Chapter 2
Quill
I ran, wanted to scream until salvation could catch up with me, but the realization that I was lost, that I had already sunk too deep to ever feel the sunbeams of salvation on my skin, constricted my throat.
I should never have come here. Not after all the tears I had shed last night until I had collapsed on the floor of my room. Not with all the emptiness in my body and the heaviness in my head that threatened to burst out of the seams of my mind.
I should have ended it, just dared to do it once and rammed the blade deep enough into my wrist.
No one would have noticed.
Mama was gone. For months, I had survived alone in the dump that had been our memory-infested refuge for ten years. Ten years in which I had lost her piece by piece and eventually myself.
One deep cut and I would have bled to death in the same place where she had taken her own life.
I would be with her now.
Blissful Death
岡部啓一 (Keiichi Okabe)
My hands began to tremble, my knees grew weak, and I slowed down, only now realizing that I was on a street surrounded by deciduous trees, dimly lit by a few elegant Schinkel-style lanterns.
Even the godforsaken streetlights seemed to be telling me that I didn't belong here.
A fragile woman in a brutal man's world. A moth with burning wings. A bleeding soul longing for liberation.
I should have ended it. But how could I have done that when I was already too weak to leave mere cuts on my skin?
All those invisible scars on my body. There must have been thousands of them.
On my wrists, arms, thighs, calves, hips, stomach, breasts.
I had never cut deep enough, so all they had left me with was temporary relief in the form of controlled pain.
Traces in my soul that I could only feel but not express.
It was as if the universe was trying to tell me that my pain was not justified.
I didn't know when I had started crying, but the tears blurred my vision.
Sniffing, I wiped the salt water from my eyes, looked around, and listened to the sound of the river.
When I realized I had ended up on the short steel bridge in the middle of the forest, where the road led back down downtown and to the other neighborhoods and estates of Maplecrest, I stopped.
Go home, Quill. Write another book in a week. Lose yourself in fictional worlds until you forget to eat. Until days pass and you no longer know what day of the week it is. Until you forget all the weight of this world...
Dazed, I stepped to the railing of the bridge and looked down into the rushing blackness, where the light of the full moon danced, as if trying to lure me down. Sharp rocks jutted out of the waters that flowed steeply down the mountainside.
Go home.
But there was no such place. I didn't even know what home felt like. Whether it was a beautiful or bittersweet feeling.
Swallowing hard, I gripped the thin steel girders, stepped on one of the large bolts and pulled myself up onto the cold steel structure with a loud thumping in my chest until I stood on the railing with sweaty hands and numb knees, gripping the cold, hard steel ropes.
I am lost.
And yet I couldn't bring myself to let go of the steel ropes and continue walking along the railing.
Heights had never been easy for my body to bear, and this was the last time I would ever expose it to one.
Down there, everything could end if I wanted it to.
And I wanted it to end.
No fictional world would ever save me. No book I wrote would ever fully heal me. No reader would ever truly understand every message I hid between the lines.
All these things should have been okay. But they hurt too much, tearing me apart little by little. A pain that became unbearable when there was nothing else but emptiness.
Jump.
Instinctively, I clung even tighter to the now slippery steel rope.
Damn it, I was too afraid to end it. But I wanted to, I really wanted to. My body was the traitor. As always.
What was I afraid of? What did I have to lose?
Lara was better off without me, as was my brother, who had seen fit to drag me out of our increasingly dilapidated house and into this gilded cage, as if I were a blind bird unable to see what lurked behind the crumbling facade of this town with all its posh picket fence villas.
“I'm sorry, Mama,” I whispered. “I'm sorry I didn't make anything of the life you gave me.”
We would be together. If I could bring myself to finally do the right thing.
At some point, she had stopped caring about this life. Stopped caring about me. And I had learned the hard way that I was the reason she had fallen apart in the first place.
The burden I was to everyone in my life. It would only take one jump to take a huge weight off the shoulders of all those whose faces were flashing through my mind at that moment.
Just one more step...
“If I gave you a thousand reasons not to jump, would you choose to live?”
One More Light
Linkin Park
My head spun around.
