Final Breath

One

   Cop cars roam, phones blare alerts, and boats patrol around the island. All in search of one thing, and one thing only. Me. But they'll never find me. Not where I am. No one dares to disturb the active volcanoes. What they don't realize, is that in the center of the multiple volcanoes lies a chaotic lake that acts like the sea. Foam washes up against the granite rock I stand upon chipping away large bits of stone rubble. I look back at the now distant small rowing boat that carried me to this spot. It slowly makes it way back to shore on the waves that will soon be over my body. Closing my eyes, I take in the all the noises and smells around me savoring the last things I'll ever hear or inhale. Birds I can't identify flap their nearly soundless wings overhead and call to the other birds to come see my end. Hoarse and urgent they call, as if they all needed to witness my death. My nostrils pick up the scent of salt. I tell myself it's the salt from the non-fresh sea water, but the truth behind the salt are my tears, speechless, yet screaming from my eyes, running down my bruised and beaten face. I can taste the wet rainy weather from last night's thunderstorm. Just like when I wake from the vivid dreams and I find new scars on my body and a new layer of pain. The dreams where everyone turned against me, where devils climbed my trembling skin. Trembling skin that holds scars from trying to escape the monster. I suck in a deep breath telling myself everything will be fine, that the pain will go away one day.

      Today is that day. I know I want this; I must do this. I let my body slide into sharp, frigid knives of turquoise and deep blue. As I predicted before, the knives sliced into me, cutting me open, spreading my soul around the sea, never to be seen, heard, or touched again. A wave stands tall and punches its fist down on my head. It drags me by my shirt into its prison before I can take a single breath.

     Before I can pray that my family understands I'm meant to do this, water drenches my barely thick winter coat. It seeps inside my jacket, hitting softly against my naked skin. My body tingles while shivers run up and down and side-to-side all over me. Two dull, rotting olive eyes are revealed from under my eyelids. Rotting eyes that have seen things a 14 year old shouldn't have seen. I keep my eyes open, ready to forget all the things I was forced to do, all the things I was forced to see. That's when blunt, deep green irises see the color I've longed to see. Blue. All shades of blue surround me. It's like floating in a heaven that I dreamed of for myself. A shade of darker, ominous blue, a blue that almost looks black awaits my arrival. I tilt my head upwards, looking for a bedazzling sun glare through choppy surface that you always see in the movies. Let me tell you, the movies compare to nothing of what I saw. Dark, harsh light from the angry sky above shadowed the untamed water beneath it.

     Bubbles escape from my mouth and navigate their way to the surface of the white-capped waters. I self-consciously hold my breath from summers of swimming in the town's public pool. From summers spent up in northern North Carolina at the lake house where I swam all day until I got goose bumps from the water turning cold pruning my fingers and toes. But now I need to turn off my instincts to swim away. Swim lessons were fine way back when swimming was crucial, but now I need to unlearn how to swim. My body will sink to the bottom of the sea, limp and lifeless, where my soul will be free to roam away from the ground, away from humans. Strawberry-blonde hair encircling my head, floats upwards into the sea swaying ever so slightly. Dizziness flows through me as oxygen becomes a less and less familiar friend but more of an enemy. The enemy that stands between imminent death and myself.

      My eyes reach blackness; everything looks like seeing a blurry, pixelated photo. They say right before you die your whole life flashes before you, but that's not how it worked for me. I see only my favorite memories from the days that the sun shone bright with joy, not the clouds of pain that darken my day. Pictures come into focus slowly passing through my mind one after another. It's like living them all over again. The memories speed up growing faster and faster until a bright light appears in front of my almost dead eyes. A light brighter than the sun, even if you were one meter away from it. With each last pulse of my still beating heart, the bright light grows, intensifying, searing my already blinded eyes. My back arches upwards while my hands claw the water surrounding me. Choked screams. Screams that can't be forced, for too much will spill cascading downwards like a waterfall. Those screams belong to me. Pain felt like being a devil tonight in my most peaceful moments, pouring buckets of poison in my veins. The poison flows through my veins dumping into my heart finishing the dead blackness that covers the old pulsating red.

      One minute. I've held my breath for one minute. My head starts to feel like a minefield someone keeps triggering over and over and over again. And that's when I open my mouth while the water flows in like a rushed river in the Colorado Mountains. Water floods my poor, weak heart. The blue liquid crystalizes the poison, turning my heart into stone. That's when everything stops hurting. When everything becomes peaceful.

    If you could see my body, you would see a short girl floating peacefully with hair that burns brightly like autumn leaves despite the fact everything else has been snuffed out. You see the girl has otherworldly purple and red skin. Of course, you look again, wanting to make sure you saw correctly. You squint your eyes and see that the girl has pale skin probably from all the lucid nightmares she has that always end up with clawing her way out of the agony that physically, mentally, and emotionally breaks her. Rich blots of eggplant laced with rotting yellow cover her body like chicken pox. Raw chasms of puckered flesh mask her image. Gauged cracks, filled with a thin sea of red, take shelter all over her. Scars from another dimension, another world. You can tell some have just developed because the skin on its edges haven't started to curl up, with some pink flesh still showing through. You'd see a girl who committed suicide because she had been weak, because she couldn't handle life, because she hid in the corners scared of the night and the day. All of your assumptions are correct, except you don't see how tranquil and serene she really is.

    Life fades from memory like a dream when you wake up, all fuzzy with little fragments telling you what happened. My neck hangs back as my eyelids drape over my eyes like a thick, soupy fog over a pond. I drift into endless sleep, forever lying in the chaotic sea, peaceful, and resting at last.