Read an Excerpt
One
Sarah Jade Kinsey
It’s strange how someone you never knew and will never know can change the course of your life forever.
For me that someone’s name was Brandon.
But before I can explain about him, I have to explain about me.
And what is there to say about me?
The truth is vastly more complicated than it ever was before the night a guy named Brandon, whom I never knew and would never know, appeared in my life and disappeared again in a brief and violent instant.
Life, it turns on a complicated array of delicate gears we cannot see. A heart that beats can go still in the space of a moment. Breath can vanish before we’ve had a chance to say good-bye.
My name is Sarah Kinsey.
I am, or was, the oldest of three sisters.
To tell my story, I must wrestle with this question of verb tense, past or present, tedious and mundane as it is. I don’t know if I, the person, still exist in any way I can explain, so I stumble over mere words, desperate in death—as in life—to understand and to be understood.
Death is the twist of the knife that makes life so sweet, some say, though I am not sure I would agree.
Imagine a place where you neither sleep nor wake up. Imagine the life you would have lived, could have lived, playing before your eyes like a movie, only not.
Imagine none of this, or all of it.
The truth—if such a thing exists—eludes me.
Death has cut clean through my life, so that now I am no longer Sarah. I am the bloodred tulip tilting in the wind, I am the brown-black earth of a thousand years, I am the welcome rain on a parched day. I am a grain of sand, and I am the entire ocean. I am the beginning and the end of me.
Here is what you have to understand. Although I spent much of my life imagining what dying would be like in a far more concrete way than most people ever do, when it finally happened, it wasn’t for the reason anyone expected. It wasn’t at all how I imagined it would be.
It did not come from the slow decay of my body, not from cancer eating me away from the inside or wearing down my body’s ability to fight. It came from gravity, that simple force we all take for granted, the one that binds us to the earth and all we hold dear.
A moment before, my feet were planted on the earth, and a moment later, they were not. It was that simple.
No, that’s not exactly true. It is not so simple, not really. Love had a lot to do with it. Also grief, guilt, and no small amount of reckless, youthful foolishness.
And then there was Brandon, a horrible twist of fate I did not see coming.
But gravity, not cancer, brought me here, wherever here may be.
Copyright © 2014 by Jamie Kain
