I was lying in bed. It seemed to be another night where I couldn’t risk falling asleep. Even now, I couldn’t tell you why. I’d like to believe that maybe my story is more than just a fold in the infinite vastness, and that somehow it began with a warning from the universe itself. We’ll never know. Maybe the desire for being less than an insignificant water droplet, in the endless ocean, is what prompted me to pick up my phone that fateful night. I typed out the words exactly as they appeared in my head.
“Maybe we can talk tomorrow at lunch? I feel like things have just been a little off recently and if I’ve done something I’m sorry.”
The lull of the frogs outside put me asleep, all forgotten. One could even call it a metaphor, the last peaceful night of my life ended as the frogs sang their lullaby and put me to sleep. Even I, in my infinite skepticism, could not have predicted how things would unfold. At mid morning break I sat outside. The chairs were hard plastic, uncomfortable. I don’t take myself for a masochist, but I don’t see any other explanation for my perpetual insistence that we had to eat lunch there every day. But this time, I was alone. She was always flaky, never quite present. I don’t give her a name here, because she doesn’t need one. But, just know, at the time her behaviour seemed normal. I couldn’t have known something was wrong. My memory betrays me as I try to recall the details, but eventually she materialized. Maybe she was standing by the stairwells, maybe she just appeared in front of me. But she was there. Something was, is still, undeniably wrong. Gnawing on her fingernails, she looked at the floor.
“I have something to tell you,”
“You can tell me anything,”
“I’m moving,”
I was naive enough to think this was the extent of the news I was about to receive. The childish hopefulness that maybe my suspicions were entirely paranoia. Though paranoia they have never been.
“Also, another thing. I took my pills. All of them. I’m going to die,”
Even now, I can still feel the same chill in my bones. I wish I had more details of the event that ruined every day to ever come after it, but unfortunately I’m left only with the snapshots. I remember the ambulance, in the parking lot at school. It’s a jarring, invasive scene. I remember watching it, holding back tears. The parking lot has a hill next to it, where we used to sit all the time. I remember the red flashing lights projecting onto it, the hill signalling to everyone that life as we had understood it was interrupted indefinitely. Though the ambulance eventually did leave and the lights stopped flashing and the grass was green again, that day is on replay behind my eyelids. The parking lot, if you could see it now, looks the same. But I remember. I never saw her again, and so the story resolves itself. But I remember still. That one fateful day, the last time I was allowed to be a child. It was the last time I was allowed to forget, or be forgiven. I carry the adult consequences of actions that weren’t mine. In the span of hours, childhood ended, and whatever came after it began.
Literary Musings 