Necessary

As I woke, I kept my eyes closed, letting the residual weight of sleep pull heavily on my muscles. If I laid there motionless in the haze of waking for long enough, I could almost convince myself that the world was as it used to be. If it wasn’t for the rock sticking in my back, the constant taste of ash in my lungs, or the dull pain radiating throughout my entire body, I might have succeeded in that particular fantasy. As it stands however, my mind didn’t have any other choice but to accept the blunt reality of my surroundings. Nor could I ignore for long, the presence of the softly breathing bundle lying next to me.

As the tangled tufts of blond hair beside me began to shift in wakefulness, I pried my dried-out eyes open while mentally assembling my defenses to face another day in this wasteland. I don’t know if she can’t speak, or simply won’t. She never tried to sign with me, and I never asked if she could. Mutism was a topic I got the chance to study in my psychology degree. Well, the beginnings of my degree that I completed before the world went to hell. The emotionally intelligent part of my brain wormed past my defenses long enough to analyze the small girl slowly rising beside me. Based on the scene of carnage I pulled her from, she was likely mute due to trauma. She looked malnourished, but that’s the standard for those of us who are left. She was young. Very young. Due to the conditions we found ourselves in however, there was a decent chance she was older than she looked. I put her at about seven.

I didn’t ask her though, and I wasn’t planning to. I didn’t ask her name, where she came from, if that bloody mess two hundred miles back was her family, or anything else. Compassion is not rewarded in this colorless landscape of violence and instinct. Attachment only serves as vulnerability. I didn’t want to know anything about her. I couldn’t afford to.

Not knowing things used to frustrate me to no end. When I was in school, I reveled in the distilled purity of arithmetic. There was assurance that finding the answer was merely a matter of time, logic, and patience. The reward for persistence was clarity. Yet here I am, on the edge of a sea with no horizon. If someone had asked me before the sky went grey what would frustrate me most, I might have said ‘not knowing what really happened.’

Now, not knowing how we ended up here is the least of my frustrations. In fact, I really couldn’t care less why the sky lost its color. I don’t waste time wishing things were different. I don’t know if government, individual, or accident are to blame. I don’t care, because frankly, it wouldn’t matter if I did. Nothing would change if I knew why all forms of electricity and technology shut off at once. It would not alter my circumstances if I understood why the toxins that swarmed in the air killed the animals but not the people. It is what it is. I had a friend in high school who came up with a word for that phrase. For him and our circle of friends, ‘it is what it is’ became the word ‘toops,’ accompanied always by a large shrug of the shoulders. It was as silly as it sounds, but it always managed to lighten the air around the awkward drama that is high school. That was years ago now.

The final residual fragments of my sense of humor give enough allowance to say this nonsense word in my head with a little enjoyment. It never passes my lips, but in the corner of my mind, there is a mental huff of laughter. Humor is about as useful here as attachment. Those who cannot accept this reality for what it is have no chance. They will die. They have died. They perished for being unwilling to do what was necessary. The numbness that swims in my brain is what has allowed me to survive this long. It is the same numbness that keeps me from knowing if I am happy about that or not.

The speechless, skinny scavenger by my side was now watching me, eerily silent waiting for me to start walking, as she does every morning. She had followed me ever since I pulled her from the pits of ebony fire left in the wake of what was clearly a supply raid on a camp. In a moment of impracticality, I had dug her limp body from the dirt it was buried in. I could have left her there, but the message from my brain to my feet that commanded them to move was useless. Once the girl had startled awake, her crystal eyes zeroed in to meet mine. I met the intensity of her gaze with stillness. Whatever she was looking for in my eyes she must have found, because the tension had immediately bled out of her narrow shoulders before walking over to me and holding onto my hand. I couldn’t quite understand it. I still can’t identify why she trusted me, or why I let her. It was like an itch in my brain I can’t quite scratch. I should have sent her away. I should have left her lying in the ashes not sparing a second thought. I just…couldn’t. Maybe it was her age, or the fact that she had likely just lost her family the same way I had lost mine. Maybe it was that her eyes were exact replicas of my little sister’s. I just couldn’t seem to force my blistered feet to walk away. Her faith in me was like feathers falling on a shattered mirror, placing her trust in something that was already broken.

