manyreddevils
02-14-2007, 07:59 PM
Crossing The Bar
When she first saw him he was sitting in the branches of a tree, like some wandering forest god or a lost child, she wasn’t sure which. A wry look in his eyes, like an impending explosion of laughter on his face in the shifting light of the sun through the leaves. The stones were warm on the path passing under her feet. She smiled, at him, the trees, the day drowning in light. His expression changed, became thoughtful, as if the smile were a question he was struggling to answer. She had slowed down without realizing it, and came to a stop at the base of the tree. The thoughtful look on his face passed away, revealing the same joyous conspiracy that had been there before. He slid from his branch to the ground, and gave a flawlessly executed bow.
“Hello,” he said, with an absolute gravity that should have sounded ridiculous, following as it did the act of leaping from a tree, yet managed to seem appropriate.
“H- hello,” she replied, unsure how to respond. The tall, thin figure stood in front of her with earnest eyes that made her uncomfortable. She would have felt like he was mocking her, if he weren’t so painfully genuine.
“Do you want to go for a walk?” His eyes held on to hers.
“I… yeah, I mean, sure.”
He started walking, looking back questioningly when she didn’t immediately follow.
“Coming?”
“Yeah,” she said, still not quite sure what was happening.
They walked together, neither one saying anything. He moved leisurely, hands in his jean pockets, apparently satisfied with simply walking. By this time, she’d regained enough of her composure to break the silence.
“So, do you spend a lot of time in trees?”
“Hmm? Oh, not really. I was just up there until you came along.”
“I guess that makes sense.”
“Does it? Good.” He said, sounding almost relieved.
They fell silent again, the path winding beneath their strides, his meandering, unhurried gait and her quick, businesslike steps. They passed students sprawled over the grass like planets; their books, laptops, cell phones all spread out in orbit. Farther from the path, children’s voices gave life to cold structures of steel mesh and pipes. Couples sat on benches like their own continents.
“Are you a student here?” She asked.
“I’m not really sure.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, sometimes I go in the rooms and listen to what the little men in jackets have to say. Some rooms are better than others. Other days it’s no good being inside, so I just walk.”
“So you’re not full-time?”
“I guess not. I wouldn’t be able to get much work done if I was in there all the time, anyway.”
“Do you work around here or something?” She was becoming confused at this point; he didn’t look like one of the homeless men she saw regularly on corners and highway intersections. He didn’t have the haunted look in his eyes or the beaten brow she’d come to associate with that particular group of desperate men. His clothes, while not especially stylish, were clean and well kept, and he could have passed for any of the dozen or so male students she passed every day, at least as far as apparel was concerned.
“I’m taken care of. I’ve got pretty much everything I need. This really is a beautiful place. I don’t know why you haven’t… well, I suppose I was told things would be this way. I just never expected…” His thoughts didn’t seem to be addressed to her, for he simply kept walking without looking to her for a response. He had the same inscrutable expression as when she had smiled at him before, as if looking for an answer to a question that he’d never thought of asking. A flock of sparrows fled from the path ahead of them, the air vibrating under the sudden assault of tiny, urgent wings.
Whatever his thoughts, he remained silent, and so did she. She was intrigued, confused, and a little afraid. The thought arose that this strange, albeit friendly person might be insane. An escaped patient, perhaps, fleeing his rubber-coated prison to finally catch the little man who kept rearranging the stars and stealing the teeth from under his pillow. Maybe before she had come along he had been deep in conversation with a congress of squirrels, high in the branches. Discussing the economy, or possibly the Lincoln-Douglas debates? She kept scrutinizing him in her peripheral vision, looking for a wristband, an ear tag, a bar code, whatever they used to mark those people. What had she been thinking? A stranger descends from the trees without so much as an introduction, bows, and asks her for a walk, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. The more she thought about it, the more alarmed she became.
