I hold the daughter’s hand. I don’t have the strength to find her name, and even less strength to say it. This woman will be missed in a way I will not be missed. This woman will be remembered in a way I will never be remembered. To love and be loved is to leave traces of permanence across an otherwise careless world. I must rely on You, Lord, to know what I have done, to give some worth to my devastated, hopeful heart. For ninety-eight years, You have been my sole constant, my companion, the only one who knows the things I’ve seen and sees the things I’ve known. I hope I have aided You in some way to understand the truth at the core of Your fallible, vulnerable, remarkable creations. I have liked to think of myself as Your eyes, Your ears, Your translator in the sum of our ways.
I have loved these people as best I could. I have tried my hardest to leave them better than they were before they met me. I have tried my hardest not to leave them worse. I have worked to remain open to every possible definition of who a person can be, even when society didn’t agree with me. To do this—to understand the full extent to which people can define themselves beyond their bodies—I have had to learn and learn and learn, and then learn some more. And by learn I mean unlearn…and then learn and unlearn and learn some more. I have made mistakes, but I have never been hateful. I have made faulty judgments, but I always sought remedy when I discovered my faults. I have asked for forgiveness, even though You are the only one who knew I needed to be forgiven. I have tried to lead a life of good, because it is the only way I know to lead a good life.
If I had a last wish, it would be to say to You: Don’t give up on them. By which I would mean: Don’t let them give up on each other.
I always wondered if, when my time came, all their lives would be shown to me again—if all those people I’ve been would somehow return to me, if I would see how all of these single days have added up to a single life. But now I understand: They all fall away. It is only me now. It is only me and You.
I hold on to that hand. I breathe for as long as I can breathe.
Every traveler returns home.
I am
M: I don’t know why you’d trust me.
Someone: I was lost in my own life. To the extent that I didn’t even recognize it as a valid life. The first step was understanding something was wrong. The second step was sharing that with someone else. The third step was giving it a name and trying to understand it as much as possible, as a way of getting power over it. The fourth step is living with it, and knowing there will be good days and bad days, and that sometimes I will lose control and other times I will regain control.
The fifth step is understanding that many of the people around me are going through some variation of what I’m going through.
I know this might sound obvious. But you have to understand that empathy is not something that comes naturally to me. It is something I have to remind myself about. Because if nothing in the world seems real, other people can also seem unreal. I must remind myself they are real. I must remind myself they are, at heart, like me.
Why do I trust you? Because you are, at heart, like me. You feel your life is wrong. You must discover it’s not. You must live with that and work with that and share that with others. I trust you because I recognize you. I recognize your soul. And you have given me no reason not to trust you.
Let me say what I said above a little differently.
I know what it’s like to be lost in your own life. I know you can get so lost that you want to end it. Or you can get so lost that you retreat into a carapace you’ve constructed in order to keep the rest of the world outside. I felt both of those impulses. But now I no longer want to be lost in my own life. I want to step outside of it. I want to know what other lives are like. I want to connect instead of retreat, even though there are days I think I will die in the attempt.
M: We can never meet.
Someone: Haven’t we already met? Isn’t this meeting?
We’re told that the most powerful words in the world are “I love you.” And while I think those are powerful, I think equally powerful is this phrase: I have started to know you, and I want to know more.
HELMUT, AGE 64
I have been in this body for almost forty years now. There is not a single day when I don’t think of what I’ve done, and tell myself it was wrong. But there is nothing I can do now.
After more than twenty-five years of moving from body to body, I’d had enough. I felt cursed. I wanted to break the curse. I was living in the center of Berlin, and even in the larger anonymity of a large city, there was no way to make a constant life in such inconstant form.
It is not like I woke up as Helmut and knew he was the one. There was an emptiness in his life, for certain…but I had experienced greater emptiness in others. That day happened to be a good day for him—a minor success in the office, a going-away party at night for a friend that left me tipsy and longing. I may have even, in my drunken state, convinced myself that I led Helmut’s life better than he ever had. When I looked into his memories, there were all these dark corners, all this trauma that made it hard for him to go forward. I understood that. But I also knew that it would never bother me, not in the way it gnawed at him. I could break him free of that. The only hitch was that he would stop existing as himself. I would become his better form. It seemed, in my twisted logic, the benevolent thing to do. So that night, it was like I made this bargain: I asked Helmut if I could stay, and even though I didn’t receive an answer, I woke up the next morning still inside his body, still inside his life. I was not intending to stay for long. But days became weeks. Weeks became months. I started to worry about what would be left of him, if I vacated. And I also worried about what would be left of me, if I had to go back to the way life had been. So I stayed. I squatted. I wore out my welcome, and there was nothing Helmut could do about it.
I have now occupied his life for longer than he ever did. But I still make the distinction between us. I have not become him. I will never become him. I will always be the pretender, the borrower, the thief.
I did not want to be captive to fate. So I made myself my own captive. Which still made me captive to fate, and I have taken someone else down with me.
The only person who can absolve me is the person I cannot let free.
MORRIS, AGE 5
I told Mommy I wanted to go to the beach again today, and she asked me when did I go to the beach, and I told her I went yesterday when she had brown hair, and she told me she didn’t know what I meant, so I stopped talking about the beach and asked her if we could get ice cream, and later when she asked me what flavor I wanted, I got that right.
X
What do I remember?
Not very much.
I have expunged the insecure sentimentality that causes people to cling to their memories, to set some measure of their own worth in the unreliable miasma of recollection. Memories—particularly ones that can be called fond—are pointless distractions, the act of putting your life into rerun when you should be focusing on the matters at hand.