4 / FLASH

SOME SAY YOUR life flashes before your eyes when you’re about to die.

It don’t always.

Not for me.

I didn’t have not one flash before I went.

Not everybody gets to see their first birthday again. Their father’s face laughing. The day their sister got married. The friends they’ve loved.

Maybe you won’t neither.

Not before you die.

It’s only now that I see the flashes. They come and go, and choose what day of my life to show me and I ain’t got a say in it. It happens to all of us dead. It’s more than just seeing the moment, it’s taking part in the memory as if it were happening again. And when you in the flash, you don’t even know that what you’re seeing is from a time already gone. You get lost in it. Feel like you got all the time in the world. A future. But it’s just your old life repeating itself and repeating itself and repeating itself. Those shivers you felt on warm days were just you—in two places at once.

So powerful, these flashes. Ask the dead. Ask the people who survive near death. Ask ’em how the flashes change their whole life from then on.

Or for the empty, it changes nothing.

I guess the most important parts of life ain’t measured by years or days or minutes but by moments. Moments that come in flashes here, only some of ’em good like seeing my sister, Hazel, again. I was seven years old in one of them flashes. Twelve in another. My favorite was the time when Hazel was teaching me how to tumble. And in another, I was six years old and she helped me lose my first tooth with a string and a slammed door.

The hell is the bad memories. Going back again and again and not being able to make a damn bit of difference. But God had mercy on me.

It’s been said that justice is getting what you deserve. And mercy is not getting the bad you deserve. Grace is getting a good thing, even when you don’t deserve it. So if I would’ve named my good thing, I’d have called her Grace. But someone else named her Josephine.