Strange, the shadows we leave behind.
I’ve stared at it so long, the sun has risen and set on its wrinkled surface. The sun rises and sets on everything. On every life. When the last shaft of golden light tiptoes away from her bed, I crawl into it. I want sleep, the dark kind. I want to never wake up. Gran’s sweet, old smell envelops me as I burrow into the covers and wrap myself in silence.
Night comes. Day passes. The earth tosses and turns in its big black bed.
Black morning.????Black mourning.
I hear whisperings. They drift in and out like oysters opening and closing in the current.
“We should call the doc.”
“Depression?”
“It’s been two days.”
“This is what heartbreak looks like. She loved her grandmother.”
“This is scaring me.”
I want to tell them I love them before I’m gone, but love is stuck like a pearl in my closed heart.
Twenty-Nine
I dreamed I was somebody else.
I wake, and still I feel like somebody else.
Both lives equally real.
Both lives equally dreamlike.
Clear water and deep water.
Not fully rested, not fully awake, I’m tired down to my soul.
I figure that today is a good day to
fall.
Thirty
THE JOURNAL SITS on my lap, and I snap it closed. I said once that nothing is more fun than to give Death the finger and have fun while you’re doing it. But Death’s a relentless hag. When you cheat Death of its prize, it keeps coming after you. Death never forgets a debt. Those eyes will follow me everywhere. Always.
This is no life.
The destructive force I’ve become to the people around me makes me a reaper. There’s only one way to stop it. I have to face the fact that I wasn’t supposed to live.
I have to right the wrong. So much of me has already died. Why not give up the rest?
The few final notes I scribble into my journal aren’t supposed to be a goodbye, though I realize that anything I write will read like one. I wish I could take away the only question they will have afterward, but Why? isn’t the right question. How? will be self-explanatory. The right question is What? What happened? What really happened to the girl we used to call Ryan Poitier Sharpe? I tried to tell them I wasn’t mentally ill. I tried to tell them I was being haunted. If anything drove me crazy, it was that.
And not being believed.
Doubt is a chain-rattling ghost.
Thirty-One
THE DESERT WIND is so hot, I feel like the devil is breathing on me. My body isn’t working right. It’s uncooperative. Slow movements, fumbling with buttons and zippers, struggling to clip my parachute chest strap. It’s built to snap together, but it’s like the clips are opposing magnets, resisting. Finally I force them together and get the pack secured. There’s a fleeting thought that I shouldn’t bother with a parachute. What’s the point? But then they wouldn’t let me on the plane, would they?
I have to get on the plane. There are lots of ways to die, but this is so right, it’s poetic.
The drop zone is a hive. People dart in and out, worker bees and drones ready for flight. Excitement is a thing you can feel here. It’s a sugary syrup over the beige of the Mojave. With the big-way and the site visit from the X Games people later in the afternoon, it’s the only day busy enough for me to get in the air without trouble. I’m just another drone. I’ll get on the plane, and when I jump, I’ll track my body as far away from the DZ as I can so they won’t see. They won’t have to find me. I’ll come to rest in the harsh, beautiful, unforgiving desert.
Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.
We all get on the airplane. My eyes meet the exhilarated eyes of a familiar guy. Only skydivers look exhilarated at eight a.m. He flicks a thumbs-up at me with maniacal happiness, and that’s when I see him in memory . . . Birthday Boy. I teased him one day, scared him for fun. Then I blew him a kiss as I fell out of the plane. I guess he came back for more.
My father once said, You don’t become a part of the skydiving life. Skydiving becomes part of you. Some people do it once, to say they did. Others do it and realize they were living a half life before that and they’ll only feel alive on the edge.
Half life. That best describes mine. It isn’t enough of a life.
Birthday Boy looks at me quizzically, and I turn my head toward the wall of the plane, focus on the dots of rivets holding the aluminum panels together. “Scared?” he asks.
“No,” I answer. “I’ve done this before.”
Only I know we’re not talking about the same thing.
The wind skims through the cabin; the air slapping our faces makes it real. I think I hear a song riding on its currents. It feels good to hum, to feel the vibration of my voice, so I do. But once I start, I can’t stop. This song rises from a deeper part of me than my self-control.
My song.
“Siren,” I say. “Of course you’re with me now.”
I’ll never leave.
“You don’t have to sing to me. I’m already yours.”