Losing Everything

Chapter 1.2

Lucy had failed. She had lost everything. She had lost her company, which meant her job, and she would lose her house by the time the bank was finished with her. She had lost people. She had lost Jake, which hurt so much that sometimes she could barely breathe. She had lost Jake without noticing it happening, and now he was against her too.

Everyone was against her. And everyone who wasn’t, all the people who were supposed to be her friends, they had suddenly abandoned her.

And that hurt, although she understood why.

They were scared. Failure like this frightened people. Failure stalked people like them, in their minds. The way a fear of plague had stalked people long ago.

Lucy understood that completely, because a month ago she would have felt the same.

She had always been afraid of bad luck, and of catching it from others. Afraid of being around failure, of people who hadn’t succeeded and people who didn’t even try. She had always half-suspected that misfortune was catching, like the flu. That if she spoke to people with bad luck, if she spent time around them, then she would somehow become infected and their bad luck would spread to her.

Perhaps now it had, she thought. Perhaps she hadn’t been careful enough. Perhaps bad luck had caught her anyway, in the end. Or perhaps she’d just always made up things like this to justify being a bitch.

She wasn’t sure.

None of it mattered any more, though, not now, not really. She wasn’t who she had been a month ago, and nobody else was either.

Now, she had lost everything. Now she was sitting on a beach with nothing but the skin she was born in, and she was happy. She’d lost more than some people would ever have, at least on paper, and for a month she’d fought as hard as she could to stop it happening, but now it was not too late.

Now it was finished, over, and she had lost. And now she was calm. Peaceful. On her beach. On her own.

She was high, too.

She was stoned out of her mind. Which might be helping.

She had come down here to smoke weed and be high and not drink and maybe kill herself a little later.

Maybe kill herself. Or maybe not. Maybe just go swimming drunk instead, which would save her having to decide. Because she hadn’t decided yet, not really, although she didn’t think she would. It seemed like a lot of trouble, killing herself. At least like this, after making such an effort to get to the beach. It seemed like a lot of bother, and she didn’t really think she wanted to, but all the same, it seemed like something she ought to consider. It seemed like what you did when you lost everything that mattered. You thought about ending yourself. You wondered whether you should.

You thought about it, at least.

So Lucy had decided to think it over, and a beach had seemed the right place to think such thoughts.

To think about life, and mistakes, and Erica.