I stared out at the horizon. It evoked the kind of beauty that seemed all but lost and forgotten, the kind of place you only ever hear about or see in fairy tales. I marveled at the mountain peaks buried beneath the cloudy skies, the puffs of white and gray being carried briskly by the wind, and finally remembered to breathe.
She said there was magic in those mountains.
I didn’t understand what she meant by those words. Part of my mind wanted to simply look at it as the kind of frilly nonsense people say when they want to sound smart and sophisticated, but as I stood there on that cliff top, looking out at a landscape that had never been altered by human hands in millennia, it finally clicked. That place was otherworldly, like the stones, crags, and boulders held vast secrets no person had ever learned. Every plant, every stone, every crevice told a story long past that would go lost to the ages.
The cool wind whipped my hair into a frenzy of tangled curls and I did my best to keep it out of my eyes, from obstructing my view. I feared that if I stopped looking, even for a moment, the land would change and the magic would be gone, a casualty to the wind and the clouds and the drab, empty world around it. There was magic in those mountains.
What better place to die?
I looked down at the ground beneath my feet and slid my foot through the pebbles, mindlessly making a figure eight in the dirt.
I had known I was going to jump for a while. People always act like jumping to your death is some sort of spur of the moment flight of fancy, like you’re strolling down the street, come across a bridge, and think to yourself, “Gee, you know what sounds swell? Jumping to my death.” No. Nobody does that. Ever. This was a decision that took a lot of thought and time and effort. Once I made my decision, the question was never whether or not I would actually do it, but merely a matter of when and where I wanted my body to drop.
For months I had lain in a hospital bed and watched people walk in and out of my room at their own will. Doctors and nurses pushed buttons, took notes, poked my body, and asked me intrusive questions about my bowel movements. Friends and family members were largely the same, but I could at least feign sleep to make them go away. It was the one saving grace of wearing an assless hospital gown with no pants.
I’m deflecting, I know. Not to get all Psyche 101, but is it really that surprising? After hearing doctors (and, yes, I do mean plural) say they have no idea what is wrong with you and thus have nothing they can really do for you, deflecting becomes something of a necessity. It makes the confrontation with your own mortality a little more bearable.
They wanted to run every test under the sun. More and more doctors traipsed in and out of my room, throwing all kinds of big words and fancy names at me, more than half of which I’m convinced were made up on the spot. And, at first, I let them. It didn’t matter if it was experimental, obscure, theoretical, or even any of that homeopathic hippy nonsense; I was willing to try anything. But after so many failed attempts and unforeseen side effects and uncontrollable bowel movements, I finally made the decision to stop.
The doctors didn’t understand. My family didn’t understand. My friends were actually surprisingly supportive, but I think they just wanted to start grabbing at what little possessions I had as soon as possible. The truth is none of them were aware of just what I was dealing with. Not only was my body going through every conceivable hell imaginable as blood was drawn, scans were taken, and medications were changed faster than I change my underwear, but it got so there were so many wires, tubes, and machines around me, connected to me, and pumping me full of fluids that I started having recurring nightmares.
I would wake in my pitch-black hospital room and I could sense something hovering over me. I would strain my eyes, but they would never adjust to the inky black darkness. I could just feel something there, above me, watching me. A cold, smooth tentacle would slide against my face and I would immediately move to slap it away only to find all of my limbs paralyzed at my sides. All I could do was wait and listen. The tentacle would multiply into a mass of entrails as they slithered and glided from my face to my body, slowly enclosing me in their slick embrace. A loud rusty creak would fill the room and my heart would begin to race. I would struggle to breathe and I would try to convince myself that noises were not emanating from the darkness right in front of me, even as they grew louder. And just as I could feel my mind beginning to snap, as the thin, rubbery tentacles would lift me from my bed and the metallic shrieks of hell became deafening, moonlight would shine between the wooden slats covering the window and I would see a creature of rusty steel and IV tubes lifting me to a face of shattered and decimated computer monitors, its gaping, bottomless maw full of row upon row upon row of syringes dripping crimson. And I would wake screaming.
