Jacky Lang's Blog - Posts Tagged "flashfiction"
Standing On a Bridge
She wasn’t afraid of death. It was the space between dying and death that terrified her. A place filled with chronic pain, failing mental faculties and adult diapers, a place her mother had lived in for ten years and it was a place she never wanted to enter. She thought about suicide all the time. The sweet and controllable overness that it would bring. Her first clear memory of it was when she was about eleven years old with long pigtails. So long in fact that she wrapped them around her neck to see if she could cut off all oxygen. It seemed like a great idea. Private and in her hands and the solution to ending the pain of not being perfect, or it would have been if she’d been stronger or more patient or less scared. A few years later she tried the classic pills route, only to discover the realities of ipecac and societal disapproval. How could anyone be so selfish, she was asked, as to want to end their own life? Of course these questioners were the same people making her life miserable with a constant stream of judgmental and abusive words, but she was smart enough to not point that out to them.
A whirlwind of life events pushed the desire to the back of her mind, where it hummed and lurked. There were joys to be had and she grasped at them with all her strength. Like grabbing at roses, the results were often lovely to the senses and painful. Raising children was all encompassing and beautiful. Yet, it became clear as her children grew up that society would always blame her for any of their shortcomings on top of her own. Somehow it was always her fault. With her children the joys outweighed the pain. Not so with marriages.
It was as if she’d come into the world with notions of grand romance implanted in her soul, and no one had been wise enough to excise them before they festered and grew. She fell in love quickly, intensely and often. Each time convinced her soul mate had finally found her; each time discarded when someone better came along. Still she never learned. She threw herself head first into one doomed relationship after another, and as she got older the bad decisions had bigger and more far reaching consequences. Today she was doing it again, longing for the release of death and fantasizing about how she might be more missed and more loved as a ghost or memory than she ever was as a woman. Just one more step.
A whirlwind of life events pushed the desire to the back of her mind, where it hummed and lurked. There were joys to be had and she grasped at them with all her strength. Like grabbing at roses, the results were often lovely to the senses and painful. Raising children was all encompassing and beautiful. Yet, it became clear as her children grew up that society would always blame her for any of their shortcomings on top of her own. Somehow it was always her fault. With her children the joys outweighed the pain. Not so with marriages.
It was as if she’d come into the world with notions of grand romance implanted in her soul, and no one had been wise enough to excise them before they festered and grew. She fell in love quickly, intensely and often. Each time convinced her soul mate had finally found her; each time discarded when someone better came along. Still she never learned. She threw herself head first into one doomed relationship after another, and as she got older the bad decisions had bigger and more far reaching consequences. Today she was doing it again, longing for the release of death and fantasizing about how she might be more missed and more loved as a ghost or memory than she ever was as a woman. Just one more step.
