As he stood there, he could not remember who he was. He could not remember where he'd grown up; his mother's face; his father's name. He could not remember where he'd gotten the scar on his left palm, or deciding that morning to wear the particular set of clothing he now bore. The city around him was an unknown jungle, full of hidden dangers and terrifying creatures. The glowing sunset out over the water might as well be the fire of Armageddon coming to sweep it all away; he would not know. He would not care.
Some mechanism in his mind had wiped clean everything but a set of memories, and those replayed over a thousand times each second, flashing before his eyes in cruelly exacting detail. They raged through his consciousness, consuming all else. When he breathed, he breathed her scent—her skin, her hair, her sweat—a hundred different days of her smell bathing his nasal passages. His tongue only tasted hers. His ears found no purchase on the slippery, frictionless sound of the outer world; their entire focus was her laugh, and three soft-whispered words. All that he did not know faded from his sight, and she was there, miraculous in her red bikini, stunning in her everyday clothing, and ravishing with naked, milky-smooth skin. His skin tingled, as if he might feel her, but tortuously, it only tingled. It was the grounding force to the mechanism—the hammer to drive home the truth he wanted nothing more than to reject. Their bodies would never touch again, her lips would never meet his—he would never cradle her against him, and feel the love and hormones coursing through his heart.
He began to laugh, a high, hysterical laugh, and he did not know he was making noise. His head was in his hands, and tears rolled down his cheeks, but a clear, maniacal laugh issued from his throat. The pedestrians glanced at him and hurried away, keeping a distance. None of them could understand. The peals of rollicking mirth found a hitch, and tugged up with them a sob, and the laughter dissolved into wretched bawling. He was on the ground, rocking back and forth, clenching his face, and the passerby seemed only to glance at him in disgust. He remembered dimly the sunset and wished that it could all be burnt away--that there was an end to this. But he knew that it could not, and he cried harder.
From the cell phone beside him on the ground, there was silence. At her seat, the nurse who had dialed his cell to inform him held the phone loosely to her ear, the other hand clamped over her mouth, the tears brimming from her eyes as she listened and only listened. The nurse behind her shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other. She remembered her first call; she would never forget. Her hand slid over the young nurse's shoulder, failing to convey comfort, and she hurried away to tend to her patients.
On the other side of the line, she heard a break in the sobbing, and the microphone crackled as if being scraped along the ground, and for a moment there was whistling air, and then a splat, and then the line fell dead. She sat there, staring at the phone, holding the headset to her ear, trying to stop the flood of tears that he had passed to her through a telephone wire. After a very long time, she put the phone down, but the tears did not stop. They slowed to mere watering, but for the remaining hour of her shift, she was useless. The older nurse sent her home, and told her to rest.
On the drive home she ran two red lights. When she got home, she parked the car diagonally in the driveway, and sprinted to the front door. She tried to unlock the door but her fingers trembled so much she couldn't get the key into the lock, the world distorted by a sheen of tears, and finally she heard the deadbolt clack out of place, and the door opened to her husband. She wrapped herself around him and sobbed into his chest, and he wrapped himself around her right back, and, confused but loving, held her for several long minutes. After a while, he closed the door, led her over to the living room couch, and pulled her down to him, and held her, curled up in a little ball, and stroked her hair. As the sky grew dark, her sobbing subsided, and she just lay there, an occasional hiccough shaking her frame. Then, finally, she sat up, and buried her face in his neck, and breathed him in, and had never realized just how much she loved him, until this very moment. She burst into tears again, and clung to him like she would never let go, and he only held her and kissed her head and murmured into her ear that he loved her.
The man who had lost his wife would never know how he had changed the nurse's life; every day she would go home, and sit on her husband's lap, and tell him, softly, about all the people who had died that day. He would listen patiently, lovingly, with understanding. When she was done, he would kiss her on the forehead, and tell her she was the most wonderful person he had ever known, because she continued to care so much for all those people, even the ones she hadn't met. Even the ones she didn't like. Even the ones she hated. He loved her because she never ceased to love them. Every day he listened and marveled at her. How she took tragedy and learned from it love. How the world poured into her mind the terrible and she learned from it only to appreciate the wonderful. There was nothing more amazing to him. And sometimes when her shifts ran late, and he sat in the dark living room, wondering if maybe, just maybe, something had happened, he remembered how she took death and made it into life, and he knew that if she never came home, she would always be with him. As he sat there he knew that her love was the greatest gift he had ever been given.
And he knew that it was given in full only by the grace of death.
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Edited, taking into account cjscoot's review.