It was the same nightmare every night, but every time that beast of modern medicine would eat just a little bit more of me, slowly working its way up my arm, my calf, my torso, my neck. The scary part was that I could feel it, every last excruciating bite of countless rusty, cracked, and broken needles tearing through my flesh. And it savored it. It savored me.
Needless to say, I called off the tests before it worked its way through my beautiful face. Not that it stopped the son of a bitch immediately, but it slowed him down and I could gradually feel him recede back into the darkness. I may have been laying myself down on my own deathbed, but at least I wouldn’t go being devoured by the very thing that should have been saving my life.
I neared the edge of the cliff and peered down at the jagged rocks far below. They looked painful. But welcoming. I imagined what it would be like to watch the world rise to meet me, the still, cool air becoming a rush of wind as I tore through it like a train barreling down the tracks. What would I think about? What would I want my last thought to be?
A screech echoed through the canyons and valleys. I stepped back from the ledge and searched the grounds and the skies until I spotted a hawk soaring high above me, its powerful wings flapping gracefully and with purpose. It was circling. I looked back down to the ground below, scanning the open landscape for its prey, but couldn’t find anything amongst the foliage. There was another screech and I looked back up to the sky, catching the bird just as it began to dive. Its wings were pressed to its sides and its body was perpendicular to the ground, cutting through the atmosphere like a burning blade through fresh snow. My heart raced as it plummeted fearlessly towards the world below, its sharp beak leading the way, until it disappeared behind some scattered trees. For a split second I was convinced the bird had grossly miscalculated its trajectory and dove head first into the solid ground, and my heart dropped. But in an instant, the hawk soared above the trees and bushes, its wings outspread and a small rabbit dangling from its beak. I caught my breath.
Two things crossed my mind at that moment.
One: I had never seen anything like that happen in front of my eyes that was not pre-recorded and it surprised me how mixed I felt about it. On one hand, I felt incredibly sad for the rabbit, which, even if it was sick or injured, was trying to go about its rabbit-y day only to find itself suddenly yanked into the air to an untimely death. On the other hand, what that hawk did, the courage and strength and knowledge it needed and undoubtedly had in order to pull off that kind of maneuver, was nothing short of magnificent.
And two: at that moment, in my situation, I couldn’t tell if I was the rabbit or the hawk. Was I being yanked from my life to an untimely demise, or was I diving with intent and purpose?
I sighed and sat down on a nearby patch of grass and thought of the parade of people who came through my door after I made my decision to stop the meds. People I hardly talked to, family members I barely knew, even people I swear I had never even met. They were all just faces; faces who didn’t care about how I felt or what I was doing or why. They were just there to stare at me and make themselves feel good because, hey, they went and spent a few minutes with that dying guy and gave him company and made his day just a little bit brighter. But it didn’t help; it made me feel worse. What they failed to realize was that I didn’t want them there. Not because I was mean or anti-social or didn’t like them (although, to be fair, I could count on two hands and half a foot how many of them I actually did like), but because I didn’t want to feel like a sideshow, some freak people could pay to see and point at and passively ridicule. It’s why I’ve never understood not necessarily why people visit loved ones when they are in the hospital, but how they visit them. The way most people go about it, visiting someone in a hospital becomes an exhibitionist affair. They don’t talk or take something to occupy themselves and/or the person they’re visiting or really add anything to the general atmosphere of the room. Most people just sit in a chair quietly and watch their loved ones as they sleep or writhe or hurt or die. And all the sick people want is to be left alone. There is nothing more humiliating than being an open wound, than admitting that you’re hurting, that you’re in pain, that you need help. So why in the hell would someone confined to a hospital bed want a nonstop conveyor belt of people coming through to witness every single moment of it?
Of course, it slows down over time. As the news of visiting a dying acquaintance becomes less of a story to tell people, it becomes clear that actually sitting and watching a person slowly perish in front of your eyes becomes a bit of a bummer. Sunlight doesn’t romantically stream through the windows into a pure white room while everyone sits around and has heartfelt conversations with each other about life and love and how little you regret. People, instead, sit in a darkened, overcrowded room and struggle to make small talk while monitors and machines unendingly bleep and squawk over the stifled moans of a person whose body is shutting down. It’s an ugly realization, and the gears that once powered that conveyor belt of unwanted cargo gradually corrode and fail until they finally grind to a halt.