Strange, dark thoughts began entering her mind unlooked for. His expression upon seeing her became in her mind twisted and full of unthinking malice. The path and the leaves dancing in and out of the light all around her grew somehow sinister, like the part in a movie where it turns out that the little girl in the corduroy dress is really a ghost, and she has hollow sockets for eyes. Her own eyes turned to his hands, as though a knife or a meat hook or a chainsaw or some even more incongruous and imaginative implement of tearing and pain might suddenly spring into existence there. She kept walking beside him stiffly, no sense in alarming him, the now-threatening figure whose lanky strides were no doubt driven by a dark and malevolent purpose. How could she have missed it before? It was obvious in the way his arms swung like dead things, the empty, gap-faced smile, the–
“You’re afraid.” It wasn’t a question. He stopped walking and turned to face her. His eyes, his great pendulum arms, his body, an entire edifice of weird angles and crooked lines seemed to stretch and swell until he dominated her field of vision. His face seemed to flicker, now a bestial mask, scarred and bent, now a bleached and cracking death’s head. The worst was when the light hit him from a certain angle, and his face looked almost normal, with all the human features in the right places, with an expression of mild disinterest, as if listening to a discussion of golf or the lumber business, but underneath it all she could tell that something was missing, like a dead man wearing makeup. She thought of screaming, running, fighting, but the bridge from her mind to her limbs and vocal chords had been flooded by the rising waters of terror. Where had this apparition come from, and how had it cloaked itself so perfectly?
“Look, you’re going to have to trust me. Whatever you’re seeing, you have to fight against it. I can’t explain it to you the way you are now. The fear is a lie. You are drowning in it. If you don’t begin to breathe again you will lose everything. You must trust me.”
The words came like a breeze, whispering in her ears. But there was a roar like a river, like an airplane. The mouth twisting and grimacing on that dead face seemed to be trying to swallow her. Her chest filled with timpani heartbeats, earthquakes threatening to shake her apart. She was frozen solid, an insect pumped full of formaldehyde, tagged, classified, pinned to a board under the glass. A wren hopped from branch to branch in the tree above her, its head tilting and jerking back and forth, pointing one tiny black eye at a time towards her. Swiftly it leapt into the air and darted away, an explosion of feathers and spindly legs.
She could feel her mind giving way to a blank, white wall of fear, creeping in at the edges of her vision, bringing a sharp metallic smell to her nostrils. The rushing sound in her ears seemed to rise, beginning to engulf her. Quicksand and turning to stone and drowning all at once. Then something new began to happen.
She heard (though nothing came to her ears) a quiet, steady voice beneath the noise, like music from a radio chiming softly in a crowded train station. The words were not familiar to her, and yet she found images and sounds and meanings igniting in her mind like bombs or flowers, beautiful and fragile. Some words and phrases hovered just out of reach, as if she’d once understood them but had forgotten. It was strange, how close the words were to what they meant, how easily language and purpose shifted back and forth between each other. It occurred to her that perhaps she was hearing the truth for the first time in her life. No – even this wasn’t strictly true; she’d heard the words before, indeed she had always heard them. She’d never been afraid enough to listen.
With this thought, she became aware of something else. He was holding her, singing gently into her right ear. The warmth of his breath seemed to spread slowly through her body, and she could feel the fear receding, like a cool wave rasping against the sand as it falls back. As the heat reached her chest she began to gasp for air. She hadn’t been breathing. The vivid images in her mind began to fade, the insistent voice fading once more into the background. Her heart beat erratically. The sudden darkness that had colored the landscape was gone, giving way to sun and the voices of birds. She could still hear him singing. He held her firmly, waiting until the last vestige of cold faded from her toes before he let her go. He looked at her, his eyes serious.
“I didn’t think this would happen so soon. I should have expected it. The fear always comes when you start to get close, but it’s different for everyone. This is the strongest I’ve ever seen. I was barely able to bring you back.”
“What…what are you talking about? Close to what? Who are you? What just happened to me?” The questions came all at once, without pause for reply.
“Everything will make sense, I promise. You have to trust me a little while longer; you’re not close enough to see it yet. All you need to know is that what is coming is extremely important.” He turned to continue walking.
“Wait, what if I don’t want to go with you? I don’t know anything about you. You could be insane, a sociopath, an axe-murderer–“
“It is your choice, of course. If you really want to stay here, that’s fine. I think you already know that you won’t.” All she saw was the back of his sand brown hair as he walked away.
He was right. She knew perfectly well by now that she had nothing to fear from him, though she wasn’t quite sure how she’d come by the knowledge. Reasoning and prudence do little to discredit simple experience. She could not deny that something had happened to her that she could not explain. Whatever it was, she knew she couldn’t let it rest any more than she could stop her heart beating. She swore softly, another unusual occurrence, and hurried to catch up.
