Save Me

At the forest's darkest edges, a man stood in the river shallows, wailing an unholy cry. Nearly catatonic with despair, he was barely able to raise a shaking hand and point toward the churning, forbidding depths that surged just yards ahead. With a guttural, beseeching tone that seemed to scrape up out of the very depths of his soul, he turned to me and implored......

Save her.

I dove in to the murky darkness fully clothed, begging the river's treacherous boil to pull me down, expedite my search. My knuckles glanced off of rocks, hands probed between eddies until my fingers were miraculously ensnared by a tangled mass of blonde locks. Wrapping them around my fist, I kicked off toward the surface, dragging with me a perilously still, sodden form. On dry land, the battle between the elements continued. Water vs Air. I gave my own breath, leveraged my weight against ribs. The river erupted out of her mouth in a volcanic spray and a natal cough marked the battle's end. Jagged breaths of a woman revived mingled with the ecstatic cries of her fiancé.....the soundtrack to a love story reborn.

......................................

The scene was a chaotic mess of flashing lights, patriarchal firetrucks, and a serpentine lifeline of fire hose. Firefighters hurried toward the oppressive heat, vicious in a way that only a fully-involved structure fire can be. We watched somberly as flames licked toward the heavens, rapidly devouring synthetic fibers and a family's dreams. Partnered with a man who had stomped callously on my heart just a few months earlier, we were forced outside by a flashover event. Bracing my boot against the foot of a ladder, I dispassionately steadied the man who had left me for another woman as he struggled to advance a 2.5" attack line. I felt it before I saw it. A bending of space, a flexing of time. I noticed the wall in front of us beginning to bow, then buckle.....I heard a ghostly command in my ear.....an entreating whisper from the adulteress herself....

Save him.

I grabbed the back of his turnout gear, and summoning a power born of desperation, I threw a man twice my size off the ladder and onto the ground. I leapt on top of him, shielding his torso with my own as the fiery wall crumbled on top of us. The debris rained down, an oddly painful salve to my emotional wounds. Break my ribs, but never my heart.  Steal my breath, but never my drive. Bruise my ego, but never my soul. Tinder to ashes, a home into dust. But a man walked home unscathed that day to his new baby boy.

......................................

The flight paramedics looked at me expectantly as I stared helplessly down at the battered body of a young girl lying on the stretcher. Her beautiful face distorted by bruises, her chest flailed paradoxically as agonal respirations haunted the room. The grisly tattoos of trauma left by the car that had struck her were in stark juxtaposition to her gravid abdomen swollen with new life. The light in her wide blue eyes was fading fast as she pinned me with her gaze, fingernails clawing at my arm as she pleaded....

Save me.

"Get me a scalpel" I demanded, with a confidence I did not possess, and the next 30 minutes dissolved into a chaos of blood and chopper blades. Of jagged metal slicing through layers of skin and sinew, of quivering hands coaxing life out of a throbbing womb. Of masses of blood-soaked gauze hysterically placed and cramping fingers frantically trying to clamp shut a traitorous aorta. Of a newborn's cries mixing with my own tears as a young mother's heart flickered back to life. Of a cohort of saviors in surgical scrubs who rushed to meet us on the helipad...."We've got it from here".

....................................

Balanced on a mountain ridge line, I am alone and bereft. An awe-inspiring landscape stretches out before me, but I'm blinded by an ache for the hand that use to clasp mine and pull me up to each summit. A hand that had fallen away a decade before and now rests beneath a marble headstone. Without that hand to guide me, steady me, love me, why shouldn't I just step out into the abyss? Close that agonizing chasm between us with an exquisite finality?

Save me.

The one hundredth rejection blindsides me on the side of a road. "I just don't feel it", echoes through the trees, amplifying into a concerted chorus of reminders that I am unworthy, unlovable, never enough. Run back down the trail or in front of a car? Seek solace beneath a Flowering Judas or seek mercy beneath the wheels of a Range Rover?

Save me.

Walking down the beach, I watch as a young couple strolls arm in arm, laughing at their young daughter's antics as she splashes in the tide pools. I smile sadly at the life that will never be mine. I buried that dream in the sand years ago. Wading into the waves, what's to stop me from swimming into the horizon, letting the sea absorb my pain? Surely no one would notice if I did not return....

Save me.

The secret is that I am selfish. I am narcissistic and egomaniacal. I save others to save myself. I am miserly in my heroism, carefully collecting and counting each life saved in a desperate effort to justify the existence and worthiness of my own. I sought salvation as a firefighter, paramedic, rescue swimmer, ER doctor. I chased the allure of valour, but instead found a grounding peace, a humble truth.... Maybe I will never be a Cinderella, falling into a fairytale of my own. Maybe my lot in life is to be a sleep-deprived fairy godmother, protecting the love stories of others. For every romantic rebuff, I can point to a relationship I saved. There are proposals, weddings, anniversaries, first birthdays celebrated because I showed up. Passion continues to play out because I didn't disappear beneath the waves. A child's gurgling laughter continues to delight because I didn't step off that cliff. A ravishing drowning survivor danced at her wedding because I continued to choose life. I will keep swaying with these exquisite survivors, inspirited by their incandescent vitality. Each heart I revive, resuscitates my own. Each love story I preserve, is my own hope, reborn.

Turns out, somewhere along the agonizing, anarchical road to love, I saved myself.