Word count: 1289
Summary: Hang on to your life – just because you want to give up doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea in the long run. A permanent action shouldn’t solve a temporary problem.
I’m not sure if this one deserves a trigger warning, but light mentions of suicide are mentioned. This one is longer than usual since it’s pretty personal to me.
When I opened my eyes, all that surrounded me was green: green trees, green grass, green hedges. It was as if I had been playing hide and seek and I had already counted to ten. …Ready or not, here I…come? Why hide and seek? I hadn’t played a game like that since I was in… Quickly standing up, I surveyed the scenery properly. This was no ordinary field in the middle of nowhere, I recognised this place, I’d spent years of my life in… “Primary school.” My thoughts overflowed into the damp-smelling air before evaporating into silence.
As I rotated my head, “I used to play there, and there and there,” kept repeating itself in my head. The logs that were lined up next to the playground – that was our pirate ship, the hill that levelled out onto the field – we used to roll down until it we felt too dizzy, the copps directly in front of me – that was where we once went through during a cross country run…we weren’t allowed in there otherwise.
Just like when I was eight, I was drawn to the small area of trees that surrounded one edge of the field. As a small person, the copps was huge, otherworldly huge; I once got lost in it and missed fifteen minutes of Maths, tears of regret coating my eyes. I took a small breath in. No-one would be able to tell me what to do, not now that I was in my twenties, so I decided to motivate myself and explore the ‘forbidden wood’.
Moving a branch out of the way, my foot snapped one of the many twigs on the ground. That acted as my cue.
Action!
“This is a strange world I’ve landed in,” I whispered to myself as if I were recording voice diary. I went further in until all I could see behind me were leaves and bark concealing most of the field. Kneeling, I picked up a pine cone and ‘inspected’ it, giving it a little sniff. “It seems to be a normal forest,” standing up, I dropped the small brown thing, “no sign of life yet, but I won’t let my guard down.”
Just as I was in the process of walking along a short dusty trail, I heard a familiar groan close by. Curling my ring and pinky finger in my palm, I advanced like a stealth hunter in the direction of the sound. With every step, my toes touched the dead leaves before the rest of my foot, and my eyes narrowed with the belief that it would improve my vision.
When I made it to a small clearing I spotted a young girl kneeling on the ground. Advancing closer, I realised that she was piling sticks on top of each other until they inevitably collapsed.
“Nice…wall you’ve built?” I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
My voice caused her to fall backwards on her butt.
“Oh crap, I scared you.”
She swiftly turned around and looked at me. I nearly stumbled back into a shallow hole by a tree before I held onto another tree and stared harder. Leaning closer, I saw that the girl looked exactly like…no, she was me…me when I was about thirteen. I remember the top she was wearing (a Scary Miss Mary black t-shirt with the phrase ‘Sweet and Deadly’ printed below Mary herself), the jeans (blue, too baggy, the hems almost ripped to pieces), and the black converse with pink stars and white skulls on the laces that I would wear everywhere.
“I’m not scared,” mini-me replied, brushing her ass off. She looked just as confused as me, no surprise there. “Who are you?”
“Um…” I began to sweat lightly. “Just…someone, I guess. What were you doing?”
She rolled her eyes before sitting on a large log. “Killing time before I kill myself,” she said nonchalantly, unfazed by the fact that a strange woman had just come from nowhere and approached her.
When I originally made that phrase up, I had laughed at myself for the clever wordplay, but the girl in front of me barely smiled, so I smiled for her.
“And just how are you going to do that?” I stopped leaning against the tree for support and folded my arms loosely.
One of her eyebrows arched up. I always did like The Rock at that age… “I don’t know. But no-one cares anyway, so why should I care about telling you?”
I sat next to her on the log. “How do you know that no-one cares?”
“Uh,” her body wriggled uncomfortably. “They just don’t. I told my friends that I wanted to do it and no-one cared. I talked about a funeral, I told them to remember that I loved them, but they thought I was kidding.”
“It’s hard to take you seriously since you’re always kidding around…”
“No-- How do you know that?”
My eyes widened and I looked at the tops of the trees. “Intuition?” Nervous giggling followed. “But your life will get better,” I looked at her again. “Believe me…I can tell, alright?”
“You don’t know that for sure.” Her dirty shoes kick the ground, making small dust clouds hover around her feet for a while.
“I do.”
“You’re lying.”
“You just have to suck it up and think of all the good things in your life. I’m sure you have some, right? Watching wrestling every Saturday…for example, maybe?”
She looked at me, brown eyes wide, both eyebrows raised. “You like wrestling too?”
Nailed it. “Oh, yeah…yeah. Especially The Rock, right? He’s awesome.”
“He is awesome!!” Her voice bounced off of the trees. “And he’s so cute, ugh! Like literally the cutest person I’ve seen, he’s number one on my cute list!”
Typical mini-me.
“Hey, what if The Rock died, though?”
An exaggerated gasp as she gripped onto the log. “NOOOOO!! No, never!”
“Hear me out, yeah? What if he thought that no-one cared if he died? What if he didn’t realise how many people liked him? You’d be sad, right?”
“Duh!” she replied instantly. “I’d kill myself.”
“But what if people liked you just as much as you liked The Rock and they wanted to kill themselves? You’d upset so many people.”
Her head shook as if she was trying to dry her hair. “No way, that’d suck!”
“You have friends, right? Quite a few, I’m guessing.” More like ‘I know’.
“I guess…”
“Well they feel close to you, just like how you feel close to The Rock. They’d be devastated if you died.” I could see her trying to think things through as she scrunched her face up. “Plus, if you die, you’ll miss out on so many great things. Please trust me, I used to be like…you. I wanted to die when I was your age, but I didn’t, and now life has dealt me an amazing hand.”
She tilted her head. “So this was all to instruct me?”
A more suitable synonym could have been used, but… “Yeah. If I killed myself back then, I wouldn’t be at a great university with amazing friends and a mature, open mind.” I scratched my head. “Please trust me. I know what I’m talking about.”
“Whatever.”
I spotted a small smile pulling at her mouth.
A gust of wind blew in her direction, forcing me to face the breeze so that my hair wouldn’t go crazy. When it had calmed down and I looked back, she had disappeared.
It had to be a hallucination: young me, my surroundings, our conversation…but I played along anyway.
“You’d better take my advice, you little shit.” I said to myself, standing up and continuing along the path. “My life is on the line, otherwise…”
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