Authors: Masha Leyfer
They both turn to me.
“And you, Molly?”
“Aside from better weather?”
“You’re really bent on hating the rain, aren’t you?”
“I have the right.”
But I think about Nathan’s question. I’m really not sure what exactly I’m fighting for. It’s not my parents
—
otherwise I would have stayed with them. It’s not the Rebellion, because I’ve been fighting for a lot longer than this. Myself? No, I’m just a hollow shell of what I could have been.
So maybe that’s it. I’m fighting for what could have been. I’m fighting for the what ifs, for the things that will never happen but could have, if only we lived in a different world.
“If you guys are fighting for today and tomorrow, then I suppose I’m fighting for yesterday.”
“Yesterday? Why?”
“Um, well, several reasons. Yesterday is
—
was
—
a completely different world. So much was possible. And today and tomorrow are already corrupted. Yesterday is the only world in which the Blast doesn’t exist and in which we still had a chance at something different. Something better. Yesterday feels
right
in a way that nothing else does, you know? Yesterday is the world of possibility, and who knows? Maybe all the things that could have happened wouldn’t have anyway, just because we didn’t know how much we had to lose, so we wouldn’t fight for them like we do now. But at least they had a chance. And that’s worth something.”
Mike examines my face as if trying to understand something. He continues smoking.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“What for?”
“Yesterday is over. And there’s nothing we can do to bring it back.”
__ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __
I stand in line for lunch, listening to Big Sal’s familiar voice chastising us for our shaky line formation.
“Keep the line together, you’re not barbarians, are you?” she shouts. I wonder if she would shout at us even if we ever did form a perfect line. I spear a piece of meat with my knife and sit down on a log. In several seconds, Anna sits down beside me. She doesn’t say anything, but smiles at me and begins eating. I smile back and watch her out of the corner of my eye. She possesses a type of quiet dignity and holds herself with immeasurable grace. All of her movements are different, almost more than human. She never makes any unnecessary movements, either. Every gesture has a meaning. She even eats differently, somehow. She chews thoughtfully before saying:
“Molly, you said yesterday that you’re fighting for the past.”
“Yeah. How’d you know?”
She only shrugs.
“And Mike said that yesterday is over. I wanted to know if you believe that.”
“Oh. Um, I’m not sure. I mean, yesterday
is
over, but it still matters. It lives on in different forms, so yes, it’s over, and maybe we can’t bring it back, but as long as we remember it, it will always be relevant.”
She nods.
“Yes,” she says. That one syllable has so much meaning when she says it, that although I’m not sure exactly what it means, I nod in vigorous agreement.
“What about you, Anna? What are you fighting for?”
“Everything,” she replies immediately.
“Everything?” I repeat.
“Yes. I’m fighting for today, because today is reality, for tomorrow, because tomorrow is the reality we want, and for yesterday because yesterday is the only reality we will always have no matter what, and because all three are part our lives and none can exist without the other. I’m fighting for this Earth and everything it has to offer. For the natural world and all its beauty: the changes in the seasons, the blooming of wildflowers, sunsets, starlight, reflections in water. I’m fighting for all the Earth’s disasters, because what is more powerful than the ground itself shaking? I’m fighting for the culture that humankind has created. That’s thousands upon thousands of years of tiny steps that, in the end, paved an entire road. We’ve been lucky enough to walk up the road this far. Now it’s our time to pave it further.
“I’m fighting to get back home. I’m fighting for us, the Rebellion as a whole, and everything that we stand for. Everything that we’ve built together. Everyone that we are and all of the stories that lie behind us. I’m fighting for myself. I’m fighting for my legacy. There is a difference between being dead and being gone, I think. Being dead means your heart stopped beating. Being gone means you no longer matter. You can be dead but not gone, just as you can be gone but not dead. I don’t want to be gone. Even if no one remembers me, even if no one cares, I want to matter.
“I’m fighting for our cause, but I’m also fighting for the enemy, because while they may be the villains of our story, we are the villains of theirs. I’m fighting so that everyone has something to believe in.
“I’m fighting for this universe, because it is the only one I know and even so, it is unbelievably vast. I’m fighting for all the other universes, because some are stricken with war much worse than we have it and some are at peace. In some we lose, but at least in one, we have to win. At least one.
“I’m fighting for everything, because you can’t have a life without the infinitely many aspects that make it up, and you can’t separate one from the other. All of the are worth fighting for, because good or bad, they constutute everything that you are.
“I’m fighting for the sun to rise the next morning and for the Earth to keep turning. I’m fighting for the stars to shine and the wind to blow. I’m fighting for the right to be, because even when everything else is taken away, that is the one thing we will have left to hold on to: the right to exist, the right to live our lives, the right to have a meaning. And before that right is taken away, we must win all of our battles. Otherwise we may consider ourselves gone. And that is something I cannot accept.”
__ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __
Nathan and I walk to the oak tree after dinner.
“Hey, Molly,” he says, “if you could summarize your entire self in one sentence, what would you say?”
“Ooh,” I frown. “Give me a moment to think. You probably have an answer to this already, don’t you?”
“Actually, I don’t,” Nathan smiles.
“Well, then you think about it too,” I add.
I consider what Nathan has asked me. To summarize myself in just one sentence. Everything that comprises me within several words. Everything that I ever was, am, and will be, packed into the space between two periods. I need to put every truth and every lie and every inbetween that I am into something so small.
