Where the Cranes Fly

TWs: Terminal illness, Abuse, Depression, Language

The sky wept, restless. Stadium bulbs clunked on, hospital eyes in the black.

Daron and I stood at center field, rolling ankles, necks, sleeking water from our faces, hair – readying for kickoff.

We shouldn’t have ever met – the age between us too great. But Daron was a prodigy, the only freshman to make the varsity soccer team.

I shivered, turning in the dying light as we waited for the ref. For the briefest moment I saw Daron in my periphery as if catching my pale shape in a mirror: narrow face, dark hair swept back in a ponytail – one of us a specter of the other.

The ref's whistle screamed.

I shook the image out, dropped the ball to our center mid, ran.

The field morphed into a face – Daron the right eye, me the left. We fell like tears, fast, both of us, all our strength in our legs.

I didn’t realize how fast she was, felt her like a shadow, carving the twin half of a Rorschach test only us two could see.

We found each other at the curve of the throat, the white goal box the beating heart where we aimed the spikes of our cleats.

I had the ball at the far edge, and Daron was already centered.

It was as if we had done it before, some kind of sameness in our connective tissue. My foot, her head. Her head, my foot.

I crossed the ball.

Time ticked slow. Stopped.

I saw the goal before it happened, the déjà vu of Daron stark in the black, like if I were only to sweep back the curtain of night, I would see that this world was the sepia dream of some other time and place.

My foot, her head. Her head, my foot.

Time folded in on itself, sped forward, and I watched the goal happen exactly as I knew it would.

The sky choked as if knowing it had revealed too much. Lightning ripped down the seam, the veil of night billowing against my skin.

Two whistles: one to call the goal, and another to postpone the game.

We didn’t care. We screamed, laughed, defied the night.

The sky heaved, sucked in a breath.

Held.

----

Alongside Daron’s arrival to the team was a new coach – a big man: loud, gruff, verbal. Angry.

At home my mom rarely punished me because she knew I was my own worst critic – any punishment she devised would pale in comparison to the ways I would berate myself. But now, for the first time, there was another voice, one outside of myself, slithering in my ear. If you want to play this sport, you better become more like a man, less like a little girl.

My sensitivity was a foreign substance – me unsuited for the jungle, arriving to the hunting party in all the wrong clothes – too much skin exposed. Cold, shivering, feeling it all, everyone around me asking what blood we’re after, and me asking why it is we’re hunting at all.

Fragile. Weak.

I straightened my spine, dared not flinch.

Emotional. Drama Queen.

I hung my worth up in a jersey, laced it up in my cleats.

I flew, dared not look down.

The voice came too close, a sudden hand on my upper arm with bruising strength, pulling me down, ushering me to the sideline when I made the mistake of clearing the ball over our own goal line, awarding the other team a corner kick. I could feel my coach shaking – me shaking, a crushed plastic water bottle in his fist, the sharp edge of a clipboard.

His anger was a mist rising from his body, and panic reached down my throat and gripped bone-cold hands around my lungs. Frantic thoughts rose like bile: like how I was the closest being to his shaking form – how he seemed barely restrained, like if I even breathed wrong, he might remember something was close at hand – something to snap.

Fucking worthless.

Later at home, my mom frowned at the bruise on my arm. “How’d you get that one?”

“Fell in the game,” I said. Because I had.

I had, hadn’t I?

----

It came on slowly – something snagging at my edges – an aging, a wrongness. I made more and more mistakes. My coach benched me more and more frequently. The hum of a question began snaking up the temple columns of my bones. What was I, to anyone, if I couldn’t do the one thing I spent all my time doing? The thing I was known for?

Daron sat next to me on the bus to our away games.

“You doing okay?” she asked one afternoon.

“Yeah…yeah. Just…” Just what? “….tired, I guess.”

“Me too,” she said on a sigh.

Her eyes were like mirrors then, and I shuddered in the foreshocks, understood then something was giving way, that the dream we created for a brief moment was merely that holy and awful Sehnsucht of a world unseen.

----

Daron received her diagnosis soon after: brain cancer. Terminal.

A mistake, surely, was all I could think. She was fifteen. In my small world, I still believed cancer came for the smokers, the abusers, the very old. Not children.

