Self Conclusion

A Story by Mikki

Basically a short story type thing I wrote for my best friend. Obviously a deeper meaning behind literal sense.

She peered over the edge of the cliff as she envisioned the next few moments in front of her. This was it. This was the end. The end to all the pain, the confusion, the anger, and yet the constant and inevitable emptiness. It was the end of a girl everyone was so convinced existed. Nobody would remember her name, just the wind as it whispered her voice into the ears of the few that would feel and experience her “life”. A smile cracked on her pale face as she thought of all those who would also feel the same ache she did. Say a quick prayer, close your eyes, and pretend you’re okay. But how long does that really work? Obviously it never did to begin with, she explained to herself. Another step forward and a stone fell to meet the other jagged rocks lying shallow in the waves below. Soon there would be nothing left but the hollow shell of a girl whose memories would be lost in the waves along with her soul. A deep breath in and her mind became still as she knew this would be her last gasp of earthly air, and she had to make it count. Thank you, she mouthed as she leaned forward and the feeling of gravity came crashing down on her in one graceful moment. This smile attached to her face widened and she knew, for the first time and the last time, this is the end.

And it was just as all the weight of her excuse of a life began to lift off her shoulders, just as her feet began to slip from the ground, something latched onto her arm and she was thrown back onto the solid ground and the rocks were dug deep into her back. Everything was spinning and the feeling of being not only empty, but lightness and dizziness overcame her. Was this death? Heaven or Hell? Her sight was lost for a moment and she quickly covered her eyes from all the light surrounding her. The smile still hadn’t left her face though, she realized within the next few seconds. This must be Heaven. I am still smiling. Sight was returned and she looked around, only to see a man standing above her, panting and with a look of pure anger on his face. He looked directly into her eye and through pants and heaves began to shout foul language and demanding what she was thinking.

This girl full of frustration towards life and everything in it was me. Mikal Merrick. And the man that saved my life was Daniel Marshe. I was only 19 years old, and he was 25, but he was the first person to enter my life to make me feel alive.

“What the f**k are you doing!? Do you realize how dangerous cliff diving here is!?” his voice echoed in my head and I realized in an instant that this wasn’t Heaven. It wasn’t even Hell. It was life. I was still “alive” and I was flooded with anxiety that everything would repeat. He must have seen the horror in my eyes as I looked at him and slowly back to the cliffs. He must have realized in that split second what he had just done. He must have been scared. He must have felt the same urge I had to just run away. We looked into each other’s eyes for a moment, both with the same look of shock and horror and anxiety and hate for one another. How could he stop me from doing something so important and make me live even a few more minutes in this god forsaken world. How could I put him in such an awkward position he had never considered actually happening to him.

My eyes looked quickly back to the cliffs as his followed mine, and the same thought entered both our minds. I shot off the ground and back towards my old place of peace, but I could hear him behind me and once again, there was a pressure on my arm and I was violently swung back, and I could just barely hear his voice screaming at me “Don’t you dare!”.

Then it happened. For the first time since I was a little girl, I felt myself cry. I felt the tears rush and pour out of my eyes in a way they had never done before. Each tear was a tear for something that had lead me here. Each tear was a painful memory, and each tear held something that I never wanted anyone else to see or experience. For the first time in my life, as I felt the tears pour out of my eyes, my heart ached. I actually began to feel something. I actually began to feel the pain in my body I could never before feel. Then I felt his arms. I felt them around me like a steel blanket that I used to dream about when I was little, that I used to long for only in my wildest dreams, back when I could dream. I felt him cringe as I knew I was digging my nails into his chest along with my face. It felt so good, it felt so real, I felt so real. I screamed into his chest, I cried, and I yelled. I wasn’t sure at the time what I was yelling so violently, but he didn’t let go, he just kept holding on. It was as if for the first time someone cared where I was in my life. I couldn’t hear him if he was saying anything to me, all I remember were his arms, holding me tighter and tighter with every passing minute.

It was dark by the time I finally stopped and looked him in the eye for the first time since my second attempt. They were weak and tired, but they spoke to me the way no one had ever spoken to me with words. Maybe it was because he had stopped me. Maybe if I had seen him on the streets a day or a week or a year earlier, I would not have seen it. Maybe it was really only because he had made this one little effort. But everything was out. I had my guardian angel. My hero and my savior. Daniel Marshe didn’t have to say a word but I knew everything that he thought and I knew how much he actually cared about me. For the first time, I felt important and like I really mattered to someone. And this in itself made me know I could keep living.

