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Daisy lets out a sigh. She is sitting in her van late at night. It’s quiet. If she were to step outside her van she wouldn’t be able to see any stars amidst the light pollution in the city sky. But she’s inside her van right now. In her right hand she holds a knife. In her left hand she holds a hula girl.
She holds a knife because she doesn’t like guns. Bullets rip though the quiet of the night like they tear through flesh, like they cut short lives and drop bodies to the ground. There were bodies on the ground. (There was a body up in space.)
So she left the gun behind like she left her badge behind. Now she sits. She sits in her van and looks down. The world has become small. Small enough that there is nothing beyond this van and there is no sound outside the screaming in her own head. Small enough to fit inside the palm of her hand. In her left she holds a hula girl and in her right a knife. She holds up the knife and examines the blade.
A gunshot would have been loud. A knife wouldn’t be. There is no point in disturbing anyone.
Once when Daisy was young, someone was kind to her.
She was lying in the hospital, sick and alone, when a nurse crouched down next to her and tapped her on the hand and handed her a hula girl. And she smiled.
And Daisy said, “When I grow up, I want to be like you.”
I want to be kind.
And she spends the rest of her life trying to be this.
She hopes that nurse knows, somehow, that she was remembered. That she made a difference. That the kindness of strangers wasn’t such a hopeless endeavor. That it was worth it.
As Daisy got older she learned what that feeling was that was filling her with nothing.
She has love in her heart for people she has never met. And sometimes she thinks it is killing her. Because when they die, what happens to that piece, that was just for them? Is it empty now? That space where they should have been. Their lives, taken. Not lost. Stolen. Like she was.
And she understands, suddenly. She understands her father perfectly, who had no memories of her and loved her still, and yet, she doesn’t understand him at all.
Agent Linda Avery was a person. She had a family who loved her. Friends who mourned her. And she had at least one stranger who never knew her, but who still thinks of her sometimes.
Linda Avery held her in her arms when she was a baby and then her father killed her and now she is all grown up and what a joke because she still doesn’t understand.
You saved me. You condemned me. And you should have just left me. You should have just left it all alone.
Her entire life has been shaped by strangers.
Her father had a hula girl on his desk, like she did. Is it nature or nurture?
“Keep it,” he told her. But she put it back down.
Months later, she saw a new one, on his office desk at his animal clinic.
When she was a teenager, Daisy found out that a girl she knew killed herself. They were at St. Agnes together, briefly. Daisy had never spoken to her, but they sat next to each other once when they were eating lunch.
And for the life of her, Daisy can’t remember where she was when she found this out, and she can’t remember when it happened exactly. She can remember how it happened, which seemed like a really terrible thing to remember. And she can remember, years and years later, she can remember exactly what was said after, when she returned from a foster home and found out the news.
“I don’t think she had any idea, how much she meant to me.”
Daisy can’t remember her. If she is honest, she can’t even remember her name. But she thinks of her, all these years later. And she wonders, who would that girl have grown to be?
She looks up her name one day. A quick search is enough to find an article on it. The world remembers her death more than her life.
Once, when she was young, Daisy sat next to a girl, and they ate lunch together.
Daisy knows what it feels like when someone is gone, and this is the cruelest gift, the knowing. Knowing the ways they have changed her and the ways they change her still. Knowing all the things they will never change again. They are frozen in time, in photographs, in memories.
But they changed her. So now she knows- when you are gone, you leave some mark on this world. Something is altered because of where you were and where you are not. Places that you could have been, but aren’t.
Her life is tangled with countless others. Woven together. Pieces. Snapped into place. Driftwood floating aimlessly down a river. Until it gets caught and branches pile up and time itself changes streams.
She is a part of that. Whether she is moving and breathing, or whether she is just holding still.
She has love in her heart for people she has never met. And sometimes she thinks it is the only thing keeping her alive.
Once she was lying on the ground of a playground. Lying on the asphalt with Matty lying next to her, surrounded by faded chalk lines. They were on top of a painted map of the US. Her, sprawled on top of California, him, stretched across Oregon, Nevada, and Arizona. Their eyes were shut and they listened to the world around them.
“Do you think we owe something?” she asked him. “To the world?”
He paused before he spoke. “Maybe not the whole world. Maybe just each other.”
Jemma handed her the hula girl once. When everything was falling apart Jemma stopped and thought of her.
And she accepted it with a smile.
