Black Lake

My head is cocked and craned at an uncomfortable angle I can and will pretend does not hurt, puts no strain on my neck.

It will look natural from a bird’s eye view, is what I tell myself, even when no one is watching from the skies above, or upon the mountains below.

I am at the precipice. I stand on the bay, crouched low. My feet hurt. My knees ache. My chest heaves with forcefully bated breaths. I am flush, warm, throbbing with myself in the freezing cold around me, and it feels like death.

I want to surrender to it. I want to roll around in all that surrounds me, taking it all into myself—the rocks, the sticks, the snow, the grasses, the trees. I want to be everything and nothing, all at once.

—

Must we love ourselves to save ourselves? To catch ourselves by the hand when our legs dangle over the edge? Or is it simply human nature, to ensure that we ourselves will not fall? Can it be summarized as a protective measure, a jolt in our bones, a step forward for no reason other than I am man, and I will live?

We are primal creatures, but we are also creatures of the mind. Oftentimes, it is harder to leave the mind than the body itself, which is stuck and strung to trudge across the earth until our final day. If we are so incapable of leaving, what makes us want to stay, even when we try to go? What impulse in the body propels us forward to save another? What explanation is there for life and living it, or ending it, or trying to? If we cannot leave the mind in life, perhaps it, too, will follow us all the way down.

Is saving ourselves very much different than saving another? It is still a hold keeping one over the edge, a halt in the fall, a cog in the machine lurching the whole world forward for a single moment.

We must see something there worth grasping at, worth saving. In the moment, when a bareness is there, when a vulnerability is uncovered and we feel like falling, the doubt never wanes. The world never caves.

The mind will not always relent, and the body will not always fall.

We lunge forward, and we grab the falling hand, and we subliminally wait for the applause.

—

I am staring into my own glossy reflection in blackened water—a dark pond, a murky ocean, a black lake.

She is motionless and staring. She is a silent demon, a strange, ghostly figure, a hallucination robbed of all tangibility, scared of the light first and the dark second. She is vague and lifeless in the eyes. She flickers in the ripples of the water, and she may disappear for good once I blink her away.

—

Hard-heartedness—the assassin of normalcy.

Numbness—the taker of life.

When we forget we are human, and we start to see ourselves as the monsters of the sea, the ghosts of the lake, we may as well fade away, sending those broken pieces of ourselves up and away until we are mere shells of the people we were, uselessly drudging down the same paths as a million of our own predecessors who died old and bored and unhappy.

But if we let those broken pieces take hold of us, we may become blinded by our thoughts, living every day lost in our own heads, time swimming by as we bask in the glory and hurt and rage we cannot define to anyone but ourselves, lonely yet incapable of being anything but alone, dreaming our lives away until we blink, and all is gone, and we stand abandonned, staring down at our own reflections in the dark water until the fear sets in first, and the soul death of us second.

If their pain does not matter, your pain does not matter. If your pain does not matter, no pain matters. If your mind is wrong, no one’s mind is right. And if you are unintelligent and lost, the universe is full of the wholly and utterly fucked, and nothing more.

Hope and hopelessness—we know both, and we choose to see the one that glows before us the most.

—

1. All pain matters, or all pain is meaningless.

2. We live, or we die.

—

The ray of sun above her head does not touch her face. It remains above her, a bright, shining streak like a shooting star. There are only glittering black diamonds in my eyes. There are bones in my mouth.

I hate her.

I think to myself: Diamonds for eyes, jagged bone for teeth, whirlpool forehead, boulder-nosed, sharp-eared demon, be gone!

She stays.

She stares.

I smile.

She does not.

I fall.

—

Can one ever truly end themselves in a way that makes it all better? Surely this face I see in the black lake will be better off gone, dead, wiped off the map somewhere, buried in the snow, sunk to the bottom of the lake against the bedrock. She will be replaced by a perfect person, a person who knows when to smile, when to speak up, what to say. A person who can connect with others just enough to impress them, but not enough to be anything but a mystery—a beautifully impossible woman.

—

Steam hangs over the inky waters. It is a sinister sight, something like poison.

I want to cut into it with a knife, slicing into it like a bringer of death. I want to be the one to end something. I want to see the face of the me I choose to end.

Anger—an embarrassment of a feeling. A reflection of the inner self taken out on all others. I hate it, both within myself and others. Open anger is for the ridiculous, the dramatic, the unintelligent. So I let empty smiles linger in the places my screams would ring out; the impact is the same, only I am protected, and my heart is safe and smug and sure. I keep it locked in and away, my knives sheathed at my side, my swords strapped to my back, and I do not touch these blades for the fear of seeming inexperienced when I do. When I do wield a blade, it will be fierce and bold in a land I never could have existed in, a land beyond this realm of human life.

I wait for it.

I swallow my rage, and I savor it on the way down.

I save it for later. I save it for sleep. I save it for sanity.

I save it for myself.

—

I was once the kind of person so weak that I could not move or breathe without contemplating myself in the silence of my own world, without kicking myself in the head for times gone by, too far away to reach or move or change.

Everything plagues me. I am proud of nothing and afraid of everything. I am shame personified.

My reflected face is contorted into neutrality only because it must be. If I were alone, and I knew no one was watching, what kind of face would I make? Would it send the birds away screeching? Or would the same silence fill these empty mountain walls?

Would I choose to save myself the next time around?

—

We save, and we destroy.

We smile, and we rage.

We keep the shards of ourselves close, cradled to our chests, even as they slice our arms open. Even as we pour ourselves out and into other things, the core of us belongs to us, and us alone.

With this core, we do what we will.

We evolve, or we die.

We turn from the reflection in the black lake.

We make our choice.

—

Thank you guys so much for reading! 🖤

This was more of an experimental piece I wrote in about an hour and a half, as I’ve been stuck in my own head all day. I’m pretty proud of it, even if it’s not a perfectly linear kind of piece, or even a piece that fully makes sense. Please tell me what you think!