“So what can you tell me? Or am I just supposed to shuffle along and keep my mouth shut?” She tried to put a playful lilt into her voice, sticking out her lower lip in mock contrition. It was a tactic she’d used before, with some success.
“Well, there’s a lot I could tell you. It’s not against the rules or anything like that. Rules really don’t have a lot to do with it anyway. But words only work when there are holding places for them in your mind, when they’re speaking to something that is already there. What I’d be trying to describe, you can’t understand until it’s happened to you.” He spoke apologetically.
“You keep talking about this ‘it’. Is it somewhere we’re going? Something I have to do?”
“I don’t think you get it. As far as those questions go, the answer is yes. But there’s a lot more to it. It’s something you have to choose, but when it happens you don’t feel like you have a choice at all. It’s being afraid, and rightly so, but it’s fear and love all intertwined, and… even when I say the words I know they’re not the truth. Or not all of it, which might as well be none. I am sorry. Surely you’ve experienced something you couldn’t explain to someone who hadn’t? It’s not nearly so rare as it may seem. Love, war, faith, fear. There are things that aren’t internal. Who could really expect everything to be contained in something as fragile and limited as consciousness? As if reality itself were merely an extension of humanity.” He stopped talking and half-smiled. “I’ll stop. They all tell me I talk too much.”
“Who’s ‘They’?”
“Another difficult question to answer. I think it’s better if you just find out for yourself without me giving you a lot of half-truth to hold on to. It can be difficult enough getting rid of the wrong ideas, let alone those that are almost right. The good has always gotten in the way of the best. It’s simple to let go of something you don’t think is worth holding on to.”
“I guess…there’s not much to say, then. But what about-“
She stopped mid-sentence because something was happening. As they walked, she could feel the temperature dropping again. She looked up at him in fear, half-expecting to see the bent man again. He was walking normally, all his limbs in correct proportion to one another. She looked back, but could see nothing behind them but a mist that wasn’t a mist. It was like her eyes couldn’t focus, but deeper than that. Her mind was unable to resolve anything she saw behind her. She could hear the roaring in her ears once more, only this time it came unmistakably from an external source. It wasn’t necessarily louder, just more purposeful, with definite intent and direction. Her footsteps quickened, her hand reached for his. He held her like a father would, pulling her gently forward by the lifelines in her palm.
“We’re here, almost to the shore. Just a little farther.”
“What…what is this place?” She had to shout to be heard.
They were standing on the edge of a torrent. The dark, swiftly moving waters were the source of the overpowering noise, now moving through her entire body. She couldn’t see to the other side, it was wreathed in the same distorting fog that had filled the path behind her. The longer she looked into the water, the more blurred and static everything else appeared. Holding her hand up to her face, she could still see the currents and weaving patterns of the river behind it. She felt thin, stretched out, like a child’s watercolor painting.
“This is the place you have to choose. You can try to cross, or you can stay here.”
“I don’t understand. What’s on the other side? How am I supposed to get there? Why is everything out of focus?” Her questions were like fingers desperately clinging to find purchase on any surface there was, for she could feel herself slipping.
“You cannot know until you cross. But there is no going back. It’s either the mist or the river. There are no guarantees, whatever you choose. Not all fear is internal, nor is it unwarranted.” His voice echoed in the thunder surrounding them.
“No going back. Then, am I –?”
“It isn’t what you think. How could it be? You are not enough yet. You think in sunrises and sunsets, collapsing stars, sleeping and awakening. To cross the river is to cross the metaphor, to shatter the looking glass and see the world behind it. Even now we’re only half-true. The image is necessary even in overcoming it.”
“And I have to…to do it alone?”
“To enter the river is a choice no one can make for you. It’s true of any choice that really is a choice, and this is the closest you’ll ever be to making one. And I wouldn’t suggest waiting to make it. The ferryman and his toll are inventions to ease man’s fears of the single most terrifying thing in his reality. Real freedom is woven inextricably with love, with fear. And there is no escaping it, in the end. Or the beginning.”
She stared into the dark water. He was right. She had never been more afraid in her life. And yet, she could feel herself growing more insubstantial with every beat of her heart. If there had been a breeze, she felt that she would have been swept away, scattered like dust. Somehow she knew that she could, if she wanted, simply let go, pass into nonbeing. The comfort of the thought was as translucent as the diminishing shadow of her body. A choice, he had said? A choice like gravity, or like falling in love.