Regardless of all logic, I let her follow me. She trailed in my footprints, always mute. Each time I took cover from the sights of roaming survivor clans in the wreckage of some dilapidated structure, she would curl into my side matching my calculated breaths. Despite our silence and my feigned disinterest in her existence, the little food that was found was always shared. This began too long ago now, or at least it felt that way. There is no night and day. The sun was held still and hidden by clouds casting their unending shadows, leaving no surface untouched. Time had lost its meaning here.

Against my better judgement, this tag along was slowly becoming incorporated into my plans. She was also becoming more of a companion each day. My mind mulled over this troubling fact as we trudged along rough patches of rocks to keep from leaving tracks in the dirt.

Movement caught the corner of my eye, and I granted my vigilant scanning a moment of distraction. My dark eyebrows narrowed slightly as I took in the sight of the blond sprite hopping along the smoother stones intermixed with coarse rocks. A memory crept into my consciousness of a game I played when I was her age, hopscotch. The echoes of schoolyard days long gone filtered through my ears.

Before I could fall entirely into rare reminiscing, the harsh sound of rocks sliding punctured the surrounding silence. Adrenaline flooded my system as I took in the dust cloud left from the impact of the girl’s fall beyond my sightline past the edge of the ridge. I ignored the screaming in my legs as new lacerations tore along my skin from my careless sprint down the jagged slope.

My rapidly beating heart leapt into my throat as I reached the bottom of the ridge. Relief took the place of panic when the girl rose from the dirt and brushed herself off with ease. She looked at me expectantly, as though nothing had happened. As quickly as the relief took over, it slipped away just as rapidly, and was replaced with something else entirely.

This, this fear and distraction and vulnerability was exactly why I should have left her that first day. The realization sat like a block of ice in my chest. I made a decision…no more.

“I won’t die for you. You mean nothing to me.”

The first words I spoke to the tiny being were a lie. The scratches of disuse raked their way along my throat as my eyes began to burn with unwanted tears.

“I won’t do this anymore. I won’t protect you. You can’t stay! Leave! Now!”

I forced my eyes down, waiting for her to finally disappear from my vision and my life. My body quaked slightly with anxious energy that surged through my muscles.

After several minutes where the only sound that could be heard was my harsh breathing, she shifted. Her too small hand grasped on with surprising strength to my callused ones. My eyes lifted at the contact, and I watched as tears born from fear and an expression of defiant bravery battled for dominance on her thin face.

With sure fingers, the girl reached into her shirt and held something out to me. Her dirt smudged fist held out a chain. The once silver links were rusted and bloodied, but the heart shaped locket on the end was clean. It was not coated in grime and blood the way that everything else seems to be. It had been protected, the way this child should have been. I could see small green vines intertwining themselves around the curves of the heart. I didn’t know if the locket opened, but I couldn’t seem to get my breathing under control enough to ask. The honest purity in this gesture was pulling at the fast-fraying threads of my composure. The intention was clear. A ‘thank you,’ not for what I was doing, but for what I had done. For keeping her safe as long as I had.

With shaking fingers that had long forgotten how to be gentle, I placed the locket in my open hand. The heart fit along the curve of my palm directly over the middle of a permanent scar that reached from pinky to thumb. For the first time in years, unbidden tears made tracks through the dirt and salt layered on my face. Not hysterical, sobbing tears. They were silent, like the two of us. With silver in my hand, I could feel the callus on my heart that kept me from caring for this child wearing away. A wave of beautiful pain leaked through the numbness long enough to remember what compassion and caring felt like. It was uncomfortable and gut wrenching and inconvenient. And it was beautiful. I had sealed this away because it had been distracting and kept me from doing what was necessary. Now as it flooded back into my system, I recognized a long-forgotten clarity amidst the ashes. I found myself asking, ‘what could be more necessary?’

With certainty solidified in my mind that there is no answer to this question, I spread the girl’s hand open. In it, I placed the locket before closing her gaunt fingers into a fist around it firmly. Her breathing quickened slightly as she searched my eyes for the answers to her unspoken questions. I merely jerked my head to the side, indicating our direction.

“We should get moving.”

With that, I began walking, trekking along our previous path. Maybe it was adrenaline or distraction, but the rocks didn’t seem to bite the undersides of my feet as harshly as before. It didn’t take long before my peripheral vision revealed my silent companion walking briskly, re-adjusting the locket around her neck where it belonged. I took three deep breaths timed to the rhythm of our steps. While keeping my eyes toward our future direction, I said with remnants of symbolic scratches in my voice,

“My name is Diana. What’s yours?”