Decisions

Twenty thousand dollars, she thought to herself, as she sat in her car, one of the only ones left in the damp parking lot, lit up by a lone streetlight closer to the road. It rained earlier in the day, which left everything, even the light, heavy and wet.

Who leaves exactly twenty grand somewhere? Her thoughts kept frantically moving, like how snow looks in the middle of a storm when you turn on your high lights. Chaos, hyper speed. It must be a drug deal. Someone's hiding what they found. It's a bizarre treasure hunt. I'm on a tv show. It's entrapment.

She sat there for a couple of hours and counted it all after work. On this side of town, single cars in the dark aren't suspicious. On this side of town, cops rarely roll through. They could easily bust anyone on any given night for something, but instead its as if they forgot about it altogether.

She found the soggy yellow backpack behind the dumpster as she took out the trash after closing. She worked at a fast-food joint. It wasn't glamorous, obviously, but it meant free meals and was quick money - she was always good at math, so once she memorized costs, she could easily pocket a good amount of cash by the end of the day working the register. She worked the night before. It definitely wasn't there. She tried to remember the scene as she walked in at the beginning of the shift, but couldn't. She thought she would have noticed it. How could she not? Even though it was rain-soaked and dirty, it's exactly her taste: bright yellow with a rainbow stripe across the middle.

It had been a long enough time that she started to believe whoever left it wasn't coming back. How could they expect people not to notice it? It wasn't obvious but it wasn't hidden. In that part of town, a lot of people spent a lot of time roaming the streets, herself included. Of course someone would pick up a backpack, no matter what condition it was in. Whoever left it there was stupid. Unless they wanted someone else to find it. Unless they meant to relinquish it, and all of its consequences, its history and its dangers, on to someone else.

She was now at a crossroad. A threshold. It was time to make a decision. What would she do? Keep it? Leave it there? Calling the police wasn't even a thought. People like her, in a place like that, don't willingly invite such interaction. Calling any friends for advice wasn't necessarily a good idea either. Most of her friends lived in squalor and spent every non-claimed moment of the day wasted on anything immediately and easily available. She already knew what they would tell her. She already knew they would take it from her as soon as she blinked.

They didn't necessarily choose to be like that. That's how it is growing up without anything but what you can get your hands on, knowing that everyone else around you is trying to get their hands on it faster. That's what it's like to grow up without resources, to feel like there are no options. It takes a long time to understand that anything could be different, and most of the people she knows will never learn it. Not in this lifetime.

She thought about her typical plan on a night like this. She'd go the park, next to the artificial waterfall the town was named after. She'd roll up the windows and lock the doors, lay her head on a pile of clothes in her backseat, and try to sleep.

It sounds sad, but it's alright. She's used to it. It's better than her recent alternative. She has a place she can stay, but it comes at a high personal cost. Some people will take anything they can get from anyone. Sometimes she can sleep on friends' couches, but she's overstayed her welcome in a lot of places, and besides, on this night she can't guarantee that she can keep her newfound treasure hidden if she does.

Still sitting in the driver's seat of her car, she randomly remembered when she almost went to college. She graduated high school early in order to work full-time but didn't realize that would grant her scholarships. She tried to take classes, hang out on the bright green grass during free periods, but it didn't fit. Maybe she didn't fit. She had to work, she had to make money, and school got in the way of that. Everyone around her was so... different. They had plans for their life, goals they wanted to pursue. They had time for homework. They had a desk in a home they could do homework at. They seemed happy and carefree and unburdened. She remembered when the guidance counselor rolled his eyes at her and told her she could be like the rest of her family then, when she told him she had to dropout.

That was a long time ago. And what's funny is that her family is college-educated. The problem is that even college-educated people can be lost, and being lost can make us cruel. Even fancy college-educated folks can be people who never healed. If you don't learn to handle your problems, they follow you everywhere you go, and you tend to make them everyone else's problems too.

