A Gift of Air

Miracle. Noun. An event regarded as impossible, attributed to luck or an act of God. A wonder.

I was never a gambler. If anything, I was full of doubt, which had led me to miss out on many an opportunity. The women I had a crush upon ended up in the arms of men I considered better than me, the prizes I coveted ended up on the shelves of those I considered smarter than me. I even passed up a few jobs that could have opened doors to higher positions of higher pay, all because I never saw myself as ready to take on such responsibilities.

There were two days of my life up to this moment that ended up being of grave matter and the change that I needed to be a better person instead of a side note. The first one was brief; my grandfather passed away after suffering for so long with a tumor that was reported to be too dangerous to remove without causing more damage to the brain. I visited him after school, a custom that I swore I would do until his passing. Three days before his final breath, he asked me to come closer and to hold out my hands, for he wanted me to have something that he held since it was given to him by his grandfather. I did as I was requested and received a black Bible with real gold for the letters. He told me that I could do one of two things; I could sell the Bible and receive a lot of money from it, given that it was around during World War One and could be worth much, or I could hold onto it and give it to my grandchild one day.

My mother and father weren't religious people despite my grandfather's urgings, instead pushing their children to work hard and be ready to earn hard. I'm talking the A+ all the way down the report cards, voluntary recommendations, job-shadow appraisals, college acceptances, and even high-paying job recognitions. But, as I stated earlier, I didn't get far because of my lack of self-worth. Thus, my parents had all but given up on me. Where they left me, though, my grandfather stepped in to speak to me about his story.

That story, though, was ended one winter day. A man with a broken mind went to his resting place and left behind a loving family, including a child with a broken heart. I was angry. I wanted to throw that book, yet something intrigued me; what sort of value did this Bible have? Doubt was put aside to make way for curiosity and, finding a quiet place in my dismal apartment, I opened it up and started reading it, hoping to see what my grandfather saw in this book.

It took me two months to finish the whole thing. Spring erupted almost as fast as my thoughts upon what I had absorbed, with questions pouring out like the rain upon the flowers. Why go through all this trouble? What is the ultimate purpose of every event? How does this truly affect the world? And then, the final questions: Why me? Am I worthy of this love and sacrifice? I shut the book, doubt moving back into its original abode.

Spring and summer shared much in between themselves in my home area, which included the blaring heat and the expected yet surprisingly violent storms. In this particular season, a violent storm was a mild breeze compared to what came. The sudden shifts of the air happened without anyone realizing the change until it was too late. On a day chosen by fate, when the storm seemed to have become lenient upon us fair mortals, I was working at the warehouse and approached my break with my mind still wandering to my grandfather's Bible. I sat outside, the cool air making its attempt to alleviate my mind as it had alleviated the warmth from earlier, and I opened the Book once more. As before, I asked the questions: where do I go from here? What does this mean for me? How should I take this? Why should I take this?

Why me?

Such questioning provided distractions to the brain and nearly numbed me to the pounding of precipitation in the form of a heavy rain, leading to hail, and then a great wind that finally woke me up. Everyone was already heading inside, getting to a storm shelter. Those coworkers, their names failing my memory yet their well-being upon my heart, managed to call out to me to run inside. I turned and ran while the wind picked up and started pushing the debris of the world in my direction. I ran towards the warehouse-

The large doorway of the warehouse was suddenly filled by an eighteen-wheeler that just flew over me and crashed into the threshold! I stopped a few yards away from the wreckage as the sound of a thousand waterfalls started to fill my ears. Despite the air being filled with particles, I managed to turn around and look behind me, the destroyed world that laid before me no longer a concern as I beheld the monster now approaching behind me. The tower of chaos came closer, spinning faster than my eyes could follow, and all I could do was press myself against the truck. The air was being pulled not just from around me, but from within me. I could not breathe. My vision started going dark. The sounds that deafened me started going quiet. The ground rose up to hold me...

A distant siren started cutting through the darkness.

I tried shaking my head, but some sort of vice held my face in place. My eyes rolled instead, the shadows giving way to the sunlight above and the flashing lights all around me. A large, bearded man in a blue uniform hovered over me, holding my skull straight. I could register that I was lying on my back and, with what I could see, I was upon a gurney that was being loaded into an ambulance. There was an oxygen mask over my mouth, and I started breathing slowly but deeply. The man asked me if I could hear him, which I could. In fact, I could hear many voices including the yells and sobs of coworkers and bystanders.

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The hospital stay was less than anticipated; all I had were just a few cuts and bruises. The doctors cleared me, their voices as well as their faces unable to hide the visage of surprise when they looked upon me. I could tell what they thought in those moments, that I should not have survived. What's more shocking was that, even though I had been battered and my clothes torn, my grandfather's gift was undamaged throughout the whole ordeal. It wasn't even wet.

The mainstream news focused solely on the devastation of the storm; strangely, no casualties were reported. As for the news outside of the big industry, what I gathered was a story that could not be, yet the accounts of those witnessing either by their eyes or by their cameras told otherwise; this twister tore through the warehouse, lifted up the eighteen-wheeler and chucked it across the street, and then it stood still in its spot and started to dissipate. When it was gone, all that remained were the piles of building materials, the ripped vegetation scattered about, and me. To those cameras pointed in my direction and to those eyes that followed the storm, it was as if the tornado just hovered over where I lay.

I took all of this in with an awkward silence, finally needing to sit down as this revelation hit me harder than even the twister itself. After a while, I asked each and every witness what happened after that. They told me the same; once the storm was gone, the coworkers in their shelter came out first and surveyed the damage. After that, they found me lying upon the saturated and broken ground. Paramedics were called in, along with police and anyone who could volunteer a good hand. I was loaded upon a gurney by two hospital personnel and driven away. That was it.

I asked them about the large and bearded man, clearly another paramedic on the scene, who held my head in place upon the gurney and gave me the oxygen to breathe in before I was loaded up. To this day, no one knew anything about this person; no one saw him there, not even the other paramedics.

I will never doubt again.