twelve : a place where nothing moves
When I slipped, my thoughts fell with me. They crashed down like rocks in an avalanche, growing from a stutter to a roar at such a speed that I was more overwhelmed by the deluge of words than the sudden lack of ground beneath my feet.
This is it.
I knew it. I knew it.
I knew this would happen.
This is what you’ve been expecting. I know. I know.
I knew this was coming. You shouldn’t have come here. God, why did I come here?
Cold air whipped over my face as I fell. It reminded me of riding on electric swings at the carnival, how I was always afraid that the chains would buckle with my weight and I would be flung across the fairgrounds. I would sit on the swing as it spun around and around, and imagine the sound of metal breaking. I would picture the way I would look as I soared over trees in my paint-chipped chair, only to slam headfirst into the ground before coming to rest in some sickening shape.
Like a human pretzel.
That snapped me back to reality, that pretzel thought.
Oh, God… I’m going to… I’m actually going to die.
The words felt jarring and unnatural in my mind, but my imagination accepted the realization without pause. I involuntarily pictured all the gruesome ways I could land on the rocks. Speared through the chest by driftwood. Face first on wet black jags that would rip through me like teeth. Bones splintered, legs buckled, spine snapped and twisted as the white capped water crashed down over me. I suddenly felt grateful that I was alone.
What if he had been here? He couldn’t have caught me, I slipped too fast. He would have watched. He would have watched me die. I’m going to die.
It wasn’t difficult to think it this time. I thought it again, testing the words in my mind.
I’m going to die.
It was simply a matter of fact. Somehow, I had acknowledged and accepted the fact that I would probably not survive, and I realized with a strange sense of pride that I was unafraid of death. I was greeting him with open arms.
What I was afraid of was the way that people would look at my broken, lifeless frame when they found it washed up on the rocks, the screams and the slap of sneakers on stone as they rushed to save me. The futile attempts to revive someone who had no hope or intention of coming back.
Somehow, the only thing that scared me about my own death was what it would do to everyone else.
Does that make me selfless, or just stupid?
I pictured the eyes of my family and friends, muddled with tears and sadness and horror, lips puckered in defiance. The look on Ethan’s face, how he would stand terrified and powerless on the beach while they tried to revive me. He was going to blame himself for not being here on time. Even worse, I imagined the conclusions they would all come to. I hadn’t exactly been the picture of good mental health when I left the house.
Will this look like anything but suicide?
I doubted it.
Does it matter? Isn’t it better that they think I chose this for myself, compared with the alternatives?
But what were the alternatives? I began to ponder the many possibilities, the kaleidoscope of deaths that were waiting to take me if this one had failed. And then, right in the split second before the air surrendered my body to the stone, was my last thought as a human being.
I cant believe I’m still daydreaming.
