WILL YOU WAIT FOR ME?
by E.D. Gray12/20/07
Disclaimer: No this is not a suicide note, this just comes from listening to Killswitch Engage late at night around 3a.m. in the morning, knowing that I should take my happy ass to sleep, but don’t. Although, I figure, if I were to write a suicide note, this would be it. But it’s…not. Not right now, anyway. I just had to get this off my chest and out of my head, and I think this thing is just too fucking heartbreaking and depressing in its own stupidly hopeful way. It was spawned from the unholy union of recent conversations, recent events and KSE. Remind me never to listen to these people this late at night ever again. Thanks.
I remember talking to her on late nights, a while go, way back when life was simple in so far as to say I was young and I was invincible and not one cold or cut or bruise could make me believe otherwise; I was a conqueror among my fellows, I was alive and nothing could snuff it out. Nothing at all because there was everything to live for. I could breathe, and you know, so could she. She could breathe, she could hope, and even though she was a pessimist at times, there was still an optimist lurking under the cowl of frowns and scowls and the occasional depressed jab.
Maybe that was the first clue, and I should’ve known then…
I should’ve known….
She always had this saying that she’d say whenever she just couldn’t make up her mind about something: if she had to chose between not buying a new pair of shoes and buying one, she’d ponder the consequences of purchasing them later and turn to me and say flippantly with a smile, “Gotta go for broke, babe.” She said to me once that it was a terrible saying, and that she wanted me to help her come up with a new one, something that wouldn’t get her into trouble “one of these days.”
And maybe that was my second clue, and I should’ve guessed then…
But, even with the pessimism and the self-critical thoughts, there was life there. There was this hunger to see and know and do everything. She had a plan that she wasn’t going to go anywhere until she fifty, but then she always said crazy things and after a while I just stopped paying attention, just stopped listening because there was no point. Or, at least, I thought there wasn’t a point.
Sometimes I think that if I’d just paid attention in those last months…
And you know, a lot of women have a goddess complex, you know? A lot of them think of themselves with a holier-than-thou complex, and yeah, she’d think that kind of stuff too, but she’d sometimes say that one day she’d become a goddess and she’d save everyone. This, of course, used to be accompanied with her pessimistic moods and really, after a while, I just couldn’t be bothered with them. I couldn’t spare the minutes, or want to, to deal with her mood swings. She honestly made me think she was manic depressive sometimes, the way she would shift.
That was my third clue, and maybe if I’d have paid attention to that one...
After all, they say these things come in threes.
She’d tell me that there was a little humanitarian in her, and that she wanted to gather up all the pain and all anger and all the hurt and all the anguish that existed in the world, that she wanted to gather it all up and take it into herself and relieve everyone else of all the evils that hurt them. She’d see things and she’d always want to save them, take care of them and sometimes I wondered why she’d want to do that, why she’d put herself out there like that. Why?
I don’t know. Maybe I was a selfish asshole. Maybe I lost the ability to care for people like that, or maybe I just was never born with that genetic marker that caused people to want to drop everything, hop on a plane and fly to Africa to help all the poor starving people in impoverished villages. I didn’t cry about those things. I didn’t let them get to me. I was invincible, remember?
But her…
Things always got her. Even the smallest things, she could never understand: someone cut her off in traffic and her temper exploded and she’d angrily wonder why people would risk someone else’s life on the road just so that they could get to a CVS when it wouldn’t close until eleven o’clock at night? She’d get angry at small things, be hurt about tiny things, as if the entire world would end just because of the smallest infraction. I could never understand that much…stress…that a person would bring upon themselves.
Like I said, I don’t know.
She’d tell me sometimes that she just…couldn’t handle the stresses of the real world, so she’d always try to see people with these thick, thick rose tinted glasses. She wanted to believe, she told me, that everyone was good on the inside. Even with the things that happened in her past, she still wanted to believe that everyone was inherently good. And on her incredibly pessimistic days, she’d take anything that she’d done, anything that she had said to someone, no matter how justified, she’d somehow turn it so that she had hurt someone irrevocably, that she had caused someone pain. I remember I had done something hurtful to her, and she still made it seem as if she had hurt me by daring to correct me or scold me or ask me why I had done it.