I honestly thought I would be happier when my room stopped feeling like a roadside attraction, when I wouldn’t have to smile politely and lie to people about how little pain I was in and how happy I was to see them. But dying has a weird tendency to weed out not only those you don’t care about, but even the ones you do. It’s sobering, to say the least. People you thought would be with you through everything suddenly disappear and people you never expected to stick around meet those expectations with flying colors (I at least applaud their consistency). And, to be honest, I can’t say I blame any of them. Hospitals are lonely. Not just for the patients, but also for the people who can do nothing but watch their loved ones suffer. So I can’t say I was surprised or angry when my sisters started making excuses about having “work functions” they couldn’t get out of or that they got “pregnant,” or when my dad explained to me that he couldn’t go through watching his son die, too, or when my friends just stopped talking to me altogether. It seemed like a natural course of action. And I’d say I handled it pretty well, considering. I only sobbed myself to sleep for three nights.
As much as I hated the fact that all of the people in my life were running away, I knew it was good for me. I needed the time to “get my affairs in order,” which in my case meant figuring out how to explain to everyone that my internet search history really was just for research. Besides, I wasn’t entirely alone. My hospital neighbors were all much older than me, so they always had older folk at their side, mostly husbands and wives, who would occasionally pop in to say hello. At first, I dreaded it. I had flashbacks to sitting in my grandma’s living room as she rattled on and on about how great my cousins were doing and how I should be more like them and “Oh, weren’t you in school? What ever happened with that?” But they never pried or tried to make small talk. They understood what it was like, what it meant, to be in a losing battle against your own body. So whenever I dodged a question or grew quiet or receded into my own mind, they would just smile, nod, and tell me stories about their lives, about what they had seen and what they had felt. It was only ever for minutes at a time, while they were passing through on their way to the cafeteria or the nurse’s station, but they were minutes I genuinely cherished.
I came to look forward to their bite-sized visits, craning my neck to see if they were coming or going and doing my best to make myself look a little less monstrous when I saw them shuffling down the long corridor. They unwittingly made me comfortable with my situation. But they also made me regret that I wouldn’t get to have all of the experiences they had – their love, their loss, their anger, their passion. Or maybe it’s just that they had gotten the time to reflect on their lives, to find meaning in the stupid mistakes and the happy accidents, the poor choices and the well thought out plans.
What good is a life without meaning?
But then, two weeks ago, I woke from another painful night of tossing and turning to what should have been an empty room. Instead, there was a woman slouching in the chair beside me, one leg crossed over the other and her face pressed behind a book. The front cover was adorned with finely ornate lettering. I couldn’t tell what language it was in. Italian? Spanish? It looked old, that much I could tell.
I cleared my throat. Her red hair continued swiveling left to right, completely unfazed. I cleared my throat again. She impatiently held up a finger and continued reading. Unsure of what to do, I just watched and waited, listening to the faint sounds of bleeps and coughs and moans emanating from behind the door. A few minutes passed and she finally looked up.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“Umm…” I stammered. “No? I don’t think so. I mean, I have no idea who you are or why you’re here and this is my room, so…”
She looked at me expectantly.
“Shouldn’t I be asking you that?”
She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, carefully considering the question. “Well,” she started, “seeing as how you’re dying and you know very well that you could not, in any conceivable way, help me, no, you shouldn’t be asking me that.” She closed her book and set it on the table next to her. “Which is why I asked you.”
I stared at her, my mouth slightly agape. I knew I looked like an idiot. She told me as much.
“You look like an idiot,” she told me, “so I’ll ask it again.” She scooted her chair closer to my bed and sat forward, carefully enunciating each word. “Can I help you?”
My mind was a complete and total void. I tried forming thoughts, ideas, anything to try and figure out who this woman was and what she could possibly want from me, but all I could muster was the wimpiest groan I’ve ever heard come out of my mouth.
She stared at me, looked deep into my eyes, and I knew she could see the vast nothing that was my mind. Her hands clenched into fists, her lips tightened, and her breathing quickened.
“Come on, man!” she yelled. “It’s a simple yes or no question! This won’t work unless you agree to it!”
“Agree to what?”
“To me helping you.”
