Choice had not always been prone to nightmares. But lately they had plagued him regularly, waking him up while it was still black, sweating and chest pounding while he gulped for air. His brain would slowly take in the room, processing little by little that, thankfully, the distressing dream was not his true reality. Tonight, when he awoke in the blackness, he thought at first that it was happening again, but as the memories of the dream started returning to him one by one, he realized this wasn’t a nightmare at all. It was a flashback..
The memory began with a young, dark-haired woman (a girl, really) in a half-laying, half-sitting position writhing in pain, her hugely rounded abdomen creating a mountain in the linens. A tall man and a woman in white began the process of turning the thrashing girl onto her side, helping her to manage stillness for the few seconds they needed to send her into relief.
A few hours passed and the new little life emerged in a whirlwind of blood and wails, of distant trumpets and horns coming from the clouds above. The infant’s tiny fists vibrated with the force of his cries while the girl trembled with cold and exhaustion after what she had accomplished. Her body craved his warm skin against hers, and she craned her neck to try and see him, but the nurse’s motions obstructed her view. The doctor instructed her to lay back, so she gave in to a moment of rest. A few minutes later, the girl heard a flutter of motion and the sound of a door. A moment of hope – perhaps it was someone, anyone, who knew her and would stay with her during this alien experience. Instead there was a descent of emptiness and she frantically scanned the room, the scale, the infant table…only to realize that he was gone – the wails, the pink skin…any chance of feeling his cheek against her chest. The reality hit her like a train. She gasped as the sadness flooded her, and the nurse, realizing what was happening, stopped fussing with the IV and sat down next to her bed, gently stroking her hand as her own eyes teared up. The tears flowed for both of them, and the young woman shook with sobs at what she had lost…what her baby had gained…the family she hadn’t been able to give him. She had to do it this way, her circumstances didn’t allow otherwise. She had chosen – him over herself. But that didn’t dull the pain, not now at least. Now was filled with the pounding awareness, the fullness of realizing, that the life she had grown until that moment would grow now with someone who wasn’t her. Goodbye, my son. Goodbye… I love you.
It was a distant, emotionally wrenching flashback to the first time Choice had influenced the man’s life – that wonderful, marvelous night he was born. Since that moment, Choice had played a slow but steady role, shifting between using others to influence the man and affecting the man’s own decision-making. Yet Choice’s influence was by no means constant; rather, he was on a roller coaster of importance – sometimes climbing the wooden tracks click by clack, overcome with anticipation, and other times falling at high speed without any feeling of control. When the man hit his teens, Choice inevitably began playing the Game of Life against Society, his biggest competitor. It was a time in the man’s life when the ivory keys and brass slides sang out their own song and when the mountains called to the man to make them his playground. But along the way, Society found loopholes in the man’s imagination and she used them callously to her advantage. As the jolly man in the red velvet hat faded into the real world, Society stepped right in without missing a beat, delivering packages to the man with tidy, hand-written messages that were as attractive to a young adult as a sack full of presents under a plastic tree was to a young child.
Society’s effectiveness lie in her insidious way of delivering her messages. Sometimes she managed to copy a friend or parent’s penmanship perfectly into the card on the parcel; in other instances, she placed her note inside a large official-looking envelope as if from an educational institution or prospective workplace. She even stooped so low as to slip subconscious content into his alphabet soup (it was a time in his life when he still ate a lot of canned food) and he gobbled it up, hungry as he was for acceptance, importance, and a life that made other people lightly green with envy. He ate the cafeteria food, he voted the way the newsers instructed him to, and he moved to the city where his money would scrape the sky.
Choice, it seemed, was always one step behind in their game. Society’s packages continued to appear, but he could never get to them in time to neutralize them. He tried his own line of defense: leaving notes (of a different kind) out on the Steinway, registering the man for classes with James McKenna, and printing catalogs of creations made by the man’s family members, carefully crafted from wood and thread. When his carefully thought-out plays went unnoticed, however, Society – ever the competitive one – was always there, in the reflection in the bathroom mirror or the backyard window looking in at him, sniggering at her success. She racked up points against Choice with the man’s wife, too, who – in her lack of self-awareness – never did much with Society’s letters except tack them to her corkboard with multi-colored pushpins.
Choice began to feel so forlorn at the state of their match that there was no way he could have seen his victory coming. Yet after the pathology report revealed the little boy’s increased cancer risk, the man began pulling out the Scrabble board and other games for some cherished moments with his wife and children. Who would have thought that another game, of all things, would help give Choice the leg up he needed against his opponent? But when the man played Scrabble, he began using all the M’s Choice gave him (no vowels needed to spell “MMM“), and the man loved playing with his kids because they didn’t care if he shut off his brain (his heart was all they wanted).
One day, Choice knew the game he had played with Society since those teenage years was over, even though the game clock was still running. The score had finally climbed too high for Society to keep trying. Choice kept to himself, though, rather than reflecting her snigger back to her. (He was a gentleman, after all, and a gentleman knew how to treat a lady.) She tried one last-ditch effort, wrapping her stationery up in bright tissue paper and curly ribbon. But the family paid attention to gifts in different packaging these days, and none of the family members even noticed her efforts. Unwilling to be visibly trounced, she let herself out the front door, carefully gathering up the ripped paper and envelopes and stowing them in the trash so no one would know how great was her defeat.
The day she left, she didn’t bother to say her goodbyes; she recognized that she wouldn’t be missed. So she just put on her Valentinos and stepped over the mess on the floor, so eager to start a new game in someone else’s life that she failed to even notice what the wooden Scrabble tiles spelled out under her stilettos.
Someone had asked the children what they wanted to be when they grew up. And, as children do, they had used their creativity to reflect, and to answer. The next guest would see, however, what Society had not…what the three children had spelled with their tiles in answer to that age-old question:
Connected.
Present.
Thinkful.