Though only a foot away, he couldn’t get close enough.
Something held him down. The shark fins appeared at his side; he felt their teeth bite into his ankle.
Almost registering was the thought of how painful it must be to be eaten by a shark. Make that half a dozen sharks.
He made it to a patch of ice and climbed aboard. Free for one moment, the cool waters quickened into a boil. The sheet, his one last hope, disappeared from under him and the rest will have to be told in her turns.
There was no more.
For him, it was his time to finally let go.
HER TURN
Her mom’s death might not have been her fault. In fact, it wasn’t her fault. It might make what comes next sound so much better. Her mom died of natural causes. However, it could only be her fault. Mom died because she died. Not suicide, not self-inflicted cause. The cause, it was her.
And now, she is the one that does this.
He swam for the both of them. She held onto one arm as he seemingly swam toward nothing.
Whatever it was, she could not see it. The moon had fallen and in its place she could only see the ghosts gathered where he would soon falter.
Tell him.
Tell him to turn around.
But she couldn’t. She had succumbed to her fears. Much like he had been consumed by an impossible goal, the hero protecting the good from the bad, she was consumed by the fear that kept her from speaking.
The ghosts wanted to see a hero win.
They cheered him on despite what they knew would happen; they cheered to force her to act.
She does this.
Her fault. She collected it all and feasted on it, which saved and doomed her as he was driven into the frigid waters.
She swam back to the coffin, watched from a safe place, as he faded into the darkness. He faded with the moonlight.
This is where he ends and she continues.
The tale goes on like this. Remarkably, she swam after him. All the self-loathing pushed her over the edge. She realized how big the coffin seemed when she was the only one to fill it. She swam but the ghosts had already departed.
They returned to their own coffins.
She would have to bury her own. She would have to bear the weight of losing the one she cared for most.
The hesitance became her only source of hope; she swam and swam until she stopped and discovered that she hadn’t gotten any closer to where he sank. She was right where she had begun, coffin floating behind her, hitting her in the arm.
She watched until the sharks showed her where he had ended. Picked apart he was now whole while she remained half.
The sea had settled into a boil. Worse, she felt it. The heat sent pain signals up and down her spine.
Her arms too short to paddle over in the coffin, she briefly wondered how he was able to do so back when they had been burrowed in each other’s bodies, back when a borrowed body had been necessary to remain in denial.
Staving off demise long after the will to do so, she closed her eyes. She waited one moment.
She closed her eyes. She would no longer need them.
Finally accepting what she must do, she jumped into the boiling water.
And then…
ACCEPTANCE
HIS TURN
She imagines. It is important for her to continue to do so. She imagines because she still holds on. Without him here, it might be that something else holds onto her, preventing her from simply falling over the edge of the coffin.
Something won’t let her sink.
Something that is most dearly nothing.
But his turns continue because she chooses to imagine that he is still with her.
She does not embellish, she does not prefer or have any preferences. She imagines him as he would be, even though only the faintest image of him could be imagined.
She imagines the coffin and his sheltering embrace.
She imagines him as a hero, and plays out what would have been his hero’s end.
Not that he wasn’t a hero. She would consider him nothing less, and yet he was flawed for having found in her a strange partner. Would he call it significant, she can’t say.
But it was significant to her: His role in her life, death, and the roundabout end that this had become.
She imagined his exit.
How she’d have preferred him to leave.
Her at fault, she featured him in her memory as the person who might have shared her coffin. In this version, she was the one to be buried in the coffin, not him. In this version, she would cease to exist as a burden before he had to see her off, a burial it would not be. She would pass on, let go, and live on in his memory. The hero would survive and would have saved her because he would have needed to save her in order to survive.
Survival is what she imagined.
His survival.
Using the few turns that remain, she imagined for the sake of a man that tried twice to save her.
It would never be his fault.
He tried to save what could not be saved.
How can one save a person who cannot begin to save herself?
Much of what she imagined existed in the white of the page, the blankness that echoes out much like this:
…echoing her wishes would have been his voice calling in the distance, near the horizon, a call that had everything to do with telling her that he was fine.
Still holding on.
Instead, there was a hero’s fantasy.
And there was loneliness. But it’s saved for her turns.
The loneliness does not bleed into his turns.
HER TURN
In this turn, she felt the loneliness beginning to restrain, pull her in such a way that she had to keep swimming to keep from being consumed by the conditions. What is clear to her now:
There is no going back.
He was here, but now he isn’t.
She was young.
Life had that way about withering and her life withered in the time it took most to get started.
She affected too many people, and those people became burdened by her demise.
Demise before it became hers was something desirable. It was an interesting concept, danger, a thrill sought after being stung by the consequences. She never could have assumed that one adventure would lead to this.
She felt cheated. She felt like a cheater.
Equally, she took too much and inevitably it was her life that was taken.
It was penance for her precarious actions, her lifetime in advance, running toward the bitter end right from the beginning.
And now she was where there were no explanations. She occupied the drift between the two phases of life. She existed, just barely. She had it better but resisted. She could not simply accept it until it was too late. These are the conditions, and this is what placed her loneliness in perspective. After acceptance came the void, emptiness of having little else to feel, no one near, only the few items she would rather forget.
All she had left was her imagination.
But if it hadn’t been explained earlier in the tale…
Indeed she did:
She swam through scalding waters to recover his body. She recovered the body and what’s more, she pulled it toward the coffin. When it wasn’t there, she went ahead and opened her eyes. She saw for long enough to see the coffin. Her eyes open in the boiling water was enough for her to lose sight of everything else.
When she reached the coffin, his body was whole. Not that it wasn’t a skeleton. Not that it hadn’t become unrecognizable.
In the dead end of acceptance, she lost sense of everything but touch. And after swimming through the waters, she lost that too. She chose to imagine him as he was, and her as she would have wanted to be.