With all these clues, I shouldn’t have been as blind as I had been.
I should have seen, but…
I was invincible, and to me, things were forever, people were forever. Even if I had seen death in my life, it had never touched me in such a way that…well, I’d never been hurt so bad that I was reminded of my own mortality. Never. Not until…
But I had never thought she’d…
I knew she had attempted it; she’d told me herself, but she’d been so calm when she’d admitted it to me, as if it were a past memory that had absolutely no bearing on the present at all, no connection to present circumstances. I knew she had been sad, and for a very long time, but I never…
She was strong, I had always come to believe that. Even when she cried, she still tried not to, she still tried to put herself and her emotions on two different continents so that neither could touch the other. Maybe that was my last clue, and maybe clues actually come in fours…
She said she was going to become a goddess…
She said that when she became one, she was going to take away all the hurts in the world…
She said…
They told me the morning after, what had happened, and my eyes sting even remembering…
I just don’t want to remember, but I have to…
Her mother called my house and spoke to my mom, and I was sleeping, dreaming actually, and it was a pleasant dream, and she was there. We were seated on rocks near the sandy shore of a beach. The sand was white, the sea this kind of emerald, deep blue type color that you only get with those expertly taken photos of island paradises. The sun was shining, like a lemon drop in the sky, as she would say, and it was all so quiet and so pristine, you just knew it had to be unreal, but that was okay. That was okay because I hadn’t been wakened yet, and it was just a dream, and it was quite all right.
She sat, in this flowing dress, white like the most purest of saltwater pearls, a sharp contrast to her brown skin, but that was alright because she wore it perfectly. Her hair was down and it was curled under just the way I liked it to be. On her back were these gossamer wings, that were so delicate and so iridescent, and the light hit her in such a way that everything about her was surreal, like her skin glowed, and the dress glowed and her hair glowed and her eyes, when they turned to me, were shinning like amber, trapped in her irises. Her smile was gentle as she reached over and caressed my cheek, threaded her hand through my hair in the way that I liked the most, and when I leaned my head into her touch, she only smiled wider, chuckled a little bit and whispered, “You are so much like a cat, babe.” And her voice sounded like…it sounded…ethereal is all I can say to describe it. And I only looked up at her, smiled and continued to rub her hand with my head in the way that always made her laugh. And she did and it was better than real life. It was like bells and filled with so much, just so much joy, exuberance, freedom, like I had never heard it sound before.
She let me continue my play for what seemed like an eternity on the beach, the waves rushing forward and backwards towards the shore and then away from it, the sun shining above us, and her shimmering, watching me, smiling at me. I looked up at her again, tried to smile, but frowned instead because her smile, it was different from the lighthearted one it had been earlier.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, and she shrugged in her way that I knew meant she wanted to say something, but wasn’t sure if she should. I smiled reassuringly. “Just say it.”
She turned away. Looked out towards the flow and ebb of the ocean tides, and shrugged again.
“I’ll have to go soon,” she replied. Her voice was sad. I smiled broadly, gently took her chin between my fingers and turned her to look at me. Her gaze was as sad as her voice had been.
“Don’t worry about it, hun,” I replied easily, wanting her to smile for me. But she didn’t. Her gaze softened slightly, eyes peering into mine with a look that almost felt like it were piercing into my soul, delving into the very heart of my darkness. It was disconcerting. “I’ll just see you later.”
Her sad smile covered her face again. “Remember when I told you…I was going to become a goddess?”
I nodded, not following. Maybe she was going to go off on one of her tangents. Those sometimes made her feel better, and I hoped this one would too. But fate, as I’ve come to learn, is not so kind.
“I…It’s time,” she replied. I frowned. She continued. “I’m going to stop the hurting, babe. I’m going to make it so that nobody ever hurts again. I’m going to stop all the murderers and all the killers and all the bad things that make people want to hurt each other. I’m…I’m going to make love real. I’m going to make it so that it exists.”
I shook my head. “I don’t…I don’t follow, babe, but….okay. If you say so.”