They kicked her out of the house when she was 14, and that was that.

Years later, here she is. Trying to decide what the next step is.

Decisions have always been a weakness for her. To be decisive is to know how you feel, and she rarely knows how she feels. What do you do with things you can't comprehend, with things you never learned how to navigate? Feelings are living things, which means they are born, they live, then they die. The issue for her is she never lets them live, so they never die. Instead, they beat on her chest begging for a moment of her time, crying out to be heard. This makes them so overwhelming she's certain she'd explode if she let them in, and she does anything she can to numb her awareness of them. To her, feelings are too unpredictable, too vulnerable, and vulnerability is dangerous. Her motto is, "Shove it all down and get through today so maybe I can make it to tomorrow." This is how she survives.

It's been so many hours since she closed shop, and she's still in her car in the mostly empty, slowly drying parking lot. The air is thick where she lives and water tends to stay. If she were to reach her arm out the window it would attract beads of moisture, and in the warm night they would call the same out of her body until she couldn't tell what was sweat and what was leftover rain.

She's angry. So angry that it's so hard to make a choice. She feels helpless, like all the strength she has is nothing but a façade, a lie, a delusion, because here she is too weak to define what will become of this incredibly rare, absolutely unbelievable opportunity.

She realizes she's holding her breath. She does this often. To breathe easily is to be in resonance with the universe, a skill she has yet to develop. It's as if she believes controlling her breath will help her control all the elements of her convoluted, confusing life.

She exhales. She starts the car, she starts moving. The only thing she knows is she's not going to the park, and she's not going to sleep anytime soon.

She gets on the highway which has taken on a mystical effect in the dark and solitude, turns on the radio, and in the early hours of the morning, she drives north out of town.

---

She's standing at the top of the trail looking down into the canyon right as the sun begins to crest cliffs made of rocks that have been there longer than she could ever possibly comprehend. The light is pink and soft. No matter how many times she's walked this path, no matter how many sunrises she's witnessed, it never fails to feel otherworldly, like maybe, for these few moments, she is somewhere no one else has ever been or ever could be.

Here, alone in the cold air, she pulls her little black notebook out of her jacket. She's never let anyone see it. It's secret and it holds all her secrets. There are some things not meant to be shared, some things meant only for ourselves.

On days like this, which is in no way particular, she likes to recall the series of steps that led her to where she is right now. It's funny how life moves so slow at times it can feel as though nothing is changing, or could ever change, and at the same time by the end of a random breath everything has shifted and we're living an entirely new way. It's too easy not to pay attention, and all the days pass feeling exactly the same. Moments are forever lost because they were moments unexamined, and after a time we wonder where our lives went and who we are, what's left.

She doesn't want to forget simply because she never took the time to remember. She looks through the pages already filled and skims over the stories they tell.

She drove until a snowstorm held her captive in a small town. She found a dog who loves sunshine and mountain air. She fell in and out of love many times, like us all when we're still discovering our preferences and our needs. She made friends who became family and held her through the times she wasn't sure she could hold herself. She worked jobs, and she quit often quicker than her first paycheck - she can't make herself do anything she doesn't really want to, and she no longer apologizes for it. She went into the woods and walked through trees that smell of vanilla. She chased dreams, and some of them came true. Over the years she found her strength, her creativity, and her determination. She learned how to forgive, most especially herself. She chose to let all her feelings in, and instead of swallowing her whole they set her free. She spoke to her soul and she learned who she was.

She never heard of anyone reporting the money stolen. She doesn't know if it would have made any difference if she had.

There aren't always right decisions and wrong decisions. Sometimes, there are just decisions. We make a choice. We move forward from there. The universe is not so fickle that we only ever have one option. Options, possibilities, ride every molecule of air in and out of our lungs throughout the entirety of our lives and that, she thinks as she breathes in, is so goddamned beautiful.

She knows what she'd do with a chance. She'd take it.

She decided that backpack was meant for her, and that was that.