“I don’t remember my grandparents at all.” Yrial lay on her back, the invigorating smell of the fresh cut grass surrounding her. Spring was at a peak, and she loved being out in it, drinking it in, letting it caress its way over her body, filling her senses. Eloa sat beside her in the park. She smiled up at him. Although he seemed to appreciate her love for nature, he apparently didn’t fully share it. He’d accompany her, but he always held back a little. He wasn’t quite as free as she liked to be.
“Not at all?” he asked her.
“I remember that we would go visit them, but I don’t really remember what they looked like. I have a vague recollection of them sitting in a chair, but that’s it.”
“How old were you?”
She closed her eyes and turned her face fully into the sun, inhaling the warmth. “I don’t know. Not very old. Four. Maybe five.”
“I can remember tons of things when I was four.”
“I can, too. I’m not saying I have no memories. Just that I don’t remember my grandparents,” she said. “It’s funny. There are a lot of things I can remember about their house. I remember looking inside their refrigerator and thinking how strange it was that they always had a pitcher of water in there. I remember the musky smell of my grandmother’s wardrobe. Most of all, though, I remember the drive as we approached their house, the excitement I felt, and I remember thinking how odd it was to drive over gravel the last half mile or so to their house. I’d never been on gravel before. You know, I don’t think I’ve been on it since, either.”
She opened her eyes then and looked up at him, catching him smiling at her. “What do you think?” she asked. “I had a chance to get to know my grandparents before they died, and all I could do was think of how strange the road was.”
Eloa sighed and studied the clouds. “That’s the way of things, isn’t it? Nobody will ever hear their story. Not theirs and not billions of others. It’s unbearable.”
Yrial reached over and put her hand on his knee. “What about our story?”
He laughed. “Our story? There’s not much to our story. Ours is the commonest story of them all, shared by everybody alive today. Ours is the story of death, of misery, of despair. No, we don’t need to tell our story. We need the stories of those who truly lived. Your grandparents. What did they know? What did they feel? What did they experience? How did the fabric of their lives flow? That’s the story that should be told, and that’s the story that never will be.”