I could define myself now, maybe, or one year ago, or before the Blast, but to get all three of those and every shade of being that I ever was? Everybody is made up of a thousand different layers that we shed and pick up as the years go by and we try to become the person we were meant to be. Each of our layers are so different, that they are practically separate people, even though they all make up one human. I doubt that I can encompass every layer with one sentence.
So then what it is exactly that makes me, me? Every bit of myself, no matter how different must have something uniquely of my own. Or am I just a collage of other people? Is that all any of us are?
“I’ve decided on my sentence,” Nathan says.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. It’s, Today, the future is still open.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means, if there is a today, there is a tomorrow.”
“Oh, that’s beautiful.” I pause. “But I have to ask: what if there isn’t? Isn’t a tomorrow, I mean?”
“As long as there is a today, there will be a tomorrow,” Nathan repeats. “If there isn’t a tomorrow, then tomorrow must be happening already.”
“So tomorrow is the end of the world?”
“No,” Nathan laughs. “The truth is, tomorrow...tomorrow isn’t real, in the traditional sense of the word. Neither is today or yesterday. They’re just constructs that we put in place to understand our world. And while they may not be real, they are still important. They’re real in our minds and it’s real today, but tomorrow, what we call ‘tomorrow’ today will become the new today. And we can fight for it for our entire life but that won’t make it any realer than how we envision it.”
“Sorry, what?”
“Sorry, that was extremely confusing. Today is the...the seventh, right?”
“I honestly have no idea.”
“Well, let’s pretend that it’s the seventh. Yesterday was the sixth. So on the sixth, when we said ‘tomorrow’, we meant the seventh. But on the seventh, when we say ‘tomorrow’, we mean the eight. The seventh has become ‘today’ and the sixth is no longer ‘today’ but ‘yesterday’. Does that make sense?”
“Yeah, I guess it does now.”
“So that’s what I mean. There is no such thing as today, tomorrow, yesterday. Every day is all three. There is only then, now, and after. What you do ‘today’ defines ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’, but it never limits you.”
“Wow, that’s deep.”
“Why, thank you.”
“I think I’ve figured out my sentence,” I say after a moment of consideration.
“Well?”
“It’s, I’m still waiting. All my life I’ve been waiting and changing. I don’t think I’ve ever been static. So I’m still waiting. I’m waiting for my dreams to come true, I’m waiting to become whole, I’m waiting for tomorrow and I’m waiting for today. I’m waiting until the truth is what I want to live. I’m waiting for happiness. But I’m not waiting passively. I will fight for everything that I want, but I am willing to be patient and bite my lip until they happen, because it’s really just the only way I know how. And I know that I’m waiting for things that never will and never can happen, but it’s the waiting that makes them real.”
CHAPTER 16
Nathan and I walk to the oak tree. We are not playing guitar or training this evening. Just talking, without anything to distract us from it. My mind wanders in various directions but it quickly settles on one thought.
There were...some
—
Smaller Sally’s mysterious unexplained words.
“Hey, Nathan,” I say. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“Um…”
I’m not sure how to phrase it in a way that wouldn’t seem suspicious or immediately bring back bad memories. But the blunt truth comes straight out of my mouth.
:There was an accident, wasn’t there? In the beginning? On a raid, something went wrong.”
“Why do you ask?” Nathan says cautiously.
“Smaller Sally said something about it. It doesn’t really matter. But it did happen, didn’t it?”
“Well...yes. There was a...an accident.”
“And? What happened?”
“Well…” He swallows. “I’m not sure where exactly to start. Um...her name was Nora. She would have been twenty-six now. She was nineteen when she...when she died.” He pauses there for a moment and swallows again. “It’s still kind of shocking, to this day. She was just so young, so full of life. I mean, I’m nineteen now.” He hovers over those words a little, as if trying out the taste of the words
nineteen
and
death
together. “To have life end now, with an entire lifetime ahead of you, is… I can’t even imagine it, in all honesty. It’s like starting a sentence and never getting to finish it. You spend the rest of your life wondering how it was supposed to end and with the distinct feeling that things would have been different if it had been completed. And she was three weeks away from her twentieth birthday, too. She used to say that if she made it to twenty, she would have lived enough. All she wanted was to make it to twenty. Was that too much to ask? But… Well, um, anyway, it was in the very beginning, maybe a year after Mike took over. It was one of our very first raids. I wasn’t there when it happened, because I was too young to go on a raid. It was an important one. It was the first powerline we had found. So they went to sabotage it, and they sabotaged it okay, but on the way back they were attacked by bandits. They started shooting and Nora didn’t duck. She was insanely proud. Insanely. And I think she felt a sense of responsibility to protect the rest of them. Mike and Smaller Sally were there with her and she was the oldest. But in any case, she didn’t duck. She took out her crossbow and began to shoot back. She went against guns with a crossbow. And somehow, she managed to take out most of the bandits out. She saved Mike and Smaller Sally’s lives. She was shot all over her body. She kept shooting, even though she was bleeding out. She didn’t stop until all the bandits left. Maybe, if she had ducked on time, she would have survived, but there were too many bullets for one person to take. Her death was rather quick, as I understand. And not too painful. I don’t know if you can still feel anything after being shot that many times. Her last words were ‘get back home’.”