We all said good night out in the parking lot, and I found myself still distracted – looking for familiar cars, checking inside mine before I got in. I did this despite knowing that Jeremy was finished with me – that all of them were.
I went home knowing I wasn’t finished with them, had only been pretending to be. And I went into my apartment, which was the same one, knowing I wasn’t finished with Beth either, with that ancient thing she’d let loose in me. That it wasn’t gone but was lying dormant. I had the urge to call her and with this deadness inside knowing not to.
I carried that deadness to bed with me. And I carried with it a knowledge I’d had all along. That I should’ve died that night – it’d been the best chance I’d had so far. And that I hadn’t? Hadn’t taken it? It wasn’t the relief or comfort I believed it ought to be. It was only a postponement of some kind. A cruel kind of cheat, pressing me to decide it myself.
I’d been left with two courses: do it myself, or undo the things that had put the desire in me to begin with. And it still smarted to see what I’d been up to for years. To see my life – pretty much all of it – as simply about finding someone who’d do me in, do me in for me. Especially it stung because I’d clung tight to an idea of myself as someone who wanted so much to stay alive. Saw myself cheating death, not it cheating me.
And so I lay in my bed, humbled and discouraged because I knew I wasn’t up to offing myself, and I couldn’t see a way to start toward the other passage.
I knew Beth had been an attempt. But right now this only reminded me I wasn’t capable. She’d shown me what I had to face, but then made me see I was nowhere near ready to. That looking at a little bit of it pushed me back to needing to die. I’d seen it this time. I hadn’t been able not to. And while this maybe should’ve felt like progress, maybe was progress, it seemed more like loss.
And so, with it too soon for doing things differently and too late to do them the same, all I could do was stay in this stasis, unable to live in the way I had for so long to give a life all about looking for death while pretending survival. But not yet able to live any way else.
That familiar heaviness crept into my limbs as I thought these things. It began to take me over, and then turn me over, until I lay mostly on my stomach with the pillows pulled close and me huddled into them.
The blackness came behind the heaviness. Came on comforting and big as always. But not deathly. Not exactly. Not for tonight at least. And this let me believe I could maybe just dip into it. For little bits of time. Go to it without that eerie pull to stay and, in this way, maybe get some rest. Get some actual sleep that might start me mending.
So I went to it, greedy as always. But, even with that slumber taking me over, and then taking me under, I knew that leviathan thing slept this same darkness. Lay with me, too. Resting, biding its time.
Copyright
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2004100912
A complete catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library on request
The right of Heather Lewis to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Copyright © 2004 Hobart Lewis and Ann Rower
The characters and events in this book are fictitious.
Any similarity to real persons, dead or alive, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
First published in 2004 by Serpent’s Tail,
4 Blackstock Mews, London N4 2BT
website: www.serpentstail.com
Printed by Mackays of Chatham, plc
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