“With what?”
She threw her hands out to her sides. “I don’t know! That’s up to you, you moron!”
I stared at her, confused.
“You want sex? I’ll get you all the sex you could ever want. You want power? I’ll help you get more power than you would know what to do with. Fame? Talent? Love? I don’t fucking know. You have to tell me, you Neanderthal.”
“So…” I furrowed my brow as I tried to understand what she was telling me. “You can help me. With anything.”
She slowly nodded and spoke to me like I didn’t speak English. She opened her mouth wider than necessary and used exaggerated expressions. “But first I need your approval.”
I opened my mouth to speak, but hesitated. “But–“
“Just say yes, god damn it,” she blurted out.
I closed my mouth, took a breath, and considered my options. Here was a woman I had never seen before in my life angrily saying that she could help me (whatever that entailed) as long as I agreed to it. And she seemed serious about it. So I could either agree to whatever the hell it was she wanted to do, or I could call a nurse, have this lady dragged out of here by security, and live out the rest of my few remaining days in pain and agony, unendingly wondering just how she could have helped, another “What if?” to add to my roster.
I slowly let out my breath and nodded. She nodded back.
“Good,” she said quietly. “But I need it properly. So, for the last time, can I help you?”
“Yes.”
She clapped her hands together. “Alright!” She slapped me on the knee, grabbed a briefcase sitting next to her chair, and set it on her lap. “Let’s get started then. What do you want?”
For months I had known what I wanted. I had thought about, it fantasized about it, even made feeble attempts at it, but in that moment, I couldn’t speak it. I looked away from the redheaded woman sitting next to me and began to twiddle my thumbs. “Well… I just…”
Her eyes fixated on me and I could tell she was growing impatient again. She tapped her finger on her briefcase and her breathing grew heavy.
“I mean… I kinda…”
She sighed and cracked her neck. “Look. I’m sorry if I’m coming across like a hard ass or a bitch or whatever other name you want to call me. But if you really want my help, I need you to talk to me. This will not work unless you are open and honest.”
I looked out the window at the passing clouds and the swaying trees and thought of everything I was missing. The laughs. The smells. The people. It was a beautiful day and I was stuck in here. Alone.
“To die. I want to die.”
She nodded quietly and patted my arm. “Okay,” she said softly. “Not particularly new or interesting and I don’t really get it since you’re already well on your way down that road, but alright. Death it is.”
My eyes grew wide and I turned to stare at her as she flipped open her briefcase and began rifling through papers. “Excuse me? Who the fuck do you think you are to tell me that I’m not making sense? I’ve put a lot of time and thought into this! Fuck you, lady!”
She waved her hand absentmindedly to quiet me down, never once looking up from her briefcase.
“And I’m not signing any damn papers!”
“Oh, you don’t have to.” Her free hand disappeared into her coat and reemerged with a tape recorder in hand. She waved it defiantly. “You signed everything I needed right here.” She looked up just in time to see my “what the fuck is going on” face and rolled her eyes. “Oh, please. Don’t act so surprised. Besides,” she said, stuffing the tape recorder back into her coat pocket, “there are other ways to tell what you said. A couple spells and incantations and we would know everything you said in the last three years. Trust me, this is the easy way.”
My mind boggled and tried to understand what I was hearing. Spells? Incantations? What the hell was this? Was any of this even real? Was I losing my mind? I listened to the woman mutter nonsense under her breath as she flipped through the papers in her briefcase (“Wealth… Strength… Love… Didn’t I alphabetize this thing?”) and very slowly inched my hand towards the remote to call my nurse. I was almost there, a mere finger length away, when she flicked my knuckle with her pencil. I winced and recoiled in pain.
“Really? You were going to tell on me?” She shook her head and continued shuffling papers around. “Some people, man. All you do is try to help them and they have the audacity to– Ha! Found it!” She held up a paper triumphantly. “The Death form!” She began to read it over, occasionally looking up at me and nodding her head. But the further she got, the more her face scrunched up and her brow furrowed. She scratched her head and bit the end of the pencil in her hand. “No. No, this isn’t right.”