She was sitting on a bench at a bus stop once and an older woman sat next to her. They started talking and something about Daisy must have seemed deeply unhappy, because the woman started to give her some advice.
“This is just the beginning. You are like clay that has not hardened yet. You can sculpt yourself into happy.”
It was corny and stupid and anyway Daisy did not want to be happy, she just wanted to be good.
But unhardened didn’t sound so bad. To stay soft wouldn’t be such a terrible thing, if it meant she could still change. Because then she is not trapped. Not trapped in her body, not trapped in her mind, not trapped in her memories, not trapped in the choices she made before. Soft meant she could stretch and grow. It meant she could make space in her heart for more. It meant that her love never had to die, she could just keep feeling it.
Daisy sat alone in a box and Coulson was on the other side. There was a gap between them that stretched further than the walls of the room. A no-man’s land where words fell and got lost.
He told her, “It gets better, be patient.”
And the funny thing was, he was right. But then it got worse again.
It comes like tides pulled by the inescapable force that is the moon. And she can never outrun it. Only brace herself for the next impact.
Daisy sat in medial with Jemma looking over her injuries many times.
Once, Jemma stitched up her wound, and after, she gave her all the instructions on how to care for it. She told her about the risk of infection and when the stitches would have to come out. And at the end she said, “Be kind to yourself.”
But Daisy forgot that part.
Once Mack told her as he cleaned and wrapped up her bloody fists, “There has to be more than this. There has to be more, than watching yourself bleed.”
Of course there is more, just not for me. She didn’t say this to him. She hoped he was right.
She has to be more than the scars she left behind.
Once not that long ago, she made a promise. She was sitting on the floor of the quinjet and for some reason she couldn’t stop crying.
And May told her, “You can’t just say it. You have to mean it.”
That seemed fair. Because she would have said anything, anything at all, to get them to stop looking at her like that.
I wish you didn’t care about me, she thinks. Because caring about me is killing a part of you. And I don’t know if you will get it back.
It was worth it. For the rest of her life that is what Daisy will tell all of the strangers. It didn’t cross her mind that her family might think that of her too. So she left.
Once, her mother put her hand on her face.
“My daughter,” she said. “So beautiful. So strong.”
And that was the first time Daisy understood that beauty had nothing to do with appearance.
And a moment later, all of the beauty was gone.
The funny thing was, she fooled herself for years, into thinking it was over. Because it was easy to stop. The problem was, it was very hard not to start again. There was no logic in it. She just felt it. All these years later, and she still felt it.
Is that what addiction is? A memory? In her mind, when she tries to think back on it, on exactly how it all happened, she can’t remember. She can’t remember, but her body couldn’t ever forget.
They tried to help her, before.
Is she throwing it all away?
She is not alone.
That was the worst thing that someone ever told her. She is not the only one who feels like this. And she wished desperately that it was a lie. She would take it all gladly, if only they didn’t have to.
She lived a life. She lived an entire lifetime in twenty seven years.
Isn’t that good enough?
She dreams about it. It is a fantasy. An indulgence. She dreams that she is there with them. She is with him underground she is with him up in space she is with them in a village in China.
She wakes up. She always fucking wakes up.
Once, Lincoln told her, I love you.
And then he died.
Standing in the ruins of a bridge with both hands clasped around one of hers, a woman said to her, “Thank you.” The woman smiled with relief. “You saved my life. Thank you.”
Daisy has love in her heart for people she has never met. For people she used to know. For people she left behind. For people who were taken from her. So much love that it is swallowing her and drowning her and tearing apart the whole world around her.
She looked into the eyes of a stranger. “You’re welcome,” she said.
Thank you, she meant.
In the dim lighting of her van Daisy looks down at her hula girl. It was given to her like her name was given to her, like her power was given to her, like her life was given to her.
She puts down the knife. Puts it away. She places the hula girl back on the dash. She picks up a wooden robin.
“I was hoping, you could help.”
She remembers their words as though she has been collecting them on scraps of paper in the dusty corners of her mind and filing them away like evidence. The story of her life told in pointless artifacts and blurry faces whose names she couldn’t remember and who she never saw again. She takes them out now, brushing off their cobwebs and stepping back to see the picture they form.
The world is large. So impossibly large that it might just have a place for her if only she can find it. And she sits alone with billions of other people who also sit alone and all of their screams of anguish echo. They are held together with a gravity that reverberates their cries back to each other. And in the quiet of night Daisy can hear them, calling out to her.
I wanted to be kind, she thinks. I just wanted to be kind.