DECEMBER 14
So, the funniest thing happened this morning. The FUNNIEST fucking thing. (Actually, “funny” is a weird term to use, I guess. Maybe it’s “funny” if you’re as outrageously morbid as Summer and I were together, I suppose.) Anyway, I fell asleep reading last night, and then this morning I was woken up by a poem popping into my head. That used to happen a lot, but I’ve never been literally woken up by one:
they say the world is full of miraculous beauty for those who stay quiet enough to observe it
and darling
you were all of my beauty
The poem was good, I decided after I typed it out, but still, the day had come: the day I’d chosen to end it. So I deleted the file and sat back in my chair. Then I looked out at my window at the roaring sea and prepared to die in it, and that is exactly when I heard a snapping sound and the cinder block fell straight through the floor, landing in an empty bathtub downstairs.
I am not kidding. It was straight out of some cheesy movie: a hole in my floor gave out, and the block went crashing fifteen feet below. I mean, my house is old as shit and everything, and the floor in the closet was always sort of moldy and rickety, but still, what were the odds? Just as I was obsessing over Summer’s death, mine was prevented, in a sense. And suddenly I wasn’t so sure of my plan anymore.
When my mom heard from the contractors who came to fix the hole that it was an old cinder block that had fallen, she wheeled up to me and gave me the funniest look. “Dear lord, why were you keeping that in your room?”
“I was, um…fixing a surfboard,” I said, “and I was using it to prop up the board while I worked on it.”
She interrogated me with her eyes. Mothers always knew the truth, and she wasn’t buying what I was selling. Finally she let it go. “Well, good heavens. Keep the construction materials in the garage next time, will you?”
Later in the night we were in the kitchen while she watched Wheel of Fortune and I thought about the world I’d been forced to stay in. Towards the end of a commercial break, someone knocked at our weathered wooden door with the crack on one side. Summer had noticed that crack once, and the memory made me want to die all over again.
“You ordered Chinese?” I asked my mom after I walked to the door, looking out the dirty side window at the delivery boy waiting on the porch.
“No. Did you?”
“No.”
“Well I sure didn’t.”
“Huh. Weird.” I paid the guy with a ten-dollar bill from the back of my wallet, then turned back to my mom. “Mom, why are you lying about this? I didn’t order it.”
“I didn’t order any food!” she snapped as I reached into the bag.
“You’re just trying to cheer me up, you don’t have to lie about…” I paused. “But wait. I never told you I liked General Tsao chicken, did I? That was something I learned last summer at that place Lil Wok, something I only told…”
My mom stared at me, lost. Something told me to open the fortune cookie, so I did. And I found this staring up at me:
Let me not die while I am still alive
The hair on the back of my neck stood up. I turned to my mom, thoroughly creeped the fuck out, as an idea came to me. “Tell me something, Mom. When you found my diary, how did that come about? Like, why’d you give it to me that day?”
She shivered. “Well, it was the strangest thing, really. I’d totally forgotten about it, and then out of nowhere, an idea just dropped into my head to give it to you, that it might help…”
Overcome, I walked back to my room. And that’s where I am now, unmoored by a cookie and a notebook and a cinder block. This shit is adding up too quickly to be coincidental. Of course, it could be nothing, a bunch of stupid coincidences that my hurting mind is stringing together in the name of comfort. All the grief counselors with their cold eyes and their fancy diplomas said the “signs” people saw after tragedies were just wishful thinking, fantasies of lost souls looking to the universe to find meaning that wasn’t there. I could be a crazy person who wrongly intercepted his neighbor’s takeout order and is looking for the meaning of life in a cookie. But this could also be something, really something. I’d never really considered the afterlife, or thought about such things at all, really, as I’d never been that religious. When Summer died, it’d felt like she was just…gone. Poof. Dunzo. But what’s all this, then?
“Okay, Summer,” I whisper at the ceiling. “I’m ready. I had no faith before, but I’m listening. I think. Tell me what I need to know.”
I hear nothing. But I’m willing to wait. And until then, I can finish my book to get closer to her essence. Because fate killed Summer Johnson, and fate saved Cooper Nichols. There has to be a reason this happened, why I was chosen to stay, why I was protected. And not just yesterday, but my whole life. So many things could’ve done me in, killed the light in my chest. My dad, my mom, my addictions, Summer…
I am being kept on this planet by something. There is no rational reason I am still here, in one piece, still breathing. And I want to find out who is pulling the strings. So I grab the book, run my hands over the homemade cover. I know what’s coming next. I remember. There are only a few more pages, and they will be the hardest things I will ever have to read in my life. And I’m a John Green fan.
But then I think of Summer, plunging herself headfirst into an uncertain destiny, completely unafraid. If she can face a surgery, can’t I face a stupid book?
I take stock of what I’m learning. All I know is, when the lights go out, I still see her. I will always see her. Because when you lie down at night and close your eyes, the person that rises into your fading mind – that person is your destiny. That’s the person you can’t run from, even when they run from you. In a sea of people, I will always search for her. And I’ve got to get to the bottom of her. There has to be more to this story, to this life. I can’t see another option.
I clench my teeth, prepare myself for the pain, and read the end of what is perhaps starting to feel more and more like my beginning.