A Breath Too Late - Rocky Callen Page 0,40

settle in its place. It swept me up when I wasn’t looking. It hit when I was midstride. You started chattering on about how you were top grade-A best-friend material, but all I could feel was that I was melting into the linoleum drop by drop and you didn’t even see as I dissolved into nothing.

31

Depression,

You always snuck up on me when I wasn’t looking. You seeped in and dug in your claws.

Depression can only sink your ship if you let the water inside. I read that in the guidance counselor’s office. In a magazine. Neatly tucked between advertisements for Proactiv and Zoloft, you know, the stuff someone puts on their face and in their mouth so that their inside and outside are spick-and-span. But people don’t understand that sometimes the boat capsizes. Sometimes the storm pummels the deck like bullets. And there are no life boats or buckets, nothing to toss the water out. Depression, you are the one who took an ax to the wood, you are the one who left the gaping holes where the water rushes in and we don’t even remember when you did it. We just wake up and the murky water is pulling us under.

That’s how it was.

Waking up in the dark, in the cold, in the wet, but our eyes are already wide open, drinking up summer days and distant laughter and we stare around and wonder how the world could go on oblivious as we stand at its center drowning.

I found the magazine while I was sitting in the guidance counselor’s office to discuss plans after graduation. It was hard to think about the future when you were my shadow with the sharpest of teeth, eating me away.

32

Flyer,

I tell my own stories in my head to try to drown out the dark ones. The ones that whisper and prod and clink against my nerves.

I was writing one in my head when a pause in hallway traffic lifted my gaze and I saw you. And like a gunshot, you scared the shadow away. Just for a moment. Just enough. You weren’t much. A glossy 8x11 sheet of paper, but I fell in love with you. The picture was of a beautiful campus and bold white columns filling up the entire page.

CREATIVE WRITING AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

I looked at you and felt … home.

I felt safe.

I tore you off the wall.

You were all mine.

33

August,

Later that day, I was taping up the flyer inside my locker. I had Googled photos of the campus, I had read and reread the university website over and over again. My fingers lingered over the words. Columbia University. The university was prestigious. The flyer seemed to wrap up all my dreams and print it off on an 8x11 sheet of glossy paper. Words like literary art, vision, creative freedom, power, masterful writers. Each word was like a lightning bolt splintering into my heart.

In my room, I closed my eyes at night imagining getting the acceptance letter, then taking a backpack and a train out of town up to New York City. I could make it. I knew it. I was so happy that I didn’t even care that there was a fresh bruise on my back or that I had heard my momma crying again in the bathroom last night. I would be free! I was counting down the days.

“Earth to Ellie! Earth to Ellie!” You were behind me and I whipped around, too happy to try to ignore you. I had done a good job of that for the past couple of weeks. I wore earphones while in the halls, pretended I was taking notes in class. In Ms. Hooper’s class, you didn’t sit next to me even though there wasn’t assigned seating. You sat a row over and a couple of seats back.

You had started doing that even when we were still best friends. It was around fourth grade. You started sitting in the back and at first it hurt my feelings. I felt like I was losing you, but then you’d gallop up to me right when the bell rang and we would walk to our next class together.

You often tried to do that in Ms. Hooper’s class, but right when the bell rang, I would go straight to her desk and ask her about the comments she wrote on my work or what I should look for in a college if I wanted to study writing.

I had found my talisman. Hooper had her books, Jameson had