There comes a point in everyone’s life when you’re standing on the precipice. A cliff’s edge with gritty rock cutting the bottoms of your feet and crumbling one granule at a time. The salt spray cuts your face and the wind almost blows you over, tearing through your hair. You know you cannot go back. In your perfect memory it is rolling hills of green, but a wiser voice whispers that it is nothing but a barren wasteland of craggy stone. Your soul aches and your heart flutters and you wonder if there is any room left for strength, resolve. There’s an emptiness but it fills and consumes you until you’re too afraid to turn away from it. You almost lean into it but feel the open air and hang tight to the edge. You haven’t yet learned to fly, but facing out into the rushing unknown, you scramble in your depths to remember how. If you let go, you know you will not come out the other side the same. *** Very rarely is it the actual loss that pains us, it is the change; the variation from routine. Faced with the countenance of death, you think fondly on smiles and laughter from golden summer days. What cuts your soul is that they are lost from your world and, with that, the world as you know it is changed. Only one coffee cup abandoned in the sink in the early morning light. You no longer have a reason to drive down their road, but your car seems to steer itself in that direction all the same. Change is the iron grip around your heart, the break of something existential you can feel. You cry, you scream, you rage at the injustice of it all. And finally a quiet comes. Not hopelessness, not acceptance, but somewhere in the no man’s land between. Your grip eases, your breath in time with the rise and fall of the waves. You know that there is cold and fear, but they are no longer with you. *** You close your eyes. You don’t jump, you don’t step, you just fall. Feet sliding away from the threshold, the wind rushing up to meet you. A roaring in your ears so loud that it is silence. It’s peace. It’s nightfall.
