Prologue

You know that feeling when you’re falling? When you take a step onto what used to be solid ground and suddenly it just falls out from under you? You start to spiral slowly, gathering speed until you know that you are within seconds from hitting the ground, and you’re praying that you’ll hit it, that everything will just disappear, that everything you’ve been fighting to escape will just consume you and everything will be over. But then the ground doesn’t come and you just keep falling and falling and falling, trapped in a nightmare that will never end. A nightmare that slowly becomes your seconds, then your minutes, then your hours, then your days, then your weeks, then your months, then your years, as it becomes the never ending eternity of your life. At some point you start hoping you hit the ground, you start looking for a way out, but the harder you look the more desperate you become, the more trapped, the more lost, and the more you want to escape, no matter which way out you have to take.

The longer you fall, the darker the world becomes, and every time you catch a glimpse of light you reach for it, but you keep falling, and you have to watch as it slowly fades back into darkness. It doesn’t matter how much you want to stop falling, you never will.

Once an object is in motion it will remain in motion.

I’m falling.

Until something stops me, I will be forever falling.

My toes hang over the edge, and a few stones tumble down into the water far below me. The world is spinning, the whole world appears to shake, but my hands are suddenly steady. My movements no longer reflect those of the girl who used to walk through life scared of everything that could hurt her. They’re sure, still.

I’m no longer that girl.

I’m still that girl in the sense that, when she stood in front of the mirror, there was no face reflected back at her. Just a figure staring back at her in fragments, darkness blotting out the reflection in places where the light had ceased to reflect. She had become so obscured by darkness that there were no more refractions of light to show her form in its entirety.

That part of me, the dark part, the part that makes my reflection cease to exist, will never fade.

But there are so many parts of me that have faded. Bad parts, and good parts.

I look down. The world tips for a second, and when it steadies itself it’s a blur, still spinning, still shaky, but it’s still there.

I can feel the spray from the waterfall on my skin, reflecting the colors dancing against the horizon, painting the body of a girl so darkened by the world that she had lost all color.

The water below me glitters in the waking sun, a silent elegy seeming to glide across the surface, disrupting the calmness of the water.

The quiet wind sneaks through my hair, blowing it around my face, obscuring the scene in front of me. Voices of those I left behind whist past my ears, parts of the past that will never resurface.

Maybe, if I had some sort of alter life, and I hadn’t run away like this, things could have been different. I would have graduated high school, kept my friends, my family, my life. But going back now was never an option. Because of the choices I made in my life, this is the last one I get to make.

And I get to make it.

Not the damaged part of me, not the desperate part of me, just me.

It’s my choice.

I’ve stood atop this cliff so many times that I feel like I know how far down the drop is, even though I’ve never jumped before. I know the breezes that float through here, whispering coaxing words of remission into the ears of the damned. Trying to get them to step away. I know the colors that shine against the horizon in the morning, and how they fade once the sun rises just enough that there is no need for any colors to manifest its arrival.

I know that the stones beneath my feet will not be what gives way first.

I turn my back on the world.

The world gives way beneath me and I stretch my arms out like wings, feeling the wind tear through my fingers as the elegy roars in my ears. The colors are ripped from my skin and stay there, suspended in the outline of the girl that was standing on the cliff edge.

She’s not there anymore.