Why is she crying?
Is it because she’s like me? Is she feeling what I’m feeling now?
Fast forward ten years, and I’m in middle school with scars on my wrists, sitting at an empty lunch table. I’m listening to music, and it’s that same awful song that Adas had shown me a few weeks ago. I listen to it over and over, as if it’s my own private meditation. The repetition keeps me grounded, keeps me sane, keeps me from jumping off the top of the school building.
Now, I’m back in my body, back in that same damn car, holding a pistol that I’d bought from the man in 219 with a warrant and two pit bulls. It cost me two hundred dollars.
He’d used it in a shooting recently.
I told him I could take it off his hands. The cops don’t scare me.
In fact, in this moment, nothing scares me.
As soon as I realize what it is I’m about to do, all of my anxieties wash away as a blanket of warmth comes over me. I have the power to end my own suffering. And I’m going to.
The relief I feel is paramount to anything I’ve ever felt, like I’m crying in my mother’s arms as she wraps me in a blanket fresh from the dryer.
I pull back the hammer on the pistol, put it to my temple, and pull the trigger.
The sound is intense, of course, but I’m immediately in freefall through spacetime, flying through a wormhole to eternity as the blood in my head pours out from my wound and drains into my belly. My body may fight to survive, but my mind has made itself up. I will no longer suffer at the hands of my depression, my hopeless financial situation, or my dead-end job.
I have no family, no friends, nobody to return to at night.
There is no other choice.
* * *
“River? River, can you hear me?”
When I come to, I can see Adas standing over me, his face concerned and frightened.
“What the fuck just happened? I think you might have had a seizure,” he continues, kneeling down to meet me on the floor.
We’re in my apartment, and I’m in the present moment again. Seeing him here, a place from mypast,feels wrong, like the world’s least requested crossover episode of a dying children’s show.
“I don’t think so. I don’t think so,” I repeat, listening closely for any echo in my voice. Could I be dead? Was all of this just a hallucination of my injured, dying brain?
“Can you tell me where we are?” he asks, taking my hand and then feeling my forehead.
“We’re in my old apartment, but I’m not sure why,” I reply.
There’s a weight in my brain that’s completely gone now, like I’ve been trying to remember a word, and I’ve finally done it. It feels like I’ve been holding my breath for months, and now I’ve finally been given permission to release it.
He slowly begins to help me sit up, but I fall back down as my head grows dizzy with the movement.
“You wanted to see your old life, who you used to be.”
When I realize that he’s right, I want to stand up just so that I can collapse in disbelief all over again.
Adas didn’t shoot me.
I did.
“Adas, I know what happened. I remember everything. It’s all back in my head, where it used to be,” I blurt. The more I try to explain, the more self-conscious I become. I feel like I’m not making any sense whatsoever.
He glances at me with concern, trying once again to help me up so that I can at least make proper eye contact with him.
“You didn’t shoot me. I shot myself. I used your gunfire as a cover for my own. That’s why you thought it was you. You did all of this for nothing. I was trying to escape from my old life.”