Sometimes, I remembered what we tried to do on that fateful night. Most of the time I didn’t, but those rare moments of clarity were spent in agony.
The morning after the incident was a nightmare come to life. I woke up with the taste of the ocean and blood in my mouth, the saltiness of both making me retch. I clawed at the patch of sand next to me, expecting my fingers to touch your soft warm skin. I was met with the cold crumbly shore instead.
The air was chilly in spite of the towel someone placed over me. I brushed my hair aside, picking away clumps of smelly seaweed. My chest was stiff with bandages, the salt cleaned from my wounds.
I thought it was you who took care of me. Wrapping the towel around my shoulders, I walked around the endless shore in search of you. You couldn’t have gone far. A set of footsteps in the sand gave me hope. Like a kid, I stepped in the prints, giddy at the thought of seeing you again.
The sandy trail led to a pavilion in the distance. I saw a figure sitting under the pointed roof, leaning against the back of the bench. I was too far to spot any identifying features. They raised an arm in greeting and took a sip from their water bottle.
As I drew closer, I knew it couldn’t have been you. You were never that pale and your hair was a curtain of gold, not a short cluster of dark spikes. The person who rescued me wasn’t you. It couldn’t have been as I would later learn because you never returned from the water.
Evan stood up from the bench, holding open a paper bag. Breakfast smells wafted from the brown opening. My stomach growled at the scent of eggs and bacon stuffed between slices of freshly baked bread. I reached in for a sandwich and peeled off the aluminum, biting it ferociously.
“Slow down. You’ll get a stomach ache if you eat that fast,” he said.
I relaxed my chewing, huddling near him for warmth. The winds on the beach were picking up, leaving a fine dusting of sand on the floor of the pavilion. He handed me a cup of coffee, black and steaming. After one sip, I remembered to use my words.
“How did you find me?”
He handed me a broken clump of wires, what remained essentially of the halo I wore to the party. “You left this on the dock. Also, I just had to go wherever these were.” A white feather was captured between his pinched fingers.
I’m suddenly aware of what little is left of the wings glued to my back. I reached past my shoulders, plucking a soaked feather from the fuzzy white mass. I probably looked more like a seagull than an angel, frazzled and hungry.
“What happened last night?”
It wouldn’t be the only time someone asked me that question as I would later discover. My mother would ask this and several therapists would wonder the same thing, probing at this festering part of my memory.
“I got lost.” This was partially true. When I fell into the water with you, I no longer had a clue as to where I was going.
“You drowned. I had to resuscitate you. You could have died.”
In my humble opinion, that wasn’t the worst outcome. If I died, I would have known where you went. “What about Elle? She was with me.”
“I didn’t find her.”
My heart dropped to my stomach. “Impossible.” The last thing I recalled was our kiss in the water. You had one hand on my waist and the other tangled in my hair. There was no way you would have let go.
“She was wearing a devil costume. It was bright red. You couldn’t have missed it.”
“I didn’t see her,” he insisted. “Maybe she swam off. Elle knew these waters better than any of us.”
It was entirely possible that could have happened. But something in my gut told me that wasn’t the case. I sat up and forced Evan to comb through the beach with me, looking for you. When that yielded nothing, I tried to go into the water again.
That was why the therapists came. I didn’t know how to swim so every time I submerged myself in the lake or the ocean trying to get back to you, I was throwing away my life. I typically chose to do this at night as if that would somehow make me closer to you. Because of this, there were many times when I almost never came back.
I sought to replicate the embrace of the water that night, the fatally beautiful kiss of death. I tried to explain it to the therapists, who were coming up with increasingly creative ways to rid me of this “addiction to dying.”
There was tuning fork therapy, meant to rid me of evil spirits and feelings. By placing the vibrating instrument near my head, over time I was supposed to lose my grasp over my intrusive thoughts. I wouldn’t jump in the water if the idea was absent from my head. All I succeeded in getting from this strange practice was the constant urge to nap.
There was also aromatherapy, the burning sticks of incense that were supposed to truly banish evil from my body. Weird-smelling herbs burned in a small metal pot in the corner of my room, I heard Buddhist chants and Catholic prayers as old men in stuffy costumes stood over my body. I also drank teas with questionable content and ate foods meant to increase my serotonin intake.
My mother even went as far as to get a hypnotherapist to bend my will. All of this came after the conventional methods, the pills I swallowed reluctantly and flushed down the toilet as well as the therapy sessions where I didn’t really want to talk about my feelings.
The hypnotherapist had the brilliant idea of making me forget that night. He saw it as the root of all my evils, believing me to be tormented by my exceptional memory. Had I known what he intended to do, I would have resisted all of his efforts to break into my mind.
But he was a nice man. Compared to everyone else who was trying to fix me, his attempts to understand me were sophisticated. He avoided the heavy-handed way most grown-ups spoke to me and tried to get on my level. So, even though I knew what he was hired to do, I allowed myself to be lulled into a false sense of security.
He knew that what I suffered from wasn’t depression as many others mistakenly believed. I had a broken heart, not a broken mind. The only cure for such a thing would have been to bring Elle back.
The town was launching a search. While I was at home confined to the strange treatments and medicines my mother forced upon me, groups of people took into the night, dividing and conquering the surrounding woods. Despite what your mother had done, people did love you at some point and they didn’t forget about the light you brought to their lives. But that too would also be lost from my memory once the hypnotherapist was done with me.
I sat on my bed, listening to his soothing voice. I fell into a trance, hovering between the conscious and subconscious. In this gray realm, I was malleable, willing to take on a new shape beyond the self that I always knew.
Lavender smoke floated up my nostrils from the incense. I heard the buzz of a tuning fork and the steady tick of the hypnotherapist’s pocket watch. I concentrated on each sensation, following his instructions to dissect them. Within the smoke, I detected the herb and separated it from the fire. In the tuning fork, I heard it splinter the wood and shake against the air. In his pocket watch, every metal part clicked together. And within myself, blood flowed to every centimeter of my body, pumping from my heart to my head.
When I opened my eyes, I entered a different reality.
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