Afterland (16 page)

“Different. Well, suppose it turned into something else, then. I did
feel
strongly. Very strongly. I just...the only things I felt were hatred and fear. So I guess that’s where all my love went.”

Nathan frowns.

“And you never searched for anyone, huh?”

“No.”

“I have to ask: why?”

“Because I didn’t need anyone.”

Love, in the way Nathan means it, seems like a necessary emotion for everyone to experience, and yet it also seems that I managed to skip over it.

I never felt the need to love. I never wanted to love. I never had anyone to fall in love with.

“And you still don’t need anyone?”

“No.”

I’m lying.

I guess the truth is that I’m afraid to love. No, not exactly afraid...

The truth is, I don’t trust myself to jump.

CHAPTER 9

I continue to train with Mike. After I defeated him that once, I haven’t been able to do it again. Mike defeats me time and time again, seemingly with progressively greater ease. I feel that I am only getting worse. With every fight that I end up on the ground, I am more and more convinced that Mike let me win.

              Of course. That makes sense. Mike felt that I needed a moral boost and so he tripped over his own feet and let me think that I was improving. I feel like a child for not seeing that earlier and even more of a child for making him feel that I needed it.

And yet it doesn’t seem like something that Mike would do. Why would he let me believe that I am capable of winning if I am not? Mike’s style of training is to train everybody to the ground until they can defeat their opponents in their sleep. Nothing less is acceptable.

So why this sudden change? I am almost certain that I didn’t win fairly. The sound of my back against the ground echoes my thoughts.

“Let’s take a break for now,” Mike’s voice says from above. I pop up and rub my tense muscles.

“Hey, Mike?”

“Yes?”

“Three days ago, did you let me win on purpose?”

“Yes.”

“Oh…” I murmur in disappointment. I was still hoping that he would deny it. “Why, exactly?”

“What is the most important thing about these fights, do you think?”

“The most important thing? Winning?”

Mike sighs.

“Really? Do you really think so?”

“Well…” I understand that
winning
is the wrong answer, but I’m not sure what else to say. “What do you think?”

“Aha. You don’t know. Well, since you brought it up, let us talk about winning and losing a little. In life, would you say that your success is measured by wins and losses?”

“I guess n- Actually...well, yeah, to some degree, at least. Yes, it is. It has to be. Success is partially the ratio of your wins to your losses.”

“That is an acceptable point,” Mike nods. “But then tell me: who - or what - is your greatest opponent?”

“Huh?”

“In order to win or lose, you have to defeat something or someone, correct? So what are you defeating?”

I pause and frown. That’s a new question. I quickly fire the first answers that come to mind.

“Injustice? The C.G.B.?”

“Really? Your greatest opponent?” Mike raises his eyebrows subtly.

“Death?”

Mike only raises his eyebrows a millimeter more.

“Really?”

He looks into my eyes and for some reason, I step back.

“I don’t know,” I mutter, looking at my feet.

“Hmm. Then tell me, how can you win against an opponent you’re not even sure exists?”

“Umm...I never thought of it that way.”

“Hmm. Well let’s start at the beginning. Are you sure you’re fighting anything?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Um…Because if it wasn’t a fight, we would all be happy. With everything.”

“All right. So by your model, everyone fights against what makes them unhappy. So your greatest opponent is the thing that makes you unhappy the most, yes?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

Mike raises his eyebrow in an unspoken question. I look down at my feet and fiddle with my fingers. I don’t think I can pinpoint a primary cause of my unhappiness.

Besides, I
am
happy.

Why are we even discussing this?

That’s not true.
A voice in the back of my head whispers.
You know you’re not happy, Why are you lying to yourself?

I roll my knuckle. I don’t want to answer that.

“I don’t know,” I admit. “I have no idea.”

“I think I might have an idea,” Mike says.

“Oh? I’d like to hear it.”

“Your greatest enemy is yourself.”

“Myself,” I repeat skeptically.

“The person who makes you unhappiest is yourself. You judge yourself the most. You question yourself the most. You forbid yourself to be happy. And you know yourself best. You can predict every move that you make, and you know exactly how to counter it. And nobody can help you in this fight. You have to face yourself alone, and that makes it twice as hard. You probably didn’t even realize that you need to fight yourself. You are the hardest enemy to defeat because you don’t want to defeat yourself.”

“So, even if I win, I lose.”

“No, no. Imagine your personality as multiple pieces. Let’s say two, for the sake of simplicity. One part of you wants to succeed. That’s the simple part. It’s controlled by nature. It wants you to survive, it wants you to be happy and successful. Then there is the second half. That’s the complicated half. It doesn’t want you to succeed and it’s not completely sure why. It feels that you don’t deserve it. It’s afraid of taking that chance. It recognizes success as the end of your journey and it’s afraid of the end. There are a million reasons why, but it’s still not sure. The most complicated part about it is that it knows that it’s wrong. It recognizes that it shouldn’t be doing what it is but that simply doesn’t matter anymore. It has made the decision to do the wrong thing. That’s why it’s so hard to fight. Because it knows what you want better than it knows what it wants. You’re afraid to hurt it because it’s half of your personality. It knows it’s hurting itself but it’s afraid of its own success. It lives inside all of us, whispering things into our ears, and we are afraid to win as well. Both parts are afraid to win, both are afraid to lose, and all that happens, is that both sides end up confused in a standstill, waiting for the other part to make the first move, all the while knowing that the one who makes the first move wins.”

