One Day, Another Lifetime

By Florence Hardy

When the world seems to be filled with problems, it’s hard, at the time, to picture those days as golden. It took a while for me to understand that you can still have golden days without always feeling one hundred percent happy. When people talk about the past, it’s usually them reminiscing about times that were simply better than the ones they’re living in now. Not the best, mind you, but better. Somehow there’s always room in the past to feel more carefree, although I’m not quite sure how that works. The only time I can remember feeling so buoyant was during the summer I spent with Oana.

One afternoon, we ran out into the meadow beyond. It curved around the edges of a stream that bordered my garden, a perfect escape into the wilderness whenever time allowed. Hopping over the thin trickle of water, she waited patiently as I adjusted one strap on the rucksack slung over her shoulders.

‘That’s where we’re going today,’ I pointed up at the silhouette of a large, sun-lit hill that was to be our destination. ‘It’s the tallest hill around, with the best view ever! You won’t believe how much you can see when you’re standing up there, it’s insane.’

‘Really? Maja, that’s perfect for our photos!’

‘Then let’s go! I don’t know how long the sun’s going to stay out for.’

There was something in the wind. It loomed just out of sight beyond the boundless fields that we sprinted through, air sucked from our lungs as quickly as we inhaled it. After an hour or so, Oana unhooked the rucksack from her back and threw it towards me, breathing hard. The hike had brought colour to our faces, reddened cheeks partially hidden by our seasonal tans. That day is particularly memorable to me because of the weather. It was acting in accord with the general feeling encompassing our world; it reflected everyone’s inner turmoil. Although the breeze was strong, it felt lined with indecision. The sky, unable to make up its mind, was at times striped grey, other times pale blue, and the clouds amassed overhead grew darker by the hour.

When we reached the hill, Oana’s fingers were dappled with dew – she’d ran her hands through the long grass — a cool contrast to the heat that flared through my skin when she grabbed my hand. I was flushed with running, words indecipherable from the exertion. Unable to keep up with her pace, I could only pant as she left me, flying up past the wildflowers that dotted the hillside white.

At the slope’s crest, a triumphant cry fled her lips and, arms raised, she beckoned for me to follow. Torn between capturing the moment on the polaroid dangling from my neck and joining her, I hesitated. Feathery grasses brushed my calves, urging me onwards, so I plucked one up to take with me.

‘What are you waiting for? There’s a windmill on the horizon you should photograph; it’s beautiful. Come on!’

She stood with the sun touching the fine hairs lining her crown. The distance yawned between us, stretched out it felt as though I’d never reach her again. An overwhelming desire to start run seized me; it was hard to stare at her from so far below, as remote as the stars through my telescope.

My legs drew me up the hill, reluctant yet the reward of her company would diminish their aching. Air moved against the fabric of my clothes; caresses turned hard as the wind grew fierce. With a start, the long grass was plucked out my hand, swirling away into the breeze until I lost sight of it against the green sea of the fields around us. Despite this hindrance, the earth fell away beneath my old trainers and I found she was right; the windmill carved a languid arch through a darkening sky, stark white against the blue-grey. As I began trying to capture the landscape on film, I caught her grin from the corner of my eye.

‘How many pictures do you have left to use?’

I checked to be sure. ‘Three.’

A distant rumble of engines broke the silence of her subsequent response. We ignored the sound, turning back to drink in the view. ‘Only three left? That’s not so many as I thought.’

‘No, it’s not.’

‘We’ll have to be careful what we use them on, then,’ Oana decided. ‘Did you have any ideas?’

‘I wanted to get one of the two of us, for the memories, you know? Is that okay?’

‘Sure, I’d love that.’

Together we turned to survey the view. I was still panting slightly. Beneath us, the wind ran fingers through a patchwork field of yellow flowers. Perhaps they were buttercups. It left them waving frantically within our eye-line, then turned back to encircling hill and the minuscule figures who’d tried to conquer it.

She let out a whoop as air rushed around us, brushing back her denim overalls to reveal socks patterned with miniature Dachshunds wearing red wellington boots. The wind was dizzying; I staggered, taking a moment to adjust my posture with as much dignity as I could afford. I hoped this had gone unnoticed but Oana didn’t miss thing. ‘Lucky you can balance. I don’t think I’m strong enough to catch you if you fell.’

‘You’d better pray this wind doesn’t get any stronger,’ I said. ‘If it gets any worse, we’ll have to find another place to have our picnic.’

‘No way! We’re not leaving now. It’s too pretty up here to go somewhere else!’

The breeze picked up, a taunting whistle that scattered strands of hair across my face. I batted them away to find Oana twirling around the edge of the hilltop, arms outstretched as if to grasp the world with her fingers.

Any words of caution died away, observing her, my hands moved automatically to the Polaroid, and I captured her spinning back towards the windmill, face half-striped with sun. Time standing still, the photograph had snipped away the landscape’s desolate edges, leaving room for her wild antics. Oana’s expression was too messy to be picture-perfect, her smile a bit too wide, her hair just a tad unruly, even as it gleamed beneath the light. We watched it develop with anticipation however the result, she claimed, was unflattering although the vividness of her joy at being alive was anything but.

‘Let’s make this hill ours, Maja,’ she urged, when the wind died away long enough for stillness to slip back into the horizon. ‘Let’s make it special. We can come here again and again, can’t we? And each time we do, we can fill it with good memories.’

The camera thudded against my chest. ‘You really want to do that?’

Those two unspoken words hung heavy in the air. Do you really want to do that?