I was shaking apart, continents shifting, a restructuring within – lands I didn’t understand, topography I couldn’t read, newly formed flood waters I didn’t know how to ford.

Depression took me by the throat, its grip light, barely squeezing one single millimeter at a time. It moved slow – trying to go unnoticed, desiring oblivion on the way toward my asphyxiation – less struggle, more purchase that way. It preyed in secret, in the quiet. It waited until the room had cleared, and then whispered in the pitch: Why you can’t fix this on your own? Surely it’s not that hard? No one else has trouble. Too bad it had to be her. Not you. Fucking worthless.

----

I quit soccer.

I watched the rest of my team carry on bravely, dedicate the season to Daron.

I watched our coach get fired. Some of the other player’s parents stormed a school board meeting, using, I would later find out, my spiral as their evidence for a termination.

I walked the school halls, now at the heart of a scandal, aware I was vindicated, aware I had lost someone their job. I walked numbly between whispers, the pleads to rejoin the team.

I was lost – no sky to fly in, no ground to walk on, only the deep chasms of me that kept cracking open. Deeper. Endless.

I begged on my knees to become the rain, to melt into the ground, fall into water, fall on her cheek, his lip, her eyelash, race about the night in perfect negligence, fall into deep waters, simply. To be something, nothing, anything, but this.

I would awake again, feverish, no end in sight.

----

I began taking anti-depressants. At first I resisted because I felt like a medication made my condition official, irreversible, out of my hands. It was all those things – but I wanted to keep holding the illusion that I could be stronger than I was, climb my way out.

After taking the medication, I had the awful awareness that I hadn’t merely fallen to the ground, that perhaps I had fallen off the edge of a cliff. I had forgotten what sunlight was on my skin, dappled between trees. I had forgotten about my senses, had turned them all off. I had been going numb for so long, I didn’t even realize that I had lost use of my body.

I remembered – a faint breath – what it was to cry and mean it. I yearned, for the first time in my life, to become sensitive again, to return to the person everyone in my life warned me against becoming.

I yearned to come back to myself.

----

My fingers went numb from folding origami cranes – hundreds of them.                 

On the day the team planned to present them to Daron, I felt sick.

“I don’t think I can go,” I told my mom.

“You can do this,” my mom said gently.

“I can’t.” I was barely holding myself together, and we both knew it.

“You’re braver than you think,” my mom said. I wanted to laugh, because I felt the furthest from brave anyone could possibly be.

But somehow, I went.

I arrived late, and the rest of the team was waiting for me in the parking lot. They handed me the bag of cranes.

“Oh, I don’t think I can…”

“It should be you.”

I looked around helplessly, and was surprised that my teammates still looked at my like I was their captain, despite everything.

I breathed from somewhere foreign inside me. I led the group to the door as my whole body trembled.

Daron’s mother answered, and we were ushered into the tiny apartment living room that reeked of vomit and menthol. Daron was propped up on the couch, hairless, a breathing tube snaked into her nose, the machine beside her wheezing ominously.

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

“Uh…pretty bad,” she said back.

Stupid question.

“Nice weather at least,” I tried again.

“I’ve been stuck inside all day,” she said.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

My face was burning, but I kept going, finding some grip against those foreign walls of myself.

“We were planning to fold a thousand origami cranes. We ended up folding two thousand. Two wishes, that way.”

This time Daron smiled. She already knew the Japanese legend of a thousand cranes – that folding as many would grant a wish, a blessing of well-being.

Daron’s mother took the string of cranes delicately. “They’re lovely.”

We left soon after, and I was surprised that it was the most ashamed and proud I had ever been of myself. For the first time in my life, I let the feelings sit side by side, let myself feel it all with no reproach. Let myself be human.

----

Our final game together, Daron and I sat side by side.

I had a camera around my neck.

She wore her sweatshirt hood bunched tight around her face, oxygen tank whirring beside her. We watched our team play from the bench.

“You should be out there,” she said.

“Not without you,” I said back.

She thrummed her fingers against the aluminum. “What’s the camera for?”