With wide eyes, I stared at the man standing a good twenty feet away in the middle of the bridge, his hair disheveled, a sparkle in his eyes.
His jaw was working in a way that threw me even further off balance.
The stranger who had taken me out of my composure inside this villa had followed me, and instead of leaving me alone with my demons, he seemed to think it was wise to continue to mess with my head with his words.
The next words came out weakly but audibly from my trembling lips.
“Give me one.”
The mere fact that he was here and could have witnessed an extremely disturbing suicide attempt was reason enough, but I wasn't going to tell him that.
Something inside me longed for an answer, as if he might be able to give me one.
Yet I knew that this town was the last place I would find any answers.
The people here wallowed in their wealth, playing superficial power games to cover up the deep holes in their souls.
The man stared at me, and only now did I realize that he was completely out of breath.
Had he run here?
The wind blew my dark brown hair across my face, where it stuck to my damp cheeks.
Because I didn't want him to see what a mess I was, I turned back to face the abyss.
“You're writing,” he blurted out frantically, and I looked back, watching him walk toward the railing, cautiously and with his hands raised.
Even he believed I was going to jump. More than I did. If only he knew how weak and afraid I was.
Wait...
“What?”
How did he know I was writing?
“The ink on your hands. You're writing...”
Realization seeped into my now throbbing skull.
He came closer until only six feet separated us and looked up at me.
The confusion must have been written all over my face, because he continued immediately.
“And the fact that you're searching and not finding...” He lowered his hands and took another step. “Writers tend to get lost quickly.”
He held out his hand to me.
I blinked, staring at him motionless.
The next realization hit me harder than it should have. It was as if a thread was forming between us at that moment and weaving itself together. A midnight blue thread that he would use to pull me back from the abyss.
“You write too.”
He nodded and a painfully gentle smile stole across his lips.
This man was handsome, but I would keep that to myself. As well as the realization that the fact that he wrote gave me hope. A dangerous hope that I didn't want to have. One that would definitely crush me sooner or later.
We both wrote.
We spoke the same language.
Authors wrote because no one listened, because words burned in their hearts, but they could only put them into lines.
They were difficult to understand, often ran into dead ends in their search for things they didn't even know for sure existed, lost themselves in worlds woven together from letters, words, sentences, pages... Alone.
Two authors meeting each other was a dangerous combination. Something unpredictable.
I stared at the man in front of me, who must have been a good twenty years older than me.
A dangerous hope of being understood and unbridled curiosity about what exactly this man was writing made my hand move forward on its own. Into his.
Immediately, his hand wrapped around mine. His skin was firm, rough, and so warm that the next cool breeze reminded me that although Virginia's summers were pleasant, the summer nights could still get chilly quickly.
The man stepped toward me and I knelt down, not letting go of the steel rope, not ready to let go, as if my hand had gone into a spasm.
“I'm afraid I can't let go.”
Smiling sheepishly, I didn't even suppress the urge to cry, even though it resulted in him staring at the water droplets on my skin as if he were studying a map again.
Finally, the gentle smile returned, sending a pleasant tingling sensation through my stomach.
“Then I'm afraid I have to come up.”
He didn't let go of my hand, grabbed one of the thick steel ropes, pulled himself up onto the railing next to me, and sat down so that he could look straight down into the abyss, from which I still didn't know if it would have been my end if he hadn't shown up here.
“I won't jump,” I assured more myself than him before sitting down so that we could stare down into the raging waters side by side.
Not today.
I let go of his hand to hold on to the wire rope on my right, immediately missing the comforting warmth, but he immediately grabbed my other hand, sending that pleasant tingling sensation through my stomach again, along with heat flooding my cheeks.
“Just in case you change your mind.”
He looked at me, smiled barely noticeably, his gaze searching, and I thanked the lanterns nearby that I could see his face again.
“What guarantees you that I won’t drag you down into the flood with me?”
I smiled provocatively, probably looking like a madwoman, because tears of overwhelm were still streaming down my cheeks.
The mere thought of looking down there now filled me with fear, and I thanked him inwardly for sitting down next to me, for holding my trembling hand firmly in his calm one...