Trembling, she stepped into the water.
When she first saw him he was sitting in the branches of a tree, like some wandering forest god or a lost child, she wasn’t sure which. A wry look in his eyes, like an impending explosion of laughter on his face in the shifting light of the sun through the leaves. The stones were warm on the path passing under her feet. She smiled, at him, the trees, the day drowning in light. His expression changed, became thoughtful, as if the smile were a question he was struggling to answer. She had slowed down without realizing it, and came to a stop at the base of the tree. The thoughtful look on his face passed away, revealing the same joyous conspiracy that had been there before. He slid from his branch to the ground, and gave a flawlessly executed bow.
“Hello,” he said, with an absolute gravity that should have sounded ridiculous, following as it did the act of leaping from a tree, yet managed to seem appropriate.
“H- hello,” she replied, unsure how to respond. The tall, thin figure stood in front of her with earnest eyes that made her uncomfortable. She would have felt like he was mocking her, if he weren’t so painfully genuine.
“Do you want to go for a walk?” His eyes held on to hers.
“I… yeah, I mean, sure.”
He started walking, looking back questioningly when she didn’t immediately follow.
“Coming?”
“Yeah,” she said, still not quite sure what was happening.
They walked together, neither one saying anything. He moved leisurely, hands in his jean pockets, apparently satisfied with simply walking. By this time, she’d regained enough of her composure to break the silence.
“So, do you spend a lot of time in trees?”
“Hmm? Oh, not really. I was just up there until you came along.”
“I guess that makes sense.”
“Does it? Good.” He said, sounding almost relieved.
They fell silent again, the path winding beneath their strides, his meandering, unhurried gait and her quick, businesslike steps. They passed students sprawled over the grass like planets; their books, laptops, cell phones all spread out in orbit. Farther from the path, children’s voices gave life to cold structures of steel mesh and pipes. Couples sat on benches like their own continents.
“Are you a student here?” She asked.
“I’m not really sure.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, sometimes I go in the rooms and listen to what the little men in jackets have to say. Some rooms are better than others. Other days it’s no good being inside, so I just walk.”
“So you’re not full-time?”
“I guess not. I wouldn’t be able to get much work done if I was in there all the time, anyway.”
“Do you work around here or something?” She was becoming confused at this point; he didn’t look like one of the homeless men she saw regularly on corners and highway intersections. He didn’t have the haunted look in his eyes or the beaten brow she’d come to associate with that particular group of desperate men. His clothes, while not especially stylish, were clean and well kept, and he could have passed for any of the dozen or so male students she passed every day, at least as far as apparel was concerned.
“I’m taken care of. I’ve got pretty much everything I need. This really is a beautiful place. I don’t know why you haven’t… well, I suppose I was told things would be this way. I just never expected…” His thoughts didn’t seem to be addressed to her, for he simply kept walking without looking to her for a response. He had the same inscrutable expression as when she had smiled at him before, as if looking for an answer to a question that he’d never thought of asking. A flock of sparrows fled from the path ahead of them, the air vibrating under the sudden assault of tiny, urgent wings.
Whatever his thoughts, he remained silent, and so did she. She was intrigued, confused, and a little afraid. The thought arose that this strange, albeit friendly person might be insane. An escaped patient, perhaps, fleeing his rubber-coated prison to finally catch the little man who kept rearranging the stars and stealing the teeth from under his pillow. Maybe before she had come along he had been deep in conversation with a congress of squirrels, high in the branches. Discussing the economy, or possibly the Lincoln-Douglas debates? She kept scrutinizing him in her peripheral vision, looking for a wristband, an ear tag, a bar code, whatever they used to mark those people. What had she been thinking? A stranger descends from the trees without so much as an introduction, bows, and asks her for a walk, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. The more she thought about it, the more alarmed she became.
