The empath had a vision. Not a vision in the sense of ambition, of goals. Her ambitions were bounded purely by the need to survive each day, each hour, each minute. Sometimes, when it was bad, each second. No, she had a vision of the more mystical variety, although it was not a very mystical experience for she was watching television at the time.
It was an advertisement, a commercial, and it featured a dizzying moment when the camera panned over the edge of a very tall building and looked down. Somehow the fact that it was an animation made it worse, not better. Which was odd, because she had not been afraid of heights for quite some time.
While she was watching this advertisement she had her vision. She saw herself, standing on top of that very building, in the cool haze of a bright morning in late Autumn. She saw the access doorway, saw the drains and vents. Then she was herself, could feel the texture of the roof under bare feet. She raised her hands before her eyes, stared at them, taking in every last detail and noting that she could get at least some idea of the overall appearance of them. They were her hands after all. She looked down at her clothes, the same basic mode of dress she had been wearing for more than a year. Black. Black trousers, black shirt. She contemplated the reason for that, dismissing affectation or statement, observing that the sight of colour against her skin actually interfered with her ability to see the world. She looked at her feet, barely recognising them, looked at her legs, her arms. Her sense of detachment, of being in the wrong place in the wrong body, grew.
In her vision she fixed her eyes on a patch of blue sky and started to run. As she ran she was thinking "If this is what it takes, so be it," and she was remembering that someone once told her it is impossible to make a horse jump over the edge of a long, steep drop. The animal will refuse. She ran, focusing her entire being on that single patch of eggshell blue, not feeling the impact on her feet, not feeling anything, not allowing herself to feel anything.
The sky opened up to her. She was running, had been running, until there was nothing left but sky. She spread her arms, splayed her fingers, leaned forward into the rushing air without taking her eyes off that one piece of sky. And she laughed, smiled, wept, as she rushed forward into the blue even as she dropped down, far down, onto the hard ground below.
The entire episode, from first seeing herself to the paradoxical joy and pain at being split in two, was over before the next advertisement started, and she was almost in tears.
Alone, as she was so much of the time, there was no one around to notice.
But it wasn't Autumn at all, it was Summer, although the weather was mixed up and strange. The empath felt as unsettled as the weather. She had been restless for months, feeling trapped, caged. She felt suffocated and sometimes wondered if dolphins felt like that when they became trapped in drift nets and drowned. The vision came out of the blue and chimed a note deep inside. It had been so strong, that final point of separation so clear, she thought, she almost knew she could do it. She could make that break, could force it upon herself, but only by giving herself no other way. In a way she thought that if she did not make it entirely, it would not matter. In her vision she had been split between Sky and Earth, and one of the possibilities showed her landing miraculously unharmed, because there was nothing in the flesh at the moment of impact to be harmed.
Was it perhaps preferable to the other escape she had considered? The final pilgrimage to the one place she pined for more than any other, the long trek North leaving her identity and pain behind her, to plunge with gleaming teeth and laughing heart into the maelstrom. She was not sure. One involved more mess, the other more uncertainty. She had dreamed of both.
And occasionally, dancing with traffic and coming close to being squashed or battered to death, she would cry. She would drive or cycle on, tears streaming, not because she had come close to the end, but because it had missed her, because she was left with the responsibility of fighting the pain to stay alive or forcing escape by her own hand.
That responsibility weighed heavy at times. Almost too heavy.
And through it all, inside she sat in the bare room with the two ravens and the uneasiness of Instinct and the Rationalist, looked out of the window and dreamed of Autumn. |
