Seen

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say.

I'm not screaming, though. Not yet. My mind is racing as I try to recall the events that led me here, as I try to make sense of the void.

There were kids. Three of them, and they were my own children... I know this because I sense a connection to them that makes me feel achy in the place where I know my body should be. I can see them in the sunlight, back when they were young and pudgy, following me as I distractedly push a cart full of groceries toward a white minivan.

The vision of the minivan incites rage, for some reason. It's a sensation just beyond the pain of the ache I feel for the children, as if the emotion lies just past the darkness that is the backdrop for what must be the memory of normal day at the market.

From nowhere and everywhere I hear a voice. It's a man, and his tone is soft and easy like butter.

"You've made a great choice," he says. "It's the safest one on the market."

Ah, there it is.

That moment in adulthood where I give up recklessness for the sake of responsibility and suddenly I'm no longer me. I'm just another mom dragging three kids around Trader Joe's, walking out to a parking lot that is full of white Honda Odysseys, completely unsure that I've ever done anything right at all. The salesman's voice is echoing in the dark, phrases about gas mileage and safety features and things that I pretended to care about when I signed on the dotted line...

The image fades and the salesman's voice is gone and suddenly the void is too deep and too thick. I contemplate screaming again, instead begin again to focus on remembering what happened so I can get out of this strange predicament.

My brain rebels, though, and the next thing I see is my grandfather. He's been dead since I was a kid. This makes me uncomfortable, that he seems so clear to me, and suddenly I think I understand...

"Am I ..." I start to ask.

"Why'd you do it, Bug?" He questioned me before I could finish my question to him.

"Do what, Bubba?" His nickname to me and mine back to him conjured a wind around us that felt like an embrace. He looked the way he did in the old pictures my mom had of him, not at all the way I remembered him. Instead of the balding, rotund man I loved to visit in the summer when his backyard was full of lightning bugs, he was broad-shouldered and young, with a head full of jet-black hair slicked back in such a way that he looked just like Elvis in the sixties. His eyes were so blue that they seemed to be glowing against the pitch black of where-ever-we-are.

"I thought you were happy," he said, failing to answer my question. His voice was barely a whisper, clinging to the edge of a sadness I understood acutely well, the word happy was a trigger on a gun, an arrow launched from a bow, a comet across the void.

Suddenly, I remembered every detail of what happened.

"Oh, Bubba," I cried as my memories assaulted me on invisible floating vapor all around him. Moments from my life that seemed like grains of salt, taken for granted in the moment but full of flavor... some of them were raw and still painful, some of them so sweet and true they ached even deeper.

"You are seen," Bubba said, and I realized that as I'd watched the entirety of my life that he'd somehow moved closer to me. "You are seen, and you don't belong here."

The void became soupy, and I became aware that my chest felt like it was being crushed. Water in my white Honda Odyssey. Water under the bridge.

You are seen...

"Wait!" I screamed for Bubba as he faded. Who could help me figure out how to get out of this?

Suddenly registering immense pain coursing through my entire body, I screamed into the void of space... not a cry for help or an SOS... I screamed like a wild animal drowning in a flood.

The void was gone, and I awoke to a complete stranger's face in mine, the white of daylight harsh behind his sopping wet head. Through ringing ears I caught voices behind him.

...then she slided right through the guardrail...

Off the bridge...

...Horrific accident...

I'm so glad we saw her when we did...