“I’m trying out yearbook. Pictures, visual design, a bit of writing.” I shrugged, looked down. “Something new, I guess.”

She smiled. “I love to write. Poetry, mostly. It’s harder…now.” She shook her head, gave a sad smile. “But I would have loved to do something like yearbook.”

Our team scored a goal then, and the noise from the stands drowned us out, our voices lost.

----

Daron died on winter, barely seventeen.

I helped lower two thousand cranes into her grave, realized cranes could do more than fly. They could mourn too. They could keep wishes buried deep in the earth, safeguard a memory of the sacred.

At the funeral, in the rain, her mother found me. “Don’t forget her,” she whispered into my ear. A challenge, a command. Words of a mother’s heartbreak.

Like I could, I thought. But aloud, “I won’t.” An understanding between us, as she gave a pure, sad smile, and the tear in her eye so thick I couldn’t see its end, a sorrow this mother rocked in her arms. She kissed my cheek, let me go.

----

My mom reached out to our church for help, and came home with the name of a therapist.

I began therapy just to appease her, but was silent for many sessions, my shame of inadequacy too great, and every word too small or too trite, a small prison to Daron’s personhood.

It was months of sitting beneath the heavy tick of a clock before my therapist asked to try something new. “I want you to go backward, go to the trauma, if you can. The place you felt most unsafe. And we’re going to look for Jesus there.”

I cringed. “I’m not sure.”

“Only with your permission.”

Something in me bled open, and a voice came from someplace within me, Deeper.

I took a deep breath. “Ok, I’ll try.” I clutched the wooden arms of the chair, rewound the tape in my mind.

I expected the reel to stop on the images I saw whenever I closed my eyes: the face of my coach rising like a dark mist in the rain, or of Daron, hairless, pale, tied down by a thousand wires, cranes strung above her head – every last one of them pierced through the heart with twine.

But the reel kept going, Deeper. It stopped so suddenly I let out a gasp.

I was alone, on a cold bench. The soccer field was in front of me, my team playing a game, but they were faded, grayscale. I was a ghost – no one could see me, hear me.

From another world, I heard my therapist’s voice, “Are you there?”

“I don’t…know,” I said. “I’m at the soccer field, but…not.”

“Ok, I want you to find Jesus. Ask him where he is.”

“I’m alone.”

“Ask.”

Deeper.

I took a breath. But before I could ask, a man appeared on the bench beside me, as if he had been there all along. I could see only his profile as he sat, staring straight ahead.

“Do you see him?” My therapist’s voice sounded distant, quiet.

“I don’t know,” I said, realizing belatedly that I was weeping, because I did know, felt so much peace leaking across my skin, picking me up, sewing me together.

“What is he saying?”

“Nothing,” I sobbed.

“Listen.”

I did, but the man beside me never said a word. I thought I caught the barest of smiles on his lips, one just like I’d seen on Daron’s mother the day of the funeral. And then the whole scene went black.

I opened my eyes on a gasp, as if I had been plunged underwater, my knuckles white from gripping the chair.

“Did he say anything to you?” my therapist asked gently.

“No.” I steadied my breath, my mind whirling. “But I think…I think that was the point.”

My therapist tilted her head. “Tell me more.”

“I don’t have to save her, trade places with her. I don’t have to play soccer. I don’t have to do anything. I can sit on a bench for the rest of my life and do nothing.” I was crying again, and barely managed the next words. “And it would be enough. I would be enough.”

----

I used to pray to the sky – the ambivalent place of heaven, hoisted among the clouds, the pearly gates and golden roads just a shift upward, a warm welcome for the winged.

What then, for the fallen, with wings clawed from the flesh long ago? What of this broken body, crawling in the mud?

The clouds above became insubstantial, hollow, a phantom holy ground.

What if bravery was lifting the curtain long enough to see your own self, without looking away – holding yourself in all the pain, all the disfiguration, all the ways you hide your darkness behind your back in fists, and letting go long enough to hold the string of two thousand origami cranes in the essential tremor of your hands?

What if bravery is crawling in the mud, blood dripping down the spine, veining rivulets across hands, and still seeing the place of God, and the ground’s thin veil drawn back to bare, beneath it all, where the cranes fly.