Infinity

By Elena Ramirez

Time froze until I had lived an eternity in that space between Heaven and Earth. I remember being told in one of my math classes that in between every number, there is infinity—something to do with fractions, but I had never understood it until now. Now, I was living it. Still, I didn’t have enough time to cry, or flinch, or scream. All I could do was fall. Suspended in time and space. I could feel the chill of oblivion in the wind parting around my body and I felt betrayed by the near languid expression on my own face. An eclipsing dread, not altogether unfamiliar, hollowed out the pit of my stomach and I thought that this must be fate. Fate that I would feel this way again after finally learning how to deny the emotional instinct of my daily fears. I had gone about a year without feeling that dread in the twenty years that I have lived. That I had lived. Twenty years of life, undone by a patch of black ice and low railing. When I slipped, I had been admiring the sky, because it looked strangely warm in the midst of a cold day like this. The clouds’ charcoal hue gave way to golden threads, embroidered there by the sun. Suddenly, as if tailored by the same hand, memories of my life came flooding back to me. They, too, were warm. The shame I normally felt at remembering the shortcomings of my life burned away in the sunlight. I realized that all of my memories were made whole by that year between nineteen and twenty, when I learned to cope with what I had felt and what I would feel. It confirmed that I had always been me. It confirmed that I had lived.