darkness is pain. So she builds herself walls of words, walls of ink and paper. It is the only thing to keep her from hurting in the outer world. The rest of the world does not understand. It snorts at her self-made castle with words of make-belief with words of its own.
One day as she leaves the tube carriage she bumps in to someone. She kneels to pick up her notebook but as she does, so does he. The book falls again and the words spread for the wind. So she stares at them. At the words. The young man captures as many as he can, as many fully written pages as possible. He looks at her apologetically when a few of them fall down on the rail. Then he opens his mouth and out comes the words. Words she has longed for, wished for and dreamed of. It is a simple apology. An introduction. And in her eyes, in her word-filled world he creates a miracle. His words achieve an amazing thing. Slowly, as the days passes, the words continue coming from him. Simple words in easy sentences. And they grow.
All things are in need of energy. Nothing ever disappears. And as the warm words reach Lily, because that is her name, the darkness goes away. It transforms into something else. Into light. And together with the walls she has built around her, the scary words go away.
The words crumble down around her.
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Buddha