With me?

‘Yes,’ her smile grew gentle in a way I’d yet to see, ‘yes, of course I do.’

Breaking eye-contact, I stared over her shoulder at the rolling hills, shrinking as they fell into the distance. Everything seemed sharper somehow – even the sun-striped shadows crispened at the edges then. Life was made up of moments, just a mismatch of adventures that foretold how it ended. Our decisions become our destination, in a round-about sort of way.

‘Nothing terrible will happen to us. We’re going to make it through this, okay? You just need to believe that.’

‘How?’ I asked, the question weak against the rushing air. ‘Everything’s against us, don’t you see?’

‘That doesn’t mean we can’t try,’ she said, and I couldn’t find the words to argue. ‘The world’s full of too many people who don’t bother being positive.’

In moments like that, when all the world lay beneath my feet, I felt invincible. In moments like that, I wished to grant her desire to make everything better again. Instead, I settled for laying down the picnic blanket. Clouds tumbled around the sky, so white and blinding that it was as if the other planes had already arrived. Outwardly, I shook my head. They wouldn’t be coming for several weeks yet, we still had time.

We passed the next hour in relative silence, interrupted by the sound of our teeth biting down into cucumber sandwiches and fluffy slices of cake topped in white icing. Once Oana clinked her fork loudly against her plate when a helicopter flew close by overhead. We did our best not to stare too closely, preferring to ignore its markings. That was a secret only the wind would know.

The distant hum grew louder, becoming a droning sound like a thousand angry bees. It was at that point we decided to pack away our things and return home for the day. That was the highlight of our time together, a day of easy companionship I have always striven to find since but never quite managed to. In the end, Oana and I couldn’t keep our agreement to return there. That time on the hill was our last day spent together.

My mother announced that evening that we would be following the directions to evacuate. We would leave, she told my father and I, by the end of the week, so it was important to begin packing right away, after dinner. It was as if a snowball at the top of a mountain had been shoved down it by impatient hands; everything felt as if it were moving at an uncontrollable rate. We all passed the next days embroiled in the affair of intense packing, barely managing to spare the time to catch the news each evening. With another day, inevitably, came another flood of deaths that rocked our hometown with every name.

We abandoned our house efficiently, stripped it of household objects and left only the heavier furniture that we couldn’t afford to carry away. Nothing like that was considered very precious by my parents, the necessity to leave was a more pressing issue.

The evening was cool, the tears on our cheeks chilled as we hugged goodbye. She squeezed my shoulders hard, unable to pull away too soon. I remember how she smiled through the pain of our parting as if to reassure me that it was only temporary. I couldn’t bring myself to smile back, something which has always stayed with me to this day. The thought that the last expression she’d seen on my face was one of sadness is very distressing to imagine.

Oana stood in the middle of our driveway, the house looming behind her with shadowed windows, our home of sixteen years.

Squished against a duvet into the back of my mum’s car, I struggled to wave to her through the window as the car began moving. I was sobbing by the time we pulled out onto the road. It took all I could bear to endure the intense pain in my chest, as though a hole had ruptured my heart, the blood slowly draining out with each metre between us. Oana was crying too, no longer able hide her grief.

I twisted round to face her as we drove away, choking on my snot and tears. It didn’t feel real, nothing felt like it was truly happening. Why did this have to happen to us? Why now, in all of time and space, were we to be separated like this?

In that moment, I would have given anything to change it.

She remained there until I could no longer pinpoint her amidst the cluster of houses that made up our town. Even from the edge of our street, I saw her waving the entire length of her arm like a flagpole, barely piercing the evening gloom. Then we drove uphill towards the highway and Oana was swallowed up by the earth.

That night, driving for hours without pause, we crossed the border and afterwards, didn’t step one foot back home until the war ended. Slipping by, almost unnoticed, soon six years had passed. When we returned, our town had been reduced to craters and rubble. Nobody had heard of Oana and her family since the tanks rolled through two years ago. For a long while, I waited for news but after enough time passed my hopes of seeing her again vanished. We had the technology, of course. If she had survived, I would have heard.

As a teenager, whenever anyone spoke to me about the golden days, I hadn’t quite realised that I was still living them. This was because they hadn’t seemed like it at the time although with each year my understanding has developed. Nobody had ever pointed this out to me (aside from my grandparents but what teenager listens to any elderly person, when they’re young) and it wasn’t as though the universe had been making this apparent, what with the political upheaval my youth had been subjected to. A straightforward way of describing a time that was anything but – war, sickness, pollution, they had taken centre place in those years, with layers upon layers of problems to untangle. Providence’s punishment, some people claimed. But what point is there in rambling on about such things? Those times have passed by me now and the chance to relive them fully has gone.

Nowadays, I struggle to focus on the important things: what clothes she preferred, how her voice sounded, the sensation of her hand in mine. In my mind, I can barely pick out her curved lips beneath that shoulder-length, cherry blossom hair. Some things are easier to recall: her ability to look flawless even in the face of a storm, something I envied her for at the time, and the tiny freckle beneath her left eye. She had brown eyes; I think. Or maybe they were blue. In the end, I’m never quite sure.

Everything’s growing distant now, as if I’m standing high up on a mountaintop looking down into a valley of fog. Even though I try my hardest to penetrate the dense mist, it’s impossible to snatch a glimpse of my lost memories back, thus they remain forgotten. Soon there’ll come the day when I won’t be able to remember her face at all. I dread that day more than I’d like to admit.