Strange, dark thoughts began entering her mind unlooked for. His expression upon seeing her became in her mind twisted and full of unthinking malice. The path and the leaves dancing in and out of the light all around her grew somehow sinister, like the part in a movie where it turns out that the little girl in the corduroy dress is really a ghost, and she has hollow sockets for eyes. Her own eyes turned to his hands, as though a knife or a meat hook or a chainsaw or some even more incongruous and imaginative implement of tearing and pain might suddenly spring into existence there. She kept walking beside him stiffly, no sense in alarming him, the now-threatening figure whose lanky strides were no doubt driven by a dark and malevolent purpose. How could she have missed it before? It was obvious in the way his arms swung like dead things, the empty, gap-faced smile, the–
“You’re afraid.” It wasn’t a question. He stopped walking and turned to face her. His eyes, his great pendulum arms, his body, an entire edifice of weird angles and crooked lines seemed to stretch and swell until he dominated her field of vision. His face seemed to flicker, now a bestial mask, scarred and bent, now a bleached and cracking death’s head. The worst was when the light hit him from a certain angle, and his face looked almost normal, with all the human features in the right places, with an expression of mild disinterest, as if listening to a discussion of golf or the lumber business, but underneath it all she could tell that something was missing, like a dead man wearing makeup. She thought of screaming, running, fighting, but the bridge from her mind to her limbs and vocal chords had been flooded by the rising waters of terror. Where had this apparition come from, and how had it cloaked itself so perfectly?
“Look, you’re going to have to trust me. Whatever you’re seeing, you have to fight against it. I can’t explain it to you the way you are now. The fear is a lie. You are drowning in it. If you don’t begin to breathe again you will lose everything. You must trust me.”
The words came like a breeze, whispering in her ears. But there was a roar like a river, like an airplane. The mouth twisting and grimacing on that dead face seemed to be trying to swallow her. Her chest filled with timpani heartbeats, earthquakes threatening to shake her apart. She was frozen solid, an insect pumped full of formaldehyde, tagged, classified, pinned to a board under the glass. A wren hopped from branch to branch in the tree above her, its head tilting and jerking back and forth, pointing one tiny black eye at a time towards her. Swiftly it leapt into the air and darted away, an explosion of feathers and spindly legs.
She could feel her mind giving way to a blank, white wall of fear, creeping in at the edges of her vision, bringing a sharp metallic smell to her nostrils. The rushing sound in her ears seemed to rise, beginning to engulf her. Quicksand and turning to stone and drowning all at once. Then something new began to happen.
She heard (though nothing came to her ears) a quiet, steady voice beneath the noise, like music from a radio chiming softly in a crowded train station. The words were not familiar to her, and yet she found images and sounds and meanings igniting in her mind like bombs or flowers, beautiful and fragile. Some words and phrases hovered just out of reach, as if she’d once understood them but had forgotten. It was strange, how close the words were to what they meant, how easily language and purpose shifted back and forth between each other. It occurred to her that perhaps she was hearing the truth for the first time in her life. No – even this wasn’t strictly true; she’d heard the words before, indeed she had always heard them. She’d never been afraid enough to listen.
With this thought, she became aware of something else. He was holding her, singing gently into her right ear. The warmth of his breath seemed to spread slowly through her body, and she could feel the fear receding, like a cool wave rasping against the sand as it falls back. As the heat reached her chest she began to gasp for air. She hadn’t been breathing. The vivid images in her mind began to fade, the insistent voice fading once more into the background. Her heart beat erratically. The sudden darkness that had colored the landscape was gone, giving way to sun and the voices of birds. She could still hear him singing. He held her firmly, waiting until the last vestige of cold faded from her toes before he let her go. He looked at her, his eyes serious.
“I didn’t think this would happen so soon. I should have expected it. The fear always comes when you start to get close, but it’s different for everyone. This is the strongest I’ve ever seen. I was barely able to bring you back.”
“What…what are you talking about? Close to what? Who are you? What just happened to me?” The questions came all at once, without pause for reply.
“Everything will make sense, I promise. You have to trust me a little while longer; you’re not close enough to see it yet. All you need to know is that what is coming is extremely important.” He turned to continue walking.
“Wait, what if I don’t want to go with you? I don’t know anything about you. You could be insane, a sociopath, an axe-murderer–“
“It is your choice, of course. If you really want to stay here, that’s fine. I think you already know that you won’t.” All she saw was the back of his sand brown hair as he walked away.
He was right. She knew perfectly well by now that she had nothing to fear from him, though she wasn’t quite sure how she’d come by the knowledge. Reasoning and prudence do little to discredit simple experience. She could not deny that something had happened to her that she could not explain. Whatever it was, she knew she couldn’t let it rest any more than she could stop her heart beating. She swore softly, another unusual occurrence, and hurried to catch up.
