The Gift Of Ordinary Days Novels & Stories

Five years ago, I saved Gina Fields through a bone marrow transplant. After the successful procedure, Levi Robbins asked me to stay, promising to repay my kindness. After five years by his side, we were finally getting married. Yet, on what was supposed to be our wedding day, Gina dramatically passed out right in the middle of the ceremony. When I begged Levi not to leave, he pried my fingers away and snapped, "Caitlyn, this is a matter of life and death. How can you be so heartless?"

It starts as a normal Tuesday. This is the thing I will keep coming back to, in the days after. Not the content of what happened but the ordinariness of the container it arrived in. A Tuesday in late March, the kind that can't decide between winter and spring and settles on a grey compromise. I had oatmeal for breakfast. I did thirty minutes of the physiotherapy exercises Dr. Morrison recommended — the ones for fatigue, small deliberate movements, the body being asked to remember what it's capable of. I washed my hair. I had a call with a supplier about a linen order that had been delayed two weeks.

"People are convincing in a crisis. The truth of who someone is comes out in the ordinary days." "I know that too." "So we take it one ordinary day at a time." "Yes," he said. "One ordinary day at a time." They drank their coffee. The morning continued outside the window. Ordinary and quiet and full of the specific texture of something beginning. Henderson called at noon.

However, he had been struck by a collapsing beam and never made it out alive. After Dad sacrificed his life, Uncle Winston had taken pity on me for losing my father at such a young age. He'd also remembered that Craig was the child my father had saved at the cost of his life. Hence, he had continued to sponsor Craig's education and living expenses, paying for his food, clothing, and tuition; he'd treated him like his son.

Just love—deep, steady, earned. And the ocean kept rolling—endless, forgiving—carrying their story forward. One perfect, ordinary, miraculous day at a time. The End

It felt like he was holding on to the last moments with me. When I woke up in the middle of the night, I was hungry but I couldn't eat until the next morning. I ran my hand through Min's hair and offered him the comfort I hadn't been able to offer him for days now. I was so happy to have him in my life. He had helped me complete my bucket list and the last year and two months had been amazing. The doctor said I had three hundred and sixty-five days but I had stayed alive for sixty days after that. I wouldn't exchange those sixty days for anything in my life. I had found my people. I got married, I fell in love and I felt love again, from my parents, my friends, and Min. I never had those bef

I was a refugee of love, seeking asylum. The cab drove me there in silence. I stared out the window, watching the city lights blur into streaks of neon. Eight years. The number kept looping in my mind. Two thousand, nine hundred and twenty days. I had given him my youth. I had given him my loyalty, my body, my soul, my potential children. And he was getting married in two days. Two days. A bile rose in my throat again. He had been planning this. While I was ironing his shirts, he was planning a wedding. While I was dreaming of our future, he was building one with someone else.

The specific quality of that. The eleventh was about the north direction. The fourth room and what it had shown and what it meant to build toward something you could not fully see and to trust the building because the direction was clear even when the destination was not. The twelfth chapter was about ordinary days. Specifically: the ordinary days were the point. Not the significant days, not the papers or the sessions or the gate letters. The ordinary days in a healed territory. The morning tea and the work and the family at the table and the long comfortable evenings. The specific weight of a life that was full because it had been honestly built.

It was a kind of heightened ordinariness: the ordinary days of July carrying an additional quality of being the days before the thing, which was not a diminishment of the ordinary days but an addition to them. He wrote, on the first of July: The days are both ordinary and significant. The ordinariness is real — the bread, the walks, the work, the meals. The significance is also real — the thing approaches. The two coexist without canceling each other. I am learning to hold both.

Eventually we returned to the road; the afternoon sunlight softened gradually, shadows lengthened, and the world slowed. We rode without hurry, without destination and without pressure, just movement, our presence, and just us. At one point, we saw a family walking together near a small roadside park, parents, children, and ordinary people enjoying an ordinary day. The sight stayed with me because once upon a time, I thought ordinary happiness belonged to other people; now I understood something different: that peace was never extraordinary. That was the point; it lived inside ordinary moments, and those moments were enough, more than enough.