cliff face

It's late. A young girl sits wild eyed and skittish on her bed. She is jittery and stressed.

Hi…

I have this feeling in my stomach where everything…everything I see isn’t right. I know you think I’m paranoid or crazy…but…I can’t help it. It’s there. I can feel it tightening and it’s like everything I look at is just a pointless waste of space that could be listening to all your thoughts.

But it’s the past that scares me the most…since we tend to forget what we don’t want to know or rewrite it to fit what we do remember or…hide it. Sometimes I wish I could force-forget, like you can on a computer…when an app stops working you force it to quit…it’s an emergency override thing. Brains don’t have that. But humans still forget things.

I’ve forgotten the right way to laugh…like, the real laugh. It’s wedged in my throat but I shove it back down like it’s thick, acidy vomit and I’ll die if I let it out. I forgot how much I wish/

Do you remember the Cold War?

When the feeling I have was everywhere at once? Like a disease. But no one could cure it, because they all had it. And doctors can’t cure themselves so what do you do? You wait at the edge for the world to stop.

Do you remember how it felt to be so close to the edge…just waiting. Waiting for the cracks to come….the bully from 3rd grade to run up and push you. Or your mother to appear and because she sees you as the disappointing, naïve child she barely knows…she stalks up to you until you can feel her breath on your neck and then the cracks come, the gravel spills and it’s over before you can even scream that you’re nothing like her and you’d never do anything bad even if it was the only way…

But instead of a quick, hollow, silent death where the jarred teeth of the cliffs and ocean swallow you in one great gulp, you keep floating.

It’s the expectation that kills you. Not the lead up, not the cracks, not your mother, not the push, not even the great sight of the ocean breathing in to consume every moment you’ve lived so far because everything, everything you see, think, hear, feel - it’s the expectation that there’s nothing left that you’ll disappear and your mother won’t care and the pushes will keep coming and nothing will stop it but it never comes and yet you’re still there standing and waiting for it to come.

Until instead of waiting for the push.

For your mother’s blue fire eyes to turn and scan you

You stomp until the cliff cracks deep and strong and leap into the sky screaming until there’s nothing left to do but fall.