A week went by after he dropped me off at my house. I didn’t think I’d ever see him again. I began to wonder if I even did matter. He never told anyone. He just let me out in my drive way and drove away. A word never passed between us. It was exactly a week later to the hour. A car rolled into the driveway and I could hear our two dogs barking hysterically. A knock, and I opened the door to the same raggedy looking guy from a week ago. A moment only passed between us before I was back in his arms and the same steel blanket surrounded me. Again, no words passed, as he lead me back to his green Camry. A sense of home came back into my heart as I felt the fabric of the passenger seat on my legs, and as I saw the same ash burns on the door, the same brown stain on the dashboard that I so anxiously wondered about every time I was in the car.

We ended up somehow out at a park near my house. We sat on the swings looking out towards the sunset that evening, breathless by the beauty of it. It was the first time I noticed how beautiful nature could be. Finally his husky voice broke the silence.

“My name’s Dan.”

“Mikal,” I quietly replied.

There was a silence before he looked at me confused, and I became scared. I didn’t want to talk about it that day. I didn’t want to discuss it. I couldn’t.

“Midol?” he asked, obviously trying not to laugh.

I couldn’t help it. I burst out in laughter. Real laughter. Not fake or staged. Just real. Real, happy laughter. After repeating my name for him, he began laughing, too. It was all so perfectly real. So comfortable. A laughter I hadn’t experienced since I was 7 years old when I watched my mom and dad dance around the kitchen to some new 80’s song they couldn’t stop playing all day. The way they looked at each other, the way they held each other, it was the day I realized true love existed. It was so beautiful and real. But the next day everything changed and I pushed that thought to the back of my mind.

And we sat there, on the swings, laughing hysterically at something that wasn’t even that funny. His smile, the glow on his face when he looked in my eyes. It made life so real, and I wanted to experience every second for the rest of my life. I wanted to experience what he felt, what he went through in his life for the rest of my life. And I swore to myself that I would. I’d laugh every day. I’d find something at least once a day to laugh at the way I laughed at that moment with Daniel Marshe.

We sat on those swings for another hour laughing to ourselves on and off, not saying another word. Finally, after that first hour he asked me if I was hungry. I told him I was. I was very hungry. So he took me to a small pizza place I hadn’t been to in the town over where he was from. I tasted the pizza for the first time, and thought how good it was to taste food, every bite. Every bite like it would be my last. I appreciated my life. I appreciated the moments, the seconds. I sat there with him. Looking into his eyes. Experiencing his gaze. Experiencing his laugh. Experiencing his words. Everyone I realized could easily be the last. And that actually scared me. I was scared to lose life. It really scared me. I wanted to live. I wanted to be here. I wanted to breathe, I wanted to know I could see the next day, the next hour, the next minute, even the next second. I was so terrified that I’d lose this, that it wouldn’t be real and I’d realize I had jumped that week before. I wasn’t going to be happy. I was going to go back to that state of oblivion when I wasn’t alive, and when I wasn’t real.

We talked about all kinds of random topics. I listened to him ramble on about things I’d never even heard of. I felt beautiful as he laughed at the odd way I had to cut and make shapes with my pizza. We laughed at the people walking on the other side of the window that separated us from the world. I showed him the memorial tattoo of my grandfather, and he showed me the various tattoos he got when he was young and now regrets. He showed me a picture of his two year old daughter he had been trying to get custody of for the past year. He explained to me he used to be an alcoholic and when his wife, Brittney, left him with Leana, he forced himself to become sober to win them back. Then Brittney remarried and he decided he had to still get his little girl back. I smiled at this story, longing to tell him what an amazing father he is, and how much Leana will appreciate him, failed efforts or not, for trying to win her. He told me it’d been 6 months since he’d seen her and he was losing hope. He told me how he went to that cliff, because that was where Brittney told him she was pregnant, to pray for the strength to keep pushing to get her.

I found it funny how he went to that cliff to attain hope and I went when I lost hope, but together we found each other. He told me, he said “when I saw you standing there, when I pulled you away and it all made sense, I found the hope I was searching for.” To which I replied, “When you pulled me and held me, I found the hope I thought I lost.”

