Mirage(50)

I lean toward the mirror. The old glass ripples my image. Flecks of black paint shadow the glint in the glass. Shafts of moonlight slice through the night air and land at my feet. I’m so tired, my heart is sagging against restraints in my chest.

She’s been chasing me for weeks, filling my head with strange words and memories. I’m ready to be done with our battle. I’m exhausted. I want to step into the light with Gran. My palms press against the cool glass of the mirror as I stare into myself, willing Death to come. Closer and closer, I inch my face to my reflection, until my forehead knocks against itself.

This feels familiar, this pressing my face against the glass, this longing to merge with something larger than myself.

This is how we found each other.

I whisper against my own lips, “Come and get me.”





Twenty-Seven


NOTHING HAPPENS. This is more startling, now that I’ve requested her presence, than seeing her face would be. I pull back, angry.

“Did you hear me? I give up! Come for me!”

The glass vibrates under my fists. “I don’t want to live this life anymore. Do what you’re going to do and quit playing with me.” A sob escapes. “I give up.” I’m angry at myself for thinking it, saying it, but it’s true. Everything is wrong. Everything.

I saw who I used to be. Like everyone else, I’m mourning the spark of that person. I’m not her. I’ll never be her.

Death is after me, speaks to me, watches me. She took Gran. Who will be next if I don’t let her win? Why not submit?

Death always gets her way in the end.





Twenty-Eight


THE SHADOW OF Gran’s head indents her pillow.

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.