Over the edge

May --, 2002

I rose from the dream with a prolonged silence. I simply did not know what to say. However now I was out of the dream and walking down the room with a new kind of energy. I had lots to do, and I couldn’t wait to get started. Something inside of me had blossomed or rebloomed, or maybe just found its way out of the morass of ordinary. Certainly, before Sarah had come into my life, it had been conventionally mediocre. And boring. And shallow.

While my own inner realizations were secondary, they were also profound. My denials, transformed into belief in Sarah, had pulled me out of that morass of superficial and insignificant. I began to see that life around me was more than a piece of successful result and unnecessary anger at father for past neglects. Sarah – indeed, had changed my life.

April --, 2005

The evening sea curled and splintered the shore in three-foot sheets. Beyond the waves are a wing-shaped formation of pelicans skimmed about a foot above the surface of the sea, their heavy bellies and powerful wings acting as counterpoint to the aerodynamic lift of their bodies. I ran across the sand until my legs cramped like stone. With a stray piece of bottle glass I etched a three inch cut into my arm and washed the wound in saltwater. I didn’t cry nor did I grit my teeth. I felt nothing.

I sat on the wide stretch of empty beach and watched a tide form. The sand beneath me was moist from the storm the night before and near the horizon the clouds blazed red and gold above the drowning sun. Sarah had been away for more than a month. Everyday her presence grew dimmer. At times I could no longer visualize the simple things; how she talked, her cynicisms through conversations, the look on her face when she moved to embrace me. I could not animate her to movement or remember sequential images, only stills – a glance, the play of light, a mischievous turn to her lips.

You were right; memory eventually would fade into the image until nothing else remained. I guess I regretted her going but couldn’t really miss her. I couldn’t miss what I never properly had. Maybe that’s what I truly missed, the chance to have ~

My flesh seemed to contract when I first dived into the sea. The tide was so strong I could barely hold my feet to the sand. I dived again and let it take me. The current flowed me out to the sea swiftly. The urge to suicide didn’t move me. Far from it. I just didn’t care.

The memories that had sustained me through the years burned me hollow and cold. I had always believed my life would truly begin when I got through the next big thing before me, whatever the thing was.

First, the thing was to get through high school and get out of the house, then to get a job, get married, get ahead. My emotions drove me forward, most of the time the engine of my actions. In my youth those who thought they knew me believed I was a good girl, I wasn’t. I was full of fear and anger. I drank because I was afraid and angry. Fury wrenched apart relationships – father, mother, Sarah – and fear lashed them together again. I hurt people because inside I raged and clung to those same people again. I had always believed that being alone by choice was better than being left alone.

Without all this, I was empty. Nothing filled me up. I was nothing but an empty bottle bobbed along the surface of the sea.

One by one I noticed the pelicans lanced into the water, shook, swallowed and yanked themselves up again at the sky with much pride and satisfaction. The sea beneath me now was a living thing and so was the sky and I was not apart from it I was a part of it.

Perhaps that was enough.