It was gorgeous.
I could picture King and Mute sitting on the terrifying edge, shooting the shit. Could see the exact spot we’d made love after he proposed to me, and the place we’d tussled, laughing and naked in the long grass off to one side.
It was a location of memories, all the good crushed by the weight of a single tragedy.
I moved slowly across the space until I stood on the precipice. The wind rushed over me with eager hands, tugging at my clothes and hair, igniting a shiver down my spine and stinging my eyes, but I kept them open. I wanted to memorize the texture of the froth-tipped ocean, the exact shade of its metallic sheen under the rising sun. I wanted to remember the exact angle over the curve in the bay and the height in metres from the top of the cliff to the rocks below.
Eyes to the view, I dug through my bag and produced the glass bottle I’d prepared days ago. There was a poem inside, one of many I’d found myself writing just to feel a connection to King, just to purge myself of even an iota of the pain clogging up all my pores.
* * *
He is not dead.
I love him and I wear him in my heart.
So.
He is not dead.
I know him and I live out his days in my head.
So.
He is not dead.
I am still alive, but half-formed because he is not here also.
So.
He is not dead.
Because if he was, I would be too.
The stages of grief: denial.
* * *
It wasn’t about creating something pretty, so I didn’t care to cast a critical eye to the verse. I just needed to get it down on paper, to make it a tangible thing I could touch because maybe then, I could find a way to conquer it.
I cocked my arm with the bottle in my hand back and then hurled it with all my might out into the sea and watched as it dropped, spinning, tumbling, green in the yellow sunlight over the blue waves. I’d assumed it would crash on the sharp teeth of rocks jutting up at the base of the cliffs, but it landed much farther out, settling with minimal fanfare in the waves.
I paused, mind suspended like a sprinter set before the race, braced to explode into movement.
And then, dangerously, I wondered.
I thought back to the wedding after everyone had left but The Fallen and family, trying to recall who was there, searching people frantically in my mind’s eyes, grateful that years of teaching had given me a gift for remembering faces.
No Eugene.
King’s uncle, Kylie’s keeper, Fallen secret harbourer.
I knew Buck, Cyclops, and Axe-Man had arrived at the bluff minutes before Danner shot King. They were testifying in court next week, and they’d all been altered by the experience, muted somehow.
But Eugene hadn’t been with them.
My heart started racing and I broke out in a cold, prickly sweat that made me itch from nose to toes.
I fumbled with my phone until I found his number and pressed go.
“Cressida?” he asked immediately, probably surprised to hear from me because we hadn’t been tight since King passed, and I was starting to question why.
“Eugene, I decided to go…rowing off my property, and I got stuck in a riptide that took me way too far out to sea. Could you bring your boat around and pick me up? I’m too exhausted to get back myself.”
It was early, and Eugene owned a bar so he’d probably been sleeping, but immediately he said, “Hold tight and be careful not to get too close to those rocks. I’ll be there soon’s I can.”
I stared at the phone long after it had been disconnected, then finally put it in my backpack and sat on the cliff to wait. My blood felt fizzy in my veins, treacherously carbonated with a hope I hadn’t felt in weeks.
I stared down the edge of the cliff, calculated the drop was somewhere around a hundred and fifty feet, and wondered idly, if it was too far a jump to survive.
Not so idly, I decided I didn’t care.
When I spotted Eugene’s small powerboat rounding the point, I stood and started to take my clothes off. Not all of them, just my heavy jeans and my leather jacket.
I waved at Eugene as he drew closer, knowing he was probably scared out of his mind seeing me at the edge of the cliff.
Or maybe not and that just proved what I was too frightened to articulate even in my thoughts.
I thought about the leap I’d taken when I’d decided to be with King, how much blind faith I’d had in him and my feelings for him, and how I’d been rewarded tenfold for taking the chance to fall for him.
And I’d fall for him again.