Aidan Gurung

RUNNER UP

Calling Out Into the Dark

There’s a story my dad used to tell me. It’s about the Buddhist concept of reincarnation—the belief that our souls never die but come back in a different form each lifetime. My dad said the odds of being born a human, instead of a tree or a mole rat or a parasite, are almost impossibly small. It’s like this, he said: imagine that in all the world's oceans there is nothing but a single turtle swimming around. Somewhere in that water floats a plastic ring the size of the turtle’s head, spending years being washed by the waves from one coast to another. Now imagine the odds of that turtle surfacing only once in its entire life, and it managing to somehow, randomly, lift its head exactly through the center of that ring. That’s the odds of being born a human again. Of being here at all. 

I thought about this the night my friend killed himself. Would I ever get to see him again? Would we need to stretch out all our lifetimes again and again and again for the chance to be two humans together just one more time? 

The night I found out, I sat alone on my bed. 

Hello? I called out into the room. 

The room was dark except for the light of the street lamp imprinting a yellow cut-out of my window on the floorboards. 

Hello? I asked the room again. 

Who was I talking to? Was I hoping for the voice of my friend, the voice of God? I waited for a noise, a sign. The curtains swayed with a light breeze, something in the roof of the old house adjusted. There was nothing but silence.

But then there was the sound of an email notification. It was a reply from a woman named Maggie about an overseas package I’d ordered that still hadn’t arrived. All the important information was in the body of the email—shipping timelines, custom delays, tracking numbers—but then, right at the end, so small and quick I almost skimmed right past it, she had had written:

Have a great day, 

Maggie. 

Was this the voice of God, mocking me? I wanted to write back: actually, Maggie, today was not a great day at all. Please go ahead and take your great day somewhere else. 

But now, years later, this little habit we have—ending emails in this way—is one of my favourite things in the world. There are all sorts of variations we use: best wishes and kind regards and cheers but all of them say the same thing: I’m here, I hope things are okay. 

I mentioned this at a party once, how I love the cultural norm of signing off emails like this. And the person said, but don’t you think people just automate their sign-offs? Does anyone really think about it that deeply? 

Maybe not. But on the night my friend died, one of those automated phrases arrived in my inbox. And for a moment it felt like someone was reaching across the void toward me. My friend’s death was the first time I thought that maybe there isn’t a God out there, looking out for us, after all. But somewhere, in another country, Maggie from customs hoped I was having a good day. 

And when my dad reads an email, he mumbles the words out loud. In teacher’s college, I learned that this is common among weak readers. When he mumbles under his breath like this, it sounds a lot like a prayer. And maybe that’s all a prayer is: a message we send out into the void, hoping someone answers back. Maybe emails are like that too. 

Maybe civilization is built out of these tiny acts of calling out to one another, answering one another. Once, the writer Ira Byock recounted the story of anthropologist Margaret Mead being asked what the first sign of civilization was. Margaret answered: a healed femur. Back when humans still lived in the wild, a broken leg meant death. It meant a person could not run from wild beasts, could not hunt or forage for their own food, could not travel with the nomadic human tribes of that time. It meant they would die before their bone could get better. But a healed femur means someone else cared for this person while they were injured, bringing food and water and carrying them when necessary. To be civilized, to be human instead of wild animal, is to care for one another. 

In her memoir A Truce That is Not Peace, Miriam Toews—who lost both her dad and sister to suicide—talks about grief. About how lonely it feels to be told by someone, even tenderly, that they can’t even begin to imagine her sadness. “Try! Stay! Stay with me,” she says. Please wait for a moment right here with me—my femur is broken and I cannot go on. 

Maybe this is why grief feels so heavy. You were just here with me—where have you gone? Do I need to comb through ten thousand more lifetimes to find you again? 

But maybe this is also why these little gestures matter so much. How wonderful to be here at the same time! How miraculous! I know we only have a moment together before the waves pull us apart again. 

And who knows what is out there in the ether. God? Nothing at all? I don’t know. But I do know this: against all odds, we have found ourselves here as humans at the exact same time. We carry one another long enough for broken bones to heal. We sit beside each other in grief. We answer each other’s emails from opposite sides of the world. 

We find ourselves all alone in the universe and we say into the dark, hello? 

And unbelievably, against all odds, someone answers back.