Headlights(102)

We take the long road down from the hotel.

And Hannah was right.

Everything is different.

Not just with her and me. With the entire world.

The shadows, from before, from my whole life …

Like the woman in the room. They are no longer shadows at all. And they’re everywhere.

Filling the hotel as we leave, the parking lot, the road and the landscape around us. Flickering, in and out. But all around us. Brighter, more defined. Shadowed, and glowing, both at once.

People. Sort of people. In all different clothes. Modern, old, everything in between. Every age. Every type of person.

And other animals. Rodents, birds, wolves, a saber-toothed cat. Dinosaurs. Things I don’t even recognize. The snowed-in landscape filled with all of them.

Some of them turn as we pass. Most just go about their business, whatever that is. Most of them there for a moment, and then gone. Just fragments, almost. Echoes. I don’t know. But we can see them, all of them. Both of us, Hannah and me. Some of them linger, watch as we pass.

The radio flips back on again. Plays Lee Hazlewood’s “Your Sweet Love” on repeat. The song we danced to last night. Hannah reaches over and takes my hand. The world outside is something new. The snow swirling, less violent now, still filling our senses with white. The cold wind pushing against the sides of the car. All these beings, everywhere, drifting in and out of it.

Us, trying to understand. Hannah’s hand on mine, holding tight on the center console.

“They don’t all seem to be on the same plane,” she says. “It’s like they’re living all on top of each other without even knowing it. They’re not looking at the other cars, just ours.”

“Maybe because we see them,” I say. Energy, echoes, imprints made by a life, or … I think of Daphne, for some reason. Suddenly.

What if … what if these things we’re seeing, these ghosts, what if they’re the equivalent of DNA shed? We leave pieces of ourselves everywhere we go all the time. Could that be it? Could they just somehow be pieces left behind?

But they can see us, feel us, some of them want something from us. I feel it. They seem to be consciously here, now, not just an echo of something from before.

“Did we do this?” I ask. “Somehow? Did we—”

“You want to know what I think?” Hannah says, and I wonder how much of my train of thought she can hear. I think what we share, it’s more like feelings, wants, images, maybe. She turns in the passenger seat and gives me a look that makes me think the answer is maybe that actually she can hear all of it.

“Yes,” I say out loud.

“I think…” she says, looking around at this new world in wonder. In fear. “I think they’re still here,” she says. “But … not. Like they’ve just—” She furrows her brow, turns her head, chasing the thought. Then a new expression crosses her face, a realization.

“Have you ever been locked out of your house at night?” she says.

I nod.

“I think … what if it’s like that? I don’t know why I haven’t thought of it before.”

“They’re locked out? Or we are?”

“No, I mean … yes. Them.”

I wait, and we pass something on our left that I think is a fucking woolly mammoth. Hannah laughs, a little. Leans further out to see as we drive past it.

“I think,” she says, sitting back in her seat, a faint smile on her face, “that maybe death is like getting locked out of your house at night. You get locked out, and your first instinct is to start to try to find a way back in. A weak point, a window you didn’t close, a door you might be able to pick the lock for. And the longer you’re outside, trying to get in, the more you start to see it all in a new way, the home or life you’ve built. The lights on inside and the heat or the fire going. All your furniture and art and photographs. It’s warm, and it’s yours, and you realize, looking at it from outside, finally in a way you only can because you’re locked out of it, you realize what you have, what you’ve built. Maybe even who you are. How beautiful it is, now that you can’t access it. And even though you were just in there, you miss it already, maybe desperately, appreciate it in a way you never could without looking in from the cold night.

“Maybe that’s what death is,” she says. “Maybe it’s like … you just get locked out one day. And inside, the lights are still on and it’s warm and it’s everything you know, and the people you love are still there, and you want to go back to them. And maybe sometimes you can just get so focused on wanting to get back in, on wanting to shelter from the night and stay, go back to your home that you know, that you don’t realize how actually small a house is. How finite and closed and … I mean, you’re standing outside. Outside goes on and on, forever. But it’s also dark, especially if you keep staring at the lights of indoors. And it’s new, this outside world. And maybe it seems lonely, even if it’s not. I mean, I don’t know if it is.

“But what I think is that sometimes maybe someone dies and they can’t see that the whole of the world and the universe is at their disposal now, that all of it is their new home. And it maybe seems dark in relation to the house, dark in some ways and scary, and it’s definitely not the warm lit-up house they know and love. But it’s so much bigger. Infinite, and full of possibility. If only we’re willing to turn around. Let our eyes adjust to the night, to see that it’s not dark, not really. If only we’re willing to take that step forward, away from the house.