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And then what?
The thought intruded loudly on Grace’s newborn slumber. It jolted her alert, scaring her more than anything else: more than endless addiction, more than drowning, more than agony, more than living with self-loathing. The unknown and bottomless pit of possibilities of And then what? was more than Grace could stand. The words marched ominously at her, pace by pace, slow and terrifying, wearing the mercilessly heavy shoes of a black and white movie monster.
And then what?
She crawled her hands back under her ribs and, with one last effort, pushed herself up to her knees. The sand, usually so soft and comforting, pushed roughly against her legs in a million tiny round points of biting pressure. Her desperation tore loose, the grappling hooks that kept it tethered to her soul ripping out ragged chunks, leaving massive internal bleeding in its wake. The excruciating red pain made her scream into the silent darkness,
“I can’t live like this. I can’t stop myself from living this way. I’m so afraid of what comes next. Somebody please help me.”
Somebody would have begun to cry at the wound Grace’s words tore through the air. Somebody would have joined her prayer, hoping to lend increased will to this lonely girl. But nobody bore witness to her cry for help. With no support, she used the remnant of her own strength to struggle to her feet. With no help, Grace stood and turned her back on the bay. She was forced to face the direction from which she had just so desperately fled. She had nowhere to turn. No escape. No way out. Like that play she had read in French class a million years ago. No way to leave this prison of endless pain she had locked herself into.
Was it Camus or Sartre?
Gag, please tell me you did not just say that.
Hilarious, you just can’t help yourself can you? Even now, you want to throw yourself an intellectual bone.
Did you impress yourself? Does it make you feel like the smartest girl in the crackhouse?
You know what is so poetically pathetic? You can’t even remember whether it’s the one guy or the other. You don’t know your existentialists from your elbow.
Another voice joined in with glee, laying a kick to her ribs with relish.
Oh wait, I have the icing for this pseudo-intellectual cupcake. You should do that one poem –remember the only one you ever learned before failing out of school? Wasn’t it a funeral poem? Oh yes!
Grace could almost hear a triumphant clap.
What a perfectly pretentious dirge to accompany your willful return to slow and sure death.
How could she expect to escape addiction? She couldn’t even escape the cruel mouthed gallery hiding in her head. As she moved back through the path of sand and crushed reeds, she saw no observer with tears washing his cheeks, wishing to impart strength to her weakness. Between the fluffy foxtails of the reed heads she saw no solitary hand reached out to give support. Nobody was there for Grace.
Grace knew she was weak-minded. How could it be otherwise with so many parts at war with each other? What did they say about a house divided against itself? Though the idea had been suggested in mockery, Grace suddenly couldn’t get rid of that funeral poem once inserted into her thoughts. She suspected the voice that made the suggestion was the part of her brain that had memorized and secretly loved the poem. It had contrived to perversely provoke Grace into contemplating the verse. She wanted to punish that voice but knew she was playing into its hands by fighting the remembered lines. The more she concentrated to block the words, the more they leaped to the front of her memory. Her contrary mind was back to its old tricks. A moment’s rest had been the merest time out.
Demain, dès l'aube, à l'heure où blanchit la campagne,
Je partirai.
Okay Monsieur Hugo, seeing as you are such a genius with the words, can you tell me where I’ll be when the light of dawn whitens this road? Will I be gone?
Vois-tu, je sais que tu m'attends.
But who is waiting for me? My parents? My sisters? My brother? The friends I don’t have anymore? Those fiends at the house? The stranger who isn’t in the reeds? No one. No one is waiting .
Je marcherai les yeux fixés sur mes pensées,
In perfect time to the beat in her head, she slogged, step by grueling step, back up the street toward the house. Feet sanded numb by the asphalt run, she couldn’t even feel the road.
I can’t feel my feet. Maybe I’m floating. Shouldn’t floating, by definition, be easier? Did I get turned around and just walk out onto the water? It’s so exhausting. No wonder that fisherman chose to sink, it’s just too hard to do this alone.
