Musings and Tidbits

a leap of faith

There's a lot of wishfulness attached to death. A certain romanticization. As if in death, one's problems were over. In death, one went to rejoin the infinite void that loomed overhead. Cowards, the whole lot of them.

To think that the discontinuous beings of the present could ever be whole again. At least, this is what she tried to tell herself as she peered over the guardrail, into the vast ocean below. It battered the legs of the bridge she stood upon, insisting on a decision. To teeter off the edge, a careful misstep? Or a careless withdrawal?

She could not tell. Her whole life, she knew one thing. Escape, or die trying. But now escape was dying. Wasn't it?

She couldn't remember when the two options bled together -- perhaps when she saw the hair that grew from her back, a ravine? Or when she trusted a glass box to a spider's daughter? Perhaps she read it in her mother's hateful -- no, disappointed -- gaze as she folded her shirts wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Maybe this was all she knew.

There was something wrong with her, she knew. Who would romanticize death? Clutching one's heart and leaping over the edge, plummeting to the end? She did, and yet she scorned it. Cowards.

"Miss?"

She ignored the calls of strangers. No, this was the only way out. Strangers came into your life and then left. No one would ever stay long enough to have a name.

"Miss!"

Underwater. She felt as if she were drowning, but she hadn't moved an inch from her perch. Like she was stuck in her own body, paralyzed. What was she waiting for? Was it her, consciously waiting, or was she really paralyzed?

"Get off! You'll drown!"

That stupid American poetry book. And like the cat, I have nine times to die, said a thought, floating in her mind. Her heart and mind were sinking, but her thoughts floated like rotting wood. She never understood poetry, but the ghost of Sylvia Plath laughed at her now.

"Please...ah, I'm calling the police! Just--"

The wind roars, cutting off the plea. How fitting, that nature would call her back. Back to the infinite void that suddenly gaped in front of her. Maybe it was natural, right, to let go. Be swallowed whole.

Out of the ash I rise, with my red hair, and I eat men like air.