Fathomless

Prologue (not in Heaven)

I met him on summer break before my last year of university. The same day, on August nineteenth, I turned twenty-three.

I don't believe in fate. I believe in coincidence and free will. Because it could not have been a godly power that brought us together. I could not imagine a god of any religion to be stupid enough to bring two such people closer than five miles apart. Because gods, unlike mortals, are supposed to foresee trouble before it hit home. They are supposed to prevent pain and sorrow. Or maybe gods just don't exist. It's also an option, which I'm keen on believing.

I feel powerful when I think about it. I can control my life, create it out of nothing. I'm the master of my fate. But so are the others, and therefore, I'm never completely in control of what is going to happen to me. Our lives, they mix together depending on our actions, and I have no power to rule anyone else's decisions. Sometimes, those accidental matches affect me more than I would like them to. 

Like in a movie that I remember seeing a long time ago, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button", if only I have woken up five minutes later than usual, and therefore my schedule moved forward by those five minutes, I would have missed him, he would have passed me without a second thought, and we would probably have never met. But we did.

I believe it was our own actions that resulted in us meeting. Not fate carved in stone, but a mere coincidence.

It was an unusually warm evening when I left my parents' home for a walk. I said goodbye to my mother, who was sitting in the dining room, drinking red wine together with my stepfather, celebrating the special day on their own. I had no intentions to participate, nor did I want any guests to come to visit us. I was unmovable, no matter how much my family wanted to mark this day with a birthday cake and gifts, meant only to end up in a trashcan.

This is when the first coincidence happened – I had to answer the phone and hear my aunt moaning and cursing on the other line. She was not happy to be left out. I said it was not her, it was me. She said it was an excuse when breaking up, not when abandoning your own blood. By the time my aunt was finished, I had postponed my walk by five minutes.

I did not refuse the half-full bottle of good brandy when going out, though. That's why at the end of the day I found myself roaming the streets with liquor bottle under one arm, all the time trying to maintain my balance in the dim light. I was sweaty as if coming right from a sauna, my grey t-shirt was stuck to my body like a second skin. There were two wet areas underneath my armpits, and a larger one in the middle of my back. I couldn't care less. I was human. Humans sweat. Fact. Some more than the others.

The second coincidence appeared in a form of cheerful laughter in the middle of the street, a mass of people parading around, celebrating something presumably nameless. I wanted to avoid their attention. I took a sharp turn right and drowned in the dark before appearing on the other side of the street, unseen by their drunken eyes. It took three minutes. I was late by eight.

I was panting like a dog, the heat heavy on my shoulders. Brandy was a poor choice when it came to hydration, but I was determined to finish that bottle. Partly because deep in my guts I still wanted to celebrate my birthday somehow, despite every verbal refusal that I fed everyone around me. And also because I wanted to get wasted once in a year. On a special occasion - I could justify this in my head.

My loyal legs seemed to remember the streets of my childhood better than my grown-up brain. Just like muscle memory allows you to ride a bike after a decade of not touching it, my body recalls those numerous times I was running around, exploring these streets. I forgot, but my body has no trouble remembering. After a long time, I commanded my logic to shut up, leaving the empty space in my head for instincts and habits to work their magic. Nowadays, I rarely did so.