Sans rien voir au dehors, sans entendre aucun bruit,
Nothing to see, nothing to hear, nobody awake, nobody outside, nobody to make a noise, nobody to know me. I am alone
Seul, inconnu, le dos courbé, les mains croisées,
Unconsciously her body imitated the rhyme. Her back bent further under the burden of her lonely anonymity. She hugged her arms against the frisson of night air across the leftover cold sweat from her run in the opposite direction.
Despite the mind games, the poem turned out to be perfectly apt. The precise timing of her brain brushing off this poem, found in a cobwebbed corner, to accurately describe her situation opened a strange and secret side door for Grace. She felt a stab of hope. The remnant of beautiful words left in a forgotten synapse reminded her of something. Like a gossamer butterfly on a bleak Bradbury landscape, it tipped the balance away from the brink of despair. Grace teetered backward, the lightest wing of her poem providing the tiniest force, just enough to change her momentum. Glimpsing something lovely and useful that had sprung up from an old reserve, somehow hidden and untarnished, allowed a tiny smudge of hope to mar the pristine sheet of her despair.
Maybe I’m not a complete failure.
Noticing the smudge, she swiped at it, spreading the stain.
I used to be smart. I used to be strong. It isn’t all gone. I can recover those things. I can recover.
She began to smear her tiny hope with wild strokes all over the canvas of her hopelessness.
This can be fixed. I can do this on my own. I don’t need somebody to help me from his place in the reeds. I can go back home, I can go back to school, I can pull myself out of this hole.
It bears telling that, even when not in full-blown drug-induced crisis, Grace is prone to radical emotional shifts. Some call her volatile. Privately she believes she just feels things more deeply than most. An accurate assessment would be that Grace has weak emotional filters. If an inkling of an emotion comes knocking at her door, she lets it in, no questions asked, invites it to high tea. Because the feeling has occurred to her, she declares protective ownership of it and wants to nurture it to its fullest potential. In her short life, it has rarely occurred to her to discipline her emotions and gain control of herself in the interest of reason. So, before tiny hope had laid knuckles to her door a second time, she had already prepared it a pot of homemade soup and knitted it an afghan, inviting it to the inner sanctum of her mind.
With a cat’s fickle agility, her mind readjusted and gained momentum. The verse had given her the first burst of non-synthetic energy of the night, quickening her pace. Her poem could be the anthem on her trip up the road, to her car, to her home, back to school, back to recovery. It would remind her of other things she had stored in her brain, in her muscles, in her heart, even long ago in her spirit.
Having pinned her hopes on the remembered rhymes, the seesaw swung one last time. One more step. Silence. Another step. Nothing. Panic attacked when she couldn’t remember the next line. Not a single word. She thrust her hand one last time into the black magic hat of her memory and wiggled her fingers around desperately. Empty. The poem had been an elaborate hoax to raise a last glimmering hope, only to smash the remaining particles into pieces too small to recover. Just as suddenly and irrationally as her hope had blossomed, it was gone. She trudged, floated, walked across the water toward nowhere, in the dark silence imposed by her capricious brain. She was left alone in the dark empty night: no direction, no goal, no strength, no hope. Everything gone again–just. like. that.
Stop sulking. Who finds herself drowning and thinks,‘You know what I need right now... some good old fashioned poetry’ ?
The fact that it was french makes it particularly useful in an emergency. Help help, I’m dying! Hang on, I’ve got these french words, they rhyme.
Here’s the most beautifully ironic part: She rested her very last hope for salvation on a requiem for a dead person.
They wouldn’t even allow her one moment to observe her grief in silence. She answered her tormentors defiantly.
Not ironic at all. I would rather be dead than live like this.
Et quand j'arriverai, je mettrai sur ta tombe
Un bouquet de houx vert et de bruyère en fleur.
well penned madame silva! (et not too shabby monsieur hugo)
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