In a flash, the paper disappeared back into her briefcase and the rifling began anew. “Something is off about this,” she said. “I don’t know what it is, but you…” She shook her head. “You’re not telling me something. So we’re going to try something a little broader, a little more open-ended.” She pulled out another sheet of paper and slammed the briefcase shut. “A Release form.”
I shrugged. “If you say so.”
“I do say so. So let’s get started. Name. David Aarons. Date of birth.” I opened my mouth to tell her, but she barreled right on through me, writing the information down on the form in front of her. “September 17, 1984. Height.” She looked me up and down. “You’re what, about 5’11”?” Before I could even tell her that she was right, she turned back to the sheet and wrote it down. “Weight. Umm…” She sized me up, squinted, and shrugged. “162? That one really doesn’t matter, I don’t know why they put it on here.” She scribbled it onto the form.
She was exactly right. My mind reeled. “Did you read my chart or–?”
She ignored me. “Alright. Now the fun stuff. Friends and family. None.”
“That’s not true. I have friends and family.”
“Yes, but are they here?” She looked around the empty room and held her hands out to her sides, her lips pursed.
“I guess not.”
“You guess not.” She nodded and continued. “Client ostensibly wants: death. Reason: Is already dying, is in pain, and is alone.”
I flinched as she spoke that aloud. I knew why I had wanted to die, but to hear it summed up in three sentence fragments brought me crashing to earth. Was this really all my life came down to? I was lost in thought when I heard her clear her throat loudly and I reentered reality.
“You listening? This one is the most important, so I need you to be honest with me. Okay?”
I nodded slowly, my mind still bruised from the triviality of my death.
“How do you want to die?” she asked.
I cocked an eyebrow at her.
“Surely you’ve thought about it,” she said. “Everyone does.”
“Well, yeah, but what does it matter?”
She sighed and placed the briefcase and form on the floor beside her. “The way someone wants to go helps determine what it is they really want. Obviously a ton of factors come into play, but on a general level, look at it this way. Say someone wants to die by fire. You hear fiery, painful death, but I hear rebirth, a la the story of the phoenix. Or say someone wants to be frozen to death. Does that mean they want to die in solitude? No. It means they want to be remembered as they were in a very specific way. And so on and so forth. See what I’m saying?”
I shrugged. “I guess. But what does this have to do with me? I don’t want any of this other stuff. I just want to die.”
“And I don’t buy that.” She sat back in her chair and crossed her legs. “You may be telling me that you want to die. You may be telling yourself that you want to die. But I’m sitting here looking at you, who you are, where you’ve been, and what you have and I don’t see death on your mind. Not really.”
“No? Then what do you see?”
She paused and studied my face, analyzing every hair and wrinkle to try to get to the person beneath, and I stared back defiantly. She spoke slowly, choosing her words carefully. “You’re sad and depressed. That everyone left you. That you’re alone. That… well, that you’re dying. But you’re also relieved. It can finally be over.” She chuckled to herself quietly. “You want to jump. But not just anywhere. Typically when people want to jump, they want attention, which is why they do it in public places, on rooftops and bridges. But you… you want to go it alone. In solitude.” She nodded as if finally satisfied. “You don’t want to die. You want to be free.”
It wasn’t a question, but a statement. I let it hang in the air a moment as I struggled to come to terms with how right she was, how unbelievably on the nose her statements were. I had considered jumping off of a building at one point. I thought even jumping off of the top of this hospital would do the trick. Not only would it be effective, it would be downright poetic. But the thought of crowds and onlookers and more sirens kept me at bay. I wanted somewhere quiet, somewhere secluded, where I could leap in peace. She had me pegged. Except for one thing,
“Dying. Being set free.” I wiped my watering eye before it had a chance to reveal my weakness. “Is there even a difference?”
“I don’t know,” she replied. “Let’s find out. I know just the place.”
And now here we are, at the top of these mountains, looking out at one of the most pristinely beautiful sights I have ever seen in my life. She came and sat down on a boulder next to me. “I told you there was magic out here.”
I looked up as the clouds began to break and sunlight streamed down through the cracks, illuminating the world around us in a soft yellow glow. “You weren’t lying.”
She kicked around the rocks at her feet. “So what now?”
I turned to face her. “What do you mean?”
