prompt: star, title: how do you sleep at night? in misc. flash fiction

I was a very different person when I was a child. I mean, I hope we all change over our lives. It’d be a profoundly boring thing if we all remained constant through this entire befuddling journey. If we didn’t keep growing and changing and adapting to each new stimuli that came along, what was the point of living at all? Ossification’s for museums, not us briefly-held star-stuff machines.

I was a sheltered kid, as spoiled as the son of a nurse and a factory worker could reasonably be, and overly-proud of my above-average-but-unexceptionable intelligence. I feared everything, I had a powerful ego and what little empathy I did possess was easily overridden by any joke I thought proved my cleverness. I badly needed the adults to understand I was smarter than them. Worrying about other people wasn’t worth ditching a good punchline. I couldn’t comprehend it.

When my cousin Al was murdered, when I was in junior high, that’s when I began to understand empathy, that other people’s feelings are real and just as important as my own. In the decades of work I did to make myself nearly-whole, I came to realize life isn’t about protecting myself from hurting like that ever again, life is about helping others avoid that and work through that. No one should hurt as I did, as my family did. The path towards teaching yourself empathy is a process.

But lapsed-Catholic guilt used to make me feel awful about that too, in between the years of the screaming-awake nightmares I experienced, the terrible thought that I was only a better person because a young man died, for no reason at all. It made me hate my own progress, time-to-time.

One night, howling myself awake for the thousandth time, I opened up about this to the woman I was living with, who I’d woken with my screaming for probably the hundredth time as well. She told me about a Batman comic book she once read, where Robin was in an alternate timeline and witnessing the mugging that would end in the murder of Bruce Wayne’s parents, that would cast the die to forge The Batman. Robin stopped and he thought, for one half-a-second, this universe, can I damn it to lose the thousands of folks Batman would save, for the lives of Bruce’s parents?

But in that then and there, fate had not been yet written and there were people to save so he did. And in that dimension, Bruce wouldn’t grow up into the grim vigilante haunted by those deaths, but instead he eventually became a swashbuckling hero inspired by the brightly-colored teenager who’d saved his family that fateful night. “Maybe,” she said, “Alan would’ve taken you under his wing and taught you how to be a good person instead. Life is crazy, we never know.”

Now instead of screaming through my nightmares, I think of that instead and sleep a bit better.

Because she was right. We can never really know.