A Breath Too Late - Rocky Callen Page 0,35

war but none can win. Anger, fear, sorrow, and desperation reload their ammunition and shoot, piercing one another so it’s all a bloody mess inside of me. I know I will fall right through you. I know that you are only two steps from jumping.

I lunge forward, hoping and not hoping, wishing and not wishing, but all I know is that I must … I must … I MUST reach you.

I crash into you imagining that you are solid in my arms, corded muscle. I imagine the realness and physicality of you shocking me. But as I reach my arms around you, my arms close on nothing but air. You are still moving, still stepping up higher onto the ledge. So I move with you, ready to fall all over again, just so you aren’t alone.

Without warning, you stop. One leg out the window and one inside, both hands braced in the in-between. Your breath is gasps, a rising chest and shaking shoulders.

The determination melts from your shoulders. You become limp against me. You bump your head softly against the wood. “You aren’t there,” you say.

You vomit again and then collapse to your knees. Defeated.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper, and I am ashamed because sorry will never mean enough. It can’t whiteout pain or loss or bruises or sorrow. A Band-Aid for a wound that is too big, but I say it again: “I’m sorry.” You pull out of the opening and lean against the bridge wall. Sliding down the wall, you fall to the ground.

“I just wish you were here,” you say to the darkness, to the shadows and the bridge and the night. “I just wish you were here. With me.”

I stare at you, watching as the far-off-ness settles into right-here-ness. You don’t see me, but you’re coming back, the drugs wearing away in your veins, reality falling back into place.

And even though you can’t hear the hitch in my voice, I whisper back, “So do I.”

* * *

I remember learning in psychology class about how people suppress traumatic memories to keep their minds safe, to black it all out so they can keep going, and I suddenly realize that my selective memory hadn’t been a cruelty, but a mercy. All leading to this moment. Because I am triggered by August’s almost-death into remembering my own. I feel it then, like the whole ocean surging to swallow me up. It is a sea of memories and it is finally ready to meet me at the shore.

the year of graduation

25

Depression,

I didn’t know what you were when you came sneaking under my window. I had known sadness. I had known loneliness. I had known anger and resentment and shame and fleeting numbness. I had known all those things. They would come and go, settling into the air and around my fingertips and eyelashes. A scream, a bruise, a curse, a door slam might’ve triggered it, but then I would grit my teeth and narrow my eyes, and with time, I would scare it off. The feeling would slink away. In a few minutes. A few hours. A few days.

But one day, you came. Seven minutes before my alarm. My eyes opened and I didn’t move. I just looked out the window.

I had always loved that window. It faced east and every morning, no matter if I had to clamp a pillow over my ears all night, I would wake up to a sunrise. And that morning, it was beautiful. The blue stretched its arms and slivers of sunlight crept their fingers up the horizon, casting shades of pinks and oranges in all directions. I would have usually smiled at that sunrise, but that morning I just looked at it.

I looked and felt nothing.

I felt like I was nothing looking at nothing.

I didn’t see the peeling white paint on the window pane, or the inky etch marks I had made on the sill, or the portrait of sun and sky beyond the glass.

I just saw a window.

I saw a place from where I could jump.

I didn’t move when my alarm buzzed.

I just kept looking at the window and wondering how long it would take to hit the ground.

26

August,

I was about to cross the threshold of my next class when I pulled out my Chemistry seating assignment sheet and stumbled to a stop. I was going to be wedged between Henry Jordan and you. I looked up. I could see the back of his short buzz cut and your shaggy mane of brown