“I mean,” she stood up and motioned towards the cliff in front of us, “we’re here. Are you going to jump or what?”
I looked at her, dumbfounded, and she looked back, a cocky grin on her face. “Look, man. You wanted my help. So I figured out what you want, got you out of that hospital, drove us almost 500 miles to this place, and practically carried you up this damn mountain, so now it’s your turn. I can’t help you from here. This is all you, now.”
I rose to my feet and hesitantly walked towards the ledge, my motions jerky and unsure of themselves. I bit my lip, stopped halfway there, and turned back to look at her, staring at me, her head cocked to one side, simultaneously confused and amused. “Who are you?” I asked her. “Why did you help me?”
For a moment she looked away and stared far off into the distance, the gears in her head slowly working. “Something called me to you. Something… deep. And when I saw you lying there in that bed, I felt I had known you all my life and that I just… I had to help. Every fiber of my being told me that you, David Aarons, were my destiny.” Her gaze shifted to catch mine and a single tear rolled down her cheek.
I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t expecting anything so profound, so deep. All I could muster in reply was, “R-really?”
Her gaze never waivered and her bottom lip began to tremble. I scrambled to think of what to say, how to console her and explain to her that she was helping me more than anyone ever had. I imagined taking her into my arms and holding her as she sobbed into my chest and a warmth washed over me. I waited for the floodgates to open, for the tears to spring forth, when she finally opened her mouth and burst into laughter. She fanned herself off and wiped the tears from her eyes as she rolled off of the boulder and onto the rocky floor.
“No!” she shouted between heaving gasps of air. “Are you insane?”
Her shrieks of laughter ebbed into monstrous coughs eased into soft chuckles, and all the while I stood there, broken and dejected, kicking rocks over the edge to meet their brethren far below. Finally, her composure returned, she stood to her feet and walked up beside me clearing her throat.
“This is my job,” she said quietly. “People hire me to help them, their loved ones. It’s what I do.”
“So who hired you?”
“This time?” She gave a swift kick to a particularly large rock I had been nudging around and sent it flying over the cliff. “No one. That part wasn’t a lie.”
I shook my head. “What do you mean?”
“I mean a friend of a friend told me about you, I felt bad, and I thought I would try to help. It really was from the kindness of my heart.”
We stood in silence next to each other for a minute or two, the soft wind ringing in our ears and the warm sunlight on our skin. As stupid as it sounds, I didn’t want the moment to end.
But it had to.
“What’s going to happen?” I asked her.
She shook her head. “I really don’t know. You’re just going to have to find out. They don’t call it a leap of faith for nothing.”
I approached the ledge and looked down. “Leap of faith, huh?” I turned to look at her wavy red hair pulled back into a ponytail.
“Yeah, yeah. It’s a cliché, but it’s relevant. A little faith never hurt.”
I nodded and turned back to the cliff. I walked to the edge and looked down once more to the crags far below. I was ready. But there was one last thing I needed to know. I turned back to the redheaded beauty standing behind me and found her staring at her watch.
“Hey!” I called.
She looked up, startled, and let out a grunt of aggravation. “Jesus, would you jump already?”
“I just want to know one thing.”
She let out a sigh. “What?”
“Your name.”
Even from 50 feet away I could see her biting her lip, unsure of what she should do or say. “We’re not supposed to give out our names. Safety precaution.”
I nodded and quietly started turning back.
“But,” she started, “seeing as how I’m not technically on the clock and there’s no way you could ever be a potential threat… Annie. My name’s Annie.”
“Annie,” I said. I felt the name on my tongue and let it rest there comfortably. It was a name that seemed to be made to be there, that I had waited for. It felt right. “It was nice to have met you.” I gave her one last smile, put out my arms, and fell backwards over the edge.
As I plummeted to the earth below, my mind almost immediately started to panic and my heart began to race. I flailed my limbs wildly searching for anything to grab onto, but the whole world was a blur.
But then I heard it. A familiar sound that echoed all around me: the screech of a hawk. I pictured the hawk as it circled its prey and imagined it plummeting towards the earth, its wings pressed to its side, its beak leading the way, and in a flash I knew what to do. I held my arms to my sides, forced my legs closed, and pointed my nose towards the ground below, and in two seconds flat I was no longer falling, but diving.
Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad. At the very least, I wouldn’t die kicking and screaming. I would go with calm and grace and beauty.
As the earth rose to meet me, I thought of Annie and everything she had done for me. She was so odd and strange, but in the end, she was the only one who was there for me. But I couldn’t get past what she said: a leap of faith. What did that mean? There is a very clear line of thought when people use that term, usually implying that there is some sort of hope. But hope for what? Annie was too calculated and precise to misuse something as common as that. What did she mean?
I couldn’t let it bother me too much, however. The ground was quickly rising. The wind lashed my face and my eyes watered uncontrollably, but I kept them as open as I could to watch my shadow grow on the ground before me, the shape becoming clearer and more defined with each passing second.
I thought of my family and my friends and how they had all left me of their own accord. I thought of my mother and how she had left me against her will. And I thought of Annie and how I had left her in the cold, after everything she had done for me. I pictured her, standing there, her red hair blowing in the breeze as she bit her lip and told me her name. And for the first time in months, a wave of happiness washed over me. And I had faith.
I focused on my shadow as it grew larger and darker. The slim outline of my body heading straight for the earth looked all too familiar and I smiled at the sight of it. But something was happening. I felt a sharp pain on my back and heard my shirt tearing. I couldn’t tell if it was the wind or if the hawk had decided to claw at my back, thinking I was some sort of threat. It didn’t matter, to be honest. I simply winced and ignored it, watching the ground fall towards me. My breath quickened and a searing pain erupted from my back. I only had seconds to go. I couldn’t die before I actually hit the ground. I wouldn’t let myself. My shadow grew larger, I gritted my teeth for impact, and something sprang out of the sides of the shadow before me. The powerful beating of wings filled my ears and I blacked out.
I came to about 15 minutes later, according to Annie. She found me lying on the rocky ground, a little beaten and scraped up, but nothing that couldn’t be patched.
Oh, and I had wings, too. Let’s not forget about that.
“What the fuck happened? Am I dreaming? Am I dead?”
“Would you shut the hell up already?” Annie implored as she dabbed my face with rubbing alcohol. “You’re fine.”
“But,” I looked to the large protrusions sticking out from my sides and lightly stroked them, “wings. There are wings.”
“Yep, you grew wings. I’m as surprised as you are.”
“You mean you didn’t know this would happen?”
Annie put down the cotton swab and sighed. “No. That’s not how the job works. I don’t know what is going to happen; I just know something is going to happen. Or, at least, something should happen. It’s not always a guarantee.”
“What?!”
“Hey, I called it a leap of faith. You fucking heard me, so don’t try to pin anything on me, asshole. I’m just the observer, the person who has to watch over the client to make sure nothing goes haywire or out of control. And if it does, I’m there to take care of it.”
“I just…” I used muscles I don’t think I ever consciously used before to move the wings and maneuver them. It was clumsy, but it felt natural. “I was so sure I was going to die.”
“Yeah, well, that’s how hope and faith work. They intermingle with fear. Without that fear, without that uncertainty, hope and faith cannot exist. And without hope and faith, well, life is just plain old boring, isn’t it?”
“Am I still dying?”
She smirked and continued dabbing my face with the alcohol soaked cotton swab. “Nope, you are as healthy as ever. But those,” she motioned to my new limbs, “may make it a little difficult to walk around in public.”
I smiled. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet. What you do from here is up to you.” She tossed the cotton swab to the side and placed the bottle of rubbing alcohol into a med kit. We both got to our feet and stood face to face. “Don’t waste it.” I shook my head. She placed a hand to my face and smiled. We stood like that, her hand on my face, and for the second time in my life, I strained and wished and pled for the moment to linger, but like the best things in life, it was over too soon, and she strode to her old white SUV and drove off down the dirt path.
I never saw her again, but not a day goes by where I don’t think of her and the gift she gave me. And I don’t just mean my wings, my new life, my freedom. She gave me her heart for the briefest of moments just before she left that day and I will do everything in my power to give it back. So I soar from mountaintop to mountaintop, from city to city, searching for her. I know the odds are miniscule. But I have faith. What good is life without it?
Standing in the Corner at Parties 