“So what can you tell me? Or am I just supposed to shuffle along and keep my mouth shut?” She tried to put a playful lilt into her voice, sticking out her lower lip in mock contrition. It was a tactic she’d used before, with some success.
“Well, there’s a lot I could tell you. It’s not against the rules or anything like that. Rules really don’t have a lot to do with it anyway. But words only work when there are holding places for them in your mind, when they’re speaking to something that is already there. What I’d be trying to describe, you can’t understand until it’s happened to you.” He spoke apologetically.
“You keep talking about this ‘it’. Is it somewhere we’re going? Something I have to do?”
“I don’t think you get it. As far as those questions go, the answer is yes. But there’s a lot more to it. It’s something you have to choose, but when it happens you don’t feel like you have a choice at all. It’s being afraid, and rightly so, but it’s fear and love all intertwined, and… even when I say the words I know they’re not the truth. Or not all of it, which might as well be none. I am sorry. Surely you’ve experienced something you couldn’t explain to someone who hadn’t? It’s not nearly so rare as it may seem. Love, war, faith, fear. There are things that aren’t internal. Who could really expect everything to be contained in something as fragile and limited as consciousness? As if reality itself were merely an extension of humanity.” He stopped talking and half-smiled. “I’ll stop. They all tell me I talk too much.”
“Who’s ‘They’?”
“Another difficult question to answer. I think it’s better if you just find out for yourself without me giving you a lot of half-truth to hold on to. It can be difficult enough getting rid of the wrong ideas, let alone those that are almost right. The good has always gotten in the way of the best. It’s simple to let go of something you don’t think is worth holding on to.”
“I guess…there’s not much to say, then. But what about-“
She stopped mid-sentence because something was happening. As they walked, she could feel the temperature dropping again. She looked up at him in fear, half-expecting to see the bent man again. He was walking normally, all his limbs in correct proportion to one another. She looked back, but could see nothing behind them but a mist that wasn’t a mist. It was like her eyes couldn’t focus, but deeper than that. Her mind was unable to resolve anything she saw behind her. She could hear the roaring in her ears once more, only this time it came unmistakably from an external source. It wasn’t necessarily louder, just more purposeful, with definite intent and direction. Her footsteps quickened, her hand reached for his. He held her like a father would, pulling her gently forward by the lifelines in her palm.
“We’re here, almost to the shore. Just a little farther.”
“What…what is this place?” She had to shout to be heard.
They were standing on the edge of a torrent. The dark, swiftly moving waters were the source of the overpowering noise, now moving through her entire body. She couldn’t see to the other side, it was wreathed in the same distorting fog that had filled the path behind her. The longer she looked into the water, the more blurred and static everything else appeared. Holding her hand up to her face, she could still see the currents and weaving patterns of the river behind it. She felt thin, stretched out, like a child’s watercolor painting.
“This is the place you have to choose. You can try to cross, or you can stay here.”
“I don’t understand. What’s on the other side? How am I supposed to get there? Why is everything out of focus?” Her questions were like fingers desperately clinging to find purchase on any surface there was, for she could feel herself slipping.
“You cannot know until you cross. But there is no going back. It’s either the mist or the river. There are no guarantees, whatever you choose. Not all fear is internal, nor is it unwarranted.” His voice echoed in the thunder surrounding them.
“No going back. Then, am I –?”
“It isn’t what you think. How could it be? You are not enough yet. You think in sunrises and sunsets, collapsing stars, sleeping and awakening. To cross the river is to cross the metaphor, to shatter the looking glass and see the world behind it. Even now we’re only half-true. The image is necessary even in overcoming it.”
“And I have to…to do it alone?”
“To enter the river is a choice no one can make for you. It’s true of any choice that really is a choice, and this is the closest you’ll ever be to making one. And I wouldn’t suggest waiting to make it. The ferryman and his toll are inventions to ease man’s fears of the single most terrifying thing in his reality. Real freedom is woven inextricably with love, with fear. And there is no escaping it, in the end. Or the beginning.”
She stared into the dark water. He was right. She had never been more afraid in her life. And yet, she could feel herself growing more insubstantial with every beat of her heart. If there had been a breeze, she felt that she would have been swept away, scattered like dust. Somehow she knew that she could, if she wanted, simply let go, pass into nonbeing. The comfort of the thought was as translucent as the diminishing shadow of her body. A choice, he had said? A choice like gravity, or like falling in love.
Trembling, she stepped into the water.