Emily Vance Brown

by Joy Sullivan

I’ve always been haunted by choice. I want the city and the forest.
Freedom but also babies. A home and the open highway.

I love it when other people choose anything for me—dinner spots,
weekend plans, hiking trails. It’s one tiny decision I’m absolved
from making. To choose is to be culpable and as a former
evangelical kid, there are few things I hate more than being
culpable.

But being unable to choose becomes its own choice. When you
don’t decide, a decision still arrives.

Once I held the fleeting body of a farm cat newly struck on the
side of a busy Ohio road. He’d gotten frightened in the rush and
couldn’t pick which way to go. So he stalled and was hit by the
car in front of me. When I lifted the big body, shuddering and
warm, I felt him die in my hands. Awful as it was, I listened to that
heaviness. I knew it was a lesson. To decide is to survive.

I wrote a pep talk recently to myself on a bar napkin: no matter
which road you take, it will be both glorious and unbearable. Every
road is lonely. Every road, holy. The only error is not walking forth.

Yesterday, a friend in California, when giving me directions, told
me I could take the trail toward the tall pines or turn left and find
a field of poppies, growing gold and savage at the edge of the valley.

When I asked which to choose, she simply shrugged and said:
either way, it’s all heaven.