SWIM Book 1 (Complete three-hundred pages)

Day 58.2 Monday, January 15, 2018

As the day died down, and the world was beginning to sleep, the night filled the clouds with a tranquilizing pace and an opening broke to show the moon. It was broken, and crescent shaped. Sad, and empty. I had driven the boat along the canal of pushed debris, and after hours of driving through it, I came to a stop. A depression finally fell into me, and I let go of the motor. The whirr of the engine turned to silence, the boat slowed to a stop, and all I heard now was the trickle of water around me. And the soft echoing wind strolling over the world.

The blanket over George's corpse hid him as only an anonymous shade in the darkness. And although I was still scared his body would suddenly jump up and attack me, I was becoming numb to the idea that I would die.

That ship was gone. The waves for miles were gone. I was in a still lake of spherical silence, and ominous beauty. I looked over the moon-lit waters, and the debris looked like a silver paintbrush had swept over them like broken sections of stained glass art, colored gray, and lonely. I lay back against the wall, and merely looked at that ambiguous darkness, alone with a motionless body, and forgot all about it. It was so cold, and I wished it was colder.

I had traveled so far in this darkness, and I should have passed Brett and that family by now. And I remembered that story I once heard, about an ancient group of settlers who ran from the religious kingdom to a mountaintop, where they sought refuge for only a short time before facing the triage of death by blade of the coming armies, or death by choice, with their own warm hands, to drink a silent poison that would let them escape in peace.

I hated suicide. The thought went against every moral value in my body. And as a rich girl, invisible in a world of nature surrounded by white walls lit by gold chandeliers, life was always worth living. But now. . . I didn't know if it really was. And I didn't know was life was anymore. Deep down in my heart, I knew Jack was gone. He had surely left this planet at the sight of us gone and his only remaining pal, Travis, dead by fall.

I laid my head back on the cold edge of the canoe, and merely stared up at the softly lit clouds, the moonlight hitting the curves of their edges softly. I hadn't the strength to even lift my jaw to close my mouth. If there was anyone in the entire world to see me now, they'd presume I was surely dead.

What is life in a dead shell, but a dead end, in path without meaning. I found none. I was all alone again. And for the last time. I wanted to just close my eyes, fall asleep in the darkness. . . and never wake, again.

I wanted to remember what it felt like to love in a little town. I wanted to forget what it felt like to hate, in a big, bad world. A world that didn't care about me. And world, that I never cared about, until I left the love I had, in that lost, little town.

Please, God. . . don't wake me up.