I stand there with my eyes widened.

“I think,” I stutter finally, “that you just explained me better than I ever could.”

Mike only shrugs.

“So you agree?”

“Yes, I agree a million times over.”

“The most important part of these fights isn’t winning, Molly,” Mike says quietly. “Your training with me is over for today.”

He leaves, and I remain stunned in the center of the field.

Well
, I think.
That was unexpected.

__              __              __              __              __              __              __              __              __              __             

Nathan and I walk to the oak tree to practice guitar again. I summarize my conversation with Mike.

“Mike made an interesting point today”

“Oh?”

“He said something along the lines of
the most important thing about life isn’t winning
, and,
your greatest enemy is yourself,
which is kind of like what you said about standing in the way of our own happy ending. And I guess that...I guess that really struck a chord, for some reason.”

“Huh. Interesting. Well, good thing that there’s more to life than just fighting, huh?”

“Um…”

“You
do
see that, right?”

“Um…”

Nathan stops walking and grabs me by the arm.

“Oh my goodness, Molly, do you seriously not see that?”

“Well...name an example.”

“For Christ’s sake! That explains why you’re so...so
dark
. You think that everything’s a fight and you’re afraid of losing it.”

“Well, yes. Do you not see it like that?”

“No! Sure some things are a fight, but there are so many things that aren’t.”

“Like what?”

“Like music, for example,” Nathan says, gesturing to the guitar.

“Well…”

“Well what? How can you turn music into a battle?”

“The battle to be good at it. Learning is a battle.”

“No, that’s not true!”

“No? Why not?”

“First of all, to have a battle, you need to have an opponent. Who is your opponent in music?”

“What isn’t?” I retort, “Self doubt, lack of natural talent, lack of time. Literally any obstacle is an opponent. It’s a battle against failure.”

“What about doing things for the sake of enjoying them? Don’t you do that?”

“Yeah, sure, I enjoy things. But it’s still a battle. It’s a battle again against being unhappy.”

Nathan throws his hands up in exasperation.

“Okay, what about something you can’t fail at? Like cloud gazing? How can you turn cloud gazing into a battle?”

“I don’t cloud gaze,” I say.

“All right, imagine you did.”

“Sure. You cloud gaze to be happy. It’s another battle against unhappiness.” Nathan scoffs. “And besides,” I add indignantly, “I could absolutely fail at cloud gazing. I could freeze to death. Even more likely than that, I could think about various things until they consume my mind and cause myself serious emotional damage…”

“Oh my goodness. Look up now, Molly.” I look up. The sky is in the midst of a sunset, exploding in colors all across the spectrum.

“All right. Yes, I see that it’s pretty. And?”

“Is it causing you serious emotional damage?”

“No, but it could.”

“But it isn’t.”

“But it could.”

“Why don’t you just chose to ignore the bad side of it? Just see the beauty.”

“Okay, maybe for the sky, but not everything else.”

“Why not?”

“Um...Because I…I’m afraid if I drop my guard something will happen, you know? Everything in my life has been a fight so far, and so far I haven’t exactly lost. Yet. I want to keep it that way.”

“If you stop treating everything like a fight, it will stop
being
a fight.”

“Sure, that’s how you see it. But I think that if I drop my guard that makes me an easy target.”

“Why? What happened to make you see life that way?”

“The Blast happened, Nathan. The constant, never ending battle for survival. Remember Hopetown? I don’t know if you noticed, but there were piles of drunks on the street.
Piles.
Half of them were already dead. Every winter, a solid chunk of Hopetown’s population died. They just disappeared and nobody cared. Nobody remembered. They just
stopped.
Every day, I was afraid it would be me. Do you get it? I walked those streets every day and saw people dying. Those were the people who stopped fighting. I don’t want to end like that.”

Nathan is silent for a moment. He frowns, opens his mouth to say something, but decides against it.

We walk up the oak tree and sit down simultaneously. We look out at the sunset, not saying anything, just observing it. We sit silently, waiting for the sun to set, watching the sky change colors. When the sun finally sets below the tree line, Nathan breaks the silence.

“So you’re afraid of dying, huh?”

“It’s not so much
dying
, as dying
wrong.
”

“Dying wrong?”

“Yeah,” I say, leaning back against the tree. “I don’t want to die with too many regrets. I don’t want the only thing I’m thinking about at that moment to be all the things I did but shouldn’t have and especially all the things I should have done but didn’t. You get it? I don’t want to die feeling empty.”

Nathan chews his lip and stares out into space.

“What if you regret never taking a break from the fight?”

I remain silent for a moment.