Her sad smile came back as she stood, balancing herself on the rock and pulling away from my grasp. I frowned, tried to rise with her, but she waved me to remain seated.
“Where I go,” and she turned, facing the sea, “you can’t follow. Nobody can follow. I’m going to become a goddess, hun. I’m going to save the world.”
And for some reason, this incredible emptiness gripped me. An incredible fear over came me and cold shivers ran up and down my body.
“Babe?”
She didn’t answer me.
She stepped down from the rocks, her footing her sure, her steps confident.
“Babe?”
I tried to stand, but something…I couldn’t move. What the hell--? I looked and saw her, her feet landing on the sand with a soft ‘pooft’ sound, her dress rustling about her legs like the gentle flutter of owl wings.
“Babe? Wait! What’s going on? What--? Where are you going?”
She didn’t turn, she didn’t look back, she only stepped forward along the sand, headed down the beach, toward the water.
“Wait! Babe, wait! Where are you going? Just…Fuck! Come back! Babe, please! Come back!”
She continued, unrelenting, unfaltering, ever forward. Ever forward. And she wouldn’t stop for me, she wouldn’t come back when I called to her, when I begged her, when tears were falling down my face in a way they hadn’t fallen in years, and desperation filled my every being. I couldn’t move. It was as if gravity had gone turncoat on me and kept me rooted to the spot, rooted to the rocks as if I were one of the packed, hardened earth.
“Don’t go for broke!” I shouted desperately. “Don’t go for broke!! We’ll come up with a new slogan! You and me, babe! Just! Don’t go!”
It was when she was at the edge of the beach, water rushing up her legs, licking her thighs that she turned back to me, smile still in place, body still shining in the sunlight. She raised a hand to me, fingers spread wide and waved. Her mouth opened and I heard her voice, still soft, still ethereal, over the driving surf, “Too late, hun. Too late. I’m going to save the world. I’m going to save the world.”
Then she disappeared, swallowed by the sea.
And I woke up, sweating and feeling an emotional pain that was almost physical. A shadow stood over me. I looked up and saw the teary-eyed face of my mother, her eyes red from numerous tears shed.
“What happened?” I asked, dread suddenly filling me.
My mom told me the news, voice cracking in a way I had never heard it. My mom told me and…all I remember was feeling this overwhelming sense of shock and numbness. Numbness because no, no, no, she couldn’t be…
She wouldn’t do that…
She promised she would never do that. That she wouldn’t…
And she….
She…
That dream was my warning, or maybe…
Maybe it was my goodbye. It was my goodbye, and if I’d only paid attention to the signs when I saw them, when they were presented to me, I never would have had to experience…
She never would have…
My girlfriend died. Killed herself.
She died on January 15, 2008.
Just after the New Year.
She died at 2:52 a.m. from massive blood loss. Slit wrists, and a serene look on her face I was told later.
My girlfriend died.
And I guess, maybe….
God, I hope, I hope she’s out there. I hope she got her wish. I hope, somewhere, in some place, a man is about to kill a child and my girlfriend descends on him, invisible, but still very much so there, and whispers in the man’s ear, a quiet voice of consciousness, and the man, god, I hope, I hope the man reconsiders, and he lets the child go, and leaves everyone be, and he turns away from his evil ways. I hope to a God I never put much faith in that she’s making changes, that she’s become a goddess, that she’s sitting beside that God I don’t believe in, I hope she’s sitting next to him, and she’s whispering in his ear and I hope he’s listening and I hope he’s taking back all the evil that exists. I hope that he’s listening to her because she gave and gave and gave, and I hope he sees how much she gave, and how much she still wants to give. I hope he listens and pulls back all the cruelty and all the pain and anguish, for her sake. I hope, oh god, I hope, I just hope…
I hope she created love.
Because in the end, that’s all that’s left to give.
And maybe, maybe that’s enough.
Dedication: To everyone. To the whole world. Let’s make love real. Let’s make it so that it really exists.
© 2008 Erica Denise Gray
BTW: I really wish this blog would do automatic formatting *grumbles*
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