He came to me every week for the next six months. We became close. Best friends. Something I never thought I’d have the honor to have. I helped him get ready for court dates and AA meetings. I made sure he did everything he needed to do in order to win court. I stopped him on nights he called me telling me how badly he wanted to drink. I laughed when he hit me screaming he didn’t care what I said. He gave me a reason to live. He gave me a reason to smile. He gave me a reason to set my alarm every night and not continuously ignore it the next morning. We never talked about what happened that one day on top the cliffs. We pretended it didn’t happen, because to us, it was only a shared memory. We both knew what happened, but it was over now. I never told him the painful secrets though, that lied deep in my heart that drove me to those cliffs.

Those next six months were undoubtedly the happiest of my life. His familiar face, his familiar scent, his familiar touch. Every ounce of misery escaped my body when we’d sit in his car or on a bench in the park or against a tree in the woods behind the high school. The beauty of life overtook me in an instant when our eyes met and when his touch met mine. When I cried it wasn’t because I was sad, not really. It was because I was relieved. I felt relieved that I could remember a moment and know it was over for the first time. It was a concept I never knew even existed and it made me only want to cry more. I felt all these emotions that had been trapped so deep inside my body for years and that ached to escape. Now they were free. Free to run and sing through my body in a way I don’t know if anyone knows the full potential of.

And just like that, Dan was gone. He showed up one morning, and I remember smiling at him. I remember the smile hurting because it was so big since I didn’t expect him. I remember throwing my arms around him, expecting my steel blanket again. I remember waiting for the steel blanket, but instead only feeling a man’s arms. I remember my heart dropping when I didn’t feel my comfort. I remember the look in his eyes as he tried to fake a smile, but I knew. He didn’t know how well I knew him. How I knew him better then I knew myself, because to me, he was the most important person in my life. He saved my life. I owed him the same and I noticed every detail about him. I noticed the freckle behind his ear. I noticed the different shade of blue his eyes were. I noticed the way he had to always touch, if even for a second, whatever he was focusing on. I noticed the emotion in his eyes as he read a book. I noticed how he had a different smile for everything. A slight different position of his lips for every slight different emotion.

“Brittney is taking you back?” the topic never even came up, but I knew. I knew when he talked about her how badly he wanted her. How badly he wanted his family. And although he covered it, I could see the happiness behind the sadness behind the fake happiness. A quick shift of his eyes. “So this is it?” I asked, trying so hard to be strong like I had been for so long now.

“I’m sorry.”

He’d leave the state, maybe even the country. She didn’t want their past to affect anything and she wanted to start over. This was it. My savior. My hero. Another hug, another apology that broke my heart to hear, and he was gone. He saved my life. He gave me a reason to live. Why would I even think he’d be there for good? Was I in love? Was I infatuated?

That night I found myself making my way back to those cliffs. This time, though, I didn’t go to give up on all my hope, I went to find it. I went to find the same hope I had just the night before, just a few hours ago even. I was deep in my own mind. The man that saved my life, that gave me every reason to breathe, what did I feel towards him? I did, I loved him. But I loved him in the way I should have been loved by a father, a mother, a brother, a sister, a friend, a lover, a stranger. I loved him and I know he loved me the way a human was supposed to love another human.

I was almost to the top of the cliff, I knew, I’d sit below the tree we sat together when he held me the first time, and I’d pray. I’d pray to God that he would give me the hope and strength to keep wanting to live another day, and to not give up this time. I was almost to the top, and then I saw her. I saw a girl. I’d never seen her before, and there she was, almost out of thin air. Standing at the edge of the cliff, the way I stood six months ago. She stood there, clutching at nothing, just the way I had been. And in what felt like a split second, she was in my arms, and I felt her weak body against mine. I felt her tears, her thrashing, her nails in my back. She was screaming and yelling, and I could only pick pieces out of it about something about her father. And I couldn’t help but smile when I realized it. She was me. She was the girl I was six months ago, and I knew I was Daniel.

This never-ending cycle full of misery will continuously spin us in its web. There is a feeling of emptiness and hopelessness that nobody can escape, and it is how we deal with it that gets us through the days. It’s the people, that one person, that can show you how to smile, and how to love, and feel every emotion that a human is supposed to feel. It is this person that shows you how to do this for another person. It is this love that we produce and give that fills us with the energy to move, to breath, to live life as though there is a purpose. And there is. It is never about us and our own misery. It is about a neighbor that never had the opportunity to feel love, or about a stranger who is alive, but can’t feel it one specific minute. It is about saving the person next to you from what you are, because we all feel the same, we all breath the same, we all smile the same and hope the same. It is about taking it one day at a time, to prove how to live to a person who doesn’t know. It is about ending your turn on this cycle, and giving someone else a chance to finish it, too.